We know so much about the European food story, and we're getting to know about the American food story; but we know so little about the African food story.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.
I wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.
Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.
American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
What makes cookbooks interesting is to find out about the people and the culture that invented the food.
It's fun to pick a cuisine and say I'm going to research Ethiopian food, and see what it's all about. You find that there are a lot of similarities in cuisines from around the world and a lot of similar flavors.
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.