Tales from the Caribbean
Page 16
Very often the trickster is an animal – Reynard the Fox in France, or Coyote amongst some Native American peoples. In China there’s a very tricky monkey king, Sun Wukong. Just occasionally it’s a human – Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, or Prometheus in ancient Greek stories, who steals fire from the gods to give to human beings – and Robin Hood in England is a trickster!
In these stories from the Caribbean, we meet two of the world’s most famous tricksters, Brer Rabbit and Anansi the spider-man. Both of them come originally from Africa!
Brer Rabbit (he’s called Compère Lapin in French-speaking parts of the Caribbean) was a hare in Africa. Many stories about him come from the Bantu people of Central and South Africa. However, when black people arrived in the New World, the hare became a rabbit. In the United States, the stories were collected by Joel Chandler Harris, who introduced them to a wide audience through ‘Uncle Remus’, an old black story-teller.
Anansi came originally from the Ashanti people of Ghana. He’s always a spider, but he often looks like a man. Anansi has special skills and wisdom in speech, and is the spirit who knows all stories – once they belonged to the Sky God, but Anansi tricked his way into getting every one of them.
Black people taken to the West Indies and to northern America as slaves told each other the stories they remembered from home, adapting them to their new surroundings. They enjoyed the fact that Brer Rabbit or Anansi – small, weak creatures – often tricked the rulers and masters!
WEST INDIAN FOOD
The West Indies – the name for all the islands of the Caribbean together – are warm, well-watered, and mostly very fertile (though hurricanes and tropical storms can do a great deal of damage!).
Palm trees provide West Indians with bananas and coconuts, and a huge variety of other plants that provide food are grown – from tomatoes, citrus fruits and coffee to more exotic things such as breadfruit, soursops, cassava and plantains. With seas full of fish – including bonitos and tuna, and shellfish like clams and crabs – and livestock such as pigs and chickens, cooks have plenty of interesting materials to use.
Over the years people from many parts of the world have come to the Caribbean, so there are recipes of all kinds in use. Some, like johnnycake (which, in its original form, was a flat bread made by cooking a sort of maize porridge) or grated and fried cassava – this is poisonous if it isn’t properly prepared – go back to the bad days of slavery when many people had to live on very little. Some have become well-known around the world – rice and peas, for example, which is found everywhere in the Caribbean (although the dish is called rice and peas, the recipe is made up of rice and red beans, along with coconut cream, herbs and spices), or jerk chicken which is a very smoky, spicy barbecued chicken that takes several hours to prepare.
One of the essential ingredients for jerk chicken – and for many other savoury dishes – is the Scotch Bonnet chilli pepper. This is a very hot pepper indeed (in Guyana, in South America, it’s called the ‘ball-of-fire’ pepper). As well as chillis, West Indians like many other spices to flavour their food. Even cakes and ice creams may have ginger or black pepper in them!
Another ingredient in many dishes is rum. This is an alcoholic spirit, made from sugar. And it isn’t just a drink. Like chillis and other spices, it appears in all sorts of dishes. It can even be used to make jerk chicken!
The Caribbean has a hot climate, and hot, spicy food. What could be better with these than a long, cool drink …?
CARIBBEAN FRUIT PUNCH
Even if summer is cold and wet, this will inspire you to dream of lovely hot summer days – think of being on a tropical island, with the sea lapping the beach …
You will need:
1 ¼ pt / 581 ml / 2 ½ cups of orange juice
⅝ pt / 298 ml / 1 ¼ cups pineapple juice
⅛ pt / 60 ml / ¼ cup of lime juice
2 tbls grenadine
What you do:
Pour all the juice into a big jug, and stir well. Put the mixture into the fridge, and chill for several hours. Pour into glasses – there should be enough here for four – and pour 1 ½ teaspoons of grenadine down the inside of each glass.
Enjoy!
SOME THINGS TO DO …
Track down a trickster! Can you track down some other trickster stories? What part of the world do they come from, and what sort of a character is the trickster? If you were going to invent a tricky character, what sort would you have?
Get a globe or an atlas. Can you find all the Caribbean islands mentioned in the stories? Can you find West Africa too? If you went to a strange country, far away from your home, which stories would you like to tell people?
How may words of three letters or more can you make from the letters in the word CARIBBEAN? We found 71. Can you beat us?
SLAVERY
Slavery is a system which allows one person to own another. The slave is property, and can be bought and sold. The children of slaves (also slaves) can be sold to owners far away from their parents. A slave is not paid, but must work at whatever the master orders, however hard or difficult the work is. There are no regulations about the hours a slave can work, and no breaks or holidays. The master should provide shelter, clothes and food, but may not, or only provide very poor ones.
Slavery probably started early in prehistoric times, when prisoners taken in war were made to work on farms. Other slaves were probably criminals, or people who had got into debt.
Every society of the ancient world – China, India, Egypt, the Middle East – used slaves. In ancient Greece and in the Roman Empire, there were huge numbers of slaves. They did most of the work.
After the Roman Empire broke up, there wasn’t a need for slaves in many parts of Europe. Instead, many people were tied to the land. They were serfs, and could not move about or do very much without their lord’s permission. However, the old style of slavery still existed around the Mediterranean and down into Africa.
From the beginning of the fifteenth century, Europeans started to investigate the world around them. They sailed down the coast of Africa, eventually reaching India by sea. They sailed across the Atlantic, in time setting up colonies in the West Indies and in the Americas.
The most profitable crop to grow was sugar, but coffee, cotton, and tobacco were in great demand in Europe. The farms, called plantations, were often very big, and needed a great number of people to work on them. There were chieftains in West Africa who were happy to sell prisoners of war and members of other tribes to slave traders, who loaded their ships full and sailed across the ocean to the slave markets, where the cargoes were sold on. This became known as ‘the Triangle Trade’ – a ship from Britain, say, would sail to West Africa, fill up with slaves, sail to (for example) Jamaica, sell the slaves, fill the ship with sugar or some other profitable crop, then head back to Britain to make further money selling this cargo.
As time went by, more and more people began to think it was a terrible thing to treat human beings as slaves. They had to fight hard against slavery, because the slave trade made so much money, but Parliament abolished slavery in Britain in 1807, and Congress in the United Sates forbade the import of African slaves in 1808 (though the slaves already there were not freed until some time later). France freed all its remaining slaves in 1848.
But slavery continued in many parts of the world. Today, it is against the law in most countries – but sadly, it still exists. No one really knows how many people are enslaved, and it seems that some governments might not be powerful enough to stop it even if they wanted to.
GLOSSARY
barracuda – a large, fierce tropical fish
breadfruit – the round, starchy fruit of an evergreen tree belonging to the mulberry family which can be eaten as a vegetable or used to make a sort of flour
Brer – dialect way of saying brother
callaloo – a plant with leaves that can be cooked and eaten as a green vegetable, or a stew or soup made from the leaves
Carib – a
people who lived in the northern part of South America and who also settled on some West Indian islands. It is also the name of their language
cassava – the starchy root of several shrubs of the spurge family: the root can be roasted and eaten as bread
christophine – a pear-shaped fruit that grows on a vine, related to melons, squashes and cucumbers
Compère – part of the French name for Brer Rabbit – it means ‘godfather’
coupay cord-la – dialect for ‘cut the rope’ or ‘cut the string’
Creole – someone of European – usually French or Spanish – descent, born in the West Indies. It is also the name of the French or Spanish dialect such a person may speak
hammock – a kind of bed made from a strip of canvas or rope mesh tied to a support at each end
indigenous – something that grows or lives or occurs naturally in a particular place
jalousie – the Kwéyòl word to describe a jealous person; it is also the word used for a window blind with horizontal slats that can be adjusted to let in air and light
johnnycake – West Indian johnnycakes are a kind of fried bread made from flour, butter, sugar, salt and water
Kwéyòl – a language spoken which has its origins in French and African languages
maman – French for mum or mummy
mapou tree – the silk-cotton tree, venerated by many in Haiti
okra – a plant belonging to the mallow family. Its long green pods are eaten as a vegetable, especially in soups and stews
passion fruit – the edible purple fruit of the passion flower, an evergreen climbing plant
patois – the dialect of a particular area, usually considered rough and uneducated
pepper bush – the plant on which the Scotch Bonnet chilli grows
plantain – a kind of banana, starchy and not very sweet when green. It is used as a vegetable. The plantain can be cooked when it is yellow too, and then it tastes sweet
plateau – an area of flat high ground
Port-au-Prince – the capital city of Haiti
raconteur – a story-teller
savannah – in tropical areas, a grassy plain with few trees
Sookooyah – a mythical scary spirit said to be seen flying about at night like a ball of fire on some Caribbean islands, including Dominica
soursop – a small evergreen tree of the custard apple family, and its large, white, slightly acid fruit
souse – a Caribbean broth dish made from spicy picked pork. Although there are various types of Caribbean souse (such as beef and chicken), pork is the most common
sweet potato – the edible tuberous root of a tropical vine. It is sometimes called a yam, but the two plants are different
yam – the edible tuberous root of a tropical vine
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First published 2017
Text copyright © Trish Cooke, 2017
Illustrations by Joe Lillington
Illustrations copyright © Penguin Books Ltd, 2017
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Cover design © Nathan Yoder
ISBN: 978–0–141–37326–3
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