Liberating Taste: Memories of War, Food and Cooking in Northern Mozambique

Abstract

This article focuses on the sensory and affective dimension of food, cooking and eating in ex-combatants' life narratives in northern Mozambique. It explores the polytemporality reflected in food memories, and the ways in which the past, present and future are connected in the present experience of remembering. For the ex-combatants, food is strongly linked to their memories of the liberation struggle (1964-74). Drawing on life history research with Ciyaawo-speaking ex-combatants in the northwestern province of Niassa between 2012 and 2014, this article traces the changing ideas and meanings of food and eating in their life narratives from their childhood, through wartime to the period of 'liberation'. After independence, most ex-combatants settled down as subsistence farmers with the expectation that 'finally' they would 'eat well'. Yet, for many, their experience of independent Mozambique has been that of socioeconomic and political marginalisation. While food is crucial to survival, this article looks at how food is so much more than just nutrition. In the ex-combatants' memories, aesthetic aspects of food are closely intertwined with the revolutionary ideas of liberation and socioeconomic justice. The meaning of food in the ex-combatants' narratives, as the article argues, is shaped simultaneously and in complex ways through their personal aesthetic experiences and memories of food as well as the changing political aesthetics.

Food and Trauma: Anthropologies of Memory and Postmemory

“…(Whewell 2014 ) From a combatant perspective, the dreadful hunger experienced during war and the camaraderie associated with finally having the chance to eat with your peers may become entangled in memory. In postconflict Northern Mozambique, ex-militia soldiers do not primarily recall tastes and smells from their days of hiding out in the forest—the dried and pulverized banana tree roots they survived one did not taste much (Katto 2020 ). Rather, what they remember is the communal act of eating together in the field, which also melts into idealized childhood memories of sharing food within the family.…”

“…Rather, what they remember is the communal act of eating together in the field, which also melts into idealized childhood memories of sharing food within the family. Still, bitter postwar experiences of impoverished communities, weakened social ties, and an increasingly consumerist relation to food “make a narrative of sweetness impossible” (Katto 2020 :983). For these ex-combatants, the hopes of liberation becoming a vehicle of social transformation and justice did not materialize; they starved for nothing.…”

sabor de la guerra y el hambre

“…111 La capacidad descriptiva de Valdés sobre el desagradable sabor e incluso la incapacidad de comer un alimento básico resulta importante porque es difícil que otro actor, militar o civil, hubiera podido verbalizar y comunicar una descripción articulada sobre el tormentoso momento de probar alimentos putrefactos en tiempos de escasez. 112 Las emociones y sensaciones manifestadas en el testimonio de Valdés, en calidad de paladar atormentado y cautivo del estrangulamiento de la ciudad, también reproducían "una construcción moral de la realidad", 113 como es posible determinar cuando refirió a la carne: era tan mala y tan escasa como el pan; por lo que la mayor parte del pueblo se mantenia con vegetales poco nutritivos y de dificil digestion, llegando á tal grado la escasez de viveres, que muchos pobres pasaron días enteros sin comer […] El uso pues de malos y groseros alimentos ocasionaba infartos gástricos y fiebres complicadas con ellos, y hacia tambien que tomasen el carácter pútrido o maligno las calenturas ordinarias. 114 El énfasis en la carne reproducía otra vez el saber médico y el sabor multisensorial ya referido con respecto al pan.…”