So Much Trouble for a Pie
Posted: March 4, 2016 Filed under: Art, Performance/Installation, Prose, Writing | Tags: Caribbean, caribbean literature, cooking, Earl Grey, feminist art, martha rosler, Peepal Tree Press, quiche, semiotics of the kitchen, sharon millar, short story, Trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago Leave a commentSharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer who published her first book The Whale House and Other Stories (Peepal Tree Press) last year. She is one of my favourite local writers, I am sure you will understand after reading the following passage, three extracts from her short story Earl Grey:
Sally is coming to tea, she is not arriving until four but Leah is nervous that she won’t have everything prepared. She has already cut the butter into the flour and is trying to think cool, calm, thoughts to keep her fingertips cold. But in the small kitchen, humidity coats everything with a damp film and causes her hair to stick to the back of her neck. She dips her fingers into the water bowl. The water is icy, the little silver chips melting around her hot fingers. She begins to handle the pastry mixture gently, touching it with the tips of her fingers. She keeps her movements light and soft, imagining a tender, flaky crust as she rubs the butter into a grainy mix. So much trouble for a pie.
[…] She’d never heard of quiche before she met Henri. Her mother baked sturdy pies with tough crusts, the kind that could hold a whole pot of guava stew and not buckle under the weight of the fruit. Pies that did not melt in your mouth but rather had to be cut firmly and chewed with a concentration that brought its own pleasure. She is kneading the pastry gently now but it falls apart, refusing to come together even though she adds little drops of the freezing water.
[…] Suddenly it is 3.30 and the quiche has become a monstrous thing. She ignored the instructions to blind bake the pastry and it bubbled and rose in the oven with a determination that surprised her. She has had to prick holes in the bottom to get it to lie flat in the pie dish. When she pours the egg mixture onto the crust, it seeps through the holes and pools around the edges. At 3.45 she is in tears, the quiche strangely misshaped and uniformly brown.
Semiotics of the Kitchen (performance piece). Martha Rosler. 1975.
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TJENBWA: PROTEAN
Posted: August 24, 2015 Filed under: Art | Tags: bat, bocas lit fest, Caribbean, caribbean literature, cariblit, moth, Peepal Tree Press, Peter Doig, Saint Lucia, Sounding Ground, Vladimir Lucien 1 CommentBy Vladimir Lucien
The moth that enters
your house at night is a grudge
that someone is holding
against you. It half-sits, bothered
by your light and the roof
over your head. It spreads
its small evening wherever
it lands over the things
you love most. A dark tent
of dark intentions.
Vladimir Lucien is a poet, screenwriter and actor from Saint Lucia, his first poetry collection, Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) won the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Man Dressed as a Bat (Night), Peter Doig, 2007
