Dangermond.org

I’ve written many times of my rich heritage being the daughter of a Cuban born Sephardic father whose parents haled from Constantinople and a mother who was raised in the pine forests of Washington Parish, Louisiana. The cuisine alone was as rich and varied as the terrain my parents came from – crisp platanos fritos, black bean and rice (aptly named in Cuba moros y cristianos) to kibbe, tabouleh, and baklava and arroz con pollo mingled with jambalaya and field peas served with cathead biscuits and a healthy dose of chicken and dumplings.

I married two Italian men, one whose stout Sicilian mother could cook like a house on fire (they owned a restaurant in Bucktown) and a Dutch guy and along the way picked up more culture and recipes – from Italian sausage cooked with peppers and onions to rabbit piccata all the way to Grandma V’s applesauce cake. Then I met Tatjana and she brought her own Eastern European ways into my world along with Arsen Dedic, Natali Dizdar’s music and some delicious cuisine like rozata, Dingac, burek (borrowed from the Turks), Dalmatian cod stew.

Then along came Tin into our rich cultural tapestry bringing with him his own force of culture just by the color of his skin. I don’t know where his ancestors hale from as blacks from the Chicago area are as diverse as they can be with the first nonresident recorded being a Haitian, and the population exploded with the blacks relocating to Chicago from all over the south during the great migration, but if you generically call Tin African American and think how expansive and rich is that cultural heritage then I’d say we are a tribe of three with a gumbo past that is ink dark in its richness.

Today we went to the Ogden’s family day event and kids from the Young Audiences performed African dancing and drumming and what a show they put on! Tin was mesmerized by all the drums and played every one of them then he watched with fascination as the young boys and girls danced with wild gyrations and rhythmic beats. And I was looking around at the young girl dancing, and the handsome boys drumming and the teachers and mothers and other children there and was so proud of the culture he brought into our life that I joined in by making the same sounds Sephardic women make behind the curtains for aufrufs* – it’s this gutteral, feral, back of the throat sound of joy and celebration. Hey, I fit right in.

[*note: aufruf is after the child is bar mitzvah’d or married, the women and children who sit apart from the men in a mezzanine area throw hard candy at the child or couple up at the bima (altar) and shout in these guttural eh eh eh sounds. I was in a synagogue in Israel where the women were actually up in a balcony and if that wasn’t enough they were behind a curtain and the sounds were so animal and primal at first I was freaked out.]

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.