If I Can Cook, God Can

I typed it and now I can't find it and don't want to repeat whatI have just typed. I have no photo.

Autobiographical and historical and cultural all rolled up in one. With the holidays coming up, these great stories and recipes of great african and african-american dishes--dishes from people and lands of color--would go perfectly with each serving of yams, blackeyed peas and rice and collards. Foods of defiance, comfort, strength. Presented by the superb Ntozake Shange. (For my two cents, all the schoolkids ought to be taught how really influential Ntozake was in black entertainment, period, not just literature. But that sounds like a discussion for another review.)

I am not an African-American but through Shange's words I can feel the grief, the sorrow, and the triumphs of the African-American experience. By talking about food, which everybody needs and relates to, she paints a far more vivid picture of the African people in the Diaspora than a scholarly historian might. Many of her recipes call for ingredients I've hardly heard of, but her evocative descriptions of the food almost make me able to taste it.