In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.
But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace.
The menu featured just five tacos to start — chicken, ground turkey, ground beef, pinto bean and the shrimp taco that Burrell had been perfecting since adolescence. Generously doused in a sweet and tangy sauce, cooked in butter and wrapped in a corn tortilla that’s dipped in the same sauce before getting crisped on the grill, the shrimp taco quickly became the signature item.
“It was new, it was different — people lined up,” Burrell says.
What she didn’t know then was that she belonged to a pioneering class of Black chefs in L.A. Like her, many were trained in their home kitchens. Nevertheless, the still-growing group put their stamp on the taco, inducting it into California soul cuisine.
The books I tend to remember are those that take a seemingly simple, self-evident idea and then show that it is in fact fraught with ambiguity and ethical implications. Chipping away at our epistemological certainties, ameliorative conceptual analysis of that kind invites us to investigate whether our core ideas are sound enough to help us accomplish vital cognitive and practical social tasks, including legislation and the building of moral consensus. The French philosopher Manon Garcia’s thought-provoking book The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (2023) subjects the notion of consent to such analytical probing and demonstrates the ways in which it is laden with problematic prejudices, old and new.
It is a writer’s work to wrestle coherent storylines out of the mess that is real life (that’s what dictators employ writers for). It sometimes feels as though Ings has bitten off rather more material than he can successfully digest for us, but his book is enlightening and surprisingly entertaining.