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The Value of Yams

The history of yams spanning from their origin in West Africa to the provision grounds of the Caribbean offers readers a look into a root vegetable that allows people to trace their cultural roots to a time before slavery and the African Diaspora. Yams provided much needed nourishment to forced to take the perilous journey of the middle passage and became a ground provision that nourished many of those who were enslaved. Yams have physically kept people alive, as well as symbolically kept the voices of slaves alive in colonial writing. Whenever yams are mentioned in primary sources and works written by colonists visiting the Caribbean, we as readers can read between the lines of the text and understand that an enslaved person’s story is attached to that root vegetable. It is our responsibility to dig deeper and look past the surface level of the text to try to recover the silenced voices and stories of people who were enslaved. Each mention of yam in historical texts has the ability to teach about someone who is nameless, faceless, but nevertheless, someone with an important story to tell.

Preface to Jamaica Cookery Book

Jamaica Cookery Book section about Yams

Each mention of yams or other ground provisions gets us a step closer to viewing and understanding different perspectives on the narrative we’ve already been exposed to. The groundwork set by those people without the ability to tell their stories enables narratives we do have. Without yams, we wouldn’t be able to read recipes from the Jamaica Cookery Book, the first published Jamaican cookbook, containing only recipes that the author Caroline Sullivan considers native to Jamaica. The Jamaica Cookery Book has a few sections about yams and various recipes that can be made with yam. These recipes wouldn’t exist without the unknown enslaved people who cooked yams and created these recipes to sustain themselves in the Caribbean. This book relied on the recipes created and passed down by enslaved people and its roots can be traced back to the yams growing in West Africa.