i ain’t gots to like you, but i love you

*sigh* i don’t like okra.

no. wait. let me try again, before y’all banish my ass from the kitchen.

i LOVE okra. i love seeing it in my kitchen. i love spilling it into my baskets and canvas tote bags at the farmers market. i love, i love okra blossoms; i love them sexy ass red jawns that grow on local land. i love that dried pods that adorn our kitchen altars, the seeds rattling inside like god’s shekere. i love running my fingers across its long, firm body, the ridges, waves of stories. i love okra stories, the ones we tell, the ones it tells us. i love putting it on our menus, browning it in the skillet, slicing it thinly and swimming it in peppery batters. i love how Black folks say okro + ochro, i love how Vertamae taught me to call it gombo.

what i don’t like is eating okra. i said it + i’m sorry… kinda. look, despite how we eat now, growing up my family had a quintessential American diet. we were treated to McDonald’s on Friday afternoons, followed by a dinner of pizza + Mountain Dew. we convinced our parents to buy us those neon colored yogurts + canned spaghetti “pastas”, filled the shopping carts with TV dinners + double stuffed cookies. when it was time to throw down in the kitchen, you’d find plenty of fried chicken + battered fish, mom’s generously buttered white rice + elbow noddles, my dad’s homemade french fries; potatoes + pastas of all kinds, succotash + “crab cakes for later”; collard greens + black-eyed peas (which i too had to learn to love… we’ll save that for another story), for sure. but no okra.

so my palate was inundated with processed sugars, salt + various fried + dried  textures. i imagine if you grew up having okra folded humbly or even reverently into your diet, you might not mind the… slime.

stop. now, you know them jawns is gelatinous af. i have a friend who’s Filipinx who once told me how kids growing up in her ancestral homelands truly enjoy that consistency, appreciating the way it slides down the gullet. “it’s the same way kids here growing up liking… food that are weird colors.” “like the green ketchup phase?” “yeah, ha! it’s like, cool + fun.” it’s a generalization, yes, but it makes sense.

chile, i’ve tried to like it. i mean, how can i be out here uplifting the story of my ancestors, both Blacklife + plantlife + not like okra? i’ve tried it every which way: raw in a couscous salad, seared + stuffed with orange + red spices, onions + garlic, tucked neatly into hush puppies, stewed long + lovingly into stews. we even served pickled okra, courtesy of fellow chef Kurt Evans, at OMK’s Vertamae dinner. 

+ guess what? i still don’t like it. at all. but i eat it. i buy them jawns. kiss them, rock them gently, baptizing them in the sink. i cook them up with the same care + attention i give to all my food friends. but nothing, i repeat, nothing has ever been able to free me from the disdain of okra slime. (well… let me be fair. gumbos + other one-pot meals do the best job at reminding me of okra’s culinary worth. don’t nothing make a stew or a one-pot thickums like okra.)

but y’all. i just… don’t love it that way my other Black chef friends love it. the spirit of Ntozake chastises me every time i steel myself to swallow. 

“I love okra and my soul is shaken every time I see someone turn her head in disgust [...] I refuse to allow our own people to reject an Africanism that is not inanimate or residual. Okra is one of our living ties to the motherland. In celebration I might make me a parade or an Okra Day/ Are you Black or Not?“

her voice from the other side is followed, loudly + irreverently by that of my homegirl Nia. i mean, Nia is a true Southern girl + she has wanted to fight a nigga over okra slander!

but i don’t just eat okra to avoid pissing off Zaki, Nia + god. i eat it for two reasons. the first, is practical. i wants them nutrients. the very thing that turns me off taste-wise, turns me all the way on nutritionally. i found my menstrual cycle + overall womb health to flourish under okra’s blessings. okra, which i’ve sometimes heard referred to as “lady’s fingers’, is truly a wealth of nutrients for bodies with wombs / wombspaces.

the second is… i guess cultural. maybe even spiritual. ancestral.

what did Dr. Jessica B. Harris say? okra. “It is the connector.” okra was one of the plant elders that journeyed with Africans, both enslaved and free, from the continent to the Americas. under Black hands it flourished, under that love + care it gifted us the same. a true symbiotic relationship. a reminder of home + a promise of future. a method of survival, growing, a practice of remembrance + resistance. + now, today, if we’re intentional, a symbol of resilience, thriving. of truly living. 

okra is so synonymous with Black foodways, it seems a crime not to give it its due in my kitchen. it’s like family.

i ain’t gots to like you. but i love you. i’ll love you, love you, love you, always. 

PLAY: okra by olu dara.