(Port-au-Prince) Combining meat, vegetables, pasta and the giraumon squash from which it takes its name, the “soup joumou”, formerly forbidden to slaves, is savored every year on the 1ster January by Haitians for whom it symbolizes the independence of their country.
This soup, which has just been listed as a World Heritage Site, was for a long time synonymous with oppression on the Caribbean island: the very many slaves, who nevertheless cultivated the squash essential for its preparation, were deprived of it, its tasting is reserved for French plantation masters.
But the 1er January 1804, when the first black republic was born, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité, wife of the first Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines, chose to serve this dish in quantity.
Cooking the “soup joumou”, “it was a way of marking these years of deprivation, oppression and proclaiming victory against the colonizers”, says Nathalie Cardichon, buying at the market all the ingredients to concoct the national dish.
“This is the weight of this soup,” she adds seriously.
Traditionally, this dish is also a time of reunion for families. For many, however, this reunion is complicated this year.
Insecurity
In 2021, after seeing its president assassinated, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake. Political unrest and poverty have intensified, as have the villainous kidnappings, the work of gangs that have become all-powerful.
Insecurity and the inability to use roads guarded by armed gangs are forcing many Haitians to spend the New Year away from their loved ones.
“I have friends at the university whose parents do not live in Port-au-Prince and who cannot join them in the provinces, because of the security situation,” explains Stéphanie Smith, a student in the capital. “So I invite them!” ”
Her mother, Rosemène Dorséus, often prepares “soup joumou” for her family, but on each national holiday, she prepares whole pots.
Enough to feed “about twenty people”, modestly estimates this 54-year-old Haitian, while her daughter thinks that the quantities can sustain around thirty guests.
“There are eight of us in my family but unfortunately, in the neighborhood, there are people who cannot afford to prepare soup, so we think of them,” explains the young woman of 27 years.
Work in the kitchen begins the day before and, even before sunrise, on the 1ster January, the women of the family are busy around the stove.
Rosemène Dorséus remembers the time when, when the children were young, she and her husband would prepare soup together. “Now that my daughters are grown up, they are the ones helping me,” she says.
Delighted to share these preparations with the family, Stéphanie Smith says she is helped a little by her young brothers, even if “they come mainly to taste, and especially the meat”, smiles the young woman.
“Tradition of our ancestors”
The soup with a rich history has just obtained international recognition, being elevated to the rank of intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO.
“Haiti’s fight and its voice have been invisible and today is a way to register it” considers Dominique Dupuy, Ambassador of Haiti to UNESCO, who recalls the “role so fundamental and so crucial in the history of humanity ”of Haiti, the first country to have abolished slavery.
The consecration of the “soup joumou” constitutes, according to her, a “just historical rectification”.
His delegation made every effort to obtain its inclusion in the register, requesting an acceleration of the processing of the file in August. On December 16, he finally got a perfect grade.
2021 having been an “exceptionally painful year”, we needed “mechanisms to help us keep our heads high”, pleads the native of Cap-Haitien, a city in mourning on December 14 by the explosion of a tanker truck that has killed 90 people.
In Haiti, cooking the “soup joumou”, a custom dating back over two centuries, is a way of honoring one’s country and its past.
For Nathalie Cardichon, it is a way of inviting the world to “discover the history of Haiti”, and a way of showing “how much we are a proud people, that we appropriate and perpetuate the tradition of our ancestors ”.