It’s time! for the next queer book giveaway!

This month it’s The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, a steampunk queernormative romp by Alexis Hall, in which Captain John Wyndham takes up lodgings with sorceress Shaharazad Haas and is immediately yanked into solving a complicated mystery of who is blackmailing one of Shaharazad’s former lovers. Wyndham rampages all over the bizarre and partially undersea city of Khelathra-Ven in the course of his investigations, acquiring admirers and enemies wherever he goes. Everyone is queer, everyone’s got an encyclopedia of secrets, and everyone’s a touch ridiculous (though that last is perhaps to be expected from Hall.) I adored this book! It was so fun!

You can enter for a paperback copy by filling out the Google form HERE.

Every so often I am reminded that I know next to nothing about tropical agriculture. (Previously this has turned into a brief but intense fascination with bananas, the potatoes of the sky.) While researching my last newsletter, I came upon several passages in Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba about growing some unfamiliar crops on an industrial scale, and I became resolved to resolve a specific facet of my ignorance. My next historical romance includes a number of Caribbean characters, and to my farm-focused self it feels impossible to know them without knowing their starches.

THE TRUTH: I have long confused a small group of tropical staples. These three tuber-looking thingies (though one is botanically not a tuber but a corm), though they are from different continents and entirely different plant families, continuously bumble into each other in my brain:

1. the true yams. (NOT sweet potatoes. I know what a sweet potato is.)

2. cassava.

3. taro.

My confusion is furthered by the fact that all three of these crops are now grown worldwide across the tropics, somewhat obscuring their origins. (In fact, so far as I can tell, all three are currently most heavily produced and eaten in Nigeria.)

This equatorial universality was not always the case! Well, okay, it was partly the case, but less the case than it is now.

Yellow and white yams (both subspecies of Dioscorea cayenensis, a monocot like grass and bananas), the most commercially important yam in the world, are vines native to sub-Saharan Africa. Cassava (Manihot esculenta, a woody shrub and dicot which is more closely related to roses) was first domesticated in northern South America or possibly Central America. Taro (especially Colocasia esculenta, though many different related species are cultivated and eaten, all of them monocots) was first developed as a food crop in roughly the same area as the banana, that is, southeast Asia and the closer parts of Oceania.

(This picture is immediately complicated by the fact that related species of yams were domesticated all across southern and southeastern Asia and into the south Pacific. However, the biggest consumers of yams still live in West Africa, so those are the varieties I am mentioning.)

Yam and taro both come in purple versions; cassava does not. Individual yams can be much, much bigger than individual cassava and taro; individual tubers of D. alata, the winged or water yam, can be 6’-8’ long and 100 to 150 lbs. Cassava and taro both require cooking to become edible, though for different reasons; cassava contains cyanogenic glucosides, which can be toxic, and taro calcium oxalate, which are caustic. Yams are typically not toxic, but the process to prepare them can still be laborious; in Nigerian cuisine, cooked yams are usually pounded for an extended period of time to develop a stretchy, dough-like consistency. (These days, this process is somewhat ameliorated by 1. food processors 2. powdered pounded yam.)

My suspicion is that the most familiar of these for most people in the U.S. is cassava, from which we get tapioca starch (though the store I work in currently has Lays’ taro chips in stock.)

Among the many places where yams are grown is the country of Haiti. I am thinking about Haiti a lot these days, because of the people I work with and the people who live in my neighborhood and the research I’m doing for my next book. I also think of Haiti all the time because the government of the country I live in has gone out of its way to convey its hatred for this country and people.

On Thursday, June 25th, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Trump could unilaterally rescind TPS (Temporary Protected Status) for Haitian people living in the U.S.

Trump has a years-long racist animus toward Haitian people, which Justice Kagan noted in her dissent on the case (many of his remarks are in the linked article, but I will not be repeating them here.) Besides that, forcing people back to Haiti puts them at risk of hunger and extreme gang violence.

In my state of Massachusetts alone, this could impact almost 45,000 Haitian people living here on TPS — some of whom have been in the state for over ten years. Now these folks are at risk of losing employment and housing, as well as violent assault by federal officers, unconstitutional and inhumane detention, and possibly being sent back to a country which has no resources to help them.

I do not have a great thing for you, my beloved reader, to do in response to this injustice right at this moment. I would ask, as always, that you familiarize yourself with the immigrants who live in your community, what languages they speak, what their histories are. We are all of us relentlessly, eternally tied together, regardless of attempts of a cowardly and sadistic few to undermine those bonds.

Yours in fear and work,

Sharon

P.S. A reminder that I recently released a book, in which community (and cows) do, eventually, triumph.

P.P.S. What is your favorite starch?