SECONDS, PLEASE!

Doc explores food as identity

Rose Wani scooped out two teaspoons of cardamom pods and dropped them into the teakettle filled with water. She took out three white, porcelain cups and dropped in Red Rose black tea bags. She added sugar.

“We are tea drinkers,” she said last week as the kettle began to whistle.

Wani, a health-care aide graduate of Edmonton’s NorQuest College, fled her home in South Sudan after war broke out. In 2001 she landed in Newfoundland and a few months later moved to Edmonton.

She is the subject of a locally produced documentary called Seconds, Please! which focuses on Wani and her daughter making a traditional Sudanese meal in their Edmonton home. The film was screened on Feb. 27 in recognition of Black History Month and was intended to capture a living history of a former NorQuest student.

Being in a new country meant learning a new language and losing a few comforts for Wani. And the biggest of those losses was the comfort of food.

She poured the fragrant water into the cups, added a dash of milk and settled on the dark brown leather sofa.

Food is important, Wani said, because not only is it a source of comfort but it is a person’s cultural identity and a way of keeping culture alive.

Back home, she reminisced, a meal — especially dinner — was a family event.

“We always sat on the floor because we had more space,” she said. “And we use our hands (to eat).”

Dinner usually had three courses, she said. The meal consisted of injera — something like pita bread but “so light” — dipped in stew.

“A lot of meat, a lot of fish, a lot of dipping … Okra with meat and onions (Wani’s favourite dish).”

About two years after she’d settled in Canada, Wani began cooking her traditional food more often. And now she’s also started teaching her 16-year-old daughter, Sarah Gore, how to make traditional, ethnic dishes.

Sarah’s learned to cook “a bit.” What baffles the teenager is that her mother cooks from memory.

“A tablespoon of this, tablespoon of that — how do you know?” she asks with a laugh. “I need to see the recipe but you can’t really Google African food.”

When she was younger, Gore said she would refuse to take ethnic food to school for lunch.

But now she’s proud of the food and understands that food is cultural.

“All food came from a place, from a person, food has a story,” Gore said. “It has traditions. Food is a part of people’s identity.”

DAVID BLOOM Rose Wani is the subject of the documentary Seconds, Please!, about the traditional recipes that were passed down through her family. Food is important in her Sudanese culture, she says, not only as a source of comfort but as a way of keeping the...

Rose Wani makes tea with two teaspoons of cardamom pods added, which she says evokes fragrances of her native home in South Sudan.