My Mother’s Rice
An image of a person wearing white pants crouched on the ground cooking a pot of kiri bath over a fire with firelighters, matches and brick flooring on the ground.
Photograph: Dinithi Samarawickrama.
Words by Dinithi Samarawickrama.
My achchi (grandmother) and ummi (mother) are stooped over a pile of kindling, bringing a pot of rice to boil as the sun cracks its yolk over the lilac morning sky. They keep the fire stoked and my grandmother mutters prayers under her breath. They are welcoming the new year by making a pot of kiribath – kiri (milk), bath (rice). As I hold this early memory I become anchored to a part of me I had left behind. Kiribath is brought to boil in a clay pot as Earth spins on into another year. In my baby eyes it was a kiss between the land, the water and the humans. Rice, humble rice, is the conduit.
Rice, unassuming monocot, simple grain of grass, held up my ancestors and therefore my being. Rice cultivation spans centuries and continents moving sideways, upwards, diagonally, through time. It was what you ate when you had nothing else to sedate the nagging hunger and keep you moving from one day to the next. Rice is a rock planted within the currents of time. When I am full of life I am like a pot of rice boiling over. I still carry within me the smell of dusty earth paddy fields before the rain falls.
As an immigrant child, I am torn between places. I yearn for a home neither here nor there, for the air drunken with raindrops, for the young and raw baby green of endless paddy fields. I yearn for the memories of my parents who grew up farming rice in these fields, among family. When I ask them to talk about it; their eyes become a kindled fire and I can see them unfurl like baby green fronds. Their childhood memories are anchored by the growth and harvest of rice. Ummi talks about how seeds were sewn into the piths of fleshy alocasia stalks to test their germination rate. My thaththi (father) recounts how his grandfather sewed their rice into neat rows, controlled water flow with a spinning coconut shell then let the weeds grow wild during the dry season to flood them out with water in the wet. They talk about how everyone came together to plant the rice, each with their own job. My father helped to plant rice seedlings in the boggy yak turned earth; they are called bithare wee (little egg babies). My parents conjure up images of endless green paddy fields hidden under the gentle cover of dew – rice for dinner, leftover rice for breakfast, tossing rice, drying rice. Their past moves around this simple crop.
When my grandparents were young this was their way of living. They grew and farmed rice and fed their community, selling the leftovers for profit. They managed to sustain themselves and their community with the paddy fields. As my parents grew older this way of living struggled to sustain itself, due to the competition of big agricultural operations, and ever spreading monetisation of resources. The paddy fields were left barren or sold off, my dad became an engineer and my mother a school teacher, and eventually they bundled us off to so-called ‘Australia’.
“The people of my homeland were moulded by the growth and harvest of rice which moved with the shapes and whims of nature.”
Hoping for a better future my parents followed the path of progress that capitalism and modernity so clearly outlined for us. They wanted to grow big shiny dreams for their children, and so we moved away from the home we had always known; further and further from our long gone paddy fields. I still yearn for this home left behind and I sometimes have to stop and remind myself that there will always be a pot of rice waiting for me, sitting warm when I need it.
Rice brought us closer to being ‘plant-human’, a term Suzanne Cesaire uses to describe the dance between Martiniquans and earth in her essay; The Malaise of Civilisation. This notion of ‘plant-human’ could be applied to many pre-colonial societies that functioned under a subsistence-based agricultural paradigm. Before the great intrusion of colonialism, we tracked the skies that carried our very being. Farmers utilised the natural fluctuation of the rain to dictate planting times. They observed and learnt from the flow of terrain and tributaries to create a complex system of irrigation. A ‘plant-human’ being is a being that rises and sets with the sun, that grows when the sky is full of rain and rests when it runs dry. As Cesaire puts it, “it is a surrender to self, to the moon to the more or less long days”. The people of my homeland were moulded by the growth and harvest of rice which moved with the shapes and whims of nature. In this way they were able to find safety in a closed cycle of being; between earth; human; plant; water, each had their part to play.
My ancestors would sing to the Sun God and the Moon God, they would pray and prepare for rice and know that rice could be grown. They would pray and prepare for rain knowing that rain would come – it was a matter of when not if ever. This is no longer how things are. Now unable to compete with the increasing mechanisation of agriculture and the growing demands of a globalising economy this form of agriculture has been largely abandoned. The stratification of labour between worker, manager, supervisor has resulted in rupture between the people and the rice they eat. This division of labour has sanitised rice farming from its original being. It has created, as Marx would put it, a division between the manual forces of labour and the spiritual forces of labour. This means that my people, and many other peoples whose lives were so deeply woven with the cycles of this little grain; are no longer “in direct contact with the conditions of their own existence” (Weil).
We are encouraged, poked and prodded to leave behind our prayers to the sun, and exchange it for the arbitrary dreams of wealth and success. I think about how deeply this sudden change has morphed our relationship to food. Life is no longer - “I am fed and I grow and in turn I feed the land” but instead a struggle for infinite growth; the incessant pestilence of profit. Where before we existed in cyclical ways of being, reciprocal and self-completing, now we are propelled on a path with no end in sight, one of growing and eating and growing.
An image of a dining table covered by a blue and white floral tablecloth, a plate of kiri bath, grapes, kokis, Sri Lankan sambals, sweets and fried goods.
Photograph: Dinithi Samarawickrama.
When it becomes, as it has, no longer possible to sing songs to the gods and worship the rice we eat, we become uprooted from the foundation which once held our ancestors strong. Maybe this is the reason why so many of us feel as if we are floating away. The insidious drone of modernity dislodges the anchors we used for millennia to hold us to this earth. It is terrifying and lonely and disorienting.
This is where I take a breath and spoon a warm mouthful of rice into my mouth, because rice reminds me to always come back home. To never forget the smell of yak dung and mud ripe for birthing.I want to hold myself steady against the grains of rice, she is a shelter against the fast paced, unending demands of a modernised world.
“A bowl of rice can be an anchor. It spans so many of our histories, is a point of sharing knowledge, coming together and coming home.”
Rice helps me build a home for myself. She is a home closer to the wholeness I imagine my ancestors felt as they moved and grew and planted. And I’m hoping, as you sit down to your steaming bowl of rice, she takes you back too, to all the timelines that crossed to meet you.
Remember, eating rice is a sign that the water, Earth, the sun, are still here for you, waiting for you. They will always take care of you, just as they took care of your ancestors. I hope that in this slow return to ‘plant-human’, rice as conduit, we can find some safety and stability outside of the blight of capitalism. A bowl of rice can be an anchor. It spans so many of our histories, is a point of sharing knowledge, coming together and coming home. The farmer sings to his yak as he leads him around the paddy field: “Go from the corner, my waha daruwe (wild daughter); you will be looked after by God, o ho ho ho. You will be looked after. When you are full of life, you are a pot of rice bubbling over”.