On Self-Determining and Actualization Through Art, Family, and Community: A Conversation with Chef Omar Tate
by SAWDAYAH BROWNLEE
in Fall 2021
Bakari Akinyele, Bonaly backflips (1998), 2021, Movement Series, 18x45, cotton canvas dyed with indigo
“A 5 or a 4-second event can be forgotten. But a sound can bring back a picture in the viewer’s consciousness and a link can be made with the story you’re seeing.”
Ousmane Sembene
I wondered, to what end does Chef Omar Tate recall such deeply personal and intimate realities of Black people and what are his dreams for us in experiencing his visceral retelling? An aroma can conjure an entirely different thought from taste and impact the flavor on your tongue. The sight of it can evoke something else entirely. Tate’s presentation, process, content, and consumption summing up a polyphonic experience of life in Black America, particularly those raised up North, with roots in the Southern United States and the Caribbean as Tate has (he’s traced his family back several generations to Orangeburg, South Carolina with his earliest Ancestors forced to the United States by way of the Port of Charleston, South Carolina, a locale that is one of the foundational places where a myriad of West African cultures were bridged, lending itself to the creation of the African American identity).This is the space that Chef Omar Tate has curated for Black people and folks outside of the Diaspora alike to partake. We spoke about the goals and intentions of his work but also the impact of his recent acclaim and his methods for maintaining the ethos of his art (catapulted to an international stage that cherry picks from BIPOC communities as exceptional representatives to fit the popular schemas of the day is a new challenge he navigates). He divulges that he does what he does primarily for Black people to reflect on ourselves and to have the nourishment of our own knowledge, wisdom, joy, struggles. While his art is wont to burst open a deluge of emotion with questions like “What next?,” it is the communal nature of sharing a meal with a family, friend, or distant relative of your cultural group that allows the prismatic answers to that question to feel that much more attainable, permeating you on a cellular level and beyond.
In our conversation below, we discuss his foray into African Diasporic history; the contemporary realities of our community; methodologies for documenting and carrying on the culture; and his segue into utilizing poetry, plating, and the culinary arts to (re)present this to our people. A browse through his personal Instagram page, which leads you to his and his wife, Chef Cybille St. Aude-Tate’s collaborative work, Honeysuckle Projects and Provisions, makes you feel as though you’re taking a peek at someone’s diary through the years, dressed down and as full as they are offline, with no intention to curry themself up to you. The most renowned gastronomic experiences and fancy cuisines are borne from this salt of the earth ingenuity that almost always is for survival first. To summarize Tate, our people know what he’s saying and feel what he’s cooked. There is a communion happening between him and us and an uncovering of the humanity of his non-Black guests. We discuss his own story of arriving at a place of seeing the connections between Diasporic foodways and finding the pieces within the landscape that were for his restoration. Tate reflects on becoming a caretaker of the narrative while maintaining his personal ability to self-determine and grow irrespective of the new labels attached to him.
Interview condensed for clarity. My thoughts are italicized.
The Ancestral connection is critical to the coalescence of all the stuff brought in to create a product. The product cannot be extant, can’t BE, without ‘the stuff’ being composed of and in relationship with the living experience of African people.
Sawdayah Brownlee: Who or what planted the seed of creation in you?
Omar Tate: As far back as I can remember, my first pieces of creativity were sketching and drawing. And the first lesson that I remember receiving was when my Mom taught me how to draw a very simple airplane; I was probably about 4. But I know that I had been drawing before then because the lesson came about from her witnessing me drawing; she offered up an easier way to do it. She taught me how to draw birds in the way that looks like a shallow ‘m.’ I got really into drawing birds and planes and clouds. I think that was my first exploration into what I wanted to be. I said I wanted to be an architect because I wanted to draw blueprints. So it’s been pretty early on [that the seed of creation has been around] and I feel like the seed was always in me but my Mother was the one that nurtured that seed.
S: Do you feel like there was a watershed experience in the process of becoming an artist that led you to cooking?
O: Oh, absolutely not {laughs}. I never wanted to cook. I’m the oldest of four, my mom was a single mom. It was my responsibility and my brother Cassim, who’s only 18 months younger than me, to prepare dinner when she was working and so it always felt like a chore or a job that I didn’t wanna do. My brother Cassim, he was the one who turned our backyard into a small vegetable garden and he was into cooking and I was very into basketball and girls and being in the streets. So when he told me, when we were like maybe 15 and 14 respectively, that he wanted to be a chef, I jokingly told him he was gay. I don’t think that way anymore but that’s what I told him. It turns out now, he installs FiOs cables and wires and wears hard hats and stuff like that and I’m the ‘artist one’ being a chef doing all the things that... {laughs in irony}.
The foundational ingredients of us are our origin stories. We as individuals are the critical, active tool that ekes out our destinies. Those destinies winding and intertwining with others,’ shaping the narrative of the communities we’re a part of.
I actually started cooking because I needed a job and it was Summer 2008. My oldest son Bashir was only about 10 months and I was in between work and selling drugs at the time. I didn’t want to just take any job anymore. My experience prior to becoming a cook was as a porter and a dishwasher at the Philadelphia Marriott and other hotels in the area and I used that proximity in the dishroom to chefs to leverage an opportunity to be a prep cook at a golf club (by lying on a resume and saying that I was a prep cook at the place where I was a dishwasher).
The golf club was 30 miles outside of Philadelphia where I grew up and it would take me 2 ½ hours to get there by bus so when I showed up on my first day and they asked me to brunoise {a very small dice} a shallot and I told them I didn’t know what either of those words meant, they knew I was lying. Because I travelled so far, they decided to keep me. They put me back in the dishroom and said they would train me to be a cook and so I worked there for a year and a half. So the watershed moment was really about me making a decision, unknowingly, to pursue, not just a career in food but my eventual career as an artist, out of a need to define myself and not let my environment define me.
S: Wow. I feel like we’re starting at the beginning, when this is a utilitarian function, there’s a need that has to be met, and now making our way into this process of it transitioning into more than a job and one of the mediums that you’ll work in as an artist. That’s got me thinking, what was the next step after that? You get this job, you’re making ends meet. When does it transition from just a paycheck to “I’m trying to create this dish and tell a larger story?”
O: Before we can get to the point where I felt like I could tell any story, the next step for me was actually a lot of sacrifice and assimilation. I was working in spaces that were primarily white, extremely white. I sacrificed a lot of my family time, I sacrificed a lot of convictions I had. I didn’t eat pork, I grew up Muslim but I started eating pork. Cooking and food and the restaurant industry became like my faith and religion and nothing was more important than that. There came a lot of great success with that but also a lot of hardship. It was more important than money to be really good at what I do. And so my family struggled a lot because of that choice. I’m probably no longer with my son’s mother because of that choice. It took many years, until 2017, when I realized that I did want to say something, I just didn’t know how to say it. And that was after probably about four years in my career of being a manager, seeking points of expression that were either being invalidated or trumped because of the importance of just restaurant business in general. I’m a very competitive person and I’ve always wanted my ideas and food to be respected in the way that the best restaurants in the world, the best chefs in the world, have their opinions respected. Me being naive, not knowing that people pay into being the best, at that time. I thought it was all based upon skill, merit, and discovery. I feel like in 2017 I poured into books and people and kinda gave up the status of my position. I went from being a chef de cuisine back to being a line cook just so I could make money. I actually would’ve taken any job really but cooking’s what I knew how to do. In the line cook position I only took it on a part time basis again, sacrificing income and sacrificing status but nothing at that point was more important to me than understanding Blackness in food, which I had no idea of really other than the framework of Southern food, Soul food, and Caribbean food (primarily Jamaican food).
It’s around this point when I begin to wonder about the people shouldering the responsibilities that Tate cannot tend to because destiny beckons. I think of Bashir’s mother. I think of my own mother and cousins and sister; Black women who gave to me as I began to answer destiny’s calls beginning with my 2013 move to Brooklyn. Those key ingredients (the sacrifices we make) flavoring this thickening roux of life.
But there were things that I grew up eating that I took for granted that I didn’t necessarily feel fully a part of because I also grew up as a Black Muslim. And so with Southern/Soul/West Indian and even parts of West African food, I wasn’t able to enjoy all the parts of my Black self because we were separated by religion. I was feeling othered in a country, othered in my own ethnicity, and othered in my own upbringing because of food and religion; those things just kind of went hand in hand. What I was really doing was tearing down my own insecurities within my own identity, finding strength in the history of a collective identity of Blackness, and then rebuilding myself as a full individual three years later, realizing that all those things, intersectionally, makeup not just myself but the body of Blackness in this country. And all of it deserves to be understood, and shared and that’s what I try to exhibit. Whether I intend to or not, that’s what ends up happening, through the writing and through the food. So it always starts with myself and then out.
S: That’s a whole rite of passage and it sounds like two different types of rites of passage. A rite of passage into the restaurant industry and into industrial culinary practices and the rite of passage into Blackness as it relates to culinary history and all of the meanings that food has for Black people. Not just the nutritional benefits, not just the artistic benefits, but the stories and the different functions it holds within the community as an entity. In the second half of this rite of passage, in 2017, did you have any guides, books, people, music, that supported you in coming to this place of consciousness?
O: Books, yes. People, not yet. So the first thing that happened was I read Edna Lewis’ The Taste of Country Cooking. That was the first book that I read that felt like it really sat me down on my ass and was like “you don’t know anything.” Then the next book was High on the Hog by Dr. Jessica B. Harris, but surprisingly the next book that really gave me theory, philosophy, and an artistic framework was Kevin Young. He has a book called The Grey Album and it’s critical essays on Black literature and Black writing. He’s got a very visual way with words, staccato almost. It’s very textured. In those essays he talks about how Black writing is truth and lie at the same time, which is the construction of anyone’s identity in general right? But even more so for Black Americans, it’s a superpower. That book taught me that Black aesthetics in writing can be mirrored in food. This philosophy of fables and lies, truths, can live and does live in all forms of Black art. And the thing that was missing in Black food to me was the understanding of that. So it almost became anthropological in a way, my study, where I was applying anthropology to food. I’d never seen that before, really, and it helped me create a space for myself that I needed where the work I set out to do couldn’t really be challenged by anyone because I would be the owner of the space. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing, my thirst was driving me and I was just pulling up on any resource. I basically call those things the ‘holy trinity’ of my education. Anything else that I read came from that. That led me to Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, that led me to Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code, that led me to Vertamae Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking. Literature and then food study and then recipe and then cultural-language study, all those things interplay when I’m thinking about food or when I’m writing about food or when I’m thinking about painting about food.
The Creative Process
S: That absolutely makes sense and it’s a very similar process for me in terms of not just trying to document the story that I’ve lived or that my family’s lived but recreating it in the space that exists now, here in this time. I’m currently in Brooklyn and continuing to think about the way that culture is always shifting, it’s extant and it’s dynamic and vibrant because we are constantly being impacted and impacting others. And that is a critical part of thinking about the African Diaspora, in the ways we’ve morphed and changed and also come up with costumes and performances to mask what needs to be kept under wraps. In some ways, when I look at the work that you’re doing, it’s like this revelation to the rest of the world, all of that process that’s been going on. What are you trying to harness in what you create?
O: There’s a couple of things. Let’s start within the community. When people come and experience the things that I’ve done, I’ve always wanted people to know that I understand them. Recently, I posted on Instagram a poem that I wrote called "Yup, In My White Tee," and a painting called Daunte’s Divine Comedy and there’s this textured video collage of battle rappers in the early 2000s that accompanies both of those works. Wearing white t-shirts, staring straight into the camera, telling people what’s up and the whole collection I called ‘Habari Gani?’
via Tate's Instagram, @coltrane215
I’m not creating that for anyone that doesn’t already understand that language, you know what I mean? That would mean Black people. Even that revelation is sometimes buried within us and kind of determines how we see the world on a daily basis, depending upon who we encounter. It’s almost always cathartic and there are things that are deeply embedded inside myself that I’m recognizing are kind of spilling out into the world, in particular right now in this moment in Philadelphia. In every city in this country there’s tons of gun violence happening and a lot of that is deep-seated anger. Those battle rappers, they always rapped about anger. About the result of anger, about the premeditated behaviors of anger, about the conditions that create that anger, and that anger is usually (whatever the result of that anger is) acted upon by Black males, that cuts our lives very short. So I posted that for myself, first because I have a 14 year-old son, Bashir that I’m afraid for. There was a shooting right outside of his house a few weeks ago. There was a shooting on the corner of his high school, three weeks ago. That stuff's just been weighing on me and I don’t know any other way to deal with these feelings but to express them. So that’s one {thing Tate is harnessing}. The other is empathy. I actually do believe in the power of empathy and that people outside of our communities who don’t really understand the nuance of Black culture, it’s definitely trying to tear down stereotypes. It’s also trying to say that “these problems exist,” or if it’s something more joyful that “these joys exist,” or if it’s about unknown histories that “these histories exist” or if it’s something as simple as …. I made a dish with pears and taleggio cheese and rye bread that was based upon a poem called "Bosc" which was about me, staring at a window, thinking about sharing. It can truly be about anything and that anything is the validation of our existence and our humanity in general.
S: And that makes me think a lot of Zora Neale Hurston because she was so big on the notion that the most mundane of mundane is Black life and that’s why it matters. It matters because we’re humans, not because we’re {necessarily} extraordinary.
O: And that’s always been what I’ve been trying to get after, showing that we’re human. And within that lies the opportunity to not be allowed to be human and that shows up in my work.
S: It’s interesting that you have those two focal points in the work. Making sure that the people that you’re cooking for and about understand that this is for them and can relate and communicate and see themselves in it. And also, at the same time engender a sense of empathy, compassion, care for you and the community that you’re representing and talking about. I think there’s an interdependence that both of those things have but also the process by which those results have to come about. I would imagine there’s some interdependence within the process or within the people, places, ingredients, that are a part of making that happen. There’s an interplay; do you connect with interdependence in your methods for your work?
O: When I think about that I think about W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of the veil and how interdependence is always there. We live in America; we only live in Black America within the confines of our own home (if we’re lucky; if we’re not, Breonna Taylor). It ain’t safe, sometimes it ain’t safe in here. The interdependence just comes naturally. I think where I’ve been able to find and generate language for it just comes from reading people that are smarter than me that contextualize what that is. I know that as soon as I started the work, that’s what I wanted to say because I was being denied my humanity, my expression, in the simplest ways. I don’t know that [my work] relies on it, it just is it [interdependent]. If I wanted to make food that didn’t consider the world, I could just make food that just resonates within the Black community. I could make $12 platters of mac and cheese and candied yams and it would be delicious. I could even plate them really beautifully but I don’t think that’s my mission, that that’s my purpose. What I’ve been able to do with my craft and my art and my language is draw in resources I never believed I’d receive to work within our communities from folks who otherwise would not have looked at us. And it’s unfortunate, very unfortunate, that we need state funding, there’s a lot of healing that needs to take place, the big healing is money and with that we’ve been able to impact so many people. Most of that happened when I transitioned from New York back to Philadelphia. When I was in NY, I was impacting Black folks like yourself. Black folks who are writers, artists, teachers, educators, but I wasn’t impacting my neighbor. I wasn’t impacting the guy who’s been working at the homeless shelter. The everyday man has been able to understand what I’m trying to say and I’m able to function and communicate on multiple levels in a way that I don’t think I would be able to if I was just selling $12 dinners.
S: Thinking about your reach and folks’ ability beyond the news channels or the big magazines to connect to the work, the very people that the work is by/for/and about, thinking about that scale is what made me feel like it was metadisciplinary, beyond interdisciplinary. There is this inherent interdependence between all of the entities at play that make up the larger whole and being able to reflect on it and talk about that larger whole while also supporting the entities within to communicate with each other.
O: I’m not a moderate. I’m not Barack Obama. People know that I’m a Black person, doing Black things about Black shit. And that’s first and foremost and that’s always been first and foremost. That inherent quality of having to navigate and deal with the interdependence or “the veil,” it might drive a lot of people crazy and it does drive a lot of people crazy. Crazy because you’re wearing different faces for different people and what I’ve been working on is how to just have the same face all the damn time. Which is something that is probably the biggest privilege, to be you, no matter what. When I go back to my community in Philly, those niggas don’t deal with that. They’re not like “When I go to work, I gotta deal with Susie or Zachary in a meeting or in the boardroom and they’re making me feel like yada, yada, yada…” No, they’re working at regular jobs, they mostly encounter Black people everyday, they view the news in a very particular way, this is the way I grew up. I didn’t see white people unless I left my community. So, my neighbors, my Mother, my brothers, this conversation that we’re having right now, I can have it with them but it would be me reporting a kind of news that they don’t ever experience.
I love and hate that James Baldwin calls himself “The Witness” because it makes him both inside and outside the community at the same time. And when I look at our leaders in the past what I’ve learned from them is that they’ve all chosen a side and it’s the "third side." It’s the side that doesn’t exist in whiteness and it’s the side that doesn’t really exist in Blackness and that is the downfall I think of all of them. So if I’m gonna fall down, which might happen anyways, I’d rather fall down with my niggas behind me, not alone with no one.
How useful is it then when the dialogue that has taken center stage on Black lives, Black desires, Black concerns, is ensconced with those things’ relationship to whiteness, mistaking our roots, soil, and atmosphere as a result of white hegemony? A reaction to that versus a matter-of-fact proclamation of who we are in spite of their pathological structures that we’ve designed full lives in and around. While there are many organizations, projects, and individuals’ advocacy efforts which seek to explain and gain benefits on behalf of the Black community, they are out of touch with the day to day, multitudinous realities of Black people. We continue on making meaning in the mundane, resisting superstructures with our very Natures, and elaborating a vision for our future.Considering what Tate calls ‘the third side,’ a Black cultural worker who is neither inside the white or Black community, I consider the sacrifices, boundaries, head scratching conversations, concessions, and acceptances made to maintain their humanity, given the fullness of themselves. For Jimmy Baldwin, refusing to stay in a house in a room, under someone else’s terms that may have been a slow asphyxiation or a stinging, sadistic murder. Can one be a witness, a proclaimer, carry the weight and frustrations of navigating between communities and remain deeply rooted, embraced, and cared for with honesty in one’s own community? Where the love is for your character and the good times shared and not the material resources bestowed by haints from foreign places seeking a revival? Can we embrace our differences and the dissonance that comes with it sometimes and not erroneously attribute it to whiteness? Questions for all sectors of our people, and ones that require us to become masterful architects who learn of ourselves, trust ourselves, utilize ourselves, and so on.
Remaining Rooted, Growing Laterally
S: What are the accountability measures or support systems or just checks and balances that help you to not move into that third realm of witness?
O: My wife. My wife, that’s it. Her and I had a conversation the other day about what we really want out of life. She felt like a lot of times I’m not listening to her and that happens with a lot of people in my life right now, and so often times (with or without her suggestion) I take a step back and look at myself from the outside in because what’s happening now is I’m being empowered to be the authority on things. I’m being asked for advice on things. And, as strong of a person, as self-aware as I am, no one is invincible and no one will not fall into the depths of their own ego. So my wife helps me with that a lot. But also because I moved back home. When I think about that I think about To Pimp a Butterfly, the Kendrick Lamar album. He went back home on purpose. I came back home on purpose. Even if the pandemic spawned it, I was thinking about coming back home anyway. Me being back home and having to be faced with the everyday as opposed to the air up there, which is New York City, {laughs} sorry, I know you’re still living there...
S: You don’t have to apologize! I’ve got a whole lot of thoughts and feelings about being here and trying to cook and share what I grew up with and doing it in a bit of a vacuum. It’s a challenge.
O: It is, because New York City makes you feel like the world’s changing.
S: But you know better. I live in Crown Heights, I’m just across the way from Bed-Stuy. I’m always in Bed-Stuy, I work in the South Bronx, so it’s very clear to me that it’s not. But I think when you are trying to harness a particular story about a particular group of people (not just Black people in general but the nuances of a particular culture), when you’re trying to capture it but also not document or share it in a very antebellum sort of way, as if it doesn’t exist anymore, it can be difficult when you’re away from the source and when you are not present in the source all the time or around people and experiences that can keep you rooted in that way. I’m grateful to hear you say that that was one of the impetuses for moving back home and that you and your wife have that relationship to support each other in staying rooted to what the point of this all is.
O: It’s definitely a challenge but we’re figuring out how to make sure that that integrity remains.
S: That rounds out to one of the last questions I have regarding the stories you’re telling about the African Diaspora through the culinary process, through writing, through presentation and all of that reaching audiences that don’t have a visceral connection to who we are and our [lived] experiences. What do you want them to take away from your art? Those who aren’t Black, who are experiencing it.
O: I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about that. I can tell you what I received. When I did the residency at Stone Barns, people literally cried at dinner. Black folks, white folks, even an Indian family was on the verge of tears because of the reflections that they saw. White folks were just…{laughs} it’s really funny to say. A lot of the dishes were very emotional, for example the first dish was called “Black Lung: A Terrarium for Black Breath.”
via Tate's Instagram, @coltrane215
It was a salad on a slate that looked like concrete, it’s really beautiful and then when you got to the bottom of the salad there were just dried, dead chicken bones. By the time you were done it just kinda looked like death on concrete and I felt like there were many moments like that where people were having a great time and then "boom" it brought them back down. And so at the end of the meal I was like, I guess they got to feel what it feels like to be a Black person in America for like 3 hours. You know, like I said, my son's 14 years-old, he’s started high school, we should be happy, and there's a murder around the corner from the school. That kind of shit happens all the time. You know?
My wife and I were having a conversation last week around how white women in particular fawn over my work in a way that's just a bit obnoxious where they’re actually centering their own...They don't even feel real, you know? It's almost as if they're performing empathy, like, “Oh my God, I just like, love the work that you're doing.” And it's crazy. People that follow me on Instagram, white women, almost always white women: "I've been watching you for years, and I just...," it's too much. It's too much. I'm not ready for it. My own community is not like that, you know, my own mother comes to my dinners, and she's proud of me but this ain’t a Michael Jackson concert in 1991. You know?
It is the age old question of living and protecting our cultures and simultaneously eating from the value that outsiders have placed on it.
S: You bring up a good point, thinking back to talking about what you want folks to understand and empathy and showing the humanity of who we are. While I'm definitely not a “We Are the World” type of person, there are some central core themes that I think people around the globe can relate to if you’re not of the upper crest. I absolutely believe that you can probably at some point relate to the reality of displacement, and the impact that that has on your community, the impact that that has on your own individual identity [if you’re not of the upper crest]. And this feeling of like a phantom limb, so I think that that's our experience, it’s the experience of many immigrants, it’s the experience of folks who are in their own countries speaking their own languages and dealing with oppression from a socioeconomic standpoint. And I think even far, far, far back, I was talking about this with a friend of mine, I think that's the experience of white people, for those who are aware that before they came out to conquer the world that they practiced [equity, accountability to other beings, collectivism] with their own people on their own continent. I think somewhere along the lines they're trying to get back to a sense of humanity themselves hence all of the yoga and Reiki {collective laughs and also, let us recall Mama Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination for a rundown of the ways that white artists shaping their society imagined themselves as heroes yet crippled with self doubt and fear, utilizing their conception of Blackness to shape an identity which still hinged on an "other"}. Grasping for straws to hold on to because that realness, that authenticity of what it means to connect back to something that's older than you, but also deeply a part of you. An epigenetic experience. I think that it's really difficult for them [white people] to access and it sounds like when they are either working with you, or getting a chance to experience your art, that it's tapping into something in the epigenome maybe. I wonder if that is an experience that may be happening for them.
O: I've never considered that.
S: I think the blessing in it for Black people is that, while our pieces have been, in some ways broken and spread around in different parts of our psyche, and throughout the globe, we have the means to put it back together again. Some of us do it through spiritual work, some of us do it through education. In watching your work on Instagram, and seeing some of the work at Stone Barns, it seems like your way of doing it has been through cooking, through poetry. And then also through the preparation of sharing that work [outward]. It feels really, really regenerative in that way.
O: I’m glad. Yeah, I think it's hard for me to think that way, especially as my work has gone more mainstream, {hard} to trust people. That seed of trust is just wearing thinner and thinner and thinner. And it's actually really scary for me, honestly, because I've never felt like this before. I've never felt like I wanted to just close my shades and stay in the house. Not that, like, I'm getting all kinds of mail or anything like that, I wouldn't consider myself to be that famous. But I think that it's not really about the amount of people that I'm reaching, it's about the strength of connectivity that people feel, to me. And this feeling of exceptionalness that is just new where after a life of being that kid that was told “you're not meeting your potential, but you're so smart.” I think in New York, they call it “gifted and talented;” in Philly, they call it “mentally gifted,” and I would go to different classes and when I got older, I ended up pretty much being like everybody else that I was around, and I still am like everybody else that I’m around. This exceptionalism is very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. So I think if I ever get accustomed to this newness, I'll be able to see others again, in a way that I've been able to see them in the past. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard right now.
Cultivating Freedom
S: You are living in what feels like an in between space. This space of navigating all of this exposure versus the invisibility that we're really accustomed to from mainstream eyes. I think there's a superpower in not being able to be seen or understood or heard by the larger world, especially when there's so much restitution and restoration within that has to happen. I want to ask you about liberation. But before I ask that question, I want to know, what is freedom to you? What does that feel like? What does that look like? Is it a sensory thing? Is it something that can exist now? Or maybe it exists in another space? And another time?
O: Freedom, to me, is imagination. This answer is gonna feel very loaded, but I don't really believe in freedom for any human on Earth. Even people in power are trapped in a power structure that they're not able to see outside of [their power structure. And so they only deliver the blows of oppression. Even if they have the tools to not, it's not nurtured or cultivated in them, there are certain expectations of people in power. The freest people, to me, are ones who live without those kinds of expectations. They don’t live in traditional— what we’ve constructed as traditional civilization or traditional society. I think the most free that I feel is when I'm traveling in my mind, you know, I'm imagining something to create. In a more rational sense, as a Black person, where we wear so many different identities, in a country that forces us to wear those identities, what does it feel like to not consider my being, my presence? It's the feeling that people explained to me of having when they go to Africa and all they see are Black people or when they go to the Caribbean all you see are Black people and everyone in power’s Black. [Freedom] It's that feeling, but I don't look to going back to Africa as some sort of escapism from the daily realities of our Americanness. I think what I'm trying to achieve through] my work is that myself, my community, and my family, and my work can all exist in an equitable form, as anything else, you know, without any fear of judgment, without anyone considering like, “Oh, this is a Black [thing].” It's beyond Black. It's in a space where we don't have to define ourselves by the construct of something that's literally only 600 years old and that's the construct of race. You know, Black people have only really been Black people for about 140 years. Before that it was colored/a Negro/a slave/a nigger and before that, it was whatever the tribes were that we came from. For white people it’s the same thing. White people have only been white since around 1650. Freedom is beyond the construct of race, not by ignoring it but by working through it. And finding new ways to define our human existence, beyond color.
S: When I think of freedom, my Mom is always a huge inspiration for me. She was a quote-unquote homemaker, a housewife. And the way that she did it, in the way that so many other people did it, especially Black women, was to create these spaces where you could be nourished and where you could be yourself. I think about the work that goes into this and how you have to build or make that space (sometimes from scratch with not much precedence). You have to acquire some ingredients and then mold it into this thing that we think of when we're talking about freedom and liberation. Do you think that agriculture, cooking, and teaching have something that we can learn about liberation? Can we use those skills to access it?
O: Yeah, agriculture especially. To me, food is the conduit to the universe. And if we don't learn anything in this lifetime, (then truly we are going to the place not designated for the righteous) it’s that we're not in control, humans are not in control. The moon and the stars are in control, you know, the air is in control; the water, the most powerful thing on this planet, is in control. The land teaches us patience. It teaches us cycles, it teaches us rest. It doesn't teach abundance, it teaches ‘enough, which is something that we're not taught. Agriculture is really special in that way. All the words that we use to define where we want to go as humans, like, “oh, we want to be more regenerative and organic and intersectional and inclusive,” all those things happen naturally, in plants. Just in plants, without farming, because farming is land domestication. Even the best practices in farming and land domestication, use those very same terms, to grow fruitful crops. To raise healthy animals. I think New York is probably a great example of showing how even within its divisiveness, there's still diversity in the offerings in New York City where you might live in one neighborhood, but every other neighborhood is mad accessible. In neighborhoods, like in Queens, where all these different smells from different shops and stores are present. You develop a sense of curiosity in folks and your neighbor could represent an entirely different part of the world.
I and millions of other people inhabiting NYC can attest to our domesticated biodiversity and the daily examples of how we impact/are impacted by and rely on each other's lives. And while the interconnectedness of our lives and the experiences we have outside of our respective community can seem a bit removed from the topic of ‘agriculture, food, and teaching as tools for liberation,’ might I entreat you to consider that the relationships present in these subjects are iterative and successively propel us to what freedom is for you?
You can't say that about every place in the world. And so your friend groups are likely to be more diverse. The way you see the world is going to be more open. I didn’t have that benefit growing up. Most of the people that I grew up with were Black {albeit different types of Black like Black Muslims}. My world really opened up when I started cooking, when I started meeting new people. I was envious of cooks that I stood beside who were like, “Well, I went backpacking in Thailand and like on $1,000” and I'd never been out of Philadelphia because I didn't think I had enough money. I was taught about the world in a very particular way and at the time I wasn't considering in my envy how these people may have been brought up, or who they may or may not have to care for in their adult life. I've been an adult since I was 15. I definitely think that because of food, it opened up my world and expanded what I wanted to consume about the world. And it's really shaped and colored how I describe myself and my perspective. What I've been trying to do is gather as many young adults as I can to be able to teach them our unique perspective on the world.
S: I imagine it as a gateway to liberation, the cooking process, but also, all of the methods, the beauty, and the magic behind the different things that you can do. The processing of ingredients, the different flavors that you can access through the processes.
O: I almost feel like I don't have to go somewhere to get a sense of how people feel, especially if the cook is a really good cook. And you're in good company, it brings out stories.
Dreams to Fruition: Honeysuckle Projects
S: So it sounds like you’re coming full circle with the architecture and the blueprint design dreams that you talked about in the beginning of our conversation, to now creating this training program with the young adults and all of Honeysuckle Projects. The landscape of it sounds very much like how you’ve described liberation.
O: Yeah, there are young chefs that are working with us, of several different backgrounds, that find something special about Honeysuckle. The closer they get to us, I think the more free they feel in their thinking and they find it refreshing, our thoughtfulness, us considering their thoughtfulness in our practice. We've been able to really reach beyond the constraints of what traditional employee-employer relationships look like because our structure and our thought patterns are so unique.
S: What would you like to see folks you work with take away from your work? What would you like for Black people to take away from your work or Honeysuckle Projects?
O: Young cooks come to me and say, “Man, I want to do what you do, I want to redefine soul food or I want to make a claim or make a statement.” And the conversation always ends like this, “then you've totally missed the point.” The point is so that you can just live. I never felt like I could just live. If I’m Clark Kent, Honeysuckle is Superman and Superman is living. I want Black folks who encounter this project or encounter our work to understand that this is an exercise in unchaining. Unchaining ourselves first because there's a lot of internalized restriction on our living and then learning the language to combat any restrictions that are coming your way. And a lot of that is hard nos. Hard nos.
I want people to learn how to decentralize Eurocentric standards. That's the language that I've been developing and continuing to develop, of what that looks like visually, what that looks like on paper, what that looks like in consumer to employer relationships, down to our handbook, just decentralizing that. And also not ignoring that interdependence. Afrocentricity is not about working in opposition to Eurocentricity. It's about making it the least important factor.
S: When you're talking about cooking, when you're talking about mentoring, and even in your poetry, not only is the content, Black people, but the methods are Black [a cultural vastness beyond the narrow concept of race]. Can we get a sneak peek of something you’re working on now? Anything that feels like your next steps in your work?
O: We're working on creating staples like white bread, and breakfast sandwiches and things like that for our store. In an effort to offer alternatives to the more regular items that people can find in our neighborhoods at the bodegas, like in Philly can get a hoagie for $1. There's a McDonald's in the neighborhood that we're opening up in and so it's in direct competition with things that are $5 or less in our neighborhood. We're not saying, “Hey, eat healthier” we're saying we're making the same thing out of better ingredients. And so it's inherently healthier. That's our beginning place and then once people kind of become accustomed to our presence and understand our message and all that stuff, then maybe we can make things like “here, eat this kale salad” but first and foremost, stuff has to taste good. And people don't want to be hearing pedagogy. You know, they don't want to be hearing a bunch of preachy stuff from folks. Aligning ourselves with all the markers of gentrification, but while wearing blackface, that's not what we're doing.
So that’s on the food front. On the art front, there's a couple of sculptural pieces that I want to work on. We're opening two spaces but when we get to our larger space I want that opening to be accompanied by artwork that I've been working on, and working through, during this process of opening. They’re like vignettes of a brain path up until this open. One of which is a sculpture depicting the peas and fentanyl needles present at our farm. We grew a bunch of peas on our farm [Max Paul Park]: cow peas, black-eyed peas, several different peas. This farm is right in the middle of the hood, in West Philly. Because of the relationship that we have with the entity that owns the space it has to be open, we can't put gates up or anything like that. So, people use it to shoot up fentanyl. Over the summer, we found in our beds of peas, needles, so we've had to install sharps boxes, because we don't want to keep these people out of the park because the cops will lock them up. We understand the battle with addiction. So we put these things up to keep everyone safe. And yet, we still continue to find needles and stuff in our bed. So one of the sculptures that I’m working on is how to make or even grow a very, very small row of peas inside of a grandma's shopping cart with soil below where the peas that are growing out of the stalks are actually needles. Because we're harvesting groceries and one of the things that we're harvesting is fentanyl needles. I have them kind of interspersed within the sculpture, growing like peas to show what we're working with in the neighborhood. It's talking about addiction, but it's also talking about the quality of life in the area. It's talking about safety and talking about what we are really harvesting. Really, you know, what are we really nurturing? What are we really trying to solve? What are we really trying to cure? Everyone wants to glorify and romanticize Black farming, even our Black selves are like, “guerrilla farming, this is the path to agency and land rights” and all this and all that. But what's really happening on the ground?
S: Oh yeah! I’ve been in the urban agriculture world for about 10 years now and…
O: It's not pretty. It's not solution based. It's very bureaucratic, you know. The most satisfying thing about these urban ag spaces is that it can actually be done, you can actually feed people when you're doing CSA boxes, or food drives. Creating community in those spaces is probably the most glorifying part of that work. But you need a full time job in real life. And then you do that on the side as a hobby. There's just not enough space. It's sovereign, a lot of the time. It's not supported by the state for the most part. Cities and states are just now coming around to the idea that they need to create city council members to actually focus on this work. And even that is tied into relationships and nepotism and bureaucracy.
Much can be said about the celebrity culture within the Black urban agriculture movement, the disintegrating authenticity, and dissolution of their ties to the OG gardeners and farmers who reclaimed vacant lots to feed hoods that businesses and governments divested from after they’d taken all they could. I’m reminded of moments earlier in our conversation where Tate identifies what keeps him rooted and his work valuable to the people it seeks to speak to first.
What's Feeding Tate
S: Nice. It sounds like a complete extra sensory experience. Is there any music that’s guiding your work right now?
O: Not much informing this phase. I'm always listening to jazz. But honestly, mostly what I've been listening to are audio books. Octavia Butler. I read Charles Blow’s The Devil You Know. And right now I'm reading We Were Eight Years in Power, [by Ta-Nehisi Coates] which is actually perfect to be reading right after The Devil You Know, it’s like working backwards in time. The Color of Money is another book that I've been listening to which talks about Black disenfranchisement and financial institutions and banks. Anything that's really talking about the disruption of Black mobility. And the collective agency towards Black secured futures is what I've been listening to.
S: I love that, as your work, it's not just in one genre. I think what you said at the beginning is really a poignant way to close. Imagination has to be at the center of it all. Someone imagined a global world market that was fueled by African bodies and Indigenous folks dying, taking their land. Someone dreamed that up and got other people to believe in it and work for it. Someone brought about a capitalist system, someone thought about all of these different ways that we exist. And I absolutely believe that the freedom from it, like you said, has got to begin with the imagination.
Omar Tate is a chef, artist, and cofounder of Honeysuckle Projects, a multifacted food company that focuses on the nuanced cultures and cuisines of the Black diaspora. In 2020, Honeysuckle (Pop Up) was named pop up of the year by Esquire Magazine and in 2021, Time Magazine named Omar as one of the 100 innovators to watch as part of their Time100Next list.
Sawdayah Brownlee is a Gullah woman living in Weeksville (Crown Heights), Brooklyn, NY and is a farmer, educator, cook, sister, daughter, friend. She is an alum of Howard University where she received her BA in Africana Studies. In her work as a farmer and agricultural/environmental student and educator, she has taught concepts in sustainable agriculture, botany, agricultural history in the African Diaspora, and food systems to intergenerational groups since 2011. As an emerging artist, Sawdayah weaves together written and spoken word, prayers, gardening, and cooking to tell personal stories of the search for home and the reclamation of her own Nature.