Rachism: you cantHave enough: Barbeques & Barbancourt

It’s that time again… hot weather, cold beers, loud music and loud relatives. Aaaaah! With summer approaching, it’s time, once again, to break out that Barbancourt or whatever is your equivalent of colonial Island rum. You know what I’m talking ‘bout. In Haiti it’s Barbancourt; to Puerto Ricans its Bacardi; to Brazilians it’s Cachaca; to Jamaicans it’s Appleton Estate and so on and so forth. You can find these potent colonial rums in any Caribbean/ South American country that suffered through slavery, especially places that processed sugar cane fields and used sugar cane byproduct to produce a potent rum to help them forget about how they wanted to strangle and stab every white man in sight. So tell your grandpa to break out that ole colonial rum and let the good times roll.

And let me just share a little something I’ve learned about barbeque season. Depending on where you go, there are cultural specific rules that you should be familiar with beforehand such as: a non-Haitian, non-West Indian, non-colored friend invited to me to her home for a barbeque a few weeks ago. My jaw unhinged when she told me that the barbeque would begin at noon. Noon? Being Haitian, I have never heard of any party/ wedding/ communion/funeral and definitely not a bbq that began before 6pm. Now, when I arrived there at 1:45pm (early for a Haitian) and found that all the guests had already arrived, my jaw and bottom lip literally scraped the floor.

When a Haitian family barbecues, everyone shows up after 6pm, and stays until 3am. People are still cooking rice and chicken when you arrive and everyone takes a big ole plate of food home with them on their way home. We drink too much, we eat too much, we dance (sloppily) and we joke on the non-Haitians in Kreyol so they can’t understand what we’re saying; and then we drive home at 3am deaf, drunk and bloated, praying a cop doesn’t pull us over. (Leave it to the reckless blog to make reckless behavior sound so wonderfully tempting). And the colonial island rum is, of course, a staple of the Haitian barbeque. A lil Barbancourt and grandma and grandpa can get drunk and reminisce about the not-so good good old days with Papa Doc. And a lil Barbancourt will put a crying baby or toddler to sleep in 2.3 seconds. Talk about good times! So call up your token Haitian friend, and hit up your local liquor store, because nothing says summer like a good barbeque and Barbancourt.