At the end of chapter one, Lowe described the shrill sounding of the conch as the morning sun rises after the fire and death of Cecil. I found this symbol quite striking with its emotional stakes in the chapter, “how years ago it used to ignite the Negro people to rise up and fight…” (19). It creates this literary double-standard where Lowe recognizes its symbolic strength in the Black struggle yet realizes how this unity doesn’t exist for him as he runs through the anti-Chinese sentiment of his community: a possible cause for the fire.
I couldn’t help but think of conch, specifically conch meat as a common dish eaten where this book takes place. Conch is indigenous to the Bahamas and in the West Indies, it is served commonly served in curries and stews. All parts of the meat are edible and in the Turks and Caicos Islands, there’s even a Conch Festival where local chefs compete for the most unique conch dishes like conch wontons and conch empanadas. Yet, the conch is also popular in East Asian cuisine like in Chinese stir-fry and in Italian cuisine as it is often included in the Italian-American Christmas celebration of the “Feast of the Seven Fishes.”
Conchs also bear many spiritual and cultural meanings. Like in the novel, it is often involved in funeral ceremonies in many Afro-Carribean traditions. In Hindu mythology, warriors blew conchs to announce battle and the sound is believed to drive evil spirits away. Its sound is believed to correspond to “higher frequency universal sounds associated with music of the spheres,” which is “an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies…not thought to be audible, but rather a harmonic, mathematical or religious concept.”
This made me think of the conch in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the only other conch in literature I can think of. The sounding of a conch, or any low-pitched wind instrument, is automatically emotional, specifically solemn, to my ears. It’s interesting how simple sounds (e.g. not music) can evoke different meanings given the context of the blowing of the conch, like strength, beckoning, and mourning.
Wow, I’d never heard of conch in culinary dishes before, so this was an informative post. It’s interesting that it plays cultural roles in both its edible and hollowed out forms, like a cultural artifact with lifecycles for different scenarios. I’m a vegetarian, but I wonder what conch tastes like and how different it is from other hard-shelled edible things like clams or oysters.