Parsley, Or Perejil

Parsley, in many ways is the most mundane of herbs, the most maligned, the most inconsequential. When I was growing up, parsley was always curly parsley, the kind of herb that looked unforgivably artificial, lodged unattractively on pieces of unidentifiable fruit in the little plastic bowls on in-flight dining. I didn’t think people actually ate parsley. It looked like astro turf for heavens sake. It would be years before I discovered that I would love the subtle flavors of parsley, combined with lemon juice to make tabouleh. It would be even longer until I discovered the flat-leaf version of parsley that would impart a delicate flavor to sauces. For years, after moving to the United States, parsley to this Indian girl, was always a trick. It was the green herb that sat unobtrusively next to cilantro, which, if in a rush, would accidentally end up in my supermarket cart, only to prove itself unpliable when I would turn to my lentils hoping to add cilantro. Saffron may be the queen of spices, but to Indians, cilantro is the everyday paesano, the necessary ingredient to render delicious eating. I can still remember the frustration of seeing parsley when I need cilantro. Madhur Jaffrey may have called it “Chinese parsley” in the 1960s but there’s nothing I can do with parsley in Indian dishes. Now that M cooks with me, I send him to buy herbs and worry that he’ll come back with parsley instead of cilantro, that he’ll bring back curly leaf parsley instead of flat leaf Italian parsley. And I think, how silly to think a little herb that doesn’t smell the way I need it to, can mess up my dish. And then I think about a poem by Rita Dove called “Parsley” and I think how tragic and fascinating that this one little herb, which can cause minor devastation in my kitchen, could be connected to so much blood, violence and hatred.

I am teaching Rita Dove’s poem “Parsley” in class as a bridge between two Dominican American texts. In the text I have just taught, no one can speak about the horror of Trujillo and the Parsley Massacre. It falls to a little girl, the littlest in her family, to refer to her Haitian nanny as a “real Haitian too and that’s why she couldn’t say certain words like the word for parsley” (218). Otherwise, this text so uncritical in its nostalgia for a nation-state still stained red by the blood of Haitian cane workers, remains silent on this history. It is Rita Dove who says:

“He will
order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word”

General Trujillo, knowing that Haitians could not say “perejil”, but would say “pelejil,” turned this innocuous herb into something that would devastate an entire people. For the sake of this word, which Dove rightly labels, “beautiful” so many would die. While I would joke in my head that it was never a matter of life or death if M confused cilantro and parsley, I think of the tragic lack of justice that in fact, it was a matter of life and death for so many, too many, who could not navigate the word parsley on their tongue. What felt like a foreign taste that refused to roll off my palate was a word that intractably refused to roll of the tongues of an entire people, even as they knew it was a matter of getting to live.

I love this poem for so many reasons. It takes a simple word, a simple herb that adds flavor to any dish, and considers the potential it had to devastate. This beautiful poem that refuses to be just a villanelle, just a sestina, makes parsley larger than life, more immense even than I can grasp.

I think then of my hatred for parsley. It is so often the wrong ingredient. In the wrong place at the wrong time when it shows up in my kitchen. And I think of how, not too long ago, it too was the wrong word and for all the wrong reasons.