This paper aims to discuss the representation of food in diaspora and exile in linkage to identity within the writing of Arab-American author Diana Abu Jaber's “Crescent”. Food as a cultural trope is discussed in many academic fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and literary criticism. In this view, food is a trope that diasporan writers deploy to negotiate their existence and raise questions about their identity and displacement from the host land. Also, the use of the thematic representation of food that the Arab author, Diana Abu Jaber, includes, aids in discussing the political issues of otherness and self by representing this cultural trope. This paper aims to discuss the representation of food in diaspora and exile in linkage to identity within the writing of Arab-American author Diana Abu Jaber's “Crescent”. Moreover, it is analysed how food is a marker that aids the existence of people in exile.
Exile and Diaspora Representation of Food in Diana Abu Jaber’s Crescent.
Abstract
Food as a cultural trope that discussed in many scientific fields as anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and Literary criticism. In this view, food as trope that diasporic writers deploy to negotiate their existence and raise question about one self’s identity and his displacement in the host land. Also, the use of the thematic representation of food let Arab Authors, Diana Abu Jaber includes, to discuss the political issue of otherness and self by representing this cultural trope. This paper aims to discuss the representation of food in diaspora and exile in linkage to identity within the writing of Arab-American author Diana Abu Jaber “Crescent”. Moreover, how food is a marker that ease the existence of people in exile.
Key words: Food, Cultural studies, Identity, Existence, Exile, Diaspora, self, Other, Crescent.
1- Introduction
Food is the cornerstone of cultural studies that circuits and organizes human identities and the concepts of others. The foodways that every human consumes help affirm their diversity and social status. Food is the essence of our identity. Every human is constructed biologically, psychologically, and socially through the foodways, they choose to blend with as being in the host land. An individual finds himself forced to live in an exile situation that compels him to think differently. Thus, the exile or immigrants become 'others' in the host-land, which assumes a new significance. Experiencing exile is a phase that composes and structures the exiled; Mahnaz Afkhami states, “through the disruption of the given and accepts, the exile experience brings into focus the sources on which the self is composed and structured.”1 From that standpoint, the application of Mahnaz epigram on ethnic food embodies a site of struggle where nationality is contested and destabilized, reinvented, remade, and re-mixed. Food aids the diasporic communities and groups to trace the past through nostalgia, and memories of the migratory cooking memoirs facilitate the self-formation.2
In addition, food resembles a medium through which minorities define, at the same time, issues and themes of inclusion in and exclusion from one community in which they live. Food plays a vital role in constructing immigrants' identities. For this reason, food gives strength and power to those minorities/exiles to re-create their past and nostalgic memories in their present and revive the totality of the old way of life.
2- Representing Exile and Diaspora:
The way migrants and exiles discuss their memories related to food permits them to evaluate their methods of writings. They are called, according to Sutton, the "nostalgia cookbook"3 or, as Bardenstein, who named them "cookbook memories,"4 which allocate memory instead of cooking as the primary reason. This kind of book explains how origin, loss, and nostalgia are conceived among immigrants.
Food is a powerful cultural marker. At home, food represents the taken-for- granted safety that provides ontological security. Moreover, food allows one to compose an imaginary bridge that keeps individuals connected with the memories of familiar faces, tastes, and smells left behind in the host-land. These features spotlight the essential role foodways plays in displaced communities of diaspora.
Many analyses deal with food and its relationship to exile or placelessness and the displacement concept that immigrants live in. Bardenstein concludes that in the beliefs of exiles without removal, food traditions would be transmitted, and identities are in action, authentic and questionable.5 Thus, in diaspora and exile, food becomes an issue from which women conceive the feeling of loss of the homeland into a direct, original, and uncomplicated canal to an actual world in which men have not been engaged in cooking. In the same vein, Peter Scholliers determines that exile means pining for home, whereas diaspora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be mean alone or solitary, but diaspora is always collective.6
Moreover, removal in the sense of estrangement or alienation from home does not solely reserve for immigrants. In this way, Abu Jaber questions the representation of identity concerning exile to show how identities are fractured with spaces, namely here, the host land and exile. Internal exile represents a robust discourse related to alienating forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion. To make it clear, food in this sense links the old and the new lives in exiles, allowing the migrants to remain connected to the past. At the same time, they try to construct a language by which they can bargain their presence in the host country and ultimately choose to what degree they become part of their new arena, the host country.
The immigrants' practices in their everyday life, such as dress, language, manners, and food, represent differences and visibility. They can embody discrimination; in this way, the concept of home for people in exile is linked with the feeling of displacement or removal. Immigrants and exiles become redundant or unacceptable; however, they are unavailable in the case of food. Especially if they continue to eat foods that entail ethnic Otherness. For example, the smelly food Abu-Jaber and her friends take to the school signifies the family's identity as ethnic Otherness. She states that:
our lunch bags open, and the scent of garlic, fried onions, and tomato sauces roll out - pierogi, pelmeni, Doro wat, teriyaki, kielbasas, stir-fries. Borsch, I become famous for my lunch bags full of garlic-roasted lamb and stuffed grape leaves (LB 160).
Rituals of the home have more than one meaning, in this respect, foodways' expression entails confirmation of culture and celebration of collaborative relationships rather than just one opportunity to live.
Whether the exile is voluntary or by force, the exiled person has a shared sense of loss and displacement, often repeated through food. Margaret Morse, quoted in Khoo, states, “food is often considered a lived metaphor of culture itself”7. In the long run, food in exile symbolizes the exilic struggle that seems to adapt to life in the host country. In this way, “home for the exile means a transitional place, since the immigrants cannot reclaim original home, nor can its presence/absence be entirely banished in the remade home.”8 Correspondingly, food significance does not affect the physical and cultural aspects.
Discussing food in exile embodies a bridge between the old culture and the new life. The foodways permit the immigrant to be linked to the old home. This connection is endured through the language of sharing, preparing, and consuming food spoken by smells and tastes. It also studies how food is a language that a person negotiates their position of being in the received land, permitting exiles to choose between knowing their culture of origin and re-acting themselves in the new culture. Rushdie states that:
The sense of who we are has been related to roots, the idea of coming from a place, inhabiting a kind of language that you share, and the type of social convention within which you live. And then what happens to the migrant is that they lose all three [...] and they find themselves in a new place, a new language. And so, they have to reinvent a sense of self.9
Rushdie's use of "language" could similarly mean "food." Thus, food articulates with different meanings and significations; food has its own language of preparation. In this regard, Roland Barthes indicates that food is an "alimentary language.", Barthes describes this as subject to the rules regulating any signifying system. He breaks down the abstract non-specific "food" and its performative aspect.10
Reading food as an abstract Saussurean langue, Cuddon indicates that food is “the system or totality of language shared by the 'collective consciousness.”11 Thus, food includes grammar rules, including "rules of exclusion," which function by expression of taboos like Kosher or Halal laws that "signifying oppositions" like savory and sweet or raw and cooked.12 The rule of "associations" acts at the dish level or menu level, which means the “rituals of use” that act as “alimentary rhetoric.”13
In terms of food, this means that exiles must choose between living in their customary langue and coexisting with the different ethnicities in the new land. In this sense, Andrew Buckser affirms that although food is culturally designed, individuals must consume food physically; therefore, eating always implies a person's choice as to who is connected; to which group they belong.14 In the first phase, the exiles can affirm their attachment to the langue, the food of their cultural community to signify their Otherness in the host culture, and resist assimilation. In the second phase, they can accept the langue of the host culture to communicate within their host land and reduce their affiliation. Exiles’ food preferences are different from those of their host country. Therefore, they cannot quickly be invited to dinner where these laws or tastes are not followed, excluding them from much social interaction within the host culture.
The nostalgia felt by the exile for the one true home appeals to the desire for the persistence of identity and belonging. This fantasy arises from the human condition of incompleteness. It is what we can sense from the state of Hanif or Han in Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent as an intellectual exilic character in the host land. Edward Said states that the academic looks like a “shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense with land, not on it.”15 In short, the migrant, when he lives in the new land, is being open to strangeness; it means that one should not try to dominate and naturalize. Han in Crescent lives with the homeland so that he is always carrying home in his memory and not losing hope. Thus, Hanif experiences “the fate [of exile] not as a derivation and something to bewailed, but as a sort of freedom” (C. 360).
Diana Abu-Jaber elaborates the quote of Edward Said through the following epigram “I miss...? The Kitchen? my Home? [...] I miss my mother's coffee/ I miss my mother's bread” (C. 57). Abu-Jaber states that when he helps Sirine in preparing the Baklava, Hanif “misses everything, absolutely everything” (C. 59). In this sense, Sirine’s food preparation from the old home metaphorically stands as a link to the ancient culture for Han, who is in the host-land as an exilic person. In this manner, Han's attending Um Nadia's café and preparing Baklava with Sirine and the way he uses food resemble his survival in the host culture and a bridge beyond exile.
[...]
1 Mahnaz Afkhami, Women in Exile (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 43.
2 Ibid.
3 David Sutton, Remembrance of Repast, 67.
4 Carol Bardenstein, “Beyond Universal Baklava: 160.
5 Ibid., 162.
6 Peter Scholliers, “Meals, Food Narratives, and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present,” in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Age, Ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 8.
7 Olivia Khoo, “Folding Chinese Boxes: Asian Exoticism in Australia, ” Journal of Australian Studies 24 (2000): 204.
8 Amal Talaat Abdelrazek, Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings (New York: Cambria Press (2007), 176.
9 Salman Rushdie, “ In Bourne ” in Voices: Writers and Politics, ed. Bill Udi Eichler and David Herman (Nottingham & New York: Spokesman, 1987): 63.
10 Ronald Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hall and Wang, 1968), 14.
11 John Anthony Cuddon, the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (WestSussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 449.
12 Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (New York: Knopf, 1996), 35.
13 Ibid., 36.
14 Andrew Buckser, “Keeping Kosher: Eating and Social Identity among the Jews of Denmark,” Ethnology 38; no.3: 192.
15 Edward Said, The Edward Said Reader (London: Granta Books, 2001), 378.
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