Edwidge Danticatis Kitchen History

I took yet another cookie, and another, until the whole box was empty. . . .
"I cannot read American," I said.

(Danticat 1996, 111)

Her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to
have my face. . . . I want to be the two of us. . . . I want the join.

(Morrison 1987, 213)

This essay has two goals. First, it establishes food as an unavoidable and complex form of language necessary to remember the past and to heal the self and communities in the aftermath of diaspora, immigration, and exile. Second, it sets out to present Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory¹ (1994) as an integral agent of contemporary American identity, not only as immigrant exceptionalism within the United States.

As Andrew Warnes has recently shown in Hunger Overcome, culinary practices have not only been overlooked in the study of literary construction but also highly trivialized. If food is at all considered, it is viewed as a form of sub-writing at best, and at worst, as an obstacle to literacy.² I demonstrate that Danticat, like the African American writers Warnes examines, "draw[s] a profound connection between writing and cooking, insisting on the capacity of both to replenish two disabling voids—hunger and illiteracy—that external forces have invested with special prominence throughout American history" (Warnes 2004, 2). Danticat's Breath could be read as a move toward that very goal. Her character Sophie Caco learns to master a kitchen poetry through which she voices her self, family, and communal history. As in the epigraph above drawn from Krik? Krak! hunger and illiteracy are irremediably linked. The solution to both ailments resides in a control of food and language.

Each stage of Breath could be read as a step toward the acquisition and mastery of food and its language. Thus, my demonstration simply follows the book's narrative order. My first section focuses on the beginning of the novel, which coincides with Sophie's sheltered early childhood in the Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets. In this childhood memory, food production and consumption connect the individual to the community, to the immediate environment, and to the communal historical past in a harmonious, albeit idealistic and nostalgic, relation.

The next two sections of this essay, "Eating and the City" and "Purging the Western Body," deal with Sophie's displacement into the foreign urban space of Brooklyn. The relationship she experiences there with her environment and her kin is one of disconnection illustrated by an abundance of random food samples leading to amnesia. Sophie's body, like the serialized food products she consumes, becomes detached from any coherent system of reference. The body turned thing does not fit the predetermined Western mold. As a consequence, Sophie rejects the food her body ingests and develops bulimia. Moreover, this disease, which her Haitian grandmother does not understand, makes her body untranslatable to the Haitian language and system of communication. Sophie's body becomes a floating sign, which can belong neither to her native nor to her acquired language.

Finally, "The Transcultural Kitchen" reflects on the use of food as healing, a healing that I claim to be, after bell hooks, the most important component of the process of remembrance. Danticat's Breath and this essay both close with a return to Haiti. This return, however, is not a retrieval of the idealized space of childhood. In this newly found Haiti, links can only be made once its inherent violence is seen and acknowledged.

My reading of Danticat accomplishes three interweaving, or synergistic connections, which are essential to a proper appreciation of Danticat's work and that of the class of transnational writers she epitomizes. First, the personal and familial modes of oppression need to be connected with the country's political violence.

Second, cooking and writing need to become interconnected forms of resistance. This association, which Danticat calls a "braiding" of cooking and writing (1996, 220), transforms the daily gesture of women into political acts, and home and kitchen into sites of political resistance. Women's previously written bodies graduate...