Cultural Contact and the Contemporary Culinary Memoir: Home, Memory and Identity in Madhur Jaffrey and Diana Abu-Jaber

Introduction

While food and taste have traditionally played a major role in ethnic literatures as ways of preserving tradition and creating communal spaces, the recent expansion of the popularity of food writing cannot be examined as a mere search for nostalgia, rootedness, and traditional, essentialized forms of identity. Rather, in the context of intercultural exchange and increasing global mobility, representations of the culinary in autobiographical writing are linked with the ongoing construction of hybridized identity and the desire to negotiate identity in new transnational spaces. One example of this is culinary life writing by ethnic and post-colonial writers who reflect on the role of food in the making of subjectivity. Through narrating stories and memories of home and family, their writings expose the formation of self in a context of cultural interchange. In this process the tropes of taste and food play a double role, stitching the group together but also separating it from the dominant. Yet contemporary culinary memoirs also posit food and taste as tropes with potential to bridge cultural difference and create new transcultural identities.

In this essay my focus is on two recently published memoirs by women, which use different representational strategies: Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India by Madhur Jaffrey, the well-known chef and author of Indian cookbooks, and The Language of Baklava by the Arab American author Diana Abu-Jaber. In my analysis of these texts I will show that they explore issues of difference and transculturation by actively using food, memory, and home to shape new forms of identity. While Jaffrey's nostalgic narrative emphasizes the role of the family home and its traditions, Abu-Jaber's memoir exploits to a great degree her positionality as an Arab American woman in constructing transcultural culinary identity. While the two texts reveal the central role of food and cooking in the making of immigrant women's identity, they also show how varied this role is. In contrast to Jaffrey's nostalgic memories from a safe Indian childhood, Abu-Jaber's narrator shows how food may also function as a marker of difference that separates the immigrant from the host. In these narratives, then, the culinary marks more than a domestic past: as I will show, it signifies the reshaping of identity characteristics of post-colonial life writing and points to the importance of memory and community for immigrants.

Culinary Memoir: Genre, Form and Function

Culinary memoirs can be seen as a form of autobiographical writing. While the traditional view of autobiographies has tended to emphasize their role in the making of modern self-reflective subjectivities, research into women's and ethnic narratives of self has emphasized their ability to critique such established masculinist and nationalist messages. In her article "Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects," Caren Kaplan suggests that the generic baggage of Eurocentric autobiographies is refuted in often marginalized forms of life writing that contradict and deconstruct conventional ideas about the genre by transgressing its boundaries (118–19). In Kaplan's view, such forms as prison memoirs, testimonials, ethnographic writings, biomythography, cultural autobiography, and regulative psychobiography are means of combining an author-centered approach to autobiographical writing with a critical one—the "out-law" genres of autobiography are means of producing "a discourse of situation; a 'politics of location'" (119). In a similar vein, Gillian Whitlock's study of colonial and post-colonial women's autobiographies suggests that they are also means of resisting fixed identities: "Autobiographic writing can suggest the multiplicity of histories, the ground 'in between' where differences complicate, both across and within individual subjects. To read for processes of multiple identification, for the making and unravelling of identities in autobiographical writing, for what Suleri calls 'intimacies,' is an important gesture to decolonization" (5). The culinary memoir has a similar politicized function. Rather than producing merely individualist narratives of foods devoured and cooked, these texts are cultural and communal as they insert the narrating and reflecting "I" into a cultural and historical location, a location that in the...