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Article Excerpt
Culinary practices situate themselves at the most rudimentary level, at the most necessary and the most unrespected level.
Luce Giard, "The Nourishing Arts", (156)
'The diaspora women who thought Culture meant being able to create a perfect mango chutney in New Jersey were scorned by the visiting scholar from Bombay--who was also a woman but unmarried and so different.
--Sujata Bhatt, "Chutney" (29)
Behind the assiduous documentation and defense of the authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject.
Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (10)
In "Food and Belonging: At 'Home' in 'Alien-Kitchens,"' Indian American cultural critic Ketu Katrak suggests that culinary narratives, suffused with nostalgia, often manage immigrant memories and imagined returns to the "homeland." Narrativizing her own migratory journey from Bombay to the United States, she remarks, "my own memorybanks about food overflowed only after I left India to come to the United States as a graduate student. The disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home. I longed for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from the throbbing Bombay metropolis" (270). As an immigrant subject distanced geographically and temporally from her childhood home in Bombay, food becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor. Psychically food transports Katrak to her childhood home, giving her a sense of rootedness when she immigrates to the United States.
And yet, she also acknowledges how the experience of dislocation, modulated by a nostalgic longing for the familiar, is also deeply rooted in the creation of imaginary fictions which distort the lived realities of her prior life. She notes:
food was not pleasurable to me as a child. Thinking about this now as an adult, I can say that food was an overdetermined category for me in my childhood years; it tasted of the heady tropical environment, it delineated who was in and out of favor with my father. I tasted anxiety in the onions fried a bit too brown and tension in the too many dark burned spots on the roasted papad. One never knew what would be considered faulty at a particular meal, and the uncertainty overwhelmed any pleasure in what was eaten. (266-67)
Katrak's honesty registers the affective value of food and smells, in the process reflecting the nostalgia structuring memories of home for the immigrant subject. Recalling Salman Rushdie's take on nostalgia and historical memory in his now classic essay, "Imaginary Homelands," she cautions against a tendency to transform nostalgia for the ineffable into an idealization of the past. In "Imaginary Homelands," Rushdie sets in motion a complex investigation into the condition of the diasporic exilic writer. As he so eloquently puts it, "It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect the world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost" (9). Seeing the past through the shards of a mirror inevitably distorts the idealized memory one has of a "homeland": owing to the exigencies of displacement and dislocation certain memories are remembered, while others, literally, are re-membered. As Rushdie moves us through the problem of memory and mimetic fidelity, he tells a story about returning to India after an absence of many years. He draws an analogy between an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood home taken prior to his birth and his perceptions of his childhood. With the passage of time and movement to different spaces, "the colours of history had seeped out of my mind's eye" (9): nostalgia intervenes to colorize, or, in this case, decolorize the past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might have been in the mind's eye.
I begin with this brief but necessary trail through these two essays to highlight how nostalgia is always already predetermined indeed over determined--in scripting immigrant attachment to the past. Further, both essays highlight some fundamental "truths" about the immigrant condition--the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recognition that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past, allowing the colors of history to seep out of the mind's eye. Katrak's essay draws attention to the imprecise rendering of personal memory by using a culinary idiom to reflect familial tensions. She shows how food takes on a nostalgic significance only upon migrating to the United States. Such distortions of actual memories underscore how the immigrant's memories of the past are always reflected in and refracted through the shards of a mirror which nostalgically restructures how memories are seen.
The desire to remember home by fondly recreating culinary memories cannot be understood merely as reflectively nostalgic gestures; rather such nostalgically-framed narratives must also be read as meta-critiques of what it means to route memory and nostalgic longing for a homeland through one's relationship to seemingly intractable culinary practices which yoke national identity with culinary taste and practices. Discursive and affective aspects of food are valued over their symbolic or semiotic meaning in nostalgic narratives that negotiate the parameters of "culinary citizenship," a form of affective citizenship which grants subjects the ability to claim and inhabit certain subject positions via their relationship to food. Within such narratives official and traditional models of national definition become reinterpreted so as to hint towards the multiplicity of definitional possibilities. Divergent but related models of "culinary citizenship" cast food into a complex web of affiliations mediated by class and sexuality.
Food therefore becomes a potent symbol for signifying the ethnic integrity of Asian Americans, serving both as a placeholder for marking cultural distinctiveness and as a palliative for dislocation. Yet literary studies has maintained a deep seated suspicion of considering the place of the culinary. (1) Furthermore, Asian American and Asian diaspora literary studies, somewhat counterintuitively, currently offer few paradigms to navigate the relevance of food in Asian American and Asian migrant psychic and material lives, despite the fact that food often functions as a multivalent symbol within Asian American literature. (2)
To work through these gaps in Asian American literary studies, we must bring to the table narratives which mine the potential of establishing food as an idiom for expressing nostalgic desire, such as the short stories by Indo-Trinidadian Canadian author Shani Mootoo, "Out on Main Street" and "Sushila's Bhakti," An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, the prolific author of numerous cookbooks, and Sara Suleri's memoir, Meatless Days. All three texts use culinary discourse to critique nostalgic longings for home and negotiate the pangs of migratory displacement. These texts entangle the language of food, nostalgia, and desire; in doing so they foreground how memory is distorted and recreated in the diasporic imaginary of subjects who are multiply located and ambivalent about their own tenuous connections with a "home" contiguous with the geographic parameters of South Asia. (3) The texts by Jaffrey and Mootoo have rarely entered into Asian American literary criticism. Meatless Days, a favorite text in postcolonial and diaspora studies, has enjoyed greater visibility, but critics rarely engage with the culinary dimensions of the work. (4) While foodways are not the only narratival axes in Jaffrey's, Suleri's, and Mootoo's work, they undeniably intervene into debates about displacement and plural subjectivities rendered legible when food is placed at the center of critical analysis.
As hinted by the lines from Sujata Bhatt's "Chumey," quoted in the epigraph above, diasporic women--diasporic married women--are often wedded to the belief that the faithful reproduction of "Culture" inheres in accurately replicating, for instance, the perfect mango chutney. The domestic arena, so frequently associated with femininity, also becomes a space to reproduce culture and national identity. As Katrak's essay illustrates, immigrants often invent an image of the homeland as an unchanging and enduring cultural essence and are often singular about the ontological coherency of their national cuisines, despite the fact that memories are fragmentary, partial, and "irretrievably lost" (9). Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart unravels the bases of these distortions, which lead individuals unconsciously to nostalgize fragmentary knowledge of the past. Stewart defines nostalgia as, "a cultural practice, not a given context; its forms, meanings, and effects shift with the context it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present" (252). For upper-class Indian immigrants located in the United States, such as cookbook author and culinary aficionado Madhur Jaffrey, cooking is one such cultural practice resignified, reinterpreted, and even distorted within the diasporic imaginary. In her autobiographically organized cookbook, An Invitation...
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