Abstract
In the words of Roland Barthes: food is “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior,” all of which heavily relies on memory. Ethnic food in diasporic experience is often treated as the very epitome of cultural memory, with its material, symbolic, and functional aspects co-existing to create a memory site or, to refer to the concept developed by the French historian Pierre Nora, a lieu de mémoire. For diaspora, food functions as an identity builder and the crystallising force of collective remembrance. In the conditions of diasporic existence, maintaining cultural culinary customs of home may be treated as a matter of upholding a bond with one’s ancestral land, and passing down recipes from generation to generation a proof that cultural memory is kept alive through everyday practice. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food, true to its title, belongs to a genre of cookbook-memoirs. Its author, a political journalist and writer, one of the best known and most influential Asian women in the UK, came to Britain from Uganda in 1972. Her story is that of an immigrant “twice removed,” first (metaphorically) from India, the land of her ancestors, then from Africa. The Settler’s Cookbook shows the role of food as a kind of anchor, providing connection to the country of origin and rootedness in the land of domicile. It evokes East African Indian roots through “food moments,” combining the traditions and tastes of the author’s personal life with the immigrant lot, and showing how memories of an individual speak of a more universal sense of uprootedness and dislocation.
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Notes
- 1.
Roland Barthes, “Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” 1975, in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 21.
- 2.
Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984, 1986, 1992).
- 3.
Pascal Ory, “Gastronomy,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 2: Traditions, 1992, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 443.
- 4.
Sidney Mintz, “The Study of Food,” SOAS Food Studies Centre Distinguished Lectures, 2007 (10 November 2011), http://depositfiles.com/kjgwupcqn/.
- 5.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (London: Portobello Books, 2010).
- 6.
Parminder Bhachu, Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1985); Roger Ballard, “Introduction: The Emergencne of Desh Pardesh,” in Desh Pardesh: The South Asian Presence in Britain, ed. Roger Ballard and Marcus Banks (London: C. Hurst, 1994), 23.
- 7.
Ceri Peach, “South Asian Migration and Settlement in Great Britain, 1951–2001,” Contemporary South Asia 15, no. 2 (2006): 136.
- 8.
Ballard, “Introduction” to Desh Pardesh, 23.
- 9.
Peach, “Migration and Settlement,” 136.
- 10.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 51–52.
- 11.
Hasmita Ramji, “Journeys of Difference: The Use of Migratory Narratives among British Hindu Gurajatis,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 4 (2006): 706.
- 12.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 31.
- 13.
Ramji, “Journeys of Difference,” 710.
- 14.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 181.
- 15.
Paul Theroux, “Hating the Asians,” Transition. The Anniversary Issue: Selection from Transitions. 1971–1976, 75/76 (1997): 60.
- 16.
Ibid., 61.
- 17.
Ibid., 62.
- 18.
Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odieno-Munara, “Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Spaces of Post-Colonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting,” in Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, ed. Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 4.
- 19.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 23.
- 20.
Ibid., 78.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid., 323.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid., 194.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., 222–23.
- 27.
Bee Wilson, “What a Turkey: Bee Wilson on the Creolization of Thanksgiving,” New Statesman (November 12, 2001): 45, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/154523/.
- 28.
Delia Chiaro, “A Taste of Otherness: Eating and Thinking Globally,” European Journal of English Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 198; Derek J. Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003).
- 29.
Christopher Driver, The British at Table: 1940–1980 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983); Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); Mary Procida, “Feeding the Imperial Appetite: Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Domesticity,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 2 (2003): 123–49.
- 30.
Gabaccia, What We Eat, 11.
- 31.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 198.
- 32.
Ibid., 241.
- 33.
Ibid., 286.
- 34.
Ibid., 67.
- 35.
Ibid., 279.
- 36.
Daniel Mendelsohn, “But Enough about Me. What Does the Popularity of Memoirs Tell Us about Ourselves?” New Yorker (January 25, 2010), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enough-about-me-2/.
- 37.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 289.
- 38.
Ibid., 368.
- 39.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74; Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996), 32.
- 40.
Alibhai-Brown, Settler’s Cookbook, 95.
- 41.
Ibid., 341.
- 42.
Ibid., 28.
- 43.
Ibid., 43.
- 44.
Ibid., 95.
- 45.
Ibid., 31.
- 46.
Ibid., 43.
- 47.
Ibid., 345.
- 48.
Ibid., 306.
- 49.
Ibid., 26.
- 50.
Bhachu, Twice Migrants, 11.
- 51.
Ballard, “Introduction,” 23.
- 52.
Bhachu, Twice Migrants, 2.
- 53.
Ballard, “Introduction,” 7n.8.
- 54.
Ibid., 23.
- 55.
Shameem Black, “Recipes for Cosmopolitanism: Cooking across Borders in the South Asian Diaspora,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 1.
- 56.
Randolph Quirk, general ed., Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1995), 963.
- 57.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41.
- 58.
Ibid., 49.
- 59.
Ibid., xviii.
- 60.
Sinead McDermott, “Memory, Nostalgia, and Gender in A Thousand Acres,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 404, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/340916/.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Leo Spitzer, “Back through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from Nazism,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 87–104.
- 63.
Anita Mannur, “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 32, no. 4 (2007): 14, http://melus.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/4.toc/.
- 64.
Pierre L. van den Berghe, “Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 7, no. 3 (1984): 387.
- 65.
Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 2.
- 66.
Helen M. Buss, Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women (Toronto: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2002), xxii.
- 67.
Ibid., 3.
- 68.
Yagoda, Memoir: A History, 104–05.
- 69.
Daniel Schachter, The Seven Sins of Memory (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 108, quoted in Yagoda, Memoir: A History, 108.
- 70.
Julie Rak, “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity,” Genre 36 (Fall 2004): 492.
- 71.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis and London: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2010), 3.
- 72.
Thomas Larson, The Memoir and the Memorist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Athens, OH: Shallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2007), 19.
- 73.
. Francis Russell Hart, “History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir,” New Literary History 11, no. 1 (1979): 195.
- 74.
Ibid.
- 75.
Murcott, Anne. “Food as an Expression of Identity,” in The Future of the National State: Essays on Cultural Pluralism and Political Integration, ed. S. Gustafsson and L. Lewin (Stockholm: Nerenius and Santerus, 1996), 49–77.
- 76.
Mintz and Du Bois, “Anthropology of Food,” 109.
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Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
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Chiaro, Delia. “A Taste of Otherness: Eating and Thinking Globally.” European Journal of English Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 195–209.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Driver, Christopher. The British at Table: 1940–1980. London: Chatto and Windus, 1983.
Gabaccia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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Ilieva, Emilia, and Lennox Odiemo-Munara. “Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Spaces of Post-Colonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting.” In Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. Edited by Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S., 183–203. Makokha, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011.
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Tomczak, A.M. (2017). On Exile, Memory and Food: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food . In: Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (eds) Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55278-1_10
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