Immigrant Food and Trans-memory of Home in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava and Elif Shafak’s Honor

Abstract

Portrayal of food production in culinary memoirs and fictional works from the Global South has recently been popular in literary circles. As different forms of food production and food consumption are portrayed, new immigrant experience abounds. Writers of food memoirs and culinary novels associate the migrant experience with the fusion of cultures and cuisines in their works. Constructing a new identity and bearing a nostalgic look into the past and home stand out as recognizable metaphors to parallel food production and the hybridized experience in culinary memoirs and fictional works relating to food. Among these popular examples of juxtaposition of ethnic food and migrant identity are Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003), Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees (2007), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen (2011), Ann Mah’s Kitchen Chinese (2010), and Kim Sunee’s Trail of Crumbs (2009). As Abu-Jaber’s Crescent fictionalizes a tale of culinary journey and identity formation, it paves the way for the proliferation of other similar works in which the journey of self-discovery and the voyage to the past are depicted through the lens of ethnic food as in Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Tree and Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen. In line with the popularity of like-minded culinary innovations and explorations in literature, women writers from the Middle East participate in this new canon by composing hybrid works of food production and self-discovery in a foreign land.