Counter Narratives: Cooking Up Stories of Love and Loss in Naomi Shihab Nye's Poetry and Diana AbuJaber's Crescent

Abstract

There nothing obscure about melons, nothing involved about yams If she were to have anything to do with world, these would be her translators.... --Naomi Shihab Nye, World in Translation (Words 17) Without even realizing it, Camille had fallen under spell of siren's call: sound that contains scent of berries, chocolate, and mint, that tastes of salt and oil and blood, that sounds like a heart's murmur, passage of clouds, call to prayers, beloved's name and a distant ringing in ears. --Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent 261) In Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent and in poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, food functions as a complex language communicating love, memory, and exile. In their texts, food also becomes an avenue questioning boundaries of culture, class, and ethnicity. Food is a natural repository memory and tradition and reveals possibility imagining blended identities and traditions. In Crescent, metaphors of food register both presence and absence of cultural and familial bonds. Indeed, food structures narrative; much of action takes place in various kitchens, which mark pain of exile and loss as well as hope of family and community. Similarly, kitchen is a charged space in Nye's poetry. In First Things Last, speaker refers to kitchen cupboard as her shrine (Words 79). In kitchens of Nye's poetry, onions, Arabic coffee, and simple ingredients take on a sacred meaning that reflect her Palestinian American roots. Her descriptions of mint-filled gardens on West Bank, or of a day-long search ideal peach in Fredericksburg, Texas, depict stories of loss, cultural traditions, and political histories. In a world of political struggle, exile, and loss, Abu-Jaber and Nye use food to construct spaces wherein they imagine possibilities of peace, love, and community. Nye's poetry hinges on feminist notion that personal is political. Her poems are often set in kitchens, gardens, grocery stores, and other domestic spaces traditionally associated with women and women's work. Her domestic alchemy turns images of food and household tasks into sacred objects that signify larger themes of gratitude, cooperation, and connection. She is attentive to small details and everyday acts that represent larger truths and reveal rich personal and political histories. According to Lisa Suhair Majaj in Arab American Literature and Politics of Memory, Nye's poetry explores markers of cross-cultural complexity (282). Her poems convey idea that through observing lives of others, we begin to dissolve imaginary boundaries separating individuals, cultures, and countries. Nye's focus on food and its link to histories of marginalized, often forgotten people, underscores notion that our connections to each other must extend beyond boundaries of self and of geographical space. She illustrates need connection beyond self through her focus on domestic space, often a kitchen in which daily rituals of cooking and eating enlarge understanding and compassion a world beyond boundaries of individual. In Traveling Onion, she gathers fragments of onion's story to reveal its heroic history. The poem's epigraph, taken from Better Living Cookbook, explains this history. The onion itself is a cosmopolitan, originating in India, traveling through Egypt where it was an object of worship, from there on to Greece, Italy, then all of Europe (Words 131). While this poem appears whimsical, its attention to small culinary details points to larger truths. The onion's translucence reminds reader of invisible work of domestic labor: When I think how far onion has traveled / just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise / all small forgotten miracles. While others notice texture of meat or herbal aroma, she praises real hero of stew: the translucence of onion, / now limp, now divided which for sake of others, / disappear[s] (131). …