Hospitality and Hostility: Confronting the Invisible in the “Transparency” of Food Narratives

Abstract

To associate hospitality with food seems tautological, however, the association of food with hostility is less self-evident.Culinary memoirs are testimonies to, as well as offers of hospitality. Narratives reveal facets of transparency and sincerity around hospitality and hostility. The works I propose to examine, Diana Abu-Jaber’s memoir, The Language of Baklava, her semi-autobiographical novel, Crescent, and Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt, are immigrant tales which oppose western and (Middle-) Eastern hospitality confronting immigrant manifestations of hospitality and hostility. We will also consider Nicole Krauss’ novel, The History of Love, a story of invisibility and loss, of how to survive in the wilderness of life on crumbs of hope, truth and lies. Like many immigrant tales, people are robbed of homeland, possessions, language and love, culturally stripped, and reclothed in alien identities, refugees of both hospitalities and hostilities.The transparency of hospitality is necessary to remove borders, to render people visible. Without this unconditional transparency the suspicion of poison arises, the ultimate hostility of betrayal. However, such honest and transparent values that engender literary representations of hospitality, also provoke scenes in which that hospitality eschews because of culturally untranslatable gestures of hospitality perceived as hostilities, in which the other’s presence is threatened and threatening. Can one truly recognize and welcome the other when one is at "home" or must one be nomadic or itinerant to understand the need for which hospitality is a response?Hospitality may also be a reaction to hostilities: many memoirists cook to assuage traumatic memories, and to offer the possibility of new horizons. Cooking is indeed a language, transparent in itself.