The Language of Food: Semiotics in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Gastrographies

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava (2005) and Life Without a Recipe (2016), the author uses recipes as a vehicle for recalling childhood memories, stories about her father's (Bud's) immigration to the U.S., and her family's navigation of life between Jordan and America. The inclusion of recipes becomes a popularized form of autoethnographic storytelling that locates the self within the culture produced through the memory of food. Drawing on the work of Brinda Mehta's Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing, this chapter explores how Diana Abu-Jaber creates a culinary sign system capable of transmitting hybrid identity throughout her memoir. As Mehta notes, this type of autobiography serves as a palimpsest preserving personal memory, familial stories, and socio-cultural systems within the contours of the memoir. Furthermore, Elizabeth Ettorre's Autoethnography as Feminist Method points out that feminist autoethnographic works use the personal to assert agency in the political. Taken together, the semiotics of food in gastrography becomes praxis of autoethnography, creating a space for Arab American writers rejecting marginalisation. Thus, this essay explores the richness of Abu-Jaber's life stories through the prism of food as she uses cuisine to autoethnographically locate the self within her diasporic Arab American community.