Counter Narratives: Cooking up Stories of Love and Loss in Naomi Shihab Nye's Poetry and Diana Abu-Jaber's "Crescent"

Author(s): Lorraine Mercer and Linda Strom Reviewed work(s): Source: MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 4, Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures (Winter, 2007), pp. 33-46 Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029830 . Accessed: 02/11/2011 10:03
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Counter Narratives: Cooking Up Stories of Love and Loss in Naomi

Shihab Nye's Poetry and Diana Abu-

Jaber's Crescent
Lorraine Mercer
Portland State University

Linda Strom
Youngstown State University
There was nothing obscure about melons, nothing involved about yams If she were to have anything to do with the world, these would be her translators ...

17) -Naomi ShihabNye, "TheWorldin Translation" (Words Withouteven realizing Camillehad fallenunderthe spell of the siren's it, call:the sound that containsthe scent of berries,chocolate,and mint, that the tastesof saltand oil and blood, that soundslike a heart'smurmur, pasthe sage of clouds,the callto prayers, beloved'sname and a distantringing in the ears.
-Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent 261)

and in the poetry of Naomi In Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent Shihab Nye, food functions as a complex language for communicating love, memory, and exile. In their texts, food also becomes an avenue for questioning boundaries of culture, class, and ethnicity. Food is a naturalrepository for memory and tradition and reveals the possibility metaphors for imagining blended identities and traditions. In Crescent, of food register both the presence and absence of culturaland familial bonds. Indeed, food structures the narrative;much of the action takes place in various kitchens, which mark the pain of exile and loss as well as the hope of family and community. Similarly, kitchen is a charged the space in Nye's poetry. In "First Things Last," the speaker refers to the kitchen cupboard as her "shrine" (Words 79). In the 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 the West Bank, or of a day-long search for
MELUS, Volume 32, Number4 (Winter2007)

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the 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 the possibilities of peace, love, and community. Nye's poetry hinges on the feminist notion that the 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 the small details and everyday acts that represent larger truths and reveal rich personal and political histories. According to Lisa Suhair Majajin "ArabAmerican Literature and the Politics of Memory," Nye's poetry "explores the markers of cross-cultural complexity" (282). Her poems convey the idea that through observing the lives of others, we begin to dissolve the imaginary boundaries separating individuals, cultures, and countries. Nye's focus on food and its link to the histories of marginalized, often forgotten people, underscores the notion that our connections to each other must extend beyond the boundaries of self and of geographical space. She illustrates the need for connection beyond the self through her focus on the domestic space, often a kitchen in which the daily rituals of cooking and eating enlarge understanding and compassion for a world beyond the boundaries of the individual. In "The Traveling Onion," she gathers the fragments of the onion's story to reveal its heLivingCookbook, roic history.The poem's epigraph, taken from the Better explains this history. The onion itself is a cosmopolitan, originatingin India, traveling through Egypt where it "was an object of worship," 131). While from there on to Greece, Italy, then all of Europe (Words this poem appears whimsical, its attention to small culinary details points to largertruths. The onion's translucence reminds the reader of the invisible work of domestic labor: "When I think how far the onion has traveled / just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise / all small forgotten miracles."While others notice the "texture of meat or herbal aroma,"she praises the real hero of the stew: "the translucence of onion, / now limp, now divided" which "for the sake of others, / disappear[s]"(131). Nye portrays the onion as integral to the flavor of the stew; in doing so she celebrates individual and culturalhistories as essential to understanding our differences and connections. This celebration of the onion illustrates her reoccurring themes of cooperation, generosity, and gratitude. As in "The Traveling Onion," food in "The Shopper" is a metaphor. Nye compares the grocery store to a cathedral:"I visit the grocery store / Like an Indian woman of Cuzco / Attends the cathedral." But this supplicant's prayer consists of these words: "Butter, bread,

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apples, butter bread apples" (Words In this way, the domestic space 83). the grocery store is elevated to the status of the sacred, serving as of a realm for worship and prayer. In this sacred area, she gathers stories of grandmothers whose carts reveal that they "eat little" and "live alone," and overhears two women casually discussing their cancers. Surrounded by loneliness, loss, and suffering, she asks the question that inspires the secular prayerin the third stanza: "How do you reach that point of acceptance?" The prayer she offers for herself, for the women, and for all of us echoes a more traditional religious service, wherein instead of a Christiangod, the poet "pray[s]to the eggplant." Instead of holy water, she suggests that we "bless ourselves with peaches," and instead of confessing to a priest, we "confess our fears to the flesh of the tomato" (83). The concluding lines of the poem represent the lessons of small details. She compares our lives to a "halfwayripened" tomato that dreams "of a deeper red."Acceptance, she suggests with this image of the tomato, comes from living with our outward imperfections-our halfway-ripenedstate-while cultivating a rich inner life-a deeper red (83). In "Going for Peaches, Fredericksburg,Texas," the theme of acceptance is symbolized in the image of the ripening peach. In their quest for the perfect peach, Nye drives her female relatives from stand to stand where the women reject peach after peach for some slight flaw.As the women carefully pick through the fruit, the seller reminds them that "natureisn't perfect. / Her hands are spotted, like a peach" (Words113). The fragility of life-symbolized by the seller's spotted hands, the ripening fruit, and the women's casual conversation in the car about "the best way to die"-threads through the mundane experience of shopping, elevating the shopping trip to a ritual that binds generations together through love and memory. She makes this point in the last lines of the poem: Everything havelearnedso far, we skinsaliveand ripening,on a day thatwas realto us, thatwas summer, motion going out and memorycomingin. (113) In the ripening peach, she demonstrates life's fragilityand the importance of preserving the communion between generations for the chilly fall and winter days when summer and the perfect peach have faded into memory. In "ArabicCoffee," Nye describes her father'straditionalceremony of brewing coffee. Similar to the shopping trip for peaches, this ritual connects not only family members but also friends. The process of making the coffee, letting it "boil to the top, and down again," two times, follows a traditionalArabic recipe. He breaks with tradition by serving the coffee to both sexes in the same room: "And the place

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where men and women / break off from one another / was not pres130). This ritualunites the past with the present in that room" (Words ent, introduces the loss associated with exile, and creates new traditions and new communities. Making and serving Arabic coffee unites two cultural traditions, American and Arabic, and reflects the father's bi-cultural identity as a Palestinian American. She asks her father to "tell again how the years will gather / in small white cups." His Arabic coffee becomes the occasion for remembering the past and sharing his cultural and personal history with all the guests who gather in the room: "He carried the tray into the room, / high and balanced in his hands, / it was an offering to all of them." His Arabic culture, his past history, family, friends, and his hope for the future are "the center of the flower" and cluster around the simple detail of making coffee. The coffee's bittersweet flavor reflects his exile from Palestine and his life in the US. In spite of what she describes as his "hundred disappointments" in a "motion of faith," he believes that "luck lives in a spot of grounds" (130). The bittersweet nature of the poem, like the Arabic coffee, interweaves the notion of exile and loss with optimism for the future and the making of a new community. The process of making and serving the coffee symbolizes her father's cultural history, his losses, and his faith. In "The Garden of Abu Mahmoud," set in Palestine, Mahmoud plies the poet with unripe vegetables from his garden:"the purple shining globe" of an eggplant, "handfuls of marble-sized peaches," and a "delicate lilt / of beans." He loved his garden, calling it 'ya habibiin Arabic, my darling tomato, / and it called him governor, king" (Words 124-25). She describes his daily ritualof digging "hands into earth saying, I know you." His love of and attention to the land resulted in "a hillside in which no inch went unsung."His garden, Nye explains, is his "all the words of any language / "querido" or "corazon"-heart-or connecting to the deep place / of darkness and seed." The peace and richness of the garden stand in contrast to the Israeli military settlement "where the guns live" (124). The garden's location in a hostile land suggests Homi Bhabha's notion of the in-between spaces that mark "the traumaticambivalences of a personal, psychic history" and "the wider disjunctions of political existence" (11). In his small plot of land, Mahmoud is king, but in reality,as Salma KhadraJayyusiwrites in of Palestinian Palestinians Literature, her introduction to Anthology Modern live "either as second-class citizens in Israel proper or lacking any citizenship at all under Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza" (2). The domestic garden simultaneously represents a politicized space and an oasis for Mahmoud in the midst of a war zone. In his garden, he temporarily regains a sense of connection to his past and of belonging to a specific geographical space. The garden, unlike the military settlements with their guns, produces nourishment and life-rich crops of eggplants, "enormous on-

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124). In her essay "One ions," and trees "weighted with fruits" (Words Village," Nye tells the back-story to the poem. The elderly Mahmoud, she writes, was "known for his military rhetoric," yet when she visits him, he only wants to talk about his garden. From his balcony, he points out to her the "Jewish settlement across the valley,"explaining
that "no people live there. . . . Just buildings. Maybe there are guns in

the buildings. I'm sure there are guns" (Never56-57). When she asks
him if he is afraid, he replies, "I'm tired of fighting. . . . All my life,

we've been fighting. I just want to be sure of one thing-that when I wake up in the morning, my fig trees will still be my fig trees. That's all" (57). On a return visit to thank him for his generous gift of eggplant, mint, figs, and peaches, she comes face to face with an Israeli tank. The incident further emphasizes the garden as a bridge between two worlds: Mahmoud's ancestral roots and the day-to-day reality of violence. In his garden, Mahmoud temporarily escapes the violence and establishes a Palestinianidentity, rooted in his homeland. The garden and the fig trees link him to his past and signify his hope for the future;the garden'slocation reflects the political realityof Palestinians, of living in an occupied territory.In both the poem and the essay,Nye shows how one man, in the midst of a war zone, creates abundance and peace through his cultivation of fruits and vegetables. In "Lunch in Nablus City Park," food provides nourishment for war-torn souls and unites friends who seek a temporary respite from the violent conflict. Nye asks: Whatmakesa manwith a gun seem bigger
than a man with almonds? How can there be war

and the next dayeating?(Words 123) She notes the incongruity of the present moment as she and others gather at a popular restaurantfor lunch, enjoying the food, each other's company, and a break in the war: Whenyou lunchin a town which has recentlyknownwar none of it, undera calmsky mirroring certainwords feel impossiblein the mouth. Casualty: casual,it must be changed. too The intermittent violence that punctuates the lives of those living in the West Bank fades, as the friends share a meal: "a plate of cigar-shaped meatballs, dish of tomato, / friends dipping bread." Temporarily forgetting the war, the communal meal and laughter signify a fleeting peace. The conversation turns to the future as one woman says, "I will not marry till there is true love," and another for whom, after a month of fighting, the University of Texas "seems remote to him / as Mars" (122). The friends toast each other in the "languages of grace,"

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and their words are full of love, faith, and hope for the future: "For you who believe true love can find you / amidst this atlas of tears linking one town / to its memory of mortar."The contrast between their words and the reality of their situation transform the toasts into a prayer for peace. The language of grace recalls the original dream that built Nablus City Parkwhen "people moved here, believing, / and someone with sky and birds in his heart / said this would be a good place for a park" (123). Nye's poetic vision offers other ways of imagining the world, similar to the vision represented by the creators of Nablus City Park. She observes the small details and then places them in a larger political context. During an interview, Bill Moyers commented that her poetry was not political. Strongly disagreeing, she explained that the dignity of daily life is political, and that it is "a political act to do something with firmness" ("Interview with Bill Moyers"). "The Man Who Makes Brooms" illustratesher point that labor done with firmness is political. In this poem, she honors the broom maker's traditional labor, using religious imagery to celebrate his craft: "the pink seam he weaves / across the flat golden face of this broom / is its own shrine, and forget 127). In the midst of war, the Jerusalem broom about the tears" (Words maker remains dedicated to his work. Similar to Mahmoud's garden and the artist'sdream of Nablus City Park,the activityprovides a spark of wisdom: "It is a little song, this thumb over thumb, / but sometimes when you wait years / for the air to break open / and sense to fall out, / it may be the only one" (127). Broom making becomes an act of faith in a chaotic world. In Nye's poetry food provides access to global politics. Her poetry exemplifies Kwame Anthony Appiah's concept of cosmopolitanism: "the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship." Appiah asks us to "take seriously the value not just of human life but of particularhuman lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance" (xv). This impulse toward global citizenship is a major theme identified by Ibis G6mez-Vega, who notes that for Nye, "people, as poets or simply as citizens of this world, must live a life committed to other people and all creations" (251). For Nye, every individual story is important because of what it reveals about the larger history of a culture or an individual. She often equates political oppression and discrimination with the silencing of individual stories. In an interview with Phebe Davidson, she explains that small details "have always been the doorway by which we approach and apprehend the larger things of the world, the larger truths, whatever they might be" (162). In her poems, the small details of domestic life, of shopping, cooking, and gardening, reveal our connections across individual and geographical borders. She finds sparks of wisdom in the labor of

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writing poetry and prose, demonstrating the same firmness of faith as the Jerusalem broom maker,a fruit seller in Texas, or a man who grows fig trees in Palestine. the In Diana Abu-Jaber'sCrescent, character,Aziz, also a poet, points to the sacred in small and everydaythings: he quotes his spiritualmentor saying, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground" (31). These seemingly small acts often revolve around food and cooking. According to Carolyn Korsmeyer, "Eating together is a common signal among most peoples for friendship, truce, or celebration" (187). She adds, "Both eating and narrativeare cultural practices. When food is treated in fiction, therefore, it brings to light the way eating may achieve significance within the tradition the narrative in question addresses or in which it participates." She adds that "the intimacy of eating is part of what knits together those who eat-the mutual trust presumed, the social equality of those who sit down together, and the shared tastes and pleasures of the table" (187). By adding a nonverbal dimension, food can register the parts of cultural experience, tradition, and identity that cannot be readily translated. In Crescent language of food serves as a way back to ethnic histhe tory, culture, and roots. Food forms a kind of contact zone, to borrow Mary Louise Pratt'sterm: "the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations" (6). While Pratt's contact zone usually involves "conditions of coercion, radical inequality,and intractableconflict," the contact zone formed in Crescent is a domestic one, situated in cafes, kitchens, and homes; it establishes the theme of the world-as-home and the theme of the personal as political. Pratt also develops the idea of the contact language, which Food as a contact language is a model for what happens in Crescent. also works as one of these "improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in context of trade."Pratt emphasizes that in the contact zone "such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous,lacking in structure"(6). In Abu-Jaber'snovel, food bridges the gap that may look like chaos and adds structure to the narrative. In a recent talk, Abu-Jaber said that "Eating is one of the things that crystallizes your experiences and the metaphor of food is a way to translate these cultural experiences. Thus the treatment of becomes a 'safe' way for white American readers to food in Crescent listen to dangerous topics like war, Iraq, the Middle East" (PSU talk, 21 October 2006). The treatment of food is itself an act of translation. Part of her project is to humanize Arabs for a US white audience, "to put a human face on people who are culturally erased," and provide human histories, family life, the day-to-day small things that people can

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relate to, food, family, love, loss" (Shalal-Esa 3). In Crescent, does she not generalize about Arab American culture but instead-through her creation of multi-faceted Middle Eastern characters-complicates the issues of ethnicity and identity as she tells the story of one woman, Sirine, who, at thirty-nine, wonders how to make peace with her past, and how to live her individual, personal legacy. Crescent foregrounds the significance of storytelling in connection to food. The novel is structured around Sirine's focus on food and her uncle's focus on storytelling. These trajectories intersect in the kitchen, where she feeds him the Arabic food he loves, and he feeds her the Scherazade-liketale of his great Aunty Camille and her son Abdelrahman Salahadin'sadventures in a fantasticalArabian landscape. 'A lesser-known fact about jinns [genies]," her uncle explains, is that although their homes may lack "living rooms or dining rooms or studies or bathrooms or even very comfortable beds, they do like a nice kitchen, to satisfy their sweet tooth, maybe bake a little knaffea, brew a little coffee, have a few people over-that sort of thing" (193). Like jinns, Sirine, the blond-haired, blue-eyed chef of Iraqi descent, appreciates a nice kitchen. She first appears in the kitchen as she brews Arabic coffee for her uncle. For her, food is a contact language-a medium to translate experience and create a meaningful world. It is synonymous with love, prayer, creativity, and healing. Nine-year-old Sirine learns this contact language, and at thirty-nine still uses it for translation, to connect and communicate with everyone around her. She learned that "food was better than love: surer, truer, more satisfying and enriching. As long as she could lose herself in the rhythms of peeling an onion, she was complete and whole. And as long as she could cook, she would be loved" (218). Similar to Nye, simple acts, such as peeling an onion or making a broom reveal largertruths, and in fact, for Sirine, this was "the only truth she seemed to possess" (217). For her, cooking becomes agency: when all else fails in her life, when she is confronted with uncertainty,confusion, and identity conflict, she goes to the kitchen and cooks herself and her history into existence. This act of cooking resonates with Frantz Fanon's statement: "In the world through which I travel,I am endlessly creatingmyself" (229). create hybrid identities Like Fanon's traveler,the charactersin Crescent involving choice and agency.They exist in a tenuous space, alwaysfluid, and they resist categorization as Arab, American, or Arab American. Abu-Jaberexplores issues of difference in people and places and points to how many of our categories of identity are often illusory. When Sirine asks the visiting poet, Aziz, if he is Muslim, he shrugs and in an answer that evokes Walt Whitman, replies, "Who knows? I am Aziz, I am large, I contain multitudes. I defy classification" (105). The novel consistently acknowledges that no one is what he or she appears to be on the surface. Blond, white-skinned Sirineis half Arab. Rana, an Arab

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student at UCLA who wears the hejjab,is also a feminist who attends a Women in Islam group. The Covered Man who kidnaps Abdelrahman is actually a Covered Woman who, unveiled, becomes the mermaid Queen Alieph. Los Angeles police officers wander into Nadia's Cafe, not to harass the Middle Eastern proprietor and clientele, but in search of hummus and to catch up on their favorite Arabic soap operas on TV. In this world of slippery identities, it is the food that often keeps the characterscentered. Characters in Crescent, from first generation children to mermaids in family fables, embody instances of cross-culturalismand exist in the in-between places described by Bhabha. According to Bhabha, "What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narrativesof originaryand initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1). These "in-between" spaces "provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular or communalthat initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself" (1-2). Sirine's questions about self-identity and origins haunt her yet also provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood. When she looks in the mirror, "all she can see is white." She describes her eyes, "almond-shaped, and sea-green,"and her other features "tidy and compact. Entirely her mother" (231). People who ask her nationality are surprisedwhen she says she is half Arab. She ponders the idea that she "inheritedher mother on the outside and her father on the inside," and believes that if she could examine "the blood and bones and the shape of her mind and emotions-she thinks she would find her truer and deeper nature."She "imagines her parents, young, expecting their first child, expecting, perhaps, a true amalgam of their two bodies. Were they disappointed, she wonders, to have an entirely fair-skinned child?" (231). Sirine's questions about her blood and bones' origins exemplify her in-between state as an Arab American. In this in-between space of cultural difference, Sirine searches for her identity through food and against the background of her uncle's stories. Her loss and exile (through the earlyand tragicdeath of her parents) drives her to seek solace in cooking, for reasons of both nostalgia and security.Her moods, philosophy of life, and place in the world are defined by food. She wonders why "whenever she tries to deliberately seek out something like God, she gets distracted . . . and she finds that instead she is thinking about something like stuffed grape leaves rolled tightly around rice, ground lamb, garlic, onions, currants, fragrantwith green olive oil" (264). Her daily meditation is "to exist inside the simplest actions, like chopping an onion or stirring a pot" (22). Through food Sirine explores her identity and her legacy. She has learned about food from her parents and "even though her mother

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was American, her [Iraqi] father always said his wife thought about food like an Arab" (56). Majajwrites "memory plays a familiarrole in the assertion of identity by members of ethnic and minority groups." She makes a connection between memory, "remembering who you are,"and family narratives.In this respect, "memory functions on both a cultural and a personal level to establish narratives of origin and belonging; myths of peoplehood, like memories of childhood, situate the subject and make agency possible" (266). In the absence of her parents, Sirine attempts to use food and cooking to establish her own narrative of origin. She says, "I think food should taste like where it came from. I mean good food especially."She explains, "You can sort of trace it back. You know, so the best butter tastes a little like pastures and flowers, that sort of stuff. Things show their origins" (78). She is more unsure about her own origin. When she goes, with trepidation, to a meeting of Women in Islam, she listens as most of the women introduce themselves in terms of kinship: "I'm married to Hassan Almirah and my children's names are Tonia and Tamim." When it is Sirine's turn, "her heart begins hammering and her mind goes blank ... 'Sirine,'she manages to say. 'I cook"' (189). The kitchen is where she attempts to clarify her origins and forge her identity. Food is also significant to other characters. In the kitchen of his small apartment, Iraqi Professor Hanif Al Eyad (Han), the new hire in UCLA's Near East Studies Department, studies TheJoyof Cooking and to The BettyCrocker Cookbook prepare a traditional American meal of meatloaf for Sirine. Han was "intrigued by the new kind of cooking, a shift of ingredients like a move from native tongue into a foreign language: butter instead of olive oil; potatoes instead of rice; beef inof stead of lamb" (77). In TheLanguage Baklava,Abu-Jaberquotes her Aunt Aya, from Jordan, as saying, "eating is a form of listening" (191). In part because Han is a translator of Arabic and English literatures, he understands the function this language serves for Sirine, and he listens deeply to her native tongue, entering her world. In fact, when Han feeds Sirine a "morsel of lamb from his fingers" it is as if "food is their own private language" (299). Food is foregrounded here as a contact language. Han tells Sirine: "I never much wanted to be up in my father's orchard. I liked this. I liked the kitchen. The table. Stove. Where the women were always telling stories" (67). This discussion of family and home life stirs memories for Han of his exile from both country and family,and fosters the realization that while memories of home are often static and stable, in reality that home is gone. ilThe lost home is the emblem of exile and alienation. Crescent lustrates what happens when people are displaced, whether by death, politics, or misunderstandings. When Han tells Sirine about crossing the desert to escape from Iraq, she tells him about the loss of her parents and the abandonment she felt during their long absences from home: "'[I]twasn't the same thing as crossing the desert,' she says soft-

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ly.... 'But in a way that's sort of how it felt. Waiting for them to come home"' (162). Sirine and Han's shared stories of exile are parallel. She fully grasps his assertion that "You are the place I want to be-you're the opposite of exile" (158). In spite of this she worries that feeding Han the dishes of his childhood will awaken his desire to return home, and instead of making the frekah he requests, she fixes a traditional American breakfast of bacon and eggs. Thus the food of home is significant for those in exile or living outside their country or culture of origin. Food memories can carry feelings of both loss and joy attached to history, family,and culture. Abu-Jabersays that Crescent explores the question of exile and "what a painful thing it is to be an immigrant. How when you leave your home country, you don't really know what it is that's about to happen to you. What an incredible experience and journey it is. And how for a lot of people it can be a real process of loss" (Shalal-Esa2). That "process of loss" is implied in Sirine's question to Eustavio, an Italian waiter: does he think immigrants are sadder than other people? He answers, "Sadness? Certo! When we leave our home we fall in love with our sadness" (143). Her uncle also speaks about the grief and loneliness of the immigrant and says that it involves "talkingabout the difference between then and now, and that's often a sad thing. And immigrants are always a bit sad right from the start anyways" (142). He tells her that one reason for this sadness is that you cannot go back: "the Iraq your father and I came from doesn't exist anymore. It's a new, scary place. When your old house doesn't exist anymore, that makes things sadder in general" (142). While they talk, Sirine takes a bite of a dessert, a rich panna cotta, and "it melts into a dozen separate flavors. She can smell oranges and lemons, cherry and wood, and even the soft silk and wool of Persian carpets, the smell she thought came from Iraq" (144). This alimentary experience recalls shopping for food as a child with her uncle where "it didn't matter if the shop was Persian, Greek, or Italian,because all of them had the same great bins of beans and lentils, glass cases of white cheeses and braided cheeses, murky jars of olives, fresh breads and pastries flavoring the air" (124). In this way, she learns that food can serve as common denominators: olives, garlic, lentils, and other foods-staples of middle-eastern cooking-are also the main ingredients in the foods of many other cultures. These foods migrated with travelers throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, as seen in Nye's traveling onion, illustrating the illusory nature of borders and nationality.Critics like Bhabha and Appiah argue that culture is not static, but constantly in motion: "But trying to find some primordiallyauthentic culture can be like peeling an onion. ... Cultures are made of continuity and changes and the identity of a society can survive through these changes" (Appiah 107). Appiah also comments that "most of those who have learned the languages and customs of other places haven't done so out of mere curiosity.A few were looking

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for food for thought; most were looking for food" (xviii). The cultural crosspollination described by Appiah and ironically referred to as "contamination" has been operating for centuries and continues to do so in markets and kitchens around the world. Through a type of domestic alchemy food can be transformed, and thus cooking can be a political act. This can be seen when the Thanksgiving holiday is celebrated in Crescent. Sirine concocts an Arab American Thanksgiving dinner for an assorted collection of unrelated friends and acquaintances-an "orphan" Thanksgiving. Since Thanksgiving may be the most American of holidays, and its history is fraught with this colonial origins, the celebration is significant. In Crescent is a hybrid holiday,with roasted turkey,football on TV, and what Um-Nadia calls the "old time Arabs' cooking"; it illustrates how Abu-Jaber uses food to enlarge the reader's understanding of the complex relationships between the guests. In preparation for the feast, Sirine "looked up Iraqi dishes, trying to find the childhood foods that she'd heard Han speak of, the sfeehas-savory pies stuffed with meat and spinach-and round mensaf trays piled with lamb and rice and yogurt sauce." Instead of breadcrumbs and giblets, she stuffs the turkeywith "rice, onions, cinnamon, and ground lamb" (214). Traditional dishes like green bean casserole and sweet potatoes vie for position with pans of lentils cooked with tomato and garlic.The contributions from guests include "a big round fatayer-a lamb pie-that Aziz bought from the green-eyed girl at the Iranian bakery; six sliced cylinders of cranberry sauce from Um-Nadia; whole roasted walnuts in chili sauce from Cristobal."In addition, Victor Hernandez, the bus boy from the cafe, "brought three homemade pumpkin pies and a half-gallon of whipping cream" (216-17). At dinner the conversation revolves around politics and food, and questions of identity are debated. What does it mean to be American? To be in America? There is talk about the US sanctions on Iraq and the ensuing starvation, crime, and prostitution. Aziz relates political events to aesthetic and cultural practices and asks the diners to "consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry." He equates this to "the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes." Sirine picks up on his analogy saying, "that's how I feel about eating" (220). She explains that "tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes." Aziz claims, "You've got the soul of a poet! Cooking and tasting is a metaphor for seeing. Your cooking reveals America to us non-Americans. And vice versa" (221). This dinner table conversation illustratesAppiah'snotion of cosmopolitanism. He states that "cosmopolitanism shouldn't be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of

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coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association" (xviii-xix). The Thanksgiving feast underscores this notion of coexistence and building community through conversation, which is also depicted in the communal meal in Nye's poem, "Lunch in Nablus City Park." Appiah adds that "Conversations across boundaries can be fraught, all the more so as the world grows smaller and the stakes grow larger. It's therefore worth remembering that they can also be a pleasure" (xx). This conversation, along with its ensuing pleasure and optimism, occurs in Nablus City Park as the friends toast each other in the "languages of grace" (Words 123). Sirine'sblending of foodways illustrates Appiah's ideas of cultural contamination and his theory of cosmopolitanism. Ironically, she is the only one of her circle of family, friends, and co-workers never to have strayed outside Los Angeles, yet she embraces the situations of cross-culturalism. She is at the apex of such a world as described by Appiah, and she uses cooking to explore her cultural roots and blend old with new, past with present, the personal with the political. This is especially apparent in the Thanksgiving dinner scene where dishes bump up against each other and the ubiquitous can of cranberry jelly sits upon a table loaded with Middle Eastern dishes and pumpkin pies. In the midst of this feast Sirine'suncle exclaims, "Well,look at us": sittingaroundhere like a bunch of Americans with our crazyturkey. All rightnow, I want to make a big toast. Here'sto sweet, unusualfamilies, pleasantdogs who behave,food of this nature,the seven typesof smiles, the crescentmoon, and a nice cup of tea with mint everyday. Sahtain. Good luck and God Bless everyone.(217) The cross-cultural Thanksgiving feast is emblematic of the theme of the novel. The dinner creates a feeling of being "home" and all that it evokes for the guests gathered around this holiday table. The losses suffered by death and exile are lessened by the sharing of the bounty of food and the generosity of the community that gathers to cook, eat, and share their stories. In her interview with Davidson, Nye says that at an early age she learned "that small things do have intrinsic and understated meaning that we need as writers" (163). In their attention to small detailsbrewing coffee, shopping for peaches, and making baklava-Nye and Abu-Jaberrefuse to separate the personal from the political. This focus on the forgotten stories and histories of people, embedded in fantastical family histories or rooted in a West Bank garden, blurs the boundaries between the home and the world. Instead of a master narrative, they imagine a multitude of stories that must be heard to understand our differences and our need for connections across the boundaries of time, generations, and geographical space. This multiplicity of stories and histories in turn suggests the complexity of identity and indicates

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that building global communities just may have to begin in the kitchen. Abu-Jabersays food is "one of the most immediate and powerful ways of creating the metaphor of the hearth and a gathering place, a place where the collective forms" (Shalal-Esa 2). For both writers, building community begins with shared meals and the appreciation of the small sacred things of dailylife. Through the practice of listening deeply and the belief in the power of words and storytelling, they create a vision of life that, while haunted by past suffering and loss, holds out hope for the future. Works Cited
Abu-Jaber,Diana. Crescent. New York: Norton, 2004. TheLanguage Baklava.New York: Pantheon, 2005. of -. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: of Ethicsin a World Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. of Bhabha, Homi K. TheLocation Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

with Naomi ShihabNye." Conversations Davidson,Phebe."Interview with

Poetsand TheirWork.Ed. Phebe Davidson. the World: AmericanWomen Pasadena:Trilogy, 1998. 151-96. Fanon, Frantz. BlackSkin, WhiteMasks. New York: Grove, 1967. G6mez-Vega, Ibis. "The Art of Telling Stories in the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye." MELUS 26.4 (2001): 245-52. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. "PalestinianLiteraturein Modern Times." Introduction. Anthology Modern Palestinian of Literature. Salma Khadra Ed. Jayyusi.New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 1-80. Ithaca: FoodandPhilosophy. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. MakingSenseof Taste: UP, 1999. Cornell Majaj,Lisa Suhair."ArabAmerican Literatureand the Politics of Memory." Memory Cultural New Approaches American to EthnicLiteratures. Politics: and Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett,Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Ed. Northeastern UP, 1996. 266-90. Nye, Naomi Shihab. "Interview with Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Mainland."Bill Moyers: Language Life-A Festival Poets,Volume of of The David Grubin Productions and Public One:Welcome theMainland. to Affairs Television. Videocassette. Newbridge, 1995. -. Neverin a Hurry:Essayson People Places.Columbia: U of South and Carolina P, 1996. the Portland: Eighth Mountain, 1995. under Words. -. Words Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. TravelWriting Transculturation. and New York: Routledge, 1992. Shalal-Esa, Andrea. "Diana Abu-Jaber:The Only Response to Silencing ... is to Keep Speaking."Interview. Aladid: a Review Record Arab and of Culture Arts 8.39 (2002) <http://www.aljadid.com/interview/0839 and shalalesa.html>.