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

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.... --Naomi Shihab Nye, "The World in Translation" (Words 17) Without even realizing it, Camille had fallen under the spell of the siren's call: the sound that contains the scent of berries, chocolate, and mint, that tastes of salt and oil and blood, that sounds like a heart's murmur, the passage of clouds, the call to prayers, the beloved's name and a distant ringing in the ears. --Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent 261) In Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent and in the poetry of Naomi 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 natural repository for memory and tradition and reveals the possibility for imagining blended identities and traditions. In Crescent, metaphors of food register both the presence and absence of cultural and 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, the kitchen is a charged 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 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 Majaj in "Arab American 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 heroic history. The poem's epigraph, taken from the 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 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). …