I listened to this entire book while I trekked around the university and surrounding environs. It‘s an excellent, thoughtful look at “authenticity” in food, literature, and media. #audiowalk
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Curry: Reading, Eating, and Race | 
I listened to this entire book while I trekked around the university and surrounding environs. It‘s an excellent, thoughtful look at “authenticity” in food, literature, and media. #audiowalk
pickWhen I first heard of this, I thought it would be a microhistory of a category of spice mixtures, but @batsy got me on the right track. It‘s a thoughtful essay about the complexities of being a member of the South Asian diaspora, using food, literature and race as lenses. It got me thinking about clichés and my own expectations as a reader. A slim volume with lots to say. #CanLit #ownvoices
The cycling story of diaspora, of human movement across great spaces, constant dislocation and relocation, is present in mouthfuls of this dish: curry‘s reassuring power isn‘t a resurrection of a stable past but a reminder that the past, and our former countries, are as fractious and adaptable as the present.
(Image: https://www.yummytummyaarthi.com/2016/01/kottayam-style-fish-curry-recipe-kerala...
Immigrant narratives allow readers to live in someone else‘s past while sharing their sense of the fragility of that particular history: that the sense of alienation has roots in reality is as important to the reader and the writer as the idea of a distant land and a time that holds answers.
(Image: cover of Mistress of Spices)
“There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there‘s the sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.” [quoting Rumaan Alam, pictured above]
Nostalgia fuels everything from revivalist rock to right-wing political movements. South Asian immigrant fiction, memoir and cookbooks are often deeply marked by nostalgia, by a drive for discovering the authenticity left behind in another time and place.
Being second-gen made me counterfeit Mauritian back in my old country, and I continued to ring false to South Asians who were more closely aligned with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh—the core we scattered from. The ways to not-belong as a brown teenager in white, small-town Canada are even more complex than my Beavis haircut and Black Sabbath t-shirt could express in 1996. If ‘Indian‘ is a baggy term, ‘South Asian‘ is parachute pants.
My family had a strict rule against reading at the table, the given logic being that it forced blood to your brain that should properly be in the gut, aiding digestion. My parents both being medical professionals (an ophthalmologist and a psych nurse), I didn‘t challenge this logic.
The introductory hook of a #cookbook, its raison d‘être acheté, must be an explanation of why the recipes matter. In the case of an Indian cookbook, an authentic experience on the plate can be provided only by the authentic experience of the author.
Food writing is also memoir, at least outside the confines of the newspaper restaurant review. The alimental is elemental to a life story.
Poet Layli Long Soldier struggles with the same problem as Naben Ruthnum does in Curry: how to express complex ideas that are threatened by reductive thinking. It is my good fortune to be reading these two books at the same time.
[curry has] also become a crucial element of how the story of South Asian cultural identity is told, in our mouths and on the page. It‘s a concept too large to be properly controlled by a recipe […]
I'm looking forward to reading this book.
https://49thshelf.com/Blog/2017/09/20/The-Chat-With-Naben-Ruthnum?
pickEnjoyed this extended essay about curry as a cultural signifier. Like curry, Ruthnum's prose has spice & heat (he'll hate me for this cliché). A sharp discussion about what he calls "currybooks" (diaspora narratives by brown authors that traffic in nostalgia+stereotypes) & brown representation in pop culture. He's interested in seeing how brown people in the West produce & circulate an exoticitism of their own culture. Smart & asks hard questions.
Trying to create a late afternoon Sunday hour on this most Tuesday of Tuesdays. For some reason it's always been my least favourite day of the week and today was a series of bleugh appointments. Stuffing my face with a buttermilk scone with cream and jam (while reading about curry 🤔)
So intrigued by tikka masala's (disputed) origin! 🍅🌶️ #iheardarumor #AugustGrrrl @Cinfhen
