Virginia Allen-Terry Sherman

 

virginia.sherman@free.fr

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Proposition for the International Conference:

Hospitalities, Hostilities: Narratives And Representations

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Hospitality and Hostility: confronting the invisible in the ‘transparency’ of food narratives

 

To associate hospitality with food seems tautological, however, the association of food with hostility is less self-evident. Panu Minkkinen cites Latin sources to explain that: “the etymologies of the words ‘hostility’ and ‘hospitality’ share a common root which has to do with food. The root of the word hostis is the Sanskrit ghas meaning ‘to eat’, ‘to consume’, or even ‘to destroy’. And even though it is unclear as to who eats and what, a hostis is a stranger and a foreigner.” (53). To this we should add the definition in Anne Gotman’s sociological study of the French origin of both words, hôte, meaning both guest and host. The nuances of these notions in literature suggest oppositions of openness and exclusion, or even hostility. For the narrator and the reader each, hospitality must be mutually nourishing, a delicate balance between hospitality and hostility, a finer opposition than that of tolerance and welcome that Kant evokes (Minkkinen (53-54).

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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.

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Hospitality, a fundamental human instinct with moral and ethical connotations supposedly opposes the immigrant condition in which one is made invisible, rootless and insignificant in the host land. It is a way of recognizing oneself as well as the other, of exposing one’s culture as a form of protection, of considering the other and of maintaining cultural traditions. Recipes, as materialized gifts, are a way of inviting, and also potentially exchanging with another. Images of food and drink, conveying religious and cultural symbols, support this endeavour: “Le vin festif—associé au plaisir, à l’hospitalité. Il marque l’évènement, il en requiert la mémoire.” (Nora, 805).

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Immigrants may hope for or even expect hospitality from host lands, for Kant deems that we have a universal right to hospitality because we all occupy the same space (Minkkinen 54). However, food narratives consider borders as both hospitable and hostile: “La frontière est une limite hospitalière garante de la diversité du monde […] La frontière est l’amie du cosmopolitisme et de l’hospitalité” says Debray (n.pag.), yet in a post-colonial world those same frontiers suggest exclusion as much

as sharing. In offering and preserving culinary traditions, one potentially excludes the other: “Hospitalité se trouve au croisement de plusieurs questionnements postmodernes sur l’identité, l’appartenance, l’interaction culturelle et la pratique de l’écriture. Elle donne lieu à un discours d’ailleurs […]” (Gauvin et al., 9).

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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. Homemaking and its values are associated with a sense of belonging at the core of culinary narratives: “On est chez soi quand on est hospité et reconnu […]” (Cassin, 14). There is a symbolic need to go ‘home’ in order to be hospitable. 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?

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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. “La langue est hospitalière” (Gauvin et al., 13), and its symbolism paradoxically reveals the invisible: “Langage est l’invention poétique de l’hospitalité” (Ginette Michaud in Gauvin et al., 39), for in poetry, a leitmotif of food narratives, one observes the transparency of emotions, reflecting the nuances of hospitalities and hostilities.

 

Bibliography

 

Abu-Jaber, Diana. The Language of Baklava. A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2005.

Abu-Jaber, Diana. Crescent. 2003. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Cassin, Barbara. La Nostalgie. Quand donc est-on chez soi? Paris: Editions Autrement, 2013.

Debray, Régis: "La frontière est une limite hospitalière garante de la diversité du monde". Interview sur France Inter, April 29, 2012.

Furiya, Linda. Bento Box in the Heartland. My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2006.

Gauvin, Lise, Pierre l’Herault, and Alain Montandon, eds. Le Dire de l’Hospitalité. Clermond-Ferrand: PU Blaise Pascal, 2004.

Gotman, Anne. Villes et Hospitalité : Les municipalités et leurs ‘étrangers’. Paris : Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2004.

Krausse, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

McLean, Alice. Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-century Women's Food Writing: The Innovative Appetites of M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, and Elizabeth David. Routledge, 2012.

Minkkinen, Panu. "Hostility and Hospitality." No Foundations: Journal of Extreme Legal Positivism 4 (2007): 53-60.

http://www.nofoundations.com/issues/NoFo4Minkkinen.pdf. (May 29, 2020).

Nora, Pierre. Le Lieux de Mémoire III Les France. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

Schérer, René. Zeus hospitalier. Éloge de l’hospitalité. Paris: La Table Ronde, 2005.

Rouyer, Marie-Claire. Food for thought ou les avatars de la nourriture. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1998.

Roy, P. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Still, Judith. Derrida and Hospitality. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Tapie, Alain. « Hospitalité », Tables et festins - L'hospitalité dans la peinture flamande et hollandaise et la bande dessinée. Grenoble : Éditions Glénat, 2015.

Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

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Virginia Allen-Terry Sherman has recently completed her doctoral thesis on “Diaspora and displacement: “The evocation of traditions, origins and identity in culinary memoirs, an emerging literary genre” at ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes. Her research focuses on questions of genre, contemporary culinary and travel memoirs, autobiography and contemporary fiction.