BOOK OF THE DAY: MALCOLM SENreviews The Settler's Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and FoodBy Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Portobello Books 439pp, £20.00
BROUGHT UP in Uganda by Indian parents and now living in Britain, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s life is exemplary of many second- and third-generation migrant identities made distinctive by further foreign travel and settlement. Little has been written of Ugandan Indians (the Wahindi), some of whom managed to migrate to Britain after Idi Amin’s infamous policy of ridding his country of British passport-wielding Asians in 1972.
Ostracised from their birthland in Africa, distanced from their inherited Indian culture and facing the British government’s characteristic resistance to allowing these (allegedly second-class) citizens to enter Britain, Alibhai-Brown recapitulates that “we were destined to be a people who leave no trace”. It is not surprising then that the chronicle of her life is palimpsestic: each layer of cultural affiliation – African, Indian and finally British – has undergone an osmotic mingling with the other.
It is diasporic writing at its best; unpretentious and quirky in its multicultural perspective, expansive in its scope. It fractures the possibility of a single lexicon that might provide a language suitable to describe these cultural fluxes. Swahili words co-inhabit with Hindi ones in a book written in English, inviting the reader to share the book’s unique perspective rather than feel alienated by it.
Because she was small at birth, Yasmin was fed baby formula by her mother Jena to help her gain weight. As she grew up, the blandness of that bottled diet must have remained in her mind, like a film of plain carbohydrate, to be made to sizzle with chilli and coriander at a later stage.
Her memoir may be read as a testament to a lifelong culinary attack on that early memory. But the memoir’s fetish with the palate (it is partly a cookbook) is more philosophical and cultural than physical. This is a book about how food, and more accurately recipes, may tether the “human flotsam and jetsam” of diasporic identities to a secure mental location. To remember a particular recipe is to revisit a time and a place when the food was first cooked.
The memoir’s subtitle could not be more succinct; love and food, two forms of human sustenance, interconnected by migration, lend a poignant emotional and intellectual momentum to the book.
The author’s transcontinental affiliations could easily have resulted in a social misfit, but the migrant’s curse of perennial movement is ameliorated by the global reach of the book’s recipes and the cultural agility of the author. Like the Indian spices transplanted in Africa by waves of settlers, which then underwent subtle anglicisation in English recipes, the author has travelled many miles and imbued diverse cultural mindscapes.
Intercontinental food is an allegory of such a life in motion. At times, the recipes metaphorically subvert the blasé attitude often adopted by imperialists in colonies, like when the humble Victoria sponge is turbocharged with saffron.
Food may also serve as a form of silent protest. Curries are made “inhumanely hot” by some canny Indian cook for racist Englishmen to make them shed some tears. If all memoirs are to a certain extent fictional, then the author obliquely acknowledges the treacherous nature of remembering. However, political and literary history woven at the edges of the author’s life story reminds us that our cognition may sometimes depend on events that touch our lives only tangentially.
The book teems with such information: “The rupee was the first currency of east Africa under the British”; in “Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam is shown Mombasa by the archangel Michael”. In such moments, the author displays erudition that shimmers.
Malcolm Sen is adjunct lecturer in the school of English, Trinity College Dublin