Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

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Culinary Narratology 17 within which a spatialized “otherness” can flourish, and thus they operate as spaces comprised of a multiplicity of real-and-imagined places (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 24). The culinary practices conducted in Mrs. Sen’s kitchen or household open up a liminal space between the mundane American world and her homeland far away. For Mrs. Sen, her household represents a space of her own, which is beyond the reach of the normalizing and assimilating force of Americanization, as well as her husband’s inconsiderate requirements. According to Foucault’s notions of normalization, the subjects to be normalized must have to be seen for “[t]heir visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them” (Discipline and Punish 87). Consequently, when Mrs. Sen stays in her apartment, and specifically in her the kitchen, her body is not under surveillance as a “marginalized other” by the public, white-dominant gaze. Within this space produced by herself, surrounded by familiar food materials, Mrs. Sen manages a sophisticated ritualization of remembering and invoking the memories of her life in India. This is her own way of existing in the alienating world from which her fragmentary yet tenacious memory of her past life will still live on. Mrs. Sen’s insistence on the sensory construction of her Indian home is a way of racializing her diasporic space in the foreign land. To a certainty, Mrs. Sen’s culinary art can be regarded as performances in which home can be imagined and recreated through associative Indian ingredients, flavors and tastes. More importantly, traditional foodways fill her void of exile life and homelessness in acts of culinary belongingness that produces the familiarity of home. By recreating the fragrances of home through the culinary occupation of space in her apartment, Mrs. Sen is able to ward off her emptiness of solitude and sense of dispossession as the customary culinary skills leads to poetic imaginings of far-away Indian life which is brought into her current living space. Apparently, the making of Indian cuisine has become a medium through which Mrs. Sen is able to transpose and recreate her memories of the past within her present dwelling, albeit her arduous efforts turn out to be a tragic failure.
Culinary Narratology 18 In this specific context, fish is regarded as a floating signifier that simultaneously reveals and resists the colonizing imprint of otherness in the form of reconfigured culinary heritage. The consumption of fish plays an essential part in Calcutta life. As Mrs. Sen recalls, she has grown up eating fish twice a day, and people in Calcutta eat fish “first thing in the morning, last thing before bed” (123). Eating fresh fish has become an inscribed urge within Mrs. Sen’s body, incorporated in her daily life. In the US, where fresh fish is not easily to be acquired, “[i]t was always a whole fish she desired,” the narrative voice observes, “not shellfish, or the fillets that Eliot’s mother had broiled one night when she’d invited a man from her office to dinner” (123). Due to its scarcity, each time when she has fresh fish Mrs. Sen treats it very carefully: “she pulled the blade out of the cupboard, spread newspapers across the carpet, and inspected her treasures. One by one she drew them from the paper wrapping, wrinkled and tinged with blood . . .” (127). This behavior with the fish is a way for Mrs. Sen to practice an important ritual in which she can find solace. To a certain degree, the fresh fish gives Mrs. Sen the security of cultural belonging. Lahiri uses Mrs. Sen’s hardships and set-backs in acquiring fresh fish as ways of defining the external parameters of her terrain, which is understood in terms of her kitchen or apartment (Kunow 168). Tragically, the route from Mrs. Sen’s apartment to the fish market symbolizes an obstacle course that exposes her predicament as an immigrant whose lack of mobility indicates a lack of capability in constructing a flexible identity. These inconvenience and hindrance do not impede Mrs. Sen’s determination on cooking a fish in a traditional as well as authentic Bengali way. Due to the humiliating experience Mrs. Sen confronts on the bus while she was on her way home from seaside shop, 6 the second time when Mrs. Sen has to get the fish by herself, she prefers to risk driving to the seaside rather than take a bus. For once, she overcomes her fear and decides to use the car, taking Eliot along with her. Yet on the way to the fish shop she has an accident: “she is startled by other cars’ horn and hits a telephone pole on the opposite corner” (134). When the policeman
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