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

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Culinary Narratology 23 among diaspora communities, in which some immigrants tend to clutch all tradition in resistance to cultural assimilation. In these kinds of communities, immigrants’ formation of subjectivity is closely tied to the group, and their collective identity is realized by means of communal feasts. For first generation South Asian immigrants, the regular communal gatherings further act as an important occasion to construct and cultivate second generation immigrants’ identity of Indian heritage. In The Namesake, most first generation Indian immigrant parents hold a double consciousness, hoping that their offspring can adopt appropriate behaviors and achieve success in American society, yet at the same time maintaining a strong cultural sense of themselves as South Asians. Ashima is also alarmed when she finds her ABCD 8 children becoming completely Americanized, without any trace of Indianness within them, as she still feels unaccustomed to life in the US. 9 The “half true” life in the US that Ashima perceives corresponds to the notion of the unhomely, a state that reflects immigrant experiences as “something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place” (Bhabha 445). To be unhomed is not the same as to be homeless; the state of being unhomely indicates Ashima’s negotiation of living between the newly acquired American space and her Indian upbringing, and particularly her struggle with the Americanization of her children and her own attempt to raise them with Indian values. Thus, she appeals to communal sustenance, hoping that the feasts may also help maintain her children’s awareness of their Indian origins as well as to sate her nostalgia with familiar foods and faces. After many years of living in the US, Ashima gradually finds herself a balanced position between resistance and assimilation, once again played out through festivals, gatherings and food. For her children’s sake, Ashima learns to accept some American ways, celebrating Christmas “with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati” (64) and at Thanksgiving
Culinary Narratology 24 Ashima learns to “roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne” (64), as well as other American festivals Gogol and Sonia learn from school. As for the children’s birthday parties, Ashima “cooks for days beforehand” and feels stressed due to the “task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are allergic to milk, all of whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread” (72). In addition, there are other ways that Ashima gives in to the hybridization of American and Indian culture. Although Ashima constantly refuses to consume supermarket ready-made items, she lets Gogol and Sonia. Thus, at Gogol’s insistence, Ashima “concedes and makes him an American dinner once a week as a treat, Shake’n Bake chicken or Hamburger Helper prepared with ground lamb” (65). To accommodate her children’s tastes as well as her own, Ashima has to maintain both Americanized and authentic Indian cuisines at home. Gradually, her compromise over foodways reveals her attitude of negotiations between two cultures. Ashima’s production and consumption of hybrid foods with Indian and American ingredients articulates an alternative dimension to diasporic culinary narratives. Her actions indicate the possibility of communicative acts which can provide cultural mediations, culinary negotiations and diasporic relocations. In preparing Indian foods in an alien kitchen, Ashima learns how migration engenders complex changes in the deep structures of her everyday life – a never-ending series of negotiations of self identity and a sense of belongingness that shifts between home as a place of origin and home as a lived experience of locality at present. Woman without Borders Food and social and cultural practices of cooking and eating are significant in charting and maintaining a collective memory and self identity in a diasporic context. Food preparation and consumption also reveals a great deal about gender and family relations, as
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