March 2, 2018

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic Not Without Laughter, recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story of Sandy, a light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s. Sandy wants great things for himself but can’t see how to achieve them in a world rife with racism. Late in the novel, he muses that “being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs.” Out of context, this may seem simplistic, but it follows Hughes’s devastating explication of how the adult black role models in Sandy’s life have tried, and failed, to thrive. Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s table, bringing home things like “a large piece of fresh lemon pie,” “two chocolate eclairs in her pocket, mashed together,” or “a small bucket of oyster soup.” Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar, cleans laundry for whites. She works herself to the bone for pennies with the belief that a quiet respectability will, in the end, save black people. Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Sandy’s aunt embrace the blues and enjoy what they have, though Hughes does not sugarcoat the reality that what they have is too little. Read More

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February 16, 2018

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin

By Valerie Stivers

As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won Hugo and Nebula awards, but it was still radical when I devoured it in the eighties and is still radical today. It tells the story of Genly Ai, a human-diaspora interstellar explorer who arrives solo on the planet Winter to convince its citizens to join the Ekumen, a benevolent interplanetary federation. Ai is a human man, but the humanoid people on Winter have no gender and instead go once a month into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which their bodies are spontaneously inspired to become either male or female, for the purpose of sex. (Sounds fun … right?) As a person who is always a “man,” Ai is considered a pervert on Winter, but in their society—unlike ours—this isn’t a very big deal. More central is how Ai grapples with his relationships with the local people, in particular a government minister named Estraven, who may be an ally or an enemy or a friend … or more than a friend if Ai can expand his categories.

Hot beer: the drink of choice for the maybe-lovers Estraven and Ai.

Le Guin said that she wrote her science fictions as thought experiments, skewing our world in search of moral insight, and her imagined society on Winter poses questions of how humans would organize themselves if we could all bear children and if we saw ourselves as humans first and sex objects only sometimes. It’s much more than just a love story, but in high school, I took it as one. Genly Ai’s long, slow, dawning appreciation of Estraven—and especially a night when he sees his friend shirtless, by a fire, as “gaunt and scarred … his face burned by cold almost as by fire … a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light”—set my standards for the highest romance.

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February 2, 2018

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The West has a long-held obsession with the roles of women in Muslim societies. The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), captures the complexity from within. Mahfouz is the only Arab writer to have won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and these three works, Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, published in the fifties, were the first modern books originally written in Arabic to be included in the Everyman’s Library. They trace the fate of an Egyptian family in World War I—when the country was still a member of the British Empire, awash with Australian soldiers, but covertly hoping for a German victory—through World War II, when the political situation started to repeat itself.

The people at the heart of the book are Mr. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, a Cairo shop owner who is “wealthy, strong and handsome,” a tyrant and a patriarch as befit the virtues of his time, and his wife, Amina, a woman who was married to him at fourteen and shut up in her house ever since. She embodies the feminine ideals of obedience, submission, serenity, and religious faith. Of her, Mahfouz writes, “Whenever she thought back over her life, only goodness and happiness came to mind. Fears and sorrows seemed meaningless ghosts to her, worth nothing more than a smile of pity.” Amina has “beautiful small eyes” and a “sweet, dreamy look” and does her housework with “pleasure and delight” and “incessant perseverance and energy.” The family’s downfall—and also Egypt’s, Mahfouz implies—is the structural weakness of these roles. Amina’s lack of education and judgment and Ahmad’s harshness and self-indulgence wreak tragic consequences for the next generation. Read More

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January 19, 2018

Eat Your Words

Cooking from Sixteenth-Century Fairy Tales

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The first and most deliciously weird collection of European fairy tales comes not from the Brothers Grimm but from Giambattista Basile (1575–1632), a poet, courtier, and feudal administrator from Naples. Because Basile wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, The Tale of Tales—in the original, Lo cunto de li cunti—has been obscure for most of its history. The first authoritative English translation, by Basile scholar Nancy Canepa, appeared only in 2007. For those of us who read to enter different skins and live in different worlds, the book is a treasure box of estranging language and metaphor. The tales are fantastical, but the greater thrill is how the writing brings alive the details and sensibilities of daily life in Baroque-period Italy, six hundred years ago. Here is Basile describing a pretty young girl:

She truly was a delectable morsel: she looked like tender curds and whey, like sugar paste; she never turned the little buttons of her eyes without leaving hearts perforated by love; she never opened the basin of her lips without doing a little laundry of souls.

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January 5, 2018

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Sylvia Plath

By Valerie Stivers

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

In her diaries, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) liked to boast about her “damn good” lemon-meringue pie, which she was able to produce even under difficult conditions. She once wrote that she “cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill,” presumably due to lack of refrigeration at a rental apartment at Smith College. Pie-making enthusiasts will know that keeping the dough cold, cold, cold is the trick, and also that the fridge is pretty essential for setting a lemon curd. They will marvel, as I do, at Plath’s excellent domestic skills. Read More

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December 15, 2017

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Chinua Achebe

By Valerie Stivers

This is the sixth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column.

My winding path as a reader has led me to a personal specialty in Nigerian literature. I know about the country’s civil war from 1967 to 1970, its languages and ethnic groups, its Harmattan winds and mellifluous names. I can name-drop hipster cafes in Lagos, where I have been only in fiction. My first love was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but my random late-night Internet searches for her biography and interviews turned me on to others, to Chigozie Obioma, to the feminist expatriate Buchi Emecheta, and finally to the éminence grise Chinua Achebe (1930–2013). Achebe was one of the founding fathers of post-colonial African fiction, a writer who worked in opposition to the racist literature of his British-educated youth. Achebe’s essay critiquing Heart of Darkness, written in 1975, was a revolutionary event in Conrad studies, and to this day he’s one of the most-lionized of all African writers.

Achebe had a keen eye for social organization, which means he writes a lot about food. In his 1956 classic, Things Fall Apart, yam farming is the lifeline of the village, the size of a man’s harvest determines his status, and his multiple wives each make him a soup to go with his evening foo-foo, a pounded yam dish. How is foo-foo made? Is it good? If I were the wife of a polygamous yam farmer and competitive about my cooking—which of course I would be—would my soup be the best one on the evening’s table? Or would I be like Nwayieke, a woman in the village “notorious for her late cooking,” the sound of whose wooden mortar and pestle is “part of the night.” Naturally, I want to know. Read More

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Category Archives: Eat Your Words

Eat Your Words

Cooking with Langston Hughes

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Eat Your Words

Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin

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Eat Your Words

Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz

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Eat Your Words

Cooking from Sixteenth-Century Fairy Tales

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Eat Your Words

Cooking with Sylvia Plath

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Eat Your Words

Cooking with Chinua Achebe

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