ABSTRACT
Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava traces her life journey from the United States to Jordan and back, highlighting the crucial role that food has played on those transnational relocations. Not only is food presented as means of maintaining a deep emotional connection to the Middle East in Abu-Jaber’s own, culturally hybrid, family, but it also serves to engage readers in stories about a culture and community they might find unfamiliar and, in a post-9/11 world, even anxiety-inducing. The chapter approaches Abu-Jaber’s memoirs from a cognitive narratological angle to highlight how the texts’ affectively charged food memories are related to issues of language and cultural identity while also serving as a formal structuring device. It argues that the combination of life writing, vivid food evocations, and accompanying recipes encourages readers to use the memoir as cookbook and to thereby extend their engagement with Arab-American culture beyond the reading experience.
