Cross-cultural Marriages and the Politics of Food in Diasporic Arab Fiction

Abstract

Food is an important aspect of recreating home for immigrants in their new lands. In
fact, food does not only provide the nutritious value for people to survive and grow, but it also
connotes multiple functions. It encodes various personal, social and cultural messages that
immigrants use in order to recreate their homes. This paper aims at investigating the functions of
food, including food as a language and as a metaphor for knowledge, food as a system of
communication, and food as a theme that is interconnected with memory to re/construct cultural
identity. These symbolic meanings of food are explored within the framework of cross-cultural
marriages that are portrayed in Joseph Geha’s Through and Through: Toledo Stories (1990),
Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993) and Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007).