The hairline fractures that had grown in number in my family over the years became fissures and, finally, inseparable breaks when my teta died.
My parents divorced over my father’s opioid addiction when I was a toddler and I lived with my mother, so I was relegated to seeing the Palestinian side of my family every other weekend, as per the divorce agreement. Where some of my cousins were able to see Sedo and Teta (Arabic for grandfather and grandmother) more often and participate in Palestinian culture more, I wasn’t. They were able to do things like having dinner with my grandparents on weeknights and attending weekday functions at the Greek Orthodox Church, the local hub for all the Christians who immigrated from the Levantine region to Birmingham, Alabama.
By the time my teta died when I was 13, I’d already had so much less time with her than most of my cousins. And now that she was gone, I feared I’d never learn all she had to teach me.
I had so many questions. What was that embroidered dress she ordered for me from The Old Country? (Google tells me it’s a thobe.) And where even is The Old Country? (When I was little I thought ‘The Old Country’ was the actual name of a country, though Wikipedia informed me it was Palestine. Later I learned my family is from Ramallah, in the West Bank, specifically.) Who would teach me Arabic? (Duolingo, apparently. It’s a challenge, as my Southern accent weighs heavily on my tongue.) And who would teach me to cook all my favorite foods?
Though she told me when I was twelve that she’d learned to cook when she was younger than I was, she deemed me a nuisance in the kitchen. And who could blame her with the way I couldn’t help sticking a tasting spoon into every pot, running a finger to lick through every sauce, and checking the oven so frequently that the heat escaped and prolonged the cooking. In the small kitchen I followed at her elbow, watching everything she did.
My favorite times to spend with her were the weekends when she’d make bread and yogurt from scratch. My grandparents’ house was two stories with a kitchen on each floor. The small downstairs kitchen she usually cooked in wouldn’t do for the all-day undertaking of bread and yogurt, so she’d move upstairs to the lesser-used kitchen and living room, where the furniture was still covered in plastic and her grandchildren were reminded regularly that it was not for us to sit on. We never saw anyone sitting on it ever and it remained in mid-century modern perfection half a century after its purchase.
Teta would spread a thin white cloth over the avocado green carpet of the living room floor and fill it with round metal pans of bread dough that she’d kneaded by hand. The upstairs kitchen had a sliding pocket door on each end and teta made one-woman assembly line work of cooking the bread. She kneaded the dough, filled the pans, let the dough rise, placed four bread pans in the oven, went back to kneading the bread and filling the pans, took the cooked bread from the oven and placed four more pans in. When the bread cooled, she popped it from the pan and put it into a plastic bag. A handful went to the downstairs kitchen where chunks would be pulled for every meal and snack in the coming days. The others went into the freezer for future use.
She would do all this with the oven blazing, the air conditioner off, and the windows open. Even in the Alabama humidity, she insisted on opening the drapes for light and raising the windowpane for the breeze. She grew up without air conditioning and saw it as a decadence she could do just fine without – though that didn’t stop her from sweating and patting down her forehead and decolletage with a dish rag as she cooked. With the amount of work it took, I could understand why she only wanted to bake once a month.
Making yogurt was a similar process, though less intense than the assembly line nature of making bread. She made the month’s batch of yogurt when she’d finished all the kneading and was just waiting on the loaves of bread to cook. There was milk and cheese and a cheesecloth over a bowl where chunks would be strained by some alchemical process that produced what looked like yogurt but was called alternatively yogurt and cheese, to the point that I never knew which it really was.
All I knew was that dipping chunks of teta’s fresh bread into the yogurt, then into a bowl of za’atar, which as a kid I called ‘dirt,’ was the best snack. And few things I did made teta as happy as when I cleaned my plate of food she made entirely with her own two hands. Though she’d lived in the U.S. for nearly fifty years, she still primarily spoke Arabic, a language neither she nor my sedo passed down to their children or grandchildren. In their desire to assimilate and be an ‘all American’ family, we were expected to keep our Palestinian-ness relegated to home and church. Yet there is no language barrier with food. Love is communicated on a plate.
Teta died in 2003 and with her gone, I wondered if I’d ever taste the love inherent in Palestinian culture again. This, too, is diaspora. Imagine a child’s father, too sick with opioid addiction to want or care for her and a grandmother dead from congestive heart failure severing the only real ties she has to that side of her family. In his grief, Sedo was not equipped to confront his son’s addiction and refused to help my mother get my father to rehab. In the end, he never got off the pills and he shot himself in the head. My Palestinian family is shattered and my sense of Palestinian culture with it. This, too, is a desert wandering.
In absence of a human connection point, I turn to Google and Wikipedia. Searches for how to be a half-Palestinian woman yield results on half-Palestinian, half-Jewish people – a combination even more complicated and rife with conflict than my Southern redneck/Palestinian combo. I return to food as a point of access.
Teta called the yogurt, simply, yogurt – I couldn’t recall a specific name for it. So when I noticed Greek yogurt in the grocery store one day, I thought surely that must be it. My grandparents attended a Greek Orthodox church and took us grandchildren every year to Birmingham’s annual Greek food festival. The yogurt inside the tub I bought didn’t look or smell the same. It was a pure white, not off-white like Teta’s. There was a milky, runny liquid on top rather than olive oil. The tang was a different tang; more akin to sour cream. It left me wanting.
There were no Palestinian or even Greek or Mediterranean restaurants in the small Birmingham suburb I grew up in, though I would later learn that finding a Palestinian-owned restaurant could leave me wanting too. As I grew older and learned about the exile of Palestinians from their homeland and Palestinian refugees, I understood why various Palestinians cooked the same dishes so differently. The food traditions they brought with them were commingled with the local cuisine of wherever they found themselves.
The search for ‘authentic’ food is a fool’s errand. It’s all authentic – it’s simply a matter of how one’s metric for ‘authenticity’ was established. My metric will forever be my teta’s home cooking.
It’s possible my memory has glorified her food into an unattainable perfection. Memory has a way of doing that – amplifying the good and unconsciously repairing the cracks. It is only in writing this essay that I recall teta did make some dishes I didn’t like. The soup with chicken gizzard comes to mind most readily. I’d always been picky about meat; unable to know its origin without imagining that animal’s face begging me to spare its life. Even as a small child, to rip apart an animal’s flesh with my teeth felt like I was eating its soul and the cow or chicken or pig or lamb would haunt my dreams. I didn’t have the words to explain, either in English or Arabic, so I pushed the plate away and broke teta’s heart a little each time she implored me to try it and I ran away from the table.
My taste has changed from childhood to adulthood. I’ll eat meat now, though only a handful of times per week. And where I used to disdain onions I’d now be happy to have them with every meal. Perhaps it’s my changing tastes that have rendered teta’s meals an unattainable perfection. The tastes I remember might literally no longer exist.
I have long believed, irrationally, that when I find the food I seek, I’ll find myself. I seek out restaurants and recipe books with dishes I remember from childhood, building the expectation up in my mind, and court disappointment. My reason kicks in and I tell myself to quit this quest and simply enjoy eating. Yet every time I consider giving up, I find something a little closer.
Two weeks ago I found the yogurt: labne. A new Lebanese restaurant opened and the picture of labne on their menu looks like what teta made. When I brought the container of labne home, it tasted like Teta made it too. If my quest is a fool’s errand, at least my foolishness tastes this good. I may never stop seeking my grandmother’s cooking in every Mediterranean restaurant I come across in the South and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get closer to my broken, diasporic family in via the plate.
By the time my teta died when I was 13, I’d already had so much less time with her than most of my cousins. And now that she was gone, I feared I’d never learn all she had to teach me.
I had so many questions. What was that embroidered dress she ordered for me from The Old Country? (Google tells me it’s a thobe.) And where even is The Old Country? (When I was little I thought ‘The Old Country’ was the actual name of a country, though Wikipedia informed me it was Palestine. Later I learned my family is from Ramallah, in the West Bank, specifically.) Who would teach me Arabic? (Duolingo, apparently. It’s a challenge, as my Southern accent weighs heavily on my tongue.) And who would teach me to cook all my favorite foods?
Though she told me when I was twelve that she’d learned to cook when she was younger than I was, she deemed me a nuisance in the kitchen. And who could blame her with the way I couldn’t help sticking a tasting spoon into every pot, running a finger to lick through every sauce, and checking the oven so frequently that the heat escaped and prolonged the cooking. In the small kitchen I followed at her elbow, watching everything she did.
My favorite times to spend with her were the weekends when she’d make bread and yogurt from scratch. My grandparents’ house was two stories with a kitchen on each floor. The small downstairs kitchen she usually cooked in wouldn’t do for the all-day undertaking of bread and yogurt, so she’d move upstairs to the lesser-used kitchen and living room, where the furniture was still covered in plastic and her grandchildren were reminded regularly that it was not for us to sit on. We never saw anyone sitting on it ever and it remained in mid-century modern perfection half a century after its purchase.
Teta would spread a thin white cloth over the avocado green carpet of the living room floor and fill it with round metal pans of bread dough that she’d kneaded by hand. The upstairs kitchen had a sliding pocket door on each end and teta made one-woman assembly line work of cooking the bread. She kneaded the dough, filled the pans, let the dough rise, placed four bread pans in the oven, went back to kneading the bread and filling the pans, took the cooked bread from the oven and placed four more pans in. When the bread cooled, she popped it from the pan and put it into a plastic bag. A handful went to the downstairs kitchen where chunks would be pulled for every meal and snack in the coming days. The others went into the freezer for future use.
She would do all this with the oven blazing, the air conditioner off, and the windows open. Even in the Alabama humidity, she insisted on opening the drapes for light and raising the windowpane for the breeze. She grew up without air conditioning and saw it as a decadence she could do just fine without – though that didn’t stop her from sweating and patting down her forehead and decolletage with a dish rag as she cooked. With the amount of work it took, I could understand why she only wanted to bake once a month.
Making yogurt was a similar process, though less intense than the assembly line nature of making bread. She made the month’s batch of yogurt when she’d finished all the kneading and was just waiting on the loaves of bread to cook. There was milk and cheese and a cheesecloth over a bowl where chunks would be strained by some alchemical process that produced what looked like yogurt but was called alternatively yogurt and cheese, to the point that I never knew which it really was.
All I knew was that dipping chunks of teta’s fresh bread into the yogurt, then into a bowl of za’atar, which as a kid I called ‘dirt,’ was the best snack. And few things I did made teta as happy as when I cleaned my plate of food she made entirely with her own two hands. Though she’d lived in the U.S. for nearly fifty years, she still primarily spoke Arabic, a language neither she nor my sedo passed down to their children or grandchildren. In their desire to assimilate and be an ‘all American’ family, we were expected to keep our Palestinian-ness relegated to home and church. Yet there is no language barrier with food. Love is communicated on a plate.
Teta died in 2003 and with her gone, I wondered if I’d ever taste the love inherent in Palestinian culture again. This, too, is diaspora. Imagine a child’s father, too sick with opioid addiction to want or care for her and a grandmother dead from congestive heart failure severing the only real ties she has to that side of her family. In his grief, Sedo was not equipped to confront his son’s addiction and refused to help my mother get my father to rehab. In the end, he never got off the pills and he shot himself in the head. My Palestinian family is shattered and my sense of Palestinian culture with it. This, too, is a desert wandering.
In absence of a human connection point, I turn to Google and Wikipedia. Searches for how to be a half-Palestinian woman yield results on half-Palestinian, half-Jewish people – a combination even more complicated and rife with conflict than my Southern redneck/Palestinian combo. I return to food as a point of access.
Teta called the yogurt, simply, yogurt – I couldn’t recall a specific name for it. So when I noticed Greek yogurt in the grocery store one day, I thought surely that must be it. My grandparents attended a Greek Orthodox church and took us grandchildren every year to Birmingham’s annual Greek food festival. The yogurt inside the tub I bought didn’t look or smell the same. It was a pure white, not off-white like Teta’s. There was a milky, runny liquid on top rather than olive oil. The tang was a different tang; more akin to sour cream. It left me wanting.
There were no Palestinian or even Greek or Mediterranean restaurants in the small Birmingham suburb I grew up in, though I would later learn that finding a Palestinian-owned restaurant could leave me wanting too. As I grew older and learned about the exile of Palestinians from their homeland and Palestinian refugees, I understood why various Palestinians cooked the same dishes so differently. The food traditions they brought with them were commingled with the local cuisine of wherever they found themselves.
The search for ‘authentic’ food is a fool’s errand. It’s all authentic – it’s simply a matter of how one’s metric for ‘authenticity’ was established. My metric will forever be my teta’s home cooking.
It’s possible my memory has glorified her food into an unattainable perfection. Memory has a way of doing that – amplifying the good and unconsciously repairing the cracks. It is only in writing this essay that I recall teta did make some dishes I didn’t like. The soup with chicken gizzard comes to mind most readily. I’d always been picky about meat; unable to know its origin without imagining that animal’s face begging me to spare its life. Even as a small child, to rip apart an animal’s flesh with my teeth felt like I was eating its soul and the cow or chicken or pig or lamb would haunt my dreams. I didn’t have the words to explain, either in English or Arabic, so I pushed the plate away and broke teta’s heart a little each time she implored me to try it and I ran away from the table.
My taste has changed from childhood to adulthood. I’ll eat meat now, though only a handful of times per week. And where I used to disdain onions I’d now be happy to have them with every meal. Perhaps it’s my changing tastes that have rendered teta’s meals an unattainable perfection. The tastes I remember might literally no longer exist.
I have long believed, irrationally, that when I find the food I seek, I’ll find myself. I seek out restaurants and recipe books with dishes I remember from childhood, building the expectation up in my mind, and court disappointment. My reason kicks in and I tell myself to quit this quest and simply enjoy eating. Yet every time I consider giving up, I find something a little closer.
Two weeks ago I found the yogurt: labne. A new Lebanese restaurant opened and the picture of labne on their menu looks like what teta made. When I brought the container of labne home, it tasted like Teta made it too. If my quest is a fool’s errand, at least my foolishness tastes this good. I may never stop seeking my grandmother’s cooking in every Mediterranean restaurant I come across in the South and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get closer to my broken, diasporic family in via the plate.
Mandy Shunnarah is a writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, USA home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds, will be out in 2022. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
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