It’s all too common for those of us who get our news from a safe distance, by reading it or watching it on a screen, to think of Baghdad and Beirut (or Rwanda or Myanmar or Haiti) as black holes, places where there’s nothing but suffering. We don’t know, and shy away from thinking about, the individual human beings living there day by day.
In her extraordinary debut, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, Annia Ciezadlo turns food into a language, a set of signs and connections, that helps tie together a complex moving memoir of the Middle East. She interweaves her private story with portraits of memorable individuals she comes to know along the way, and with the shattering public events in Baghdad and Beirut. She does so with grace and skill, without falling into sentimentality or simple generalizations.
In the introduction, we learn that in the spring of 2001 she met and began a serious relationship with a man named Mohamad, a Lebanese-born American journalist based in New York. But 9/11 changes everything: They get swept up in the events in the Middle East and every aspect of their lives intensifies. He soon flies off to Pakistan to report; she stays in New York and worries about him, surviving on brief agonizing phone calls. The following spring, he is appointed Newsweek’s Middle East bureau chief. They travel to Lebanon to meet his parents, then move to Beirut, and soon to Baghdad.
The once-faraway world of the Middle East is suddenly the foreground, needing to be understood. How to do that? For the author, food is the entry point (along with learning Arabic). She is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Throughout the following years, food anchors her in the reality of the day-to-day lives of the people on whom the burden of war falls most onerously (as she notes, it’s mostly the women).
But food is more than a way to immerse herself in place and culture. Ciezadlo also uses food as metaphor and teaching tool. Take Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, for example. We outsiders tend to think of Ramadan as a time of privation. But as she tells us in luscious detail, it’s also all about food, a time of feasting and sharing at iftars (fast-breaking post-sundown dinners). Once we understand what Ramadan really means for people, we can truly be appalled at the situation she describes in the fall of 2003 in Iraq: The threat of bombs puts Baghdad in a kind of lockdown, so that people are obliged to break the fast alone. Ramadan becomes “a season of fear and fasting.”
Food is also a way of talking about events. For example, masquf, a dish of river fish grilled slowly over a smoky fire, preferably along the banks of the Tigris River, used to be a Baghdad treat until Saddam Hussein fenced off the river with barbed wire. It evokes an earlier, happier era, when fisherman hung out by the water’s edge, and it’s one of the author’s favourite dishes. She puzzles over the regional origins of the dish, asks around to find out which part of the country it comes from, and eventually concludes that it belongs to everyone, a symbol of Iraqi identity.
