BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Culinary Comfort in a Tumultuous Middle East
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: February 6, 2011
After the shocks of 9/11 many New Yorkers turned their thoughts — and their lonely stomachs — to comfort food, to reassuring combinations like macaroni and cheese and Ben & Jerry. We got a bit plump.
Annia Ciezadlo
DAY OF HONEY
A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
By Annia Ciezadlo
382 pages. Free Press. $26.
There was a second reaction too among some liberal foodies. As Annia Ciezadlo writes in her winsome new memoir, “Day of Honey,” people flocked to Arabic restaurants as if to say, “Look, we trust you, we’re eating your food.” Newspapers ran photographs of immigrants holding platters of appetizers, she writes, “their eyes beseeching, ‘Don’t deport me! Have some hummus!’ ”
Ms. Ciezadlo is a seasoned young foreign correspondent — she reported from Baghdad for The Christian Science Monitor and from Beirut for The New Republic — who in “Day of Honey” turns her attention to Middle Eastern culinary traditions and to “the millions of small ways people cope” during wartime. Her book is among the least political, and most intimate and valuable, to have come out of the Iraq war.
In part “Day of Honey” is the story of a marriage. In 2003 Ms. Ciezadlo, who describes herself as a “Polish-Greek-Scotch-Irish mutt from working-class Chicago,” married a Lebanese man, Mohamad Bazzi, who was the new Middle East bureau chief for Newsday. She fought the idea of marriage after witnessing her parents’ ugly divorce. “Marriage was the boot that had kicked me out of my peaceful Midwestern childhood,” she writes. “Marriage was a mistake other people made and then tried to lure you into: a colossal, cross-generational human Ponzi scheme.”
But marry she does, leaving Brooklyn and spending her honeymoon in Baghdad, outside the American-fortified Green Zone. She falls hard for the city and the people and the food. Besides, she no longer wants to “sit around in Williamsburg with our friends and trade ironic banter about the latest reality TV show.” Real life was happening elsewhere.
There are many good reasons to read “Day of Honey.” It’s a carefully researched tour through the history of Middle Eastern food. It’s filled with adrenalized scenes from war zones, scenes of narrow escapes and clandestine phone calls and frightening cultural misunderstandings. Ms. Ciezadlo is completely hilarious on the topic of trying to please her demanding new Lebanese in-laws.
These things wouldn’t matter much, though, if her sentences didn’t make such a sensual, smart, wired-up sound on the page. Holding “Day of Honey” I was reminded of the way that, with a book of poems, you can very often flip through it for five minutes and know if you’re going to like it; you get something akin to a contact high. Let me skim through “Day of Honey” for you, plucking lines and snippets almost at random. A few I had underlined in my copy, many I hadn’t.
“Hatred was the force that determined where you lived”; “she was too kidnappable”; “What god leant down and whispered in what mortal ear to put walnuts inside an eggplant?”; “joyful, revolutionary mall rats”; “chain-smoking her Davidoffs and squeezing lemons into vodka”; “Beirut is a city of balconies”; “He whimpered the way men do when you wake them up”; “bombed into a concrete goulash”; “Hezbollah is known for many things, but grace under criticism is not one of them.”
I could fill the rest of this space with resonant lines from “Day of Honey,” and I’m pretty tempted to do so. (O.K., another one: the huge white Toyota Land Cruisers “were ‘Monicas,’ after the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.”) But there is more to say about it. For one, don’t be put off by its feeble cover, a sentimental photograph of a cute and smiling Middle Eastern girl sitting beside a pile of cut pink flowers. It looks like the cover of some mediocre nonprofit group’s annual report, or of Guideposts magazine.
For another, Ms. Ciezadlo is the kind of thinker who listens as well as she writes. Her quotations from other people are often beautiful, or very funny. One learned Iraqi sings to her the praises of “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader,” that American trivia book, a copy of which he has somehow acquired. “It is so beautiful,” he exults. “It is not a book — it is a university! It contains everything beautiful.”
Here is Ms. Ciezadlo on the lexicon of war. “During peacetime, when we need metaphors, we raid the language of war. But the idiom of wartime is food: cannon fodder, carnage, slaughterhouse. Buildings and people are pancaked, sandwiched, sardined. Perhaps it is because the destruction reminds us of the knowledge we spend our lives avoiding — that we are all meat in the end.”
She explains how Middle Eastern women “correct” a package of pita bread. (They pull the two halves apart and lay them back to front, exposing more of the bread to the air and delaying mold.) She learns how to navigate Beirut — a place without “street signs, a functioning government, or any semblance of a social contract” — by food, by the names of restaurants and markets. Everyone knows where these places are. War may be awful, she writes, but “you still have to eat.” About herself she says: “I am always, always hungry.”
“Day of Honey” has its slow moments, its narrative eddies. But it is buoyed by Ms. Ciezadlo’s simmering anger at those who claim, wrongly, that Iraq has no cuisine. “Saying a country has no cuisine seemed like saying it had no culture, no civil society,” she writes. “I decided to go out and find it.”
Find it she does, and readers will feel lucky to find her.
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES.
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