Handmade: Stories of Strength Shared through Recipes from the Women of Sri Lanka probes postwar legacies and human rights through the concept of food. Printed as a cookbook by Palmera,12 it assembles recipes recollected by thirty-four internally displaced women from the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the regions most severely affected by the civil war. The partici-pants were asked to narrate from memory familiar recipes that they would prepare on a daily basis or for special occasions. The women’s narrative ac-counts are inevitably steeped in testimonies of the civil war capturing mem-ories of loss and displacement.13 The narration of everyday cuisine impels
them to lament their inability to prepare the food during the war and in the postwar period. It also enables them to ruminate on their resilience, in par-ticular to talk about how they made culinary compromises by using substi-tute ingredients or prepared comfort food to live through psychologically testing times. The Palmera editorial team has chronicled those anecdotes alongside the recipes, interspersed with graphic photographs of the cuisine prepared in a test kitchen.
Handmade presents itself as more than a cookbook as explicit in its fo-calization of women’s hands, which produce the food. The cover depicts a pair of weatherbeaten hands cracking open an ariyatharam, a sweet made of ground rice—a gesture that welcomes the reader into a culinary world of creativity and labor. Hands signify labor, both in domestic and public spac-es, that women undertake for the upkeep of their families. On the other hand, hands symbolize self-defense, strength, dexterity, and, by extension, ability. In this sense, hands are a metonym for survival while the food they prepared during war and its aftermath becomes what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer call “testimonial objects”—artifacts that “carry memory traces from the past” (353). Handmade, read as a project premised on women’s storytelling, emphasizes the legitimacy of oral testimony in envisioning an archive of war, one that is constituted mainly by mnemonic components rather than empirical evidence. The recipes narrated by the women function as “anchors” of memory imbued with nostalgia for a prewar, predisplace-ment past. Among many examples provided in the cookbook, the account by a participant named Rajini is a good case in point. She “vividly recalls Pallai, a lush green land, rich with vegetables—thick, furry, lime-colored okra; glossy black and green eggplant; and an abundance of purple yam”
(Palmera 212). Rajini’s bond with her arable land and memories of its lus-cious cultivations help her imaginatively transport herself to a temporality that is not maimed by violence.
Rajini’s account reveals a nostalgic passage of memory unbolted by cu-linary memory. Critics have deliberated on multiple capacities enabled by nostalgia and food. For instance, writing about South Asian diasporic citi-zenships in Anglo-America, Anita Mannur recognizes that food functions as an “intellectual and emotional anchor” allowing an immigrant to look into “the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced” (“Culinary Nostalgia” 11–12).
Such yearnings for culinary-scapes, Mannur states, can be charted in “culi-nary nostalgia.” Nostalgia, however, is not always considered a dynamic exi-gency. As Mieke Bal points out, it is a “specific coloring of memory” that has often been denounced as unproductive, escapist, sentimental, regressive, and romanticizing, as it is a search for “an idyllic past that never was” (xi). Leo Spitzer opines otherwise and uses Maurice Halbwachs’s position that nostal-gia’s provision of an “escape from the present” is one of its merits to argue
for its productive impact on a survivor’s memory. He maintains, “As a ‘retro-spective mirage’ constructed through hindsight, nostalgic memory thus serves as an important comparative and, by implication, animating purpose.
It sets up the positive from within the ‘world of yesterday’ as a model for creative inspiration, and possible emulation, within the ‘world of the here-and-now’” (92). Spitzer illustrates how nostalgic memory is useful to the community of Central European refugees who use nostalgic memory “as a creative tool of adjustment, helping to ease their cultural uprootedness and sense of alienation.” “Creatively reconfigured,” it is a “source thorough which they built a new communal culture and constructed a new collective iden-tity to serve their changed needs” (Spitzer 92).
Spitzer’s observation of nostalgia can be yoked with Mannur’s “culinary nostalgia” in order to analyze Handmade’s mediation of IDP memories. By no means can experiences of a diasporic subject and an IDP be considered equal pairs for comparison. Therefore, it is with a critical awareness of fun-damental differences pertaining to class privilege, education, capital, social networking, mobility, and state protection that figure in the two contexts in relatively oppositional ways that I invoke Mannur’s and Spitzer’s scholarship.
A racially marked diasporic subject and an IDP, however, do share a few paradigmatic traits. Both often find themselves in “in-between” locales where their identities and subjectivities are far from fixed. As such, both are searching for more stable identities with recourse to nostalgic memories of an original home/land. Both a diasporic subject immigrant and an IDP walk under the weight of their racial and ethnic minoritarian position in a socio-political climate that privileges the will of the racial and ethnic majorities.
Furthermore, just as much as food provides a language for Asian Americans to negotiate their othered position in the American imagination (Mannur, Culinary Fictions 13), it provides a language for IDPs to articulate their sub-jectivities in postwar Sri Lanka.
Mannur and Spitzer delineate the forging of community and citizenship away from original sites of home, ones held together by nostalgic memories.
For Mannur, culinary trajectories offer potent avenues to inquire into mat-ters of survival and resilience of minoritarian subjects, thus forming “culi-nary citizenship”—that is, “a form of affective citizenship which grants subjects the ability to claim and inhabit subject positions via their relation-ship to food” (“Culinary Nostalgia” 13). The participants of Handmade con-stantly use their relationship to food to give meaning to their present-day existence. Take, for example, the following account by a woman who pres-ents a comparative temporal observation:
In the days before the war we made our own rice flour, grinding the rice ourselves. Now we rely on packaged food and flours. We do not have the facilities to make the foods we used to make. . . . We had our
own cows and fresh milk. Vegetable were in vast supply. Green man-goes and green bananas abounded, rice was so cheap. [Now f]resh fruits are expensive. Now we have processed foods, sodas, biscuits, Milo and juice. In those days children didn’t get as sick. We used a lot of herbal medicine like curry leaves. [Now] Kurakkan maa is low in stock. There is no saamai rice for diabetic people. Now they are just given medicines. (Palmera 115)
Beneath her lamentation on the erasure of arable lands, animal husbandry, and prosperity that mark the pre-IDP life is a self-recognition of subjectivity anchored to a specific geopolitical history. This cannot simply be dismissed as an escapist account. It features a collective voice. Spitzer reminds us that nostalgic memory, by devising a bridge between a “self-in-present” and an image of a “self-in-past,” contributes to the reconstruction and continuity of individual and collective identity (92). Along these lines, the woman’s ac-count explains the constitution of her community’s identity as one informed by predisplacement memories.
Some culinary memories enable alternative realities. Confined in heav-ily guarded IDP camps, the women’s mobility is scrutinized and regulated, but their memories are not. One participant of Handmade, for instance, nar-rates how food preparation helped her temporarily take her family to “an-other, more joyful world, outside of the camps” (Palmera 46). The woman forges emancipation through culinary creativity and “resettles” her family in a territory of her own design. The affective relationship she cultivates with food allows not only her family to carve out, claim, and inhabit identitarian positions (Mannur, Culinary Fictions 29). This is a form of citizenship that is constructed outside national, legal, and political boundaries. Hence, it is shielded from the intrusive eyes of the state and interference of its military apparatus. Identitarian positions facilitated by culinary citizenship allow displaced subjects to fixate themselves on specific historical and geopolitical locations via memory and to complicate popular notions of displacement.
The women’s narratives accompanying their recipes in Handmade unravel possibilities of defining citizenship as one that is not necessary coeval with territorial inhabitance in the nation-state but one that can actively and cre-atively function in a mnemonic domain as well.
The cookbook’s presentation of a dozen close-ups of hands that are mak-ing, holdmak-ing, or offering the visually appealing food is a subversive move. For Mannur, dominant culinary cultural politics conveniently mask labor prac-tices underlying food production.14 Foregrounding the women who create the food, Handmade acknowledges not only the culinary tradition but also the displaced women who produce it. Whereas refugee women are conven-tionally “socialized to silence their own experience, needs, and pain” since they have to undertake multiple employment and caregiving functions
(Hajdukowski-Ahmed 47), culinary power elevates the displaced women to positions of agency. Along these lines, Handmade recognizes the indomi-table spirit with which the women survived the war and their memories before, during, and after the war.