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Thursday, February 9, 2012

::In My Mother's Kitchen: Thoughts::


I have been thinking a lot about food, because I am teaching a class on food. I like to eat, I like to experiment with ingredients in my kitchen. But when I approach food as the raw material for my scholarly and creative reflections and productions, I am primarily interested in these things: food and its relationship to concepts of power, food as a site of power, food as a site of resistance, food as a site that exists as an intersection of social processes like labor, commodification and consumption. Because I am interested in the labor that happens around food production, I am also interested in the valence of the kitchen-space. Kitchen the space within which most domestic food production happens. Kitchen the space which has, for so many centuries of human history, has been seen as the space where women belong. I can flip the equation around, and also say, because I am interested in gender, I am interested in the history and politics of the kitchen. I have been trying to find poems and memoir-pieces on kitchen. And this is one of the first things that came up when I did a Google search with the keywords In My Mother's Kitchen.

IN MY MOTHER'S KITCHEN

Fragrance of fresh tortillas and corn stew

Fills my mother's kitchen

Sparsely furnished

Crowded with warmth



Soot-grayed walls, secretive and blank

She moves gently in and out of light

Like a dream just out of reach



The morning light gives her a halo

That plays upon her crown of dark hair

Strong brown hands caress soft mounds of dough

She gazes out into the warming day

Past sagebrush hills, out towards the foot of Black Mesa

How far would she let the goats wander today

Before it rains



Childhood dreams and warmth

Tight in my throat, tears in my eyes

The radio softly tuned to a local AM station

News of ceremonies and chapter meetings

And funerals

Flows into the peaceful kitchen

Lines upon her face, features carved of hard times

Lines around her eyes, creases of happy times

Bittersweet tears and ringing silvery laughter

I ache in my heart




My mother's gentle movements light up dark corners

Her gentle smiles recall childhood dreams still so alive

My mother moves in and out of light

Like clouds on days of promising rain

—Shonto Begay


And here is Begay's website: http://shontogallery.com/wp/


What struck me about this poem is the way the poet reveals the little details of the mother's kitchen. There are so many images in this poem, much like the classic confessional/memory poem tradition of American poetry. But, all those image-work have been mobilized towards a specific impulse : to construct the mother's kitchen as an abode of peace, and the mother as a figure who embodies all that is "gentle" in life. Given Begay's personal and creative history, I am seeing in this poem a well-known trend: constructing the kitchen and the mother that provide refuge against the outside world : the world of funerals, tears and chapter meetings. In other words, the colonizing world which is only capable of generating trauma. But then, the mother in this poem is hardly a "real" figure : she "moves in and out of light", she is like a "dream that is out of reach." Yep, she becomes the classic national allegory. The allegory of the indigenous "American" nation that hasn't been born, that probably will never be born, and therefore, like the mother of this poem will always be a little elusive, its dream-like quality providing solace during moments of stressful contacts with the "mainstream" world.


But this is not just all. I am also thinking about how this elusive mother-figure keeps appearing in male poetry throughout the world. And not just the mother figure, the figure of the allegorized woman, Like Jibanananda Das's classic imageries of "kishorir chal dhoya haat" ( the young girl's rice-washed hands). In spite of their huge geographic and cultural difference, what is common in Begay and Das's kind of metaphor-making is that, it transforms women's actual labor into romanticized allegories, symbolizing some kind of inaccessible, elusive antithesis to the trauma of the outside world. So, when I read poems like this, I cannot help asking: where is the actual labor of the mother within the space of the kitchen? How does the mother-figure's frustrations and hysteria get reproduced within the kitchen space? How does the kitchen become the space where women's trauma (as against the "outside" world and its identification as the space for male trauma) gets constituted, articulated, expressed? And last but not the least, how does the mother herself see this kitchen? Does this ever become the space for expressing her creativity? What I am seeing as I am reading these lines I just wrote, what are the questions that we need to ask in order to de-naturalize the idea that kitchen is the essential space where women find belonging, and somehow, that's inherent in the very constitution of women. Unfortunately, in spite of the beauty of his images, that's what Begay's poem ends up doing.


As I am struggling through these questions, I find myself writing some poems which try to answer these questions. So far I have written six such poems. All of them are pretty short. But I am enjoying writing them. And along with finishing the first draft of the dissertation and teaching, that's what I have been up to.

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