Host/Guest, Author/Daughter: Considering Hospitality in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Culinary Patriographies

Diana Abu-Jaber’s culinary memoirs, The Language of Baklava and Life without a Recipe, are patriographies preoccupied with considering hospitable encounters. In these texts, Abu-Jaber’s presentation of her father as a host and, thereby, as an ethical subject, shows how she develops her own feminist hospitality in response to her father’s hospitable practices and experiences: Bud functions as the host within the memoirs while Diana—memoirist, archivist, storyteller, recipe-writer—exemplifies hospitality as host/author. Reading Abu-Jaber’s memoirs through the lens of hospitality allows readers to see beyond the fact that food functions as a throughline in Abu-Jaber’s life, amplifying the serial, daily resonances of how hospitality complicates our understandings of what culinary relationships do. Writing patriography, Abu-Jaber demonstrates how her family is implicated in hospitable encounters and illustrates that it is within language that the memoirs enact such exchanges. Her use of culinary life writing allows the work of translating extralinguistic experiences, like cooking and eating, to amplify the significance of language to the work of memory-making and preservation. In so doing, Abu-Jaber considers the temporal collapse of immigrant sensibility as sparked by culinary memory.