مجلة البحوث و الدراسات الإنسانية
Volume 18, Numéro 1, Pages 61-76
2024-06-30

Planting Olives In Memoirs: Tracing Genealogy And Mobility In Anthony Shadid’s ‘house Of Stone’ (2012) And Suad Amiry’s ‘my Damascus’ (2016)



Authors : Sathananthar Arththi .

Abstract

This paper will explore how olives are used to represent the trope of the return home. Anthony Shadid’s ‘House of Stone’ (2012) and Suad Amiry’s ‘My Damascus’ (2016) detail the olive as a symbolic motif to express home, loss and exile. Shadid and Amiry both call attention to the prominence of olives and their many uses in Arab culinary culture. Where the physical house no longer exists or has been left desolate, these culinary tropes represent reminders or remnants of the lost home. Through a focus on the ancestral home, I trace the socio-political changes in the region which lead to the family’s displacement and exile from the homeland. I also demonstrate different modes of movement which are shaped from not only the geo-political landscape but also traditional cultural mandates whereby food traditions are preserved and sustained by future generations living in the diaspora. In both memoirs, there is a meticulous documentation of genealogy which also produces, in fascinating ways, a cultural history of the memoirist’s home. This home is intergenerational, and is itself formed from Arab culture and food. The writing of traditional Arab food, in particular olives, preserves the writers’ Arab ancestry and locates this heritage in the memoir. I examine the representation of olives through movement and relocation. I explore both the centrifugal movement of the writers’ families away from the homeland, and the writers’ centripetal movement back towards it. Therefore, the olives becomes the focal construct to trace these familial crossings across the adopted country and the ancestral place origin. The comparative study of olives in these texts unearths a larger geopolitical framework of migration and mobility.

Keywords

Middle East ; diaspora ; migration ; memoir ; life writing

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