Food and Its Connotations in Birds of Paradise

In this section, I will analyze how food becomes in Birds of Paradise a multi-meaning narrative medium through which Abu-Jaber creates the character's own perspectives for many aspects in their personal life. However, food, in some contexts, shows how Abu-Jaber is affected by storytelling technique and myths. Through a binary opposition between a friend and an enemy, food is portrayed as a way to torment an enemy or to build a new friendship. In addition, I will focus on the ways in which food articulates tension as well as recalls memories and nostalgia. Food also forms a philosophy and a social language which both enable the characters to communicate and be active in the family circle as well as the social environment. I will also analyze some other meanings of food which Abu-Jaber offers in the novel. For instant, food is shown as a combination between heavenly and earthly ingredients, and food itself is connected to vanishing times and fleeting moments. However, it also becomes a way to save Avis from her harsh reality.

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In Birds of Paradise, considerable attention has been devoted to food preparation and the ingredients of the wafers, pastries, and cookies. For example, the ingredients of the wafers, which are mixed with rosewater, urge young Felice to connect this taste with what the mythical mermaids may eat. This metaphor represents an implied reference to the myths that have been told to Felice. In fact, in an interview, Abu-Jaber draws attention to the importance of food and storytelling as being two of the most essential parts of her educational background. She has stated in an interview that "storytelling, along with food, was one of the great pillars of my own cultural education" (Field 221). Based on myths, the taste of wafers reminds young Felice of the imaginary magical taste. Wafers, for instance, connect the present days of the novel with the ancient times of myths. In this way, the novel builds a bridge and travels via the taste of rose water to the old times where mermaids were supposed to live. For Felice, the delicious flavor of rose water shapes the mermaid's identity. Felice enjoys the taste of each wafer when they melt in her mouth and wants to have another piece in order to enjoy the same taste that the magical mermaid used to have:

Four-year-old Felice lifted her face. Avis fanned her daughter's eyes closed with her fingertips and placed it in Felice's mouth. Felice opened her sheer eyes […]

Avis handed a cookie to eight-year-old Stanley, who held it up to his nose. 'Dose that taste good?' She asked. Felice nodded and opened her mouth again.

'It smells like flowers,' Stanley said.

'Yes.' Avis paused, a cookie balanced on her spatula. 'That's the rosewater. Good palate, darling'.

'Mermaids eat roses,' Felice said. 'Then they melt.' (Birds 11)

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In addition to the myth of the Mermaids, Abu-Jaber uses the storytelling technique. The mood of the storytelling mixed with food offers a well-organized picture of the Muirs' house. In such a space, where the scent of sugar drifts from the kitchen to the whole house, Brian feels that:

the whole house had the pink scent of sugar. He read to Stanley […] about a witch who backed a gingerbread house to lure children. Brian felt as if he and Stanley were the children in this story and Avis the good witch who backed the house they all lived in. (Birds 75)

The problematic issue of food helps Geraldine, Avis's mother, to offer a new perspective to analyze the role of cookies. They, as Geraldine interprets, would torture enemies if they only tasted them and realized how delicious they are. Furthermore, Avis thinks that, according to her professional point of view, revenge does not need such a laborious work, what preparing cookies requires. Through the binary opposition between a friend and an enemy, and in a distinction between offering them cookies for revenge or for building a friendship,

Geraldine theorized that the cookie must have been invented to give to enemies:

something exquisitely delicious with a tiny yield. The irony, from Avis's professional perspective was that while one might torment enemies with too little, it also exacted an enormous labor for such a small revenge. (Birds 94) In this context, cookies become a means of torturing enemies when offering them few pieces, but, on the contrary, it becomes a sign of love, and an indication to build a new friendship when several pieces are offered to someone, or to a neighbor, as in Avis's case with her neighbor Solange: "'I brought you…' She holds out the white bakery box. […]

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'Do you like chocolate and hazelnut? They're petits fours. They have a little layer marzipan and a layer of meringue. Some berry'" (Birds 172).

As a troubling structure, food, drawing upon Mannur's interpretation, "becomes a tool to articulate tension" (185). Also in Abu-Jaber's novel food becomes a medium through which tension is depicted. Avis expresses her grief and tension concerning her daughter's absence when she stops preparing the cookies she used to make when Felice was still living at home:

'I actually haven't made these since she left,' Avis says. If a voice could be inspected under a lens, the first tiny crack of the day would be detectable. 'I thought these might be – ' She's gone too far – pretending to be braver than she can manage right now – and there's no good way to complete the sentence. (Birds 14-15)

Tension is, once again, depicted through the food medium. Brian and Avis quarrel when Avis has prepared cookies before she goes to meet Felice. In fact, clear signs of tension dominate their conversation as Avis puts the cookies into the tin:

They're trying to stop fighting, but can't quite leave each other alone.

'That kid never ate anything anyway,' he says darkly.

Avis begins the cautious and deliberate transfer of cookies to tin, […] 'Yes, and I'm crazy to go meet her.'

'Now you are angry again.'

'No I am not.' Avis places the cookies in concentric rings on parchment layers inside the tin. 'I know just what my husband thinks, thank you very much, and I'm not angry. I am fine'. (Birds 14)

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For Brian and Felice, the beautiful shape of the cookies becomes an important pleasure more than the delicious taste itself. Such a vision is depicted by Endrijonas who mentions, that "[a]ccording to Marling, for many people, the visual pleasure of food was actually more important than the taste" (160). Abu-Jaber depicts the same situation when both Brian and Felice express their admiration of Avis's cookies and pastries. In this context, Brian praises Avis's pastries when he resembles them to Marie Antoinette's jewelries. For him, "'[t]hey're like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one' […] Brain hold one on the palm of his hand; it twinkles with the kitchen light. 'Shame to eat them'" (Birds 11-12). Therefore, on her tenth birthday, Felice refuses to eat her favorite cookies that Avis has prepared. She admires their beautiful shape in a way that can be read as a part of her identity formation, as she says, "'I just like the way they look'" (Birds 12). In fact, Felice's admiration is interpreted by her mother as "the purity of Felice's desires – preferring beauty to sugar" (Birds12).

As the novel progresses, Avis realizes the negative effects of some kinds of food such as sugar. Despite the fact that "sugar is sweet, and human beings like sweetness"

(Mintz 6), sugar also implies fatal effects beyond its sweet taste. Avis "tries to think her way through this: the link between death and sugar […] It seems to her that sugar is a metaphysical problem: each occasion of eating asserts its own needs" (Birds 171). For the sake of clarity, the definition which offered by Solange identifies sugar as a sort of a delicious taste which has bad healthy consequences. In this sense, Solange describes sugar as "[s]weet in the mouth, terrible to the body" (Birds 230).

In creating her own private social language by means of food, Avis tries to build a private zone between herself and her neighbor in order to be able to connect with her neighbor. Avis's culinary language enables her to communicate with Solange, and as

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result of offering her some food, they both become friends. On this ground, Avis thinks that food allows such a bridge of communication:

(she imagines going next door, offering cookies, making a gentle complement, and all the ways her neighbor will be mortified). Eventually Avis arranges the bittersweets on a footed silver try delicately limned in tarnish, stretches plastic wrap over this, then walks out her front door. (Birds 94)

By calling upon memories, food and its preparations evoke the former days with Felice in Avis's thoughts. The beloved memories, which food recalls, roam in Avis's mind during her process of food preparation. One of these, as Avis remembers, when she and Felice went shopping. They would go to a café where the mother-daughter relationship is shown, once again, by means of a discussion concerning Felice's suitable style of clothes:

Sometimes, while she worked, she revisited memories of the prelapsarian days with Felice, of shopping and talking. After a morning of strolling through the open-air mall, they went to the café […]. Mother and daughter would discuss the outfits – which styles would look the most becoming on Felice. Avis's mother was amused by the old-fashioned domesticity. She told Avis, 'You are teaching the girl to be an odalisque!' (Birds 87)

To draw on the food metaphor, Abu-Jaber uses food fragrances to awake happy memories in Avis's mind. As such, the aroma of food, after Felice's departure, recalls the most pleasant trips that Avis and Brian used to have. The smell of "[s]ome ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trip they used to make to the Keys […] on a sort of second honeymoon" (Birds 349).

Food also evolves nostalgia for the taste of the mother's food. However, when Felice lives in the dispersion, she "[s]ometimes […] lets herself think about her mother's

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crisp little pizzas, the salty pretzels, the croissants stuffed with Nutella and a thin layer of marzipan" (Birds 56). This nostalgic attachment to her mother's food, therefore, indicates a main part of Felice's distinctive identity. This part shows an unexpected central element of Felice's attachment to her childhood and the mother's culinary work. As the novel puts it, Felice "grew up in the greatest bakery in the world: nothing can impress her" (Birds 61).

The odor of Avis's marzipan petits fours awakes Solange's memories of dispersion. As the fragrance of the berries reminds her of her mother, the odor of the petits fours reminds her of "'[t]he lady who owned the house where [her] mother worked – almost every day she ate these […] my mother smelled like these berries" (Birds 173).

Hence, Avis's culinary preparations and food ingredients imply her own magical secrets. She considers some ingredients to be brought from the heaven, while others are connected to the earth. Using the binary opposition between heaven and earth, Avis combines the heavenly ingredients with secular ones. It is, therefore, Avis's own way to show the significant role of food as a means through which the secular and the heavenly elements, when they are combined together, they address new forms of identities. In such a context, Avis defines food elements as follows: "[f]lour and yolk and cream are all coarse – of the earth. But sugar and air and vanilla are elements of the firmament" (Birds 14).

Abu-Jaber provides a new meaning to the concept of food. In fact, food represents the vanishing time, fleeting moments and passing seconds. In this representation, Avis offers a new understanding when food comes into terms with the meaning of lifetime.

According to her food philosophy, "Avis used to tell her kids: Sweets should be an

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evanescence: cakes and pies represent minuets, cookies and mille-feuilles are seconds, meringues are moments" (Birds 14).

As a parallel to pastries which are backed and eaten, a lifetime, according to Avis's philosophy, goes within the same stream. Every minute vanishes and the only thing left is the harshness of the present which carries the painful consequences. Avis states the resemblance between the pastries and the moments of now as follows: "[a]ll the glorious pastries of the world are backed and eaten and gone forever, and there is only the fiery moment of the now. Minds and bodies tell one story: I tasted; I loved; I was young. But the now burns everything in its oven" (Birds 171-172; emphasis original).

For Avis, food functions as a resurrecting medium. She believes that food provides her with the strength required to undergo the pain of loss. However, she toils over her culinary procedures with her tireless hands in order to create her ideal creation of pastries and cookies. Avis's culinary preparations functions as a key power to bring her alive by the time she becomes too close to collapse. This sense is clear as she realizes

"that this work – the most challenging and imperial of pastry creation – might have the power to save her." (Birds 86). It is in this respect that Avis's new awareness of creating pastries becomes a medium of strength; it helps her to leap forward, become stronger, and cope with her grief.

Among the several perceptions of food that Abu-Jaber offers in this novel, I have analyzed a variety of distinguishable ones. For example, food and storytelling has become intertwined in some incidents. However, while food has mapped most of the relationships in a family and with a neighbor, it also becomes a social language as well as a medium to articulate tension, express nostalgia, and recalls memories which are associated with food preparation and fragrant. For Avis, food becomes as a creative mixture of ingredients,

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some are connected to the earth, while others are connected to the heaven. It is, therefore, and in a striking metaphor, connected to the passing of time, to fleeting hours and moments.