52 pages • 1 hour read
Diana Abu-JaberThe Language of Baklava
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Places, People, and Feelings that Constitute Home
Content Warning: This section contains references to racism and the Holocaust.
The Language of Baklava follows Diana’s upbringing and early adulthood, which involve several physical moves: from America to Jordan and back, as well as changes of house and city within the US. These moves represent a constant search for home, first with her family and later alone. The restlessness of her father, which drives him to move his family back and forth to Jordan, passes on to Diana, as she feels she is torn between the two countries. As a teenager, Diana cannot wait to leave home and become independent, yet she is drawn back to her parents and their family house. She moves to Jordan herself after graduating in an attempt to decide where she belongs. After returning from Jordan, she feels the need to uproot herself from her job and city and move across the US to find a new place, ostensibly to settle. She concludes at the end of the book that she cannot accept having only one home: She feels at home on the move, as her Bedouin ancestors did.
Nevertheless, home is important to Diana, as evidenced by the emphasis she places on the physical spaces she occupies, as well as the neighbors who surround her. She describes her various homes and neighborhoods in detail, attributing emotions to them to create atmosphere: “There are veined marble floors, cool underfoot in the summer heat, and a deep moody living room crisscrossed with shadows” (32), she says of the first Jordanian house. It is in a neighborhood where “[t]here are apartments—many apartments—that smell powerfully of babies and dinner all the time” (33). In Amman, the line between neighbors and family blurs: “Their apartments spill onto the same central courtyard, and their meals spill into ours” (35). This image of a crowded, warm, busy, and sociable neighborhood contrasts with the “cold breeze” of America when Diana and her family return (71). Diana is dazed by the “blankness” and “immobilizing silence” of Syracuse, but most of all by the interpersonal coldness: “The neighbors seem hesitant to emerge from their glittering homes, and we almost never see anyone outside” (71). Diana eventually gets to know Mrs. Manarelli—the lively, food-loving neighbor of Italian descent—and some of her “real American” neighborhood children, but she still misses the days of running free with the local children in Amman.
As a child, Diana generally feels at home where her parents and sisters are. However, as she grows into adolescence and the natural urge towards self-expression and independence, being at home with her family—especially her father—becomes oppressive. After her ill-fated attempt to run away from the isolated house in the country, she “walk[s] back past [Bud], back toward the house, knowing that there is no way out except through this door that is [her] father” (148). Thus begins Diana’s internal conflict between her love of her father and her need to break away from him. The push and pull continues throughout her time at college, where she can create her own home: “My days of candy and nights of cappuccino, the music and the boyfriend are all my own” (223). When she goes home for visits, she becomes nauseous after eating her father’s meals, her emotional struggle with home manifesting itself through physical symptoms. Eventually, her moment of epiphany arrives: “It is like a benediction. I sense the distances between places, the country house and the suburbs, even between American and Jordan, start to disintegrate. Geography becomes liquid” (229). Her nausea disappears and she is now able to eat homecooked food again as she has returned to the idea of family as home.
Diana’s relationship with Bud improves, yet she still fails to settle, even trying marriage but unable to accept the feeling of confinement it entails. She travels back to Jordan and then on her return to America feels completely disoriented, “as if [she were] the first and only person ever to be unmoored between countries” (318). She moves across the states to Portland, feeling isolated but recognizing that this is her choice: “Perhaps I enjoy feeling judged, criticized, and deeply misunderstood. Perhaps that feeling is also a bit like home” (319). When she walks away from Scott’s flat, where he has just kissed her, she ponders: “Perhaps I’m trying to return to aloneness, my unknownness. How can I give up such surety? It’s the only think I know any more; it’s the house I’ve lived in for so long” (321). After a long walk, she returns to his flat and his arms: “I feel not captured but saved—given safe harbor from the raining, unknown world beyond the windows” (322). It seems Diana has finally found a kind of home, yet she does not say any more about her relationship with Scott, and the final section of the memoir indicates that she feels she will always be unable to settle and call one place home: “And so I go. Into the world, away” (328).
For Bud, the struggle to find home concludes more definitely, his beloved grandchildren rooting him in the US:
And I wonder if it is this, the children, that can ever anchor any place enough to make it a home. Once we are grown, we are no longer so porous, our identities don’t connect with a place as much as they do when we grow up with a place and the places, in turn, grow into us (327).
Chosen and Unchosen Identities
Closely related to the theme of home is that of identity. As the Arab American daughter of a man who struggles to settle in either Jordan or America, Diana inherits the same conflict. She does not feel completely at home in either country, nor does she feel her identity is clearly one or the other. Being of multiethnic heritage presents many challenges for her, and this dilemma is a key part of her life story. Along with this, she faces the usual adolescent/young adult turmoil of identifying and developing her path in life.
Diana will eventually become a writer, and language—including names—is key to the way she expresses identity. Diana describes her Jordanian uncles’ anglicized names, which mark their immigration to America: “Almost everyone I know has two names—one from Before and one from After” (5). In Jordan, Diana learns Arabic quickly and uses it to vindicate her Jordanian heritage. Language is the bridge that brings her close to her Bedouin relatives and impresses the old man who looks after her and her sisters in Jordan: “‘Alhumdullilah,’ I echo like an old Bedouin or an old Circassian” (57).
Appearance is a less malleable aspect of identity. Diana’s green eyes and pale skin correspond to her mother’s side, while her hair “springs in frizz and coils all over my head: It won’t lie down like the other children’s bright caps” (23). Her German grandmother calls it “something like ‘Crazy Hair’ in German” (23). Diana works on her outer appearance to create an American identity: “It hasn’t been easy for me to construct this American self. I’ve had to observe closely. I have finally acquired hip-hugger jeans and a long shag haircut, in the posthippie fallout look of the seventies” (135).
Diana’s efforts to “look” American stem from adolescent rebellion against her father and his culture. The strongest expression of this need to disassociate herself from him comes when she rejects his beloved cuisine: “‘I hate Arabic food!’ […] Worse even, it seems at that moment, than saying, ‘I’m not an Arab’” (185). Before going to Jordan as an adult, Diana feels she has become American: “I’m an American, with only a few lingering suggestions of another place in my nature” (234). However, her long stay in Jordan will unsettle her again, and in the end she realizes she cannot be one or the other but must accept her Bedouin nature and remain a nomad.
Diana’s struggles with identity occur against a backdrop of similar conflicts. The episode with the Chinese waiter and her German grandmother demonstrates the confusion and ignorance that can surround ethnic and racial identity; Diana’s grandmother means no harm, but she sees all Asian people as the same. The story about Bennett illustrates a more serious clash of identities that involves explicit racism and prejudice. The story about Olga’s father reveals the suffering of a man whose identity was the reason for his internment in a concentration camp and his subsequent trauma. These characters are all affected in different ways by the challenges of not easily fitting in to their surroundings—the clash between their identities and the society in which they find themselves.
The Power of Women
The Language of Baklava contains many female characters who stand out in Diana’s life as strong, powerful, and influential. They often contrast with male characters, such as in the relationship between Diana’s mother and father. Diana’s mother is a quiet, calm, and steady presence, steering the family along in the wake of the disruption caused by Bud’s stormy, passionate, and sometimes whimsical urges.
This theme of the unacknowledged strength of women in the face of men’s capriciousness or even weakness surfaces elsewhere. Diana’s German grandmother, Gram, is her childhood idol: “It looks as if everything about her is soft, from her permed blond hair to the cute short pants she calls pedal pushers, but her white forearms on the counter are like crossed swords” (88). Men are Gram’s enemy, not least Bud: “Naturally, Gram and Bud are at odds, like mythical adversaries. Their competition—over race, culture, values—is primordial and monumental” (89). Despite this professed aversion to men, Gram is a flirt and a charmer when she finds a suitable recipient. She is a feisty, independent elderly lady whose love of life excites and comforts the young Diana.
On Diana’s father’s side, one of the strongest characters is Aunty Aya. Her knowledge of natural medicine, her ability to read the future, and her cosmetic skills all draw the family to her. She has no husband but gives advice on marriage freely, and her cooking skills are legendary. For Aunty Aya, teaching Diana to cook is her “tutorial in womanliness” (186), but not the kind of womanliness that entails serving and pleasing a man. On the contrary, she suggests that cooking gives women a mysterious power over men: “And you’ll see what happens then” (186). Her most prominent role in Diana’s upbringing is that of subduing and controlling Bud’s excesses, especially when it comes to constraining the teenage Diana. Using her baklava, she manages to convince him not to send Diana to Jordan; having eaten the delicious pastries, the previously apoplectic Bud calmly asks for more and accepts Diana’s terms. When Bud nearly spends his whole life savings on his traitorous brother’s property in Jordan, Aya comes to the rescue again: “Well, I cured him. I cured him of the family” (305). Extracting Bud from his dealings with his family is her strongest display of power yet.
Other powerful female characters in the book include Mrs. Manarelli, with her defiance of the prejudiced neighbors; Diana’s friend Mai and her manipulation of and then disdain for the feckless, simpering Fattoush; Munira the Bedouin housekeeper, with her disapproval of all that is American; Uncle Nazeem’s Egyptian housekeeper, Antonia, who manages to reprimand and subdue, with “ a torrent of Arabic invective” (249), the group of Jordanian uncles who are laughing riotously at the expense of Diana’s American friend; Diana’s aunts Sandra and Rachel; and her Jordanian grandmother. Without proselytizing on the role of women in society—especially the perceived subjugation of women in Arab cultures—Diana demonstrates that strong women are everywhere and that in many cases, they exert power over men.
