The Language of Baklava

Sixteen-year old Diana is bored and restless at school. Her guidance counselor notices her state and advises her to try to get into college a year early—an idea Diana welcomes. She manages to persuade Bud, who lets her go to the university where her aunt and uncle teach, 30 miles up the road. She stays in an all-girls dorm, and her parents pay for all her meals.

Bud arranges for Diana to work in the campus “Sweet Shoppe” after he meets the Palestinian owner. The shop sells old-fashioned candies in jars and is a popular hangout. The food on campus is so bad that Diana stops dining there and lives on sweets instead, losing weight and becoming sugar-addicted. She starts dressing like a punk rocker, though she dresses conservatively when she visits home. Her relationship with Bud improves: “The sizzling stress between the two of us […] dissipated” (218). They often talk about the safe topic of Bud’s family history. However, Diana can no longer eat her father’s cooking without suffering terrible nausea and vomiting. She wonders if this is psychosomatic but says, “[T]he sickness is so immense, crashing over and swamping my whole body, that I can’t imagine that it’s something that comes simply from my mind” (217).

At college in October, the Jewish student organization holds a Jewish Foods Day. Diana is excited at the idea of eating foods she grew up with, like falafel and hummus, and recruits three college friends to join her at the event. The reluctant Courtney, a “southern debutante,” is surprised to hear that half the college students are Jewish and that Diana is Arab. The food is poorly made and lacking in flavor but Diana still finds it comforting and emotional, and she is filled with nostalgia for “the sun-soaked air of Jordan” (221).

In winter, Diana begins dating Timmy Fussell, a punk rocker. She hangs out with him at the Lowlife Café, where local amateur musicians jam amongst the “sour, rotting reek” of the decrepit building (222). Pouring sugar into her cappuccino, “the inverse of [her] father’s blunt, black, Arabic coffee” (223), she feels she has completely broken away from her father’s influence and disapproval.

At Christmas she goes home for a month, craving her father’s food but anticipating the nausea and vomiting that it regularly brings. Her parents have decided to move back to the suburbs, and Diana realizes she has grown to love the house in the countryside. She also thinks she misses Timmy and writes him long pining letters. On her first night back, Bud makes one of her favorite dishes, chicken fatteh, and the recipe for “Homecoming Fatteh” follows (225). During the meal, Bud asks Diana about her major; when she tells him it is English literature—“not the correct answer” (226)—he loses his temper and storms out. Diana suffers terrible nausea that night and for the next three and a half weeks. She reads about the theory that people store emotional pain in their bodies and concludes that her body is rejecting “something more powerful than food” (227).

Bud and Diana’s relationship remains tense for the rest of the vacation until one early morning she wakes up to a beautiful sky and feels a “startling cellular jolt of exquisite love and connection to the people who lie asleep in the purple lights and in all the sleepy, snowbound houses around us” (229). She finds herself hungry and eats a dish of lebeneh, creamy thick yogurt. She feels she has finally come home and is at peace, and the nausea and sleepless nights end.