The Historical is the Personal — Reflections on Postcolonial Guilt, Mi Koo Buns, and Writing History

I did not know that the Mi Koo [1] buns I used to eat for breakfast at my grandfather’s house on Sunday mornings have a history. Smack in the middle of their bright pink skin, there are five gashes radiating from the center, forming a clumsy floral design. I used to peel the skin and slice the freshly steamed bun in half. The next step was to slather butter on both pieces. It would melt immediately into the fluffy bread, leaving a golden patch that came back to taunt me in the cold mornings of my adulthood. Now, I am years and seas away from the simple anticipation of an eight-year-old waiting for the butter knife while swinging her legs underneath the antique table.

*

While watching the buns of my childhood, now on a computer screen in a university library in Abu Dhabi, I am unsettled. I am doing research on the communist guerrilla army in Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore) who fought against the Japanese and British imperialists during World War II and the Cold War. When the banned documentary first arrived via an email notification, I dropped everything to collect the DVD from an expressionless librarian.  He was stoically hunched over the reserves shelf, hovering his fingers over each title at a painfully slow pace until arriving finally at my order. Titled The Last Communist, this “semi-musical documentary” was made by Amir Muhammad in 2006. It was inspired by the memoir of Chin Peng, the leader of the Malayan Communist Party, who died in exile in 2013 in Thailand. His last wish was to be buried in his hometown of Setiawan, Perak, located an hour and a half away from my hometown. The Malaysian government denied his remains passage.

But what have Mi Koo buns got to do with communist insurgents? Everything, the film argues. It takes us chronologically through Chin Peng’s life by visiting the locations he travelled through in his political career. There is no narrator. The storytellers are the shopkeepers, bakers, plantation laborers, vegetable vendors, tour guides etc. who speak about their vocation and occasionally, their relationship with the past. Reading the captions on Chin Peng’s life in relation to the documentary of the mundane, the quotidian reality I am familiar with becomes imbued with history. I learn that the Mi Koo buns of my hometown are famous for their unique floral design. “Only in Taiping,” the long-faced baker declares in Mandarin. How this design came about is less famous. Decades ago, a young man who joined the Malayan Communist Party’s guerrilla army was caught by British soldiers and sent to prison, where he was tortured into a coma. His mother prayed for him every day at the River Goddess Temple on Temple Street, offering lotus flowers with incense sticks. One day, all the florists in town were out of lotus flowers. Desperate, the mother baked some Mi Koo buns, carved flowers on them, and presented these at the altar instead. The boy survived his coma.

Last summer, while interning at an Asian Studies institute in the Netherlands, I stumbled upon a book on the Malayan Emergency in the “free for all” bookshelf at the pantry. The Malayan Emergency: Essays On A Small, Distant War by Souchou Yao. Distant indeed. As a third-generation immigrant who grew up with middle class concerns, like how to get out of Malaysia, a failed revolutionary movement seemed completely incomprehensible, like the photographs and letters we found in my grandfather’s personal archive after he passed away. Bundles and bundles of relatives in China we know nothing of lay bound in rubber bands. A post-funeral gift from the dead. He left us no clues to make them legible.

*

“Where did your Malaysian accent go?” A close friend asked me after I came back from my first year at university. We were sitting at a café with sleek glass windows in Kuala Lumpur. “Give me a few days, it’ll come back.” Till then, he had to deal with speaking to a foreigner. I became very self-aware of my spoken English after that. Remember the lah’s, the meh’s the wan’s. Remember the Malay words, the Hokkien words, the Tamil words. In truth, I knew my Manglish had dissolved like salt in the sea. As I fill up my senior capstone proposal two years later, I bite down the anticipation of embarking on a journey to the juicy forbidden. I grew up learning that the communist insurgents were terrorists in an insignificant but unfortunate chapter of our national history. Like the methane of decomposing bodies, inherited memory somehow always finds its way to the surface. A trigger, like the subtle reproach of my friend, is the spark needed to start a forest fire. History is closing in on me, and no Western country can save me from my guilt.

*

“What is the archive for a memory that was decimated by colonial powers and actively suppressed to this day?” I asked my professor a few weeks ago. We had just read Arlette Farge’s Allure Of The Archives, in which Farge describes her experience of looking through police surveillance documents in 18^th century France in the Paris Archives. They were incoherent transcriptions of splintered conversations and scattered observations. Farge notes with delight how these fragments capture what the archive itself rejects, and how this tension reveals “history as it was being constructed, when the outcome was never entirely clear”[2]. Enchanted as I was by Farge’s poetic prose, I could not help but be bitter. Fragmented as they were, at least the proletariat’s subjectivity was preserved. What about my grandfather’s? The historical has become the personal.

In The Combing of History, David Cohen writes that there are “multiple locations of historical knowledge”, and only by “recognizing the spacious and unchartered reservoirs of historical knowledge in present and past societies [can we] begin to think more clearly about the forms and directions of historical knowledge…”[3] As I start collecting the various fragments of a memory smashed by successful British and nationalist propaganda, I am finding that some of the richest locations of historical knowledge are situated within my memory. That surreptitious memorial plaque by the haunted waterfall my parents forbade us to swim in? It was actually built to honor the guerrillas who fought against the Japanese soldiers during the brutal occupation. The Chinese high school that was my mother’s alma mater? It was a school known for its communist sympathies, and where teachers would beat anti-imperialism consciousness into their students. The Chinese-concentrated area my mom and her siblings grew up in, and the constant subject of their nostalgic conversations? Just two generations ago, it was a concentration camp built by the British colonial government to isolate the communist guerrillas from their Chinese-majority support base. I am not recalling evidence or even anecdotes that are useful for my research topic. Rather, I am starting to look back and recognize the everyday of my reality as a product of a history that is worth paying attention to. In other words, I am an archive.

Like my parents, I was an inactive carrier of the memory of our civil war. Somehow, an alignment of random chance and privilege has caused a mutation in the gene of silence.  I find myself fervently gathering every insurgency-related fragment from libraries and archives around the world. The expressionless librarian might have caught on to my impatience. His fingers hover slower each time. But every time I open the book, or the document, or the DVD case, the ghosts rise howling. I hear the planes carpet bombing our tropical rainforests. I hear the wailing families forcefully removed from their ancestral homes. I hear the fading heartbeat of a husband bleeding to death at the fringe of the jungle, begging his wife to leave with their comrades before the enemy closes in.

But I have also been listening for the silences. I cannot force the mute Mi Koo bun to tell me its story, but the silence surrounding its incredible origin says something about how the censorship of the history it is associated with trickles down. The closed doors I keep encountering in my search for primary sources also speaks, albeit with bureaucratic language. “Special permission is required for materials related to the Malayan Communist Party at the Arkib Negara[4],” a Malaysian scholar writes to me. But if I stick my ear against the door, I hear fear. A fear inherited by the present government from the past government, who inherited it from the British colonial authorities, who shared it with their American counterparts across the ocean during the Cold War. A fear that was global in scale, local in its casualties. A fear that stretched across time, across subcontinents: evolving from the fear of a British ethnographer in India when confronted with identities he could not neatly categorize, to the fear of a contemporary Malaysian politician who cannot foresee how ethnic tensions will escalate should the narrative of our hard-won independence shifts. The fragments cannot be put back together, but writing about how they came to be hits back at power with the force of a million clenched fists, raised.

*

Sunday mornings at Grandpa’s were always a quiet affair. As a child, I revered and feared him. I would stare at him from across the table, Mi Koo bun in my tiny hands, while he cracked a raw egg into his rice. “That was how they did it in China,” mother explained, while peeling baked sweet potatoes, her favorite breakfast.

“You wasteful children,” he would growl from across the table when I turned away from my mother’s hand trying to feed me potatoes, “the sweet potatoes were all we had to eat in those camps.”

***

• [1] A Malaysian-Chinese bread. “Mi Koo” roughly translates into Tortoise Bun.
• [2] Arlette. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 107, 113.
• [3] David William. Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4-5.
• [4] Malaysian National Archives.

Artwork by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “I Still Face You”, 2015.

Amma, Acha & Malayalam ft. english

അമ്മ (Amma)
My Amma’s Malayalam is Trivandrum slang,
shifting between simple
churidar and formal sari in a blink.
trishurpooram cacaphony is her laugh,
words the speed of onam boat races
on slow crashing waves of kovalam beach.
It is every spice bubbling
in my Ammuma’s cheenachatti,
both sweet sharkara and sour achar
Chutni podi with chilli podi by her hand.
Her Malayalam hits hard
Ammuma’s soft palms, Appupa’s rare playfulness;
Her Malayalam is a 22-year-old recipe, came along to flavour a desert.

My Amma’s english is accented
with Malayalam, from ancestral
beef fry to salmon grill
Other worlds and words with a twist of her own
Kovalam softened by corniche calm,
chilli podi, sounds of two cities, date syrup
and desert sand filling
the gaps in her english
“Yalla pogam!” She yells “Mafi Mushkil, Aathma!”
Sharkara lacing her laugh,
it echoes loudly in between
the buildings of Hamdan St.

Appupa said my laugh is like hers,
I carry it safe in my voice box.
My Malayalam is a mirror  
of her slang, her lullaby my tongue
Trishupooram still resounding in them.

They complain they can’t understand her,
her laugh too loud, her accent too strong for their weak ears
They demand us altered for their palate
demand silence, compliance
for their tongues to handle.

Amma did not move
for me to be silent;
our laughs are trapped ancestral joy, they died
for the spices you came to our shores for,
they died. Our laughs are eulogy
folded into our voice boxes.

Does your tongue burn?
Here, have the water–
our laughter will not drown again

അച്ഛാ (Acha)
My Acha’s malayalam drips
on the page, fountain pen sprouting
rhymes, rhythms, words
of a Love, land,
loss, gain,
home, no home, new home, old home,
dreams to come, dreams left behind,
shore he came to, shore he left,
a sea, a kadal that watched him come
and go over and over and over–
the second half of his life,
the first half he refuses to forget.

He polishes an english accent
with experience, age, command
and Malayalam slips in, a jewel found:
film comes filim, his english crashes
under Malayalam exclamation,
the language of his soul sees no barrier.

An architect of words, an architect of worlds
an architect on two shores, he built
poems, he built places,
built a love for words in his Molu,
built a home, a city for his daughter.

This new city gentrifies her tongue;
he wonders if he can build
a bridge, a boat for his daughter lost in the kadal
between the poems of his soul and
this new city she speaks of.

Artwork by Dayanita Singh “go away closer”

Through the Forest

My mother held my hand as we shuffled through the crowd.

“Be careful,” she said, noting the murky puddles of cooking oil and cabbage shreds on the ground.

The square was busy that morning, bustling with peddlers hawking their wares on the street, wagon conductors touting cheaper fares and bigger trunks. The sun was hardly bright enough to mark the day’s start, but people from around the town had already gathered here to conduct their various affairs. There was the rice cake uncle busy serving someone in the corner, the butcher aunty chopping chicken feet and throwing them in a bag, and me, trailing behind my mother as she cleared the way to the bus station, declining the many offers being pressed upon her.

It was July 2006, and I was on my way to visit my grandmother in Pasuruan, a five-hour bus ride from my tiny hometown Caruban. Every school break, my mother and I spent a few days in the countryside. My father took us to the square, dropped us off at the gate, and reminded me, while my mother was busy buying snacks and water for the ride, to protect her and myself on the bus.

“You’re a big boy now,” he said, fastening the straps of my yellow Pooh overall, “you need to beware of strangers, you understand?”

Before we made the journey, my mother always made sure that I brought a gift for my grandmother. It didn’t have to be anything big or expensive; a handwritten card or a drawing from my art class would serve the purpose.

“Old people love to be remembered,” she’d say, while also packing a few things: boxes of ginger tea and shredded meat, curry paste and tomato powder, and bags of red rice that she claimed would be good for my grandmother’s health.

I always looked forward to these visits and wondered what my grandmother would do if I was not there, helping her feed her ducks, walking along the riverside before dusk. My grandmother lived by herself on the outskirts of Pasuruan, where geraniums grow in the colder season. My grandfather, once a revered general in the army, had passed away in a war long before I was born. The idea of a time when my grandfather was still alive, a time before I knew what time even was, before my grandmother acquired gray hair and cloudy vision, always made me feel uneasy. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother being anything other than old. I wondered if she’d come to this world with wrinkles already, and sunspots across her face. The fact that she had once been a pretty lady, that she’d had plum cheeks and full teeth and fallen in love with a soldier younger than herself, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

At the station gate, my mother and I looked around to spot the green bus that would take us to Pasuruan, the one that had the word “Suryapati” printed all over it. One would imagine, since it was a fairly long ride, that Suryapati buses would be big and comfortable. But instead, these buses were often tattered and small to fit the narrow winding road uphill. The seats were grubby and had deflated foam. The windows were always foggy because the air conditioner was too cold. There was no toilet inside, so every now and then the driver had to stop at the petrol station or mosque or the side of the road to let passengers out.

Still I loved these long bus rides, loved watching the driver hoisting my mother’s packages onto the roof, strapping them safely under the tarpaulin. I loved the chatter between bored strangers, how I could sit back and see an endless expanse of paddy fields with cows chewing lazily on their cuds, crows brawling for fruit peels thrown by lunching farmers. I loved the fresh air and the anticipation that the journey brought for my grandmother’s sweets—sesame balls and coconut pudding and star-shaped cookies.

“Front seats, please,” my mother told the driver once we found the green bus.

“Ah, yes, Ma’am,” he said, his eyes flickering up and down her frame. “Two, but separate rows. Okay?”

My mother peeked through the doorway at the two empty seats, one on the left row, next to hands of bananas that couldn’t fit on the roof, and the other on the right, a single seat next to a window. She looked at me, debated for a while, and eventually said: “This time, Dayin will have to sit on his own,” referring to me in third-person to signal her trust, to accord me the respect of a grown-up and make me feel capable of being on my own.

She mounted me on the single seat next to the window, fastening me with a scarf around my waist. I looked at my mother as she settled herself in her seat, clutching her black handbag where she’d stored my gift for grandmother, this time a snippet of a poem that I’d written for my Bahasa class. There were many passengers behind us, and the one sitting behind my mother was a man, perhaps as old as my father, with a mop of curly hair and a dragon tattoo on his neck. He wore a pair of jeans and a sleeveless shirt, the kind that my father would wear while doing dirty work, either fixing his motorcycle or pruning the garden. The man looked at my mother, then at me, with his big, cunning eyes, and in an instant threw his gaze out the window, as if startled by my staring.

“Clear the way!” the driver shouted at passersby, cueing the bus’ departure.

The machine began to gurgle, and everyone recited a prayer under their breath. I watched my mother solemnly close her eyes and raised my own hands to pray.

“Ya Allah, I hope I don’t get too hungry or get kidnapped. I hope Uti is baking cookies right now.”

At that point, being a nine-year-old, I had heard enough stories about child kidnapping and been trained by my parents to avoid risky situations with strangers.

“Don’t take any drinks from them,” my mother would say.

“If somebody approaches you after school and offers to drive you home, ask them what Baba’s last name is,” my father would chime in.

“But Baba doesn’t have a last name,” I’d protest.

“Exactly my point,” the quick reply.

In Caruban, children went missing for days, only to return at the end with a scar across their stomachs, one kidney gone and sold by the kidnapper. Some came back only years after they had been forced to beg on the streets, their bodies skinny as straws, legs amputated to prevent them from running.

My parents never held back on telling me the gory details of these stories. They brought me  news cutouts and turned up the television so I could see the danger threatening nine-year-olds like me across the country. Although they were persistent in convincing me that people were not always good-natured, they never told me that crime could afflict adults too. I was small and still oblivious to what people thought of women in our society: how they saw them as easy prey.

In the beginning, everything went normally. The bus pressed onto the uphill route, and my mother took out the sweet corn that she’d purchased from the square. Usually, we talked a lot on the bus: about my father and his work, about my birth and what I had been like as a baby. We discussed trees and bees that helped pollinate flowers, interesting lessons and teachers at school. This time, because we were sitting in separate rows, we had to make do with smiling across the aisle. She resigned to look at whatever she could with the bananas blocking her window, and I enjoyed my lovely views of the forest.

After my mother had fallen asleep in her seat, I began to notice something very strange about the man behind her. From time to time, he’d look over my mother’s shoulder, as if trying to peek at something that he couldn’t quite see. As in the case with my mother, who was sitting by the exit door, the window seat next to the man was also loaded with bananas, blocking his view of the forest. Whenever he looked over my mother’s shoulder, I tried to pinpoint what exactly he was doing, sticking his head out like that. Did he feel uncomfortable in his seat? Was he trying to keep an eye on the road? But why would he want to do that?

As we went deeper into the forest, we passed by the usual petrol station. By then, the bus had grown much quieter; most of the other passengers had fallen asleep. I steadied myself, still fastened to my seat by the scarf, and suddenly noticed the driver from the rear-view mirror blinking at me, then doing an elaborate gesture with his hand. I turned around and was rather surprised to see that the man behind my mother was also doing an elaborate hand gesture, his eyes flickering to my side.

In movies, a surreptitious sidelong glance like that was never a good omen. There was something going on. The man and the driver were onto something; otherwise, why wouldn’t the bus stop at the petrol station?

I shifted my body to the side so I could scope out what was happening. Still, as though he did not see me as a threat, the man behind my mother looked over her shoulder. What do you want to see, strange man? I asked myself. Then, as I recalled how kidnappers in movies often ask for ransom from parents in exchange for their child, my eyes landed on what I believed was the cause of the man’s curious behavior: my mother’s handbag.

Containing money and my gift for my grandmother, the handbag was not securely placed under my mother’s care. I looked outside and saw the trees running past me, as if the world was going backward. How would he do it? I asked myself. If the bus was moving this fast, and we were in the middle of the forest, how would he plan to escape after he’d stolen the bag? I glanced at him again; he was still trying to avoid eye contact with me. Maybe the driver will stop, I thought. Maybe he will run downhill to his hideaway place. But where would such a place exist? In the middle of the forest? Why?

I tried to recall all the things that my father had told me about forests.

“You see, if you turn your back on a lion, the lion will come and eat you,” his voice suddenly echoed in my head. “You need to keep facing the lion. Look him in the eye,” the voice said.

I couldn’t recall the occasion that had warranted such advice from him in the first place, but I turned my head anyway, aiming a steady, penetrating glare at the man. I felt the strong urge to wake my mother up but thought of how tired she must have been after staying up the night before to make tomato paste for my grandmother. I thought hard, while still keeping an eye on the man with the cunning gaze, about what I could do to prevent the crime. After ruminating for a while, I went with what I thought was the best action: rest my legs on my mother’s seat and use them to trip the man.

The bus suddenly took a right turn, and I saw vague impressions of buildings in the distance. The driver, snapping his finger, again used the rear-view mirror to communicate with the man in their secret code. I thought to myself: this is the time, this is where his hideaway place is. The driver had given him a clue that a village was near, that he could simply take my mother’s handbag and run away. I prepared myself as the bus decelerated, the man again looking at the exit door. Houses and lampposts were flashing past me, and my legs, resting on my mother’s seat, were as stiff as wood. As the bus eased to a slow halt, the man, putting his cap on and fixing his hair, rose from his seat and drew his backpack from the overhead compartment. He turned his body and saw my legs blocking the aisle. He crouched, put on a smile, and stroked my shins, looking at me straight in the eye. I glared at him like I was trying to threaten another kid in the playground.

“Hey, child,” the driver called.

But I didn’t flinch. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the man and give him a chance to slip by me.

“Oy!” The driver called out again.

The man, looking up at the driver, did another one of his elaborate hand gestures.

“Oy, boy!” The driver shouted even louder, startling my mother, waking her up from her sleep.

“Let the man out!” the driver called.

My eyes were still on the man, who then laughed, a rather gentle, innocent laugh.

“Ma’am!” The driver called my mother, who was fully awake now, rousing in her seat. “Your child is blocking the aisle.”

“Dayin, your feet,” she whispered, tightening her grip on her handbag. “Get off the seat.”

The man smiled at her.

“Sorry,” my mother said, apologizing to the man, who only nodded and produced a sound that I couldn’t quite comprehend, turning his one hand into a fist and sticking out his middle and index fingers, like a peace sign.

Seeing that I was still not willing to stand down, my mother pushed my feet off her seat and let the man out, the driver shaking his head and laughing behind the steering wheel. I watched him get off the bus and walk into a house with a huge mango tree on its patio.

“What was that?” My mother asked. “It’s not nice, what you just did.”

“He was trying to mug you! I saw him looking at your bag!” I replied.

My mother hushed me, showing a stern, reprimanding look.

“You’re being silly. The man was just trying to get out.”

The driver, who couldn’t stop laughing at our conversation, said, “My boy, my boy,” as if I was his own son. “Your son is funny, eh, Ma’am?”

My mother nodded her head and smiled.

“Sorry. He’s just a little tired.”

“No, I’m not!” I protested. “He was trying to mug you! The driver was in on it! They did the thing… the thing with their hands. He kept looking over your shoulders.”

The driver kept laughing, and my mother, too, somehow joined him.

“He was deaf, Dayin, he can’t hear,” my mother said. “You heard how he just spoke? That’s how deaf people speak.”

“He was not checking your mother, son,” the driver chimed in, “he was looking at the road to see if he’d arrived.”

Seeing I was not convinced, he added: “He was sitting next to the bananas, you see? He couldn’t look through the window. I just happened to have a deaf sister, so I know how to speak sign language.”

Instead of relief, anger boiled inside me. I felt betrayed; I felt like everyone was trying to make a mockery out of me, robbing me of my heroic moment.

“No, he’s lying, Ma. He was trying to mug you, I swear!”

“Hush,” my mother said. “What did I tell you about swearing?”

For the remainder of the ride, my mother and I stayed awake, me looking out the window and reflecting on the crime that had only occurred in my head. The driver glanced at me every now and then and chuckled, perhaps, at my misplaced suspicion. I wondered if he thought I was just overreacting. I wondered if he knew where I’d gotten all of my suspicion from.

Artwork by Thomke Meyer

Appa

blue flame turned light blue
turned orange under half-sphere metal
waiting to turn milky texture
into crispy shells
that my grandmother’s toothless gums
cannot could not chew
despite how much she wanted to

ladle spooning texture onto hot
metal, circling it around the sides
in an upstairs, dimly lit
second floor, plastic metal
chairs and tables, corner
behind the glass panel
in an Abu Dhabi street I cannot remember
in a foreign city turned home

rice flour, coconut milk, yeast
mixed and left to rise
for my one staple served between
semesters when my feet
landed on the ground I was born in

aerated bubbles popping on black
surface pan creating corridors
weaving through streets leading
from Madinat Zayed next to
luminous pink venus salon
in the night because
they only serve appa for dinner

sliced onions fried with miris and sugar
spotted with chili seeds
creating fire within my tummy
the spicy seeni sambol wrapped in
soft crunchy appa remind
my taste buds that they are alive

white tender squishy center
radiating into light crisp brownness
served on 1^st avenue snuggled
thinly between fire escapes and
basement shops selling
South Asian spices

sunny side ups
sitting center in bithara appa
waiting for crunchy shells to
slit through the orange yolk
oozing over, coating
memories of introducing
Sri Lankan food to the
habibis and habibtis
on warm humid days
where the spices hit
their tongues into foreignness
later where the spices hit
their tongues into homeness

Artwork by Tjalf Sparnaay

Noxchi Eats Galnish

Today, we are having galnish. My dad, giddy like a child, teases my brother and I, while laughing at YouTube videos and simultaneously WhatsApping them to his friends, accompanying voice note explaining why exactly the video is funny. We all love galnish; I loved it more as a child, when I didn’t have to help clean up the kitchen afterwards. But I confess, there is something special about helping my mother out in the kitchen. Intuitively, I know what utensil to hand to her before she asks, or when to give her the salt or to check that the heat isn’t too low or high. I feel useful, and hungry.

Garlic, heavy salty bone broth, steaming pasta-like galnish and tender lamb: the way to any Chechen’s heart. Nothing feels more like home than galnish heaped high onto plates, with thick broth served in earthy mugs on the side. The galnish are skewered onto a fork, two or three at a time, and dipped into a garlic sauce which stays in the hollow center of the galnish. The slightly chewy texture of the galnish, the spice from the garlic and the hearty broth create a pleasant fullness and comfortable warmth in the stomach.

The meal is not even ready yet, but we are aware that for the next week, the garlic smell will linger. It will stain our hands, clothes, breaths. Just like a cloud of hotpot smoke stalks you home, or the stench of burnt popcorn persistently haunts dorm kitchens, anyone whose food demands submission to olfactory power knows there’s no point in trying to conceal the…fragrance. You learn to embrace the acridity, and possibly, love it in secret because it will mean you have eaten well.

Galnish, like its lingering smell, has followed Chechens around the world. I have had galnish in Grozny, Moscow, Zarqa, Los Angeles, Hamilton, and Abu Dhabi. I will find it in Paris during my semester abroad and wherever else I live after that. Galnish is delicious, yes, but it represents something deeper. Eating galnish and speaking Chechen are the two most consistent acts of rebellion that almost all Chechens incorporate into their daily lives. Holding on to such ancient traditions is open defiance against three centuries of attempted colonisation of the “free people” in the Caucasus, oppression that includes Joseph Stalin’s horrific mass deportation of Chechens to Kazakhstan from 1943-1957, which the European Parliament declared as a genocide in 2004. Speaking Chechen is becoming harder and harder with subsequent generations of diaspora dispersing across the globe. Thus, cooking galnish is the most powerful way for Chechens to reconnect with their homeland.

As my mother recounts her university days in the nineties, I peel the garlic. Apparently, all the residents in the Moscow State University dorms instantly knew when Chechens were cooking – when the smell of crushed garlic seemed to invade the entire city. But the Chechens did not shy away –  they owned it. This smell became a vital link to a home that, at the time, was being bombed and depleted of every source of sustenance.

Chechnya’s situation has changed but the largely unwelcome scent of garlic has not. And neither has our food, which is still trailed by a potent odour. This stubbornness mirrors our love for our shared identity, and how confidently Chechens identify themselves as such, especially as a minority in Russia, where garlic in cooking is used with much less gusto.

Living mainly in the mountains, Chechen tribes used to perceive snakes as a serious threat, and believed that smelling like garlic would help deter the slithering predators. The garlic represents our national pride in that it does not come from a place of arrogance, but rather self-preservation and communal protection. The Chechens at my mother’s university were a diaspora, one of many navigating  potentially hostile environments, such as their university or perhaps Moscow in general.

Unfazed by the ignorance or racism of outsiders, they focused instead on the beauty of their culture, despite it seeming dangerous, or unwarranted, or unbelievable to those around them. They played eshars on car radios at full blast, did the traditional dance, lezginka, in the metro, and they ate galnish. Many Chechens were forced to leave their home, but they refused to bow their heads or allow themselves to be belittled.

I turn the stove on as my mother kneads the dough with assured pride. Making galnish counts for me as a religious process, partly sanctified by childhood sentiment and partly due to the awe I feel when watching someone make dough. The biblical example of Jesus transforming water to wine does not seem so far-fetched after having witnessed someone take flour and water then miraculously make a wholesome meal out of it, seemingly from thin air. I let the dough set. My mother rolls every fat little finger of dough into a gal. I imagine how many generations of women have cooked this recipe with their daughters.

Dinner is ready –  after hours of preparation, when the chefs (read: women) are all but about to collapse. We begin by serving the eldest guests. Respect for our elders is a cultural cornerstone, which could also be gleaned from seeing me trying to watch television at a relative’s house. Every time someone older than me enters the room, I must jump to my feet and wait until they are seated or I have been told to sit down. Although resembling an unnecessary exercise to the untrained eye, it is actually a traditional exercise of memory. It demonstrates the value we place on respecting our elders.

Respect also extends to our ancestors and their struggles. One difficulty that we thankfully no longer face is famine. It was not that long ago, however, when a working man’s daily wage included a mere glass of milk and crust of bread, as my grandma recalls. Or when under Stalin, my great-uncle remembers working at a flour mill, no longer able to bear his neighbours’ starvation. He ended up stealing all the flour and bread he could, and distributed it in his community, for which he was imprisoned for twenty years. The struggle of our ancestors is given the utmost respect, which can be witnessed in our kitchen. The traces of dough that form on our wooden table are scraped off with a knife and added to the rest of the flour –  not a single speck is wasted.

Memory is important. Our language has been butchered, the books burned down and land-mines placed in our mountains; the construction of collective amnesia is centuries in the process. We hold on to whatever we can.  Such as the story of Chechenits, a Chechen painter who was raised by a Russian general after his family was killed, the boy who despite his bizarre upbringing and lack of memory about his roots, held onto the threads of his identity, renaming himself Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenits. Chechenits is the Russian word for the Chechen; my last name, Shishani, also has the same meaning in Arabic.

When I was little, I would wish off the fuzzy dandelion heads, before blowing away the seeds to scatter elsewhere. I often feel that my family and other waynakh are like those wispy white dragonflies, having been blown to different corners of the world. One way back to our roots is though our food.

I am finally seated. I look around the table and I am grateful for what my parents have taught me about what it means to be Noxchi. I dig my fork into the galnish and dip into the garlic sauce. The first bite is always the best; a wave of doughy goodness and warmth . We enjoy the taste, but there is also a sense of responsibility within –  to eat it often, and to always remember where we come from.

Black Kitchen

The bacon sizzles in a silver pot on a spiral top that burns
To a tangerine orange beneath sweet cabbage.
Turn that stove down low, boy!

Collared greens unfurl to the size of elephant ears.
Let the water run rinsing them clean.

Hand me the knife from the drawer.

Get the strainer ready for rice.
Here are the scissors to cut the chittlins’.

They don’t smell as bad over rice,
Doused with hot sauce.

Seasoning salt is drizzled over
Honey-sweet ham.

It’s 6p.m. Time to make the cornbread.
Slices of Aunt Earline’s jelly cake

Lie like dominoes on a plate painted with porcelain roses.
Mama makes the wild berry kool-aid syrupy sweet.

Pork chops in a ceramic bowl
Sit sullenly next to store bought
Sweet potato pies.

I’m in my room writing poetry,
Waiting to sink teeth into chicken breast
While the Superfriends are on mute.

Y’all can come on eat now!

Artwork by Alice Andreini

Curry with Dad

I get home, starving
What’s for dinner? I ask
My dad is in the kitchen
What you got?
Let’s see here
Anger, Bitterness, Existential Thought?
Plenty
All best served hot
We put on our aprons and pick up the knives
Peel off the skin from the root of the problem
Chop up the large questions into roughly diced answers
Grate the anxiety into fine powder
Stir in the understanding
Volume of conversation brings the water to a boil
Lastly I throw myself into the pot
Tighten the lid
Watch it all grow tender
Serve it hot
Voila!
Beef Curry

By Angie Lee

Artwork by Isadora Fidler