"FOOD MAKES MOTHER-TONGUE SPEAKERS OF US ALL"
"We continually devise ways to feed for social effect: to bond with the like-minded, who eat alike; to differentiate ourselves from the outsiders who ignore our food taboos; to recraft ourselves, reshape our bodies, recast our relations with people, nature, gods." —Felipe Fernandez-Armestro1
Food is an important marker of identity. In his speech at the launch of All Under Heaven, Accone noted eloquently: "Food makes mother-tongue speakers of us all. Through it, we converse with other cultures in a dialogue both fundamental and profound".2
Accone recalls that it was food that reminded them that they were Chinese. Food was, in fact, that red silken thread that his great, great grandfather, Tian, gave to his great grandfather, Langshi. Accone notes that "It was food prepared in the Chinese way that kept me connected to my roots through the many years that I struggled with questions of belonging and identity. Always, though I did not realise it, it was the whispering and murmuring of my first language, rising over time to a fully articulated voice".
It is not surprising that the trope of the family shop and restaurant is a familiar one in diasporic literature. One recalls The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Divakurani, among other writings, as important in this sub-genre. Fernando-Armesto notes that the "spread of Chinese cooking around the world has…been colonial but not imperial, carried by peaceful migrants in self-imposed 'economic exile'"3. Accone points out lyrically that the Chinese restaurants "are representations of home, microcosms of the real and mythical worlds left behind. Their voices soar collectively into song, the song of remembrance, oftentimes the song of exile, most often the song of celebration".4
While this sub-genre of writing generally raises questions of self-commodification and the social meanings of "ethnic food" in Western contexts5 in Accone's text this theme is naturally and unselfconsciously developed; it is, inescapably, an intrinsic and inescapable part of his memories:
Food is among the most abiding memories of my childhood. When I think of my maternal grandfather - the young boy Ah Kwok in the book - I remember immediately our trips to Chinatown, and his food. It was Jo'burg's original Chinatown in Commissioner Street, now a fleeting image of its heyday, that I saw while acompanying Kong Kong on his regular shopping trips.6
Accone recalls the Sunday meals they would all share together in "working class Westdene", with his grandparents Kongkong and Bobo presiding over the family feasts. He sees these happenings as an important "affirmation of family, tradition and culture as well as a never ending journey into the gourmet delights my grandparents would prepare with such generosity and facility".
It is his grandfather who plays an important role in these culinary ceremonies and events (in other diasporic narratives it is usually women who play this role)7 and Accone "realised all too belatedly, his subtle way of reminding us that we were Chinese".8 These may be seen as small acts of heroism, but no less slight in the face of exile and loneliness, given their experiences in an alienating society.
"SENSUS COMMUNIS"
How do we read this history at the present time with the many conflicting and competing claims to identity, with the world fractured at the turn of the 21st Century. In writing his family story is Accone asserting (an essentialist) Chinese identity in South Africa?
Because Chinese writing and literature in South Africa is a hidden, sparse and undeveloped field it is easy to see All Under Heaven as a representative text, with Accone as an "authentic native informant"9. Accone's text shows that the "enactment of hybridity" takes many forms and is influenced by myriad elements. Stuart Hall (quoted by Narayan) reminds us that
Cultural identities come form somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they [identities] undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.10
I take my cue from Spivak who both asserts the ‘importance of positionality and refuse[s] to essentialise it”.11 Spivak has emphasised the importance of being aware of the risks and traps involved in taking an essentialist position, and of the ‘strategic use of a positivist essentialism".12
While Accone's narration of his family history underlies its uniqueness, it also shows its commonality with Chinese experiences in South Africa, and with migrants' stories everywhere. Accone’s very writing of his family story is a way of holding these two in tension. As Spivak points out: “to an extent, the way in which one conceives of oneself as representative or as an example of something is this awareness that what is one’s own, one’s identity, what is proper to one, is also a biography, and has a history “.13
There are also feelings of doubt or of ambivalence about where one is located, both physically and existentially (this accounts for Chow’s suicide recounted in the Prologue). It is understandable if, after all these years, both South Africa and China are seen equally as both "real" and "unreal" homes. There is a sense of belonging both to homeland and adopted country, and indeed of shaping the history of the latter. There is an inevitable claiming of homeland, with memories of its landscape, its culture and history being preserved and handed down from generation to generation. At the same time there is a feeling of being distanced from it, of not belonging to it because one has left. There is a feeling of rejection in the new and adopted homeland. Some of these feelings of being in limbo are captured in Accone's view when he observes:
Neither eastern nor western, not Asian nor African, classified non-white in the old South Africa, but not deemed previously disadvantaged in the new, we live in perpetual bifurcation…Home is here, at the tip of Africa, but also across the sea, as it was for my Kongkong, my grandfather.14
In his famous “I am an African” speech delivered at the adoption of the new South African Constitution in 1994 Thabo Mbeki notes the Chinese contribution to the building of South Africa and that an African belongs to more than one world:
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.15
Yet this rhetoric of inclusion must be translated into reality so that a critical "nation-building" might proceed, where all groups are equally valued, with the project of nation-building itself being scrutinised for any narrow chauvinistic thinking. Wherever there is an emergence of nationalism there is an assertion of identity and with that the problematics of identity. How does South Africa forge a self-identity that is inclusive of its many and diverse histories and peoples, and avoid, in Said's words, a "fetishization of the national identity", which is the narrow road to fundamentalisms of various kinds.16
"OVERLAPPING AND INTERTWINED HISTORIES"
Of course this ambivalence need not necessarily be resolved but lived with. Edward Said highlighted this constantly, speaking of our “intertwined and overlapping histories”, and reminding us of seeing “human history in spatio-temporal fields".17 This is true in the life of nations, continents as well as in the life of families and individuals. Accone’s narrative is a good example, and in a rather pointed way, of how in postcolonial writing the historical and geopolitical are intertwined.
Abdirahman Hussein, in his excellent study of Said, points out that Said always "tried to undermine linearity and foundationalism – unsullied origins, essentialised identities, teleological horizons… and insisted “on the patterns of human interrelatedness - what he has called [in Beginnings] the multiplicity, correlation, and complementarity of socio-cultural forms from different times and climes“18. This is the “sensus communis" he drew attention to, which he crystallized in the notion of affiliation as developed in The World, the Text and the Critic”. Said is arguing for a convocation of multiple cultures and canons.19 This is also what, I believe, he meant, when reiterating Adorno, he emphasized that the” work of theory, criticism, demystification, deconsecration, and decentralisation…is never finished. The point of [radical] theory and [critical intentionality] therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile".20 Said has consistently spoken against identitarian politics and the 'jargon of authenticity".21 He has always turned the experience of diaspora as displacement as exile and has suggested that this 'in-between-space in the space from which the intellectual, always an exile or marginal, speaks.22 Accone echoes this himself when, in his lecture on Guy Debord, referred to earlier, he quotes Harold Beaver's son, who pays tribute to his illustrious father by referring to the words of a Buddhist monk: "The first step is to learn to be at home anywhere, and the second is to be at home nowhere".23
1 From Food - A History. Pan Books/Macmillan: London.
2 Accone, Darryl. "Red Chamber Speech." Speech for the Launch of All Under Heaven, 4 May 2004.
3 Food - A History. p167
4 "Red Chamber Speech."
5 Narayan, Kirin. 1997. "How Native is a 'Native' Anthropologist?" In American Anthropologist, Vol 95, No 3, pp671-686
6 "Red Chamber Speech."
7 See Govinden, D. 2000. Sister Outsiders - The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women. Phd. Dissertation, University of Natal [Unisa Press, forthcoming].
8 "Red Chamber Speech."
9 "How Native is a 'Native' Anthropologist?"
10 Hall, Stuart. 1989. "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Framework, Vol. 36, pp.68-81.
11 Spivak, G. 1993. Outside in The Teaching Machine. Routledge: London. p5
12 Outside in The Teaching Machine. p3
13 Outside in The Teaching Machine. p6
14 Accone, Darryl. 2005. 'A Chinese Childhood in Sixties South Africa.' [in Chinese, translated from English], HK Writer 31, Hong Kong, 2005.
15 Hadland, Adrian and Jovial Rantao. 1999. The Life and Times of Thabo Mbeki Zebra Press: Cape Town. p155
16 Viswanathan, Gauri. [ed]. 2001. Power, Politics and Culture - interviews with Edward W Said. Bloomsbury: London. p129
17 Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
18 Hussein, Abdirahman A. 2002. Edward Said - Criticism and Society. Verso: London/New York. p259
19 Edward Said - Criticism and Society. p264
20 Edward Said - Criticism and Society. p308
21 Said, Edward. 1995. The Politics of Dispossession - The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1999. Vintage Books: New York. p359
22 Walia, Shelley. 2001. Edward Said and the Writing of History. Icon Books: Cambridge, UK. p5
23 Accone, Darryl. "Passageways: Revisiting Self, The Society of the Spectacle and Moby Dick in the wake of September 11." Fourth Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture delivered by Accone at the University of Natal [now University of KwaZulu-Natal], 2003.
