By: Arlette Martinez
“Food can give you a sense of home and belonging, and it can help you build spaces that can sustain you and provide you comfort, where you can imagine that you belong” — S. Chakrabarti.
Sohni Chakrabarti is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English and co-founder of an interdisciplinary food studies group at the University of St Andrews. At the Food Matters and Materialities conference, Sohni presented a paper entitled “Imagining a Disabled Diaspora: Reading Chronic Illness Through the Lens of Food in Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir.” Her research analyzes space and time through the intersections of gender, race, social class, and nationhood. We talked over Zoom shortly after her presentation.
Credits: Illustration by Kit Chokly.
AM: What led you to analyze this memoir? And why a memoir?
SC: There are several reasons for it. First, because I have followed [the Iranian-American novelist] Khakpour’s works before, I’ve read another of her novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects. And I like her style of writing. Second, I don’t have Lyme disease, but I have rheumatoid arthritis. So, I was quite interested in a chronic illness memoir, and it was a book that I looked forward to reading. I work on diasporic women’s writing in terms of research interests, and I thought this was a fascinating angle for two reasons. There are similar works like Anna Castillo’s My Love, where the main character has Polio. But disability is otherwise not that much explored, especially chronic illness, and I’m not talking about visible disabilities or terminal illnesses. In general, you’d find in many disability narratives, there’s a lot more around visible disabilities, and a lot more around terminal illnesses, and less around invisible illnesses. That was, for me, quite interesting. I was also very intrigued by the title because it’s so direct. It is Sick: A Memoir. And I thought that was one of the purposes of the memoir itself: being able to reclaim sickness, being able to say, as, as a dispossessed person, who came to America as a refugee, and is a Muslim American woman; to be able to reclaim sickness as somebody who’s chronically ill, to say “I am sick” is an empowering thing to do because it’s pushing back at a lot of hegemonic narratives of health and well-being that place higher expectations on marginalized people and racialized women to conform.
AM: It’s true that her book highlights the struggles with chronic illness and brings forward the political and cultural conditions of what it is to be a Muslim woman in America, mainly post 911. So, could you elaborate a little bit on that?
SC: She notes a couple of interactions, like one in the cab, where she got pretty sick and confused and had panic attacks. She spoke on the phone to her mother in Persian and noticed that the cab driver, a white man, looked at her. And she immediately felt the need to say, “excuse me, so I’m not one of those Muslims, I’m not a fundamentalist”. You know, we are not one of those people. And she grew up in an Iranian ghetto in California, which is almost like Tehran, because of the large Iranian community there. And she could not eat Persian food in school, of course, that happened before 911, but it suggests an Islamophobia that [had] existed and then intensified post 911.
AM: During your presentation, you mentioned that, in contrast, no one questioned Khakpour when she was eating chicken nuggets. It made me think of the control of racialized bodies through food. I wanted to ask you for more examples of food as a narrative strategy in the book.
SC: She does a lot of things with food. For example, connecting her PTSD to her childhood, although this is more from her Twitter feed than something that she has written in the book itself. Khakpour has a complicated relationship with her family, and I think she is alluding to an element of neglect. Perhaps because her parents were preoccupied with trying to settle down in America. I think she’s trying to highlight the trauma she experienced after Iranian food was replaced with American junk food. Khakpour didn’t know where she belonged because she didn’t feel at home in her own family, and she didn’t feel at home while outside. So, I think there is that, and her unhealthy relationship with food – that’s one of the things that the book chronicles – and her history of drug addiction in her college years in New York. She tried to fit in at a time when skinniness was the ideal, and eating less meant she could stay skinny. That shows an element of her conflicting relationship with her body and herself. Later, it changes to the other extreme when she gets ill and spends years figuring out what is wrong until finally getting diagnosed with Lyme disease. Then there was the other end of the wellness industry. There was the royal jelly, whole foods, and turmeric lattes.
Khakpour also asks, how can one escape American capitalism, especially as a disabled and diasporic Muslim woman? On the one hand, as she writes, by trying to gain access to that kind of wellness, she makes space for herself in a broader America. On the other hand, however, she’s mindful of American consumerism at the same time. Lastly, Khakpour negotiates with patriarchy and the gender dynamics around food, and what happens when white heterosexual men, in particular, adopt their version of Oriental traditions as a response to American hypermasculinity but are unable to question the power and privilege that allows choosing these cultural things.
AM: I’m wondering: what else can literary works teach us about people’s experiences and relationships with food?
SC: I believe that food work can also provide modes of resistance, especially to people from marginalized communities. That is not to say that it doesn’t come with its own gendered and domestic implications. A white woman can reject the kitchen and be seen as liberated. However, for a Black woman, cooking [Black] food is a mode of sustenance and resistance to a history of slavery. The same thing goes for Chicano communities. The women are working in fields all day, cooking with limited ingredients, preserving their versions of culture, being able to evolve, surviving the body borders of America while surviving the US-Mexico violence, and this is a mode of sustenance. That’s not to say that it’s free of problems. But I think that only seeing housework as patriarchal, sexist, and gendered leaves out a greater nuance of what people from marginalized backgrounds do with food? And why does food matter? And why preserve specific versions of traditions and certain kinds of recipes, and it’s building an oral history, right? It’s like building an archive of intergenerational knowledge, and I think these things matter. I believe food comes with its own sets of hegemonic oppressions and problems. And it’s going to be tied to questions of gender, race, class, capitalism, and nationhood. Still, at the same time, food can subvert or be subversive and provide resistance when used to reclaim a sense of self or identity or push back against what is hegemonic and essentialist. That way, food can give you a sense of home and belonging, and it can help you build spaces that can sustain you and provide you comfort, where you can imagine that you belong. That’s how I think about food.
The beauty of books is that they transport us to other places and points in time and offer us a glimpse into people’s struggles, dreams, and desires. This book is an excellent example of how words can convey the material aspects of food, belonging, and the complexity of the author’s journey.
Sohni’s passion for both food studies and reading was contagious. I was deeply inspired by her and her research. Her work demonstrates how food plays distinct roles in marginalized communities, not just as a reflection of their struggles but also speaks to their heritage, and resilience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.