Seasoning Refugeehood through Food Memory: Tracing the Sensory Souvenir of Home in Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth

Abstract

Forced migration constantly leads to a great extent of cultural difference between the native land and the host country. The impact of food plays a special relevance in refugees’ post migration, as it symbolizes the earliest structural link with the homeland and societal construction. Food practice is a form of discourse that inexplicably circumscribes with the individual’s identity in association with the self and the object split representation.  'The Other Side of Truth' by Beverley Naidoo, scrutinizes food memory as one of the introjects that entails both the sense of continuity with the lost objects and also the feeling of uprootedness from the native culture. The flavours of certain food evoke the regressive feeling of estrangement among the repressed refugees by gustatory and olfactory stimuli. The correlation of food consumption, memory of homeland and refugeehood is analyzed through the theoretical underpinnings of sensory and emotional involuntary memory. This paper adopts an ethnographic approach and introspects the food memory through the protagonist’s longing for African food in the host country. It also delineates how food consumption triggers refugees’ past thereby eliciting a range of positive and negative recollection through sensory stimulation.