She Who Tastes, Knows: A Memoir of Food, Exile and Awakening (Durkhanai Ayubi, Murdoch)

Just pages into She Who Tastes, Knows: A Memoir of Food, Exile and Awakening, my taste buds were tingling at the tantalising descriptions of Durkhanai Ayubi’s family making traditional Afghan mantu (dumplings), using gandana leaves grown from seeds spirited to their new home. This cultural memoir is a rich interweaving of legend, family, history and politics, as Ayubi (Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen), who owns Adelaide’s Parwana restaurant, moves from describing specific dishes into a deep meditation on her family’s homeland, its fertile and fought-over terrain and what it means to be displaced. While her sophisticated sentence structures at times require concentration and verge on the academic, her turn of phrase remains poetic and linguistically elevating. Foods such as mulberries and figs become symbols that underpin discussions of the history of the Silk Road region, foreign interference in Afghan power relations, the rise of extremist radicals, and intergenerational inheritance and ancestral strength. Readers learn of the tradition of “landays”, poetic couplets that reveal women’s perspectives, while author Bruce Pascoe appears as Ayubi explores First Nations connections to food and land, reflecting on refugees as “bridges” between settlers and Indigenous people. Though readers may wish for more of Ayubi’s food writing, this complex, legacy-driven work enriches the understanding of belonging and cultural inheritance. It deserves an audience among those interested in culture and migration, poetry, human nature and the healing power of food.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Joanne Shiells is an editor, writer and English teacher. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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