Jazarah and Yeshi are searching for a quintessential American cookbook. This is so they can produce pleasing food for the potlucks and bake sales that appear to be a requirement of their new lives in the US, as much as neither woman is interested in cooking, nor appreciates this transactional approach to food. The bookseller holds up The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, telling them it’s an instant classic. Who doesn’t want to keep their house, Jazarah responds: “I’ve lost two already – one to the Derg in 1975, one to the Derg in 1979 – so I’d love to keep mine as long and as good as I can.”
This title story, bottling as it does humour, loss, and the longing of the refugee to fit in, alongside an inescapable comparison to “home” – and this is a word laden with questions throughout the book – is a blueprint for the collection, which is pitted with fear, hope and wit.
In The Suitcase Saba arrives from United States to Addis Ababa, where she experiences a tumultuous and unnavigable city, rather than any instinctive bond to her history; she brings perspectives of the emigrant, the immigrant, a tightrope in the story. Everything her extended Ethiopian family want to fill her empty suitcase with for her journey back to the US – bread, food, a special medicine – which is memory, connection, and love: “Saba felt the weight of choosing what should be taken and what should be left behind. She was looking for a way out and a way in, but she realised there really were no shortcuts here.”
Seeds, growth, and transposition – welcome or otherwise – bloom in this collection, in stories which hold beguiling wisdom: Wall is a tender, sad unfolding of an intense but fading friendship between a young boy and an old man; The Drought That Drowned Us is despondent but tempered by lyricism, as each drought is given an imaginative name. Ending on a note of hope, as many of the narratives do, this story has those fleeing the dry soil bring seeds from the last harvest along with them: “As the village left their homes behind, they decided it was time to call themselves something new as well. They chose ‘the people with seeds in their pockets’.”
