Comment Cuisiner Son Mari a L’africaine: How-to Manual or Cautionary Tale

De tous les arts, lart culinaire est celui qui nourrit le mieux son homme. Pierre Dac Calixthe Beyala was born in Cameroon in 1961. She was truly disturbed by the extreme p everyplacety of her surroundings. She went to school in Douala, and she excelled in Mathematics. Calixthe Beyala traveled widely in Africa and Europe before settling in Paris, where she now lives with her girlfriend. Beyala has published prolific ally, and her intimately recent smart, which came out earlier this family, is called La Plantation.Beyalas novel Comment cuisiner son mari a lafricaine appe bed in the year 2000, published by Albin Michel. It is equivalent in structure to Laura Esquivels Like water system for Chocolate, where the narrative is interrupted by the recipes which figure in the plot line. In her platter, Beyala inclu stilbesterol twenty-four of the recipes which her heroine Aissatou prep atomic number 18s to attract her neighbor and compatriot, Souleymane Bolobolo. In this behavior th e throw serves as a how-to manual, as its title suggests, on how to seduce, marry and accommodate a husband by prep aredness for him.The book begins with a prologue in the figure of speech of a leg cease where a cleaning womanhood arrives at the remote crime syndicate of the recluse, Biloa. She announces that she has dreamed of him since she was a little girl, and that she has always known that they would marry. Biloa protests that he isnt the wizard she is waitking, repeating Ce nest pas moi, however the woman tempts him with viands so Biloa admits his indistinguishability, Cest peut-etre moi, and takes the woman and the basket of food into his house. This, according to the legend, is how Biloa came to be a member of the partnership of men.This prologue does, indeed, prefigure the struggles of Aissatou, our novels heroine, who is a une dame-pipi28 caught between her identity as a Parisian and as an African. Fed up with romantic disap putments, she has chosen her neighb or Bolobolo to be her husband, though she hasnt really charge met him. Aissatou, who habitually eats only ternary grated carrots for her dinner, and always takes her tea without sugar in parliamentary procedure to primary(prenominal)tain her lose weight figure goes to a marabout for advice on how to seduce Bolobolo, and is provoked by the some another(prenominal) women that are similarly waiting there for advice.According to them, Aissatous enigma is that she is as well skinny, and they lament the level(p)t that ces filles daujourdhui ne savent meme pas cuisiner.. et ca se veut des femmes. 29 Aissatou takes this all to heart and armed with the recipes she learned from her mother and grandmother, she attacks her neighbor on the culinary front. She begins by en prognosticateing beignets aux haricots rouges to Bolobolos elderly mother who is suffering from a mental illness, and then continues tempting her neighbor with other exotic and engaging dishes.Aissatou is not unop posed, however, and deals with her rival, Bijou, by again eclipsing her performance in the kitchen. Eventually, Aissatou does seduce Bolobolo, and after(prenominal) his mothers death, they do marry. But the story doesnt end here. In an epilogue, the ratifier gets a glimpse of Aissatou and Bolobolos marriage twenty years later. Aissatou admits that she cooks to save her marriage, which is constantly imperiled by her husbands infidelity.But, as her mother had told her, There comes a cadence when one moldiness prefer ones marriage to ones husband, and so Aissatou sacrifices her pride and tends her birth in the kitchen in time though she realizes that her husband is an adulterous coward. The epilogue leaves a bitter judge at the end of such a delicious novel, but it keeps it honest, and doesnt forget it to seem like the simple re-telling of the legend of Biloa. Whereas the themes of food and planning often serve as expressions of nostalgia in other novels, in Beyalas book, food is a language spoken by the different characters.Aissatou hears her mothers voice prescribing certain dishes to shit a broken heart and other dishes to soothe herself and her family, for as she says, Ventre plein na point de conscience. 30Her daughter, however, doesnt initially have the same reaction when feeling low and preferably she makes herself a bowl of verit satis occurrenceory soupe chinoise en sachet. This means that prior to her end to seduce Bolobolo by prep for him, the only cooking that Aissatou undertakes is no change stateg more(prenominal)(prenominal) than adding water to a desiccate powder and heating it up.The fact that the dried powder is identified as real and Chinese point to the fact that it is really neither. Aissatou is not concerned with her foods quality or ethnicity, and cares only about its convenience and calorie count. In the course of the novel, Aissatou provide give up her proclivity for these inauthentic foods and begin to enjoy the foods o f watt Africa prescribed by her mother and other African characters. In Beyalas book, African food is imbued with nearly magical qualities. Yes, it does put meat on the bones of those who enjoy it, but it to a fault excites the senses, and inflames the passions of those who eat it.Moreover, the true connoisseurs and sages of African food are all women. Even when Aissatou goes to consult a marabout about her love life, it is the women who actually reveal her diagnosis. Maimouna, who is known as la cheftaine-reine des cuisines amongst the women at the marabouts apartment says that Aissatous problem is that she is too thin, and that a certain spicy shrimp dish testament always attract a man. Once Aissatou decides to begin cooking African food in order to achieve her design of seducing Bolobolo, she is also qualified to influence other situations through her cooking.She decides to provoke a macho reception in her passive male best friend and prepares a jus de gingembre, a drink f ormulated to send him into a frenzy of desire, just to see what get out happen. When confronted by her angry rival, mademoiselle Bijou, she cooks a bouillie de mil for her to luff that she is civilized and in control of the situation. Later, angered by Bijous assessment of her relationship with Bolobolo, she also takes r flushge on him by putting a purgative in a favorite dish of his. And of course, Aissatous prime objective, clinched by her pepe-soupe aux poissons, is to arouse an appetite for passion within Bolobolo.Aissatou is speaking through her cooking, revealing her desires and fears, using food to express those things which she cannot explicitly state. In addition to its attend to as a way to provoke a physical reply in the eater, food acts as an important cultural identifier in this novel. by means of it we see the transformation of Aissatou from Parisian, back to African and from egg vacuous, back to opaque. In other words, she effectuates a reverse migration, an d food and cooking are the vehicle that she uses to bring herself back to her roots.Though this migration is easy to track, as she embraces her mothers attitudes toward food, cooking and fifty-fifty marriage, it is more difficult to find Aissatous point of departure. In the beginning, Aissatous very racial and ethnic identity is called into question by Beyalas own publishers blurb on the back of the novel itself. It describes her as une Parisienne pure black en proie au tourments de lamour. 31 But Aissatou claims that her self-imposed exile in France has made her forget the fact that she is black and that she doesnt know when she became white.She admits that she has become white by imitating the thin, white Parisian women who are, as she is, altogether caught up in the constant rocking horse of beauty that is calculated to please men. She realizes that she has adopted a orthogonal mental capacity when it comes to her own body image and describes herself thus Moi, je suis une n egresse blanche et la nourriture est un poison mortel spill over la subjection. Je fais chanter mon corps en epluchant mes fesses, en rapant mes seins, convaincue quen martyrisant mon estomac, les divinites de la sensualite sechapperont de mes pores. 32It is enkindle to note the use of the kitchen techniques, which indicate how previously her only cooking projects served to keep her thin. She combines these techniques where she literally scrapes her body until it is thin with words like martyr and divinity, contend into the idea that the denial of food in order to remain thin is a somehow sacred task. This is a long-standing dialectic, where women align divinity and nonindulgence when that same asceticism really represents a societal imperative to conform to ideals of beauty.This statement is a declaration of success she has martyred her body in order to be desirable, and therefore white. Though Aissatou admits that she foods constantly and obsessively, like other Parisian wom en, she also lies about what she eats, just for the sake of be cruel. When asked about her diet by an apparently jealous overweight woman, Aissatou joyfully tells her that she has, since her birth, eaten, le coq au vin, arrose dun bon beaujolais nouveau les epaules dagneau aux champignon noirs, le ris de veau a la creme fraiche et le couscous mouton a la tunisienne. 33Of course, it is completely untrue that she ever indulges in such rich food, and certainly doubtful that she ate these traditional french dishes as a child in Cameroon. It is worth noting the inclusion of Tunisian couscous with the list of very traditional french food. Couscous has entered the repertory of French foods and is a greens dish, despite its colonial origins. Though one whitethorn turn over about the authenticity of a Parisian couscous a la Tunisienne and how it plays on French ideas of exoticism, it is undeniably a part of French cuisine.This is in bank line to sub-Saharan African cuisine, which is mu ch more difficult to find in the capital. Though you can eat couscous in every arrondissement, you would be concentrated pressed to find many restaurants that serve food from West Africa or the provisions necessary to make them at fireside. With this book, Beyala presents a fictionalized cookbook, and if the intrepid base cook should retrace the steps of the heroine, it could even serve as a guide for shopping for the ingredients in the recipes.As mentioned previously, this books structure is similar to other popular novels where recipes for the dishes prepared by characters are included, like Frances Mayes, on a lower blast the Tuscan Sun, and Laura Esquivels, Like Water for Chocolate. But in these novels, the recipes are most often a part of the narration itself and sometimes are even recounted by one character to another, mimicking the traditional way that cooking recipes are transmitted, orally, from one cook to another, most often mother to daughter.In Beyalas book, which features African characters who themselves benefited from the oral tradition of passing hatful culinary knowledge, Beyalas chooses to completely disconnect the recipes from the text, placing them on a separate page at the end of the chapter, and printing them like a traditional recipe that could be prove in any cookbook or magazine article. Also, Beyalas book differs from Mayes and Esquivels because their novels are both set in a time or place that is foreign to the reader.Esquivels novel is set during the Mexican revolution, and Mayes is set in Italy, and their settings automatically place them in a foreign and/or exotic locale. Despite this fact, the reader can easily jolly up the recipes that their characters make, thereby exoticising themselves by their appropriation of the foreign meal. In contrast, Beyalas book is both more admission priceible in its setting, and less accessible to the home cook. Comment cuisiner son mari a lafricaine is set in the present-day(prenominal) French capital and is completely recognizable in terms of its arrangement and lifestyle.But re-creating the recipes that Aissatou makes is nearly impossible, because many of the ingredients listed in these recipes are not translated or even described. Though it would seem that this cookbook is intended for other immigrant women to use in re-creating dishes from West Africa, the lack of information about ingredients or possible substitutions runs counter to other cookbooks with similar propositions. Therefore, the status of the book as a manual is questionable, since it is not clear that one can even follow the recipes.Beyalas book may just be using the recipes as other novels use examples. They are glimpses of a foreign culture provided by the generator in order to pique the interest of the reader, just as an illustration does. Beyalas location of the text in Paris is key in the novel, because it allows her to set up a cultural dialectic between France and Cameroon. Her heroine moldinessiness navigate the multicultural space of the post-colonial capital to assess the compromises and concessions that white and black women make.Aissatou is caught between her Parisian reality where sexual value is based on how thin a woman is, and her memories of her mothers advice which promoted the importance of domesticity and especially culinary triumph in the life of a couple. Un homme qui vous fait ressentir de telles emotions.. merite le paradis,34 she would say as she seasoned a dish to please her man. Aissatou imagines the questions that her mother would have asked her if her daughter had come to her after a failed love affair.Her mother would have asked if first, she had fulfill him sexually, second, if she had kept the house well, and third if she had prepared nice dishes for him. As Aissatou begins cooking savory dishes for herself her thin figure fills in with more womanly curves, eliciting sympathetic looks from some who think that she has let herself go, an d approval from others. Race, beauty, food and sex are all locked into an uneasy correlation that she cannot accept. She gives up on the idea of maintaining a French, i. e. thin, ideal of beauty and trades it for the African ideal of sensual frolic of food as a means to attract men.Interestingly, she does not trade her French beauty regimen for an African one. She even cites the methods that she is unwilling to follow and decides that braiding her hair, massaging herself with shea butter and pretending to be fragile is not for her Rien qua y penser, je mepuise comme si cetait deja a louvrage. 35 This consequence to her roots is unquestionably gnarly for Aissatou. She is torn between the two worlds constantly. For example, when she sees Bolobolo going the apartment building, she is struck by her sudden African reaction Si jetais sa femme, je serais restee a la maison a lattendre. But just as apace she asks herself, Mais pourquoi dans le partage des roles les femmes doivent-elle s garder le foyer, cuisiner, allumer les lampes. jusqua ce que mort sensuive? 36This is the same reaction that she has when she asks herself if she is subject of using African methods of seduction. Aissatous onerous task is to reconcile her African mothers advice on how to seduce and hold on to a man with her French post-feminist questions about that role. She knows that her mother is right, and that she will be able to seduce this African man by appealing to his sensual desires and African identity.So, she picks at Bolobolos sensibilities as an African man and critiques him for doing the marketing himself, saying Vous vous etes finalement bien adapte a lOccident qui voudrait que lhomme soit une femme et linverse. 37In this way, she calls attention to the cultural difference in the French and African views on the traditional division of labor and highlights the fact that she and Bolobolo share a common culture, though they may be forced to adapt to French practices.Aissatou also se eks to call attention to their shared culture when she uses Bolobolos mothers condition as an explicate to get involved, which she does with ulterior motives Jai limpression que mon discours est en decalage, espace et temps. Je sais que jai eu une reaction africaine ou tout le monde se mele des casseroles etrangeres. 38 This statement is telling because it shows that Aissatou knows that she is acting in bad faith.She knows that she has rejected certain aspects of African seduction and that she is not being honest about her intentions, but she nevertheless goes forward with her culinary seduction of Bolobolo and his mother. When Aissatou brings the beignets to Bolobolos mother he mentions that she mustnt have anything better to do if she is cooking for others, but Aissatou reminds him Oui, parce que dans ce pays il faut etre vieux ou au chomage pour se rendre compte quil est important que lon soccupe des autres, again setting herself apart from the French and reminding him that they are compatriots.She finally gains access to his house with this plate of food. Once inside, she professes that she loves to cook and he answers that he loves to do dishes, seeming indicating that they are ideally suited for each other, but also indicating that he may be an African man, but he has adapted to a non-African setting. And this is the prime reason that Aissatou cooks, and especially why she cooks African food, to dismission Bolobolos passion for her. Aissatou cooks constantly, and she cooks the most exotic dishes and uses ingredients that she must search for in all the African boutiques of the capital.Her apartment building is infused with the heady aromas of African cuisine, which causes different reactions among her French neighbors. The concierge battles the smells of cooking with the Airwick spray, but the old lady who lives on the first floor creeps up the steps to hover on the landing dapple Aissatou is cooking. Aissatous cooking, because it is foreign and strang e smelling, makes her black in the eyes of the racial concierge and Bolobolos metisse girlfriend, Bijou.Aissatou decides to invite Bolobolo and his mother to dinner at her apartment, where she intends to win him over with her prowess in the kitchen, but when she goes downstairs to invite him, another woman is in the apartment with him. Unfazed, she announces that she would be happy to bring dinner down to them to enjoy together. The dinner is a success with Bolobolo but his girlfriend, a amiable metissse named Bijou, doesnt enjoy herself at all Je nai jamais aime la cuisine africaine Parait quils mangent des singes, ces Negres To which Aissatou responds Du snake in the grass feather boa egalement.Cest excellent, nest-ce pas39Again, the food has served to bring together the Africans and place them in resistor to a separate group because they share a taste for a dish that others find objectionable. Aissatou even goes further in invoking their taste for boa constrictor, because sh e knows that Bijou will be disgusted by this prospect. Since Bijou is mulatto and not just French, Aissatou and Bolobolos shared food preference places emphasis on the fact that they are from the same country in Africa and therefore share a diaphanous culture, and should not be lumped in with other people of color. But Aissatous main goal for her fabulous dinner is achieved after Bijous departure when Bolobolo starts kissing and stroke Aissatou while she is cleaning up the kitchen. This woman, who previously denied herself any sensual pleasure at all from food, is altered by her dinner with Bolobolo. With her seduction of Bolobolo she acquires a new language, where food metaphors dominate the description of sex and the body. Nicki Hitchcott sees the narrators almost over the top references to food to be a inference of cliches on which Western advertising depends. 0But at the same time, this dinner is smelling(p) of the traditional polygamous African family dynamic, where the wife who cooks for the husband is the one who sleeps with him that night. Although Aissatou must still deal with her more proponentful rival, Bolobolos mother, she is eventually successful in seducing and keeping him with her culinary talents. By the end of the novel, Aissatous transformation is complete. She does experience disquietude when it comes to her own motives and doubts regarding her role in what Hitchcott calls postnational France, but Aissatou settles on using cooking in order to maintain her relationships.She has gone from being a self-described white woman who viewed food as a fatal poison in the publication of seduction, to using food as a tool to accomplish her goal of seducing Bolobolo. She now sees food as a positive, unifying force La nourriture est synonyme de la vie. Aujourdhui elle constitue une unite plus homogene que la justice. Elle est peut-etre lunique source de paix et de reconciliation entre les hommes. 41And in this novel, cooking can also reflect passio n, love, comfort, anger and civility.Food and Aissatous deft habit of people through her cooking give her power that she doesnt have other than in French society. As Bolobolos mother says in the novel, cooking is indeed becoming a rare skill especially in large capital cities like Paris because women are increasingly working(a) outside the home, and dont have the time or even talent to cook, since they never really learned the skills from their mothers. Even though France may be a center for haute cuisine technique, it suffers the same problems of all modernistic countries where there has been a redistribution of domestic tasks from inside to outside the home.Women dont cook as much as they used to, and more and more people eat outside the home. Therefore, we must ask ourselves for whom the didactic subdivision of this book is intended. As stated above, it is not descriptive enough to converge a food adventurer in search of the exotic and by virtue of the fact that it is writte n and published in France, it is clearly not intended to be used by African women. Perhaps the reader who would find Beyalas recipes to be the most accessible are women like herself, immigrant women who might need to be tempted back to the kitchen.When this is considered along with Beyalas problematical portrayal of marriage, the book appears as an invitation to take up cooking, not as a way to experience the exotic, but as a way to reject the Western ideal of beauty and to appropriate some power within the community. Aissatou returned to this aspect of her African heritage, because she had a specific goal in mind and felt that this would allow her to achieve it. She questions herself, her methods and her motives all along the way, and ultimately accepts the limitations of un bon pepe-soupe and her husbands monogamy.Just as she advises her neighbor whose husband has begun to stray from the connubial bed, she doesnt reproach Bolobolo and accepts his infidelity, knowing that eventua lly, he will return to her. She rejected the literal and figurative hunger that she experienced as a negresse blanche and chose the culinary tools that allow her to make her husband happy, even though she knows that he will sometimes hurt her. Beyalas heroine fully understands the limitations that she faces in a Paris, and negotiates an identity through her cooking that she can live with.