Abstract
This fascinating work brings together the concepts of gender, violence, and food in the most innovative manner possible within the empirical context of Afghanistan and Canada, as women are forced to move from one space to another. It should be noted that the violence that has been destroying so many lives in Afghanistan for decades also seeps into the author’s narrative: she remembers not only the many Afghans and service professionals who lost their lives there, but also two Canadian colleagues killed by the Taliban insurgents merely a year ago.
Dossa engages a postcolonial feminist framework into her topic, starting the Introduction by bringing in her own subjectivity marked by years of war, subsequent uprooting, migration, and then living in the margins as an immigrant. All through this pain and suffering, Dossa introduces the concept of inner spaces to identify an area where the enduring effects of violence are felt in everyday life but remain hidden on account of the politically constructed situation where some lives are grievable (generally the hegemonic North) and others remain ungrievable (generally the subjugated South). (p. 6)
And she promises to convey Afghan women’s negotiation of violence in the inner recesses of their life both at their point of origin as well as their destination through memory work, one that is captured best through the activity of cooking. Dossa’s innovative focus does indeed move beyond the local/global, individual/collective, macro/micro divides to present not only a very meaningful, but also pungent portrayal of Afghan women in Afghanistan and Canada, as they mourn all they have lost during their lifetime, yet still manage to preserve their agency.
Two elements make this work unique: Dossa unconventionally approaches violence in war and displacement through women, and she does so not only in their national location in Afghanistan, but also in their diasporic location in Canada. By doing so, Dossa enables us to trace the process through which women continue to negotiate violence through their lives, violence that appears in different contexts in different forms, first physically visible in Afghanistan and then socially invisible in Canada. And the process Dossa so skillfully traces and portrays is unfortunately one that has become all too familiar to us during the 21st century as such wars, violence, and displacements diffuse throughout the globe. What makes this process even more tragic is that many of the victims are put in these terrible positions that are not of their own doing, but rather a consequence of major world powers’ continuous contestation with each other.
Specifically, Chapter 1 introduces the epistemology and methodology as the author identifies her research sites in Afghanistan (there) and Canada (here), conducting ethnographic work to delve into the meaning-making process women employ in both locations. Dossa quickly finds out that violence exists in both places but in different forms; it is public and physical in Afghanistan and then recedes into everyday life in Canada, becoming less publicly visible and more symbolic in character. Yet, the inflicted pain and suffering persist throughout.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Afghan women’s lives in both sites, capturing the pain and suffering in both contexts through the women’s own words. The very innovative Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the one item that persists in our (and the women’s) lives regardless of what we go through in so far as we stay alive, namely, food. Through food preparation and emerging ‘foodscapes’, Dossa and her subjects beautifully portray their losses and gains: scarcity of ingredients prepared in a physically dangerous environment in their homeland of Afghanistan transforms into a secure but alien environment in Canada as the latter is predicated on a whole different food spectrum where the ingredients are not scarce, but certainly scattered.
In the Conclusion, Dossa skillfully reveals the significance of an engaged anthropology in capturing everyday practices of meaning production. She demonstrates the manner in which such practices reveal the continuation of violence and destruction even when one is removed from the physically dangerous Afghanistan to safe Canada. Indeed, it is time to move beyond the congratulatory narratives that portray giving refuge to victims of violence as an honorable act in and of itself; Dossa reveals that the inherent violence persists across space, and that receiving states and societies need to continue working on with such populations for a very long time, cognizant of the continued pain and suffering.