ዝተጻሕፈ ይውሳእ፡ ኣብ ቃል ዘሎ ይርሳዕ [zi-te-tsah-fe ye-wi-sah, ab qal zelo yi-ri-sah]
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This article begins with—or perhaps more accurately, comes from—a story first shared with me by my mother, and told to her from her mother before. It is the story of a spice derived from the intertwined histories of Eritrea and Ethiopia and “made by” the labor, laughter, and love of their many generations. In the materiality of በርበረ3 [ber-be-re]’s bright-red color, ubiquitous among families like ours, speaks my mother, her mother (my grandmother Tarta), and her father’s mother Tadess (my great-grandmother), who with the voices of family long since passed are continuously present in this spice’s experience. But also present are the oral histories shared by the men who were, and so still remain, actively there within the spice mixing process. They encompass myself, my father, my uncle, my great uncle, and the other voices of our ongoing present, but they also include the still-unfolding events of our unconcluded past, captured in detail by the 19th-century traveler Mansfield Parkyns during his travels through Abyssinia. I list these figures not for the obligatory credit of their contributions, but to structure the experience of how this article is meant to be read, “to give the key through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage” for a spice that plays through the dimensions of its practice (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995, p. 12). It is for my family this article is written, and with them this story is told.
The Story of a Universal Sauce
In the fall of 1853, Victorian England witnessed the publication of a paste recipe by Mansfield Parkyns that most (if not all) of its readers had never come across. Termed ድልኽ [dill-ikh], this sauce appeared in the first of two volumes published by Parkyns, who had spent several years residing in Abyssinian communities like Adwa and observing the customs and habits of those residents.
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ድልኽ was, Parkyns (1853, p. 371) wrote, “the only sort of made dish” produced during his hosts’ food preparations, a universal sauce added to nearly all stews and dishes, such that “whether fish, flesh, fowl, or vegetables predominate, the same peppery and greasy sauce is always the accompaniment.” The details Parkyns (1853, p. 380) provided were limited, but they included a preliminary recipe that explained the process behind ድልኽ’s production:
[M]ade of either dry or fresh pods [of red chili pepper], cooked on a fire, with an equal quantity of onions. After they are well done, black pepper, salt, fresh ginger, and a great variety of odiferous herbs and other condiments are added, according to the taste of the maker; and the whole is worked down together on a “mout-han” kept on purpose, till it becomes of a soft, paste-like consistency.
For Parkyns, ድልኽ was the representative dish of Abyssinian culture and akin to what he noted was the “Chatney [sic] paste of India,” acting as a key additive and ingredient in the many stews, dishes, and meats served during Abyssinian meals.
However, much like the 19th-century traveler tales authored by Europeans of life abroad (Smith, 2012), Parkyns’s system of notes filtered his observations through the framework of his own experiences.
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Comparing ድልኽ with Western applications of salt and mustard, Parkyns framed the sauce as a self-contained object that was always in service of the meal it accompanied. In this cultural translation, ድልኽ became a resource exclusively valued for the aid it provided to consumption, derived “according to the taste of its maker” rather than the onions and red chili pepper of በርበረ [ber-be-re] that formed its base. In short, ድልኽ acted as nothing more than the product of human agency, a re-inscription of what Rosiek et al. (2020, p. 336) caution as “the traditional Enlightenment dichotomy between knowledge and values” that separates humans from nonhuman agents.
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Yet, this reading obscures the entanglements of ingredients like red pepper with dishes like ድልኽ, and the ways that በርበረ acted as “a staple commodity” for the communities visited by Parkyns (1853, p. 379). Indeed, as Parkyns (1853, p. 371) also records, the red pepper of በርበረ so saturated the sauce of ድልኽ “that the whole is of a bright-red hue, and a drop of the sauce is sufficient to produce a blood-red stain on any article of dress.” Much like this metaphor of blood, በርበረ ran through the very heart of Abyssinian culture, permeating (literally staining) each aspect of that community’s being: from the labor that produced its final form to the dishes that accompanied its experience. Indeed, በርበረ illuminated not just the judgments and actions of its producing communities, but the very values that helped define their identity. Through its blood-red color, it even echoed the etymology that characterized Eritrea’s eventual naming: from “the Greek eruthra—red. (Hence Eritrea, ‘the land adjoining the Red Sea’ [sic])” (Copisarow, 1962, p. 5).
As confirmed by contemporary recipe writer-editors,
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the entanglement of በርበረ extends beyond the human agency imposed by Parkyns’s account. Samuelsson (2007) and Gebreyesus (2019) cite the complex spice mix of በርበረ, which combines በርበረ with the odiferous herbs and condiments cited by Parkyns (1853), as a key flavor for Ethiopian cuisine, whereas Warren (2000) describes this spice mix as fundamental to Eritrean food. This transection of national boundaries is supported by Hassan’s (2020, p. 50) observation that በርበረ is “the spice mix of Eritrea and Ethiopia.” These and other writer-editors like Mesfin (2019) and ገብረሂወት [geb-re-he-wet] (2001) celebrate በርበረ’s experiential power in the descriptions that accompany their recipes, documenting its proliferation among Ethiopian (Samuelsson, 2007) and Eritrean families and its variation “from region to region, family to family, even neighbor to neighbor” (Hassan, 2020, p. 50). But like Parkyns, much of this variation is restricted to the single temporality of በርበረ’s transcript, which limits the spice to the observed moment of its recording. In this transcription, በርበረ’s praxis is limited to discrete lists of ingredients, measurements, and steps of preparation, in whose disengaged abstraction we lose the “otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing, and living” that positions በርበረ as a material in constant discovery of both itself and our co-existence (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 4). Here, the transcript detaches በርበረ from the “local histories, subjectivities, knowledges, narratives, and struggles against the modern/colonial order” that constitute its interrelated practice. Although it provides us with entry into በርበረ’s practice, it also buries its vitality deep within the recipe’s precision of clock time that, among other effects, separates the ingredient of በርበረ (red pepper) from the recipe of በርበረ (berbere spice mix).
It thus becomes the work of this article to unearth this otherwise of በርበረ’s relational existence from the ruins left by its documentation, examining how በርበረ’s entanglements of memory persist and even thrive within the recipe transcript. “As in quilt making and jazz improvisation, many different things are going on at the same time: different voices, different perspectives, points of views, angles of vision” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017, p. 5), all of which become superimposed onto and into በርበረ’s material structure. Beneath the recipe, then, lies the entanglements of በርበረ as it once truly lived, bridging the orality of its ever-changing practice with the eulogy left by its transcription. To interrogate the Eritrean voices present in Warren (2000), ገብረሂወት (2001), and Hassan (2020) alongside the Ethiopian memories captured by Samuelsson (2007), Mesfin (2019), and Gebreyesus (2019),
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we must therefore embrace what Barad (2017, p. 64) describes as a methodology of diffraction: “a matter of reading insights through rather than against each other to make evident the always-already entanglement of specifics ideas in their materiality.” Such a methodology of diffraction allows us, in our analysis of በርበረ, to not just differentiate how it becomes translated as matter outside of time, but to investigate the persistence of its indeterminacy, whose “infinite undoing of closure” sets the conditions for life to continue in the void enacted by በርበረ’s transcription (Barad, 2017, p. 80). As Barad (2017, p. 78) clarifies, the recipe’s precision may impose a uniformity that assimilates በርበረ, but this linear precision also leaves behind a void rich with the possibilities of life still living, and “flush” with the imaginings of what was, could be, [and] might yet have been. Adopting the recipe as framework thus allows us, on one hand, to examine what Bourdieu (1996) observes as the transcript’s ability to not just describe its content (i.e., በርበረ), but to rewrite the very nature of that content. But this framework also enables us to examine how the transcript becomes destabilized by the recipe’s required performance of play, which challenges the fixed game of ingredients and directions imposed by its rules. It is thus in our analysis of recipes that we can situate the transcript as a simultaneous space of im/possibilities, delineating the dimensions of በርበረ’s entanglements through the limits of its inscription.
The Contrary Lives of በርበረ Transcripts
As Gebreyesus (2019) records, በርበረ is the product of an experiential process whose knowing is built across the stages of its life and eventual labor: from በርበረ’s harvest to the several phases of its preparation, from the tapping of chili peppers to remove its seeds and other particles, to the wet aromatic phase of blended wet ingredients and days-long marination, until finally reaching the days-long drying stage and roasting of spices. It is, Warren (2000, p. 19) interjects, “a long and tedious process which takes several days [in Eritrea],” a labor so intensive that Ethiopian households, according to Gebreyesus (2019, p. 40), “often make it in vast quantities only a couple of times a year.”
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As these and other recipe writer-editors illustrate, በርበረ co-exists with preparers as part of a vital materiality that dictates everything from the seasonal cycles of ingredients to the availability of sunlight for drying, and, where needed, the discard of spoiled ingredients. Through this active negotiation of process, preparers operate in a relationship that Sicart (2014, p. 2) frames as constitutive of play, “brought by people to the complex interrelations with and between things that form daily life.” Far more than a condition of leisure or unquestioned fun, play for Sicart (2014, p. 6) is a way of being in the world. It permeates everything that we do, from the selection of chili peppers at the market to the labor of stem and seed removal that blunts በርበረ’s final heat. “Play is the force that pulls us together. It is a way of explaining the world, others, and ourselves” and connects us with the ingredients, tools, and objects that help tie play and playfulness together.
Citing this intense labor, the more Western-influenced recipes of Warren (2000) and Samuelsson (2007) detail an abbreviated process of በርበረ that reconfigures play for the record of its transcription, one that encourages its preparation by less-familiar readers. “This recipe is not the way it is made in Eritrea,” Warren (2000, p. 19) states succinctly, offering a two-step process that translates the subjectivity of her ingredients into an assortment of pre-ground powders. In contrast with the “curved, smooth texture, with leather red-maroon skin” of Mareko chilies popular in Ethiopia (Gebreyesus, 2019, p. 42), Warren calls more broadly for the reader to assemble ground በርበረ alongside her other ingredients, closely echoing the ground ingredients called for by Samuelsson in his recipe. In each case, play becomes regulated into a game of procedure, with specific rules that reconstruct these grounded powders along narrow lines of victory (i.e., a “successful” batch of በርበረ) and defeat. Yet, even in the more detailed instructions of writer-editors like Gebreyesus (2019, p. 40), who instructs readers to discard the stems of chilies and shake out the seeds of hotter varieties, the “visual and tactile aspects” of በርበረ’s experience is sharply limited (Pink, 2015). Gebreyesus may detail the concern of discoloration for chili peppers, but he does not specify the type or feel of discoloration that a preparer should be wary of, an absence further magnified in the silence of Warren (2000) and Samuelsson (2007) on the subject altogether. “Hence we have in principle a point-by-point correspondence and constant connection between the stimulus and the elementary perception” that reduces በርበረ’s play into a series of concrete objects (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 8). In this forced enclosure from these dimensions of lived experience, በርበረ’s sensed components thus become little more than how they are described: ingredients singularly read from a landscape of predetermined being.
The effects of this clock time thus restructure the rules that organize በርበረ’s play, effecting an enclosure that limits what በርበረ is, can, and should be. As Bourdieu (1996, p. 30) writes, “even the most literal form of writing-up (the simplest punctuation, the placing of a comma, for example, can dictate the whole sense of a phrase) represents a translation or even an interpretation” that dictates our understanding of በርበረ’s experience. Although recipe writer-editors such as Mesfin (2019, p. xvii) insist that their text is meant only as a guide “to learn to cook by instinct,” their instructions also impose limits around በርበረ’s possible forms. We may, as Hassan (2020, p. 50) suggests, “feel free to add a little bit more of one spice or less of another. . .or try swapping one for something else,” but our choices are constricted by the recipe before us. The “warmer” flavors of cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, and ginger cited by Hassan, for example, act as static ingredients, adjusted by proportion rather than the sensorialities (e.g., smell, color, and taste) of their relational use. Our relationship to በርበረ exists in a double bind that encourages us to be creative while setting implicit limits on what that creativity can be, namely, that “An Ethiopian man is always the diner; never the cook” (Mesfin, 2019, p. xvi), and that “unbridled imagination” is demanded even as the recipe restricts its selection of possible ingredients. In the rules outlined by its recipe, then, በርበረ’s play becomes reconfigured into a rigid (and rigidly gendered) game of dis/allowable encounters. It is women, not men, who bear the brunt of responsibility for በርበረ’s preparation, and even in the exception of authorship by Samuelsson (2007) and Gebreyesus (2019), maternal figures are cited as the key influences for its transmission.
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Within these restricted paths of being, በርበረ’s agency becomes reduced to a promise of precision from its volume measurements, whose “translation, convertibility, mobility of meanings, and universality” guarantees a uniform experience for recipe players (Haraway, 1988, p. 580). And yet, the neat units of teaspoons and tablespoons detailed by recipe writer-editors like Hassan (2020), who calls for ½ teaspoons of ground ginger and nutmeg, and Gebreyesus (2019), who calls for 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon, may define the “problem” of በርበረ more simply, but the ease of translation promised by these metrics impoverishes our knowledge of በርበረ’s experience. Rather than treat በርበረ as an equal partner in the knowledge practices of preparers, its ingredients instead become relabeled as resources to conquer, a normalization that, as Trammell and Crenshaw (2020) note, displaces play in favor of these quantitative mechanics and ready-made powders. In this algorithm of በርበረ production, the recipe, rather than the reader, becomes the principal authority of በርበረ preparation, flattening the aroma of በርበረ’s roasted spices and bright-red color into a set of numbers that regulate the efficiency of its applied ingredients. Far more than just displace the preparer’s body, this algorithm displaces the knowledge developed by preparers in this reciprocal exchange with በርበረ. It contributes to what de Certeau et al. (1998, p. 220) caution as “the erasing of numerous small procedures. . . whose secret will disappear along with the memory of the older generation.” Debates over ingredients, suppliers, and best practices are elided by the exacting recipes shared by Hassan (2020) and Gebreyesus (2019), as they and other writer-editors elevate በርበረ’s reproducibility at the expense of its social memory (Isaac, 2019).
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In this formalized system of knowledge, the orality of what is unsaid becomes forgotten, replaced by the new rules enacted by በርበረ’s colonization. These exacting measurements thus act as a type of death for በርበረ’s experiential play, offering a seemingly permanent recipe that dominates the conditions for how በርበረ can be practiced. The recipe may promise በርበረ’s faithful recreation, but its restrictions place us as always just beyond the reach of its game’s promised victory.
The Relocation of Life in the Recipe Transcript
It would be wrong, however, for us to restrict our conversation to the exclusions enacted by the recipe transcript. “Words are, of course, spoken to do things as well as to say things—they have practical and social impact as well as communication function,” Hodder (1994, p. 112) notes. As he explains, the text of recipes can speak differently across different contexts, such that “there is often a tension between the concrete nature of the written word, its enduring nature, and the continuous potential for rereading meanings in new contexts, undermining the authority of the word.” In this tension of text and context, the recipe and its preparer continuously define and redefine the other through the practice of their encounter, generating not just new meanings and disclosures, but new rules for the recipe’s engagement.
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As Mukherjee (2017, p. 7) details in his analysis of the postcolonial in videogames, players do not always play by the rules of empire. Rather, they “play back” against empire’s colonial connections, sometimes adapting empire’s practices but also pushing back against its rules, and even, in some cases “refusing to play the game of the colonizers” altogether. We must therefore be careful, as Mukherjee notes, to avoid “this ‘othered’ thinking” of Western rationality that posits the transcript as the space of all that exists, and that simultaneously posits the unsaid as “that which literally doesn’t matter” (Barad, 2017, p. 77). Instead, we must embrace the void left by በርበረ’s transcription to determine its possibilities for life still living and explore the indeterminacy of exchange that affects how exactly this spice becomes produced.
As Barad (2017, p. 78) notes, the re-discovery of በርበረ’s local practice cannot be possible without troubling the opposition of life and death—in the transcript, that which is/isn’t said—or which discourages their connection. The void, Barad explains, “is a dynamism of indeterminacy, a threading through of living with dying and dying with living, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming that cannot a-void matters of life and death.” It is thus from the “death” enacted by exclusions like the recipe’s volume measurements that we can re-experience በርበረ’s opportunities for life—in other words, to continue living through the spaces of its nonmention. Mesfin (2019) helps demonstrate the experiential potential that volume measurements can have beyond the simple quantities they carry. Adopted alongside weight measurements, the cup is the only unit of volume that appears in his recipe. Of course, this could be explained in part by the 15 pounds of በርበረ called for by this recipe, which produces a far greater yield of በርበረ than the 3 cups promised by Warren (2000) or the “generous” ½ cup in Gebreyesus (2019). And it could also be explained as one of the many differences that exist between families in how they prepare በርበረ, as Samuelsson (2007) and Hassan (2020) clarify. But one needs to only examine Mesfin’s description of cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom—each ¼ cup—to understand the cup’s implicit avoidance of smaller volume units, given the more likely translation of ¼ cup (for spices) into 4 tablespoons. The measuring cup may standardize the cooking process (Sutton, 2006), distributing the recipe’s ingredients into manageable units, but Mesfin’s cup operates as a boundary object that translates more than it exacts. It frustrates the precision enacted by the tablespoon by acting as a tool of convenient reference rather than measurement, working in consultation with the reader’s hands, eyes, and body as we determine the approximate amount we are expected to add. Put another way, this cup limits its advice so that we may judge for ourselves the final proportions we adopt in each preparation, balancing our measurements of ingredients like “sacred basil” (1 cup) against the 1 lb. of rue seed. Akin to Samuelsson’s (2007, p. xi) suggestion that we “put aside the measuring cups and spoons and instead use a handful here and a pinch there” in the spirit of ubuntu, Mesfin (2019) challenges us to reorient ourselves at the center of his stated recipe, preserving the knowledge of our experience in the uncertainty of its measurements.
Together with writer-editors like ገብረሂወት (2001), Mesfin’s (2019) recipe illustrates the reciprocity that exists between ingredient measurements and the preparer’s body (Sutton, 2006), each of whom work together to shape and transform the other. Where Mesfin limits the adoption of weight to the recipe’s most valued ingredients—በርበረ, ginger roots, garlic, and rue seed—ገብረሂወት instead eschews the concept of volume instruments altogether, building her recipe around the mass units of grams and kilograms and a detailed process that calls for, among other ingredients, wet and dry versions of ginger and onion. Weight is the primary means through which በርበረ is assembled for Mesfin and ገብረሂወት, but while mass offers the impression of more exacting measurements than volume, such as that hoped for by the scientist (Haraway, 1988), its practice of experience is closely tied to our experience of how that weight should appear and feel. Indeed, the time pressures implicit in cooking
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discourage the exact measurement of ingredients as small as 10 g (de Certeau et al., 1998), as in the case of black seed, coriander, ground ginger, long pepper, black pepper, and rue seed in ገብረሂወት (2001), frustrating the promise that mass offers for neatly reproducible recipes. Thus, rather than support an aperspectival objectivity that assumes the reader as interchangeable, “unmarked by nationality, by sensory dullness or acuity, by training or tradition; by quirky apparatus, by colourful writing style, or by any other idiosyncrasy that might interfere with the communication, comparison and accumulation of results” (Daston, 1992, p. 609), the mass-based recipe offers approximations specific to the reader’s perception of weight. Mass here is judged not by its placement on a scale, but on how heavy an ingredient appears to our eyes, as conveyed by its pressure on our hands as we hold it, its height and depth, and the changes that result from its combination with other ingredients.
The playful entanglements underscored by Mesfin’s (2019) and ገብረሂወት’s (2001) weight-influenced recipes help situate their recipes as part of a much wider, and more unstable, place-making encounter, interconnected with the ratios of ingredient sights, smells, textures, and sounds (Pink, 2015). We can appreciate how, as Sutton (2006, p. 309) observes, “the ingredients themselves become ‘tools’ and perform the role of ‘measuring’ other ingredients,” with the ratios of onion, ginger, and garlic adapted to the recipe’s unstable measurements of በርበረ and spices. When we thus marinate the preliminary mixture of በርበረ, garlic, ginger, red onion, rue seed, sacred basil, and bishop weed for 12 hours, as in the case of Mesfin, or visually compare the roast of fenugreek until, like mustard seed, it turns a light reddish-brown hue, as ገብረሂወት notes, we act as sensory ethnographers in constant discovery of በርበረ’s material properties. “No two women—even mother and daughter—never [sic] cook a dish the same way,” Mesfin (2019, p. xvii) explains in his reading of the practice, such that it does not matter whether explicit instructions are provided to mix powdered ingredients (Samuelsson, 2007; Warren, 2000), or more vague directions are given to roast spices for about 2 minutes until they are aromatic (Gebreyesus, 2019; Hassan, 2020). The result will always be something different, a state of superposition that oscillates በርበረ between its recipe and the realities of its production,
not to be here or there, or even simply here and there: rather. . .indeterminately here-there—that is, there is no fact of the matter (it is not simply that it is unknown) as to whether it is here or there. (Barad, 2017, p. 65)
Akin to the given particle of quantum physics, በርበረ’s diffraction patterns are produced from its location in multiple places, radiating through the simultaneous agencies of its preparers and materiality of ingredients. Thus, በርበረ lives not in the localized place of its definition (i.e., the recipe), but in the waves of spacetimematter dispersed through its preparation. This noncompliance with the recipe’s game is what enables the preparer to not just “play back” against the expectations of its ingredients and directions (Mukherjee, 2017), but to play with their own rules for what በርበረ can and should be.
The Assemblages and Hauntings of Our Ongoing Pasts
As Mesfin (2019) details in his cookbook, the transmission of በርበረ’s recipe is most often derived from the mentorship of a family’s matriarch, who passes its knowledge to her daughter or, in the case of Gebreyesus (2019), inspires their interest to learn more. Its preparation acts as a generational link between a preparer and the traditions of their family, confirming de Certeau et al.’s (1998, p. 222) observation that
the everyday work in kitchens remains a way of unifying matter and memory, life and tenderness, the present moment and the abolished past, invention and necessity, imagination and tradition-tastes, smells, colors, flavors, shapes, consistencies, actions, gestures, movements, people and things, heat, savorings, spices, and condiments.
Cooking may be individual, as Mesfin (2019) writes, but it is also deeply connected to the collaborative histories of one’s family with their social and natural environments, challenging “the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought” that posits በርበረ as a stable object formed solely through the actions of its preparer (Bennett, 2010, p. xvi). If we are to truly access the force of በርበረ’s thing-power, we must, as Bennett implores us to do, push our gaze beyond the recipe into the collaborative practice of human and nonhuman agency. Such a story “highlight[s] the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other” as part of a shared ecology of horizontal, rather than vertical, differences (Bennett, 2010, p. 4). The transcript is not, as the game of በርበረ’s recipe might suggest, a unidirectional encounter of reader to subject, but is instead a relation whose encounter co-constitutes the core of how we, and በርበረ, come to be.
Indeed, by engaging with the techniques and instructions that በርበረ recipes request we follow, we also play through the assemblages left by their continuous re-making. As Tsing (2015, p. 23) reminds us, “Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them,” with patterns of unintended coordination that create, like polyphonic music, spaces of harmony within their discordant melodies. “To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather,” situating, for example, the “aromatic” roast of spices as intertwined with the tradition of roasted coffee beans during Eritrean and Ethiopian coffee ceremonies. Like the intensive process behind these coffee traditions (Gebreyesus, 2019; Hassan, 2020; Mesfin, 2019), the labor of በርበረ operates in many ways as a meditative, if not sometimes torturous (Trammell, 2020), practice of play whose ceremony “focus[es] attention to a way of living awake in the world” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 49). In the instructions of writer-editors to “warm” or “roast” በርበረ’s spices, for example, we are implicitly asked to draw upon the many threads of our past knowledge and being, whether that be in the trial-and-error of experience or the lessons shared by other recipe players. Contrary to the recipe’s expectations, roasting spices requires us to reside in the past as much as it does the present, in conversations had and avoided, advice heeded and ignored, and gestures real and imagined, all blended into the aromatic process that folds these spices into በርበረ’s other ingredients. It is in the recipe, then, that we connect with the traditions of those who have come before, those who, even in their physical absence (e.g., death) or the difference characterized by their stories (e.g., other nonhuman species), have “been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 18).
We are, in short, haunted by the ghosts of በርበረ’s past preparers, whose recipes offer less a promise of exact recreation than a power to “marr[y] the mundane to the sacred” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 51). Far from any obliteration of being, በርበረ’s recipe provides us with the metaphysical trace of what it means to have been (and continue to be) through the co-existence of its labor. It is in this void of what is left out that we are haunted, as Barad (2017, p. 74) reminds us, by the whispers and mutterings that infiltrate the recipe’s efforts to “smooth” the ever-unstable relations of our past. “Hauntings are not immaterial, and they are not mere recollections or reverberations of what was,” they write. “Hauntings are an integral part of existing material conditions,” hope-lessly (hope-fully?) entangled with the unfinished events of a past that are still unfolding. በርበረ may be connected to the experiences of past authors, but its preparation is infused with the unstable memories that structure how its materiality is realized, tied to the subjective practice of who, and how, we remember. As Samuelsson (2013, p. 4) writes in the opening chapter of his memoir, በርበረ is “in the DNA of every Ethiopian mother,” but it also structures the cultural and familial histories that shape one’s self-identity. Citing the red tin that houses his own personal blend of the spice mix,
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Samuelsson (2013, p. 4) himself connects በርበረ to recollections of his mother, whose early death displaces his memories with the vague, secondhand accounts of those who knew her best. “For me,” he notes, “my mother is berbere.” No picture may exist of her, but she emerges in the red-orange powder of this “universal” spice mix, in much the same way as her features emerge through the contours of Samuelsson’s own face. በርበረ thus operates for Samuelsson as a personal project of remembrance (Ahad, 2016), part of what Barad (2017, p. 73) confirms as an “atomic past [that] not only haunts the present but is alive in the thickness of the here and now.” Its recipe may limit its promise to the margins of a single moment, but its materiality haunts the very question of what it means for us to simultaneously know and experience the fragments of our ongoing past.
Conclusion: The Polyphony of Reading Through Diffraction
In his review of oral and literate cultures, Connerton (1989, p. 75) highlights how the recipe, like the standard edition and canonic work, is fixed in its account of በርበረ, offering a closed composition that, over time, limits what the spice mix can be. “When the memories of a culture begin to be transmitted mainly by the reproduction of their inscriptions rather than by ‘live’ tellings,” he writes, “improvisation becomes increasingly difficult and innovation is institutionalized.” In its capture of events, the recipe erects a barrier between what it in/excludes, replacing the subjectivity of sensory practice with a promise of reproducible certainty. And as warned by Busau (2020, p. 231) in the ትግርኛ proverb that first began this essay, the certainty of this transcript eventually replaces the improvisation that defines በርበረ’s practice, such that its many “small procedures” are eventually forgotten in the tangibility of its ingredients and measurements (de Certeau et al., 1998). It is in the transcript that በርበረ’s radical possibilities of play ultimately become transformed into a rules-based game with fixed parameters for in/correct behavior.
But the recipe also carries pockets of remembrance and life amid its omissions, entanglements whose performance (i.e., በርበረ’s preparation) exposes the indeterminacy of its material product. As Barad (2017, p. 66) reminds us, there is no determinate path for how the particle of በርበረ’s play is performed across the recipe’s steps—“that is, no such path exists”—and it would be wrong for us to equate the recipe with the certainty spelled out by its ingredients and directions. Like diffraction patterns, the transcript “is a superposition or a sum of all possible paths—they all coexist and mutually contribute to the overall pattern” of በርበረ’s composition (p. 66), which is to say that its recipe is layered with the patterns of possibility left by its difference and accessed through its play. Yet, Barad also clarifies that alongside the recipe’s spatial diffraction of ingredients and directions are the temporal diffractions of its practiced past, continuously re-experienced through the gestures, thoughts, and impulses prompted by በርበረ’s play. “The diffraction pattern, in this case, is a manifestation of different times bleeding through one another” (p. 68), disrupting our understanding of when (and thus how) its events take place. Beneath the manifested text of this article’s six recipes, then, are the intertwined voices, perspectives, and lessons produced by the spice’s play (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017), and whose wisdom will guide the later recommendations of practice adopted by experienced preparers. In this way, በርበረ’s transmission is structured by the histories that radiate from the mosaic of its transcription. በርበረ may exist within the linearity enforced by its recipe, but its “radical potential” of play helps to trouble those unidirectional assumptions of time, progress, and procedure spelled out by its transcription (Barad, 2017).
In analyzing the recipes of Warren (2000), ገብረሂወት (2001), Hassan (2020), Samuelsson (2007), Mesfin (2019), and Gebreyesus (2019) through a diffractive lens, this article thus offers a theoretical contribution that situates the transcript as a place of exciting possibility rather than exclusive domination, one that resists and contradicts as much as it seeks to colonize and define. Alongside the voice of Warren (2000) and Samuelsson (2007), for example, we hear the polyphonic voices of acquaintances and families in their respective travels across Eritrea and Ethiopia, and through Hassan (2020), Mesfin (2019), and ገብረሂወት (2001), we hear the generational lessons offered by በርበረ’s matrilineal experts. And we also connect, in the “signature, rich, dark red color” noted by Gebreyesus (2019), to the hauntings enacted by በርበረ’s material vitality, from the encounter of “blood-red” ድልኽ cited by Parkyns (1853) in his travels to Adwa to the very etymology that links present-day Eritrea’s naming to this very color (Copisarow, 1962). Although obscured by the clock time and voice of the recipe transcript’s “now” (Barad, 2017), በርበረ’s entanglements nevertheless persist in the connections of life provided by its labor. It thrives (perhaps contrarily) within the carefully managed silence of the transcript’s homogeneous void and pushes us to consider how else life might be lived within the records of our ongoing practice.
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