From Hunger to Hospitality: Food, Memory, and Collective Identity in Mohammed Dib’s La Grande Maison and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent

Abstract

Background This study explored food memory in Mohammed Dib’s La Grande Maison and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. Recent scholarship conceptualizes food as a symbolic and cultural medium that shapes memory, identity, exile, trauma, and belonging rather than merely satisfying physical needs. The analysis reveals how, in both novels, food serves as a medium for communicating and representing historical experience and collective identity. Methods Methodologically, the paper uses a qualitative comparative literary approach, comprising close reading of selected passages that address hunger, bread, cooking, taste, and smell, as they relate to the food-memory theories of David E. Sutton (2001) and Jon D. Holtzman (2006). Results The results show that in La Grande Maison, food is an absence, a hunger, a poverty, a lack of bread that keeps alive the painful memory of colonial persecution and collective Algerian suffering. Food in Crescent, on the other hand, works by the presence of others: presence through shared tables and through diasporic memories and identities recreated with the Arab meal. In both novels, food serves as a shared historical experience that is remembered from one generation to the next, even as there are differences. Conclusions The novelty of the paper is that it does not take into account the comparative aspect of food absence and presence within a single food-memory concept, which is not studied in the pair of novels. It extends the scope of comparative literary and food studies by enriching discourses on food, memory, and identity in colonial and diasporic writings. This multifaceted perspective can be applied to other fields of study, such as trauma, migration, and cultural studies in other postcolonial and diasporic settings, in future research.