N.S. Nuseibeh on Migratory Alchemy
The British Palestinian author talks about the very personal story of her book Namesake
This month on the Lecker Book Club, Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman, by N. S. Nuseibeh. Namesake is a collection of essays exploring what it means to be a young, secular Muslim woman today, told through the lens of stories of the author's ancestor, Nusaybah, the only woman warrior to have fought alongside the Prophet.
N. S. Nuseibeh is a British Palestinian writer and researcher, born and raised in East Jerusalem. In Namesake, she weaves her own experiences of anxiety, of racism, of joy, of illness, of cooking in shared houses, of aubergines, with the myths and legends told of her ancestor. And this makes this a book that I think should be required reading for everyone.
Photo: Catherine Ramsey
Lecker Book Club is a monthly (ish!) feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? What did you think? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
It was tricky to figure out exactly how to approach this interview, if I'm being completely honest.
I really wanted to give N the space to talk about the book in its breadth and depth and beauty, because she deserves to celebrate this. It's an incredibly intelligently written and funny and stunning and triumphant piece of writing, which lays out the complex and often painful reality of existing as a Palestinian person in the world within the author's own lifetime, alongside the historical context.
I also really wanted to talk to her about Palestinian food because that's something we've talked about together before, and her writing about it, her writing about aubergines, about Jerusalem breakfasts. They're stunning and mouth watering, and they are in this interview as well, so I was really pleased to be able to do that too.
But it’s obviously impossible to talk about Palestinian history without talking about the present. To begin, I want to quote the author; she begins Namesake with a note that acknowledges that the book was written and finalizsed before the events that unfolded during and after the 7th of October, 2023.
“I have no idea how long this war will last, whether Gaza will exist by the time of publication. There is no point writing down the number of children killed. That number will have been dwarfed by the time you read this. My intention with this book was to bring certain narratives, Muslim, Arab and Palestinian ones, into the cultural consciousness of those outside the Arab world.
I wanted to write for others who know these same narratives well, and also to show those who don't how much we actually have in common. Look at me, I write in these essays. I'm not so different from you. And wouldn't you want freedom? It is clear to me now that this is futile.
Instead, reader, whoever you are, I simply hope that whenever you open this book, you think of Gaza.”
N and I spoke via video call, and to begin I asked her to give an overview of Namesake, for those who haven't read it.
N.S. Nuseibeh: So, the book is called Namesake, and it's a collection of essays that uses the figure of Nusaybah bint Ka'ab, who is this 7th century warrior woman in Arabia who, apparently is my ancestor. Supposedly, they say! I don't know if I believe it, but I use this figure and the stories about her as a kind of way to explore a range of different subjects from anxiety to motherhood to language to, of course, food.
We do have – interestingly – like, quite a lot of records that suggest that she was a real person and that, like, our lineage does trace down from her. I don't know. I just kind of don't believe it. She sounds too cool to be real.
L: And you write in the book that, when you started, you felt like writing about Nusaybah would be “less controversial” when you're writing about Palestine and about Jerusalem specifically. Did you still feel like that was the case after you finished writing?
N: When I first thought of the idea of somehow kind of using this figure in a book somehow, it was quite a while ago, and it was at a point in the British consciousness when I think people were starting to you know, feel a bit more positively, or a bit more curious maybe, about Islam in general.
There was a book called It's Not About the Burqa that came out that did quite well. Non Muslims were starting to be like, Oh yeah, maybe it's not that bad. Let's make it cool. And also at a time when sort of lots of Greek goddesses, Roman mythology was being sort of reinterpreted and looked at from like a feminist point of view. So between those two things, I thought, oh yeah, this, this warrior woman ancestor of mine…it seems like people might be interested in her.
But I guess as I wrote the book and as I did more research and as I found that I couldn't really extricate this character from questions about Palestinian-ness and Arab-ness and Muslim feminism, it sort of I ended up not being able to avoid the controversial.
I think I had a clear intention when I set out to write the essays that I would sort of talk about a Muslim Arab experience, maybe a British experience, but I would avoid the subject of Palestine. I didn't really want to write about Jerusalem or about being Palestinian. You know, I wanted it to be like less personal, less revealing, less specific.
Yeah, I didn't want to get anybody's back up! Because I'm a very deeply ingrained people pleaser. So it's just like, you know, I'll just write about something that's like nice and inoffensive. But I just found that like I couldn't.
L: That's also a horrible weight to bear, that you feel like you have to do that.
N: Yep. Yep. But I mean, as the last six months have shown, being Palestinian is not something that. is considered vanilla in the world. Like it's not an apolitical thing. And I thought that I could kind of just put it to the side and, you know, be a kind of more general person and have more generalities to connect with people over, but you know, I – even in writing about food, like I couldn't avoid talking about Jerusalem, about being Palestinian. Like it just, it kept coming back in.
I found I just couldn't be honest…yeah, without talking about this very fundamental aspect of myself, which is that I am Palestinian and I was brought up in Jerusalem. And that's where my family is. And, you know, if you're talking about, like, ancestry and if you're talking about all sorts of like all the questions that I thought were more general ended up being so stupidly specific.
L: The first chapter of Namesake is about aubergines. Can you tell us why you started with aubergines?
N: So I write in the book that food is a way of making myself and my Palestinian-ness literally palatable to people, and I think that's probably why I wanted to start the book with that essay. I felt like I could draw readers in, like, look, it's just a book about delicious things. Oh, surprise, twist, there's some politics.
And I guess I also, I found it a particularly interesting story about my ancestor. The the one that that Aubergines chapter draws on is about this Nusaybah woman making a meal for the Prophet and then fasting. And it just seemed like a really interesting way into looking at her as a more sort of three dimensional character.
L: Can you tell me about beitinjan battiri, and why this dish feels like such an impossible one to recreate?
N: Yeah, oh my god, beitinjan battiri is my favorite dish ever. It's a beautiful blend of meat and spices and tomatoes and this perfect small deliciously sweet type of aubergine that comes from this village in the West Bank called Battir. And I guess it feels like home.
It feels, in some ways at least, impossible to recreate because I don't have access to these special aubergines unless I'm in Palestine, but also to local sort of Palestinian produce more widely.
L: You also talk about the dish mujadarrah is both something historic, so you describe it as a 13th century recipe and it's also very contemporary, something your sister in law might cook on weeknights because it's cheap, it's easy, it's delicious. I found this really interesting and really moving, actually, as an English person whose food culture does not feel historic, whose food culture feels very borrowed, stolen, you know, from the colonial past that we have.
I have sort of ended up maybe feeling slightly rootless when it comes to my food culture. And I guess I'm really interested in your experience as a Palestinian person who has spent a long time in the UK studying. Did you feel a tension in those two very different experiences and cultures when you came to the UK?
N: Yeah, I mean, I do think the food and eating culture is really important. different outside the Arab world. I mean, I grew up with everyone wanting to feed me constantly with food being this sort of casual, but communal thing. And it's, it is much more individualised in the UK.
I mean, you have to have dinner parties if you want a communal eating experience, people don't just share food as a given. So I guess over the years, I've learned to kind of individualise my cooking a bit.
Yeah, I remember listening actually to an episode of Lecker a while ago where you interviewed Fliss Freeborn about her student cookbook, and her saying everyone would go around to hers all the time for meals because she'd cook, but in my experience it was actually quite hard people getting people to want to sit and share food with me.
N: Once you get older, there's maybe more of a relaxation around food, but in a kind of university environment, which is the one that I've been in for most of the time that I've been in the UK, people want to, if they're socialising, they want to play drinking games and drunkenly get like chips and gravy or whatever.
They don't really do the kind of excessive food that's part of that kind of food culture and it's partly, you know…maybe it's partly a budget thing, but also people will spend that money on alcohol. So I don't think it is necessarily, it's just You know, it's kind of, what do you see as a kind of social lubricant or as a good time?
And I don't feel like the people that I've interacted with in Britain see food as a social lubricant. They see alcohol as a social lubricant. It completely changes the sort of dynamics around eating together.
L: You talk a lot in the book about the idea of positionality. I'm interested in your views on that around food or cooking. Do you think positionality is important when we talk about those things?
N: Yeah, absolutely. I think so because in food, as in other culture, there's the risk of appropriation, of, you know, using and benefitting from the culture of more oppressed groups. So I do think it's important to be sort of mindful of that if we can be. But I also, I really liked what Anya von Bremzen said on one of your earlier episodes about cutting the bullshit and just saying, this is racial injustice, you know, rather than talking about appropriation.
Like, I just thought that was so true, you know, like in the case of Palestinian food, for instance, there's definitely something that sort of is painful for me when foreigners refer to a cucumber and tomato salad as an Israeli salad rather than a Palestinian salad, because. To me, it's obvious that that's a Palestinian salad that has been appropriated by Israeli culture.
Or, you know. Something like Sabra Hummus, which is, you know, sold all over the UK. You see it on shelves in supermarkets, owned by a huge Israeli company. And again, it's like, they're profiting from a Palestinian or from an Arab dish, from an Arab way of making hummos, you know, and that's what appropriation is.
But then again, as Anya said, it boils down to racial injustice. So that's the important part. The appropriation part is like, yes, that's an offshoot of it, but the racial injustice is at the core.
At the same time, I don't want to come across as like, weirdly like, purist about food. Like, I think there's something really beautiful that happens with food. That kind of, I don't know, migratory alchemy that happens when, you know, people take local ingredients, to make versions of foreign dishes or the other way around.
I learned a lot and I've incorporated a lot into my own cooking from like various flatmates that I've had who've been, whether British, but like also Italian or Pakistani. And, you know, they've shown me different ways of like, of thinking about food and ingredients. And then I've taken those ways of thinking about food ingredients and applied them to Palestinian dishes that I know well. So there's also something, you know, lovely that happens with that mixing. It's just the appropriation is the profiting off of it, which I think is, you know, the racial injustice part.
L: As this well as this amazing historical research you have, there's so many contemporary sources in the book. It feels so present, and I just wondered if you would be able to mention a few of your favourites that you talk about, specifically some Palestinian writers who write about food.
N: Yeah, sure. I would highly recommend that everyone go out and get Sami Tamimi's Falastin cookbook because it's beautiful. It's full of great recipes. He's got even like lots of bread recipes that are really amazing, including a recipe for ka’ek. I tried, I did try to make it myself in London and it did not turn out very well, but I don't blame the recipe. That's, again, my own cooking, clearly.
I, also would recommend Laila El-Haddad, she wrote a book called The Gaza Kitchen, which is also really beautiful and she herself is Palestinian who grew up in the diaspora, but she did spend time in Gaza around 2010, I think. And she collected stories and recipes from the locals there. And it's like one of the few sort of cookbooks about Gazan food that's in English. I've never had the opportunity to go to Gaza, but I have family members there. And my immediate family has also been there and talked about how good Gazan food is. They have like a big focus on fish because they're obviously on the coast.
And I would highly recommend also following Hamada Shakura, who is a Palestinian food blogger, and he's incredible, you know, like most people in Gaza, he's like, he's lost an inconceivable amount of…well, just everything, you know, his home and livelihood and family and displaced several times, et cetera.
But he went viral a little while ago for the meals that he was making from aid packages in Gaza. And he just makes these incredible, like little videos on TikTok and stuff. Just a beautiful insight into what's going on in Gaza, but through a food perspective. And he's pretty funny as well. I mean, amazingly, people keep their humour and their warmth and their humanity, despite being dehumanised.
And, in terms of sort of less food focused, but other people. People that incorporate food into their writing. Hala Alyan is a beautiful novelist who also has very rich descriptions of food in her writing. And again, as someone interesting to follow and to read.
L: To finish, I guess I just wanted to ask you, what does it mean to look at figures like Nusaybah in this particular environment? What does it mean to kind of celebrate this incredibly historic culture at a time when so much of a, you know, of a culture is being destroyed?
N: Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. I guess one honest answer would be that I really haven't thought about her very much because yeah…the reality of living through this, this genocide has been sort of overwhelming and it's kind of put things like historical figures kind of on the back burner.
But also, I guess it's made me think, I mean, the, the kind of experiences that people in Gaza in the West Bank all over Palestinians are going through Palestinian women, they are just…they're surviving so much, they're incredibly powerful and strong, and, you know, so, so much more powerful and strong than I am.
And, you know, here I am writing about this, like, historical figure who was brave a few times in battle, but she wasn't actually subject to, you know, aerial bombardment 24/7. She didn't have her entire home, you know, destroyed in a matter of minutes. I think actually in a lot of ways, the people that are living today are much braver and much more interesting than she was.
Like I feel a bit silly really for having drawn her for inspiration, but, but also maybe, I don't know, it's, it's nice, or I think maybe it's important at a time when so much of Palestinian culture and as well as Palestinian life is being demonised or erased or, um, or yeah, vilified in some way and, um, and denied, it's good, nice to have stories about the past that we hold on to, you know, I think that that is important in the same way that it's important to hold on to our food, our different types of food, our dishes.
Yeah, actually I wanted to say there's this really interesting project based partly out of this village that I mentioned earlier, Battir, where they make the beautiful aubergines.
I don't know if you've come across it. It's called the Palestinian Heritage Seed Library. It's really cool. It was founded by a Palestinian woman called Vivien Sansour, and what it does is work on preserving and promoting heritage and threatened seed varieties and traditional Palestinian farming practices and the stories and identities that are sort of associated with them.
So like, Sansour finds key seed varieties…I remember I saw pictures of these incredible carrots that were huge, like giant carrots and food crops that were sort of threatened with extinction and she works to actively preserve their bioculture and recuperate the local landscape.
It's sort of a similar idea, like I'm trying to do it with a story, but she's doing it much more practically and importantly with food. And you know, it's again, this idea of like the past and this, our heritage and land and stories, all of it being kind of connected and important to preserve.
Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman by N.S. Nuseibeh is out now, published by Canongate.
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was extensively edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a fuller version of my conversation with N.S. Nuseibeh, click here for the podcast.
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