52 pages • 1 hour read
The Language of Baklava
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Chapters 23-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary: “HTML”
Diana returns to the US a few months after Bud, feeling sure that she is “ready to be home again” (316). However, she suffers culture shock, missing Jordan terribly and finding America alien. She resigns from her university position and moves to Portland, teaching at a university there in fall. Meanwhile, Arabian Jazz has been published and receives all kinds of reactions, from positive reviews to letters containing criticisms and complaints. She is accused of writing “depressing things” about Arabs and of being the “disappointing American child” who is not Arab enough (319). She feels alone.
Diana is assigned a tutor to teach her HTML at work: a young man called Scott. Over several months, Scott and Diana meet for private lessons, often in his apartment. He is attentive and they become close. When they finally kiss, Diana walks out in the rain, shaking and “stunned with fear” (321). She eventually buys familiar Jordanian foods from an international shop and takes them back to Scott’s flat, where he is waiting for her. They share the food and she feels “not captured, but saved” (323). The recipe “Ful for Love” follows (323).
Chapter 24 Summary: “The First Meal”
Bud returns to America ready to embrace the country and finally opens his own restaurant in a golf course: “Bud’s Family Fun Center” (324). He serves American food and gossips and chats with patrons. He tries and fails to learn golf. After two years, he hands the restaurant over to his daughter Monica, as he is tired: “Though it was filled with Americans, the shack resembled an over-crowded, talk-heavy Jordanian coffeehouse” (326). While he and his brothers fly between Jordan and America over the next years, his two younger daughters have children, “babies who’ve stupefied him with love and pleasure” (326).
Diana identifies herself as a “hopeless case” who can never settle down in one place or one culture (327). She is constantly restless and protests, “Why must there be only one home!” (328). She ends with the words: “And so I go. Into the world, away” (328).
Chapters 23-24 Analysis
The last two chapters of the memoir are about finding The Places, People, and Feelings that Constitute Home. Bud is the one who manages it best. He finally opens his longed-for restaurant, where, despite the fare being American, the atmosphere is Jordanian. However, Bud tires of the place because his “instinct to serve, to cook, to talk, to welcome” means he can never close his doors or say no (326). returning to Jordan for visits after this, he feels most at home now in America, where his beloved grandchildren live and adore him: “He is no longer—not entirely—Jordanian” (326).
Diana finds only a partial home. Returning from Jordan she is “set loose in a wilderness” that tears her in two (317). She does things “to make [herself] feel even more isolated” (318), moving away from the job and people she knows. The mixed reception of her novel makes her feel even more alone, but she recognizes her own responsibility for her state: “[P]erhaps I enjoy feeling judged, criticized and deeply misunderstood” (319). This may be the legacy of an upbringing with a controlling and critical father and frequent movement between two cultures where she never felt completely at ease. Her slow-burn relationship with the patient and understanding Scott, a character in strong contrast to Bud, offers her a place of safety in the presence of someone who sees her and listens to her story.
In a final reflection on Chosen and Unchosen Identities, Diana describes her two selves: one that is drawn to the foods and smells of family and the other “a wild bird, easy to startle away” (327). It is the second that owns and wants nothing, but merely to describe. That is her writing self.
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