"playing the game of words": Notes Towards Day 17 (Tues, Nov. 1)

"My Madame knows that intrigue, like salt, is best if it is there from the beginning." (177)
"Salt enhances the sweetness." (185)
"She had added a spoonful of salt to the water to help cleanse the wound." (201)
"Before I could taste my mother's milk, I tasted the salt on her nipple" (217).
"Powered sugar, cracker crumb, salt...the snow" (225).
"Tell me the word for 'salt'" (241).
"I charge four times the usual price for a salt print like that one." (246)

"Salt is an ingredient to be considered and carefully weighed....The true taste of salt--the whole of the sea on the tip of the tongue, sorrow's sting, labor's smack--has been lost, according to my Madame, to centuries of culinary imprudence. It is a taste that Miss Toklas insists is sometimes unnecessary...and other times...it is the hinge that allows the flavors of the other ingredients to swing wide open" (212).

"Salt, I thought. GertrudeStein, what kind? Kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea. Madame, they are not all the same. Their stings, their smarts, their strengths, the distinctions among them are fine. Do you know, GertrudeStein, which ones I have tasted on my tongue? (260-261).

onewhowalks really nailed/blew open this lyrical sequence, with a posting about "binh/lots wife" (which got a coupla snaps):

For my first reflection on The Book of Salt, I want to talk about some biblical salt. First, the title of Truong's novel replicates the style of the titles of each Biblical "Book:" Book of Esther, Book of Job, Book of Genesis, etc. 

The first book of the Old Testament is the Book of Genesis. Chapter 19 holds the story of Lot, a nephew of Abraham, who lived in Sodom. God had decided to destroy Sodom because of how sinful it was; namely, that gay sex was popular in Sodom (think: SODOMy). Because Lot lived there, Abraham pleaded with God to spare Sodom; God compromised that if 10 "righteous" were found there, the city would not be destroyed.  Angels were sent to Sodom and Gomorrah; they stay with Lot. The men of the town gather around his house so that they might "know" the men who are staying with them- he offers his virgin, engaged daughters up for sex to spare the 2 traveling men/angels. The men of the town accuse him of being a judgemental foreigner, and the angels make all the men blind. They then tell Lot that God is going to destroy the town and that he should take his wife and daughters and leave. As God rains down burning sulfur on the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife looks back, in sorrow for lost roots. God turns her into a pillar of salt. 

God isn't just warning against homosexuality, he's warning against nostalgia. 

Christianity IS a presence in the Book of Salt- not just in the title, but The Old Man (whose voice/ideals/morals stay with Binh even after Binh is away from his father) was deeply involved with The Church. But twisted. Binh is nostalgic (and gay) but maybe he will challenge the biblical ideals shown in Genesis. 

Also, salt comes up in many places throughout the bible: in sacrificial rituals and as a sacred symbol. Additionally, in Ezekiel 16:4, this line appears in a section labeled sometimes as "Jerusalem as an Adulterous Wife":

"our ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 4 On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. 5 No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you."

Salt is acting in tandem with washing and swaddling to clean and prepare infants for a good life. Seems important.

...I felt like I wanted to bring [this connection] into this space.

Where might we go with this connection...?

IV. Countering nostalgia: learning another/the colonizer's language
Sunshine (a French minor!) meditated about what might be “lost in translation," on "how associations in different languages play out," whether a book like this would...could be translated," if it "would make an ounce of sense in another language?"

Others of you focused on the translations already going on within the novel.
smalina traced the ways in which cooking and eating enable Bình "to reconcile his home...with his identity," then wrote,

language functions consistently to remind Bình of his distance from home. He insists that others ask him to speak so they can delight in the "otherness" of his accent, his "unique" and even "entertaining" way with words. It is this mockery that reinforces Bình's refusal to speak, to use the shared and language-less experience of taste to communicate (and, in turn, to call out the inadequacies of language). Though Bình can delight at the sound of English on his lover's lips, his lover cannot do the same for him, finding himself lost and distressed by his inability to understand. He is reminded, even in his romantic relationship, of his otherness. Later on in the book, Bình feels the weight of his inability to participate due to language barriers: "Lanugage is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys" (155). 

I'm interested in the complicated relationship between these two worlds (of language and of food) when they collapse into one another--when Bình can know a food so well, can find such pleasure and such comfort in its taste and texture, but cannot speak its name in the language he is forced to use. 

The Unknown wrote similarly that the novel revels in the idea of language and translation: Binh frequently remarks on the fact that his own native language is essentially incomprehensible and unpronounceable to the French colonialists who govern Vietnam, and yet, despite his increasing facility with French, he is permanently identified as culturally and linguistically inferior. Truong employs...the idea that context and significance can be lost in a literal translation of one's words--to good effect...Binh himself writes in Vietnamese, speaks a little French and less English, but comments on the meaning of words as they play against each other in the three languages. Binh is isolated by his limited French, and his most frequent utterance is "Oh," a perfect expression of his in-between state: The word contains a note of agreement but not complete capitulation. Because Binh lacks a strong grasp of French, he also lacks access, a colonialist theme that is sounded throughout the novel.

bluish also wrote similarly that, while reading "book of salt" i've been thinking a lot about Fanon and his ideas about what it means for "the native" to speak the language of the colonizer….there's a LOT here to think about... I really hope we come back to language.

Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquais-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, writer;
lived from 1925-1961; supported the Algerian War of Independence from France.
His life and works have inspired national liberation movements/other radical political
organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the U.S; still very influential in
the academy, in critical Marxist theory and post-colonial studies.
He asserts that one cannot learn and speak a language without
subconsciously accepting the cultural meanings embedded in it.

Fanon's "post-colonial psychoanalysis" gave careful attention to the
violent ramifications of colonialism on the psyches of the colonized;
he argued that the colonized individual was “stunted” by a “deeply
implanted sense of degradation and inferiority."

He focused a lot on the role that language played in this process,
on how it was used as a "weapon for colonization."
He argued that language is "a potent vehicle for
cultural and political domination in a colonial situation."

The first chapter of his first book, Black Skin, White Masks,
is called "The Negro and Language." Fanon argues there that
"Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul
an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of
its local cultural originality--finds itself face to face with the language
of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.
The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his
adoption of the mother country's cultural standards." Focusing on
the life of a black man living in the Caribbean, Fanon wrote that
he "will be proportionately whiter--that is, he will come closer to being
a real human being--in direct ration to his mastery of the French language....
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed
and implied by that language....To speak a language is to take on a world,
a culture.”

What do we think? Does this describe what happens to Binh?
How does his story intersect with--exemplify/qualify--
the one that Fanon tells? In what ways is he "colonized" by
the French language? By the English one? Or is he not...?

V. continue this discussion on Thursday,
looking for further exs. of how Binh has to "adopt" Miss Toklas' tongue,
"which can only mean the removal of his own" (p. 211); of how he is
written into "a book about a cook" by GertrudeStein, who takes
his story--though he says he "is here to feed her, not to serve
as her fodder" (p. 215, p. 260). We'll look a little harder/longer
@ the uneasy power relations in the novel, @ how gender
intersects with varieties of racialized class formation.
And we'll look @ whatever else you mention in
tonight's postings...