The taste of a mother tongue

Responding to Violeta and Sofia by Noah Berhitu & Alejandra Rogghé Pérez 

Violeta and Sofia, 2021 (Film still)

I’m sitting in a restaurant in the south side of Glasgow. From the outside, it could be a hardware shop or electronics store, with its flat roof and walls of brick and metal sheets. It’s not on a high street, or near any special points of interest. It’s somewhere people choose to visit. It’s here that I’m meeting one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had for the first time. Here, this chosen place, is a Persian restaurant where we will share koobideh and naan, where we will sip from the other’s cup, and where our conversation will eerily mirror that of Noah Berhitu and Alejandra Rogghé Pérez’s in Violeta and Sofia: 

“Do you actually feel Iranian?” 

“I don’t know.”

For both of us, half-Iranians raised 4,000 miles away from the land of our fathers, this is the first time we’ve met someone else who understands our experiences and our lives, in such a profound way. Sitting across from each other, we see ourselves in the face of the other – we definitely look a bit alike, and get mistaken for each other every so often. We’re surrounded by scents that our family know so intimately – turmeric, saffron, the particular smokiness of charred tomato – but that still feel slightly foreign to us. As we eat, and chat, surrounded by Glasgow’s Iranian families nattering away in Persian, a language neither of us understand, we find unity in the meal placed before us, and in our conversation comparing our favourite dishes. Over the years since, we’ve both learned to cook the food of our ancestors. We trade recipes for tadhig, offer advice on making ash-é reshteh and I lament my failings when it comes to ghormeh sabzi. 

We don’t have the tongue to translate the language that we both feel we should know. But we have tongues that know tastes that our distant family knows, tastes that the people in a land neither of us know experience everyday. Through this taste, we can transport ourselves back to Iran, insert ourselves into a lineage and a life we’ve been denied. Since this first meeting, we’ve visited other Persian restaurants in Glasgow, and each time I’m amazed at how these places are points of contact for the diaspora, how the flavours and scents of Iranian homes and kitchens have been reconstructed in these pockets of Scotland, how home has been recreated an ocean away. 

Watching Violeta & Sofia, I’m aware that my friend and I are not alone in turning to food for comfort, an attempt to compensate for our linguistic and cultural deficiencies, as we see them. We could – we are – the faceless women in the kitchen, cooking together, thinking about what it means to belong in the West, recreating family recipes in an act of ritual. We map our own displacement in the rice we cook, and the way in which we cook it. As the film opens with rice pattering across a map, following ancient trade routes, we too follow our ancestors’ footsteps across the globe. 

I’m lucky I’ve visited Iran. Now, when I eat certain foods, feel the sharp tang of barberry between my teeth or suck on a spoon full of rose water faloodeh, the brainfreeze that generates transports me, for a moment, to the bazaar in Tehran, it’s claustrophobic, mesmerising chaos. Or to my auntie’s flat, cross-legged on the floor around the sofreh with the uncles and aunts and cousins I don’t know how to speak to, as we all taste the same saffron rice, the same fresh sabzi, the same sting of mint. Around these sofrehs – large clothes laid on the floor, in lieu of a dining table – I’d smile at cousins with skin like mine, hair like mine, eyes like mine, we’d mime our appreciation of my aunt’s fesejan, shake our heads at the offer of more, have our cheeks pinched when we passed our elders a dish. The first Persian I learned, the phrases that come to me as naturally as my own name – bia, besheen, bekhor. Come, sit, eat.

I couldn’t tell my family how much I missed them, how I wished I’d had the chance to know them, to spend more than a fortnight every seven years in their presence, but I could name the meals laid before me, and could reach them in their language for one brief glimpse of time. During the film too, the speakers flick between languages, constantly code switching as only those in diaspora know how to. In one powerful moment, a promise is made “to never forget their mother tongue”, a luxury my friend and I have never had. Instead, we’ve started teaching ourselves, using the vocabulary of the kitchen to help us find our way.

I’m amazed at how powerful the connection between food and memory is, at how eating is such an overload of the senses. There’s such strength in our female relationships, our female lineages, the women who birthed us giving us life and feeding us, years down the line, giving us more to inherit than they already have. My own turbulent relationship with my baba is smoothed over, time and time again, by the unrequested cooking of my favourite Persian dishes when I go home, or by me asking for a Persian recipe from him. He knows, I think, that when I do that I’m asking for another path into my heritage. As Noah and Ale reflect, it’s important for children to know where they’re from. 

As for me and my pal who I met so nervously over Persian food to try and forge a friendship? Last month we tried the newest Persian restaurant in town. Neither of us have grown our father-tongue fluently. I’m going to be a bridesmaid at her wedding later this year, and I can’t quite believe our friendship began with a plate of Persian kebab.