Leon's Harvest (2021). Watercolor by Alana Salguero, part of Nafas
An Essay About the Exhibition Nafas by Adam Dalva*
Years ago, in graduate school, I wrote a short story about a Thanksgiving dinner gone wrong. Mercifully, this piece has never been published. As far as I know, it only exists in a folder on my laptop called “discards.” But of course, back then, after I wrote it, I hoped that it was good. I printed the story, submitted it to my class, and waited a week for judgement day. The professor was the great writer Lydia Davis. A hero of mine. Finally, it was my turn to be workshopped. Lydia led the usual obligatory praise of the story. The sentences worked, the dynamics were sharp, the sex scene in the pantry after the meal was passably achieved.
And then, I’ll never forget it, she looked right at me. Her eyes smoldered.
“But you forgot the turkey.”
She, who was always kind, who’d passed the harshest judgments without a drop of negativity, seemed angry with me. And I realized, to my horror, that though my characters had spent hours arguing at the dining room table, I wasn’t sure if I’d remembered to put food in my story. I flipped through it in front of everyone, blushing.
My god. What had I done?
I had imagined the food. I’d even tasted it in my mind. The turkey a touch too dry, the lasagna (for they were Italian), the too-sweet sweet potatoes. They were all on the kitchen counter of my subconscious, but I had forgotten to carry them to the dining room, and to the reader. The story was a complete failure. Without food—that invaluable invocation of taste, smell, touch, sight, even the sound of chewing—the story was deprived of the authentic sense work that makes writing great. I’ve never made that mistake again. And I ask myself, “did you forget the turkey?” after every short story I write.
Great art should involve food, I feel, because the gustatory moments of our lives are aligned with both desire and the thwarting of desire. Food is also the crucial sensory aspect of memory. Think of the chocolate you ate right before you decided to leave your lover; the childhood sandwich that your cruel babysitter prepared; the last meal you ever ate with a dead loved one. The memory is locked in by what we consumed during the memory. In the case of the lead of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, of course, a humble madeleine thrusts the lead back into a 3000-page reverie. It’s not that the madeleine itself is particularly remarkable—it’s what it’s associated with, redolent of childhood walks, a beloved grandmother, and the most shameful of secrets.
And here, now, with this fabulous exhibition, we have another invocation to future memory: an omakase on Bergen Street, with a tasting menu of food of all stripes. When one first hears about a food show, one might perhaps stray toward imagining indulgent, fun, technicolor treats. But of course, food is much more than saccharine sweets. Food is politics—the war in Ukraine is also a war of grain shortage. Food is body, with all its attendant dysmorphias and shames. Food is joyous cultural representation, but it’s also colonialism. The choicest vitamins are counterbalanced by the vilest carcinogens. In Joyce’s Ulysses, food is a seedcake, passed from lover to lover by a kiss that carries the promise of years of communion, but food is also the infidelity-representing potted meat that, many years later, one of those cheating lovers doesn’t even bother to clean from the marital bed.
The curator of Nafas, Lucien Zayan, has a known passion for cooking himself—his “Chef Ambition” dining series is about both the personal aspects of food and the gorgeous detail work that goes into its preparation. As he imagined this show, he told me, he had the idea it would be fun, with things like “a gown made of farfalle pasta.” But as the exhibition evolved, it turned out to be an emotional, intellectual grouping. And so we have the most sumptuous of dinner parties, that rare kind of supper where we can talk without embarrassment about our passions, our politics, and our pasts, and in so doing achieve a sort of transcendence.
Highlighting even one individual piece from our smorgasbord would do a disservice to these remarkable artists, but it’s worth noting the ideological weight behind so many of these works. From a watermelon that represents the ban of the Palestinian flag to a picnic that takes place on either side of the California-Mexico border, from a plastic grocery store to art made out of flour and accidentally eaten by mice, these gestures are fundamentally linked with our present moment. Lucien took his inspiration for the show from the Marina Abramovic video in which she eats a raw onion—trying and failing to get that video into this show was, I’m told, something like eating a raw onion itself—but the last piece of art to be included turned out to be a watercolor of a decaying onion, a perfect little sorbet that invokes the flavors of the amuse bouche that started the meal.
Because food is such a critical part of literature, I’ve curated a reading with some of my favorite writers, which will be taking place on September 29th. Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Brandon Taylor, and Sanaë Lemoine are sensualists in the best sense of the word, and their event will be part of a program of live performances and events that will run over the course of Nafas. I’m thrilled to bring them to the table.
And of course, it’s worth remembering that food is even, for some people, God. Recently, I went to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, near Edinburgh, as research for a book I’m writing on religious belief. I was there alone. I’ve never had the opportunity to take communion—every other time I’d been in a church, there were people there who would know that I wasn’t Catholic. I’d feel embarrassed to consider it, like I was propagating a dishonesty. But I felt a sudden impulse to finally try the transmuted body from thousands of years ago, there in that temple of stained glass, with its centuries-old columns and its kind, elderly parishioners. It wasn’t a mockery—I just wanted to know what it would feel like in my mouth. I thanked the aged priest who passed the wafer into my hand. It was soft as a wet cracker, tasted of bread, and stuck unpleasantly in my teeth. Nothing notable about it. I felt a bit ashamed to have had such a negative experience. The next week, I went back to the chapel. The priest was absent, and we had to eat leftover communion wafers that he had blessed on his way out the week before. Again, I was tempted. Again I shuffled forward. Why not? That time, the wafer was transformed. It was absolutely delicious—crisp, earthy, and with—could this be my imagination?—just a touch of very good red wine.
I would place those wafers in a side-dish on my table anytime. And if I ate them, I wouldn’t think at all about the body of Christ—I would think of the memory of that church, my nervousness and the beauty, all of that subjectivity contained in one tiny biscuit.
Adam Dalva
*Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. He is the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, is the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
Adam is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He is a writer-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Invisible Dog Art Center, and has received fellowships from Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, Iceland’s Gullkistan, the Vermont Studio Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Wildacres. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019.
Instagram: @adamdalva