We Are What We Eat

Suad Amiry, Rebecca Clarren, Humor, and the Costs of Occupation

I’m sitting with my pup Saku on the back patio, Organ Mountains in the distance, and reading Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance. It’s causing me to consider the costs of occupation and entangled histories. So, I dusted off a 2005 conversation with Suad Amiry about her memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law to add to the assembled company at this rented adobe wedged between the railroad tracks, a drainage ditch, and a pecan orchard in Mesilla Park, New Mexico—Piro/Manso/Tiwa and Mescalero Apache territory. I have landed here to find a way through a comprehensively destructive and extended cancer recovery tail, and back into a sustainable and sustaining life. My literal end-of-the-road spot in the Chihuahuan desert sits roughly a third of the way along the Rio Grande’s almost two thousand mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico, a territory I’ve been spiraling through since 2021 to try to understand belonging. I will admit that things are not going smoothly, but I’m finding inspiration and comfort in the company I’ve assembled for breakfast this morning.

I invite you to join us. Clarren’s book offers a rigorously researched exploration of her family history colliding with United States history, when members of her family fled poverty, persecution, and 19th century pogroms in eastern Europe for the American myth of freedom with its so-called free land—despite the millennia of indigenous stewardship and everyday living that was already occurring in these same lands. In Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, Amiry juxtaposes a private, seeming-occupation at home in Ramallah with the systemic occupation of the West Bank. Both writers illuminate personal and everyday ways to make it through while also complicating and nuancing their ingenious maneuvers to manage and overcome the overwhelming and oppressive forces that frame the everyday experiences they chronicle. Humor figures prominently but does not laugh away the horror.

This fine line is akin to the one I’m trying to walk these days while navigating my own period of cancer occupation. I do not wish to succumb or to emerge bitter, nor conversely, to affect sunny and rosy as if this era never happened or isn’t existentially difficult. Instead, I am taking care of basics with fresh vegetables, exercise, and lots of rest, and through the windows of bonus capacity, I feed myself a steady diet of nuanced complexity laced with humor-elevated reality. If we are the sum of what we consume—and I believe we are—then, I hope this recipe nourishes both you and me.

For your breakfast, or the drive-time slot for which it was initially conceived, here’s the 45-minute conversation with Amiry. It was pre-recorded in Ann Arbor, Michigan for December 21, 2005 broadcast on WCBN-FM’s Living Writers Show, when I was the show’s producer-host. I know you’ll find your own favorite bits, but I’ll tempt you with one of mine: Amiry becomes her rescue-dog Nora’s driver for trips into and out of Jerusalem, when neither she nor her car have papers, but she’s able to credential the dog. Have a listen for more…

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