Naben Ruthnum

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.

Reading, Eating, and Race

Curry

Wynter

Thank you to NetGalley and Coach House Books for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

This title is part of Coach House's Exploded Views series that aims at looking at most current social and cultural issues from politics, to art, to class, race, and everything in between. Curry is a heartfelt, emotionally engaging collection of essays on what it feels like to be a "brown person" in the West. Ruthnum uses such a broad term to categorize his own culture to reflect how the Western audience tends to clamp together multiple nationalities, very much like any saucy, fragrant rice dish is categorized as curry. He discusses the literature by South Asian authors that is often plagued by the tropes of exoticism, alienation, and nostalgia that seem to be the only elements publishers seek out in writers like himself. The "currybooks", as he calls them. Ruthnum also writes about his own fears of falling into this trap, and what it means to him and his cultural identity. Each essay is an eye-opener and provides multiple arguments to chew on.

It's interesting that while Ruthnum is speaking on behalf of this very specific demographic, I find myself relating a lot as a daughter of immigrants of Eastern European heritage. When he speaks about being a peg forced into a Western-shaped hole with all the accompanying stereotypes, I see myself nod. When he describes his frustration with the endless silks, mangoes, spices, and grains of rice on the covers of South Asian lit, I remember my own gripes with garish red, blocky, pseudo-Cyrillic lettering, onion domes, and ever present matryoshka. It seems that Western audiences crave the stories they consider exotic, yet insist on them being comfortably familiar, shaped according to their own understanding of our foreign-ness. It is incredible how much I can relate to this book!

Anyone who likes to question the to understand the world from multiple perspectives should read this book. It will teach you a thing or two.

Curry Reading, Eating, and Race

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