Mareme Cisse in the kitchen of Ginger People&Food
-Essay-
TURIN — Guess who's not coming to dinner. It seems like a scene from the American Deep South during the decades of segregation. But this happened in Italy, in this summer of 2023.
Two Italians, in their sixties, got up from the restaurant table and left (without saying goodbye, as the owner points out), when they declared that they didn't want to eat in a restaurant where the chef was what they called: an 'n-word.'
Racists, poor things. And ignorant, in the sense of not knowing basic facts. They don't realize that we are all made of mixtures, come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And that food, of course, are blends of different ingredients and recipes.
The restaurant is called Ginger People&Food, and these visitors from out of town probably didn't understand that either.
They don't know that ginger is an ancient spice, and that all cuisine is the result of crossings and blends, a combination that forms with culture. They didn't know that behind the stoves of the well-known establishment, managed by the social cooperative Al Karhub, chef Mareme Cisse, originally from Senegal, arrived in Sicily in 2012 to join her husband and decided to stay. They also don't know she has become a well-known figure, having won multiple culinary competitions, and renowned for her couscous dishes.
We learn of this stunning incident from the Facebook page of the restaurant's owner, Carmelo Roccaro, who wrote a "Letter to a Stranger." It begins like this:
"You entered in a hurry, with your partner, salt-and-pepper hair, cut very short. You were greeted with a smile by our Karima, the dining room attendant, a young second-generation woman, a hard worker, who seated you where you wanted to sit."
Then the owner explains the sequence of events: "Karima looked at me with wide open eyes, saying: 'After looking at the menu, the lady asked me if the restaurant owner was by any chance (an n-word). Then she stood up, saying that she didn't want to dine here anymore...' I went outside and followed you as you got back into your car and drove away, avoiding looking at me, while forcing your partner into an improbable U-turn. I don't know who you are, your story, your problems, and I don't dare judge you. All I know is that I felt great sadness in my heart. Last night, I realized how deep and ingrained this feeling is, emerging from within people's dark side."
Senegalese tradition blends with Sicilian specialties.
Roccaro couldn't have chosen better words: Sadness in the heart. How dark must a person's perspective be to not want to eat food cooked by someone with a different skin color?
Does difference scare us? We are accustomed to being served by people of color, accepting them when they wash dishes, clean floors and streets, collect garbage and pick tomatoes – when they are essentially invisible. Only in that context (let's call it the "service mode") has our imagination metabolized them, and they cause no discomfort.
But racism is a creeping beast, often unconscious and unaware.
But this story, like all stories, has a bright side that counters the darkness and sadness of racism. It's in the photos of Mareme Cisse, beautiful, with magnetic eyes, smiling in front of her spices and vegetables. Her awards speak for themselves: in 2017 for the most original recipe at the Couscous Fest in San Vito Lo Capo. The following year, the Bezzo Prize, for environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable restaurant practices. In 2019, the World Couscous Championship in San Vito Lo Capo, a global competition where she represented Senegal with the Falilou Couscous, named after her son. In 2020, she also won Cuochi d'Italia on TV8, outperforming chefs from all around the world.
There is light in her dishes, where Senegalese tradition blends with Sicilian specialties, a mix of cultures and flavors. There is light when she talks about holding cooking classes and being involved with the Al Kharub cooperative to help find employment for women, young people, refugees, and individuals in vulnerable conditions.
Let's say it in Mareme Cisse's own words, which overcome any sadness in the heart: "The spirit that drives my work is the awareness of the need to build a multicultural, colorful, and open society for the future."
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.
