Tahir’s Table

Skills/Tools Used: Laser Cut, Adobe Suite, Set Design

An interactive performance that encourages individuals to explore personal narratives of identity and culture…

Project Overview

Baklava is a traditional filo dough pastry, that has a very contested origin throughout the Middle East. Nearly everyone in the Middle East has had familial experiences eating and baking this pastry, and because of this, different countries within the region have claimed responsibility for first inventing the pastry. Particularly in Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon individuals argue about whose ancestors created it first. The question Who invented baklava? has plagued individuals living in the Middle East and Eastern Europe for hundreds of years. The question has sparked nationalistic rivalries in the region about ingredients, family recipes, and most significantly, about the true genesis of the famed dessert. These rivalries usually take the form of playful discussions over dinner but can escalate to more serious discussions concerning identity and culture. In the Middle East and Eastern Europe, different cultures and ethnicities often become amorphous as they influence and change each other’s customs and traditions.

The project Tahir’s Table began as a personal exploration of my Turkish heritage across New York City and transformed into a universal framework for cultural understanding and discovery. Tahir’s Table functions as a safe place for two individuals coming from different cultures to come together to tell each other about their backgrounds in a trusting environment. The goal of the project is to provide individuals with a structure for conversation that emphasizes listening and personal reflection rather than common question and response constructions. Individuals will then be given the opportunity to share a piece of dessert from one of the individuals’ cultures as a symbol of trust, sharing, and unity. THe performance of this process presented at the Parsons MFADT Major Major exhibition is conducted through my own personal heritage, but I encourage participants to take the framework of this project and apply it to their own communities and cultures.

In Turkey, the history of baklava starts before the inception of the modern nation state. Almost five hundred years ago the Turkish poet Kaygusuz Abdal (1341-1441) wrote of his experience with baklava, reminiscing about there being “two hundred trays of baklava/some with almonds, some with lentils” (Lord 1) for him and others to enjoy. This description explains how baklava was often a delicacy and enjoyed during Ottoman feasts held by the Sultans and other nobility. It was a delicacy known to have been served in the Imperial Ottoman Palace in Constantinople for five hundred years (Lord 2) and it most famously known to be “an innovation of the Topkapi helvane kitchens”. Baklava came to embody all that was sophisticated and cultured. Only the most well-off individuals living within the Ottoman Empire could afford to have these desserts at their events.

In fact, baklava also became a key element of cultural ritual as well during the baklava alayi, or Baklava Procession. This was a Janissary or Turkish Yeniçeri ceremony where on the 15th day of Ramadan every year “the Janissary troops stationed in Istanbul used to march to the palace, where every regiment was presented with two trays of baklava. They would sling the trays in sheets of cloth from a pole and march back to their barracks carrying the baklava…” (Roufs 2011). This ceremony demonstrates the significance of the pastry to the region’s cultural exchanges and rituals. Baklava was created as a way of demonstrating the significance of various cultural occasions within Ottoman culture. Eventually, as more individuals and families could afford the expensive ingredients and honed the skills necessary to create the complex pastry, it became a way for families and friends to share their culture and offer a serious gesture of community.

This immense gesture stems from how difficult it is to make baklava. It is made with yufka or phyllo, which is a very thin flaky dough. Traditionally, in order to get yufka to the right width, bakers spend hours rolling and spreading it over specially made marble tables. These tables are designed to provide just enough friction for the dough to stick when it is being spread so that the dough can be re-rolled over and over. To test if the yufka is the right width, the head baker then drops a metal coin from a low distance. If the coin pierces the dough than it is thin enough to bake. The fragility of the dough is doubled by its tendency to dry out quickly. This means that bakers must keep the dozens and dozens of layered yufka damp before baking the dough. The process is complex and immensely scientific, making it difficult to repeat in lower tear restaurants and in-home kitchens.

This means that when someone makes a batch of baklava from scratch and shares it with you, it is understood how great an effort that individual went to make it for you. It is a value skill that is often passed down through generation and family and geographical recipes are valued within community circles. This also means that when someone begs the question, Who Invented Baklava?, individuals are eager to defend their communities.

Therefore, it is possible for baklava to act as an avenue to learn more about the cross-cultural nature of these communities that were once all part of the Ottoman Empire but have separated into their own nation states. These borders have created nationalistic rivalries that oversimplify the amorphous nature of identity and culture as it exists in the past, present, and future. Through this project titled, Who Invented Baklava? we will explore collective memories surrounding baklava and investigate how those memories have changed overtime as baklava becomes a popular ethnic dessert in the West and all over the world.

Due to the complex history of the Ottoman Empire, the greater Middle East and the relationship between these geographic locations and Western cultures, it is important to view this exercise as a means of experiencing culture through a mediated filter. In our everyday lives, this mediation often takes place through our experience of different art forms and cultural activities such as eating, dancing, and listening to music. By practicing these elements of another person’s culture, we do not inherently learn the deep underpinnings of that culture. However, through repeated exposure, trust, understanding, and deeper learning has the opportunity to manifest. This framework of repeated exposure is applied to individuals taking place in the rituals surrounding Tahir’s Table.

At the beginning of this creative process, my goal was to create a film documenting the personal exploration of my Turkish heritage in New York City. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska meaning that I was only exposed to the culture through my mother who acted as the mediator between a distant place and community and the one I was accustomed to in the United States. She often taught me about the culture by showing me art, television shows, music, and cooking traditional food in the home, but my experience was still limited by the lack of other Turkish immigrants in the community where I lived. When I moved to New York City for school, I was surprised to see how many Turkish immigrants lived in the city, working predominantly in Turkish restaurants all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

After discovering this, I decided to start visiting these restaurants to meet the owners and employees who could teach me about where they come from and the food that the serve. I also decided to invite my non-Turkish friends to have Turkish meals with me all over the city so that I could go through the process of exposing others to my culture, while simultaneously trying to understand how they experienced culture through mediation. The first interview I conducted was with Tahir Eirmli from the Brighton Güllüoglu Baklava Café in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Tahir is a middle-aged Turkish immigrant who opened up the café with the goal of encouraging the spread of Turkish culture abroad. When we sat down at a table of his café, he brought over Turkish coffee and a few pieces of baklava. At this point in the process I was still looking forward to making an ethnographic film and was recording his voice. This meant that I would ask him a question and stay silent so that the audio would not be compromised. I found that because I was not responding or interrupting with more in-depth questions, he would continue talking for as long as he decided as necessary and went on to whatever tangents he saw fit. This meant that I learned more than I had initially tried to learn, and the direction of the questions were decided by him rather than I. I found the conversations moving toward tangents I did not realize existed and I learned the answers to questions I didn’t know to ask.

Furthermore, Tahir talked about food as a starting place for cultural exploration. He stated how “the only places nations do not fight is a table”. Since everyone shares a common need for food and a common desire for the social comfort it provides, everyone lowers their guard and is open to a more unrestricted discussion. For Tahir and I this was the case. I was immensely nervous conducting an interview with a stranger and using new equipment I had not quite figured out. However, as soon as he brought a small cup of Turkish coffee over, I knew the social etiquette and felt more relaxed in his presence. I believe food has the power to project comfort and solace and this was an element I would eventually utilize in future iterations of the project.

The second interview I conducted was this my friend Kevin Burke, a friend from Bridgewater, Massachusetts who is known for eating nothing but milk, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and donuts. I chose to invite him specifically because I knew he would be out of his comfort zone if I took him to a restaurant with well-seasoned and very traditional food. We decided to eat at the Turkish Kitchen on 27th street. I ordered a lamb dish and he ordered a simple chicken dish. I spoke about what ingredients made up everything he was eating and set up a cultural context for the food on his plate.

After the meal, he spoke about how he was not used to seasoned food due to growing up in an American Irish-Catholic family where junk food was abundant. He then went on to discuss his upbringing and the culture he grew up in, in the suburbs of Massachusetts. From this interview I learned quite a lot about how to effectively conduct an interview where both parties are a little bit uneasy about how it will go. Most significantly, as Tahir pointed out in the previous interview, the food sitting between us acted as a means of comfort and starting point for conversation. It kept us occupied in moments of silence and allowed the conversation to continue naturally. Since the food sitting between us was Turkish, I could also refer back to it in order to sway the conversation in the direction I wanted.

The third interview that I conducted was with Fifi Xie and took place at the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn. At the Museum of Food and Drink we saw an exhibit about Chinese-American food, setting this interview up to be the exact opposite format as my interview with Kevin Burke. The goal of this interview was to understand how another person from a different culture would share their experience of identity with me as well as to explore how research about food could be exhibited in an interesting way.

The exhibit featured an array of data visualizations about the transformation of Chinese food as it spread across the United States, as well as different interactive machines and a station where chefs cooked authentic Chinese American food in front of guests. As we walked around the exhibit Fifi explained her experience with the traditional Chinese food she grew up with in contrast to the Chinese American food she has grown accustomed to here. Through this I experience I began to reflect on my experience eating Turkish American food in contrast to authentic Turkish food abroad. The exhibit also acted as a precedent for an interactive food exhibition that I would hope to incorporate into my Major Major installation. I learned that people want the permission to ask questions and enough information to provoke such questions and sought to achieve this in my own project.

After conducting these interviews, I discovered that I was generally displeased with direction my ethnographic film was going in. I felt that what I truly wanted to do was to get individuals to talk about their own cultures over plates of food and share their own personal experiences with one another in a safe space. I thought that the film would be the best way to spark these discussions but found that a film was often an individual experience. Yes, people do discuss what they saw after they watch a film, but in a group setting full of strangers, I felt that they would need a simpler and more dramatic method for breaking the ice.

Therefore, I began brainstorming a ritual that would force two individuals to sit and truly listen to each other about their backgrounds and cultures. The ritual I decided upon consists of the following steps:

1. Two individuals sit down across from each other at a table

2. These individuals both get one minute to think about how the following questions apply to them

· Where are you and your family from originally?

· How did your familial and cultural background affect the person you are today in terms of opportunities, accomplishments, personality, or personal choices?

· What advantages or disadvantages has living in America provided you?

· Have the ways you choose to identify yourself to others changed over the course of your life? If so, how?

· How have your beliefs about identity in general – race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. changed over the course of your life?

3. After a minute of deep contemplation, the two individuals each get five minutes to answer and elaborate on these questions to the best of their ability.

4. While each individual is talking through their five minutes, the person sitting opposite them must remain silent – communicating only through facial expressions and physical gestures.

5. After they each talk through their five minutes, the two individuals will share a piece of baklava as a symbol of trust and understanding.

6. After both have eaten their half of the piece of baklava both individuals may take the liberty of speaking and asking questions about what they both stated during their five minutes.

The idea is that this framework will act as an icebreaker for more critical cultural and personal discussions. Due to the fact that each individual is speaking without another person interjecting or responding, they can talk about whatever they want to in relationship to the questions above for the whole five minutes. This means that they are in control and that their testimony is not altered by the input of the individual sitting across the table. The hope is that once the baklava is shared between the two, they can elaborate on what was presented by each during their five minutes with the intent of understanding the other person as they wish to be understood. To conclude the interaction, each person will receive a small card that explains how they can apply this process other people in their lives. The goal with this is to encourage individuals to continue participating in the practice in order to develop a deeper understanding of those around them.

After this ritual was established, I began prototyping the experience with fifteen pairs of individuals. From this experience I received constructive feedback about how announcing that both individuals are in a safe space is crucial to the success of the process. I also received feedback that I should create a card or token for participants to take after they have engaged with the process so that they have a means to apply it to other places in their lives. I found this advice particularly interesting because I felt that it helped me get to the root of my intent which was simply to get two individuals to sit down and really listen to each other and start to understand the other person’s perspective on identity and cultural background.

Furthermore, through testing the efficacy of this ritual, participants told me beautiful things about their experiences. One individual told me that this process “was amazing. Talking with such open arms about your life experiences showed so many similarities despite living such different lives. I feel so open and accepted. I could have talked for hours.” Another individual told me that they “think more people should be forced to listen in silence and talk for five minutes. It’s very grounding and therapeutic and a very fast but meaningful way to get to know someone.” Someone also told me that “this exercise was very fascinating and made me actively think about the ways I respond to people in day-to-day conversations. I am naturally a giggly person and it was tough not to laugh. It also made me realize how much can be spoke, heard, and interpreted in just five minutes.” This feedback felt extremely rewarding to the process. although it was out of most people’s comfort zone, the process seemed to have the effect I desired, and they came away feeling like they had gotten the opportunity to be listened to and to listen to another person in a sincere way.