- 1 All translations from the French are mine, unless otherwise noted.
- 2 Rachid Taha, the genre-bending Algerian Rock singer who popularized Raï and Chaabi music in France (...)
1Clearly, a couscous pot cannot utter words, for it is an inanimate object. Yet it has a lot to say. My title refers to postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak’s foundational text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which she concludes that the subaltern, an inferior, oppressed other, cannot speak because their agency and resistance are not heard and therefore go unrecognized. In extending this question to the couscous pot, I propose to consider this domestic utensil as a nonhuman subaltern whose significance has been overlooked. In Spivak’s post-marxist analysis, the category of the subaltern cuts across class, to account for gender, race, sexuality, and colonial domination. In approaching the couscous pot as a colonized subaltern, I echo philosopher of techniques, Gilbert Simondon’s call to take into consideration the significance of technical objects. Simondon posits that apprehending “the mode of existence of technical objects” is analogous to “the abolition of slavery and the affirmation of the value of the human person” (1958: 9)1 in that it recognizes the humanity of and in the technical object, and advocates for its reintegration in culture, in the “world of cultural significance” from which it has been severed (1958: 10). This approach has several consequences. First, it gives the history of techniques, even the most humble and neglected of them, that is the cooking technology used by colonized women, a larger place in the production of knowledge. Second, bringing Spivak in dialogue with Simondon makes it possible to listen to what the couscous pot has to say, as a technical object, as an indigenous artefact, as a manufactured colonial commodity, and as an aesthetic object. The mundane factory-made aluminum couscous pot, present in most North African households and on French kitchen shelves2, is an archive whose potential history has been ignored for three main reasons: it was invented and made by native Maghrebi women; it is a culinary technical device, and even in the field of food history, ingredients get most of the attention at the expense of techniques and equipment (Wilson 1994: 21); and lastly, the colonial civilizing mission and its teleological notion of progress cast that native object as archaic, and therefore out of the domain of valuable knowledge, despite its unique design and functionality.
2Focusing on the couscous pot’s physical, practical and aesthetic qualities, as well as its migrations, uses and reuses, I explore how the itinerary of that cooking utensil helped make the North African staple into a favorite dish of the French. I argue that the transformation of this cooking device from handmade artifact and female craft to manufactured aluminum utensil rendered invisible the material dispossession of Algerian women’s technical and culinary know-how. Uncovering the individuality of this object, and its history, I endeavor to follow Simondon’s illuminating suggestion that one “can find in a machine or a tool the trace of its invention” and hence combat the prejudice that “our predecessors were less intelligent than we are,” so that the technical object can become an “instrument and a friend in our relationship to the world” (Simondon 1967 b). Making the couscous pot the object and vector of my inquiry acknowledges the agency of this nonhuman entity. Furthermore, making visible its role as carrier of indigenous ways of knowing puts into question the anthropocene’s “conquest model of consumption” (Elton 2019), and invites us to “unlearn imperialism” (Azoulay 2019).
3Assimilating couscous, I contend, was predicated on the forced displacements and expropriations caused by the colonization and decolonization of Algeria. After 132 years of colonial rule and 8 years of a bloody war (1954-1962), 8 million Algerians gained their independence. 800,000 Europeans, categorized as “Pieds noirs”, including 120,000 Algerian Jews, were “repatriated” to a France some of them had never visited. During the war, the number of Algerian migrants in France nearly doubled, and it continued to grow after Independence. Reflecting on how deeply this shared history shapes both countries, philosopher Etienne Balibar thought-provokingly asks whether Algeria and France, combined, amount to one or two nations (1998). He answers their sum is neither one, as the proponents of French Algeria vociferously claimed, nor does it quite get to two as the war of Independence and the “invention of decolonization” (Shepard 2008) would suggest. Rather, Balibar proposes, Algeria and France add up to one and a half nations.
4Although the couscous pot may seem like an innocent, apolitical implement, it is a racialized, overlooked object of memory whose whereabouts flag the uncharted overlap between France and Algeria. I propose to use this pierced artifact to screen the enduring colonial legacy of French Algeria, and trace a history of dispossession, as well as possible reinventions.
5A cooking utensil is by nature always already diasporic. As a material object, it is eminently detachable. It can be lost and found again. As technical objects, cooking implements are put to a variety of uses, and not all of them correspond to their original intent, for as Latour writes, “we are exceeded by what we make” [“nous sommes dépassés par ce que nous fabriquons”] (2004: 601). They are thus endowed with a certain autonomy and their own personal existence. As portable pieces, kitchen utensils are “of manipulable dimensions, and correspond to the strengths of the human body” (Simondon 1967 a). A cooking tool can thus be defined as an extension of and a supplement to the human body, in regards to its manufacturing and its uses. Just like the cuisine and dishes for which it is used, a kitchen implement is eminently prosthetic, detached yet still adjusted to the body. Exploring its functions opens a window into a kitchen utensil’s genesis and history, hence granting it the quality of a quasi-living organism. The couscous pot in its technicity and its shape manifests the intentions, values, and corporeality of those inhabiting the living world from which it was extracted by colonial capitalism. Hence, using a technical object means engaging in an aesthetic as well as a moral relationship, one that is, often unknowingly, imbued with respect for the intelligence of those who invented the object (Simondon 1967 b).
- 3 A kaffal ring made out of extendable silicone has been patented under the brand name “Khafel” by a (...)
6Made of two nesting stew and steamer pots, the couscous pot’s main purpose is to cook together the components of a couscous dish. A generous, balanced concoction, it comprises a foundation of fluffy cereal grains that gives the dish its name, supporting a quasi-infinite variety of seasonal and regional preparations, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, pulses, herbs, spices, dairy, meats, fish, combined in stews or broths of all kinds. Uniquely designed to simmer and steam at once, the couscous pot is what Bee Wilson calls a joined or double tool (20). It features a large base, called gdra, barma or tanjra for broth, meats, and vegetables, interlocking with a steamer basket or strainer, the eponymous keskes, that fits atop to steam couscous or, more rarely, other cereal-based preparation such as small pasta or rice. Both parts can operate independently from each other. To fasten the double-chambered device, a wet strip of fabric, a kaffal, is tied around the junction3. Kaffal, which means “to close” in Arabic, suggests that the couscous pot is indeed a sealed system where as little energy and resources as possible are wasted
7Hand-rolling and steaming are the two foundational operations that characterize couscous for structuralist anthropologist Hélène Balfet (1987). Sociologist and moujahida Claudine Chaulet felicitously underlines communal eating as a defining feature, since a couscous pot is designed to make a large amount of couscous (1980, 2012). Technically, couscous is a small pasta made from durum wheat semolina and water. Unlike pasta, which is kneaded and boiled, couscous is hand-rolled then steamed. In an extremely labor-intensive process, women sprinkle coarse or medium durum wheat granules with fine semolina flour and water in a large shallow dish, the gsaâ, hand-rolling them to form small, uniform globes while adjusting the quantity of semolina, flour, and water as needed. Grains are then sifted, rolled again, and finally sorted through sieves of different grades. Calibration is key to ensure that couscous grains are the same size and dry or cook evenly in the keskes.
8Water and mixing cause gluten strands to form between the three to four agglutinated grains of semolina that make an individual couscous grain. The addition of semolina flour stops the agglutination process and figure-eight hand motions consolidate and compact individual couscous grains, while keeping them separate from one another. In the final couscous grain, gluten nets ensnare starch molecules and form a delicate architecture between the original semolina fragments. During steaming, water, broth or a stew, is boiling in the bottom pan. Steam enters the upper pan through its perforated bottom and goes through wet couscous. The heat hardens the gluten strands in the newly-formed grains thus preserving their airy structures. Secondly, the gdra’s closed chamber generates and concentrates “saturated” steam, a dry steam hotter than wet steam. Dry steam is “the gaseous form of water that is able to carry heat and can travel around obstacles and reach areas wet steam cannot”4, such as the kernel of the couscous grains. Dry steam ensures and controls the swelling of starches by providing heat and just enough water. A wetter steam, charged with water particles, would turn couscous grains into mush, as if boiling them. The steamer basket has to sit high enough, away from the stew in the lower pot to prevent direct contact between the water or the sauce and the grains. The gdra’s high, narrower neck concentrates the stew’s savors and fragrance so that saturated steam and the aromatics it contains gelatinize the starches to produce soft, pillowy couscous grains. As anthropologist Slimane Hachi notes, steam acts as both a thermal agent and a flavor carrier that traverses the grains’ core as it imbibes them with the stew’s fragrance. Original couscous pots came without a lid to prevent the formation of wet steam and condensation, which could clump the grains together. So did the first registered model for an aluminum couscous pot. Lids came later, first as an optional feature, and then as a permanent fixture, as a sign of the couscous pot’s integration into the grammar of French kitchen technology and batterie de cuisine.
9This mode of preparation is fuel- and water-efficient, denoting thrift and economy in societies where resources were used carefully. Steam ensures that the small, agglomerated pellets are evenly cooked, preserving their unique airy texture and granularity. It enables the cooked grains to absorb the sauce of the stew without turning into a paste. Anthropologist Marceau Gast hypothesized that achieving this satisfying yet light consistency was the culinary quest of semi-sedentary Berber populations who were seeking to replicate the delicate taste and mouthfeel of gleaned wild grasses’ tiny seeds with larger cultivated cereals (2010). Whether this is accurate or not, it captures the visual, haptic, and gustatory aesthetic qualities of couscous.
10Steaming is repeated 2 to 3 times for 15-20 minutes or more, starting when the steam goes through the upper pan and becomes visible “in contact with the cooler atmosphere”5. Each time, steamed couscous is tossed into a large shallow dish, where it is de-clumped, sparingly sprinkled with water to help it swell, and left to rest until the next steaming. The labor-intensive hand-rolling, siftings, and 2 to 3 successive steaming operations necessary to prepare couscous grains have been replaced by industrially-produced, pre-cooked couscous, which can be quickly and conveniently rehydrated with boiling water, although it does not yield the same texture or taste sensation. Steaming was an uncommon technique in France until the popularization of the pressure cooker, affectionately called “cocotte minute,” in the 1950s (Brayet 2009). Domesticating steam was a hurdle that may in part explain the slow adoption of couscous in the French culinary repertoire. In a mistaken description meant to assimilate the dish to more familiar preparations, the 1926 Larousse Ménager compared couscous, presented as an “Arab recipe,” to “pot-au-feu,” a rustic French boiled dinner of meats and vegetables. Couscous grains, it explained, should be cooked “in a double boiler, in a type of colander, […] by poaching” [au bain marie dans un genre de passoire, [...] par pochage], (442), thus conflating poaching, which involves submerging food in a hot liquid, with steaming. To this day, most non-Maghrebi consumers bypass steaming and add boiling water instead, which yields a less satisfactory gustatory experience for it neglects that tasting is tactile and involves texture as well as flavor. The use of a couscous pot, referred to as “consommation traditionnelle” or “consommation ‘ethnique’” by the food industry, still accounted for half of the overall French consumption in 1999, according to Ferrero executives (Grange and Barriol 2010: 85-86). This marketing category unmistakably marks the couscous pot as a quaint but archaic cultural leftover, erasing the complexity of what it uniquely accomplishes, the simultaneously communal, yet separate, cooking and coming together of couscous’ components.
11Its unmistakable shape and visual characteristics deserve attention for the symbolic connotations they hold. Its curves and narrow waist likens it to a female body. Not only does the pot contain life-giving fluids in its belly, it also gestates a multitude of grains, embodying metaphors of fertility, growth and prosperity, that bond male and female principles. Couscous grains, a non-discrete entity, swell in the couscous pot and embody the very notion of multiplication. Thus, couscous is one of the foods prepared on the first day of sowing, as a good omen for a plentiful harvest (Aït Ferroukh, Messaoudi 2004: 19). With its round bottom, the gdra espouses the shape of the kanoun, the portable brazier on which cooking can be performed outside the home, in the courtyard and away from children. Secured on the kanoun’s three supporting points, the pot’s curves allow the heat to diffuse more evenly. The kanoun can be considered as the third level of the couscous pot, and corresponds to a mobile form of cooking where the kitchen space can be anywhere and everywhere (Wilson 1994: 23).
12This aspect was highlighted in colonial postcards of the “Scènes et types” genre, made popular at the turn of the century in French Algeria, and displayed as proof of the natives’ backwardness. A series titled “Women/Mauresques preparing couscous” showed them sitting on the ground, often outside by an entryway or a tent, with all their implements around them and looking up at the camera and the postcard viewer. A few of those postcards show bare-chested women, making it clear that exhibiting the act of cooking as colonial spectacle makes it potentially pornographic and likens it to prostitution: these women are presented as as available as the food they make. These commercial images aesthetics, their settings, and low angle shots circulated and reinforced the cultural hierarchy between archaic, “nomadic” natives looked down upon as a curiosity by civilized, modern colonizers, whose glistening kitchen and cooking appliances were becoming an insignia of progress and technological superiority (Oldenziel, Zachmann 2009).
13The couscous pot makes couscous the unique culinary and technical invention that it is. Yet relying on archeological remains alone does not suffice to support the antiquity of the dish. Pierced pottery was found in Roman-era, North African burial sites (Camps 1960: 103-104) and shards of perforated pottery were dug up in Medieval archeological sites dating back to the IX-Xth centuries, following the Arab conquest of North Africa (Rosenberg 1980: 43, Morsy 1996: 15). The first written mentions of the dish are found in a XIth century Arab text and the first recipes appear in Arab cookbooks in the XIIth century (Oubahli 2006). However, as Ernest Gobert, a doctor and a keen observer of Tunisian foodways, wrote in 1940, absence of proof is no proof of absence. Indeed, portable keskes made from plaited esparto grass or palm leaves, still in use to this day, are bound to decompose and leave no material traces behind (Camps 1960, Gobert 1940, Morsy 1996). Plaited keskes, lined with a cloth, are said to make better couscous than metal pans as their vegetal fibers impart some of their natural fragrance to the grains, avoiding the metallic taste of aluminum steamers. They also absorb humidity and swell with steam, thus eliminating the need for a kaffal, a joint, between both pots. As hand-made objects, these woven vessels elicit an aesthetic and affective bond that enhances the tactile and gustatory pleasure of cooking and eating. A renewable resource, they also make for poor archeological remains. Searching for and sacralizing traces, written sources and archeological evidence over transmitted practices and knowhow have instilled uncertainty about the invention of this ancient dish by Berber women. It has also made it easier for subsequent occupiers of North Africa to appropriate this culinary invention, as will be shown later, thus denying Berber women ownership of, or credit for their innovation, and recognition for its sophistication, which reflects a general disdain for the contributions of vernacular Berber cultures (Gast 2010: 75). This is in part due to the materials used to make couscous pots.
14Before the advent of aluminum utensils in the XXth century, embossed copper couscous pots made by skilled artisans, such as the one photographed in the first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique under “Couscous” (1938: 363-364), were available for affluent city dwellers. In rural areas however, couscous pots were made of terracotta, with top chambers in terracotta or basketry. Trained women potters designed, hand-built, polished, fired, and decorated a variety of utensils for water transportation, food storage, and cooking, for their own domestic use and the community. These pots were not meant for sale outside of the community. They belonged to their makers, and men in the family could not cede them to outsiders (Guichard 2005: 13). Furthermore, while the work may have been performed and fired collectively, the pieces were signed by women potters with designs or symbols that were uniquely theirs (Van Gennep 1911: 292, Hachi). Thrown pottery made in urban centers by male potters did not reach remote villages where production was utilitarian, as well as destined for ritual and votive uses (Guichard 2005: 13). Couscous pots were thus part of a continuum of artifacts that catered to bodily and spiritual needs, and were inscribed in daily, annual, and lifelong cycles.
15Using techniques such as coiling and modelling, women potters worked without a wheel nor a kiln. Once finished, their pieces were dried before baking in an open bonfire (Balfet 1957: 12, Guichard, Van Gennep). Cooking vessels were left undecorated and unpainted. The rudimentary nature of the tools—besides the hand—used to make these utensils; the absence of a monetary value and commercial circulation; and the fact the potters were women all converge to explain why the art and knowhow of these female makers tended to be overlooked, if not scorned as primitive. During the military conquest of Algeria, rural Berber pottery attracted the attention of French officers and travelers who were seduced by their elegant shapes and their abstract, geometrical hand-painted decorations, even if they considered them crude. Looted pieces found their way to Algiers’ shops where there was a certain European demand, as well as in museums and private collections in Europe (Guichard). Extracted from the world of significations they once inhabited, they can be found in museum exhibits, as in the photo below, separated from their co-objects and juxtaposed with others, or forgotten in people’s attics and museum storage.
Fig.1. Algerian terra-cotta couscous pot at the MuCEM museum in Marseille, 2014
A lone couscous pot at the MuCEM, in Marseille, in the now closed inaugural exhibition titled ”Galerie de la Méditerranée” in 2014. This terra cotta couscous pot from Tipasa, Algeria, dated 1880, was there to evoke wheat agriculture in the Mediterranean. The label provided date and place of origin, with no indication of how the object got there. A very similar couscous pot was featured in another exhibit on Mediterranean foodways, “Le Grand Mezze,” in Summer 2021. This time, the couscous pot’s date is “XXth century,” but no details were provided about its trajectory either.
Courtesy of the MuCEM, photograph of the author, 2014)
- 6 MuCEM, “La Galerie de la Méditerranée : Les Objets-Phares”, MuCEM.org, p. 19, consulted November 14 (...)
- 7 On the notion of the Mediterranean, see J.R. Henry, ‘Métamorphoses du mythe méditerranéen,’ in J.R. (...)
16For instance, no caption explained the trajectory and migration north of this couscous pot, on display in the “Mediterranean Gallery” (Galerie de la Méditerranée), the now-closed inaugural exhibition of the MuCEM (Musée des Cultures d’Europe et de Méditerranée) in Marseille in 2013, during Marseille’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. Its mute presence supported the museum’s aspirations to become “the new forum of the Mediterranean”6 an all-encompassing notion and a fuzzy colonial geo-historical construct that conveniently erases power differentials and historical exploitation, as well as the forced displacement of objects such as this very couscous pot7.
17Although in isolated rural areas women potters continued to make hand-built pottery and terra cotta couscous pots into the second half of the XXth century (Balfet 1957), various observers documented the slow disappearance of urban Algerian craftsmanship. Louis Massignon (1883-1962) writes that following attempts to reorganize and control craft guilds, French authorities abolished them altogether in 1868 (1924: 183). At the turn of the century, a renewed interest in indigenous art industries and Islamic arts, sought after to decorate private villas for rich patrons or pavilions during expositions, led to the creation of a local museum of Islamic arts, and the opening of workshops and schools aimed at revitalizing local crafts by reintroducing old models and techniques (Alvarèz Dopico 2020: 25-27). Writing in support of such initiatives, Marius Vachon (1850-1928) who was himself involved in reviving industrial arts and crafts in France with the creation of the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie in Saint Etienne, celebrated the sophistication of Algerian artistic and artisanal productions. He emphasized the beauty of the objects made by Algerian craftsmen during the Universal Expositions and deplored that to visitors and sceptics they belonged to the “category of whimsical trinkets and shiny junk more so than to an industrial production that could powerfully contribute to a great colony’s prosperity” [“plus au domaine du bibelot fantaisiste et de la camelote brillante qu’à celui d’une production industrielle, de nature à contribuer puissamment à la prospérité d’une grande colonie”] (1901: 387). These attempts were hampered by the disappearance of guild structures, the destitution of artisans, the lack of transmission, and the lack of continued commitment on the part of government administrators (Alvarèz Dopico 2020). Interestingly, Vachon makes no mention of rural women’s hand-built pottery, a genre considered as even more archaic and of lesser economic and artistic value.
- 8 L’Écho de Bougie : journal politique, littéraire, commercial, agricole, 17 septembre 1905, p.5, Gal (...)
18The decline of Algerian handicraft industries meant the “number of artisans went from 100,000 in the mid nineteenth century to 3,500 in 1951” (Bennoune 1988: 67). Without tariff protection against French and international competition, the existing economic organization collapsed. As a result, “all the utensils for domestic use that were manufactured by the potters, tinkers, smelters, coppersmiths and tinsmiths had been replaced by European hardware” (R. Lespes 1930, quoted in Bennoune: 67). In 1902, Vachon had already lamented the dumping of inexpensively mass-produced European objects, from jewelry, carpets, and utensils, to metalwork and pottery (23). Native models were imported, copied, industrially manufactured, and then exported back. Vallauris, a French hub for industrial pottery, manufactured terra cotta “couscoussier” and “Arab pots” [“marmite arabe”] for the North African market, as shown by its catalogue (Costes 1995: 57). An announcement for a giant couscous party hosted by the touring club of Kabylia confirmed this: “This time, the lamb roast [Méchoui] will be replaced by a monster-sized couscous. To prepare it, the organizing committee was obliged to order special pots from the factories at Vallauris” [“Le Méchoui sera remplacé cette fois par un couscous monstre pour la confection duquel le comité s’est vu dans l’obligation de commander des marmites spéciales aux usines de Vallauris.”]8
19Establishing a direct connection between the trajectories of objects and people, Massignon linked handicraft’s decline in Algeria with the surge of labor migration to post-WWI France. The trajectory and exhibition of the couscous pot at the MuCEM is thus significant for what they entail and omit. As critic Ariella Aïsha Azoulay proposes in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, the forced migrations of artifacts and people are one and the same, and museums and archives responsible for curating these objects constitute, as imperial institutions, a “major force of racialization and hence world destruction” (2019: 102). The couscous pot in the gallery of the Mediterranean says nothing about the colonial conquest of Algeria, but it posits Marseille and France as a shining Euro-Mediterranean beacon.
- 9 L’Écho d’Alger, January 1, 1923, Gallica.fr, consulted May 22, 2018
- 10 L’Écho d’Alger, Feb. 25, 1923, Gallica.fr, consulted May 5, 2018
- 11 L’Écho d’Alger, July 14, 1923, Gallica.fr, consulted May 5, 2018
20In January 1923, the first advertisement for an aluminum couscous pot was published in L’Echo d’Alger. “Polished, strong, aluminum couscous pot, very practical article, can be used to steam food” [“Couscoussier aluminium poli fort, article très pratique pouvant servir pour la cuisson des aliments à la vapeur”] said an ad for utensils at “Galeries de France,” a premier shopping venue in downtown Algiers9. Dissociating the couscous pot from couscous preparation, the description presented it as a modern kitchen aid in healthy cooking. Although the basic design of this immemorial utensil did not change, its new, shiny, aluminum body propelled it on a different trajectory. This ad is one of the first occurrences of the word “couscoussier” in L’Echo d’Alger to designate the two nesting pots as an ensemble, not just the upper pan. A subsequent advertisement for an “Algerian aluminum couscous pot” [“couscoussier algérien aluminium”]10 suggests it was either made or designed in Algeria. In July 1923, Grima, the prominent owner of a mill, pasta factory, and workshop where native women workers hand-rolled couscous in the Mustapha district of Algiers, advertised for its couscous along with a “Grima aluminum couscous pot for steaming” [“couscoussier Grima en aluminium pour cuisson à la vapeur”]11, quickly branding and adopting this new tool as a selling point, to flaunt the taste, health benefits and digestibility of steamed foods.
- 12 See Cato, On Farming, De Agricultura. Trans. Andrew Dalby. Prospect books. 1998, p. 162-163.
21Before WWI, “les couscoussiers” had designated not just a cooking utensil, but a coterie of local officials, artists, “chansonniers”, humorists, and other Algiers’ luminaries whose monthly gatherings at a local restaurant for libations around a generous couscous were publicized and reviewed in L’Echo d’Alger. Dignitaries and prominent Algérois named themselves after a dish they perceived as an asset they owned and through which they claimed their algérianité, setting themselves apart from the French metropole. Academician Louis Bertrand (1866-1941) who spent 10 years in Algeria (1891-1900), and whose novels celebrated the emergence in the French Algerian crucible of a new robust Mediterranean race predicated on the exclusion of the “Arabs” and the Jews, promoted the notion that French colonizers were the direct heirs to the Roman empire, enrolling couscous to further support his claims: “I have tried to show that [...] Africa never ceased to be Roman, even under its Muslim garb. [...] This couscouss [...] is the Carthaginians’ pultis punica, their national dish for which old Cato already gave the recipe to Rome’s cooks, two thousand years ago” [“J’ai essayé de montrer [...] que l’Afrique n’a jamais cessé d’être latine, même sous son costume musulman. [...] Ce couscouss [...], c’est la pultis punica des Carthaginois, leur mets national dont, voici deux mille ans, le Vieux Caton donnait déjà la recette aux cuisinières de Rome”] (1921 : 488-489). Pultis Punica, according to Cato’s recipe, was in fact a boiled cereal porridge, nothing like couscous’ airy rolled grains (Cato 162-163)12. Invoking the Roman Empire, Carthage, and Cato to justify French rule over Algeria, while denying Berbers couscous’ ownership, Bertrand suggests that the dish was already ingrained in the French settlers’ culinary identity and sensorium, yet their right to it was not felt as completely legitimate. After WWI, this use of the word “les couscoussiers” disappeared with the generation that appropriated it, while the word “Algérien,” heretofore used by and for European settlers, was claimed by the “Young Algerian” movement [“Jeunes Algériens”], the native elite calling for more political participation as recognition for the blood native troops shed on the European front (Fromage 2012: 239).
Fig.2. The first registered model for an aluminum couscous pot, 1923, Algiers. Designed by Ernest and Hélène Scebat
Dessin & Modèle n°11037 déposé le 15 février 1923 par Ernest SCEBAT à Alger pour un couscoussier en aluminium comprenant la marmite et le kaskees (1DM11037, source : archives INPI).
Archives INPI
- 13 All information on the Scebats comes from an 11.12.19 interview with Jean-René Scebat, Ernest’s gra (...)
- 14 Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun corroborates Bahloul’s point about oil as a stigma. Even before 1962, upwa (...)
22In 1923, Ernest Scebat registered the first model patent for an aluminum pot (ill. 2). Ernest came from a Jewish family whose roots in Algeria went back to 184013. An independent traveling salesman, he imported and sold cooking utensils and trinkets, such as those mentioned above. His wife, Hélène (born Missika) was a postal worker. They belonged to Algiers’ petite bourgeoisie. Family lore has it that she designed the first aluminum couscous pot because she was tired of lifting heavy terracotta pots and that Ernest, who liked to tinker, made it. It is unclear how, where, and with what the first model was built, but the model patent shows the Scebats’ address in Algiers. The opening of the first Salon des Arts Ménagers in Paris in 1923 may have been an inspiration. The fact Algerian Jews created the first aluminum couscous pot is revealing of the ambivalent social space they inhabited in colonial Algeria. Naturalized en masse by the Crémieux decree in 1870, they experienced unprecedented social mobility, adopting French, French names, Western dress, Republican ideals and schooling. Deeply attached to Republican assimilation, they still faced antisemitism from European settlers and prejudice from Muslim Algerian subjects. Despite their quick acculturation, they continued to share foodways, music, and some degree of cultural closeness with the latter. In 1962, they massively chose to relocate to France over Israel, further severing their bonds with the Maghreb. In exile, cuisine distinguished Algerian or so-called “Arab” Jews from European settlers, as well as from European Jews; for anthropologist Joëlle Bahloul, it even constituted a stigma: “The Algerian Jew eats, as does the Arab, oily and indigestible dishes, so spicy they ruin one’s health, in short his nutrition is backwards. These ethnocentric formulations have had reductive and depreciative effects in Judeo-Algerian minds and practices, instilling in them a deeply-seated sense of guilt about their Maghrebi Orientality.” [“Le Juif algérien mange, comme l’Arabe, des mets huileux et indigestes, épicés à détraquer la santé, bref sa nutrition est arriérée. Ces formulations ethnocentristes ont produit leurs effets réducteurs et dévalorisateurs dans les esprits et dans les pratiques judéo-algériennes, les imprégnant d’une profonde culpabilité de leur orientalité maghrébine.”] (1983: 24)14.
23Mrs. Scebat lived at the confluence of these cultural forces, culturally close to the dominated Muslim majority, yet legally and aspirationally part of the dominant European minority. Her French citizenship enabled her to access education and gain employment as a low-level civil servant at the post office, where many Jewish women worked. This was a desirable occupation for the stability and benefits it provided, as well as a step up for modest but socially mobile families (Allouche-Benayoun 2003: 113-117). In that position, Mrs Scebat interacted with her European counterparts, their way of life, and ideas. Her ingenious idea for an aluminum couscous pot devised a solution to combine her aspirations to culinary modernity, practicality, and respectability, embodied by the shiny and enticing utensils her husband sold for a living, with the need for cultural continuity and her attachment to Jewish-Algerian culinary traditions, which included couscous. The shape of the Scebats’ aluminum model also embodied this fragile compromise: the upper part had no handles and it came with no lid, which is closer to the shape of the original terra cotta model, whereas subsequent French designs saw the addition of handles and optional lids. The Scebat family was a cultural linchpin that set the couscous pot on its international trajectory. According to the family memory, the term of their patent covered their model for a limited time only; Ernest did not think his wife’s idea called for more thorough protection. Hence, according to the story the family tells, the Scebats had no recourse when Japy, a large northeastern French company known for its clocks and utensils, later plagiarized their model.
24Aluminum seems to have helped consolidate the use of the word ‘couscoussier’ to designate both parts as a whole, not solely the upper pierced vessel. Aluminum had emerged for military use around 1890 in France (Grinberg 2003, 76). This new metal was light, non-corroding, malleable, highly conductible, and shock-resistant. Its many properties explain how quickly it made its way into the kitchen and the domestic sphere. New lines of utensils started to replace hard to clean copper, heavy and cumbersome cast-iron, and breakable earthenware in the early XXth century. Fueled by the advent of gas, electricity and new stove technology, aluminum cookware was advertised as non-stick and odorless. In 1936, at the Salon des Arts Ménagers, Dr Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964) lent his considerable authority as a respected expert in matters of gastronomy and cooking science, which he termed “gastrotechnie,” to advertise aluminum’s many qualities and applicability to cooking techniques: non-tarnishable, no hot spots, and more affordable than copper, nickel and steel (de Pomiane 1936: 121). By 1937, copper and enameled iron practically disappeared from batterie de cuisine and by 1960 “70% of household goods [were] made out of aluminum”(Grinberg 2003, 77). Although stainless steel, glass and plastic eventually replaced it, Grinberg notes that new utensils and products, such as non-stick frying pans, couscous pots, electric rice cookers, certain types of pressure cookers, and packaging materials gave new life to aluminum, thanks in part to so-called “ethnic consumers.” Aluminum made the couscous pot more attractive to French consumers, and in turn, the couscous pot gave aluminum access to emergent markets in former colonies, such as Morocco and Ivory Coast. There, Pechiney, a major aluminum conglomerate based in France, opened new factories, Ivoiral and Mogalu in the 1970s. While in Europe concerns were raised about the safety of aluminum in kitchen utensils, Africa provided developing markets for the culinary, and potentially toxic, use of this metal.
25At the height of the colonial period, in the 1930s, leading French utensil manufacturers issued their own models with slight differences in the shape of the gdra, more or less potbellied, the shape and type of handles, and the optional inclusion of a lid. Japy added two handles on both the bottom and the upper pots and lids for both pots were optional. The Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus’s model was straighter so that both stacked vessels having the same circumference, they could use the same-size lid. For the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris, a special issue of the Revue de l’Aluminium et de ses applications dedicated a section of “Life in the colonies” to “kitchen utensils.” Sleek photographs artistically showcased aluminum utensils from the largest French manufacturer, the Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus: an “African teapot,” a couscous dish, rice bowls, an “Anamite spoon,” chopsticks, and an interesting hybrid, a “couscous pot with feet” that blended together the sieve and the keskes (ill. 3). These items were clearly intended for customers in the French colonial empire, colonized natives and settlers alike. Deploring the thinness, and hence the fragility and poor quality of certain utensils, the author suggested that “clearly, the extra-thin wares are in principle intended for indigenous customers” [Sans doute l’article extra-mince est en principe surtout destiné à la clientèle indigène] (L’intérêt colonial de l’aluminium 1931: 1437), as if native consumers deserved utensils of a lesser quality than their European counterparts, and were to blame for manufacturing shortcomings. The author further suggested that good quality aluminum would resist native servants’ [“les boys”] carelessness better than enamel would. These aluminum replications of native implements, meant to replace and outdo local handicrafts, were not only ruining vernacular industries and replacing them with subpar utensils, they also circulated racist stereotypes about backward and inferior natives and helped cement colonial racial hierarchies in everyday life.
Fig.3. An aluminum couscous pot, manufactured by the Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus for the colonial market
« L’intérêt colonial de l’aluminium. La vie coloniale : les ustensiles de ménage », Revue de l’Aluminium et de ses applications nº 43 Mai-Juin 1931, numéro spécial de l’Exposition colonial, p. 1436. This article featured a couscous pot alongside objects such as aluminum chopsticks.
Collection Institut pour l’histoire de l’aluminium
- 15 I thank Mr. Jacques Muccini, director of the Musée Japy in Beaucourt, for kindly sharing images fro (...)
26The undated nº 8 catalogue from the Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus, published between 1925 and 1928, featured these same items under “Special items for export” [Articles spéciaux pour exportation] (Articles de ménage: 121). A 1935 catalogue from Aluminium du Rhône, another company, proposed “Couscous kettles with kess-kess without lid, Authentic Arab model, patented” [MARMITES à COUSCOUS avec KESS-KESS sans COUVERCLE Véritable MODÈLE ARABE, breveté] (Aluminium du Rhône, 25). The same racialized labeling was present in a 1935 Japy catalogue, where the gdra was called “Marabout Pots with handles and lids with handles” [Marmite Marabout à anses et couvercles à anses] (Etablissements Japy: 9), (ill. 4).15 The word “marabout,” with a wide range of meanings inlcuding a revered Saint in Islam, a bird, and a kettle with a dome-like lid, evoked Orientalist images that confirmed the object’s racialization and suggested that the intended customers were not French.
Fig.4. The aluminum couscous pot manufactured by Japy bears a strong resemblance to the Scebats’model
« Marmite Marabout à anses et couvercles à anses », Établissements Japy, Fesches-le-Châtel, Aluminium, Tarif nº 13, 1935, 9.
Photo courtesy of Mr. Jacques Muccini
- 16 Les Modes de la Femme de France, 2 juillet 1921, nº321, p.26, Gallica.fr, consulted 3/15/2018
- 17 Les Modes de la Femme de France, 21 décembre 1930, nº815, p.7, Gallica.fr, consulted 3/15/2018
- 18 Les Modes de la Femme de France, 10 juillet 1927, nº635, p. 3, Gallica.fr, consulted 3/15/2018
27Readers’ correspondence in Les Modes de la Femme de France (later La Femme de France), a French women’s magazine (1916-1938), is indicative of couscous’ widening, if still marginal, appeal in France itself. In a section called “The beehive,” female readers of the upper middle class, aka “the bees” communicated using pseudonyms, exchanging recipes, riddles, and wise quotes. Asking “the Algerians among us” for recipes, the “bees” exchanged tips on where to buy it, or offered to send some sun dried couscous from Algeria to correspondents in France. Whereas a 1921 recipe suggested, as a makeshift solution, to use a regular colander for the keskes on top of a terracotta pot for the stew16, a 1930 reader wrote: “you can now purchase very practical aluminum couscous pots” [on vend maintenant des couscoussiers en aluminium qui sont très pratiques]17. That tip came from a reader who, by her own admission, “hid under the white veils of la dégueiza,” the name given to a North African fortune teller that she used as pseudonym18. Disguising as, and displacing native women, tapping their alleged allure and mystique, “la dégueiza” confirms that as couscous and the couscous pot made inroads into French foodways, they were permeated by forms of Orientalist exoticism and eroticism.
28This shiny modern utensil made couscous more culturally palatable to French cooks and eaters, while the addition of a lid improved its legibility and usability. The new aluminum version helped French cooks get acquainted with steam cooking, a method that was still fairly rare in the 1930s French culinary repertoire. Famous French proponent of Home Economics, Paulette Bernège (1896-1973) extolled the domestic uses of aluminum in L’Aluminium ménager (1941), a textbook written for Home Economics teachers that was part manual, part promotional literature. Aluminum, “the ideal popular, domestic, and economic metal” [le métal populaire, familial et économique par excellence] (9), was also “more French than any other”: developed by two French scientists, it was made of French-extracted bauxite (3). Bernège included the couscoussier in her “Alphabetical list of the main aluminum utensils for household use” [Liste alphabétique des principaux ustensiles d’aluminium d’emploi ménager] (11). With this mention, the couscous pot was formally integrated into French domestic sciences’ official curriculum, and on its way to becoming a household name.
29In 1934, ten years after its first mention in 1923 and in the wake of the very successful 1931 Colonial exhibition, the aluminum “couscous kettle” [marmite à couscous] appeared in the the mail order catalogue of the well-known Saint-Etienne manufacturer and retailer, Manufacture d’armes et de cycles de Saint-Etienne, later known as Manufrance. This popular illustrated catalogue, a fixture in French households, reached deep into France’s provinces and colonies. In the “Cooking utensils” section, the couscous pot was grouped with other steamers and an early pressure cooker. This time, it was clearly earmarked for French customers’ use, not solely for export to the colonial market. Its very name, “marmite à couscous,” instead of the newer “couscoussier” already in circulation, suggests that shoppers and eaters, especially Manufrance’s mostly rural customer base, were not all that familiar with it; the word “marmite” felt more homey. A rudimentary recipe accompanied the item’s description; a rare occurrence in the catalogue which confirms the perceived novelty of the utensil and the dish for its intended audience. The recipe, however, was erroneous. It called for placing meat in the keskes not in the bottom pan where it is supposed to stew. This may be due to the conflation with a different recipe in which meat is steamed in the keskes with spices and herbs, but it is unlikely. Strikingly, the error was not corrected until 1951. Neglect? Low volume of sales? Poor management? Still, the couscous pot remained in the catalogue.
30In the 1951 catalogue, the corrected recipe appeared in conjunction with a new model that resembled that of the Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus, whereas the previous one looked like Japy’s pot-bellied model, with the exception of the handles. Manufrance, famous for manufacturing bikes, firearms, and sewing machines, marketed goods from other companies without necessarily indicating their provenance. The recipe disappeared in 1967, when clearly couscous and the couscous pot no longer needed an introduction. Six years earlier, in 1961, the word “couscoussier” had entered the Petit Robert dictionary, a year before Algerian independence and the Pieds noirs’ “repatriation,” yet the dated “marmite à couscous” remained in the catalogue for another eighteen years. In 1971, the couscous pot was featured under “Everyday Aluminum Utensils.” In 1977, the “marmite à couscous” became “Le couscous” and joined a new category of trendy, festive, semi-exotic specialties titled, “Specialties practical tips” [Les Spécialités idées pratiques] (552-3), which included a “paella pan” [le plat à paëlla], a new addition in 1976, as well as “Crepes, Fondues, Pizza,” with their specific, and of course necessary, utensils. Couscous was now part of a more international culinary offer that reflected French eaters’ aspirations to worldliness, tourism and travel abroad via consumption. Marketing renamed that section “the Gourmets’corner” in 1978. In 1979, the name “couscoussier” was finally adopted. A new large model available in 10 and 12 liters from Tournus (ex-Manufacture Métallurgique de Tournus) intended for “Collective catering and large families” [les collectivités ou familles nombreuses] (640) may reflect the policy of family reunification (1976-1978) that allowed migrants to bring their families to France, as well as new patterns of consumption with the popularization of eating out. Couscous had become a popular and inexpensive way to feed large groups and became a go-to food for mass catering. Subsequent Manufrance catalogues continued to offer couscoussiers until the company went out of business in 1985, an evidence of sustained demand.
- 19 Bernard Loiseau, L’envolée des saveurs Hachette/Michel Lafon, 1991. Gallica.fr, consulted June 6, 2 (...)
31Steaming gained favor as a fat-free cooking method with the advent of Nouvelle Cuisine and concerns over healthy eating in overfed Western societies. Cookbooks from the late 1970s to the 1990s, from chefs such as three-Michelin-starred Bernard Loiseau, suggested substituting a couscous pot for a steam cooker for delicate food such as fish, scallops, vegetables, or fowl supreme19. In that configuration, vegetables and meats migrated from the bottom section of the couscous pot where the stew used to cook, to the pierced steamer, from which couscous grains were expelled. Couscous grains, despite their lightness, had become too blue collar for this rarefied, elitist, white cuisine.
Fig.5. Aluminum wine cooler pierced at the bottom to be used as makeshift keskes
This pierced wine cooler can be secured on the valve of a pressure cooker and used as a keskes, thus transforming the pressure cooker into a (faster) couscous pot.
The object belongs to the collection of Mr Abdelkader Zennaf. Courtesy of Mr Abdelkader Zennaf, photograph of the author
- 20 “Les 22 couscous” by FERICO S.A.
32While every French person seems to own a couscous pot, as Rachid Taha sarcastically noted, these implements may not get a lot of use. Ferrero and Ricci, two couscous manufacturers who relocated to France following the nationalization of the food industry in Algeria in 1964, understood that the couscous pot was both a marker of authenticity and an impediment to expanding the market share of their industrial, pre-cooked couscous. On packaging and publicity from the 1960s, they suggested the use of a colander on top of a large pot for those who did not own a couscous pot. A later Ferrero commercial brochure published after their 1973 acquisition by the French multinational corporation Gervais Danone and subsequent merger with Ricci, suggested ways to bypass the couscous pot altogether with “les couscous express” (21): “Couscous is not just the traditional dish you already know. Couscous is also the foundation of numerous recipes: salads, sides or desserts, that do not necessarily require the use of a couscous pot” [Le couscous, ce n’est pas simplement le plat traditionnel que vous connaissez. Le couscous, c’est également l’élément de base de nombreuses recettes : salades, plats d’accompagnement ou dessert, qui ne nécessitent pas forcément l’usage d’un couscoussier]20. The biography of the couscous pot and its adoption in French households could end in kitchen limbo, if not in obsolescence, as Rachid Taha quipped, due to the very success of the grains it helped invent.
33Conversely, in Algeria, the consequences of emigration between 1930-1954 were felt at the most intimate, everyday level in the domestic sphere. Migrants sent remittances that enabled families back home to renovate their homes and purchase household items. They brought back sewing machines, radio players, and portable butane stoves that replaced coals and the kanoun (Ageron 1979: 531). Newly available butane gas burners announced the demise of earthenware pots, which tend to crack in direct contact with gas flames’ very high temperature, in favor of aluminum couscous pots, often made in France or by French companies. This was a slow shift, however, for in 1980, in her text titled “In Praise of Couscous,” Algerian sociologist of agriculture and moujahida Claudine Chaulet still noted that aluminum couscous pots and large shallow vessels to roll couscous were becoming widely available, as was gas cooking (2011, 40).
- 21 See Nadia Benahmed’s blog post “Astuce pour préparer facilement la semoule pour le couscous” 30 jan (...)
- 22 Mr Abdelkader Zennaf, born in Algeria in 1951, who migrated to St Chamond, France as a youth, recou (...)
34The generalization of the aluminum pressure cooker, which cooks stews faster than any pot, prompted the invention of another clever contraption. Aluminum wine coolers, pierced at the bottom and adjusted on the valve of a pressure cooker, provide an inexpensive makeshift upper steamer (ill.5). The truncated cone made of aluminum is filled with couscous and placed directly on the source of steam exiting the pressure cooker and entering the wine cooler through a unique hole, thus adapting the principle of the double-chambered cooking vessel to the pressure cooker. Similarly, a large, used food can, pierced and placed on top of the valve, can ingeniously replace the upper steamer in the absence of a couscous pot or to save time by using a pressure cooker21. In her first online recipe for couscous (2015), French-Algerian food blogger Nadia Benahmed credits her immigrant mother and her counterparts for this resourceful bricolage, one of her cherished childhood memories. Whether this practical device was invented in North Africa or in the immigrant community in France, it indicates that technical knowledge and know-how, not just objects, travel and adapt as part of an expanding couscous culture22 .
35The couscous pot is now a familiar, if seldom-used, utensil in France. The food industry has developed ways to bypass it and make it obsolete. It has become a relic of sorts, separated from its material world and co-objects. Its colonial trajectory seems all but muted. In the Maghrebi diaspora, however, the couscous pot remains a symbolic culinary implement, a vehicle of individual and collective sensory memory, and a cultural signature. The couscoussier encapsulates not just home but a history of displacement. It encompasses both cultural continuity and wholeness, as well as conflict, separation, and alienation. In this section, I explore two literary and photographic representations from the Algerian diaspora. Both make use of the couscous pot to tell complex stories about colonial history and postcolonial identities. Journalist Dalila Kerchouche in her autobiographical memorial quest, Mon père, ce harki (My Father this Harki 2003), and visual artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah in her photographic self-portraits with a couscous pot (“Ni, ni, ni” 2007) do not use the couscous pot to cook or perform the operations it was designed for. Lost, found, and lost again, her mother’s couscous pot is a physical and figurative link to her family’s traumatic past for Kerchouche. For Bouabdellah, the couscous pot is both a detachable accessory and an intimate object that she chooses to include in her self-portraits to create room for play. Born after the War of Independence and having lived in France, not Algeria, for most if not all of their lives, both women rewrite the expected uses of this utilitarian object, while inscribing themselves in a lineage of Algerian women makers.
36Mon père ce harki, by author and journalist Dalila Kerchouche, born in France in 1973, is a testimonial and a cathartic historical quest that investigates her family’s painful history of forced displacement from Algeria to France. Piecing together family stories and silences, historical archives, and witness’ testimonies, she documents how her father, a poor Algerian peasant, enrolled in a French army’s irregular militia as a “harki” during the war of Independence, to support his family. After the family managed to escape reprisals and massacres at the hands of newly independent Algerians, they escaped to France, only to be interned for 12 years in remote and isolated detainee camps overseen by former settlers or military officers, and victimized by endemic racism, leading to her older brother’s suicide. Born in France, Kerchouche experiences rejection from the French and the Algerians, and is stigmatized as the child of a traitor. She engages in a quest to elucidate a past she was never told, visiting the French camps where her family lived, and her parents’ native village in Algeria. There, her cousin Djamel takes her to her parents’ abandoned shack and brings her the keskes her mother left behind, half filled with wet dirt. A photograph shows her smiling cousin holding the broken keskes with the following caption: “My cousin Djamel unearths my mother’s broken couscous pot. Forty years later, I retrieve this utensil. My journey takes on its full meaning” [Mon cousin Djamel déterre le couscoussier ébréché de ma mère. Quarante ans après, je retrouve cet ustensile. Mon voyage prend tout son sens].
37It is broken and unusable, but Kerchouche identifies it emotionally as the couscous pot her mother made out of clay more than 40 years ago and whose holes she pierced with her index finger. The holes are rough and unpolished and reflect the type of utilitarian pottery rural women made for their own use. A past testimonial to her mother’s labor, these holes are also her signature as an illiterate potter. The fabrication of these pots, without the mediation of a potter wheel, necessitates a more intimate contact between the potter and her creations. Seizing the pot that her mother made and used so often before she had to leave it behind, the author establishes a physical, yet disjunctive connection with her mother’s past self, before her hurried departure for France in 1962. She enters the cabin, holding the pot as a magic key, and uses it as a narrative tool to unlock and retell her parents’ past. Unearthing the couscous pot is part of the “harki”-ology/archeology the author says she is conducting, to tell the story of those crushed by history. Yet, the broken pot also embodies a fractured relationship with the past and the land that gave the very clay her mother used to make the pot. The stories she digs up, just like the reality that can be glimpsed through a couscous pot, have dips and gaps: “My father was never a great hero nor a vile traitor” (257). She learns from family members that her father, while working for the French army, stole ammunition for his brother and nephew who fought for independence and provided them with protection as best he could. When leaving her parents’ cabin, Kerchouche takes the couscous pot with her with the intention of bringing it back to her mother, as if she had just omitted to pack it with her in her rushed exile. Yet, she ultimately forgets it in Algeria (255), keeping the circle open, broken, as if to signal that just like the couscous pot she unearthed, and unlike what her caption suggested, there is no being made whole, no completion.
38Zoulikha Bouabdellah, born in 1977 in Moscow of Algerian parents, grew up in Algiers and moved to Paris in 1993 during the Algerian civil war (1991-2002). A graduate from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts, she works between Paris and Casablanca and is the recipient of numerous distinctions. Her work is represented by art galleries in Paris, Madrid, and Dubaï. The triptych “Ni, ni, ni” [neither, nor, nor] is a photographic self-portrait with a couscous pot that astutely references still life and self-portraiture23. The first one shows the artist holding a keskes by the handles, covering her mouth and nose, leaving out her discreetly made-up eyes; in the second one, it covers her eyes and nose, to reveal her mouth; in the third one she covers her ears with two keskes. With all practical culinary functionality removed, Bouabdellah explores the metal couscous pot as an aesthetic accessory, a shiny play object, as well as an obstacle that obstructs her vision, muzzles her mouth, and impedes her hearing. A clear visual reference to the famous three wise monkeys’ maxim, “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil”--the handles of the keskes in the middle photograph even look like monkey’s ears, the triptych cannot however be easily understood as either a token of wisdom or an invitation to look the other way. Rather, combined with a keskes and condensed into three negations, “ni, ni, ni,” the motto alluded to in the title invites viewers to refuse gender expectations, domestic alienation, exotic eroticization, and racist stereotypes.
- 24 Conversation with author and scholar Zahia Rhamani, Georgetown University, Nov. 19, 2012.
39At first, it may seem that Bouabdellah uses the humble couscous pot found in most North African families’ kitchens, markets and grocery stores to weigh in on the side of those who especially denounce Maghrebi women’s oppression through the work of feeding and the drudgery of cooking. The couscous sieve physically contains and blocks Bouabdellah’s face, alluding to the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. This association is further solidified by French-Algerian author and harki daughter, Zahia Rhamani’s refusal to learn how to make couscous as a declaration of emancipation.24 Here the triptych also makes barely veiled references to the recurrent debates on the hijab that have stirred up French politics and society since 1989, turning Muslim women’s bodies and faces into a Republican battleground where secular rhetoric is obsessively reasserted and where unfinished postcolonial business is replayed.
40However, couscous pots have holes. Cleverly engaging in object play, Bouabdellah seizes the utensil and makes creative use of the engineered porosity of this ancient tool. She plays peek-a-boo with the viewers and their expectations, affirming her freedom to reinterpret and redirect the intended practical uses of the cooking utensil. She conjures up images of Mashrabiya, an element of traditional Arabic architecture used since the Middle Ages up to the mid-20th century, consisting of a window enclosed with carved latticework. There is a deliberate reference to Orientalist stereotypes of mysterious and hidden Harems, of (un)veiled women, but the Mashrabiya also implies that the residents can observe from behind the lattice. Viewers and museumgoers are peaked at and under observation, while the model, who is also the photographer, looks the visitors in the eyes, returning their gaze.
41By staging her self-portraits with a couscous pot, and making them into a triptych, she suggests a dynamic, evolving, and ambivalent bond with that object, one that questions the notion of woman as object. She is and she isn’t that couscous pot. The keskes may appear as a mundane cooking vessel. Inexpensive, mass-produced, aluminum, and now stainless steel versions are ubiquitous. However, it uses an ancient technology, a method of indirect cooking that demonstrates sophistication as well as thrift, water and fuel economy, since the various components of the meal-stew, vegetables, seasoning, meats, and cereal base—cook and steam separately but stacked up over the same fire. It is an economical solution to accommodate seasonal ingredients while feeding a large group of people.
42Inscribing herself in a lineage of women potters and cooks who made, used, adapted the couscous pot as a technical object, the artist reflects not only about, but with this object, as an extension of her own body, as she manipulates it physically and figuratively. In her triptych, the couscous pot represents at once forms of domestic oppression, a tool for culinary creation, a bond to the artist’s culture, and a prop for performances of the self that is at once her/s and distinct from her. In a self-referential gesture, the sieve with its holes and chamber replicates the lens of a camera, such as the one used in this series of self-portraits. The keskes and the camera both screen, separate, and select; they both frame as much as they obstruct, hence the need for more than one portrait of the self. Staging herself in the position of the apes from the famous motto, Bouabdellah carefully composes a self-portrait of the artist as a wise ape and quietly depicts herself as a trickster who reclaims the couscous pot, with a twist. In so doing, she frees herself and the object from the significance and ethnic stigma attached to it. Although the artist’s use of the iconic couscous pot could be deemed an objectification of her culture of origins, which the implement conveniently packages and encapsulates, it can also be understood as a critique of such a reification, since the artist as model is attached, in more ways than one, to her culinary attachments, yet reimagines their meanings in playful ways. Reappropriating couscous from folklorization and forms of colonial representations such as the postcards described above, Bouabdellah uses it to concoct a defiant photographic work that manages to maintain filial bonds with her female predecessors. By giving herself and the keskes equal presence, Bouabdellah makes it a character in her mise en scène, one that questions the objectification of objects as mere extensions or means, and highlights their role as racialized attributes, as well as cultural and social mediators that frame and re-orient interactions. By placing the keskes in a new frame, literally and figuratively, Bouadbellah disorients our perceptions and distances herself, and the keskes, from the (post)colonial morass.
43In the two narratives presented above, cooking implements are put to new use to rewrite the diasporic self. Kerchouche and Bouabdellah mobilize the couscous pot, a traveling technical object and vehicle of an unacknowledged colonial history, as anamnestic sieve and artistic play object. In rearranging their relationship to this object, they also reinvent their positions in relation to others, the milieu they inhabit, and their pasts. In these works, the couscous pot, a traditional, racialized cooking tool associated with patriarchal domination, folklorization, and women’s ingenuity, becomes a portable, traveling piece of cultural heritage through which displaced subjects can rewrite old narratives.
44Can the couscous pot speak? Yes, under specific conditions. In my introduction, I proposed to approach the couscous pot as a technical and colonial subaltern, and in doing so I mean to connect, not equate the two. Making the couscous pot speak and allowing it to be heard requires focusing on the materiality of the object, that is its design, its mode of operation and the sequence of actions it enables, the materials it is made of, its names, its historical trajectory and the reinventions it lends itself to. This also involves developing an appreciation for the cultural practices, social values, and culinary tastes it necessitates and supports. As a technical object, the couscous pot retains, materializes, and communicates to those who use it and to those who taste couscous, the skills, practical knowledge, and ingenuity of its anonymous inventors. It conjures up the faint voices of its makers. The couscous pot is their signature and a transnational agent in the culinary and aesthetic transaction and extraction that occurred with colonization
45Their knowledge and savoir faire were unacknowledged, expropriated, and their creation deemed archaic. At the heart of imperialism is “the dissociation between people and objects in which the experts specialize,” (Azoulay 2019: 49) a “dissociation that unleashed an unstoppable movement of (forced) migration of objects and people in different circuits and the destruction of the worlds of which they were part” (52). For women in the Algerian diaspora, seizing this mute witness as an open-worked window into the upheaval of colonization and migration is a gesture of reparation. Making the couscous pot speak means “unlearning imperialism” as charted by Azoulay, by reconnecting people and their objects.