Our daily bread

I first met author and foreign correspondent Annia Ciezadlo in New York City. Like me, she was a Midwestern mutt torn between the city's seductive bustle and the airs it put on. It was the early 2000s, a decade before Ciezadlo published her stunning memoir, now out in paperback, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. The book chronicles her "honeymoon in Baghdad" in 2003, the months she spent there, and her subsequent move to Beirut, all the while working as a foreign correspondent alongside her Lebanese husband, journalist Mohamad Bazzi. (Like many Lebanese, Bazzi has family in Dearborn.)

I caught up with Ciezadlo while she cooked up greens and shallots to talk about what it's like to move to the Middle East as an American woman — and how stories of daily life and meals tell us as much about a country as the tales of its wars.

Metro Times: There are a lot of books about the wars in the Middle East, but Dwight Garner in the New York Times called yours one of the "most intimate and valuable to come out of the war in Iraq." Why did you think writing about food and culture would be more valuable than doing a book on the politics of the region?

Annia Ciezadlo: I was writing a lot about politics and I was writing a lot of these sophisticated political analyses for National Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. [But] when I came back from trips in Baghdad, no-one wanted to know, "What do you think about the Iraqi governing council?" People wanted to talk about, "What does Baghdad look like? Where do they eat? How do they get around, do they ride donkeys?" That's the stuff that people are actually interested in and that's the stuff that makes people care about a country they can't see.

If you want to understand a country that's having a war or an uprising or a revolution, you can't understand that country at war unless you understand it at peace. If people had absolutely no understanding of America before Sept. 11, how would they understand America before or after it? And that's what we do with the Middle East. Most of us don't pay much attention to Egypt or Tunisia or Lebanon until there's a revolution or a war. But to understand the extraordinary events you have to understand that ordinary events.

That's really abstract: The basic genesis of the idea is, I was looking at this giant pile of wild greens [on my counter], and I was washing dishes, and I was thinking about all this political stuff I write and how no one ever reads it. And I thought, "You know, Lebanon is really a lot like southern France, if I wrote a book about Lebanon that was like A Year in a Provence, I wonder if anyone would read it." [laughs]

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