كل بصل و انسى اللي حصل |EAT ONIONS AND FORGET WHAT HAPPENEd. 2019- ongoing
For over 60 years in Saudi, women’s narratives and stories were rarely made visible or heard. These narratives were taking place yet were experienced in carefully curated social spaces that practiced anonymity, privacy, and gender segregation. Women experienced each other regularly, in private spaces, amongst each other. The main exposure the women in the house had with men is through food. The sons used to live in their parents house even after marriage, and their wives take turn to cook everyday. Each woman is constantly judged by everyone in the family for her performance. Cooking food became an expressive platform for women to prove themselves, and their opportunity to make history. History shows us how human possibilities allow normal people, just like us, who simply lived in a different time can have such an impact on how we see and perceive ourselves today. It leads us to believe that everything is changeable. History shows us that we are not only the products of history, but we are its agents too.
I used to hear this saying growing up, “eat onions and forget what happened”. Onions releases a gas as a defense mechanism that causes irritation in the eyes, resulting in tears. Onions create an inhospitable atmosphere as an act of resistance and survival to an act of intrusion. The unpleasant interaction induces a physical reaction in the body resulting in the excretion of the memories of the past, in the form of sweat and tears. Onions have powerful antiseptic qualities and are good for starving off bacteria. This is probably why onions are regarded as a symbol for warding off evil due to its potent smell and chemical properties. Since onions have no central core or a pit around which the various layers form, the circular shape and many layers seem to come out of an eternal void where we all came from. An onion can be peeled down layer by layer until it completely disappears.
It has pungent smell and tastes spicy when eaten raw. When cooked, onions turn sweet. They are easily grown, easily stored, and is a tasty and staple ingredient used in many recipes around the world. Cooking is an activity unique to humans. Cooking is inherently an art form that relates to people and not only the individual. Sometime in the history of our evolution, cooking became an activity associated with housework and women. Human agricultural settlements are said to have been a transformative point in history for women, where the division of labor defined our gender roles, of men going to hunt and women staying home to farm, cook, saw, clean, and take care of their children. households became miniature factories, where women create food, fabric, and other items that were essential for survival of their families, communities, local economies, and the new nation they helped to create.
