The Compromises of Bread-Making

The Compromises of Bread-Making

Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table by Mohammed Al Naas

By Assia Belgacem

Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table by Libyan author Mohammed Al Naas follows in the footsteps of Tayeb Elsalih’s Season of Migration to the North, with both Milad and Elsalih Mustafa Sa’eed’s work points for understanding the pressures to assimilate in colonial environments. While Sa’eed’s work highlights broader colonial violence through his proximity to whiteness, Milad embodies patriarchal violence, or the expectation to be a man in a traditional Libyan society.

Originally published in Arabic in 2021—and winner of the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction—Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table arrives in the English-speaking sphere translated by Sawad Hussein and published by Harper Via Books. It centers on the life story of Milad, a character inspired by the Libyan proverb “a family with an Uncle Milad”—that is, a man unable to exert authority over the women of his family. Milad is a man who allows—or at least, does not get in the way of—women who live outside of Libyan society’s requirements and expectations of them.

The novel’s Milad is a Libyan man who goes wherever the wind blows, forever vacillating between his true identity and society’s expectations of him. Milad is close to an anti-hero, a passive character without any strong personal convictions. Milad remains nonchalant, siding with men sometimes, women at other times, not knowing where he stands or how to articulate his thoughts on certain issues. While he might look progressive for allowing his wife to smoke and drink wine, there is no real intellectual process that allowed him to reach such conclusions. It is simply his “nature,” which, unfortunately for him, doesn’t align with Libyan society’s expectations of men. Milad feels alienated from his own country, family, and society, sometimes questioning his existence. His progressive ideas make the reader want to root for him, only to give up a page later because of his lack of conviction. The author keeps this back-and-forth rhythm up until the very last pages, exploring Milad’s individual liberation within and outside of traditional gender roles.

It would, however, be reductive and inaccurate to summarize the novel as a story of a nonchalant character who doesn’t know where he stands on gender issues or how to fight society’s expectations of him—even if these conflicts are indeed the main threads of the story. What may first seem like a common, maybe even redundant, theme in the Arab and North African literary sphere—the male/female binary—is rendered unique through one single component: bread.

Bread is a metaphor for life, and Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table might as well be a bread recipe. This food made of six simple ingredients is a staple in Libyan homes, providing the imagery needed to understand the stages of development Milad goes through and how ultimately his identity is shaped, or rather, kneaded.

But what kind of bread are we talking about? French baguette, ciabatta, mhawwara, tannur bread? Therein lies the potential of this novel, one that explores the “paradox of the Libyan psyche,” as Milad puts it, through the different stages of recipe for making bread. Because Milad is a baker, he can only understand life through his number one passion. Baking, because it requires patience and gentleness, is the one process through which Milad can express his soft nature without being judged by society. The bakery is the space where men—regardless of their harsh personality—must be tender and delicate to produce good bread.

Surprisingly, the novel opens up with a quite cheerful Milad, welcoming an unknown filmmaker introduced by Madame, a former psychology student. The filmmaker is interested in interviewing Milad as a baker—possibly the best baker after his father—in a Libyan town. What is supposed to be a back and forth between the interviewer and Milad instantly becomes a back and forth between Milad’s past and the present moment. Instead of dialogue, the narrator takes over the entire narration with a stream-of-consciousness monologue that reflects his own existential crisis and journey of wavering between his own identity and the way he is perceived by others. Milad’s control of the narration also hints at the heavy load that weighs on his shoulders, one he begins to unload through his discussions with Madame, and then in his interview with the filmmaker.

This interview is a chance for Milad to reflect on his life and past decisions with a clearer, sharper mind, contrasting with his previous self as a Libyan man lost between his soft nature and his father’s expectations that he be strict and severe with women. Milad’s father maintained strict gender roles and despised anything that even hinted at femininity, so much so that he could not stand his own henna-colored hand, and even more so Milad’s henna-died pinkie. Despite henna being an important element in Islam, praised and recommended by the Prophet and a cultural heritage in Libya among both men and women, it is also most generally used to adorn women’s hands, symbolizing delicacy and gentleness, the same qualities used to bake good bread.

Ironically, it is Milad’s father, a baker, who introduces him to bread. It is in the bakery—as the first part of the novel is titled—where Milad is trained as a baker and his nurturing side—best represented through his henna-dyed pinkie—takes shape. Here, he witnesses his strict father turn into a tender and loving person, gently handling dough to produce the best bread. Milad sees his father in a new light, so much so that he describes him as having a “love affair with bread.” Even while giving the basic recipe of bread to Milad—the four ordinary ingredients being flour, water, yeast and salt—he includes a lesson on male female relationships: “don’t mix the yeast with the salt, they’re like men and women.” Bread becomes a metaphor for life and gender.

Yeast can’t survive when in direct contact with salt, the latter dehydrating it. Legend says that salt instantly kills yeast, while in reality, it only slows down the process of fermentation. Yet still, a slow fermentation usually means dough takes a longer time to rise, and does so unevenly, resulting in an unaesthetic bread shape. This explains why yeast is sometimes first mixed within warm water, or salt is added to the flour instead of the yeast. In any case, a mediator is needed or both need to stay separated for the yeast to stay alive.

Milad has always respected this part of Milad’s father’s advice, which is also a baker’s number one rule. The same cannot be said for the last part: “they’re like men and women.”

Milad Mukhtar Mohammed Milad al-Usta grew up in a home full of women; he was the fourth child, had three older sisters, and the last child, an attempt at giving Milad a brother, turned out to be a girl. He was doted on and molded, kneaded, by his sisters. He made the best wax and waxed his sisters’ legs, and later on, his wife Zeinab’s legs too. He befriended his wife’s co-worker, Madame—a Libyan widow from the upper class who lived in France with her now deceased husband—and became her mentor, teaching her how to bake bread and take care of her garden.

Not mixing yeast with salt was quite a challenge for Milad, and one that was doomed to fail. While his father always provided the best environment for his dough to rise, he struggled to provide an equally good environment for his son to be as masculine as society demanded. Despite his best efforts, and his teachings at the bakery, Milad (the salt) mixed with yeast (women). Milad’s father might have been able to express his soft, tender side with his yeast, who he named Valentina and later renamed to Khadduja, only. Ironically, both Milad and this father gave their yeast female names.

Outside of breadmaking, Milad had more difficulty repressing his soft nature, simply not understanding what was so profoundly wrong about a man feeling at ease around his sisters and not needing to perform for society. But, haunted by his father’s advice to man up, Milad leaves the bakery for the barracks of the military and then later on for the fittingly named barraca—a cabin he built under the supervision of his cousin Absi. The specific alliteration seems to be found in translation only since “the bakery” is originally “Al-makhbaz” (المخبز) or “kusha” (كوشة) in arabic, “barracks” is “الثكنة” while the Barraca remains similar “البرّاكة”.

The translation here adds a layer of intensity to these moments, since the consonants /b/ /k/ /r/ in these three soundingly similar words creates aggressive and rugged sounds, conveying heavy, masculine expectations of how Milad should behave by Libyan society’s standards. These three places also represent the spaces where Milad is supposed to be trained into achieving “full manhood.”

First, at the bakery—the most soft-sounding word—with his father as the male role model. Then, in the military barracks, with the famous or rather infamous Madonna—a military chief and the embodiment of male toxicity who made it his personal mission to make Milad an aggressive, rugged, macho man just like him. Last but not least is the Barraca, the cabin where Milad hung out with his chauvinistic cousin Absi, his friends, and occasionally prostitutes, who boost the men’s ego and sexual prowess.

The similarity between the names barraca—an Italian word meaning hut, cabin—and the military’s barracks conveys Milad’s attempts at conforming and meeting every male’s expectations: his father, Madonna, and Absi. The barraca is a place where he continues his military training with Absi as his teacher.

What renders this story rather unique is the diversity of characters. Milad might be the main figure, but the author provides other characters as complex as Milad, even if they seem at first glance to fit into society’s expectations. Absi, for example, boasts about his superiority as a man by how he dominates women, but has never been in the military and never experienced what it truly means to “be a man” by military standards. Zeinab, Milad’s wife, is both a conservative and progressive woman. She is the breadwinner of the family while Milad is the one bakes the bread, does household chores, takes care of plants and knows what kind of incense to finish off with. While Zeinab doesn’t mind the reversed roles, she cannot have the neighbors see Milad washing dishes, or worse, let her mother-in-law know about it. Ultimately, none of the characters are spared from the heavy chorus that is their village, which meticulously comments on anything out of the line: a woman wearing jeans, a man not exerting his authority over women, to mention only a few.

Some characters cannot bear the weight of society’s expectations, while others hold on to life through their passions. For Zeinab, it’s her ambition at work; for Milad, it’s baking. Bread, the dough left rising, the yeast Khadduja to be taken care of, save Milad’s life many times throughout the novel, though it might not be everyone’s savior.

But the question remains: what kind of bread does Milad ultimately decide to bake during the interview with the filmmaker—a scene that both opens and closes the story? How does that bread reflect Milad’s identity? As Milad bakes, the tensions between his kind, soft nature and his desire to meet the expectations of the men in his life clash, resulting in the baking of a bread that represents a newly shaped Milad—one that attempts to resolve the impasse he has found himself in. While a brand new Milad is at first a promising sight, the latter is only able to exist through the internal pressures of conforming to society.

Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table, by Mohammed Alnaas and translated by Sawad Hussain, is available now from Harper Collins.

Assia Belgacem is a French-Algerian writer and literary critic based in Bordeaux, France. Her work focuses on decolonization, French politics and North African affairs.

Also by Assia Belgacem:

On ‘Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide’

Also on Bread for Uncle Milad’s Table:

On Translating a Novel of ‘Profound Gentleness in a Violent Milieu’

A Playlist for Mohammed Alnaas’s ‘Bread for Uncle Milad’s Table’

On an Award-Winning Novel & the Unstable Literary Scene in Libya

Kneading Words: Mohammed Alnaas on Bread, Writing, and the Stuff of Language

Also by Mohammed Alnaas:

‘A Taste of Bitter Tea’, by Mohammed Alnaas