berry season

We’ve entered the season in which the fruit kiosks and market stands are teeming with colorful heaps—yellow, red, and purple plums; apricots; red and black currants; white mulberries; fresh figs, still green and plump; deep red and bright yellow cherries. The feast for the eyes anticipates the explosion of flavor. 

The berries are my favorite--bite sized pieces, adjustable portions, even I don’t have to cook them!

This post was almost titled “weird berry season” because that phrase popped into my head as I was adding these fruits to my matsoun this morning. But actually, there is nothing weird about these berries. Blueberries, black currants, and gooseberries are all perfectly normal berries. In fact, unlike raspberries and strawberries (aggregate fruits and accessory fruits, respectively), these three are all firmly within the bounds of what it takes to be a berry, botanically speaking. 

That I think of them as weird is a mark of my foreignness, specifically my Americanness. Gooseberries and black currants are unusual to me because they are uncommon in the United States in my lifetime. Gardeners in the US could grow them, they just tend not to. And it took a lot of searching before I found a nursery who would sell me a black currant bush to plant at Rambling Farmhouse. 

It's a common human impulse to normalize the familiar and to label new or unfamiliar things "weird." We can only know what we've been exposed to, after all. But that impulse to apply the label "weird" or its cousin "exotic" is also one of the pernicious problems with travel writing. It's something I think a lot about as I write here and on social media about my experiences as a person living and traveling outside her culture of origin. 

"Weird" lowers whatever it describes; "exotic" places it on a pedestal. 

So, how can I tell you about my experience, about the things that are new and unfamiliar, about the moments of culture shock and dislocation without invoking the categories of weird or exotic? How can I avoid repeating the destructive patterns that Edward Said, a Palestinian-American scholar, outlines in Orientalism?

Well, I can describe the experience as it is, rather than as it is not, and I can highlight differences as gaps in my own experience.

Fruit stalls here in Armenia have an abundant variety of fruits, especially this time of year. Every trip to the fruit market is a reminder that the abundance of US grocery stores is the mass production of the same few varieties of a few types of fruits. Here, there is less of each thing, but so many different things!

Did you know that plums come in yellow? I just learned that recently. Sometimes I take surreptitious pictures of new-to-me fruits so I can learn about what they are when I get home. Sometimes I ask the vendor, but that often results in being offered a taste, which is dicey for my oral allergy syndrome, unfortunately. 

The berries are my favorite because they are generally outside my allergy categories, and I can taste them when making a choice and then enjoy them on the way home. Each kind of berry has its own flavor, of course, but gooseberries and currants (both red and black) share a tartness that I love. US foodways tend to favor sweetness, of course, but until I was contemplating these berries, I hadn't realized this extended to the fruits we cultivate. 

 Basically, the idea is that Westerners (including people from the US) tend to view Eastern cultures (formerly grouped togehter as "the Orient") from a colonizing standpoint