The Shift with Sam Baker Samantha Ellis on food, family and finding your identity in your 40s
My guest today is a woman on a mission to preserve the language of her grandparents. Playwright, screenwriter and novelist Samantha Ellis is the author of one of my personal favourites How To Be A Heroine. Sam was in her early 40s and a new mum when it dawned on her that her mother tongue - or milk language - was on the verge of dying out.
The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Sam grew up surrounded by the noisy vivid hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, but when she tried to tell her son he was chopping onions on her heart, she realised she couldn’t find the words - and even if she could, he wouldn’t understand them.
In her evocatively titled book of the same name, Sam goes back through the lives of her parents and grandparents, from Iraq to Israel to London and in so doing discovers far more about herself than she could ever have imagined.
Sam takes us on a journey back to 1950s Baghdad to share what she discovered about herself and her family heritage and how it’s shaped her as she heads towards 50. We also discussed intergenerational trauma, uses for coriander, cooking as a cure for overthinking, learning to belly dance and the unexpected joy of not being allowed to hold your stomach in!
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.
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