Samantha Ellis yearns to eat the nabug fruit that her Iraqi-Jewish parents recall from Baghdad back gardens. Yet when she asks for it in London’s Iraqi shops, she’s met only with blank looks. It took much effort for her to find the English name for the nabug – the Christ’s thorn jujube – and even then she’s unable to source seeds online. Eventually an Iraqi Muslim friend brings her a bag of the fruits. She shares them with her mother, who lights up: “It’s nabug!”. She tells her grandson she hasn’t eaten one in 50 years, and despite wanting a Haribo, he joins his grandmother and mother in enjoying the taste, “like a cross between an apricot and a date”.
This story in Ellis’s memoir is, like the book itself, about many things – loss, the distance between generations, nostalgia for a place one has never been, and the power of food to evoke memory – but perhaps most fundamentally, it is a story about language; of its slipperiness and ambiguity.
