The Persistence of Life and Play in በርበረ [ber-be-re] Transcripts

Abstract

In their record of events, transcripts act as the representative account of their participants’ dialogue and actions, crystallizing these moments into coherent narratives that detail “what exactly happened.” However, this coherence obscures the many choices that go into a transcript’s production, from the descriptions offered to the descriptions left out. Nowhere is this perhaps clearer than in the recipes of “made dishes,” which promise the faithful reproduction of their subjects’ sensory experience. Reading this author’s localized experience of the spice mix በርበረ [ ber-be-re] through the recipes of six writer-editors,1 this article adopts a methodology of diffraction to illustrate the transcript’s many practices of domination. This article argues that while the transcript colonizes the space of exchange it describes, it can also act as a space of playful resistance, detailing በርበረ’s persistence of life, hope, and possibility even among the ex/inclusions of its transcripted recipe.