Coffee as connection – tradition, controversy and literary representations

I would like to introduce my new project on the ways in which material culture connects seemingly disparate literary traditions around the world in unexpected ways. 

Coffee is my example. Coffee is everywhere in our life today. For many of us, it marks the beginning of our day, and signals respite from work in the middle of the day. It wakes up our brain cells in the morning and replenishes them with energy in the afternoon. It is all too familiar – a mundane, quotidian drink – so why would a professor of Arabic and comparative literature take it on as a subject of study?

As a Chinese Arabist interested in Arabic-Chinese Comparative Literature, and more broadly South-South connections and exchanges, I have found the current theories and practices in the two areas of relevant literary studies, Comparative Literature and World Literature, confining. Informed by definitions of language, text, and genre that are grounded in the concept of ‘territorial nation-state’, Comparative Literature privileges West-East and North-South influence or parallel studies, while World Literature tracks the movement of literary works, through translation, from local southern national fields to cosmopolitan northern literary capitals. Direct literary contacts, often through southern authors’ and their translators’ mastery of northern languages, are necessary. In such configurations of Comparative Literature and World Literature, Arabic and Chinese literary exchanges would be deemed improbable. However, our experience of the quotidian says otherwise.

Arabic and Chinese – in fact, all our languages; cultural practices and literary works – are saturated with things, concepts, and worldviews from around the world. Coffee, as a drink, commodity, and cultural practice, links one thing with other things, the local with the global, social life with intercultural exchange, and politics with aesthetics.

We catch a glimpse of this in the following passage from Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory of Forgetfulness – a record of one day in August 1982 of Palestinian life in Beirut – in Ibrahim Muhawi’s beautiful translation. Beirut was under siege and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was getting ready to move to Tunis.

“I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.

"Coffee for an addict like me, is the key to the day.

"And coffee, for one who knows it as I do, means making it with your own hands and not having it come to you on a tray, because the bringer of the tray is also the bearer of talk, and the first coffee, the virgin of the silent morning, is spoiled by the first words. Dawn, my dawn is antithetical to chatter. The aroma of coffee can absorb sounds and will go rancid, even if these sounds are nothing more than a gentle 'Good Morning!'

"Coffee is the morning silence, early and unhurried, the only silence in which you can be at peace with self and things, creative, standing alone with some water that you read for in lazy solitude and pour into a small copper pot with a mysterious shine—yellow turning to brown—that you place over a low fire. Oh, that it were a wood fire!”

Coffee, ‘the key to the day’, is to be made by hand in a copper pot and, we can guess, served in china. China here is not the country but its famous porcelain, which is everywhere in our material world as well. Coffee, for Darwish, is to be consumed in silence and solitude in the morning here, but elsewhere in the same text with friends in coffeehouses surrounded by chatter, noise and exchange of news about Palestinians around the world. By the time we come to the end of Memory for Forgetfulness we get a very strong sense that ‘coffee is geography’ and that if we follow the aroma of coffee with our nose, we can visualise a transnational Palestinian community connected by coffee — coffeehouses and news of Palestinians exchanged around these. It is here, the source of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetics, and of his reflections on solitude and sociability, and on life and death.

Those of us who have grown up in the Arab world and with Arabic television drama would not question the Arab-ness of coffee and its history in ancient Arabia. The contemporary Jordanian/Palestinian custom of serving coffee to guests at their arrival is traced to Bedouin customs in Arabia before Islam. Drinking the brew is an expression that the guests come in peace, and refusal points to unhappiness with the relationship between two tribes and anticipates a contentious discussion of a dispute. As such, coffee is ingrained in Arab identity since, let us say, time immemorial.

The history of coffee tells a different story. It shows such integration of coffee into Arab identity is a part of ‘invention of tradition’, a term Eric Hobsbawm describes in his discussion of the ‘pomp and ceremony’ underpinning rituals performed by and around British Monarchy. Coffee is native to either Yemen or Ethiopia and the Sudan. The first mention of coffee drinking among Yemeni Sufi circles appeared in the 15th century. Coffee reached Persia, Turkey and North Africa by the 16th century, then spread to Europe in the 17th century, and the rest of the world. The Dutch East India Company brought it to Japan at the beginning of the 18th century. From there, it reached Taiwan and possibly the rest of East Asia and Southeast Asia. It spawned coffeehouses around the world: Mecca before 1512, Damascus in 1530, Cairo thereabouts, Constantinople after 1555, Venice in 1629, Rome in 1645, Oxford 1650, London in 1652, Paris in 1657, and Japan in 1888.

Coffee and coffeehouses were not uncontroversial. They generated heated debates and were banned in Mecca between 1512-1524. Throughout the 16th century attempts were made in Europe and the Ottoman world to ban coffee and coffeehouses. Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate, sums up the Islamic discourse on banning coffee and coffeehouses in his 1988 novel My Name is Red, using the voice of an 16th century Ottoman religious scholar by the name of Husret Hoja:

“The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil’s ruse.

“Coffeehouses are places where pleasure-seekers and wealthy gadabouts sit knee-to-knee, involving themselves in all sorts of vulgar behaviour; in fact, even before the dervish houses are closed, coffeehouses ought to be banned. Do the poor have enough money to drink coffee? Men frequent these places, become besotted with coffee and lose control of their mental faculties to the point that they actually listen to and believe what dogs and mongrels have to say. But those who curse me and our religion, it is they who are the true mongrels.”

Clearly, these attempts were not successful. Coffee drinking spread and coffeehouses sprung up everywhere in the Middle East and Europe first then the rest of the world, with the help of European imperialism and colonialism. The coffee market is valued at $127 billion today, and the British coffeehouse market at £10.1 billion in 2018 and £5.3 billion in 2023. Coffee became the ‘dark gold’ of the 19th century economy of empires, European and Japanese, that drove colonial exploitation of the natural and human resources of the colonies. This is detailed as early as 1860 by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), also known as Multatuli, in Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. Coffeehouses became the ‘public sphere’ in which trade, economy, politics and international relations were discussed and debated in England. This English coffeehouse is the model of Cairene coffeehouses in the 1988 Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novels. An imagined, modern democratic Egypt emerges in this fictionalized Cairene coffeehouse, where the various classes of Egyptians come together to exchange news and dialogue.

Coffee engineered another colonial enterprise. Together with tea and other drinks and food, it served as an impulse behind the ceramic and porcelain industry in Europe, which copied and competed with the Chinese blue and white sold around the world since the 13th century. The blue willow, modelled on the Chinese landscape pattern, is a design invented by English potters in the 18th century. It is today one of the most popular tableware around the world. You see it used in coffeehouses, tearooms, kitchens, dining rooms and restaurants, and displayed in museums, paintings, films, and television dramas. More importantly we tell stories around it and on its surface. The blue willow is an ‘oriental tale’ inspired by Chinese stories of unrequited love. The ‘two birds flying high’ in the poem, invented to give blue willow an oriental flair, are two lovers who die and transmogrify into birds when they are prevented from being together. This is how the poem reads:

Two birds flying high,

A Chinese vessel, sailing by.

A bridge with three men, sometimes four,

A willow tree, hanging o'er.

A Chinese temple, there it stands,

Built upon the river sands.

An apple tree, with apples on,

A crooked fence to end my song.

As we have seen already, coffee features prominently in the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk. In World Literature, it retains the original meanings associated with the Arabic word for coffee: qahwa. Qahwa meant wine, more particularly, warmed wine in pre-Islamic poetry. Wine is associated with desire and passion in pre-Islamic poetry and pre-modern Arabic writings. In The 1001 Nights, a feast of food, wine and music is always a prelude to a night of passionate love. In Brazilian-Lebanese Raduan Nassar’s 1978 novel, A Cup of Rage, a cup of coffee left on the table to get cold is the barometer of the male and female protagonists’ cooling passion that is the cause of their divorce. In Taiwanese Zhu Tianwen’s 1994 novel, Notes of a Desolate Man, a 'cappuccino with cinnamon' in the morning after a passionate wedding night, 'assaults [the] nose like a hurricane', and on another occasion,

“When the coffee arrived, Fido looked at me, waiting for orders. I just focused on the cup of iced coffee, overflowing with whipped cream and topped with a cherry; I was half meditating, half nodding, like a man appreciating a work of art. He took that as a sign that he could start drinking. And so, with total composure, he raised the cup to his lips, no longer feeling any need to pay attention to me. I was the lucky one, for I was free to drink in his beauty and youth with my eyes. I was getting a lot for my money.”

In Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel, Kafka on the Shore, coffee is the means to an Oedipal sexual liaison between the teenage Kafka Tamura and the older Miss Saeki. Mundane quotidian things often have a rich intercultural life. This is true not only of coffee but also of other global commodities such as tea, cocoa, sugar, tobacco, silk, cotton, linen, porcelain and spices, to name just a few. The intercultural life of a commodity informs its social and literary life: in literary works, as it travels across countries and domains, it can be the source and site of creative innovations in aesthetics, ethics and politics. Coffee, in its travels, brings with it a history of practice, a tradition of knowledge, and a poetics and metaphysics, depositing these in the host culture and weaving them into the fabric of cultural expressions so seamlessly that it is at home everywhere in the world. This intercultural life of things shows us how entangled our lives and destinies are. More importantly, it shows that cultural encounters can take place translingually and across literary texts daily, and as such, it has the potential to pluralise Comparative Literature and World Literature.

Professor Wen-chin Ouyang FBA is a professor of Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London.