From KCRW, I'm Evan Kliman and you're listening to good food.

When she opened her restaurant in Fitzroy, Australia,

Saba Al-Amayo described the food as Ethiopian, but in 2020 as conflict consumed the Tigray region where her mother is from,

Saba wanted to share the deeper story behind her family's recipes.

In Tekebash and Saba she takes us through the complexity of her mother's

journey including civil war, migration, divorce, and immigration. It's an

extraordinary document of a daughter's love for her mother and all of it is

emotionally bound up with Tigray culture and food.

Hi Saba, welcome to good food.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

In the book, you say that the concept of being Ethiopian is a constructed one and you

paraphrased author Chimenanda Ingoze Adiché, who says the only authentic identity for the African

is the tribe, we became Ethiopian through conquests.

So tell us a bit about where Tigray is and how the culture is

different from the rest of Ethiopia. So I don't want to overemphasize, it's not necessarily the differences, because there are some similarities in the same way that I guess you might find Americans might have a lot of similarity for Canadians or Switzerland like you know the ones

that share the border with Germany might have a lot of similarities to the Germans on the

other side and so on so to, Tigra is located in the northern regions of Ethiopia.

So it's in the furthest north bordering with Eritrea.

Now, the Eritreans are from the south are also from the same actual tribe as like let's say Tagaro as together but obviously is a border now so half of us identify as

Ethiopian Tagaro and then the other ones are from Eritrea.

So there's that distinction, but what was really important and different that can be

highlighted between let's say Tagaru and the rest of Ethiopia is historical contexts.

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