The heavy weight and symbolism of Cake
Sugar, Power, and the Politics of the Birthday Tier
I recently watched Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake (2025), and the film still hasn’t left me. It sits somewhere behind my sternum, the way certain stories do…not as a memory of plot or image exactly, but as a feeling that has decided to stay and make itself visible. It is not the most devastating film I have seen about life under a dictatorship. Nor is it the loudest or the most explicitly political. It is, on its surface, a film about a little girl trying to find flour, eggs, and sugar. And yet, there is a scene near the beginning that I keep returning to. Nine-year-old Lamia is in her classroom in 1990s Iraq, watching her teacher draw names from a jar. The room holds its collective breath in the way only children who already understand danger can. Part of the mandatory national celebrations for Saddam Hussein’s birthday, Lamia’s name is called for the cake, and her face immediately changes. It doesn’t crumple. It recalibrates. She is nine years old, and she already knows that failure means punishment and that there is no appeal. The cake isn’t a privilege. It is almost a sentence.
Hasan Hadi’s debut feature — Iraq’s entry for the Academy Awards, winner of the Caméra d’Or and the Audience Award at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is restrained yet emotionally devastating. Shot on digital with a film-like softness, it follows Lamia and her friend Saeed across two days as she scours a city ground down by western sanctions and the infrastructure of a dictatorship to find three ingredients: flour, eggs, sugar. The performances, drawn almost entirely from non-professional actors, carry that unguarded quality you only get from people who don’t know how not to be themselves. Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, who plays Lamia, is one of those rare child actors I’ve come across whose inner life you can watch unfold in real time: thinking, calculating, swallowing fear, and proceeding anyway. Waheed Thabet Khreibat as Bibi, her grandmother, is a quiet earthquake. A scene in which she refuses to leave a police station until her missing granddaughter is produced feels less like drama and more like a documentary: a record of a woman who has outlasted regimes by refusing to move.
What Hadi depicts with extraordinary economy is how totalitarianism shrinks life to its most exhausting particulars. Hussein himself is never seen; he is only ever invoked, his portrait omnipresent, his birthday a gravitational force warping every transaction in the city. A cake isn’t just a cake. The film insists that every obstacle Lamia encounters is proof of loyalty, a performance of joy compelled by a state that understands perfectly well that forcing people to celebrate is a more intimate humiliation than forcing them to mourn.
A critique that came to mind was that, while the film is entertaining and compelling, it ultimately rehearses familiar stereotypes about Iraq and speaks more to the appetite of a Western festival circuit than to the country’s reality. There is a long tradition of films about suffering in the Global South that achieve their emotional power partly because they confirm what their audiences already believe — the exotic poverty, the brutal regime, the innocent child navigating what adults have destroyed. Hadi, who grew up under Hussein’s rule and filmed entirely in Iraq, is not an outsider to this story. But the question of for whom a film is made, and which version of a place it chooses to show, remains a legitimate and unresolved tension. I left watching the movie a little uncertain, which might be the most honest response available. What really haunted me was the central image. A child crossing a devastated city in search of the ingredients to bake a cake that nobody wants to bake, for a president nobody loves, in a country that cannot afford the sugar. It is absurd. It is perfectly, historically real. And it is far from the first time that cake has been made to carry political weight it was never meant to bear.
The phrase we all know; Let them eat cake (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche) was almost certainly never said by Marie Antoinette. Historians have established this with reasonable confidence for decades, though the attribution refuses to die. The line can be traced back to Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1765, when Antoinette was nine years old and still living in Austria, years away from France and its court. Rousseau attributed it simply to “a great princess” — probably, some scholars suggest, Maria Theresa, wife of Louis XIV, who lived a century before the Revolution. The earliest known connection of the phrase to Marie Antoinette in print appears in a 1843 journal, fifty years after her execution. By then, of course, she was already dead and could not object.
There is something instructive in the misattribution itself. The phrase survived not because it was true but because it was useful — because it crystallised something many people needed to believe about power. That those who hold it are not merely cruel but oblivious. The distance between the palace and the street is so vast that the people inside cannot even correctly name the food the people outside are dying without. This is, in its way, a more damning charge than deliberate malice. Malice at least implies awareness.
And there is a further irony buried in the translation. The original French says brioche, not cake — a rich, buttery, egg-enriched bread, somewhere between a loaf and a pastry. Cake, in English, refers to excess. Brioche was already a step up from bread, but it was still bread. The translation performs the very obliviousness it describes: even the retelling inflates the luxury, without knowing it. Someone along the way decided that brioche wasn’t quite extravagant enough, and so a princess who possibly never said anything became forever associated with a word that wasn’t even the right word. Yet, we cannot quite exonerate the world the phrase points to. Antoinette’s Versailles was a machine for the production of spectacle, and sugar was central to it. The elaborate spun-sugar centerpieces on the royal table, the confections displayed at state dinners, the pastries assembled into architectural fantasies in France, were saturated with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade. The sugar that made Versailles taste sweet was grown on Caribbean plantations by enslaved people whose names did not make it into the histories written about the great princess or her table. The cake, even before anyone is compelled to eat it, is already a colonial object.
There is a way in which every tier of a traditional celebration cake is a compressed history of empire. The sugar from the Caribbean. The chocolate and vanilla from Mexico and Madagascar were harvested by Indigenous and enslaved labour under colonial management. The flour from grain markets whose prices were set by powers far from the fields where it grew. Sidney Mintz, whom I learned from in my Master’s, in his extraordinary 1985 study Sweetness and Power, traced the transformation of sugar from rare luxury to everyday commodity and argued that this transformation could not be separated from the plantation system that made it possible. Sweetness and subjugation were cultivated in the same soil.
This is what makes Raju Rage and Jesse Darling’s 2016 anti-performance Let Them Eat Cake / May The One Without Hunger Lift The First Knife so precisely titled. The cakes at the centre of their work were not incidental; their very ingredients were the argument. I was attending Block Universe performance festival in London in 2016, and I walked into that room not quite knowing what I was walking into. What I found was an installation that refused to behave like one. There were sculptural cakes, all beautiful, impeccably made, arranged on a table. A rack of knives. A Sikh sword, which I later learned was a deliberate and layered inclusion, a reference to the Sikh soldiers who fought both for and against the British Empire. A waltz playing on a loop, something almost ballroom about the whole setup, and then a napkin with a prompt: may the one without hunger lift the first knife.
The room had that particular energy of people who have arrived expecting to be shown something and suddenly realise they are the show. No one moved immediately. We stood there, audience and complicit parties simultaneously, caught between the aesthetics of the table and the violence the table was quietly staging. Raju described it later as an “anti-performance”; a refusal to let the performers be consumed by the audience’s gaze, a flipping of the dynamic so that the audience becomes the actor and must face whatever that reveals about them. Standing in that room, I felt it working in real time: I was being asked to locate myself in a colonial economy made delicious, and to decide what to do with my hands. I did taste a piece of the cake. I want to be honest about that too. It was extraordinary, and I ate it knowing, because the work made sure I knew, that I was eating something that had been colonially traded to reach my mouth — sugar, chocolate, coffee, vanilla, all of them fruits of empire dressed up as celebration. That is the brilliance and the difficulty of Raju's practice: it directly takes you into the history it is narrating. The act of tasting was not a relief from the tension; it was the tension.
Expanding on Raju Rage & Jesse Darling’s cake installation, I want to highlight another artist’s work. Taus Makhacheva arrived at the cake by accident. Working in the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, she stumbled across a piece of Soviet propaganda footage depicting Hitler cutting into a cake shaped like the Caspian Sea. The narration was emphatic about Nazi intentions toward Baku’s oil. The experts, she later noted, believe the footage is fabricated, and there is no frame in which the cake and Hitler appear together. The whole thing was a construction, a piece of edible political theatre assembled to tell a story about conquest and desire. The image lodged in her. In 2014, she remade the cake — a chocolate-sponge replica of the Caspian Sea — and presented it to guests in the peace room of Uppsala Castle in Sweden, at the 5th Friction International Performance Art Festival. She later served a map of the Russian Federation in Moscow, offering it to people according to the regions they wished to visit. The geography of appetite, made literal. At the Delfina Foundation in London, she staged a dinner tracing the food memories of Dagestan (the multi-ethnic North Caucasian republic where her family is from) moving course by course from the basic mountain dishes of the 19th century toward a finale of a Chanel-bag cake, with gold-leaf vodka in ice shot glasses. She described it as “a journey from basic food to luxury,” but also as something more unsettled than that: a way of talking about historic wounds that have not healed and perhaps never will, dressed up in icing and served with a smile.
What I find so urgent in Makhacheva’s practice is that she is working in two directions at once. The propaganda footage she found is cake as territorial ambition — geography edible, conquest performed in miniature. The Chanel-bag cakes from Dagestani bakeries on Instagram are cake as aspiration, luxury goods reproduced in cream and sponge by people who cannot afford the originals, in a republic with high unemployment and endemic corruption. Both are forms of fantasy. Both use the cake as a surface on which desire is projected, whether the desire belongs to a dictator eyeing oil fields or a teenager wanting a Louis Vuitton bag that will never exist except in sugar. The cake, in Makhacheva’s hands, becomes a kind of lie detector — it shows you what people want badly enough to confect from nothing. Her Caspian Sea molds, which she later developed as industrial pressing objects, sit in gallery spaces as serene minimalist objects. The sea is reduced to a shape that can be multiplied and used to make something pleasant. It is one of the colder observations I have encountered in contemporary art. Everything that cannot be controlled, including seas, territories, histories can be reshaped, made domestic, made delicious, served in a peace room to people who will eat it.
It is worth standing back for a moment and asking why it is cake, specifically, that keeps recurring across these histories. Cake is structurally a celebration. It arrives already encoding joy, already demanding that something be marked. A loaf of bread says: here is sustenance. A cake says: here is an occasion. And this is precisely what makes it so useful to power. Forcing people to bake a cake for a dictator is not merely demanding labour, it is demanding festivity. You can force people to work, force people to march. But forcing them to celebrate, to dress their compulsion in icing and candles, is something more invasive. More intimate. Lamia’s teacher didn’t ask her to write a report on Saddam Hussein. He asks her to bake him a birthday cake.
Raju Rage & Jesse Darling understood this when they placed the knives next to the celebration. Makhacheva understood it when she served geopolitics as dessert. Hadi understood it when he built an entire film around a child sourcing three ingredients in a country emptied of them. The phrase that started all of this was probably never said. But its power was never about who said it — it was about what it named: the ease with which those who control the ingredients of celebration can demand that others perform it. This logic keeps recurring, across centuries and geographies, without embarrassment. In Versailles. In Hadi’s schoolroom. In Uppsala’s peace room. In a London performance space in 2016, with beautiful cakes on a table, knives beside them, and a waltz that had forgotten to stop.
I flinched — not from the sword, not from the knives, but from the napkin. May the one without hunger lift the first knife. I read it and looked around at the room doing the same quiet calculation. Then came the harder question: what does it mean to be standing here, full enough to perform hesitation?
I ate the cake. It was very good. And the goodness of it was the point.
References
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