What did my mother do to me the first time I accepted food from a stranger? Did she beat me? Maybe she twisted my ears as hard as if she could crumple them like a paper ball and toss them away since they didn’t seem to listen. I no longer remember. But I always remembered not to eat from a stranger’s pot, even if they nudged me with their warmest smile. Especially if they nudged me with their warmest smile.
In Nigerianspeak, a stranger is anyone who is not of our household. On the list of strangers are neighbors, classmates, family members our parents distrust, our friends and their families. All of them belong outside. We children do wrong when we eat outside, in someone else’s home. It is greed. Our mothers ask if they don’t feed us enough, if we hadn’t just eaten before committing that act of shame. We have made ourselves carcasses for witches to take, we’ve eaten our way into initiations we know nothing of. I must have been guilty of all of the above, because my mother cited them all.
We hear of initiations not only from our parents. At school in Lagos, in gatherings of young and old families in Ibadan, we’re told the story of the child who got a lollipop as a gift from a friend. When this child tore the wrapper open, the candy that previously balanced itself on its stick had morphed into an index finger that sat on a skewer like it was set to be grilled. The child in the story is a boy or a girl. They saw the candy for what it was, because the child or the child’s parent prayed upon it before attempting to eat it. The story changes with each teller, but the lessons are glaring.
How this story toured Nigeria is traced to the era where the creators of exorcism performance art in the Nigerian film industry made children their primary subjects. The 90s and early 2000s were especially tainted by one pastor in Calabar who fed Nigerians otherworldly horror: children were portrayed as seldom pure, as agents of darkness. On the different social media where we chatter, fight, and find out our lives are crafted from the same Nigerian script, we all learned how these films provided our parents with the raw material for tales like the one about the child with the ‘finger candy.’ Or worse, how they influenced some parents to start injuring their children when they tried to beat the demons in them.
We can’t know how many ‘no, thank yous’ we’ve said to food from outside. We’ll guess how many grains of sand are on a beach instead. We can’t say we’ve never lied when many times we had to say a painful “I just ate at home” to the offer of a meal that arouses desire from all five senses.
To tell such a lie is not to soil our probity; to refuse to tell the lie is to pursue greed. A stench will grow from it and never leave. It’ll turn us into easy adults that stretch hands towards an outsider’s plate at a single invitation, instead of making our host beg us as if they’ll gain a favor when we eat their food. We’ll never know to announce a sudden farewell once our host starts gathering plates to serve us, so they can plead that we stay and inform us that they prepared the feast just for us.
In this country our mouths are passages to our faith, the vessels through which we seek the face of our creator. We believe. We disbelieve. We also eat our way out of faithfulness. We save ourselves when we shut our mouths against food that comes from outside the fold.
Our neighbor in the next compound tells my mother over the fence that she is not open to eating the meal we will take from door to door in celebration of Eid. Her belief kicks against it. My mother appreciates the honesty. She says it is better that her food won’t be fed to the bin. I know what she refers to by so saying. Another neighbor, one whom my mother held highly and thus served the best of Eid meals reserved for guests, confesses that she’d never eaten any of those meals I’d been taking to her house over the years. What she did with the food, she wouldn’t say.
To dine with others outside my faith is to join in their celebration, to become one of them. It may also mean losing jannah because we’re no longer what we should be if we hope to see the light of paradise. We argue for our dilemma: How do we turn our backs on our kith and kin who give themselves to us and share in our meals during every Eid even when they don’t share in our belief? What do their feasts matter? Does the reciprocity of kind deeds not mean more in our culture? We can’t do without it lest we break the chains that make us a community. In the end our arguments are struck with multiple arrows. Some say we’re just Yoruba Muslims and only lukewarm believers and keener hedonists like us make such allowances.
What is clean is what we trust enough to put in our mouths, my mother always says. On this matter I stand as one with her. We will not eat foods that come from people whose kitchens she suspects ooze filth. She accepts the food if she mustn’t offend the giver. She instructs me to discreetly invite stray goats into the compound for their enjoyment. Sometimes she tells me to give some to our chickens.
I use the same checklist as my mother to mark the people from whom I shall accept no food.
The wearer of an outfit that’s been worn for too long without being cleaned, or a seemingly clean one whose collar or hem has darkened with grime. One who appears too stale in the morning or whose face is speckled with dried drool by the noon hour. When one eats from them, my mother says, one courts ill health.
It is not that I was so immune to the aroma of food from bukaterias and roadside vendors by the time I outgrew childhood. I wished I could do more than stare at the display of akara and dundu, fried potatoes, and plantain and the large pots of stew from the window of my primary-school bus whenever we drove by these places. But my mother’s will was stronger and it forced me to see something more: the gutters by these food stands, the dirty plates stacked high and covered by swarms of flies, the yellowed water in which the dirty plates would be cleaned, the crowd of sweaty customers clamoring and stretching over open pots and food coolers.
When my mother’s sisters learn that I’m often not more useful than an attendant in a kitchen, they say to me, “O our sister, the mighty, has birthed a weakling.” A daughter can be like her father, so I don’t mind them. I cook rice and tasty stews and I’ve had a number of people ask me for my recipe. I’ve made jollof rice that everyone wanted to eat. I make beans that no one likes because it is everything bean porridge shouldn’t be – hard, salty, flooded with palm oil. For most of my five years at the University of Ibadan, these meals were often what I ate when left to my own devices. Because I am my mother’s daughter, I didn’t belong in the school cafeterias where I would never trust the source of their water. I was proven right a few times when students reported trouble in their insides after eating at a particular spot.
To be a Nigerian child is to be restricted to a portion of meat that never sates you. But when you’re older, free, and moneyed, you can’t steal from your own pot. You simply take. Food might be at home, but if what we want to eat is outside, a vendor and a phone call away, we have to bring it home. These are part of the little joys of outgrowing the wings of parents.
Soon many things don’t mean much, even if our parents object. We don’t see strangers, we see food. Outside of the home. Outside of the faith. Outside of the borders of hygiene. But what a myth it is that our mouths won’t lose the taste of freedom, that our mouths won’t punish our bodies as much as they can gratify it.
We eventually arrive at the place where we must restrain ourselves in front of food. We scroll through timelines endlessly, memorizing hacks on how to cut off the foods that touch our souls. We commit atrocities like cooking ẹ̀fọ́ rírò without oil, akin to relocating sealife to land. We must lose what we’ve gained in flesh.
Dietary changes are often the first to announce punishment when we’ve been made vulnerable by sickness. Look at me. In my very last days at Ibadan, I stopped adhering to the principles my mother passed to me. I was on every food delivery app and in every cafeteria on campus. I only retained my need to set high taste standards for the food I put into my stomach. I became a walking directory for where you could find the most delicious jollof rice in the university. Perhaps the thrill of having a new lover surged my appetite for these lifestyle changes. Together, we hunted for food spots and lived on takeouts.
I approached my sharp bend very quickly, in less than a year. A sore throat diagnosed as a bacterial infection. Then an irritated esophagus that was diagnosed as a viral infection at a different hospital. A burning chest and throat drew a pharyngotonsillitis diagnosis in yet another hospital, with a cocktail of medications and injections that didn’t help. I fought against being sent home with yet another presumed diagnosis and insisted on a blood test to confirm the cause of my sickness. It was reflux disease. I don’t know what I ate that is responsible for my suffering, but food has stopped being the centre of my world because there’s little I can eat, I think, without being punished.
This is how we return to childhood to pick one thing from everything we’ve been told not to do. When food looks at us too invitingly, we must think, No, thank you. I ate you in the past, I no longer can. After weakening the iron hands we’ve previously had, this is how we find strength. ▪