I wish I ate garri. It is important to the people I love: My late grandmother used to want to havegarri three times a day. My brother’s idea of a perfect meal is pounded yam. My father once came home from a conference in Paris, and when I asked how it had gone he said that he had missed real food. In Igbo, another word for “swallow” is simply “food,” so that one might overhear a sentence like “The food was well pounded, but the soup was not tasty.” My brothers, with affectionate mockery, sometimes ask whether it is possible for a person who does not eat swallow to be authentically Igbo, Nigerian, African.
Last year, I worked on a travelling food writing series for work called Food Tales. The aim of the tour was to open up a narrative about food in Queensland, and to see what that meant for the oral and written memory of the state. Ever since I did the tour, I've been really fascinated with the way food informs us as people, identifies us and defines our relationships with others, culture and our homes. This short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie embodies all those things so perfectly. It's such a short piece too that I don't want to ruin it by saying too much, but it's pretty darn beautiful.
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