Tell Tales: The Global Village

[shameless self-promotion]:

I have a short story out in the new Tell Tales, which you can get here.

[end of shameless self-promotion]

Notes on Ebeh

Every once in a while, my (mostly Gambian) friends over here get together and cook Ebeh. It is usually on a weekend, with no school and no work: the whole day becomes centred around the Ebeh: waking up late, lounging around until the afternoon, going to the International store to get ingredients, arranging rides to where it's going to be cooked. And then the lazing and becoming increasingly hungry as you smell it coming from the kitchen, at various stages of being ready.


Nyaambi (Cassava) is one of the most important ingredients. Ebeh is mostly liquids with small bits of solid (kobo, nyama-nyama[1] things) floating in it - of these bits of solid the most important is the nyaambi. Without it the Ebeh would float too dangerously close to being entirely liquid - the nyaambi anchors it as it were in solid reality.

This image is a bowl of nyaambi peeled and ready to be boiled. The nyaambi is boiled first, laying the foundation, and then the other parts of the ebeh are gradually added.


To understand the consistency of Ebeh, think of a line of foods, arranged by solidity. Soups and other watery dishes would be at one end, foods with almost no water in them at the other. Ebeh would lie somewhere in the middle but - and here is the important distinction, and one that I think is the main one that forms the difference between how a Gambian thinks of Ebeh versus how a non-Gambian does - for someone Gambian Ebeh lies closer to the solid foods: it can be used standalone as a meal, complete in itself without the need for a second course. Whilst to a non-Gambian Ebeh appears to be only a thick soup. It is a fine distinction, but one which subtly changes the Ebeh eating experience.


I have never seen Ebeh cooked with meat - even imagining it threatens to make me nauseous. Instead an assortment of seafoods are used - from the venerable kobo (bonga fish; which, alas, we could not get here) chopped into tiny pieces, to paanye (a specie of clam), to shrimps. Oysters, despite their similarity to clams, are not used - these extra bits apparently have to be small, to stick with the general philosophy of the Ebeh. Nothing can be bigger than the nyaambi. Unless, of course, you lay your hands on some crabs.

No one who I have asked knows exactly where Ebeh came from, though most opinion seems to be that it originated in Sierra Leone, before it came down to us. I imagine a Sierra Leonian living in Gambia inviting their Gambian friend over for a meal. The plates are set out, the pot brought from the stove and set on the table. In it a bubbling yellowish fluid, with bits of lumpy solid sticking out. "What is that?", I imagine the Gambian asking with a curious face. "Oh - na Ebeh" (assuming this is what they call it in Sierra Leone). With some trepidation the Gambian dishes some out - "only a little - my stomach is not good today - not that hungry even" - and tries it. Three bowlfuls later, she is gleefully taking down the recipe, and can't wait to cook it at home. The Ebeh sensation begins, and within a month everyone is having Ebeh at parties, cooking it on weekends, using it for picnics on the beach...



Where the International Store we went to lacked in kobo they more than made up for in crabs. They had a whole bucket full of them, live and feebly kicking at each other's shells. Here they are in the sink being washed. They are cooked whole in the Ebeh. When one is eating one leaves them last, for the end, when one has finished consuming everything else in the bowl. Then one picks them up and starts on them. Ebeh crab eaters can be divided into two caegories. The first will attempt to stick to what they imagine is their dignity, picking the crab up in a spoon and sucking on its appendages, taking cracking bites into them. But it is impossible to completely enjoy a crab out of a spoon, which is what the second category of people has realized: when they reach the end of their Ebeh they put the spoon down to one side and slide up their shirt cuffs[2]. Then, with a manner that seems to say to anyone looking that dignity does not lie in the eating of a crab (and even if it did, this crab is worth losing it for) they begin to strip the crab layer by layer of all its shells and juices. By the time the very best are done all that is left is a chewed-up mass lying in a pool of palm oil on the bottom of the bowl.

Sometime during my childhood - I don't remember exactly when - Ebeh became the food of choice for parties. It has all the good qualities of a party food: cheap, easy to make, plentiful when it is done so it can feed many people. Also homogenous: apart from the extras (such as the dahaar sauce) everything goes in one pot - the more pots you have for a food the more the chances increase that you will run out of the contents of one pot before the other when serving, for example. And most important: everyone loves it.

Dahaar (Tamarind) is an optional extra, but a necessary one for any true connoisseur. It is mixed with lemon or lime juice, and served in a side dish. It can be added to the Ebeh as you eat - after you have chewed on the nyaambi and swallowed all the liquid the dahaar seeds are left in your mouth. They have imparted some of their sourness to the Ebeh all this time, giving you a hint of what is to come - now you suck on them to get the full flavor (even the thought of it makes my mouth begin to water as I type this).


After we finish eating we sprawl - some on the ground, some on the sofa. There are foods we eat to stave off our hunger: once we are satisfied we stop. Then there are others which we continue eating and eating (and eating) until we feel we are about to burst - we stop only because we begin to feel vaguely uncomfortable as our stomachs complain at the added baggage. Ebeh, like Mbahal (the "bu tilim" type, with diwtirr on top), are like this. Cooking the Ebeh, with the sounds from the kitchen and the smells wafting through to the living room, we were back in Gambia, someone's house hanging out. Now after it is done we are independent of country or culture - we are a couple of college kids happy in each others' company, just lying there and saying anything, while slowly inside us it digests, our bodies thanking us again and again for the food.



[1] nyama-nyama, one of those beautiful Wolof words whose sound contains its meaning, is used to mean "small-small". So nyama-nyama things is all the little bits and pieces floating around in the Ebeh after it's done.

[2] Ogasu is the Wolof word for this. See note [1] above.

Wollof word of the day: chaalit

chaalit:

1. v., to act in a manner not usual because of food. eg: Serign dafa chaalit palansoram bi ndik leka bi. . Serign forgot his umbrella here because of the food (maybe it was super, and the rainy season, and Serign enjoyed it so much he stepped out into the rain without his umbrella, so focused was he on the food).

2. v., to lose one's restraint because of great pain, sorrow, etc. eg. bul chaalit -yaala kor dogal. do not lose yourself - it was the will of God. (this said to a man whose whole family has just died in a freak accident, and who has begun to speak strickenly of taking his own life).

usage 1 is meant jokingly, usage 2 only with great seriousness.

also pronounced saalit.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Wollof word of the day: toox

toox (pronounced "tookh"), v., to smoke. notice how the word starts out on your lips then gets to your tongue and then, just as it reaches your throat the difficult "kh" comes in, mirroring the harshness of smoke in your throat as you inhale, and lingering in your throat for what seems to be a moment after the word has run out of syllables, like the aftertaste of tobacco.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Awesome Tapes From Africa

This site that brought tears to my eyes. Check especially the Bamba J Faal, the Pacotille (looked everywhere online for this), and our very own Moussa Ngum.

Leebone.com

The Internet just got a million times kewler - check out leebone, a Senegalese site containing audio of stories narrated (mostly) in Wolof - 451 of them at last count. Beautiful, beautiful stuff - this is why the web was invented.

[Thanks to my friend Amy on facebook]

Adventures of Samba in America #4

For the first time in his life the weather has taken on character. It is like a person with moods - and what moods. He knew a girl once, whose behavior was unpredictable and often cold. One moment she would be smiling and talking happily - then of a sudden she would withdraw behind a cloud of gloom, frigid and impenetrable. They had gone to school together and she had had no friends, gaining a reputation on the playground as being too much like a toubab, too withdrawn into herself. Under the unrelenting heat of the Sun at midday she had seemed a strange thing, a pillar of ice un-melting, self-contained and refusing to join the great deluge of melted waters about her. Now he feels like the opposite of her, transplanted from the great communal warmth and heat which now seems unbelievably comfortable to this place where the weather is a person and goes into wild moods of hostile silence. The cold gets past his every attempt to hold it back, seeming at times to have found a secret way into his body so it seems its source is internal and emanates from within him, from his very bones. To the point where the thought of a warm room fills him with craving. At night when he has trouble sleeping he draws the blankets tighter around him, and feeling the warmth all about him beginning at his toes is comforted and grateful. Thankful for small mercies. Back home after a while the heat had receded into the landscape, barely noticed except when it was brought up to save a dying conversation. Here when he is outside the cold stands out sharp and at the center of his attention, making everything else become blurry and unimportant. It makes him sad and miserable, the useless sun in the sky seeming but a poorly-wrought imitation of the one at home, producing a weak light and no heat, failing to blind the eyes of irreverent gazers who would look directly upon it. How unlike the Sun back home, King of all it looked down upon, merciless Tyrant around whom days were formed.

He had called his mother, in the first week. One day after work, coming back from the Senegalese man's shop, his place of employ. Past one-dollar stores and stores with Touba in their name, joining then leaving crowds of people spontaneously formed, waiting at roadsides for a light to change and give them leave to cross. Then dispersing as the great host of cars (here he saw more cars than he had ever seen in his life in one place) coming to a stop, powerful things of metal seeming to be barely controlled by the fragile men and women who sat within them. His eyes meeting theirs as he crossed as quickly as possible, still not trusting that the line which held them back would not break and have them roll with a great crunching onto the mass of people walking across the road. At home he had retrieved the phone card where he had left it in a jeans pocket, and dialed the number. The first time it had not gone through, before he read the back of the card and saw that the dialing codes changed here. You entered different digits, before you entered the country code. Then her number. Mobile phones had been introduced about five years earlier, and by the end of the year everyone had one, carrying them around clutched in their sweaty palms like life support systems. He had never called his mother, though he had memorized her number. He had never had occasion to, the distance between them never expanded enough to warrant the service of telephone lines and network antennas.

When she picked up her voice sounded distant, and as if originating from a hollow place in the Earth.

"Hello... hello... hello"

"Hello"

"Hello"

The trick was to speak then let the other person speak, to resolve the delay created by the distance. He had been told that the voices which travelled across continents over phone lines had at one point to go under the Sea, in giant cables each bigger than a Man which lay on the Sea floor. He had imagined them as he imagined all machines, tools of metalic architecture, man-made and lacking in emotion and warmth - in fact the very opposite of these things. Deep beneath the Sea, with curious fishes swimming by them. It is this image that had come to him as he listened to her speak then, trying to figure out who the call was from. Except as he imagined her voice traversing the undersea cables they became of a sudden imbued with life, cold steel springing into action. The surprised fishes. Life lines linking continents, the only connection between this cold country in which he felt so lost and the warmer lands of his origin, where he had belonged so well he had never noticed the fact of his belonging, coming to take it for granted, coming to cheapen and think it of no value, when he thought of it at all...

"Who is it? Samba?"

He thought he could detect a rise in the inflection of her voice as she spoke his name.

"Yes - Ya it is I" he tried to say past a suddenly-blocked throat he had to clear before he could speak.

"Samba!", she exclaimed and even in spite of the imperfect job of transference carried out by the deep sea cables he heard the happiness in her voice, and his heart leapt. The skin of his face suddenly become heavier, his brows bunching together, his eyes narrowing - what was this liquid that filled them? This drasted cold, that made eyes watery...

She was calling out behind her to his sister, to come to the phone.

"Hurry! Maybe his card will finish - it is Samba!", then back to him again: "Samba! How are you doing? You are there? You have arrived?"

A torrent of questions. He said nothing about the things that had run through his mind, of the trials he had lived through - what makes a Man but his lack of complaint? What other way can he earn title as head of a family without a father. And so he replied that all was well, to all her questions, and told his sister that he was doing OK, that he had started work.

"And prayer - do you pray?", his mother asked, taking the telephone back (he could hear his sister complain in the background, and their bickering made him smile past the wetness in his eyes). He lied without hesitating.

"Good", she said, "it is the only thing that will save you" - and once more she commended him to God. "You have been my good and only son", she had said, when the one-minute warning on the card came on and he informed her, "God will not abandon us". And as his sister took the phone to say goodbye there was a click.

This had been the first phone call. He had called many more times after that, trying to at least once every two weeks, but none had ever been like that one, the opener. Back home his mother and sister had formed a female circle from which he was excluded. A domestic companionship he could not even begin to understand the rules of. Doing the household tasks together everyday, surrounded by a layer of conversation they had built and refined over the years, so it covered them lightly but did not hinder their movement through the house's backyard. A comfortable blanket which protected them from boredom and brought them together under its folds. A blanket invisible to men. And so they had always seemed to him to form one unit, as if their family after his father had died was of two: himself, and his mother-sister unit. Since his arrival this unit had become even more mysterious, even more obscure. The telephone such an imperfect device, providing the means of conversation yet at the same time accentuating the conversations' defects, in ways eyes and faces had been hiding for centuries. The long silences filled with Ocean noise. The conversation become a series of questions and answers, not even having the comfort of being linked by a narrative. Back home the fact of his living with them had been enough, so they could go days without a proper conversation. Now here he saw for the first time clearly how disattached they had become from him, how almost nothing existed between them save for the fact of their being related, and even this barely sufficient. It made him dread calling (though he would not admit this even to himself, pretending tiredness or using the different timezones as an excuse to put it off). It made him sad.