Jollof Rice: Sierra Leonean Foodways IV
by Mariam Fofana
E De Kam Ɔp
the absorption of water by a seed
grain
grain
grain
water
enters
through a seam
too small
for the eye.
Not a crack.
Not yet.
An undoing
inside the hull.
A swelling.
Within the husk,
an embryo
no larger than a thumbnail clipping
waits
beside its inheritance
starch coating a future.
The water continues.
Persistent.
cell by cell
Nothing visible.
Still
everything changing.
endosperm
is sugar
is possibility
Then
splits.
Not dramatically.
The way coastlines split from maps.
The way daughters leave.
Silent enough
that only water notices.
radicle
first.
Root.
White as tendon.
White as scar tissue.
It turns downward.
Always downward.
Toward pressure.
one root hair
then another
another
another
touching soil
releasing
touching again
assembling a geography
through repeated contact.
By now
the grain has begun consuming itself.
The starch reserve shrinking.
Its inheritance metabolized
For distance.
The first blade appears.
Green.
Sharp enough
to divide earth from air.
Sharp enough
to insist on elsewhere.
And suddenly
a field.
Tens of thousands.
Root systems crossing invisibly beneath water.
Each grain descended
from another grain
that crossed.
River.
Border.
Ocean.
Steam gathers beneath a pot lid.
Tomatoes burst.
Pepper shrivels
The grains lengthen.
Separate.
Beside one another.
The way families gather photographs.
The way cities gather accents.
The way my mother, fixated on that green, white, and blue
washes rice three times
before cooking
because someone once showed her
how.
Water clouds.
Clear.
Then clouds again.
At the bottom of the bowl,
the grains gleam
like small sleeping futures
Artist’s Statement for Sierra Leonean Foodways Poetry Collection:
Foodways, a term coined by folklorist John W. Bennett in 1942, describes the cultural, social, and historical practices through which food is produced, prepared, shared, and remembered. I approach foodways as a repository of knowledge through which histories of labor are taken from one generation to the next. In this decadent poetry collection, I use poetry to investigate four Sierra Leonean dishes—bitter leaf, groundnut soup, fry fry, and jollof rice—as distinct epistemologies. The culinary process of each dish thus determines the formal architecture of the poem itself. I attend to the distinct practice of remembering, where the movements of the hand, the sounds of the kitchen, and the textures of ingredients preserve forms of knowledge that evade written form. In whisking together Krio and English alongside experimental typography and audio, the project expands the poem beyond the page and constructs a multimodal experience by which sound, voice, and food are intertwined.
Mariam Fofana is a Sierra Leonean & junior at Northwestern University studying Anthropology, History, and Chinese. Her research work zeroes in on West African diasporic life, with a particular focus on migration, memory, and the ways people rebuild belonging across borders. She is especially interested in using storytelling as an archive of the experiences that comprise the Black experience. The Sierra Leonean Foodways Poetry Collection is her Poda-Poda Stories Internship Capstone Project.