Groundnut Soup: Sierra Leonean Foodways II
by Mariam Fofana
Insay Mata Odo Bɛlɛ
Before the basket opened
before daylight split the weave apart
before her fingers descended among us
smelling faintly of smoke and onions
we felt her footsteps.
Inside the sack
the old granat warned us constantly.
Do not trust soft hands.
The mortar forgets every name it eats.
Still, when the basket opened
we rolled toward the light instinctively.
This is the terrible thing:
we wanted to become useful.
The chosen were gathered in her lappa
against the slope of her stomach.
We listened to the unchosen exhale below us
with something dangerously close to relief.
Outside, the kitchen had already begun its ruckus.
Pepper waiting in a chipped blue bowl.
Fish split open along the spine.
Palm oil shining sinisterly in afternoon heat.
The mortar was wider than we imagined.
Its bowl, haunted by the ghosts of green leaves,
pepper seeds tucked into its grain,
the fine ochre dust
of granat who had already learned
what we were about to transform into.
The first blow did not hurt.
We were stunned.
Then commenced the splitting.
Bodies opening.
Skins tearing away from flesh.
Around me
my people collapsed into fragments.
Some prayed.
Some cursed the woman.
One granat beside me kept repeating:
we were meant for planting
we were meant for planting
we were,
until the pestle interrupted him permanently.
After a while
even grief became difficult to organize.
We entered one another.
Oil bled from us slowly.
The woman added water.
We loosened.
The last stubborn pieces of ourselves
drifting apart.
Then pepper
red heat searching every fracture,
finding us where the pestle had left us open
Then salt.
There went our certainty.
We spread ourselves
through broth,
through spoon
The children ate us
without ever knowing.
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.