You are what you eat!
If you’re a health nut, you may interpret this to mean that your food choices play a huge role in maintaining your health, and if you’re a student of Pierre Bourdieu, it’s a phrase that encapsulates the French sociologist’s argument about eating habits functioning as signifiers of social class and cultural capital.
However, if you’re a writer and your name is Nnamdi Anyadu, these words are inspiration to knead fiction and culinary tradition into the starter dough that will yield your debut short story collection, A Meal Is A Meal.
Each narrative in this 12-piece anthology comes with its own self contained epigraph — An old woman’s recipe is known to her fingers; Memory is the meal of the mind; Even the spirits love a good feast; What’s worth eating is worth fighting for, etcetera — which lends an artisanal touch to the project.
Food is the unifying theme here, but categorizing Anyadu’s writing style into one genre can be a challenging undertaking seeing as his range spans comedy, folklore, and the Gothic. Not only is Anyadu’s literary palate diverse, he deploys multiple points of view in the manner of a seasoned chef deciding which cooking technique would maximise an ingredient’s flavour.
Borrowed from one of the stories where a serial killer cleaves her victim into morsels to feed her cannibalistic family, the book’s title also reveals a subtle ironic wit that lends flavour to its contents. In “The Power of Orts”, and “The Tangerine Encounter”, fruits catalyse mystical occurrences; in “The Recipe for Comfort”, iced tea is a salve, if not a cure, for the broken-hearted; in “Cheers!”, a drinking contest devolves into a battle for dominance, and in “Saara”, a party menu fosters community. Food, Anyadu seems to imply, provides way more than nourishment and can never be relegated to the commonplace. The associative meanings given to food in African spirituality is also interrogated, albeit to varying effects — “Suppers at Slumber” challenges conventional wisdom that cautions against eating in dreams, yet in “Forbidden Meat”, centred around taboo eating practices, logic and scientific evidence are no match for supernatural decrees.
Ensuring that a Bini character refers to oil bean as okpagha, as in the story “The Power of Orts”, is a hallmark of an author who prizes fastidiousness and cultural respect, but to misname pumpkin leaves as ebe-uvbenkhen [sic] instead of umwenkhen in the same story?
Perfection is an ideal but the previously noted attention to detail renders the occasional slip-up that much more disappointing. One wonders if the copy editors and proofreaders at his publishing house were somnolent at their workstations while lexical errors like the substitution of ‘tether’ for ‘teeter’ and elevating sardines and mango trees to proper noun status escaped their notice.
The buck doesn’t just stop with the chef. The maître d’hôtel has to shoulder some of the blame here too.
Notwithstanding, A Meal Is A Meal is a remarkable debut and with it, Nnamdi Anyadu offers up a hearty 12-course meal that leaves the reader satiated, yet craving for more.
Overall rating? Two Michelin Stars.
***Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
