Echoes of a Former Land

Every December my mother makes pepper soup.

Not for Christmas. Not for any occasion that a calendar would recognise. She makes it because December is cold here and pepper soup is what her own mother made when the harmattan came and the air turned dry and the body needed something that reached all the way down. She makes it the same way, with the same ratio of crayfish to pepper that she learned by watching rather than by measuring, because some knowledge does not live in recipes.

We did not bring much when we came from Enugu in 2011. Four bags, two children, the documents. There was no room for the mortar and pestle, for the clay pot she had used since she got married, for the specific brand of ogiri that only one woman in our neighbourhood sold from a table outside her compound. Those things stayed behind. Some of them are gone now entirely. The woman with the ogiri died in 2018 and nobody has picked up where she left off.

But my mother brought the knowledge. It lives in her hands and in the particular way she tilts her head when she is adjusting a flavour, tasting from the wooden spoon and standing very still for a moment the way someone stands when they are listening for something. She brought the knowledge and she has been quietly depositing it in this kitchen in Scarborough every time she cooks, whether or not anyone is watching.

My daughter watches.

She is seventeen and she does not always want to be in the kitchen and there are Saturdays when she would clearly rather be anywhere else. But she watches. I can see her storing things. The order of the ingredients, the sound the soup makes when it is ready, the way my mother hums something tuneless and low when she is concentrating. She is filing it away without knowing she is doing it, the way I filed away my grandmother's word without knowing I would need it.

Tradition is not always ceremony. Sometimes it is just showing up in a cold kitchen on a December afternoon and standing close enough to learn something without being taught.

My mother is sixty-eight. She moves more slowly now. There are things she remembers about Enugu that she has never told us and probably never will, not because she is hiding them but because some things only come out when the right question is asked, and we do not always know what to ask.

So I have started asking. Every visit. One thing. How did your mother do this? What did this mean? Where does this come from?

She looks surprised every time, as if she did not expect anyone to want to know.

She always answers.

Tag: Igbo diaspora, Scarborough, intergenerational, food, memory