About the Curry

I’m becoming really concerned about the curry.

It’s hot, yellow and deliciously sticky and my mother has made it exactly the same way for thirty years with a secret of spices, a trickle of turmeric and with the amazing ability to not have the skin cling to the bottom of the pot.

When I’m solitary and starving to death in my apartment, I can smell it if I wrinkle my nose right.

If I tilt my head and shut my eyes, I can imagine the ineffable aroma wafting down the hall of all the houses we have ever called home and it’s enough to set my crazed culinary instincts down a pathetic path of rubbery chicken, burnt skillets and some guilty gulping down throat.

I’m going to write down the recipe one day.

Before the world abruptly empties and my mother moves on and I’m left wanting what I can never truly have again.

I’m going to watch her one day.

Minutely observe every pinch of salt and block of stock thrown into a cauldron filled with the magic of motherhood, the melancholy of memory, the taste of time and the warmth of love.

But this only in-between afternoons when I ask her about the start. When  I carefully place her stories in a jar marked ‘Before’.

Before me, before my brothers and sisters and the existence extinguishing time before my father.

A time when she was the girl one could easily mistake for me in photographs and who went on to train in the army before becoming the kind of graphic artist whose work can still be seen on faded billboards in  a country I have never quite called home.

The same can be said of my father.

Of future enlightening afternoons in which I’ll ask him about the grandmother that I am named for but never knew and the granddad who’s long and gone life remains only as a fading image of  slight man astride a small dwelling in the countryside delighted by the fact that we brought him a battery charged light.

I’ll ask him also to expound on his tall tales fit for fantasy novels.  Of being one soul in many bodies including a red headed fellow in America and of the space ship he saw in a field as a child. Set in the sky behind aliens as big as oaks.

All these many questions, these histories and stories to write down before it’s too late.

Before life comes dressed darkly as death on the day one finally decides to ask those who gave us life about their lives, the books they’ve read, the choices they made, those that were made for them, their motivations and their regrets.

Talohole Enkono has already begun.

She mails me five days after Valentine’s day and asks me if she can pay me to write her mother’s memoir because she doesn’t think she’s much of a writer.

She wants the world to know that her mother lived. That she  survived the massacre at Cassinga, attended  a village school deep in the heart of the Omusati region and went on to become a medical doctor as she reared her children as a single mum before beginning to build a hospital in Outapi while raising Talohle’s son as she studies in the Ukraine.

Her story is touching but I tell her no.

I have a knot of hopes and dreams and commitments I need to see through and I tell her she should try writing it herself. It can be edited later or ghost written if she wants it for the world but, in the meantime, she should gather her mother’s stories as best she can so she can tell her children and they can tell theirs and theirs.

Before everything that tore African traditions asunder, this is the way it was done.

Legends leapt up out of village fires and family histories were recalled with pride even if we didn’t have the shadows of Shakespeare and Achebe to call attention to our inarticulateness.

Talohole doesn’t reply but a few months later she’s back in my inbox, beaming, buoyant and bubbling with delight.

“I took your advice on writing my mom’s biography, it’s challenging looking for words to describe and explain. Nothings impossible, though.”

As I write Talohole Enkono sits at her desk in the Ukraine writing about her mother in-between her studies.

She hopes to tell the world an inspiring African story.  She hopes to regale Africans with the tale of a single, Namibian doctor who defies odds and nurtures ambition. It’s uplifting, inspiring and ripe for emulation but it’s the kind of story we don’t see on television and rarely read about in widely published books because the west’s storytelling mould is not made for Africa.

Africa with its ancestors still whispering in the ears of elders. Africa interrupted by colonialism and just beginning to  emerge from blood-soaked soil in shining shards. Africa filled with family, fantasy and factual stories told by the people who lived them.

Or by the children who listened.

Even though the stories halted and stuck in their parents’ throats.

Even when they rambled and ran back in time.

Even as the pot smoked and the chicken burnt because they forgot about the curry.