Gastronomic rhapsodies
Salutation to the Gut
Wole Soyinka
2002, Bookcraft, Nigeria
84 pages
Reviewed by Gbemisola Adeoti
Outside the cerebral realm of literature and politics, other fields where Wole Soyinka’s judgement can be well relied upon include food and wine. This fact may elude some of his critics, but his friends and associates have always talked about it: Segun Olusola, Tunji Oyelana, Jimi Solanke and the late Wale Ogunyemi among others.
A joke that is strongly rooted in experience has it that if Soyinka, a discerning connoisseur, spots a hundred bottles of wine on a banquet table, hundred metres away, he can tell with amazing precision and accuracy, the content of each bottle, whether red or white, dry or sweet, the makers and the country of origin. Sometimes, such information would be completed with the age of the wine. He knows the exact forest where the most juicy game can be obtained, being a distinguished member of the hunters’ guild at the University of Ife. He would tell you the type of ‘bush meat’ that would sink well with amala or the one that would be a delightful accompany iyan. Hardly a heavy eater, he is a man with a painstakingly choosy palate, one who can rightly be described in his own words as "the true hedonist who has felt in every morsel, the soul of the open kitchen".
Soyinka brings this personal trait, sourced in cultural origin, to bear on his polemical composition on Yoruba food and drink - Salutation to the Gut. The essay is more of a celebration of collective cultural experience rather than that of an individual. Exploring Yoruba’s vast corpus of praise chants (oriki), the author in a palate tickling poetic prose pays tribute to hunger. Having established hunger and thirst as the basis for humanity’s quest for food and drink, he rhapsodises in lucid images and pun, about popular food in Yoruba menu. These include amala (yam flour preparation), iyan (pounded
yam) and the final cause, emu (palm wine).
‘Having established hunger and thirst as the basis for humanity’s quest for food and drink, he rhapsodises in lucid images and pun, about popular food in Yoruba menu’
Talk of old palm wine in a new gourd - Salutation to the Gut is now published as a small pocket size book. But it has earlier been published in the 1960s in Africa in Prose, a collection of writing edited by O.R. Dathorne and Willfried Feuser. It also featured in Reflections, another collection edited by Frances Ademola and published by African University Press in 1962. What earns the Bookcraft pocket gift edition its timeless appeal is the fact that it makes the essay, hitherto out of print, more available in a portable, durable and more accessible form. Besides, the essay is broken into short meaningful segments of one sentence or more on a page, and the idea on each page is illustrated with partly realistic and partly abstract drawings. It enhances understanding of Soyinka by a wider spectrum of audience, including children and non-Yoruba who are not familiar with the cosmological soil on which the essay grows.
Reading through the book, one is confronted on the one hand with the structure of performance of a traditional oral artist, prefaced by homage to forces of inspiration. On the other hand is the order of meal consumption, beginning with appetite-whetting fripperies, the main cause and the last cause - wine. Using personification, hyperbole, pun and imagery, Soyinka paints the picture of each food, its constituents, mode of preparation and consumption.
Oriki (praise chants) prepare the palate of the consumer, heighten the pleasure derivable therefrom and also serve as a befitting "after cause". Oriki is a recurring feature of various genres in Yoruba orature. esa (ancestral cult poetry), ijala(hunters’ chants), sango pipe (sango invocation), rara (ballad) and ekun iyawo (bridal songs) feature physical attributes, achievements, origin and essence of the person, nature and super nature. Yoruba imagination composes panegyric for every object under the sun, so that an ordinary subject like eating and drinking can attain a hallowed eloquence in the full throat of poetry. Oriki uses literary devices like personification, metaphor, simile, pun, hyperbole and allusion. It combines the grossly hyperbolic with the modestly understated, in a tone that is serious, yet humorous. Good wit and keen observation lend praise chants their vitality and vigour. This perhaps, explains why they achieve the same significant effect, whether extended to supernatural beings or mundane subjects like food which assumes a greater significance beyond giving nourishment and satisfaction.
Soyinka affirms the centrality of oriki in the life of the Yoruba. He asserts that the ability to celebrate in rare euphony, the beauty and benefit of food, stands out of the race from others in the world, making it "the leading race of lyrical gastronomes". To be sure, this is one case of the local, proudly holding out its own against the global in the era of "inhuman vitamin pill age". The essay rhapsodises, sometimes to the point of deification, about hunger, an experience that binds the universe in common humanity, from the "long-nosed European" to the "black-faced African". Hunger (like thirst) is a frosty abstraction, but it is painted in poignant strokes and loud colours. Notably, hunger provides the basis for humanity’s earnest quest for food. It is like a red-hot daggers knifing through the stomach of the poor, the idler or the one given to supercilious piety. Here is a god whose shrine is located in the stomach, hence the saying: Orisa bi ofun ko si, ojojumo lo n gbebo lowo eni (there is no god like the gut, ever implacable, it demands offering daily). The author describes it as "the god that rumbles and thunders when sacrifice is late".
The stomach has an ally in the head. While the head ministers to the intellect, the stomach responds to material and physiological stimuli. The stomach is adjudged to be the supreme deity in the hierarchy of human parts. The body can bear intellectual malnourishment, but not physical deprivation. Indeed, hunger poses moral and social challenges as it impels man to embrace what he ordinarily abhors, like the proverbial Sule who devours a monkey to quench blazing hunger, against the dictate of his faith. Its claws are so wide to grab human beings and gods alike, as established in the myth of Orisa oko (the god of farming) who set a whole yam plantation on fire because of hunger. It is just like Ogun, Soyinka’s patron deity, who resorted to massacre at the ancient Iree, driven by thirst. Some people transcend the limits of decency and resort to cannibalism, yet, hunger is argued to be the muse behind masterpieces in artistic creations and technological inventions.
Against the backdrop of hunger’s universal import is the assertion of differences in the attitude of the Yoruba (African) and that of European toward food. Soyinka’s assertion here seems to rekindle Leopold Senghor’s polemics about reason being Hellenic and emotion African. He also attempts a displacement of Freudian theory, advancing hunger as the first principle in place of sex. So, the answer to Freud’s question: "what is on a man’s mind", will no longer be "woman", but "food". He extends the displacement to Yoruba mythology where Obatala, the god of fertility and creation yields his primal essence to Opapala, the deity of hunger.
Having cleared the path with homage to hunger, key items on Yoruba traditional menu are paraded, beginning with amala, the steaming yam flour preparation which is one of the votive offerings to the implacable deity called the gut. Its heat and the fiery pepper of the accompanying soup are cherished by the Yoruba people, a curious invitation to pain and pleasure in the tradition of masochists and hedonists. It is difficult for a foreigner to fathom the pleasure in amala, "the heat that leaps to scald the stomach". But what appears like an exercise in self-torture provides gratification as captured in luscious poetry composed in its praise. The author shows that though hunger is universal, food and eating habits are culture specific, an area where racial supremacy cannot be exempted. It should not be surprising therefore, if some readers find it difficult to share gastronomic euphoria which Soyinka demonstrates in the book.
Iyan (pounded yam) is awarded the throne in the kingdom of Yoruba food. It enjoys a string of epithets: "the pounded dome without a blemish", "Plump white slug in the throat’s passage", "white as the egret". These are rendered in Yoruba and later translated, into English. But the beauty in pun and alliteration in the Yoruba original is masked in the translation.
On the heels of pounded yam comes "the ultimate thirst quencher", emu, the milk-white drink from the palm tree relished by man and god. Emu, like amala and iyan takes on human appellations. The nickname - Alimotu Lanihun for emu is perhaps derived from one of its many retailers in history. The drink is praised for being cheap, yet, rich and grand in pleasure, hence, it is called "the mistress of two pence only, yet chased the millionaire into the forest". In a lucid metaphor, a cup of palm wine becomes a sacrament that "raises man froth-like on to the mystic layers of consciousness".
When taken in moderate measure, the drink can be a primal muse, inducing pleasure and creativity. When taken in excess, it leads to reckless actions as evident in the praise chants. Palm wine robs the horse of its horns, costs the hen its right to urinate and drives the guinea fowl far into the jungle. These are brief allusions to African aetiological tales and myths that explain the whys and wherefores of nature. But more important is the reference to Amos Tutuola’s novel, The Palm-wine Drinkard which tells the story of a rare epicurean who journeys from the land of the living through the world of spirits into the precinct of heaven. The object of his quest? Alaba, his master wine tapster, whose death ushers in a season of ceaseless thirst for the protagonist.
Palm wine, in the order of ritual to the imaginary god of the stomach is the last cause. And like the preceding items (iyan or amala), it is not lacking in praise chants that enhance the pleasure derivable from its consumption, while paying tribute to the creative impulse and sensitivity of the people.
Generally, Salutation to the Gut laughs at the perceived lack of a "fundamental sensitivity to food" among Europeans. It rhapsodises about the abundant presence of the quality among Yoruba. The author draws evidence for his witty claims from sources as diverse as Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Samuel Johnson, William Golding, S.T. Coleridge, Sigmund Freud, Amos Tutuola and ijala poetry. The 84 page book is one of those efforts to render Soyinka’s works more accessible, not only intellectually, but also economically. The book throws open the aesthetics of a poetic prose, which has hitherto remained a "cross of uncompensated torture", to borrow the authors expression, to many readers. One of the ways this is achieved is to render as vividly as possible in pictorial illustrations, Soyinka’s gastronomic cultural nationalism.
Gbemisola Adeoti (PhD) is a Lecturer in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria
