by
Obododimma Oha
One major experience in COVID-19 is lockdown. There are several lockdowns: country lockdown, city lockdown, pocket lockdown, thinking lockdown, academic lockdown, food lockdown, and pocket lockdown. There is also hunger lockdown -- which is linked to food lockdown. In fact, one lockdown could lead to another, could cause another. For instance, when you have a city lockdown so that I cannot go to market to buy things, I could have a hunger lockdown while lying stomach-down like a lizard with a long history of stomach ache. It was when I staggered up in a hunger lockdown recently looking for what to eat that I went to a mango tree with fruits. I saw a snail trying to burrow into a fallen mango fruit to eat. I, too, must have been looking for what to eat in a hunger lockdown. Well, that was meat, even though it was very mean to take the snail and eat it. But I was very hungry and a hungry person cannot think about all that. Food cycle it was and I had been looking for a source of rare protein for days! It was just natural to pick the snail and eat it along with the fallen mango. That I did.
But there was the snail and there was the mango. It reminded me of one significant narrative in Igbo folklore. A mother was leaving home and gave a snail and one yam tuber to her son. He was told to roast the tuber first, then the snail. But he chose to roast the snail first, with the consequence that the fluid of the snail easily extinguished the fire so that roasting the yam tuber was impossible. So, he was singing bitterly:
Nne m ọ bụ ọ́malụngwọ!
Ọ́malụngwọ! (chorus)
Nne m nyere ji na ejula,
Ọ́malụngwọ!
Sị m buru ụzọ hụọnụ ji,
Ọ́malụngwọ!
E buru m ụzọ hụọnụ ejula m,
Ọ́malụngwọ!
Ejula ahụ agbọnyụọla m ọkụ
Ọ́malụngwọ!
(Mother, it is ọ́malụngwọ
My mother gave me a yam tuber and a snail,
And Instructed me to roast the yam first
But I roasted my snail first
That snail has extinguished my fire)
That was a greedy fellow, you would say. It is good to listen to advice, at least, to think about it. But greed led that fellow into changing his priority that had a serious existential consequence: the fire went out! One has no blame for his mother. Also, the snail seemed to be fighting back with its fluid. Even as a dead body!
Anyway, hunger has a way of affecting the way that some people think. They often do not think straight. It can cause one to do very mean things. Like eating the snail that came to eat a mango in a hunger lockdown, which entailed a nocturnal straying into and staying into the daylight and turning muscles into teeth that it hoped could bite through hard things....The snail was obviously the first to get to the mango, though a slow-moving animal, and must have been labouring all night! Well, my teeth were sharper and would eat both mango and its closest friend! And there was this terrible hunger!
Hunger is a terrible lockdown. Robinson Crusoe and all marooned sailors know it and have to thank their stars if they could improvise some crude tools. Hunger is a terrrible lockdown. Isn't that why a university lecturer has to take to serious academic blogging so that his mind would not gather weeds by the time the federal lockdown is lifted? He has to blog his appetite for theorizing and analysis, which have been badly touched.
Hunger is a terrible lockdown, which is why armed robbers would stop a vehicle at gunpoint or invade somebody's house because they are looking for tubers of yam to steal, not millions of useless Naira to sniff. Food is the necessity, not money! It is because hunger is a terrible lockdown if one can have money but cannot spend it or if one cannot transform the money into food. What is money if it cannot give food?
That is why mango and snail have to rest in perfect peace, and allow another hungry creature to continue living. Life is given to sustain life. A painful logic, but it is applicable. The snail has come to the end of its existence and another creature is taking over. That gives one the impression that death could be part of endless life. In that case, there is no end in an end. There is only a continuation of a continuation.
But the logic of continuation is vital. Maybe the mango first before the snail. There is no fire, but it is raging, we know. The snail is consumed first if in my predatory logic I want the first feeder out of the way first. But I could allow the first feeder to eat the mango, then I eat what has eaten the mango! In that thinking, have I eaten two things or one? So, I am in a dilemma, eating but thinking, though not clearly!
Hunger must be a terrible lockdown, making it impossible for me to see clearly. Even COVID itself looks like CONVICT. I wish it were a convict, so that it can be put into a cell and alow one to think straight. This convict has many shapes: symptomatic and asymptomatic, living in the present and in the future, air-borne and surface-borne, multi-headed, yet one, etc. This COVID is a terrible convict.
Anyway, stay safe. Have I used that cliche before? I cannot remember! It is because hunger is a terrible lockdown of mouth and stomach.
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