There has been a lot of arguments over why a woman should
invite her would be daughter in-law to the kitchen when she visits for the
first time. Different people have their varying perspectives on the subject.
However, I cannot help but remember some of the things
my late grandmother told me as a kid as regards the kind of politics played in kitchen,
and I realized why a mother would invite a ‘stranger’ in her kitchen. Though her
era is gone and the dynamics of culture transmission have taken their toll on
that aspect of our life as a people, kitchen politics has not completely
changed.
As a kid, my grandmother made me understand that
intrinsically, women did not invite their brides to be to the kitchen to
test them. It was basically a huge sign of acceptance. There was absolutely nothing
to test because she and her entire family had known almost every detail about a
bride to be before she set foot in her would be husband‘s home. This used to be
a standard marriage procedure in Igbo culture which was achieved via the practice
of iju ese where families ask questions or perform divinations to gain insight
into the worldview and practices of the families their sons or daughters would
get related by marriage.
She said that the politics of the kitchen was all
about control.
Women rarely shared their kitchen with people they neither
trusted nor liked and because their kitchen and its immediate surroundings was
a no fly zone for men, it was one of the safest places for women to make or
mar; the success or failure of a man or even an entire family can be decided in
the kitchen. They did everything within their power to keep the men away from
the kitchen.
Now, the acceptance of a daughter in-law to be in the
form of bringing her to the kitchen transmutes to sessions of knowledge acquisition
for the young girl which either improves on or reiterates what she has already
learnt about the politics of the fireplace from her own mother. Such knowledge serves
certain purposes such as.
- Reminding the bride to be that the women who effectively
managed their kitchen were warriors who safeguarded their families. There were
zero margins for error because if by error or mistake, an enemy gains
access to the kitchen and poisons the food, an entire family is wiped out.
They keenly watched what their families ate and made sure they had healthy
and uncontaminated food. They forbade their children from eating from
families and people who did not have healthy habits.
- Limiting the culinary knowledge of the man to the
barest minimum and shaming him to shreds if he showed more than a passing interest
in learning kitchen affairs even as a boy. They reported such a man who is
interested in the kitchen to his fellow men that he was becoming
effeminate and most definitely, they will join in shaming such a man as
not fit to be among them. Failure to keep the man in check was tantamount
to losing control.
The men would toil from dawn to dusk at their farms to
provide the much needed food but the most loved hands were the ones that cooked
the food in the kitchen and served. Children knew who fed them whenever they
were hungry and nobody needed to ask where their loyalty anchored. Children can
forgive you for taunting their father but only God can forgive you when you
taunt their mothers? Imagine the pride of the man who is served food that was a
little bigger and had more pieces of meat than the ones served the rest of his
fellow men. The power that came from the man appreciating that food and the
gesture against the background of his interaction with his fellow men would be
evident when she needed a favour.
My grandmother made me understand that the kitchen
department was the only place the men dared not ask questions about how the
money they provided for food was spent. The tough or brave ones who dared to
ask for accounts got robust explanations and often ended up coughing out more
money to pay off debts the wives owed imaginary ogiri and ukpaka sellers at the
market. A woman could even save as much as she wanted.
For her, the sweat and heat of the fireplace was a
little sacrifice they had to make, which was inconsequential compared to the
power and control that came from managing the kitchen effectively.
That was an era. It is now a new era. Times and tides
have changed.
Emeka Amakeze
