18 Oct, 2021
One of the gains of colonization was the inheritance of a language that enables us to share our ideas with a much wider audience. A language that bridges tribal and national barriers. Sadly, this is also an inheritance that gradually and relentlessly chips away at our ability to fully and effectively communicate in our own native tongues. As I hit these keys and craft a message in the English language, I acknowledge that I, too, am a victim. In his 1997 essay, The African Writer and the English Language, Chinua Achebe spoke to the complexities of this strange gift; the gift of “a language with which to talk to one another” across the African continent. Achebe and his cohorts as well as all those that have done serious writing between then and now have grappled with these complexities in various ways. Yet, as we yield to the comfort of writing in English, I can’t help but ask; what are we losing and what have we been losing in the process of translating our thoughts from one language to another? In case you missed it, yes, I still think in Igbo, for the most part! A few evenings ago, I was in conversation with a friend and partner in the Igbo language preservation project, Uche. We reminisced about favorite native dishes that marked our childhood experiences, especially those that cannot be found here in the United States. I mentioned that my childhood favorite which I have not tasted for decades was “achịcha.” Not surprisingly, she had no idea what I meant and readily quipped, “Is achịcha not bread?” To her surprise, I replied that “achịcha” was not bread! Well, what is achịcha? What was the food item that Igbo people called achicha before bread was introduced to them? To provide some context, I hail from Mgbaneze, Isu in Ebonyi state. In my area, as with most Igbo communities, the period between May and August is a time of very limited food choices. The period called “ụnwụ” (the English translation for ụnwụ is famine) is the interval between the planting season and the harvest season. It is the season when families subsisted mainly on corn, vegetables, legumes, and other meager remnants from the previous year. In my locale, Achịcha, made from sun-dried “ede” (cocoyam), is one of those lifesavers that sustained families through oge ụnwụ . May is the time that most communities completed their planting. Consequently, there was limited choice of what to eat while you waited for the year’s crops to mature for harvest. Achịcha is made from ede (cocoyam) preserved from the previous year. Between August and December, cocoyams are harvested, boiled, and their backs peeled off. They are cut in small chunks and sun-dried. Afterward, the dry ede, ready to be made into achịcha, is stored in the kitchen, usually over the (open-fire) cooking spot, to prevent insects and worms from attacking it. During the time of ụnwụ, this dry food is ground up, boiled, and prepared with your choice of vegetable like afụfa, aṅara, awa leaves, akịdị, or a combination of your choice of vegetables. Some may add maize to boost the quantity of the food. Achịcha is, by far, the food that I miss the most. achịcha makes for a very tasty dish after the ede acquires its own unique taste from months of being sun-dried and smoked. For me, the best part is the sediments that settle and crunch up at the bottom of the pot as it is cooked. Scraping the bottom of my mother’s pot for the crunchy remains of her achịcha is as good as a trip to the moon and back! I can also imagine that other communities in Igboland may have other food items called achịcha that may not necessarily be a product of dried and preserved ede. Achịcha is neither bread, biscuits, crackers, wafers, nor the entire family of baked goods we now translate as achịcha. Prior to colonization, what our ancestors called achịcha was sun-dried ede (cocoyam). The best way to translate that to English would be "cocoyam flakes" or any similar thought... And we can just keep what europeans calls bread as bread (breedi). The suggestion to write this blog post came from a food-based nostalgic conversation as well as a reminder of the limitations of bridging two languages. Whenever it was that Europeans set out to translate between their languages and those of the colonized communities, I imagine that when pressed with a word that tasked their translation skills, one was out would be to use native terms to embrace non-native ones as best as they could, and vice versa. In elementary school, the word used to translate bread was achịcha. Achịcha was also used to translate the whole family of baked goods, so that, cake, biscuits (crackers), wafers and so forth were all called achịcha. This is a fitting illustration of the concept of “lost in translation.” What our ancestors called achịcha before they made contact with Europeans was not a baked food. And to my knowledge, no Igbo community heated their food in any type of oven as of the time that Europeans arrived. Things were either cooked in a pot or smoked over open fire. The achịcha that I know was neither made of dough nor was it baked. If not for convenience, it’s hard to explain why they called bread achịcha when our own achịcha was a world apart in consistency, taste, primary ingredient, and mode of preparation. In fact, thinking of achịcha as bread or biscuits makes achịcha not a thing but a category, a family name for all baked goods. This is a translation problem, a language problem which can also be understood in terms of the inherent limitations of all human languages. As linguist and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limit of my language is the limit of my mind; everything I know are things that I have words for.” Every tribe has a word for all things they interacted with; but the farther they ventured from their enclave, the more different place the world became. Our world is a place filled with things that no single language can have names for! Using one word, like achịcha, to embrace an entire family of baked goods is an approach to translation that begs the question. From what part of Igbo land do you hail? Can you find out if there is a thing that your community calls achịcha? #IgboAmaka