Sunday, September 4, 2011

Nzolo, Dearly Beloved

 "...Adah and I were trying to puzzle out how everything you thought you knew means something different in Africa. We worried over nzolo - it means dearly beloved; or a white grub used for fish bait; or a special fetish against dysentery; or little potatoes.

Nzole is the double-sized pagne that wraps around two people at once. Finally I see how these things are related. In a marriage ceremony, husband and wife stand tightly bound by their nzole and hold one another to be the most precious: nzolani.

As precious as the first potatoes of the season, small and sweet like Georgia peanuts. Precious as the fattest grubs turned up from the soil, which catch the largest fish. And the fetish most treasured by the mothers, against dysentery, contains a particle of all the things invoked by the word nzolo: you must dig and dry the grub and potatoes, bind them with a thread from your wedding cloth, and have them blessed in a fire by the nganga doctor.

Only by life's best things are your children protected - this much I surely believe. Each of my peanut-brown babies I called my nzolani, and said it with the taste of fish and fire and new potatoes in my mouth.

Page 606, 'The Poisonwood Bible', by Barbara Kingsolver

...................................................................................................

This novel, set in the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, was not a book I chose to buy - it was chosen for me by a strange white woman at a second-hand sale, while I stood at the old-books stall not doing much to resist. She just came over, looked at me, picked up this book and asked if I had read it - and proceeded to give me a summary of the novel, set in an important, and turbulent, period of Congo's history.

There was an urgency in her voice, which took me by surprise, so much so that I just managed a weak smile, and did not even say Thank you for the recommendation. I opened one of the pages at random, promised myself to not let myself be bullied by a stranger who probably caught me in one of my weak lost-looking moments, and then I came across this sentence: "There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure."  I bought the book.

And had no cause to regret. What a brilliant inter-weaving of injustice and humour and war and violence and discovery - all so neatly, lyrically rolled into each chapter, told by multiple voices, so vastly different, so lush and sparse in turns. The wit, especially, was startling, considering the setting, but never taking away from the gravity. Amazing achievement.

Thank you, stranger.

1 comment:

delhidreams said...

:) and u've made sure that i add it in my wishlist too!

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