I ran into a friend the other day and immediately felt like I had walked into an 'African store'. The mix of stock fish, dried fish and crayfish smells assailed my nostrils. "Wow!" I said, "Bro, did you go to Ako or Benchris?" (The two major "African stores" in the Phoenix area). "No," he said, and asked, "Why?"
How do you tell someone all dressed up in a suit and carrying himself mightily that he smells like an immigrant in winter? Indeed, it is extremely difficult to tell someone that he or she has body odour or bad breath. We do not want to embarrass anyone and so we tiptoe around the person, averting our faces when he or she starts talking. Personally, when I see someone make that sudden retreat while I am speaking, I take that as a cue to freshen my breath, particularly if my mouth has been inactive for a long stretch of time. After hours in the office in front of the computer, even Mr. Colgate himself will need to freshen up. But we are not talking about me!
I noticed the 'African immigrant smell' early on in my Diaspora adventures. In the search for Nigerians and African food in Toronto, I was given contact information for a Nigerian doctoral student at the University of Toronto. He and his wife lived in the university's married students' residence, a high rise apartment building about a 30-minute walk from my own residence, Massey College at the University of Toronto. After we had established contact by phone and e-mail, the couple invited me to their apartment one Saturday afternoon. I was excited to visit someone's home for the first time since I arrived … plus the anticipation of eating 'home food'.
I ate home food alright … or more like, the food ate me! The 'immigrant smell' hit me as soon as the door to the couple's apartment was opened. I wanted to retreat … never to return. But the young woman who opened the door for me had a huge smile on her face, obviously happy to meet me finally. I had no choice but to enter the apartment. As I got to know the couple, I understood that the smell was structurally inevitable. Theirs was a very small one-bedroom apartment on the 14th floor of a high-rise building with poor ventilation, especially during winter when the windows were frozen shut and 'cracking' them was out of the question.
Also, the closet was so small that it could not close. This meant that the smell of food found a permanent place of abode on everything in the apartment, including the clothes. And so when the wife came to visit me one afternoon, she brought along with her the quintessential 'African immigrant' smell and it attached itself to all my clothes. For days, my suite smelled like her apartment. I loved my young friend's cooking but I disliked the stale left-over smell with a passion. The smell of fresh food induces eager salivating; the stale smell of food fills the mouth with pre-vomit saliva.
The tables were to be turned the following year when I cooked dried fish pepper soup in the home of my host family in Ottawa. I came back from school that evening anticipating a dinner of dry fish pepper soup, a special treat as I came in from a below-30-degrees-Celsius outside temperature. But the pot was not on the stove where I had left it that afternoon as I rushed out of the house. I was embarrassed to find the pot on the back porch the following morning. My hostess must have returned home only to be hit by the smell. The pot on the stove was the clear culprit and she banished it to the back porch.
I threw out the food both because it had spent the night outside and because I didn't want to assault my hostess' senses a second time by warming up the food in the kitchen. As we got deeper into the winter though, I realised that leaving food in the back porch in the middle of Ottawa's winters is a perfectly normal thing. When the Lord gives 'below 30' degrees temperature, we thank him for a free deep freeze. Similarly, when the Lord gives me triple-digit temperatures in the middle of Arizona's summer, I spread out the laundry in the backyard. The crispy smell of sun-dried clothes is the delightful opposite of the 'African immigrant' smell. And it is nostalgically African!
We still have to do something about the stale smell of 'home food', though. In my home, we shut the doors to the bedrooms and closets before we cook anything that could have a lingering smell. We also turn on the oven range fan (which sucks the air upward and outward) and open the back door (mostly possible here in our Valley of the Sun). Also, for things with a really strong smell such as dodo (fried ripe plantain) and akara (fried beans paste), both of which we cook every now and then, we use the stove on the gas barbecue grill in the backyard. When we went shopping for a new barbecue grill, we particularly sought one that had the stove feature.
But our set-up is less elaborate than what a guy constructed for his wife at the far corner of their backyard. He built something close to an outdoor kitchen, complete with a fridge. That way, Wifey can cook and store all her 'smelly African food' outside his 'nose range'. Though he is African himself, he doesn't care too much for 'home food'. However, sometimes it gets too hot to cook in the backyard. When this happens, Wifey secretly cooks the (forbidden) foods in her indoor kitchen when the husband is at work. Then she 'hides' the smell by burning sandalwood incense sticks.
She is a Christian who grew up in a Muslim environment and hates everything related to Islam with a passion. I don't have the heart to tell her that the particular smell of incense in her home always reminds me of the mosque across the street from my first Lagos apartment, back in the 1980s.
— Excerpts From Letters to Nigeria: Journal of an African Woman in America.North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013, pages 266-268. The book is publicly presented today in Mesa, Arizona. You can join the celebration online @www.starlinkvoice.com
