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I’m in the market again shopping for food. I love and hate the process.

I often complain
that the world really belongs to extroverts and in it, we introverts
are marginalised and treated like aliens. Market shopping is an
extroverted affair. The swagger and wit and pretence of casualness; the
false sociability and the endless superficial “how’s your familys”; the
skilful or otherwise haggling and speedy brain calculations of whether
one is hearing an absolute truth, a half truth or a blatant lie is
overwhelming.

In contrast, there
is something soothing about supermarket aisles and their aloofness,
about the inward negotiation of choices.

I much prefer to go
to the market with my neighbour and friend who I call Local Government
Chairman! Everyone knows her and she knows everyone. And with bright
flashing smiles she wraps them round her finger and chops every price
they offer in thirds.

When we first used
to go to the market together, I would walk behind her and pretend I was
her mute relation from Cameroun. It gave my brain the freedom to really
negotiate the sights and sounds. I believe that a necessary organic
relationship with food and the accompanying skill or common sense that
allows one to recognise fresh good produce that has not been tampered
with or force ripened or presented to hide rot or decay, is becoming
obsolete.

A young lady who I
sometimes send to the market astounds me every time by bringing back
the freshest most delicious produce at considerably lower prices. She
has a feel for the market and for food sold in the market that I don’t
have even in an elementary capacity. She can keep her head against the
tide of loud smells and conversations and confusing banter, somehow
project her mind into every tomato and yam and green leaf and know that
it is the best to eat or the very worst. She has a relationship with
food that is significantly more cultured than my weekly urban mute
visits to the market. She has grown her own food.

How I hate that
line: “Aunty Okro no dey,” or “carrot no dey,” or “yam no dey.” I want
to shout at the vendor, “That’s completely meaningless! What do you
mean e no dey!”

The meaning is
plain. It is rarely about whether the vegetable or fruit that one is
attempting to buy is in or out of season. It is more likely that a
scarcity has been declared by the produce vendors in order to get the
best sale price.

Some conversations
I have had in the market are so ridiculous that they confound reality:
Once a goat vendor followed me through the market in an attempt to
convince me that his goat which only looked slightly bigger than a
puppy was a good buy. He told me that I was not to worry; once the goat
had been fed and watered it would increase in size and become
comparable to any other goat in the market.

As much as I hate
the sweltering loud smelly assault on the senses that the market place
is, on Thursdays, you will inevitably find me standing in front of
Mumsie’s smoked and dried fish stall. My head will almost be level with
her reeking roof of suspended stockfish worth as much as the plaster of
Paris ceiling in my house. Mumsie will be standing to the right of a
table piled high with smoked impaled Shinenose, rolled up catfish and
shimmering white crayfish. On the wall behind her, the letters YHWH are
scrawled, yet around her neck she wears a catholic scapular. She will
be hacking into the belly of a smoked Shinenose with a saw, and I will
practically be begging to buy a piece that is falling apart. She will
turn her nose up, hold the piece of fish together with rubber bands and
declare that that one piece is worth the price of one whole smoked
catfish.

WHY?!

If you ask too
insistently, she won’t sell it at all! Or she will ramble on and on
about how the Ijaw men who fish have all disappeared into thin air and,
“fish no dey!”

This is the thing
about the marketplace; its animation is addictive. I have lived almost
forty years but had no clue about the incidental delicacy that the
belly of a Shinenose is. One day, I was in the market, and in an
organic moment, I was introduced to imperfectly smoked fish, one part
dry the other moist, and for this imperfection, one pays an arm and
leg, and pays rapturously. In Okro soup or in Ogbono, this piece of
fish is so delicious; one’s tongue is in perpetual danger of being
bitten in half.

In the last few
months in the markets in Calabar, I also discovered at least three
different genres of Okro; fresh bush pepper berries, red and gorgeous,
harvested from the forest, heavy on stalks before they are dried into
the black sullen pellets that everyone knows as black pepper; edible,
ferociously addictive native chalk the colour of onyx on the outside,
grey dust on the inside, a true enigma when it tastes like one is
eating sand; local pink apples shaped like bells that disappeared off
my radar in some distant point in childhood.

What I am trying to say in effect is that the market is the place
where my inspiration for food is most fired, not among antiseptic
supermarket shelves, but among disdainful traders selling in their
nightgowns and headscarves, inflatable goats, stockfish roofs, absolute
lies and disappearing Ijaw men.