With so much stress
in a country like Nigeria today, many people easily get edgy, snapping
at others over trivial issues, heckling and biting and tearing.
Obviously, the emotional lives of many people are in the kind of
trouble that constantly looks for ways of expression.
If you want to
make matters worse when someone is “boiling,” advise that person to
seek help from a psychiatrist. Who would agree with you if, during the
imbroglio that results, you start delivering a lecture on how what you
said was not what you meant? Definitely, madness is enjoyable when it
involves at least two people who cooperate.
Teasing is one of
the wonderful ways that human beings use discourse in softening the
seriousness of everyday struggles. Men tease women and women tease men.
But more than just being a matter of laughing at the other, it is a
great way of laughing with the other.
In my Igbo culture,
teasing the opposite sex does not attract extreme censure form the
guardians of political correctness, even when viewed through the lens
of modern gender consciousness, it is easy to read the expressions as
offensive.
A woman could turn to a man and say: “Go and shave your beard; it makes you look like a monster!”
And the man, without any feeling of hurt, would tell her: “You are jealous of my beard!”
And the woman would deny it flatly: “How can? I don’t belong to the zoo.”
And the man, smiling, would give it back to her: “When you women start telling the truth, you will start growing beards.”
And the woman, in mock annoyance, would cry out: “The truth is that we don’t want it!”
And the man would fire back: “Oh, I forgot that you women actually have beards, but at the wrong places.”
And the woman would laugh and playfully hit him with her fists or with any harmless object she is holding.
And to consolidate
his victory in this debate, the man would add: “You women want us to be
like you; that’s just what you want.”
Where else could
one still find this kind of cross- gender humorous exchange than in an
African rural community where, in spite of the so-much advertised
mistreatment of women, there exists some mutual understanding that this
kind of banter feeds community life? Women freely joke about men’s
sexual lives and weaknesses, and men do so too. They do not see this
kind of talk as being morally contaminating to the extent that they
would no longer be able to talk later with their Maker.
It is not all about
the body and sex: it could also be a focus on food and the kitchen.
Although in modern feminist agitation, cooking for the family is
sometimes viewed as one area of domestic life where the metaphorical
and literal enslavement of women is enacted in the patriarchal context,
men in local Nigerian environment reconfigure the kitchen as
“cheating,” using this play on the sound of “kitchen” to suggest the
woman’s conspiratorial posture. Articulating “kitchen” as “cheating” is
an invitation to laugh at a serious fear about what a woman could do
with, and in, the kitchen where she presides over the stomach of the
family, or over the stomach of her man.
Local Nigerian men,
in teasing women as being in their “cheating” instead of “kitchen”
confess to the enormous power that women wield as those in charge of
food preparation, not only because a woman may choose to eat the
choicest part of the food in the kitchen before serving it, but also
because she decides what quantity and quality to serve the man. She can
also decide to snuff out the life of her man by dropping a little
dangerous something in the egusi soup she is going to serve him, and
there goes Papa Ngozi, twitching and twisting like a worm as he joins
his ancestors!
When men tease
women about “being in the cheating”, they are actually crying in their
laughter, crying in their souls about the danger they have brought upon
their lives by insisting that cooking for the family is a woman’s task.
Perhaps, women recognise this cry of despair in men’s deconstruction of
“kitchen” and so some of them try to intensify the fear in their
responses, for instance saying, “Yes, the kitchen is my office. That is
where I sign my signature before you can eat any thing!” Or, by saying:
“You can return to the kitchen to burn your beard if you like; that
would perhaps teach you what a barbecue is like!”
The laughter in the
verbal hide-and-seek remains an essential part of a gendered tenor in
social interaction. It gives men and women the opportunity to play with
words, with their gender differences, and with hopes and fears.
Essentially, that act of playing with words with the gendered other
announces that a society that cannot laugh at its differences and
conflicts has not even got enough capacity to manage them.
