April Is Here!

Flowers Around Me

Spring thoughts shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.
All spring photos were taken this week, © 2025 mae sander.

Baby Owls

Can you see two owlets peeking out from their hollow tree? We visited them on Monday.
Shared with Eileen’s critters.

 An Excellent Novel

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think many people are recalling the start of the pandemic five years ago, and probably share my feeling that it seems very long ago and at the same time seems like just yesterday. The pandemic is at the center of the lives of the characters in this newly published novel, which makes it perfect reading for right now! Ultimately, the narrator says: “The ending of lockdown trailed off like a forgotten song. If only life could immediately return to what it used to be. Some bars and restaurants had opened, all hesitantly, the rules changing day by day.” Things return to normal — but not really.

Dream Count is about four characters, all women from Africa who immigrate or simply visit the United States. Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor all know one another in various ways. Each belongs to different ethnic and status groups. They have different economic opportunities: one comes from a quite rich family, one makes money on her own, and one is quite poor. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayals of the women, their relationships with men, their views of both American and African social norms, their attitudes towards having children, their jobs or careers, and many other features of their lives. The author has a fabulous way of creating stories and showing the inner and the outer realities of the characters.

The poorest woman in the story, Kadiatou, works as a hotel maid in New York, and her high-profile experience is based on the much-publicized rape of a hotel maid by the famous French banker Daniel Strauss-Kahn, in 2011. However, the author created an entirely different background for the character and her reaction to the events and the cancellation of the prosecution of the perpetrator, imagining an original persona into existence

What is the “Dream Count” of the title? It’s the way that Chiamaka, the pivotal character, during lockdown, reviews her many failed relationships with a series of lovers, both serious and casual. At the end, her friend remarks that “normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.” Chiamaka (who is narrating the novel, corrects her:

“My dream count,” I said. 

“So how many dreams have you been with?” 

“The world has changed and you look back to take stock of how you’ve lived. And you have so much regret,” I said. I wished I had not used that word, “regret.”

In my opinion, Dream Count is one of the best novels I’ve read recently because of the penetrating portraits of the characters and the fascinating insights into both African and American lives.

A Poem For Changing Seasons

With all the big wind storms that have swept across the country lately, I thought a symbolic wind poem would be good for this week —

[what if a much of a which of a wind]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives truth to the summer's lie;

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two, 

peels forever out of his grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die, the more we live

(Source: Poetry Foundation)

Caused by the wind in April, 2025.

 

Food Writing

Brownie Mix

1 box of Duncan Hines

Chewy Fudge

Family Style

Brownie mix

water

Sit on floor.

Cut open bag of brownie mix.

Add water.

Stir.

Eat with fingers.

Repeat when necessary. 

--Eat Joy pp. 55-56.           

Many recipes appear in the book Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers. The rather eccentric one that I quoted above is probably the most unusual. It's in short work about "a summer outdoor leadership school" where writer Anthony Doerr experienced hunger and sometimes burned food, felt fear or elation at natural wonders, hated the constant rain, and was absorbed by other delights of early adolescence. This essay was first published in  1843, the magazine of the Economist newspaper; several of the short pieces in Eat Joy were first published in highly esteemed magazines.

Some of the recipes are a bit more conventional. Claire Messud's memoir of her childhood and her mother's unfulfilled life even describes her favorite ordinary brownies. She says "nothing buoyed the spirits— hers or ours— like my mother’s chocolate brownies. They were actually Mrs. Hemmings’s chocolate brownies, though I never knew Mrs. Hemmings. To this day, the recipe, typewritten on a slip of paper, is glued to the back flyleaf of my mother’s battered and stained Fanny Farmer (held together with elastic, the masking tape on the spine having long ago failed)." (p. 28).

Much of Eat Joy is amusing reading. I especially liked the essays by writers whose works I'm already fond of, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Sierra Leone, 1997" describing the "houseboy" who worked for her family, and how he learned his job and did it very slowly. Her recipe, "Fide’s Jollof Rice" has a very intriguing flavor profile, including Nigerian curry powder and a scotch-bonnet pepper (which is way too hot for me). Her essay originally appeared in the New Yorker.

Another amusing essay is called "General Tso" by Lev Grossman, which starts: "When you get divorced, if you don’t get the house or the apartment, what you get is a divorce apartment." His description of his rather makeshift version of this not-so-Chinese dish is not very appetizing. About Tso's tofu he writes:

"The essence of General Tso’s Anything is the sauce: sweet, sour, spicy, salty, unabashedly gluey, studded with nuclear red chilies. Its color is a radiant translucent orange that reminds one of rubies and molten iron. The hot tofu, lightly coated in a form-fitting cornstarch batter, cracks open to reveal a silky slippery interior not unlike a savory toasted marshmallow." (p. 84-86). 

I keep thinking of more of these little gems that I would like to mention, such as "Spaghetti and Books" by Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, the author of the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, a book which I really loved. And "Minute Rice and Other Miracles" by Amitava Kumar. But that's enough for now. I do need to tell you that not all of the essays that come up to this standard. Some are disappointing, but plenty of them are good fun to read.

Just one more observation: I was amazed at how nearly all of the writers, according to the brief biographies at the head of each essay, are professional teachers of creative writing at various universities and writing programs. This fact leaves me with a lot of questions. Are most writers actually employed this way? Or was there a selection bias by the editor?

All in all, it's a fun book. One of my fellow bloggers reviewed it and inspired me to buy & read it, and I'm grateful to her! Unfortunately I lost track of who it was (if you let me know it was you, I'll add your link to this post).

Eat Joy was edited by Natalie Eve Garrett, and published in October, 2019. This review is by Mae Sander, © 2020 for maefood dot blogspot dot com, and if you see this at some other blog it's been pirated.

"Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ugwu, a boy from an Igbo village in Nigeria, is one of many fascinating characters in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At the very start of the book, as a boy, Ugwu comes to work for a professor at the University of Nsukka in Nigeria. His auntie, leading him to the site of his new job, says: "As long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day." (p. 3).  Ugwu begins by eating chicken and bread from the master's refrigerator; he marvels "at the magic of the running water and the chicken and bread that lay balmy in his stomach." (p. 7).

Ugwu's job includes all kitchen duties including cooking many local dishes. His service discloses a great deal about him. "He had spent many evenings watching his mother cook. He had started the fire for her, or fanned the embers when it started to die out. He had peeled and pounded yams and cassava, blown out the husks in rice, picked out the weevils from beans, peeled onions, and ground peppers." (pp. 14-15). He created foods like "a perfect meal, a savory jollof rice or his special stew with arigbe," (p. 29) or a pot of pepper soup in which "The oily broth swirled, the hot spices wafted up and tickled his nose, and the pieces of meat and tripe floated from side to side." (p. 114).

There's much more going on, but the details of food preparation and the cuisine of this family give the reader a grasp of the circumstances in which all the characters are living. There's even a contrasting houseboy in another family, who foolishly insists on preparing what he believes to be European or English food, such as beet salad or chocolate cake -- which he never gets right.

For the first half of the book, which takes place during the early 1960s, the reader shares the life of Ugwu, his master, his master's girl friend and then wife, their circle of friends and colleagues, their families and social status, and the entire atmosphere of their lives, their politics, and their thoughts. Although they belong to an ethnic group called the Igbo, they have many associates who belong to the other ethnic groups of Nigeria: they discuss the meaning of these associations and clearly expect that their differences will not be damaging.

The foods that Ugwu cooks are one of many details that anchor the book in the prosperous and in a way complacent life of these intellectuals. Nigerian ethnic unity is clearly worse than an illusion: riots begin to break out, and these murderous riots target Igbo people living throughout the country. Their world collapses, and the family flees to the Igbo territory which secedes from Nigeria as the new country of Biafra.

Anyone who was reading the news between 1967 and 1970 surely can't forget the story of the Biafran war. Newspapers showed the images of near-skeletal, dying children, whom the international community could not or would not rescue from their tormentors. I just looked at some of these unforgettable images online, and again found it unbearable to contemplate the horrible suffering of the starving children. I thought I would include one of these photos but can't bring myself to do it.

Three million people died, most of them children, mainly suffering from the disease kwashiorkor. This severe protein malnutrition among almost the entire population resulted because Nigeria instituted a near-complete blockade of all food and supplies to Biafra. Three million people starving is not something you can imagine, but Adichie makes it real through her presentation of the experiences of Ugwu and his employers, who become more and more his family. The declining circumstances of their lives are shown as they move first to a much poorer house than their University residence, then to a single room with filthy bath and kitchen shared with many people, and as they are affected by refugee camps much worse than their own circumstances. More and more people die or disappear without a trace.

At the end, the desperation of the people becomes vivid through Ugwu's witness of people who begin to eat lizards. "A hawker walked into the compound with an enamel tray covered in newspapers, holding up a browned lizard on a stick." He tells the child of the family: "If you eat one, all the ants the lizard ate will crawl around inside your stomach and bite you." (p. 442).

Eventually, he has to give in, and eventually he records his experience in his journals:

"[Ugwu] wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed up after it and the lizard leaped off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree. 'The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement,' the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share." (p. 498).

Since its publication in 2006, the novel Half of a Yellow Sun has been reviewed or rated by thousands of readers -- over 1,100 at amazon.com, over 7,000 reviews and 85,000 ratings at Goodreads, all the major book review sites, and so on. It's also a movie. Finally, I managed to read it, though I've always been afraid to.  I doubt that I can possibly say anything that hasn't been repeated many times, but I've tried here nevertheless.

I expected that Half of a Yellow Sun would be an amazing and courageous book. Still, I can't imagine how the author had the strength to describe the experiences of the victims of the Biafran genocide. The author achieved amazing clarity in her portrayal of the desperation of individual characters in the context of the destruction of an entire people. As always, I found the use of food as an indicator of society and social relationships to be extremely fascinating, more in this book than in most.

Recent Reading Roundup

Though I'm having a wonderful and action-packed stay in Kauai, I have read a few books in the last week, including quite a bit of reading on the long plane ride and airport waiting times. (Lucky us, the Delta meltdown was a few days after our trip!) What I don't have is time to write about the books, so I'm just going to make a list:

• Harry Potter and the Cursed Child -- I read the screenplay that opened in London last month. It's ok but I think I'd rather see than read it. Anything else I could say would be a spoiler.

• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- Its insider-outsider perspective on the USA, the fact that the central character earns a living as a blogger, and the fascinating portrayal of life in Africa are great, though I found the ending a little forced. Lots of good things about food!

• Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer before the Dark by Volker Weidermann -- pretty much for aficionados of Austrian and German writers of the era between the two World Wars. I liked it, and learned about a few obscure writers I hadn't heard of before. The relationships among these writers were new to me.

I'm now reading two others. May not finish soon!