Reflectons on Porridge

My grandfather lived in Lome.
We drove from Ghana to Lome, waiting patiently to be waved through the Ghana/ Togo border with a sense of anticipation and excitement. From there into Lome, the European language would be French and not English, but Ewe had long been the language even deep into Ghana. Ewe stretched across the border, another example of the hubris and high-handedness of the acts of Europeans partitioning Africa.

My grandfather’s house was never empty. At least one (often two or three) of my mother’s many sisters would always be in the same house with all their children. Cousins. So many cousins. There were many rooms in this two-story house with its upstairs balcony of filigreed woodwork and its wood floors. The lower level also had a wide porch that seemed to wrap around the house. French windows with slats for ventilation opened out onto the porch.
My grandfather’s rooms were upstairs and in one wing of the house. We would go there to greet him. He sat at his desk. I remember him to be a man of some size. He would smile. He was almost blind. He knew our names. He liked to listen to us talk. He always sent word that he was proud of us.
At night, the children would sleep all over the house, but mostly on the porch where it was cool. We felt protected by the whitewashed wall and wide courtyard of trees and shrubs that hid the house away from the main road with its network of gutters. The back of the house rose above a small alley. This alley was where a man would pass everyday pushing a large cart. He would empty the latrines of the house through a small doorway built into the wall that rose from the street. In Accra, we flushed away our waste. Here we watched a man take out waste in a cart, casually, as if this is the way the world worked and had worked for centuries. The latrines always had the heavy smell of Detol or some stronger, heavy-duty antiseptic liquid. The latrines were always dark and quiet. You did your business, unlatched the door, and left, quickly, quietly.
Each morning, we would wake up and flood out into the cobble-stoned narrow streets, chew-sticks in our mouths, bowls and spoons in our hands. We would find a woman stirring a large pot on a fire just to the side of the road. For a few pennies, she would pour cupfuls of a white pulpy porridge that had a sweet and tart scent—the sent of almost fermentation. It was hot porridge. She would then give us cones full of freshly baked and shelled nuts with the thin veneer of brown skin still on the groundnuts. We would sprinkle the nuts over the porridge, then make our way back to my grandfather’s compound, where we would sit and eat this delicious porridge. It was the only porridge I could eat. Its lightness, its sour sweetness and the viscous barely opaque film of syrup that edged the pulpy bits seemed as delicious as anything one could eat. We barely spoke. We slurped and chewed the nuts swimming in the porridge.
I would have been about seven years old the last time we spent time with cousins like that in Lome. I have not been back since. The house, I hear, is still there. It is probably a small, untidy cottage in the middle of a city of narrow lanes. Perhaps there were only two trees in the courtyard. Perhaps everything I think I remember is the way memory must work—as a kind of fiction, a kind of myth to help us find pleasure in the past.
My grandfather died in Lome.
I thought he was old when he died. We were in Jamaica when he died. When he died my mother sang a lot. She traveled home to see him. She stayed in the house. The cousins were there, she said. They asked of us. It is funny, but all I kept thinking of was the porridge. I hate most porridge, always have—oatmeal, corn-meal, and grits. But that porridge in Lome, that pulpy white porridge remains the only porridge I would ever enjoy.