From Henry Chigozie Duru
Not infrequently do we hear people, while sympathising with others, lament, "a whole Christmas Day and there are some families who cannot afford to cook common rice." Though such comments are often an accurate reflection of the grinding poverty in the land, it is somehow also revealing of one of those illusions that combine to make life incurably painful for humans. Truth is that beyond the society's glorification and elevation of rice almost to the status of the substance of the merrymaking that happens at Christmas and indeed during other celebrations, not being able to cook rice on that day should in itself not dent one's celebration.
I understand that when people make such comments, they usually mean to say that such families are so poor that they could not afford the common staple food every home customarily cook on a day like that. While this is basically true, it does not tell the whole story because, even without those who make the statements knowing it, such words are also partly motivated by certain biases held by society regarding food prestige.
On Thursday, December 24, 2009, as we were immersed in our newsroom duties in a national newspaper I was then working for in Lagos, a colleague of mine said to me, "Henry bring me Christmas rice while coming to office tomorrow, I want to eat from your pot." I knew she wasn't serious, but the response she gave when I told her I would have no rice in my house that day but that I would bring her a rich vegetable soup with garri was instructive. "No nah, tomorrow is Christmas, you should cook rice with a nice stew and chicken," she threw back looking genuinely surprised.
Truly, I didn't plan to have rice in my house, not only because I was staying alone but also because the fancy which rice held for me in my childhood days had since petered out. I think ever since, rice wouldn't be my pick if one were to ask me to make a choice for a dinner treat. I wasn't planning for "a rich vegetable soup" either, but that would have surely given me a more fulfilling Christmas than rice and chicken. It was a matter of staying true to my personal choice and ignoring society's choice. However, I had mentioned this meal to my office colleague knowing that it was something she loved so much. But then, the reality is that the rice-and-chicken bandwagon always rules people's taste during Christmas.
What is clear from the above personal experience is the reality that society often tries to dictate to us how to enjoy our life and how to be happy. This reality is evident in the irony that I must leave out what my taste buds genuinely long for and settle for rice and stew before my Christmas would be considered good. That is how much social and cultural bandwagon conditions our mindset, desires and expectations. But truth remains that, based on my food preferences, once I begin to see rice as something I must have in my house for my Christmas to be worthwhile, then I am definitely not being myself but merely trying to live up to a social trend.
Sociologists study what is known as sociology of food, and through their efforts, we have now understood why certain foods become regarded over others in society. Often, the status gained by such foods may have nothing to do with real nutrition or any other practical consideration, but merely a function of glamourisation. Worse still, such foods may even have health hazards for humans! For example, in Igbo land, we have now so much glamourized breadfruit (ukwa) that it has become a status symbol at occasions so much so that they are often a reserved dish for some category of guests. One may fill disrespected if ignored by ukwa servers at such occasions - notwithstanding that for such a person ukwa may not really rank high on their list of preferred delicacies.
Funnily, accompanying this glamourisation is a fallacy about the proteinous richness of ukwa. But science has a different account. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the proteinous content of breadfruit is just 2 - 4 percent while its carbohydrate content is 77 - 80 percent. Interestingly, our usual white rice has a higher proteinous content (at 6 - 8 percent) than our darling ukwa, and with the carbohydrate content of rice higher by only 3 to 5 percent, according to USDA.
So much about rice. But the point I am trying to make is that many of the things we long for and suffer as a result are a mere product of social illusions. Society creates illusions around certain things, thus seriously compromising our ability to see through things and separate concrete realities from phantasies.
Contemporary philosophers and critical theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adonor, in their book, DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, argued with deep-cutting conviction that popular taste is always a creation of society. People grow in society, and as part of their socialisation, their society defines for them what they should like, cherish and aspire towards. This way, individuals are deprived of their independence of thought as they are lumped into one homogenized mass who think alike, prefer alike, choose alike, and reject alike. French Marxist thinker, Louis Althuser, observed that even before birth, an individual's social personality had been completely pre-moulded by their society through a set of rules and "choices" upheld by that society for its members. Thus, it is easy to predict that a child who will still be born next year will grow to join the rice-and-chicken Christmas bandwagon of today, opt for fashion practices like artificial hair amd nails (if they're female), fancy digital activities like Snapchat photos and videos, and posting of one's photo on social media among other things valued by our society. As can be seen, none these "choices" are actually made by this unborn child; they had been made for them by society and they will simply internalise them upon birth.
Thus, being that the society's control of our minds starts even before we are born, we are literarily captivated and rarely able to resist it. This is what social psychologist, Serge Moscovici, meant when he wrote that society's overbearing influence on how individuals see and behave towards life is primarily because, even before a child learns how to think, society, through early-years socialisation, has already imposed on their minds certain ways of thinking and interpreting reality. Thus, from the very beginning, an individual is mentally captured.
This is exactly why there is no limit to how much society and its belief systems, norms and values can condition what we know (or think we know), what we believe, and the choices we make. From the onset of one's life, the indoctrination and pressure start mounting as to why you must live your life this way or that way, marry a wife or husband, have a male child and not just females, have this kind of car that suits your status, build this sort of house, eat this or that sort of food, have meat as part of your meals etc. Thus, from life-defining engagements like marrying and building a family to trivial matters like what to eat on Christmas Day, the individual is under the suffocating grip of society and is rarely able to make genuine personal choices.
It is for this reason that life seems like one unending race to meet up with expectations. This race is never won by anyone but everyone ends up physically and mentally drained by the race to please society. But fortunately, one begins to see a way out of this agony-filled race track that leads to nowhere when they take a moment to ask themselves whether they actually made the choice to pursue these endless social goals or whether society made it for them. These goals, like Christmas rice and chicken, are indeed tragic illusions; illusions in the sense that they are not real given that society that invented them merely masked them to appear as necessities we can't do without, and tragic in the sense that their pursuit often brings about agonizing pressures because of their underlying achieve-it-or-be-doomed imperative.
Let me end by recalling my encounter with a former student of mine who is today a lawyer. I had taught her at a prelim programme through which she gained a direct entry admission to study law. While in her 400 level, she had breezed into my office for routine greeting and at some point told me her current worry. It was time for the yearly dinner of the law students' association and her pain was that she had no money for a new gown and a new pair of shoes to attend the function. Noticing her real worry, I asked her whether she currently owned a gown and shoes, and she answered in the affirmative, and I said to her, "Look, is the dinner you are planning to attend not the same as the ones our friends in the law faculty attended when we were undergraduate students in this same university? When has it become the rule that one has to buy new wears for such students' events? I am sure you people now go there to be looking out for who wears the newest and costliest clothes and shoes instead of settling to enjoy the meals served. Who set this new standard and who said you can't be happy without following them? Who said the wears you own currently can't be good enough for a students' dinner event?"
I honestly can't recall the exact words I used in speaking to this student but what I made up above definitely reflects the exact points I made to her. I have recalled this encounter to simply show how society creates standards and continuously raises the bar, thus putting everyone on endless high jump. Students' events in the days past weren't meant to imitate elite evening functions held at exquisite hotels and event centres of Ikoyi and Victoria Island where socialites come to showcase the most expensive latest wears. They were rather forums where everything was kept simple without any air of elite classiness and everyone was welcome and could feel free. Today, the story is different; those unseen hands of society have once more raised the bar and students and parents are feeling the pressure. Thus, my final piece of advice to that agonizing former student of mine was, "Simply go and wash and iron the one you have very well and wear it to the dinner. Don't go to compete with anyone. Besides, I am sure once one wears a presentable attire to an occasion, no one sees them as an outcast."
Merry Christmas and prosperous New Year in advance.
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.