A Writhing Basket in Zambia
How to love animals and yet eat them. As published in GRAZE magazine.
The mottled brown chicken is deftly scooped, held upside down by its rubbery shins, and plunged into the basket. Cecilia bows out from the coop, and holding her plastic coin purse close, counts out some bills. The old woman who tends the coop hesitantly accepts payment. It is an awkward ritual that Cecilia insists the village must become accustomed to, as their animal and crop production grows sustainable.
I lift the bundle of ‘Graaaawk’-ing chicken as Cecilia jokes respectfully with the woman in KiSwahili. The basket shivers in my arms. Coarse leaves of palm and grass had been twined and knitted into a wide-toothed weave, a sphere just solid enough to hold an animal within a cage of roped ventilation. It was the same handiwork I’d seen on local buses throughout the continent of Africa, travelers bearing a future feast. Only this one is for me, my own Welcome feast, hosted by a former stranger on the bus.
In boot cut jeans and a pink saucy-phrased T-shirt that seemed incongruous with her philanthropic works, Cecilia scooped me out of my foreignness and brought me to this village, where she is spearheading a miracle of sustainability. She speaks encouragingly with the older woman, hoping to ease the anxiety of economics. Her work is unprecedented. She fears it is strange for a community to claim as their own what initially came from her. Although barely older than myself, she communicates with an effectiveness I’d never witnessed from the usual Western ‘bearers of aid’. It is her vision to revive the village of her childhood through her own intrepid non-profit, Project Zambia.
Cecilia finishes the exchange, and goodbyes are performed by lowered chins, good-willed shoulder clasps. I carry the chicken basket. It squirms like a gyroscope, and I clutch it in a way that makes Cecilia laugh. She offers to take it off my hands, but I hold it closer, awkwardly embracing it between forearm and chest. The urge to participate in any way is overpowering after months of solo travel across Africa. Always gazed upon as the Other, as a woman, as an American alone who presumably might gaze back, I was drowning in subtle tensions and alienation. Somehow by grasping the basket, I would show my host, the village, the passing vehicles on the road, that I wasn’t such a strange observer hovering on the fringe of things, that I could take part here, and exist.
The basket shivers. Moist feathers tickle my arm, and strange talons protrude. I feign naturalness, perhaps to convince Cecilia that I’m not afraid of the chicken’s fate.
“Do you know how to prepare this?” Cecilia asks, nodding towards the sagging basket. She sees through my act of familiarity, knowing, this isn’t how they do it in America. She teases, “Maybe you can fix the chicken and I will make nshima?”
I smile, hoping to hide my trepidation. Cecilia reaches out, holding my free hand for a few strides as we wait for the combi-bus home. “Don’t worry, we do it together.”
Cecilia’s house is sunshine yellow and leans slightly leftward. As the sun subsides, neighbors set up folding chairs near their vegetable patches to chat amidst the cool. Inside, her small rooms are painted an uplifting Pepto-Bismol pink, and a new tiled latrine has just been constructed out back. As we enter Cecilia removes some towels hanging from the backs of chairs, apologizing for the mess, as every busy person does. We move straight through the house — a brief tour, no pomp — Cecilia sets down the vegetables and forages through the kitchen drawers.
“It is best we do this now,” she announces, gesturing to the bird.
One wouldn’t want to get comfortable, with dinner to be made, death tap tapping at the stomach from the outside windows.
The deed is done in the back, in the twilight, with a thin serrated bread knife. A basin is fetched, so blood doesn’t run all over the garden. The chicken does not protest when it is lifted from the basket, perhaps knowing that no effort will change its situation. Unfocused chicken eyes stare, zombied, like static television, like humans who lose hope and ‘un-human’ themselves.
Gently I clasp its ruffled torso, instructed to hold fast its claws. My palms pulse with the bird’s mechanics, its heartbeat raised to vibration. There is no hesitation when Cecilia fixes her grip on the knife. She places her left thumb and fingers softly around the crown and beneath the beak, stretching the neck thin. The knife scissors across, but it is blunt, she must saw, back and forth, through the feathers, strings, vessels, bone. I try to hold the chicken firm so its spasms don’t throw the knife and harm it more, but I wish Cecilia would be swift! She tilts the creature upside down, letting its warmth drain.
“We should have rung its neck first,” I say quietly.
“We should have…? Oh — ” Cecilia mimes a ringing action, like twisting water from rags. “I am sorry, it was difficult to hold the kicking for you! You are alright?”
Cecilia asks as a careful host remembering a thing of comfort for a guest. But I was referring only to the solace of the chicken, forgetting my host as my eyes start to burn. It was a slow and painful death. In truth, it is strange for Cecilia to think of an animal feeling pain, never something she could afford to believe. To think of the discomfort of animals, while surrounded by starving, suffering people! It seems somehow more perverted. Pain in death ends with death, pain in life endures.
“I’m alright,” I answer.
And I am all right, though I hold the body of something killed. I had never held anything as it died (anything larger than a butterfly), never been the cause of death. There is a shadow in my stomach that flaps like fear, or guilt, but it evaporates under the gaze of inner scrutiny. I want to be disturbed, to feel more shocked and repulsed by the gore on my hands, but somehow I feel… grateful. Glowing gratitude seems mixed with carnal adrenaline in my chest. Silently I utter my thankfulness, not knowing why or to whom or what kind of chicken-spirit might hear. It’s something old that’s emerging, something that had never been awakened by the world I was born into.
The chicken was real. It had lived naturally. I’d seen where it scuttled between mud houses, clucked in its shed with other real chickens. I’d held the eggs from which it hatched and lived to lay. For the Westerner, some disconnect had been bridged — an ecstatic remembrance that food is life taken and given.
I feel giddy with the truth on my hands, as though I’d uncovered a precious secret that industry had swallowed: the idea that chicken tenders are fifty-nine cents is a random fiction, yet given that price they become that value — cheap filler, easy binge, usually better if you’d done without. But if the processes that make chicken so cheap — obscuring the uncomfortable steps of death and dismemberment (while creating greater unseen horrors) — if that whole progression of animal-to-food is faced, the experience of chicken becomes priceless. It is sacred, and has been since the dawn of humanity.
My absurd prayers emanate, and continue to seep as talons are sawn off, as the flesh softens under boiling water. Perhaps America’s Thanksgiving came about this way, thanks coming from the feast rather than the feast commemorating the thanks (the pilgrims could rewrite the origin if it were anything so pagan). I weed the withered feathers myself, plucking tender bunches like tufts of inedible fur off artichoke hearts.
We light a candle to continue the preparations. Cecilia narrates the gutting of the bird, stumbling in English over words like ‘spleen’ and ‘gallbladder’, as she pulls organs from the dark body and sets them on a plate. Eventually the animal is cut into pieces I recognize as ‘chicken-that-we-eat’, the air-tight plasticized thighs, drum-legs, tenders. This is where the meal would start “from scratch” in the bright aisles of Safeway.
We set about the part of cooking that I know well. I chop onions, tomatoes, crush garlic — all thrown into a skillet with the chicken and oil — then tackle the thick collard greens. Cecilia directs me in the traditional recipe, as she crushes the cornmeal fine. When nshima begins to coagulate from watery porridge, stirring may be equated with the effort of steering a small ship and must be done constantly for the proper creamy texture. As a self-respecting Zambian woman, Cecilia shows no grimace of effort. She sways her slender frame in the momentum of her arduous twirl.
We hear the swish-and-clack of the front door, as a guest arrives. Yvonne, Cecilia’s best friend huffs into the kitchen, her arms wrapped around packages. She greets me efficiently, like I’m someone who belongs here. Then, like a magician she dramatically reveals something special from her bag. A bar of Cadbury chocolate!
“Dessert for us. After the special meal!”
Cecilia trills over the unexpected treat as we each bubble on about the last time we had chocolate. Yvonne prepares the living room for dinner, loudly rhapsodizing about her day. She is exhausted, working two jobs and volunteering for Cecilia’s non-profit, and is giddy over having Special Chicken tonight. Cecilia beckons me over, surreptitiously.
“I told her we are very old friends you and me.” She says it like a shy secret, eyes sparkling in divulgence.
I smile down at the leaves I’m chopping, pondering the little secret between us. It is only a lie in the reckoning of time, and time of course is relative. How comfortable it is to chop strange food and stir thick nshima with Cecilia. Just as when we were girls in play we would have prepared mud pies, wherever our respective homes. In some way it is true that we’ve become Old Friends.
I finish sautéing the chicken dish to Cecilia’s instructions. The meat is browned and growing tender in the spicy tomato broth. The ingredients were simple, yet the aroma fills the house with sizzling spice, with an underlying sense of comfort. Somehow the dish speaks clearer than language, Welcome back, to the strange and familiar. And I feel welcome, invited in fact. I am taking part in conjuring this traditional meal from scratch.
We carry the meal into the living room, and set it on the low coffee table. Yvonne fetches a water bottle filled with passion-fruit juice, and always, Coca Cola. I crouch to my knees when my hosts are seated on the floor by the coffee table, bowing my head to them as I had practiced. I would serve them as they’d taught, the way women in this area have always served their men and elders. I pour hot water over my hosts’ hands, slowly so each can lather the soap. Following whispered prompts from my bemused friends, I spoon the chicken and collard greens, attempt (disastrously) to ladle the boiling Nshima into perfect, hardening circles.
It is as if we were three girls make-believing a tea party, playing at the ceremonious roles bequeathed to our gender. Only, culture is reversed now, history repealed and the places of host and guest are merrily topsy-turvy. The Zambian women applaud my efforts at convention. We plunge our hands into the nshima bowl, rolling the porridge into cratered scoops to steep in the sauce and greens.
Strangely, I enjoyed enacting the ritual place of the female, something I’d fought against with all my being when traveling alone. Somehow it seems subversive, as if we were rewriting the inherited hierarchy, Yvonne and Cecilia softly inhabiting and mocking the dominant. Now, I am pleased by this small chance of subservience, any chance to convey the honor and gratitude with which I overflowed. Mopping chicken, precious chicken, with gobs of smooth nshima, I had, for the first time, an unfamiliar urge to flatten myself, to bow my forehead to the soil of this land.
