I heard a great piece of supposed wisdom yesterday a few moments before I ate a great piece of traditional cake. It was from a famous pop singer here in Ngaoundere who told the entire audience, made up of private invitees--worry not I will unfold the tale more thoroughly presently--that "when your lips say you love me / but your heart never says yes / then you kill me." this got me thinking, as I was digesting various forms of awesomeness, that the most erotic moment of saying I love you is the lip formation of you. Because you proffer a kiss with it, and if the parter responds with either "I love you too" or "I love you also" then the lips can meet somewhere betwixt the people. This seems a nice meeting in the middle, but if you are asking heart to yes, well there are many problems. For the start, it will be hard to hear the heart unless you are awesome at Morse code, second yes is rather a snake-like hissing response. That is why it is best when one responds to a marriage proposal not to say yes, but rather "I never had a clue, but I will" something like that, a response that keeps the snakes away from the chicken eggs of early love.
Are all of you readers thoroughly confused yet? If this were a Harlequin posting, it would end with you learning that I had actually proposed and there would be at least three scenes of lovemaking and probably six horse-back rides between persons of incompatible job descriptions but nonetheless star-crossed qualities and certain muscular thighs and shapely triceps. (I'm running out of reading material).
Still confused, well, I shall explicate. This week's post is about appetite, but I wished to open with a false trail, for it is actually the appetite of the belly.
On Thursday my darling mischievous students in 5B invited me to a party. Now I was a bit hesitant because they had invited me to a soccer match the day before that proved to be a myth but I accepted because I saw something of actual veracity shining out of their normally mendacious eye-sockets. And so on Friday at 9:30 am (also known as third hour) I found myself outside a classroom being asked to wait for the other professors. Ahh, at last a sign of the veracity of the situation. As a result, I stood gently off to the side and began reading my book, some seven or eight minutes later Aie Sabine came to me with a gym t-shirt over her arm, as though she were a server in a high class restaurant, and she gestured me inside. I was the first, a typical state to which I have accustomed myself, and I sat behind student desks turned buffet table. There were vegetables, five types of spaghetti, salads, meats, juices, grains. It turns out that the class was throwing a surprise party for their professors. Soon after me, in filed others. We filled our seats to the cheers of students, two of whom gave darling speeches about thanking their professors who work too hard. The principal was there and gave a gracious speech, and then we ate to a chorus of M. X eat my food Mlle. Eat my thing, I did not make it, my mother did. Mdm. You make sure to try my salad I put extra avocado in it for you.
It was in all a marvelously warm experience wherein I was far more happy for my lips (which held the food in my mouth) than for my heart.
Of course I discovered an hour later when I returned to teach the reason that they had specified that "sometimes their professors work too hard." They wanted the day off! I told them to keep dreaming and cooking and we spent an hour on the vocabulary of computers.
On Wednesday Alfred's wife gave me an invitation to be present at a community even. The invitation and envelope were quite large and I expressed my gratitude. Alfred then told me that one best expressed gratitude through hidden sums of money in marked envelopes, so I slipped some cash in it and waited until saturday night. Now I am sort of used to the wild inconvenience that is called African time (and, sometimes rather awkwardly for me, Black Time). So I figured, the invitation said seven so we ought to arrive at eight. And so we did, but we were the third group there. I went with Alfred and Genesis (the president of M'Baya). And we sat and sat and sat and at ten thirty the event began and we could begin eating the small sugared pop corn and drink some luke-warm beers. But the event was really fabulous. The president of group we were celebrating stood up and said that they had invited the governor and so had to wait for him. Even though the governor was on drips all day (.I.e. He had malaria) he said he would try to make it and so the organizers were under compulsion to wait because "protocol must be followed." but once it began the cultural evening was stunning. Alfred's wife comes from the south, from a region called Kumuda, short for Kupe Muanengouba. The people are called the Bakossi, which means "you hate us." the president of the Ngaoundere branch explained that the name originates from the first German explorers who asked the people "who are you" but the people thought they asked "why do you think we have come." and so they answered "you have come because you hate us" that is "you have come because Bakossi."
And there was great dancing and great speeches and CRTV (Cameroonian radio and telivision) was there. Something I did not know until after I left and Alfred informed me. They were un-uninformed and I thought the man with a camera was just there to register the archive. There is one definite memorable moment that comes from my certain peculiarity about condiments. You see, if I have the chance to dip things, I dip them. This ranges from women and men with whom I dance to chips and salsa to pizza and ranch to soups and food. Well this latest dip was the famous green soup of the Bakossi. I was supposed to eat it with only the pieces of cow tail already in it. As a brief aside, I have become quite adept at eating tail, a feat that is neither easy nor instinctual for me. But I had a fish head, and so I dunked the fish head in and sucked down the eyeballs. Three other people at my tabl stared at me, and when I repeated it they shot beer and Smirnoff ice across the table as they guffawed at my audacity. Who, they demanded to know, had ever though of drinking the soup out of the empty eye socket of a fish skull. Alfred, fortunately, just shrugged. He's used to my embarrassing ways. And the table soon adjusted so they expressed no surprise to my various other mixtures.
Throughout the evening, we had musical interludes from the famous pop star H. Peizon, he of the opening quotation. Women loved him, men to, but I could not help wonder why, despite his obvious hotness, they were so attracted. He was lip-syncing the entire time, his mouth had a mouthy ironic twitch, and his lyrics were soporificly saccharine to the core. But I guess, at the end of the day, one likes to think that the heart speaks more truth than the lips, even though it is the lips that let great food in. Me, I'd far rather eat some tasty cocoiams dipped in soup that listen to the morse code of another's heart. Or if the person actually wanted to talk, I'd engage in the palaver, but elsewise there are too many linguistic problems with translation that just don't occur in the kitchen or in the dance. After all, as Shakira told us all, hips do not lie, whether they are the hips of a babe still struggling to crawl of or a nine year old poking her honey hips into me, the dance is still the dance.
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