Collard greens—a large green loose-leaf predominate in African American cuisine, often cooked tenderly with turkey leg, bacon, ham, or the individual’s preferred protein. A hearty side dish that accompanies and completes a soul food plate. With care, it is thoroughly washed, stems are removed, piled one leaf at a time on top of each other, rolled and chopped away. Collard greens— a side dish that immediately takes you back to your grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving. You remember the seasoned aroma that fills the house, the chattering, giggling and occasional screams from your cousins and their parents chasing them. Savouring the taste, the warmth, comfort, and nostalgia clothes your taste buds slowly draping over your entire body. The orange golden lights from the sun that hit your face, the familiar hands you hold during prayers and the tender smiles all come back rushing to your memories eye. One dish, ten thousand emotions.
On the other side of the planet, in another home, a different culture, under the same brown and black shades, the stems of kontommire are removed, either rolled up and chopped like collard greens or cooked whole and grinded in an earthenware bowl with some onion, pepper, groundnuts, garden eggs, Turkish berries and salted fish, garnished with palm oil, sliced avocado, eggs and salted tilapia, accompanied with either yam or plantain. Around the earthenware bowl, friends and family gather sharingtales, gossip, laughter and food. They are reminded of their grandmothers, mothers and aunts through the familiar flavours, building community and everlasting bonds.
On two different sides of the globe, two different cultures, and two different leaves, one same tale of the unifying quality of food is shared and yet, divides. For a group of people forcefully divided leading to the loss of identity for one faction, the idea of reaching to their roots through food should rather sound inviting but is rather turning into a competition of who is more enlightened and civilized. While African American food is discriminated against in America for being slave food, pauper food and an unhealthy cuisine, African food is highly discriminated against internationally and painfully, the African diaspora contributes to it.
The unspoken animosity between the diaspora and Africans is far from food wars but a distasteful divide and struggle with identity, culture, pride, ideals and oppression on both sides that separates but yet, eerily similar— mirroring each other like shadow to an object, even though one comes from an uninterrupted, inherited chain of ancestry and the other bud out in a system of forged chains and displaced origins. The quiet detachment both parties try to cosplay to each other’s customs,is not necessarily a reflection of their ideals but a projection, an influence, an idea, some manipulation or brainwashing designedto stretch and not bridge the artificial, systematic gaps.
Thanks to the “unfiltered, raw, based on real life stories”, Hollywood, when an African person peeks at diaspora culture, they see guns, drugs, gangs, ghettos, murder, criminals and everything the average African would not want to see. They take away the solidarity, the art, the music, the invention, the systematic oppression. With the ever-helpful lens of conglomerate media houses, a glimpse into Africa is bleak. It is bloody, dirty, diseased, uncivilized, poverty-stricken— a hellhole, a hellhole they were lucky to have been captured from. They take way the culture, the community, the stories, the beauty, the corruption. They take away the mirror, they take way the undying, ever-beating connection— they divide through a camera and a script. Rather than fixing the divide revealing itself, we cosplay each other. Africans go in for the accents and lifestyle, while the diaspora come in for the spirituality and tradition— both putting on costumes thinking it is kinship. While the Diaspora feel abandoned, Africans feel invisible. While the Diaspora is uncouth, Africans are savages. Different forms of the same thing and yet, each party points such fingers.
The divide between Africans and the Diaspora is ugly, cold, unsettling, misplaced, firm, impeccable, concrete, built and very efficient, identical to brutalist architecture. It is driven from a place of demobilization and enmity, and functional in performing its role while being unapologetic and unmasked.
While we are both called “monkeys”, the diaspora think they are the more refined ones due to their perceived proximity to whiteness and the benefits that ensues while Africans are the jungle freaks. Think of it more like Bubbles and Harambe, one refined and globally loved, and the other an entertaining savage. At the end of it all, the abused becomes the abuser, the discriminated ends up discriminating. “The blacks” end up calling their skin folk “the Africans” going as far as condemning and prohibiting them from using the N word, almost making it feel like they are gatekeeping the trauma of slavery and colonization, weirdly happening online only.
The ships did not only take away our precious sons, brothers, daughters, husbands and wives but gave us trauma, not only to the one that was stolen but to the one that was stolen from.There is no bigger victim or lesser victim. Africans and The Diaspora should remember that there is no side to take in this war, in fact, there is no war. It is a boxing stage set for us to fight one another with the perpetuators placing systematic bids.
Kendrick Lamar said “turn the TV off” in his song TV Off, genuinely we all should.