The African Spoon
We made the world. Humans did. We abandoned the wilderness, left the forest or the savannah or whatever it used to be– I don’t even know. I can recognize more types of shoes than trees. There is another ecosystem now, of man-made things.
I began to realize this when I flew overseas. I found myself in a brand new jungle, with Moorish walled compounds sprouting from the ground and entirely new species of cars. For a month I rented a room in the seaside town of Taghazout, Morocco. It had a small sink in one corner, and opened onto the central courtyard of the second story. By day, light came from the sky. By night, fluorescent tubes cast muddy shadows on the faces of my hosts. And every door in town was blue.
No one could tell me why the doors were blue; the doors were invisible to the Moroccans, just there, just doors. After an hour walking through town and puzzling, I realized I was blind: I didn’t know what color the doors were at home.
A year later, returned, the question came to me and I checked. I exited my apartment and turned around. My door is made out of dark, carved wood. The hallway is lit by an incandescent bulb in a glass shade. The floor is carpet, dark blue, industrial. Everything is perfectly level and right-angled, and all of this is so usual that it had never existed before.
Everyone already knows, or should know, that the people are different in each place. But not until I was immersed in the strange textures of a different culture did I understand that everything humans do can be subtly different, down to the smallest details, the shape of the nail heads in the walls, the tiniest material flora and fauna.
Sometimes, the differences mean something. That sink in my room was there because Morocco is a country of scant plumbing, which means shared bathrooms. But it was also there because Muslims must perform ablutions before their prayers, five times a day, and because hand-washing is more important when you eat without utensils. Meanwhile, the doorframes in my hallway are rectangular because the rectangle is an easy shape to build with. Or is this, too, just tradition? The right angles of Latin lettering are nowhere to be seen in Arabic, and those Moorish doors are arched…
And did Allah lovingly craft a different style of cookware for each race? I drink tea out of mugs, the British have tea cups, and the Turkish use what we would call a shotglass. Water is served warm in Vietnam and Mauritania. The Japanese word for “meal” actually means “rice.” Bolivian propane cylinders are actually ellipsoids, and yellow. Government buildings are decorated with columns in Europe, with gods and lucky swastikas in India…
Yes, there is language and culture; yes, you can get a PhD writing about differences in the conception of self between East and West, blah blah blah need to get out more. Can you see the invisible air of your own culture? Not the theories, not the great forces history, but the base physical details, those first flowers you notice in a new jungle. Tell me, what is the most common color for a bar of soap in America? And in India? Does soap even come in bars in other countries?
The modern spoon is differentiated by culture. The Western spoon is small, metal, with a shallow bowl. The Eastern spoon is typically deeper and made out of porcelain, with a more angled handle. The African spoon — perhaps the precursor to both — is mostly large and wooden, and is more of a cooking than an eating utensil.
