Effizy Chefizzy

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KEEP EXISTING IN STRUCTURES YOU WERE BORN IN JUST AS THEY ARE. YOU CAN ALWAYS MAKE THEM BETTER!

Effizy Chefizzy!

DISCLAIMER: Please, the above is not due to any influence from Mavo Swaggo.

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Growing up as the first daughter in a heavily traditional Idoma household, the name Enenu automatically sticks from birth, and you uphold it whether you like it or not, even if it's not on your birth certificate.

Ene in Idoma means Mother and the combination Ene-nu means our mother. All my cousins who are first daughters too have this household nickname and it's funny whenever we are in a gathering and they have to differentiate whoever's being called upon.

“Ene!”

All of us. “Yes!”

Them. “No. Enenu!”

“Which one?”

Then they add whatever defining detail to the Enenu they request. Small Enenu, Big Enenu, Fair Enenu, Dark Enenu or Enenu (last name).

This piece is not about the variations of Enenus in my family but about how I came to be Effizy Chefizzy. Hold on, I'm getting there.

Being an Enenu of the house, you learn to take care of the household just as it is expected of the first daughter in most traditional homes. Especially in one like mine with both parents working long shifts. As Enenu, you're the second mother; you learn from an early age to cook and clean, and everyone else in the house feels entitled to your service. You can't be tired. You can't think for yourself alone. You always have to be considerate of the family.

Well, that was what I saw growing up, but because there has always been something ‘wrong’ with me according to my mother, who never misses the chance to say how my own has always been different, it didn't take a lot of time for me to break away from this expectation of an Enenu. My parents forever grieve how I'll never be an upstanding wife.

Well, how I quickly relinquished all expectations of an Enenu brings me to my piece today.

My piece that hopes to inform you that YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KEEP EXISTING IN STRUCTURES YOU WERE BORN IN IF YOU CAN MAKE THEM BETTER!

So while in Enenu training, cooking was always my biggest feat, and it was cooking I could never relinquish. Cooking was the one Enenu duty my parents would never let me let up on. They like to believe it was due to the fact they were strict on not letting me ignore my duties there and not that I liked to eat and wanted to be able to cook myself the meals I craved.

Cooking, for how much I loved food, refused to bend to my will. I could never make the recipes turn out as good as my mother's, and I hated it. No matter how scientific I tried to be each time. Considering if I put in the salt too quickly, or put in too much pepper, or not enough crayfish or Maggi. I just never got it right. Though, I'll admit there was a malevolent satisfaction watching my family eat my horrible meals because they had no other choice. Still, it was a double-edged sword because not cooking great meals like my mother didn't let me off my task of cooking, and I had to eat the horrible meals too.

So one fortunate day, I got fed up with my father's complaints and pity for my future nuclear family and took it upon myself to find out how to cook better. I put my hands on my waist and muttered in desperation, “God, I don’t want to cook one bad meal again in my life. Let my meals taste like manna from heaven. Teach me!”

After that, I threw my mother's recipes into the trash and began mine, starting with my biggest enemy. Egusi soup. My mother's recipe included a frying method that I never got right until that day. I ignored that step and decided to pour the Egusi into the stock. Marvelously, it turned out alright just as hers did in the end. I remember the skepticism when my father saw the soup not looking like baby poo as he usually complimented but rather like perfect balls with the right ratio of leaf strips to oil. It was a breakthrough.

Since that day, I have never looked back and learned to always try to discover easier, less stressful ways to cook sumptuous meals. Hence, one of my brothers gave me the nickname, “Effizy Chefizzy”. In the end, my meals got even better than my mother's, and she beams with pride when people eat my meals and praise them. She knows I threw her recipes away a long time ago, and though we still squabble anytime we are sharing the kitchen preparing meals, we understand the different ways that work for each of us.

The point I'm trying to get at with this narrative is THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU WERE BORN INTO A CERTAIN SYSTEM OF DOING THINGS DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE MEANT TO LIVE IN SAID SYSTEM FOREVER.

Times change, environments evolve. Therefore, we as humans have to evolve too. Just as the humans long before us did.

The complacency in the low quality of life we experience daily these days doesn't sit right with me. It is like we believe we cannot change things for the better, like it's not people changing things for the worse that put us in this deteriorating state of life.

Like the structures we have today that positively work for the good of the people are not a result of the curiosity of people who eventually discovered how to turn their curiosity into reality and make life better for themselves.

The systems (society, culture, ethics, and etiquette) we were born into were as a result of the times of the period of our ancestors. Those ancestors did not exist in the world we are existing in now. How can they possibly know better for us? Obviously many of their doctrines are no longer functional for the world of today.

Imagine if I held on to my mother's recipes I never could get right. Failing and trying and failing instead of breaking away from the norm to forge my own path.

Well, maybe I might have eventually got it right. But then we all in my household would have spent longer time eating those ill-tasting meals at the dinner table.

Also imagine if people didn't stop killing twins in Nigeria back then. Imagine if no one created electricity. Imagine if education never existed. All these things were as a result of opposing the existing status quo of that time, and we are all better for it.

So dear human, sometimes conformity is but a shackle to stagnation. In the era our world has entered, life doesn't call for conformity but for eccentricity and unconventionality.

TODAY, DARE TO CHALLENGE, DARE TO BE EFFIZY CHEFIZZY