Effizy Chefizzy

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KEEP EXISTING IN STRUCTURES YOU WERE BORN IN JUST AS THEY ARE IF YOU CAN 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 even if it's not on your birth certificate. Whether you like it or not.

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 when 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 in most traditional homes. Especially 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 on how I'll never be an upstanding wife.

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

To inform that; YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KEEP EXISTING IN STRUCTURES YOU WERE BORN IN IF YOU CAN MAKE THEM BETTER!

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. 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 it 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 me 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 I never got right and that day, I ignored that step and decided to just 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 perfect balls with the right ratio of leaf strips to oil.

Since that day, I have never looked back and always try to discover easier, less stressful ways to cook sumptuous meals. Hence, one of my brother's gave me the nickname Effizy Chefizzy from how I seem to now do too much cooking. In the end, my meals are now even better than my mother's and she beams with pride when people eat my meals and praise them. She knows I have thrown 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 works for each of us.

The point I'm trying to get at with this narrative is, THAT YOU WERE BORN INTO A 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 were not as a result of the curiosity of people who discovered how to make life better.

The systems (society, culture, ethics and etiquette) we were born into were as a result of the times at the period of our ancestors. They did not exist in the world we are existing in now. How can they know better for us? Obviously many of their doctrines are not longer functional for the world of today.

Imagine if I held on to my mother's recipes which I never got 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.