I Eat With My Hands

I Eat With My Hands

My mother birthed me the color of the fertile earth we used to step bare foot on. Had she left me in the soil, I think the Earth would have swallowed me up like a seed and I would have grown still. But she did not. She brought me instead into a world that hated how natural I am, how easily I blend into forests, deserts, dunes, and rolling hills. Soft white fingertips would touch the back of my hands with acute curiosity and ask why the dirt wouldn’t come off. How could I tell them that my mother’s hands were coarse and deep from weathering storms, letting life grow in and around her, like tree trunks or brown branches reaching heavenward.

I never could have imagined that it was envy.

Yet sea merchants traveled around the tip of Africa, some risked sailing straight off the Earth, trailblazers and forgers followed foot-trails and endless rivers to nowhere, to find the pungent pigmented powder that sits in my mother’s kitchen cabinets. All those people searching for what was before me.

How else could I describe home but for the metal pot, as deep as a drum, which held liquid gold, made only that way by my mother’s hands. Like an apothecary conjuring up remedies, or a dancer floating across the floor to the beat in her head, there was no rhyme or reason for what ended up making magic. When that liquid gold made its way to me, after long hours of sitting on the stove, it stained my fingertips hues of yellows, as luminous and deep as the sun. Tamarind tickled my tongue in conjunction with cayenne, cardamom, cumin, and coriander, setting my lips ablaze, bringing tears to my eyes, like the ending of my favorite movie.

I imagined it would have only brought great envy.

But when I set foot outside the comfort and confines of my red brick house, there was seemingly none, only recoil, resentment, reproach. “Barbaric” was the first word that ever brought me embarrassment so great I could no longer stand the sight or smells of what I thought to be gold. My yellowed fingertips evidenced that I had no need for utensils until glowering eyes set their sights on them and said real gold comes from deep within the earth, not from tin pots.

The smells that brought me home to a land I had never set foot on, yet engulfed me like a well-worn sweater rooted me back to the ground. They brought me back to the wooden stool I sat on, watching my mother swirl bright yellows and oranges with deep browns and reds in awe. She was better than any painter I had ever known. Her art was interactive from start to finish and how could I dare separate my senses from it? And so, I ate with my hands.

From the Earth that asked me to represent it with my complexion, to the sunlight that my pores open up to and gladly welcome, I am made up of yellows and oranges and deep browns and reds. So, I eat with my hands.