COAT recalls home on your taste buds

Yomi Sode’s COAT brings a sizzling performance to the stage, one that evokes all the senses. The show explores the relationship between food and growing up British-Nigerian in London, and is all about food’s significance in identity, home and parental relationships that strain under the pressures of cultural differences and practices. The audience, and ultimately the diners, are left to consume the peppered ponderings of a young man’s angst and frustration in trying to understand how his past informs his present.

COAT opens with Yomi running through ingredients to prepare one of his favourite Nigerian dishes – Obe – for his mother to try. They have a difficult subject to discuss. Yomi hopes this meal will ease the flow of conversation and recognises, in the process of cooking this meal, his appreciation of his mother;

“Everything is measured right for this Obe, I think. I’ve laid out the ingredients. I didn’t add too much Maggi because I’m rubbish at opening, crushing and trying not to get it in my nails but mum, even with the harshness life has dealt her, could gently crush a Maggi cube between her thumb and side of her index finger effortlessly without causing a mess. And me? Like a young Daniel San in training, watching my African Miyagi make the impossible possible. Once I make this, she will be proud of me.”

Yomi applies loving attention into making Obe for his mother, hoping she will approve of his attempt – though we know, she probably makes the stew best.

But the play is not all sombre meditations, there are plenty of mouth-watering moments where Yomi stirs laughter among the audience through his rapturous retelling of his childhood and uncovering the stark differences in our fridges…

“Rob opens his fridge, there are no pots in there. At home, mum stacks the fridge with pots of food that will last two weeks, but not in Robert, Rob’s house. He has Babybel, Sunny Delight, ham, yogurt, the food I see on telly, food you microwave for 3/5 minutes. His cupboard is filled with Super noodles, Heinz baked beans, and Tuna! Mine is filled with Indomie, Ewa, Gari, Iru and other food mum purchased from the market.”

Reading Indomie and thinking of Obe stew leaves one craving home-cooked meals and a feast of poetry. Hungry…? We are too!

If you can relate to home-cooked meals invoking thoughts of home, identity and cultural difference, then share your views with us online with #COATatAfricaWrites.

Yomi will be opening the Africa Writes 2018 festival at the British Library on 29 June, so book your tickets for COAT before they sell out!

BOOK TICKETS

from Africa Writes https://ift.tt/2KuLRYf

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog