Remembrances and New Yam Rituals -By Theo Egwuonwu

My father did not have the privilege of a  formal education. But in striving to become a man of modest means,  he acquired the requisite discipline  and  self grooming necessary to function and thrive as a local and international Businessman.

Being an Igbo and a Christian, he believed and adhered to traditional Igbo norms.

Given that most of the fundamental Igbo norms and taboos have biblical references,  especially as recorded in the Old testament,  he was very much at home in his traditional Igboness and Christianity.  Norms like egalitarian ties to kindred  and community, levirate marriage, circumcision and other personal incorporeal ethos, harvest rites etc were natural to  him.

New yam, as markedly different from old yam in Igbo and other yam farming communities, typically begins to be available late June through July, but my father never ate new yam except in August after  observing certain rituals. These  included killing an animal -goats / Chickens, thanksgiving and the  resultant  new yam feast (compare Deuteronomy 16:9).

As a child, witnessing the strict adherence to the timing and practices of this new yam rituals as observed by my father, wherever he found himself in August,  one came to think then that the early new yams available from late June to July were unwholesome with some yet to mature  content  that could make one sick when eaten before August, especially without the attendant New yam rituals.

Later on in life,   with personal exposure to formal education and modernity, one easily found,  more or less, superficial conclusion as to why native communities  may have made it a taboo to eat New yam before communal rituals and the attendant festivities- that aside the religious reason of thanking the God of harvest, it was probably  to ensure the optimal development of the particular community yam before harvest.

Backed by such ‘enlightened’ thought processes  and modernity, one therefore came to trivialize the sense and necessity of new yam rituals before its consumption as there appeared to be no empirical bases for it. So one  had long stopped waiting for August and observance of any new yam ritual before eating the new yam as became available yearly in June and July.

With most August and the  sightings of new yams also came remembrances of seasons past,including of  my father and new yam rituals, which remembrances passed subtly sometimes barely noticed in  years gone by.

This  August however, these seasonal remembrances were  accentuated to rather melancholic depths. One suspects this is not  unconnected with more availability of meditative time and space and the  bedlam of vacating a world of personal presence, physical participation and emotional intimacy. One found oneself  moved to  reflect more deeply on the relevance of norms and rituals in individual and community life.

Through rituals, we  build families and community, we make transitions and mark important events in our lives, we express ourselves in joy and sorrow, this is so  because rituals memorate,motivate and move us. Perhaps, most importantly, through rituals and norms  we create and sustain identity.

As a Christian, Juxtaposing Jesus admonition that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath against  His participation in the ritual of baptism, as he puts it, to fulfill all righteousness, (knowing him to be  God’s unassailable righteousness), helps one comes to a holistic appreciation of ritual adherence: ritual is as  important as being human but not more.

The way we behave, dress, eat, and drive, as well as our intimacy life, are all actually directly or indirectly tinted with  rituals  stemming from our adherence  to norms and taboos of the societ-ies we allege to.

Rituals occurring in Christian spirituality and religion are called sacrament. In truth,  we cannot be  spiritual without being religious, maybe because we cannot really be human at all without rituals.

While communal rituals give us the comfort of familiarity, solidarity and shared experience, personal rituals can also create a feeling of connection in the grand scheme of things.

The simple act of participating actively in our own lives is a giant step towards taking back personal responsibility on how we choose to live, with who we choose to share our experiences and for how we choose to define ourselves.

And one supposes,  ultimately, how we will be remembered in temperaments  and times to come. Just as August and new yams evokes the remembrance of things past and, because of his beliefs and adherents, one’s protuberant remembrance of my father and where he had come from.