Grandma's Snack
Words by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Illustration by Olivia Twist
The tonality of my language stares at me through the taste of my grandmother’s favorite snack. Àádùn is a corn snack that showed up often at Christmastime when grandfather returned home from the farm with the proceeds of his harvest. It would be neatly wrapped in banana leaves, and tied with palm fronds. The location was Àkóbọ, a small suburb in Ìbàdàn, and the time was in the late eighties.
I never quite figured where the farm itself was—I remember the name, Arárọmí—because none of the promises my grandfather made to eventually take us there materialized. All we grandchildren knew was when to expect these adults in the house, with their gifts; at the end of the year, when the leaves turned gold rust, and wisps of burning grass made their way to us from the neighbor’s backyard.
Àádùn is made of ground corn, mildly roasted and dipped in red oil before being moulded into the leaves. Grandma would cut them into bite-sized cubes before serving us, and they would explode into a powdery form in the mouth, transitioning from a once-solid object into a soluble spread on the tongue. In the àádùn you could find traces of salt, and maybe honey, as my memory conjures up now.
The word for sweetness in Yorùbá is adùn, carrying possibilities of either sugary goodness when applied to sugarcane or mangoes, salty, umami richness to a full-bodied plate of ẹgúsí soup or àbùlà, or even the bland, non-taste-specific ‘sweetness’ of pounded yam or amala, whose sole purpose is to provide carbohydrate complement to the colorful soup. The verb root, dùn, can reference any of the aforementioned tastes, conjuring sweet pawpaws, savory pepper with jollof rice or even the pleasures of sex or a television programme. It is only context that determines what the mind imagines as the word tickles different parts of the brain.
My first taste of àádùn was a disappointment. How did something so-named, containing the root word of sweetness, lack that which I had expected to be sugary delight? On sight, with its bright orange color, àádùn led the child’s expectations only in the direction of a familiar type of sweetness, the one associated with syrupy candy, carbonated drinks, or biscuits which we bought for about one naira down the street. I was about seven. I remember the initial recoil, negotiation, surprise, and eventual surrender. At the time, I thought whomever came up with the name for it had pulled off a wicked prank—as a linguist I would come to better appreciate the effect of word tonality on me aning and expectations.
There are other confusing dimensions of the word, if the tonal permutation were extended to the other ways in which Yorùbá bends itself to find polysemy. While adùn is sweetness, ẹdùn is grouse or pain. Here the root—dùn—is either pleasure or pain. While ó ń dùn mí means, “I’m pained by this”, ó ń dùn mọ mi means, “It is giving me pleasure.” A pet-name like Àdùnní, most commonly explained as, “(the child) that is sweet to have”, could as well be, “(the child) one went through pain to get”. The famous Yorùbá talking drum, dùndún, gets its name from this same line of thought, gesturing on each repeated half of its name towards the instrument’s sweet sound. The root dún, means “sound” while dùn, as we previously found, means “sweet”. Dùndún: sweet to hear. Sonic pleasures from the leather membrane of a dead goat’s skin. Pleasure. Pleasures.
Maybe the name Adùnọlá (“the pleasures or sweetness of success, nobility”) better explains the depth of the word as applied to food. We may not have been speaking to its specific color of sweetness—sugary, umami, saltiness— after all, but the overall pleasure and the depth of satisfaction. As a child encountering my grandma’s snack, however, none of this was exactly clear at all. Just the name àádùn, an expectation of a different kind of sweet, and then a letdown. Yet, as an adult, whenever the memory returns, the joyful dissolution of the snack’s soft atoms on my childhood tongue, a good feeling also returns. It’s a feeling perfected from subsequent encounters with àádùn that carried wholesome pleasures, even this far removed from that first contact.
