There is a theory, not quite anthropology, that the most honest thing a person can do for another is cook for them. Not because cooking requires skill, though it sometimes does, and not because a good meal is a kind of pleasure, though it usually is, but because cooking requires a decision that most other forms of intimacy allow you to postpone indefinitely: you have to decide, before you begin, what you want the other person to feel. Hunger is not a neutral thing to satisfy. The person who feeds you has already, before you lift the fork, made choices about who you are, what you deserve, and what, if anything, they want in return.
Nnamdi Anyadu's debut collection, A Meal Is a Meal, understands this. His characters cook to grieve and to manipulate, to heal the sick and, in at least one instance it would be a disservice to describe, to do something considerably worse. What holds these twelve stories together is not a shared plot or even a shared tone, but a shared conviction that the question of what we put into each other's bodies is the oldest question we have.
The collection opens with "The Power of Orts," a story so quiet and so dense with implication that it takes a second reading to appreciate how much Anyadu has packed into it. A woman attends her sister-in-law's art exhibition and buys an imitation Benin Bronze. Hours later, she kneels before it, asking for reconciliation with her estranged brother. Then, in the same prayer, she asks for her husband to die.
"Saara" is the collection's most tender story. A woman who has suffered a miscarriage is pregnant again and frightened. Her mother takes her to a prophet who prescribes the Saara ritual: cook a feast, invite the neighbourhood children to eat, and let their hands rest on her belly in blessing. Anyadu is too careful a writer to let it stand as local colour alone. The story is about what women do with fear when the sympathetic husband who "respected himself about town" has reached the edge of what he can offer.
The collection's darkest investigation of food as power comes in "Love Potion," which is also its most narratively accomplished story. A waiter becomes transfixed by a woman who visits his lodge for a monthly literary gathering. He cannot cross the distance between them by conventional means, so he crosses it by others: a charm, dissolved into her stew. She falls in love with him completely. What follows is not a love story. Against this, the title story reads as a kind of terrible correction: a woman meets a stranger at a club, brings him home, and her family arrives for dinner shortly after.
It would be a mistake to leave the impression that this is a uniformly dark book. "Battle for Akara" is pure comic delight: a suited man, provoked at a roadside food stall, removes his jacket, folds it carefully, administers a decisive beating, then dresses again and walks away. The closing fable, "The Porridge Strategy," ends the collection on an ancient note, the tortoise outwitting in another race.
The collection has its rougher passages. "The Tangerine Encounter" reaches for a hallucinatory register it cannot quite sustain. The naming of Achebe, Emecheta, Ekwensi, Rotimi, and Soyinka within a few lines of each other is a habit that a more experienced editor might have questioned, not because the references are wrong but because they announce an anxiety about context that the best stories in this collection have already resolved without needing to. "Cheers," the campus rivalry story, is a pleasant minor piece whose ending you have read before you have finished reading it. These are the small costs of a debut by a writer who has taken on a great deal.
What Anyadu has written, underneath all of it, is a meditation on what it means to be responsible for another person's hunger. That responsibility is neither purely loving nor purely dangerous. It is both at once. The woman who prays for her husband's death has cooked for him every night of their marriage. The waiter who poisons the woman he desires has spent his career attending to other people's appetites. These are not comfortable ideas. They are, however, recognisable. Which is the only thing a story is required to be. A Meal Is a Meal is a remarkable first book. Nnamdi Anyadu has arrived knowing what he knows, and what he knows is considerable.
