Ọbádélé Kambon
University of Ghana
An Analysis of the Connections Between Black Thought and the Culinary Ritual in the Context of Black Survival
In this article, we will draw an extended analogy between the centrality of Rꜥ ‘Ra, the Sun’ in the solar system and the centrality of food—literally and figuratively—in Black culinary traditions. We will do so by means of Extended Analogy Layering (Kambon 2017a) interpretive analysis, in which we will look at the literal centrality of collectively-eaten food in Malidoma Somé’s (1994) Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman; Camara Laye’s (1954) The African Child; and Chinua Achebe’s (1958) Things Fall Apart as compared to the figurative centrality of Rꜥ ‘Ra, the Sun’ in life as attested in the Song to the itn ‘Aten’ (Obenga, 2004). We find that these contemporary and classical texts, respectively, serve to mutually illuminate each other in that the meaning imbued in one text is further elucidated when compared with the other texts under study
(Kambon 2017b).
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