As Mangoes to the Fire

Brenda Hartman-Souder

Early in the morning you bring out the recipe and show it to Lydia, your Nigerian house helper, who is good-natured, calm, and game to try anything new, especially on a day that you are working from home and can help with the finer points of a recipe. Magdalene, who also helps you in the house on Lydia’s day off and other days as needed, is here because you know that making chutney, along with other household chores, will be plenty of work.

Now, along the side of the road, women sell buckets of ripened mangoes for pennies a mango. But those plucked from trees on your compound for this chutney are still green and sour. Lydia and Magdalene cut them into smooth oval strips, then diced sweet and hot red peppers, purple onions, and pungent ginger.

You take over at this point, adding vinegar and brown sugar before the big aluminum pot goes on the stove. For the next two hours, the mixture cooks down into a fragrant thick stew. You stir and add water, sugar, more water. Only the sugar and treacle which Lydia mixes together to make brown sugar and the raisins, which you’ll add at the very end, are imported; everything else comes from Nigeria, so this chutney is mostly homegrown. Its sweet-sour blend is perfect with curries, pork, and rice. A little of it suffices to infuse a slightly spicy sweetness to a meal.

You’ve been sitting here, tending to the chutney while writing emails and reading work reports. Your mind is also still clouded from difficult interactions you’ve had with some of your workers. You want to defend yourself and your integrity, to say you’ve been falsely accused, misjudged, misunderstood. You want to reach out across the chasm of broken relationships but whenever you tentatively do so, the chasm of brittle insistence that both sides are “right” stretches dark, deep, and seemingly impossible between you.

But here you are stirring mango chutney, determined instead to think of time and how it can soften and blend facts, hurts, and memory. How some relationships can’t be easily fixed, or disintegrate no matter what your best actions or intentions. You know that you’ve been humbled and forced to learn about the sting of criticism, about the difficulties of leadership, about the complexities of individuals.

You know peace between humans is difficult to build and maintain. You know that such a hot fire of conflict has, on this journey, been both painful and necessary. But still, you wish relationships were as easily adjusted as your mango chutney recipe is—developing into something soft and succulent—even if the ratio of mangos to onions to peppers differs based on what’s available, what’s in the storeroom.

You are tired because you didn’t sleep very well and in just four days you are heading out of here for some months in America and you want to take a nap but with two women in the house and the generator repairman tinkering away outside you really can’t, and you longingly think of your old life back on Fellows Avenue, where you had to do your own cleaning, cooking, and laundry but once in a while on an odd afternoon when the kids were at school you could lay down without guilt and take a nap.

But you wouldn’t be making mango chutney there and sniffing the sweet smell of rain hidden in the black clouds coming from the east. You wouldn’t have this time to write, this flexible schedule, this opportunity to live among Nigerians and watch your children make friends with them, along with Danes, Irish, and Canadians.

Your home wouldn’t have been filled yesterday with ten little neighbors who mysteriously knew it was your son’s birthday and that a cake was cooling on the counter, who sat primly up to your dining room table, said polite thank-you’s as you served them, and devoured the moist made-from-scratch-with-real butter-frosting-chocolate cake.

You wouldn’t be able to actually dance in church, travel to other African countries or bear witness to those who valiantly believe in the possibility of peace even when a “low-level civil war” is described about the area you live in, even when folks have been killing their neighbors. Your nostrils wouldn’t be stinging with the tart, almost angry smell of vinegar as mangoes surrender into a softer, more mellow stew.

It’s 1:30 and Lydia and Magdalene have just hung the wash out on the line, even though a storm is on its way. Usually doing laundry would be a cinch with a small, old but trusty washing machine. Today, however, as usual, there is no electricity. In addition, the generator is broken, so they have hand-washed the massive four-day pile of clothing, towels, and bedding.

Now Lydia is boiling water to sterilize the canning jars. The simmered mango chutney will be ladled into them, lids screwed on tight, jars lowered in boiling water.

The chutney will be orange-golden with flecks of pepper and raisins. With the soft ping signifying a successful seal, each jar will be a triumph, a time capsule, a promise. 

You wish your life itself could be so beautiful and preserved after fire. But you are still learning to surrender, to die, to forgive, to let go so that your life with its sharp and tart individual components might (the word might being, like the Snitch in Quiddich, such a hopeful, yet elusive reality) simmer down into something so fine as mango chutney.
—Brenda Hartman-Souder, Jos, Nigeria, serves as co-representative of Mennonite Central Committee Nigeria and, along with spouse Mark, as parent of Valerie and Greg.