Becoming The Muse

Graffiti With Punctuation

I recall on the first day of lockdown during the Covid pandemic era, watching the movie Contagion, and there someone said this of blogging:

Blogging is not writing its graffiti with punctuation

@beatonm5

Blogging is not writing its graffiti with punctuation – clip from Contagion #Contagion #blogging #grafitti #blogger

♬ original sound – ~B – ~B

I felt that… it was a sharp sting.

But on the other hand calling it graffiti also appreciated it as an artform. What are bloggers but artists painting graffiti on the digital canvas of the world wide web, marking their tag, that they were here.

A number of people consider blogging as inconsequential personal ramblings at best or tabloid celebrity gossipmongering. Blogging may have had its humble origins in digital logs Web Logs; weblogs which became blogs but it has evolved beyond that into a power tool with uses only limited by the creativity of its wielder.

How many times have you searched for a solution to a problem on the internet to find that someone has not only experienced something similar but has a solution, or maybe just to assure you that its something that happens and life goes on…. There’s a profound feeling to the validation that you are not alone.

I grew up thinking that our staple food Sadza made from maize mealie meal, was a dish unique only to us, but imagine discovering from other blogs that it has also made many an appearance in various African homes across the continent, just with different names, posho, ugali, pap, fufu, nsima.

I am now out here wondering how it became so ubiquitous, the maize plant zea mays is exotic to Africa, and the people who introduced it to us used it as feed for their livestock… If one ponders too deeply into it, one might get offended and start demanding maize be banned in favour of healthier, disease and drought resistant smaller grains, to phrase it diplomatically.

If you run it through nutritional sequencing you will find it is so devoid of additional nutrients almost as if it were genetically modified to only serve as an energy source and nothing more… Local millers fortify their mealie meal with added nutrients to makeup for the shortfall and bring about balance in the world.

What I find most crazy about it, is how if despite its high energy yield, if you eat too much of it, especially during lunch you become less productive and feel super sleepy.. It suspiciously feels like it kills off our brain cells one by one – ok that maybe an exaggeration on my part, do your own research. I feel someone should do a research on The Relationship Between The Consumption Of Maize Mealie Meal Versus The GDP Of A Country, my prediction is that the results should be very interesting and warrant further investigation into the case of the maize maze:

– Do the low GDP countries eat more maize because their economies dont allow them the choice or ………Of Cause, Causation and Correlation.

Reading this article will probably leave you with questions or maybe they are questions you have also had yourself or something you have observed… Perhaps one day you will bring it up with family, a friend or work colleague over a meal of sadza by whatever name you call it….

….And its something you got from graffiti with punctuation.

~B

PS What are you thoughts and experiences of this “African” Staple carbohydrate?

#WinterABC24