I-Shebeen Madiba
I-SHEBEEN MADIBA
RICHARD LORANGER is a poet and teacher at Pratt. When I met him at the South African i-shebeen, he told me he'd had a rough couple of years. It was his teeth. I listened sympathetically, having hit an uninsured 40 myself.
"I went to my dentist, and she told me I needed 17 fillings and three extractions!" Loranger, stuck in the adjunct system, had no money.
"At first, I liked the idea of asking everybody I know for $10, but I found it embarrassing. I thought about it-what if I wrote funny little poems about each tooth, and make it a chapbook, and sell that for $10? But the poems didn't turn out to be funny or little or cute."
Instead, he worked for a year, writing 31 five-page poems, one for each tooth. Some are rather grand:
TOOTH OF MYTH: #14 - Upper Left First Molar
14 lies face down in the forest,
breathing in the mulch
eating trees and defecating rain
She has been happy as a
Toadstool ever since she gave up her
Desk job to pursue a position in
Animism.
?
14 is an advertisement for dirt,
and you line up to buy it with your
last sense of purchase
There is also "Tooth of Exhibition, #22, Lower Left Canine." Now, this isn't something I would do-think about teeth that much-but then mine aren't that bad. Yet.
i-shebeen isn't the only South African restaurant in New York, but it's in Fort Greene, on the new boulevard of DeKalb. Richard ordered the oxtail stew, which I thought of having a sort of gelatinous texture. He put it better: "The meat around the bone is extraordinarily tender and a bit fatty." It reminded me of eating the only tongue sandwich I ever tasted-before I knew any better-so I lay off and ordered Durban Bunny Chow, a mutton curry served in a hollowed out loaf of bread, like my sister uses for her famous spinach dip.
Spices, flavors and dips to try with it (mango chutney, coconut and heavy cream, tomato and red onion relish) were displayed in little nouvelle droplets, such as I once saw in an upscale dim sum place. It's an innovation I could live without. Just when you figure out you might like a certain taste, it's gone, just like that. Bunny Chow is fast food in parts of South Africa, so the little smidgeons of flavor on display are an upscale touch.
The exhausted host and waiter Leki sat down with me for a minute, and told me the menu is not all that simple. "The food from Pretoria is one kind of food; there are 14 to 15 African cultures, plus English, Australian, American and Asian. Also, most of the spices have an Indian influence. This menu is from different countries, and it's a black and white menu, not just one."
I hadn't been aware until recently that in South Africa, types of food are considered to be for either white or black people. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. "When American blacks get our pumpkin dish, which is boiled pumpkin with butter and sugar boiled at low heat till it's soft, they know what it is," Leki told me.
The food tasted homey, though I prefer West African food, like the dish my mother brought back from a Peace Corp stint, Poulet au Arachide-chicken in a peanut tomato sauce. I once even made it for a boyfriend's Yankee parents, who professed to find it edible. This was sheer kindness on their part, because just the day before I gave their son food poisoning by treating him to some undercooked pork.
Meanwhile, Richard, a writer even in duress, was riffing on the word "engineer," perhaps picking up strength from his oxtail dish:
"I like the word engineer," he pronounced suddenly. "Engine, ingenuity, ingenious, to be inspired by a genie, from genius-like a genie, which is not how it is used, genius has become kind of a snobby word!"
Seventeen fillings, shit. C'mon, let's get this man some dental work, we just might need him:
EDENTULOUS FANTASY
Has the toothless man nothing but memory? No. He has
The ordinance of memory.
Deep in the hills, a cache of tiny capsules lies in wait,
Guarding the human sap for the mindful rearing.
Each holds the pudding of a mighty race
Concentrated into joy and crouching will.
You hold the talisman within your face,
And say the word, and watch the passion spill. o