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This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The History of a Mouthful of Bread

J >> Jean Mace >> The History of a Mouthful of Bread




It arrives at last at the leaves, which it enters as our food enters
our stomachs, and for the same purpose; for in them takes place, as
in all true stomachs, that process of digestion by which the elements
of the crude sap-food are decomposed from their first condition, and
converted into a nourishing chyle; in each tree of a sort "after its
kind."

But more than this. Like the outer coat of the earthworm, the coat of
the leaf affords a passage to air and moisture through its surface;
and here, therefore, takes place that mysterious exchange which is
everywhere the essential condition of life. Here is the charcoal-market
as before, only the bargainers have changed parts. The air, which in
the other case received the _carbon,_ delivers it up, now, and
receives oxygen in exchange; exactly the reverse of its traffic with
animals. In other words, the tree inhales through its leaves the
carbonic acid gas thrown into the atmosphere by our lungs. On its own
responsibility it breaks through the alliance between the carbon and
oxygen contracted in our organs; keeps the carbon for its own use, to
restore it to us another day under the form of wood, or, by the aid
of the charcoal-burner, in the pure and simple state of charcoal; and
sets at liberty the oxygen, which once more goes off in search of new
lungs and a fresh alliance. Thus a constant equilibrium is maintained
in the atmosphere; and thus, by a system of perpetual rotation or
everlasting merry-go-round, the same substances serve, indefinitely,
to support life of every opposite description.

Now there are two things to be remembered in this inverted respiration
of vegetables. In the first place, it occurs only in the parts which
are _green_. Flowers, fruit, the root, and every part of any other
color, do as we do when we breathe; _i.e._ deprive the air of its
oxygen, charging it with carbonic acid instead. For which reason,
by-the-by, we ought not to keep flowers in a bedroom at night. Charming
as they are, they are _poisoners_, and a headache is what we may
fairly expect after sleeping shut in with them in the same room. It
is almost as bad to allow green boughs to remain there either, for,
in the dark, even the green parts cease to purify the air, and begin
like the others to manufacture carbonic acid, at the expense of course
of their carbon, which thus by degrees is used up. Now, as it is the
carbon which constitutes the solid fibres of plants and produces their
green color, they soon become yellow and limp when deprived of light.
You may, perhaps, have wondered why the gardener amused himself with
smothering his poor lettuces by tying them up at top like a knot of
"back hair," instead of letting them grow freely in the air and
sunshine. It is, my dear, to make them more tender and delicate for
you to eat; and those beautiful, crisp, yellow leaves, so delicious
to the tooth, would have been green and tough, had they not slowly and
quietly let out a great portion of their store of carbon in darkness
during the last few days, before being gathered. Even without playing
the gardener, you may assure yourself of this fact in a still more
simple manner. Put a flat board upon the lawn and leave it there for
three days; then take it up again, and you will find just where the
board has prevented the light from reaching the grass, a yellow mark
so distinctly traced as to be seen from the other end of the garden.

But to return to the sap, which we left undergoing a change from air
and solar influences in the leaves. The ascending sap was to all
appearance only clear water. When it returns from the leaves, charged
with carbon, it is a thick juice having almost the consistency, and
sometimes even the color of milk, and is possessed of properties
altogether new. The most striking example that I can give you of
thedifference of the two states of sap is the Euphorbia of the Canary
Islands, whose digestive or descending sap is a violent poison. When
the natives of the country are accidentally pressed by thirst, they
carefully remove the bark in which the fatal juice circulates, and are
then able to refresh themselves safely by sucking the stem, which
yields only the watery sap sucked from the ground, and as yet unaltered
and harmless.

Each of these two saps, in fact, has its path distinctly traced for
it: the first rises through the wood, the second descends through the
bark, whence it is called descending sap. If you wish to satisfy
yourself of this, fasten a rather tight knot of pack-thread round a
young branch, and after a time you will see it pine below the knot and
become swollen above it, an unanswerable proof that the nutritive
juices flowed downward through the bark; for the wood inside the branch
will have been uninjured by the strangling pressure. Remember this,
my dear, when you are playing in the garden, and do not injure the
bark of the young trees your father likes so much to see flourishing.
It is by the bark that they are nourished, and you might even kill
them by treating it too roughly.

And now I must show you how the nutrition is carried on, or, if you
like better, how the tree grows by means of this descending sap. See:
here is a fir tree, which has just been cut down to the ground. Now,
if you like, I will tell you in a moment how old it is. I will even
tell you the age of every branch, little and big ones both, without
making a mistake in a single year; and you know as well as I do that
I am no conjuror. You see these small circles so delicately drawn, as
it were, upon the face of the sawn trunk, each wider than the last,
as if they were composed of a set of tubes, of unequal sizes, fitting
exactly into each other. Now count them; and you will perhaps find
twenty-five; and as each of these circles represents the work of one
year, you will know that the tree is twenty-five years old. In spring,
when the sap begins to move more briskly, it deposits everywhere between
the wood and the bark, from the trunk to the farthest boughs of the
tree, a uniform layer of a thick liquid, which moulds itself exactly
upon the wood already formed. This layer stiffens during the year; it
gets filled with the carbon left in it atom after atom, by each drop
of the descending sap as it goes by, and thus insensibly becoming
organised and hardened. When winter arrives to interrupt the work, it
will have formed two _ligneous, i.e._ woody layers, as they are
called. Of these, one belongs to the wood, and will never move again
so long as the tree lasts, for it will be covered over, and as it were
buried, by the successive layers yet to come; while, on the contrary,
the other (layer) belongs to the bark, and is doomed to find itself
perpetually forced outwards by the fresh layers, which will after a
while insinuate themselves between it and the wood.

It is for this reason that the bark of old trunks of trees is so deeply
furrowed, and that the dry scales may be picked off the surface without
the slightest injury to the tree. It is part of the original bark,
dead long ago. The old wood also is dead inside, and even when it is
altogether gone, the glad youthful branches growing green in the
sunshine will scarcely find it out! This accounts for those oaks which
time has hollowed without destroying, as those of Allonville in
Normandy, in which mass is said, and which is moreover the greenest
tree in the country. But without going so far, who has not seen those
hollow old willows, sometimes pierced with holes letting in daylight,
yet proudly crowned above by a forest of young boughs, as green and
full of vigor as if the trunk were still in its prime? What was dead
has departed, but all that has life in it remains, and that is enough
for the tree.

Need I add that the descending sap, this steward of the vegetable, has
also his workmen to supply with materials, as in our case, and that
he is always falling in on his road with organs, all of which want
different things from him? That here a flower has to be formed, there
a fruit, there a leaf, or a bit of wood, and so on: and that a
mysterious intelligence--the same that we have found everywhere
else--presides over all these varied constructions, the materials for
which are mixed together pell-mell, in the imperceptible thread of sap
which oozes from the leaf to the bark? I recollect just as I am about
to conclude, my dear child, that I once told you, you were a small
temple in which God perpetually attests His presence, by a permanent
miracle. You may now henceforth look upon a tree as something more
than a bit of wood, yielding a pleasant shade. God is in it also.


CONCLUSION.

And now, my dear little pupil, to what conclusion do we come from all
this? To that which I announced to you from the first. Throughout the
length and breadth of creation, from the highest to the lowest grade,
every living thing is subject to the same law. Everything eats, and
eats nearly in the same manner, since everywhere the same substances
furnish the feast. I laid down in my first letter that our feeding
machine was reproduced even to the farthest limits of the animal
kingdom, though always becoming more simple as the species descends
in the scale. And afterwards, where we began the study of animals, I
told you that in this machine lay the uniformity of their construction.
Was I not right? and what could I add to all the proofs which have
developed themselves one after another, to establish the fact of this
uniformity of plan in the animal machine, in all its essential points?
And it will be to the lasting renown of the illustrious Geoffroy St.
Hilaire that it was, in the face of all the Academies and under the
fire of very learned indignation, he proclaimed this truth, which one
cannot lose sight of without losing one's way in a crowd of arbitrary
fancies.

I return, then, to the definition which I gave you in speaking of the
worm, and which is the final word of the ideas I have been endeavoring
to make you understand. _An animal is a digestive tube served by
organs._

In the first place it must eat, and for this therefore the Creator
provided first. All the rest came afterwards in order to enable it to
eat more readily, to secure its prey more easily, and to make the most
of it when eaten. The movement machine, therefore, whose history I
have promised you, is only an assistant, and not the principal feature
of the organisation, and it is not by it, therefore, that the question
can be decided, whether God has made three, four, or five animals, or
whether he has only made one.

And now, my dear little pupil, I will bid you adieu, or rather say as
the French do, "Au revoir," which means "Good-bye till we meet again,"
begging you to excuse any awkward expressions that may have escaped
me, as also my having now and then talked about things because they
have interested me, without perhaps sufficiently considering whether
they might have an equal interest for you. Yet, while the pen is still
in my hand, I will not leave you my concluding definition of an animal
without adding a word of explanation. You know nothing about such
matters yourself, but to some people my words might have the air of
a parody upon another definition, applied by those grave gentlemen the
Philosophers to man, whom they have denominated _An intelligence
served by organs_. My definition is applicable only to the animal,
and not to man, observe. Man in the natural, physical machinery of his
body, is very decidedly an animal; yet as certainly is he, by the
divine reflection which shines within him, something much more and
greater; but _what_, is so far beyond the reach of definitionthat I
shall not attempt to give you one. "Man," as Jesus Christ has
said, "lives not by bread alone, but by every word that proccedeth out
of the mouth of God." What it is that is nourished in us by that word,
is precisely what I cannot attempt to define for you; yet I think you
have understood my meaning.

Go, then, and eat your food in peace, like the pretty little animal
that you are; but do not forget to nourish also the other part of your
being; that indeed which is of the most importance, and which enables
you to ascend to your Creator.

THE END.



POSTSCRIPT.

In going through the preceding pages (Part II) with a comparative
anatomist, it became evident that some few popular and other errors
and misconceptions had crept into this portion of M. Mace's usually
clear and accurate work.

Naturally it was not in his power to verify all the statements he had
to make on so many and such varied subjects, and he appears occasionally
to have trusted to works of old-fashioned or doubtful authority.

In these cases I have considered it desirable to make such corrections
as should secure the trustworthiness of the descriptions as far as
they pretend to go.

It would not, however, have been in my power to accomplish this, but
for the kind and efficient aid I have received from a scientific student
of these subjects; and I am glad of this opportunity of acknowledging
how much I am indebted to him for his assistance in making the necessary
alterations, as well as for confirming the correctness of the greater
portion of the work.

MARGARET GATTY.

January, 1865. January, 1865.

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