Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
I was watching a children’s science programme with my kids yesterday evening. Halfway through dozing and feigning interest, I noticed that the topic that was being discussed was one that way very dear to my heart. One I had learnt to live with all of my life. It was the issue of hand-dexterity and being right-handed or left-handed.
I grew up remembering that long yellow wooden ruler being rapped on my fingers when I held my pen in the ‘wrong’ hand. Needless to say I hated my Primary One teacher, and had the misfortune of having her in Primary Two and Primary Five as well. She had more than enough time with me to persuade my darling mum that I was very likely going to have major problems in life if my hand dexterity was not changed from the ‘wrong’ hand to the right one.
My ‘wrong’ hand is my left one. I was only little, but I just seemed to do everything the opposite way. By the time I was in secondary school, I had learnt the art of writing with my right hand, but I could still write legibly with my left hand when no one was looking. I arranged my clothes in my wardrobe from the left to the right, I wore my wrist watch on my right hand (right-handed people where theirs on their left), I always stuck out my left hand to point at things, pick things up and collect stuff from people. But my mum always corrected me and said that in Yoruba culture it was rude to receive something from someone older using one’s left hand.
I really tried to do things according to the ‘right-handed’ code of conduct. I had comments from aunties who complained when I chopped vegetables with the knife in my left hand. They said I couldn’t possibly prepare proper ‘Ibadan-style amala’ with my left hand. Even the wooden spoons were designed to make me look inept when I tried to roll them and twist them the same way everyone else did. Perhaps the most humiliating thing to happen to me in my teenage years occurred one December when my dad hosted our extended family to a meeting.
I come from a very large and proud Ibadan family. Though we lived in Lagos, we also had a house in Ibadan and this was to be the scene of my ‘disgrace before the kindred’. This meeting was a yearly event and that particular year, my dad was hosting and both my parents had spared no expense in making it a pleasurable occasion for everybody. It was thus a family meeting cum Christmas party. Without going into detail, I can honestly say that I had worked my socks off that weekend: from pulling green stalks from big bell peppers and fiery hot ones to destalking huge bundles of ewedu, that dark green vegetable with smallish leaves. I smelt of charcoal and fried meat by the time the meeting started but I wasn’t really bothered.
When we were asked to serve food, my sisters and cousins dashed up and down producing plates of an assortment of vegetables, goat meat, pounded yam, amala and all sorts of food. I was juggling two plates of food in my hand when this man asked for some soup. I instinctively gave him a plate and everything just went crazy from there. I remember the first insult was to the effect that I was an ill-mannered girl with no respect for her elders. Something to the effect that I was growing up in Lagos without manners and I remember crying and apologising while the man insisted that I got on my knees to apologise properly. My crime was that I gave him food using my left hand.
A couple of other relatives joined in to chastise me. My poor dad tried to divert their attention to some Star, Gulder and Dubbonet and many of them succumbed, but the aggrieved man would not let up. He just kept talking. My mum was boiling with anger in the kitchen but she dared not come to my defence in front of her in-laws. What annoyed me most was that this man wasn’t even a close relative. I had only seen him a few times in my life and at those times he was always eating or asking for food. I wished I was right-handed even harder after that humiliation and I tried even harder to conform to the right-handed world.
Now, here I am over 25 years later. I have so adapted to my right hand that I am now considered to be ‘ambidextrous’, which means being able to use both hands with equal dexterity, although, as with many ambidextrous people, I tend to gravitate towards using my left hand. This means that I still get confused when I have to stretch out my hand to greet people or give directions, or use certain right-handed instruments like corkscrews and scissors. At home my kitchen sink is made for right-handed people so I find it very awkward washing plates. I still fiddle with my wedding ring (even after 13 years) because it feels like it is on the wrong hand. I normally never wear jewellery on my left hand (but right-handed people do) and I still struggle with getting plate settings right when laying out cutlery.
What is wrong with being left-handed? Shame on the cultural practice that stigmatises uniquenss in a person’s motor skills. I know that one of the reasons it is considered rude to use your left hand to receive or present things to adults is the misconception that the left hand is used for menial and dirty tasks such as cleaning up after moving one’s bowels. Well, here is a shocker: I never use my left hand for that, so anyone who thinks they are being served with my ‘clean’ right hand is getting the exact opposite. I am sure other left-handed people agree with me that we should be allowed to use our hands the way God proposed.
There really is no logical reason (scientific or otherwise) why people, particularly children shouldn’t be allowed to use which ever hand comes to them naturally. Many parents still think it is a problem which needs to be tackled but forcing children to change their hand dexterity has been shown to increase the occurrence of stammering and dyslexia in children.
Parents should also be aware of the fact that research has shown that left-handers are generally intelligent. Some researchers claim that we are more intelligent and eloquent that our right-handed counterparts. In tests conducted by Dr. Alan Searleman from St Lawrence University in New York, he found that left-handers can be considerably more intellectually gifted. There were more left-handed people with IQs over 140 than right-handed people – which is the “genius” bracket. This is perhaps why there are more “lefties” in creative professions – such as music, art and writing – and more left-handed astronauts and leaders than would be expected.
Perhaps the fact that the USA has had seven left-handed presidents so far, with President Barack Obama being the seventh, will convince skeptics in Nigeria that a left handed child hasn’t got a problem but a blessing, a uniqueness that may just make him very special in his life. Who knows how many bright stars; leaders, professors, etc have had their innate talents crushed from an early age by over-zealous teachers and hungry relatives?
There is also something alluring in being different, or so I’ve been told. My husband told me that one of the things he fell in love with about me when we were courting was that ‘odd’ way I held my phone or spoons and stuff when I was cooking. This was exactly what my aunties warned me against: they said no man would want a wife who held things in a ‘funny’ way. What did they know?
I must conclude this column this week by saying that I did get my own back on that relative of mine. A few months after my grand disgrace my parents and I were in Ibadan for a weekend when this man and his son came to see my dad about a job for his son at the Civil Service. It was very early in the morning and they banged on our gate really loudly (as you would expect from this man!). My room fortunately overlooked the gate and seeing these people; I ran to my dad’s room and told him that two big goats were fighting outside our gate, hence the banging on the metal gates. (There were always random goats on our very quiet street).The man and his son had to come back the following month because no-one opened the gate that weekend!
