Which Day You Go Marry?
I’d barely taken off my coat before my grandmother walked into the living room and asked her infamous question: “Iyore, which day you go marry?”
She placed her hands on her hips and slowly moved her waist from left to right, singing , “Eh eh…I wan shake my ikebe.”
Iye, my grandmother, was ready to dance at my wedding — the same wedding that she’d been pestering me about since I graduated from undergrad ten years prior.
My stomach could no longer resist the food that awaited me in the refrigerator. I debated whether I would devour egusi soup with bitter leaves or fried rice. “I hope you are cooking these foods by yourself by now,” my father said from the living room couch. I pretended not to hear him and dished the fried rice from the repurposed clear bin.
Iye continued dancing and singing, “God go bless you oo. God go bless you oo. Agh, now! Which day you go marry ooo?”
My father looked up from his phone and fervently shook his head, “She won’t understand.”
He was right.
Iye wouldn’t understand, not because she barely understood my American English or because my Pidgin wasn’t as fluent her own.
It wasn’t a communication barrier. It was a generational one.
