Innocuous question right?
Well, what if the response you got after cheerfully asking your female
colleague this question early in the morning was, “F*** off! It’s none of your
dam* business!”
What if she screamed this at you
in a crowded elevator while you and other members of your team were on the way
to the office? True story.
I recently saw a social media post of a young Nigerian lady cautioning
her followers that it was rude to ask a woman how her night was. Seeing this
post reminded me I had come across this same information before, while reading
on cultural nuances in the country I now lived in since I emigrated from
Nigeria. Further research led me to the blog post that captured the true story
in the opening paragraph of this post.
The basic premise is this, and feel free to correct me if you have more
accurate information- asking anyone how their night was seems to imply you’re
trying to find out how the sex went last night.
Outrageous?
What the hell?!!
I hear your expletives. I hear you scream.
To be fair, I also hear another camp condescendingly ask, “Is that not
obvious?
Euphemism:
The oxford dictionary defines this as: A mild or indirect word or
expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring
to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
I
faintly remember stumbling on this word as a keen eyed teenager when I decided
I was going to read the whole dictionary. Pardon me; I think it must have been
a mild head injury from a fall or something. Scratch that. Moderate head
injury; because I remember also being keenly interested in the etymology of
words at the time.
Anyway,
I stumbled on the fact that one of the earliest synonyms for what we now know
as toilet was ‘privy’, with its earliest citation in an Oxford English
dictionary from 1225. Since then we’d had chamber pot, potty, little house,
outhouse, head, john, cousin john, cuzjohn, jake, water closet, dunny,
lavatory, bathroom, ladies room, cloakroom, restroom, women’s room, throne,
powder room, honeypot, biffy, netty, loo…
Let
me shock you- The above list is not comprehensive!
Basically,
for as long as man has been able to ‘take a shit’, we have always been
embarrassed by it, even though it is a basic physiological requirement. As a
matter of fact, when the excretory system does not work as needed, it is a
super uncomfortable feeling- Trust me, I’ve spent some time in general surgery.
I have seen the agony from unpleasantly close proximities.
Roses and Shakespeare
Since I moved abroad,
I’ve had to also shorten bits of my name to make it easier for communication at
work seeing how some of my ‘oyinbo’ friends seem to lose the plot once a name
is stretched beyond 2 syllables. Again, I’ve heard many arguments from fellow
Nigerians in diaspora of how allowing this somehow meant I was ashamed of my
culture or how they would learn to pronounce it if they had any respect for our
people. I honestly appreciate and understand these concerns but to each his
own. My reasoning is simple, paediatric even- you may say. I spend a bit of time on the
phone taking and making referrals when on call and making phone calls at work
generally and think it’s a bit of a ‘faff’ if I spend half that time teaching
the person on the other end of the line the correct pronunciation of my full
name. They’d probably mispronounce it anyway and sometimes it sounds really
awkward to hear. The sheer irony is that by Nigerian standards, my name is
pretty easy to enunciate!
I’m quite confident in my identity and all I stand for that I’m happy to
ignore these cultural and identity battles and just carry on with work. In our
spare time, I’ve told close ‘oyinbo’ friends my full name and tried, often with
little success to teach them the correct pronunciation. When faces begin to
turn red, I quickly quote the famous Williams Shakespeare: A rose by any other
name would smell as sweet!
We laugh and move on.
Concluding Quips
Now that you have taken a peep into my mind, perhaps you might empathize with me on
why I find it hard that a question as innocuous as ‘How was your night?’ would
cause such anger and uproar. I understand and even support the need for a more
sensitive and kinder society but I probably also get why some people are quick
to quip with derision ‘Social justice warrior!’ when such a dissent comes up.
A 2011 paper by Aminoff et al is famous for stating that we spend about
a third of our lives sleeping or trying to. It therefore feels to me that with
a gun to my head, I’d guess you most likely spent last night sleeping, and not
give a hoot what part your genitalia played during that period.
The Holy Bible in Proverbs 11 vs. 12 (NCV) says that “People without
good sense find fault with their neighbours”.
With age, reading and understanding, I have increasingly come to ignore
what is said or done. Rather I find myself peeling through layers and layers of
context, cultural nuances, most likely intent, and available information before
I decide whether or not to get upset about things.
Anyway, just to be sure, if I must employ a conversation starter with a
colleague, I’d probably ask ‘Did you sleep well?’
Better that than get inundated with emails from HR about my use of
language. When I get back home, back to the clarity and serenity I find in my
thoughts, I can then laugh heartily at how crazy the world is.
Author
Oluwaseyi Adebola is the author of the collection of short stories, ‘A
Cluster of Petals’ which was shortlisted for the 2019 Quramo Writers prize and
the 2019 AFIRE Linda Ikeji prize for fiction. Purchase links and reviews
available here: https://linktr.ee/aclusterofpetals
He is a medical doctor who works in the UK and also has a master’s
degree in translational neuropathology from the University of Sheffield. Follow
him on twitter @laylow1388
