Mummy always said “the world holds so much mystery,” so much that we could not begin to describe. She also said that most of these mysteries couldn’t hold a candle to what the waters held. Fishes, for example, their shiny bodies and the heavenly tastiness of them, but I had never been lucky with fishes. As a child, their wide-eyed stare – even after they were dead and frozen – scared me, their smell – raw and sickening – provoked my nostrils, their slithery movements made me queasy and their scrumptious tastiness nauseated me. I once tried to eat one and the bone took residence in my throat. My cousin who lived with us for a while didn’t eat fish because he believed that most fishes sold in the market were snakes. A friend of mine wouldn’t eat fish because his grandfather choked on a fish hook and had to undergo surgery before the hook was removed. My younger sister newly weaned could only eat okra soup prepared with liver and fresh fish and barely three weeks after she started surviving on okra soup, choked on a fishbone.
I had enough reasons to despise fish but life decided to teach me one more. My favourite aunt, aunty Tobe was spending Christmas with us. It was a Sunday – three days before Christmas – and we had just returned from mass when Aunty Tobe decided she wanted to prepare fish stew. Mummy was delighted because for once she would eat a meal she didn’t cook herself. I wasn’t impressed and I made sure they knew it. I didn’t care much for fish, I never had. It didn’t matter that mummy droned on about how healthier than meat it was, or that she used vinegar to wash the catfishes to remove all of their sliminess. And despite Daddy always leaving a piece in his plate for me, to get me to start liking it, I never faltered. I didn’t care that whenever we visited our iku nne, my grandmother always gave my siblings and I fish, I didn’t care that mummy tried to reassure me when she said, “You will like it, Kamsi.”
Read The Times Colors mixed me into a colour – An Article by Kelvin J. Shachile, Kenya
At dinner, mummy had just started laughing at something I said when suddenly she frowned. She blinked and swallowed – I watched her throat bubble – and then she winced. She reached for her glass of water and gulped down. It was when Aunty Tobe leapt from her chair and rushed to pound mummy’s back that I knew she was choking. I pushed my plate of fried rice aside and took my glass of water and tried to feed it to her as she once did to me. She gulped down the water but the bone refused to go down, she coughed, swallowed, gagged and coughed.
“Should I call Daddy?” He would know what to do, I thought. He had made my siblings and I memorize and promise to call his telephone number when there was trouble, he had even had his number written in bold next to our table phone.
Mummy shook his head, “He will worry.”
It wasn’t until Mummy’s best friend who was a nurse breezed in like the force she was and cleared the room that I knew it was her Mummy and Aunty Tobe had been waiting for. She asked Aunty Tobe to get a bowl; she placed the bowl in front of Mummy and while rubbing Mummy’s back, thrust her forefinger and middle finger down Mummy’s throat. Mummy threw up and I felt rather than heard Aunty Tobe heave a sigh of relief.
As I watched Mummy shuffle to the bathroom, I swore never to ever eat fish and I believed that after what happened, my family would never eat fish again but on New Year’s Eve, Mummy prepared fish pepper soup for dessert.
Years later when I took interest in fishes – but not so much as to eat them – I learnt that the earliest organisms classified as fish appeared during the Cambrian period and they had soft-bodied chordates and they had continuously evolved – developing jaws and external armours that protected them from predators, becoming predators rather than preys. I learnt that they communicate acoustically and that a shoal is a loosely organised group of fish whereas a school is tightly organised.
Jellyfish also called sea jelly is medusoid and the oldest multi-organ animal having being in existence for more than five hundred millions years; starfish has a central disc and five arms – or more – which it can shed as a defense mechanism, it can also regenerate its lost arms or damaged body parts; the electric fish generates its electric shocks from its electric organ, an organ made up of modified muscles and nerve cells. Man according to Darwin’s theory of evolution evolved from shellfish but shellfish are known not to be fishes but water-dwelling animals; walking fish can walk over land for a long period of time whereas a flying fish can take short gliding flights through the air; swordfishes have specialized organs that heat their eyes and brains.
Read Frangipanis – An Article by Ernestina Azah, Ghana
Clownfish or anemonefishes have symbiotic mutualism with the poisonous sea anemone; zebrafish so-called because of its vertical white and black stripes is both a tropical and subtropical fish notable for its regenerative activities and use in drug development; hagfish is eel-shaped and is the only living animal that has a skull with no vertebral column. All anglerfishes are carnivorous, they have a fleshy growth on their heads which allow them to attract preys, their jaw and stomach can extend to allow them to accommodate preys up to twice their size; lungfish eat members of their own; pufferfish though serve as food and are considered a delicacy in Japan, Korea and China, most species are poisonous.
These fishes are all very different but they have at least one thing in common, they all are edible and I still do not care much for them.
