How to turn noodles into an allegory? There are some questions that shouldn’t be answered, let alone exist.

But let’s humour ourselves a little bit. Imagine someone, for some reason, found a grimoire when they were ravaging a billionaire’s grave. The exterior is bleak to look at, the type to make you scratch out your eyeballs with sandpaper just to do away with the image of its cover; a tapestry of human-skin and edges made with jaw bones for decor. The pages are swarthy with browny-red stains, presumably of blood, and they’re filled to the brim with instructions for alchemy.
This grave robber, upon running his eyes over spells that sacrifice the poor for unimaginable wealth and instructions for sex rites, and point-of-no-return rituals, finds the only interesting spell in the grimoire.

“How to turn noodles into an allegory”. A spell so different from its family of malevolence that it hints at the possible existence of a forgotten diary of a long-dead, naive kid who thought the world could use a little more empathy and love. The instructions for this perculiar spell point to the grave robber's local spaza shop and lists alternative noodle brands just in case he’s a picky allegory turner.
He suspects that although its quite midevil-ish in its design, it is a technologically advanced grimoire, updating with current affairs everytime someone new is layered with dirt into the ground. There are spells on “how to reverse time if a millionaire ever becomes PM of Lesotho.”, but that’s neither here nor there. This grave robber, with the whimsical powers of a dead diary, turns noodles into a physical manifestation of an allegory. A wonder he can effectively undersell to the British museum, and a book that could either break capitalism or feed it another billionaire.

Maybe then, the answer to this empty and arguably nonsensical question would have some value to those who asked it, and those who cared to find the answer. But maybe that’s too unrealistic, a real brainteaser would concern itself with tangible examples in the realm of possibility, those grounded in semantics and logic, just like the way I used to write my poetry and stories. They were objectively correct, especially from a guy who learned story telling and English from rap. To do this, we’d have to look at my history with making noodles.

See, I could never quite get them right, and they effectively became the reason I wouldn’t live in-camp at university. The thought of having to chuck down a mush, snail-trail like block of soulless grass with a texture only acceptable during cunnilingus, gave me nightmares so horrific that to me, a person either hated themselves or lied through their teeth if they spoke of noodles as food.

But in a surprising twist of fate, I finally made a good bowl of noodles recently. I learned that it was no different from how I wrote and delivered my poetry, the rhymes needed to marry into a each other, and the set-up and punchlines should be a perfect cause and effect in the end. Noodles were just the same: To get the right texture with boiled water, they soaked for a good 2 minutes 47 seconds. Then, leave a quarter of the original water when you filter it out, and pour spices and 2 teaspoons of mayo and tomato sauce respectively. If you fancy eggs, boil them with salt water, it does something that’s too long to explain.

The perfect noodles are just like my writing, or atleast, they used to be. Precision and timing are your god, and adding & subtracting ingredients is an essential step se ka u jesang hlama ha u ka ea u se chechela. My writing had to be perfect, like mathematics, like noodles. And just as I was about to touch fingers with the god of perfect poetry, I tripped ea ba ke lahleheloa ke T’sepo, ka ipotsa na molato ke eng ha ke tsamaea ka lekeke. I had heard and seen others’ poetry, it had more heart than semantics, than mathematics. It had food for the soul, made with passion, love and devotion, kind of like when a lover thrusts and undulates in and out of another. Not noodles, as perfect as they can be… they aren’t real food. I knew how to preach, and I did it perfectly. But I could not relate emotions, I dictated them instead, forcing lessons, just like how I’m forcing this allegory… I could not convey the intimacy and meaning hiding between the subtext of the experience.

But now I can, and I can also tell you that its stupid to try an turn noodles into an allegory. But, its fun to do it anyway. Just like how we enjoyed writing “Where The Mountains Meet The Sky.”, we wrote it with love and passion, and I want you to experience it. Grab a copy.