WHO DRANK THE WINE IN THE BARN?

An average kid heard stories of the princesses, like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella before the age of five, but growing up in a rural village in the east of Nigeria, I did not hear stories of those trios until I was twelve years old and in secondary school. That didn’t mean I and my five siblings did not hear bedtime stories. We did, a lot, from my mother and my grandparents, but ours were stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. They usually involved social justice, a little bit of magic, and always a song with a chorus so that everyone could participate. At the end of the story, each child got a chance to share the moral lessons she or he learned from the story. It was a tradition that usually took place outside, with everyone sitting on the ground or the stones around a fire, while actively swatting away mosquitoes and paying rapt attention to the story.

My mother and her mother had endless stories to tell us, and every night, we were so excited to hear what story they would come up with. For today, I should cast my mind back to one of my favorite bedtime stories. It is a simple story in the form of a song. The story is a study of ripple effects. Please bear in mind that I am doing a direct translation from my native language, Igbo, which was the original language of the story. In the end, I will share what values this song taught me as a kid and maybe you can share yours.

The song/story goes like this:

Who drank the wine left in the barn?

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo!

A cockroach drank the wine left in the barn.

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If a roach gets angry, it gets eaten by a lizard

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If a lizard gets angry, it gets eaten by a rat

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If a rat gets angry, it gets eaten by a hawk

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If a hawk gets angry, a gun will shoot it down

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the gun gets angry, fire will burn it /destroy it

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the fire gets angry, water will put it out

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the water becomes angry, the ground will soak it up

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the ground gets angry, weed and grass will cover it up

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the grass gets angry, a human will cut them down

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If the human becomes angry, death might come for him

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

If death becomes angry, Chineke will put a stop to it

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

Nothing will happen next because Chineke is never angry, but He will put wine in the barn again and start the cycle of life again.

Everyone Chorus; Aliyo

(Repeat)

Listening to the story/song, you can see that it has repetition and rhythm, and these were some of the things that would draw in kids’ attention and invite them to clap their hands or slap their laps according to the beat. Now to talk about the lessons learned from the story, there are a number of them. As the song concludes with Chineke and how nothing is neither above nor beyond Him, as a kid, it made me reflect and acknowledge the supremacy of Chineke, and this, in turn, made everything that the priest said in the church make more sense. I was always amused by the fact that He put the wine there in the first place, but I kept that amusement to myself because my mom did not play with anything that had to do with the Creator. So this was a private reflection of mine. But at this point, my mom would invite us to share the lessons we have learned from the story.

I learned that no one is bigger than Chineke. No matter how big one thinks one might be, there is always something bigger and stronger. Just like the cockroach is bigger than an inanimate object like the wine, but something else was bigger than a cockroach, which was the rat, but as it turned out, something else was also bigger than the rat, and so on and so forth. I think my answer made my mom like me a lot more.

My older sister, on the other hand, would say that everyone should do their best to avoid temptation because if that wine had been left alone, the song would have been very short. Hearing her answer, you will not be surprised to find that more than twenty years later, she is still a firm believer in the art of minding one’s business.

Now, my younger sister was the family thinker. She never failed to impress me, even as kids. She would usually say the lesson she took was that there was a reason for everything. Everything had been preordained and that drinking the wine was just the fate of the cockroach. And at this point, she would lament how helpless the cockroach was, how it never stood a chance in the first place. Heavy, right? For a kid not yet ten years of age.

As kids, giving feedback to our parents on lessons taken from the stories gave them an insight into our minds and how they worked. With this particular song, there was always something new to be learned from it every day. As I got older, I found new meanings to the song. Recently, this year, I concluded after much thinking that the song was warning us kids about death, telling us that death was coming for everyone. I arrived at this by seeing the wine as a representation of a newborn baby whose life brought a lot of changes in the world, but those changes inevitably drew the child closer to death.

You will notice how we started with a small creature and worked our way to the Almighty Chineke. That’s how life is. It starts small, little kids only after food and happiness, who then grow into adults with responsibilities and whose life might even be on fire, as mentioned at one point in the song. All this brings you closer to old age and death, then the cycle begins again, hence Chineke places another wine in the barn.

The story is about the circle of life. Usually, when we tell that story, everyone gets to participate, and it’s repeated more than five times sometimes. Looking back now, I think our elders, my parents, and grandparents were trying to warn us about the hardship of life, instill a faith and fear of Chineke in us, while actively reminding us that death was inevitable, among other things.

But you tell me, did you learn anything else from the bedtime story? Please share if you did. I look forward to your feedback.