Martín Caparrós - Hunger: The Oldest Problem

There were three women: a grandmother, a mother, an aunt. Id been watching them for a while as they milled around the hospital cot; as they slowly collected their two plastic plates, their three spoons, their small, sooty pot, their green bucket, and handed them to the grandmother. And I kept watching while the mother and the aunt tied up their blanket, their two or three little T-shirts, and their rags into a cloth so the aunt could place it on her head. But I shook when I saw the aunt lean over the cot, lift up the baby boy, and hold him in the air, then look at him with a strange expression on her face, as if puzzled, as if incredulous, then place him on his mothers back the way children in Africa are carried, on their mothers backstheir legs and arms spread, chest pressed against the mothers back, head turned to one sideand the mother tied him on with another cloth, the way small children are tied to their mothers in Africa. The child stayed in its usual place, ready to return home. Dead.

It wasnt any hotter than usual.

I think this is when this book originated, a few years ago when I was in a town deep in Niger, sitting with Aisha on a straw mat in front of the door to her hutwith midday sweat, on dry earth, under the shadow of a spindly tree, within earshot of children scattering aboutas she told me about the single ball of millet she ate daily, and I asked her if that was true, that she only ate one ball of millet a day, and thats how we had our first cultural misunderstanding:

Well, every day I can.

She spoke while lowering her eyes in shame, and I felt like such an ass. Aisha was thirty or thirty-five years old; she had a concave nose, sad eyes, and a lilac fabric covering the rest of her face. We kept talking about food and her lack thereof, foolishly unable to see that I was face-to-face with the most extreme form of hunger. After a few hours full of surprises, I asked herfor the first time, a question I would subsequently ask so oftenwhat she would ask for if she could ask for anything, if a wizard told her he would grant her any wish. It took Aisha a while to respond to a question shed never even dreamed of.

I would ask for a cow that would give lots of milk, so I could sell a little of the milk and buy what I need to make puff-puffs [fritters] to sell in the market, and then Id be able to get by, more or less.

But lets say this wizard could give you anything, anything you want.

Really, anything?

Yes, whatever you want.

Two cows?

She said this in a whisper, then explained, With two, then Id really never be hungry.

It was so little, I thought at first.

Only later did I realize that it was so much.

Theres nothing more frequent, more constant, more present in our lives than hungerand yet, for most of us, theres nothing further removed from us than real hunger. We know hunger, were used to hunger: we feel hungry multiple times a day. But the distance between that repetitious, daily hunger we feelone that we can repeatedly satisfyand the desperate hunger that is never satisfied, is an entire world. Hunger has always been the force behind social change, technical progress, revolutions, counterrevolutions. Nothing has had a greater influence on human history. No illness, no war has killed so many people. There is no plague as lethal, and at the same time as avoidable, as hunger.

For so long, I had no idea.

My vision of true hunger, in my earliest imaginings, was a little boy with a swollen belly and stick-thin legs in an unknown region once called Biafra, an ephemeral place that declared its independence from Nigeria on May 30, 1967the day I turned ten. During the war that ensued, nearly two million people died from starvation. It was then that I first heard an even more brutal word for hunger: famine. By the time Id turned thirteen, Biafra no longer existed. What it left behind could be seen on the screens of those black-and-white television sets: children surrounded by flies, their faces shadowed by death.

Throughout the following decades, I would become more and more accustomed to this repeated, insistent. This is one reason I always imagined writing a book that would give a harsh, horrifying portrait of famine. I would accompany an emergency relief team to some wretched African locale, where thousands of people were dying of starvation. I would describe it in brutal detail, the worst of all horrors, then say that we mustnt lie to ourselvesor allow ourselves to be lied tothat situations like this one are only the very,