This summer we were engulfed by plums and greengages from our French garden. After making plum tarts, plum coulis, plum puree and plum jam, we still had kilos and kilos. So my husband went round to neighbours’ houses with bags of fruit and drove our red 2CV down the lane to friends in a neighbouring hamlet.
We soon noticed how much these small acts of giving strengthened our local relationships (perhaps obvious to anyone who has lived in the country). Each time we turned up at someone’s house with plums, a friendly conversation started; one couple spontaneously invited us over for an aperitif the next evening. I even gave a kilo to the woman who serves in the village shop, and the irony of ‘giving food to your grocer’ gave us both something to smile about.
It’s much harder to give stuff away when you don’t have enough of it yourself. In her brilliant novel “Half of a yellow sun”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes perfectly the dilemmas people face in a situation of scarcity.
Though the book is set during the terrible war in Biafra in the 1960s when some three million people starved to death, it’s not relentlessly bloody or violent. Instead the author shows us the kinds of ‘micro-interactions’ that all add up to create a wartime society.
Towards the end of the book, Olanna, a previously well-off academic, is repeatedly confronted with the dilemma of whether or not to give food away when her own family is close to starvation. Together with her husband and baby, she has been forced to move into a single room in a multi-occupancy building. An unsmiling neighbour, Mama Oji, wastes no time in warning Olanna that all the other residents are ‘accomplished thieves’.
“Lock your door even when you are just going to urinate," she advises.
Meanwhile, Olanna’s baby soon makes friends with a little girl, Adanna, who has liquid-looking boils on her arms and a flea-ridden dog. When Adanna’s mother (Mama Adanna) notices cooking going on in Olanna’s room, she comes over holding her enamel bowl:
“Please, give me small soup.”
“No, we don’t have enough,” says Olanna.
Then, thinking of little Adanna’s only dress, which is made from the sack used to package relief food, she scoops some of the thin, meatless soup into the bowl. She repeats this generous act the next day, but on the third day Mama Oji is in the room and screams “Stop giving her your food! This is what she does with every new tenant.” Mama Oji adds that Mama Adanna is not a refugee but an indigene who could be farming cassava instead of begging others for food. The scene concludes with Mama Oji shouting “Shut up your stinking mouth!” at the other woman.
What this scene tells me is, first, that it's much harder to give stuff away when you don’t have enough of it yourself. And second, the decision to be generous can involve many conflicting impulses. It also makes me wonder whether I have ever made a present of something I would have preferred to keep for myself. I do recall some small examples of spontaneously giving away much-loved cashmere scarves to friends, knowing they were just the kind of thing they loved. But these examples seem piffling compared to what went on in Biafra.
So, what can those of us living in a wealthy society give away, apart from ‘things’ that many can afford to buy for themselves?” How about time and attention? When we give those, we don’t really even lose anything. But sometimes it feels as though we might. For instance, if we take time to listen to someone, we might have to put off something else that feels more important (for me it’s often my writing). What’s more, to listen really attentively, we have to stop distracting ourselves by silently preparing our next interjection. This can be hard.
It seems that being generous, whether with things or non-things, can be highly complex. While it's partly about compassion, it’s also entangled with other aspects of human relating, such as friendship, our sense of social obligation and even our identity – we might, for instance, want to be seen as kind and generous.
It’s also noticeable that a generous gesture often prompts a delightful and unexpected response. A few days after we gave away our surplus plums, more than one neighbour came round with a jar of jam they themselves had made out of them.
Related reading
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)