Camera Obscura # 2

Jiddou trying out a pose with attitude.

A lackluster photo of St Louis's crumbling elegance.

Rachel doing a nerdy pose near the beach in St Louis, and my dearly departed Lee and Christine. We miss you!!

Bobbo covers his eyes.

Take me out

I love Dakar. Did you expect any less?

If you don't know what WAIST is, you're probably not in Peace Corps. And if you don't win it, you're from somewhere besides Mauritania (Yay! We won! It must be all the sand and ruthless heat that make of our intrepid softballers unstoppable machines).

Anyway, WAIST stands for West African Invitational Softball Tournament, and the rest is whatever you make of it. Even after months in the vacuum of desert, many drunk Americans, hot-dogs and baseball aren't quite what I would refer to as the highlights of Dakar. Not to mention the queasily compoundish and 'Passage to India' -like nature of the 'American Club' where we played. Still there was beer, there was dancing and there was English, so there was fun to be had.

Anyway, Senegal is like Mauritania cubed. So you have to bring it.

Dakar is notoriously crime-ridden and teeming with pick-pocketers, muggers and -who knows.. vampires?- a fact which I can't seriously doubt, but which I found nothing to support. I feel like the people who allow themselves to be closed off because of this reputation are weak and flawed (excepting women - women probably have a legitimate right to feel scared all the time in Africa). Am I naive? Insufferably. Am I preachy? Sickeningly. Are there untold volumes of things I don't understand about Africa? Unquestionably. But listen to this....

In most interactions with African's, it is necessary to immediately establish that you are not a western imperialist, a tourist, or someone who has no interest in understanding them. And ironically, the best way to do this is to also immediately establish a sort of dominance. Because of course, as in any culture in which you are an Alien, your ignorance and consequent fear make you subject and suspicious, though your manners may be those of disinterested aloofness, or disdain, or of practiced (though maybe unconcious) superiority. So you need to make them see you as a person, and then you need to see them as one too.

You need to be impeccably earnest, kind and honest. Your lack of fear, your guilelessness (sp?) will disarm them. If you are guarded, there are plenty of people who will give you something to be guarded about. If you are confrontational, you will lose all confrontations. You have other weapons: smiles help, a lot, your tone of voice is important. You need to be funny, you need to be quick. If you are neither, then god help you, they will eat you alive.

You need to find a way to exist in their physical space. I get right up close and stare into their eyes like a puppy dog and smile big (not like a nutter). My hand always finds its way to their shoulder and squeezes or rests there while my grinning mouth talks about the heat or asks for directions. I scold those whose prices are too high with a wag of my finger, I pout my lips and scrunch up my brows and ask them why they are so mean to me. And then when they get too serious or start shouting, I poke them in the chin, and ask why they aren't smiling, or put my arm around their waist and my hand on their stomach. In America this would be highly unusual, inappropriate and antagonizing, but here it just works. I do not know why.

Again, speaking through the language of gestures I say, 'My brother, I love you. Now, these oranges are shit, please lower your price'. But no matter how harmless, or careless, or playful you seem to be, the little intelligent flame in the back of your brain must never go out. You can not be stupid, or you will deserve what comes to you. This is Africa, after all, the color of your skin is unfortunately always talking, and you do not get to choose who listens in. So while my mouth is chatting, the hand on their tummy always whispers 'If you repay my kindness with deception, I will destroy you'.

I met a nice young man working at a pizza shop who I think will be the next something-or- other important of Senegal. He was brilliant, and wistful, and talked with me about Michael Owens, and how American's don't care about soccer.

I met a security guard and explained to him the rules of baseball, halfway through realizing both that I did not know said rules and that he actually did, though had proclaimed not to out of politeness. Then I gave him some candy and he tried on my sunglasses.

I met so many cab drivers I can't count them. It sometimes feels too easy - I'll greet them in Wolof a little (all I know), then ask them how they are, ask them if they've had lunch, if they're tired, if they like dogs, if they're married, why they drive so fast, or whatever comes to mind. It's not quite a science, but it's definitely an art.

Unfortunately, a thorn (a nail? a hypodermic needle? a chicken bone?) on the ground (and later in my foot) put me out of commission for a few days, so instead of wandering Dakar I mostly just limped around like a scary, homeless ghost between my bed and the club.

I did get to see a few things though...

Traffic, traffic. The big commuter busses, the color-splashed cartier transports, crammed full with people, weaving through lanes.

A cool scrap metal horse sculpture, rearing its head.

Fruit. Oh my god, there is nothing more beautiful than an overflowing fruit stand, glowing like lit-up jewels at night on the side of the road.

I saw the stifling grip of religion (in this case, Islam) fall away a little like a dark veil, and for some of the rhythmic variety of natural human lives begin to return.

I saw a really big ram.

I ate absolutely perfect pastries for breakfast, each as elegantly fashioned and unique as snowflakes.

Horse carts, moving through traffic along side sleek mopeds and shiny new nissans.

I saw what appears to be the disturbingly insular nature of the American ex-pat community.

I saw an uncountable number of unfathomably beautiful people, in clothes the colors of everything, with intelligent eyes, laughing, or sad, or busy, or heedless, or loving, walking through their lives -those made from the constant, palpable richness of an only partially tamed wilderness.

Road Notes # 2

A few thoughts while traveling to Tijikja...

1 This time out of my village I caught a ride with one of the big, Italian-donated green supply trucks that come here occasionally bearing all sorts of necessary, and unnecessary junk.

2 The truck had a crew of 4 (very dirty) men who sat off to the side as the villagers unloaded the truck and flared their egos.

3 When I approached them to ask for a ride they were on a small mat, eating a lunch/dinner of white rice, which had been cooked on a little gas burner in the cab of the truck.

4 I bet it was the first time they were ever asked by some random whitey, living in the middle of nowhere and speaking their language, if he could catch a ride on top of their motored leviathan.

5 Cheikh, the driver, wouldn't let me ride on top because he said I would fall. So I rode in the cab. (By the way, I totally would not have fallen).

6 Hours later (around ten pm) after eating cous cous with a strange family, served by a Buddha-like woman who hid her face, we left.

7 Ironically big trucks get stuck in the sand much more frequently than little ones (sand is basically like snow) and so on about twenty separate occasions we stopped and put down giant metal plates on the ground for traction.

8. They expressed surprise when I proved willing and able to give unsolicited help getting unstuck, much the same way everyone else expresses surprise whenever I do almost anything at all.

9. The crew of men (none over 30) were each like something perfectly sketched by a short storyist's pen. Cheikh, slightly pudgy yet solid with a highish, nasal voice, a little imperious, a chain smoker. Ali, side-kick-esque, thin, and with one lame leg causing him to limp heavily, sober-voiced and quiet, the rice-cooker, the tea-maker. And the two Mohameds, both young, both sporting spectacularly oil-stained clothes, one short with thick, aggressive features, a happy persona and loud, bad (yet fluid) French, the other tall and thin and broad-shouldered, with an elegant, finely drawn face, austere eyebrows; the countenance of a wise child.

10 From sucking on a rubber hose earlier to induce gasoline to travel from a spare barrel to the fuel tank, tall Mohamed had become ill, and afterward merely lay in the truck bed while we dug out the tires. More importantly I knew what was happening because I know the verb 'to vomit' (which is Yigdhev).

11 We finally reached the gudrone about six hours later (4 am) and collapsed on dirty mats under a hangar on the side of the road, me sharing the blankets of this strange collection of men I didn't know a few hours ago. Sometimes Mauritania is wild.

12 Also, not for nothing, but could you imagine for a second that I would ever be allowed to find myself in a similar situation with the approximate counterparts of these people (whoever those might be) in America? No sir. Being foreign in the third world is like having a backstage pass to all sorts of crazy perks. Although I guess perks is relative.

13 The next morning I woke up to the sound of names being called. One of the inscrutable, and, I happen to think, endearing things that Mauritanians do is to call the name of the person they want over and over and over again, with out ceasing, and without the change of inflection or exasperated shouting that would certainly seem reasonable after a while. They just evenly call over and over, as if they're certain you will answer and haven't a thing to do in the meantime.

14 Spread on the pavement we breakfasted on peanuts and camel biscuits. Ali made tea on the gas burner and served it from a dirty, blue-plastic oil jug, turned on its side, with holes cut out for two kesses (shot glasses) and a baraad (the dainty little tea pot).

15 One of the new companions I had acquired overnight (we had slept in a place with several more of their truck-driving companions, waiting for a wheel to their hobbled vehicle) was named Yahya and had such exaggerated African features (prodigious lips; wide, flat nose; almond shaped eyes ) that it was hard to believe he was real. He chatted with me about his wish to learn karate while Cheikh scrubbed his feet on the pavement with a sliver of soap and a stone.

16 The late morning found me waiting in the searing heat for a car, in one of the many places in Mauritania where no one should ever have settled down. (But they did).

17 At the gendarme stop, where Yahye and his newly be-wheeled comanions bade me their farewell, I finally snagged a car for the second leg of my journey. The driver was nice, conversational but just enough for politeness, his speech intelligible, the window was down (it was just the two of us) the fare was free, and he gave me an orange from the pile on the floor. That's what's known as a holiday.

Je les ne veux pas

Hello Valentines

This post is to void all the previous posts I have put up asking for lovely American mass produced gifts to be sent in the mail. I have received an embarrassment of riches from many friendly people and no longer need anything. Except perhaps inner clarity and infinite wisdom, but those don't ship well.

If you still want to send things, please send the following:

Ziploc bags.

Pens I will continue to receive with joy, but I'm changing my preference from the uncapped pilot G2, which are my favorites, to the capped, and therefore sand-resistant uniball something or others. Just something with liquid ink.


Everything else I can either find on occasion in the capital, or is no longer important to me. As one might imagine, my living requirements are ridiculously reduced.

Plus, it's not like any of you are Rockefellers, to be perfectly honest....

So that's all. Plus good wishes to you all, so far away.

-Colton


PS Happy Birthday Mom. I love you.

How to avoid the subjunctive

Now is the time of Jujubees and millet. Now is the time of cold, of windy skies and hazes.

The greenery is being picked clean, the remaining shoots of desert peanuts, the brush-like weeds, the green skin of the poisonous turga. So it follows that the milk has begun to dry up as well; we don't drink it anymore, in big, plentiful gulps from metal bowls. Sometimes we have it with our nightly cous-cous, (poured and mixed with the hand, into a soupy glob that you slurp from your palm - it is incredibly good) And sometimes not.

As the green goes further and further away, the Tagant comes to resemble ever more the surface of a distant planet. No kidding - it's just plains and plains of rocks and reddish sand and mountainous, impassive cliffs. The inhabitants are, at times, just as alien to me as the scenery.

And then, many times, and without warning, they simply aren't.

In fact, it's surprisingly easy to forget that all my interactions with people, and therefore all the relationships and events that make up my days, are in another language, as if they happen in a place a few inches in front of my nose, instead of behind it. That fact is simultaneously unremarkable and continously astonishing. I remember how, months ago, landing in Casablanca, -a stopover on the way here- I felt mildly terrified at the loss of my language. It was my first time out of the country (Oh! dear, sweet bumpkin) and suddenly, something that I had always taken for granted, something that I had always been blessed to have in easy abundance (English) was no longer available. Just like that.

Now, I have to try hard to hear the constant jibbering around me as exotic, to hear it like I used to, as an unintelligable collection of foreign syllables.

Which is not to say that I'm no longer confused. I'm always at least somewhat out of the loop, and more often than not, I'm left staring off into space, with a wrinkled brow, thinking about hamburgers...

Nevertheless, the clueless westerner does have at his disposal a few tools. One that has served me especially well is the classic, non-commital utterance 'Mmmm', which straddles the boundary between 'yes' and 'no', and accordingly takes on whatever meaning the questioner secretly wants to hear. It's outrageously successful, and works like this:

Q- Cheikh-Akhmedou (that's me), do you want me to bring you some cous-cous?

Me: Mmmmm....

Q- Okay, I'll be right back.

(Actually, this example is misleading, because no one ever offers to bring me anything)


Another option is of course ignoring the question altogether, or changing the subject with some left-field non-sequitor like:

'Your shirt is dirty'

or

'My head hurts'

or

'Get that chicken out of my house!'


One which sometimes works better than others is the stock answer I'm not a muslim. Surprisingly, it applies to more situations than one might hope, though not always.

'But I'm not a muslim!' I'll answer a bit frantically to some perceived question.

'Ok-aay,' they'll say, 'but I was just telling you that you have rice on your nose'


The point is, one gets by. One rediscovers day after day what lives at the place where words end, and how to push forward through it like a new neighborhood. It helps to be clever, honestly. It helps to be fearless, or at least to tell yourself that you are. It helps to recognize value in the language of gestures - an icy stare, or a well-timed poke in the ribs, or an impromptu bout of arm wrestling can speak volumes. I like to think that good will can be exchanged through the skin of the fingertips. What mine says is something like 'I can't understand you because we are worlds of words apart. But lets hold hands'.

Some things though, need no translation. The other day I was helping my friends Bobo and Taleb make bricks from sand and cement in a square near the market. We had stopped for tea and biscuits when across the way we saw a little wandering donkey poking his oversized head and mangy ears through the entrance of their family's boutique. Donkeys almost always behave so much like nervously maladjusted people that its impossible not to personify them. This one seemed to be running low on sugar for tea, and had popped out to re-up. None of us mentioned it and only smiled, though it was nice to be sure that for once we were all on the same page.