Tuesday, September 30, 2008

and you, a young mistress

Here in Nouakchott we have a stadium (actually we have two, supposedly, though I have serious doubts about the second's existence). It's not far at all from my house, and was named the "Olympic Stadium" Stade Olympique, by some cruel, if prescient, official in the past, or by some digruntled architect, because of course, to quote a friend, "it will never play host to the olympics" .

Mostly it just sits there, hulking and derelict, its tall poles of clumped flood-lights, dark, and visible from afar, and in that way it serves a sort of passively-helpful purpose as a landmark, like a shipwreck, given the fact that addresses in the city consist of phrases like 'two streets past the boutique with the Marlboro sign turn left and go until you hit the giant pile of tires'.

I suppose once in a while they must surely hold a soccer game or two, though I've never heard of one happening, and somehow the image of stands full of fist-shaking men in crumpled bou-bous, though amusing, seems to jar with my experience of reality.

Then again, again, the other day I found a couple of jujube seeds on the ground which I am 100% certain is the snack that Mauritanians would be eating, instead of pocorn and hotdogs, if the aforementioned situation were true. Anything's possible.

Lately, (okay, three times, and counting) I've taken to running on the track in the early morning when the air is cool and when the entire place is hauntingly empty, save for a fit, speedy Chinese lady in black shorts and her balding companion. Like any two or more parties of westerners in Africa, we religiously participate in the fiction that the other does not exist, ignoring them completely, which is no skin off my nose because I just pop in my ill-fitting earphones and listen to Pharoahe Monch.

This, along with stuffing myself with as many fruits and vegetables as my body (and wallet) can handle, represents my sad little attempt at reparing some of the surely irreversable shit that Mauritania has done to my body (um, what vitamin is good for UV damage?) because, while having the endurance and muscle-tone of a dead twelve-year old was fun while it lasted, you know...all good things......

Something about the Stade is very beautiful to me in the way that all my favorite parts of Maurtania are beautiful, but it resists explaining. It's a giant symbol (sorry, you knew that was coming) of the country's, I don't know... cluelessness? naivete? predictability? None of those things sound very flattering when listed like that, and I guess they aren't, actually, but nevertheless I think of them warmly. Okay, luke-warmly. They are the only things that still (sometimes) make me smile, after all this time, when someone does the exact, tactless, hillbilly-like thing I knew they were going to do a moment before. Life here is scripted. In fact, the script was written so long ago its authors have been forgotten and though additions have been inserted here and there by clumsy colonists and malcontents, the plot chugs on. I can't believe I just wrote that extended metaphor, but listen...

This is a perfectly adequate stadum with an absolutely average oval of track surrounding a shock of green astroturf. The stands are little cement shelves with neatly painted numbers on the front. There are offices for the Olympic Committee, there are dormitories for visiting teams under a giant clock face which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are locker-rooms. There are box seats. I mean, are you kidding? There are box seats? Oh M..... wake up! And somehow the whole place feels like a slightly used, out-dated and transplanted high-school gymnasium from Ohio.

It's all perpetually locked too, btw, to even further stymie its use by would-be, athletic upstarts, so to get to the track you have to make a little hop-slide over a guard-rail (not hard) whose white paint is worn to black in patches by the actions of previous delinquents who had the same idea.

As of yet, no one's tried to kick me out, but there is a white Moor man who appears in his slept-in bou-bou every morning, and makes no attempt at any form of exercise but rather sits on the edge of the rust-colored track, quite plainly watching me, Chinese woman and baldy go around and around in circles.

Since I don't know, I am forced to give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is possible that he is an important stadium personage, supervising the arena. Though much, much more likely he is just an average, naughty, Joe, lured there by nothing more, and nothing less, than the promise of seeing, as Ginger puts it "ladies' legs".
 
Oh dear. Oh poor, stunted, creepy, dear. I supposed we all have a need to see ladies' legs, but just do us all a favor and keep it in your pants. Em....I mean, sirwaal....

Monday, September 29, 2008

there is no aboriginal stuff

Winter is coming.

That is a statement which, clearly, is good only after being qualified, since the temperature here probably never fails to reach 100 degrees in the sun, at some point during the day, no matter the season, but what I mean is that the coolness, that little, ever present(ly hidden) seed-like locus of cold, which opens, often only for a moment, like a shy flower, around 3 or four in the morning, begins to come a little earlier in the evening with the breeze, to linger a little longer in the morning, like a reluctant lover. Clearly it knows how to artfully foreshadow itself, to those who are watching.

At a much brisker pace, I’m rediscovering food, or rather, cooking, or rather, cooking is rediscovering me. In America, I used to be permanently tuned to the Food Network, which I still maintain is not girly, but Mauritanian brousse will, and did, put a stop to that sort of foolishness in anyone. It will make you lose your appetite, not gently, for anything but white rice and oil. It will therefore render ridiculous, any attempts to cook, not to mention attempts to do other things too, like live, but that’s another story.

Here, down the street a little ways, past the Chinese restaurant (we have one), past the (one) undercover and un-marked bar-simulacrum, hiding in plain, sunlit sight, past the half-hearted attempt at a supermarket, (which nevertheless sells ice-cream bars) there is a small dark room, squeezed in next to the refrigerator "repair" men, which has a reasonably reliable supply of the standard Mauritanian vegetables for sale. They sell someone's twisted idea of meat too, but if you come later in the evening that's all been sold, and what's left is the ancient, nicked and notched log, stained with old blood, where countless animal carcasses have surely met their fate, being hacked apart, limb from limb, bodies separated from all their constituent parts, each one sent to a new home in a tiny green plastic bag. Yum

The little guy who sells me vegetables -while his mother sits in the dark shadows, is about 13, maybe, with a voice that's beginning to change, and plump, lisping lips, and big hands with rough, elephant skin- wears the same, unwashed red shirt every day and is aggressively dirty, which is only logical since he spends all day sweating in that hot, sweltering hole of a room, where the wind does not penetrate, puttering around wilted vegetables, sticky, raw meat and occasional fat chunks of a fish which may or may not, be "grouper".

He speaks Hassaniya with a subtle accent, which I can't identify, but which I think must be the lingering echoes of some Pulaar grandmother speaking ghost-like through his mouth.

To pass the time, I've cultivated a casual friendship with him, which I am wont to do, and which represents my only real skill. The skill is, not, (creepily) 'forging relationships with children' so much as infiltrating the lives and routines of others, by imitating their voices, and gestures, and habits, until I seem to blend into the background. By another name, it's called mimicry, and it's all, in the end, a result of my splendid, machine-like ears, and if I've had any success at all here, (a big if) it's due to that fact alone.

Sometimes children will surprise you with the extent to which they guilelessly buy it all, this illusion of mine, and the other day while I was picking through turnips, veggie-boy asked casually if I had finished school already, and if I therefore had any leftover 6th year school books he could use.

-I asked, “Which ones? Like, Science? Math?” I handed him a bunch of turnips to weigh. “History?”

-“It doesn’t matter. Anything.” he said.

I looked away to keep from smiling, because his adorable assumption, even if only in one irrational part of his brain, that I would have used the same Mauritanian school-books as he, was oddly heartbreaking.

Someone must have overheard the exchange and set him straight, because two days later, when I came again the first thing he said to me was, “What country are you from?” It had taken him a month and a half to ask the question which most people ask within two seconds of meeting me, (right after "are you a Muslim?") and I responded in the way I sometimes do, just to mix things up: I cocked my head, and thought for a moment, my eyes upturned. Then I gave a quick shake of my head and said, “Yaa....I dunno. I forgot.”

I couldn't tell you his name, I don't think I've ever asked. I constantly bug him to give me a good price, in the persistently rude and brusque way of Mauritanians that is now mine, and I tell him if he doesn't I'm going to "nitarsh" him, meaning, roughly, "to smack upside the head", which is a word related in that patiently Arabic, tri-consonantal way to "atrash", which means deaf.

He sells lentils, a graceful, wonderful pulse I hope to never again take for granted, as well as gooey bags of tomato paste from a giant can, and garlic, and homemade peanut butter, and lettuce and cucumbers, green-peppers, fresh carrots from a Moroccan plastic sac, and beets. If you don't like beets, I hope that you will go and re-evaluate your life, because, as if the fact that they bleed a deep scarlet-red juice were not reason enough to adore them, they happen to taste like the actual crumbling earth itself, which is a good thing. Repent, beet haters.

None of these things are necessarily unique to Nouakchott, and can be found in most regional "capitals" in the rest of the country, but to me, coming from the brousse of all brousses, I find myself continually amazed by the city's humble, and ubiquitous, wonders.

The one thing I've come to depend on, in order to keep my life worth living, is "tigi digi", the (Pulaar?) word for a peanut-butter-like substance (Moors don't make it) which appears throughout the country in various guises, ranging in taste from "unpalatable" to "better than nothing", but which has surely reached its ultimate zenith here in the bloated, greasy bags of the stuff sold in this little man's shop.

They keep it in an old, yellow Jumbo-cube bucket, buried amongst the hot peppers, so now I just go and help myself to a couple of bulging bags while my little guy is occupied, chopping up some fat, veiled, vampire-of-a-white-Mooress's fish steak.

This peanut butter is oily enough to be creamy, but not whipped into the synthetic pansy-ness of, say, Jiffy, and it is bitter and ballsy and unapologetic, and I love it. Every morning I slather it on fresh bread loaves, bought from the toothless old shop-keeper across the street, drizzled with honey (thick, impure stuff with actual dead bees in it, which Ginger brought us from Senegal in a vingear bottle), and sip real coffee, reading a children's book in French, about 'N'zi, the Great. Warrior of Africa', or sit basking in my electric fan's benediction.

I have a good life. I don't say it enough, but I do. Now if only having a good life had even the slightest connection with having a happy one, we would be in business.

But at the moment, I'll make do with lentils and say ilhumdulllah.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

by tacit agreement they ignored the remarks

Today I met a young man from Syria, (the shadowed, mysterious country of so many staid CNN broadcasts) whose name is Hazaa, like that weird old word for ‘hooray’, which is a name I’ve never heard of before, and which sounds like it’s spelled with a ‘hamza’ (glottal stop) at the end, but isn’t (he told me) so now I’m stumped.

I met him by chance (like I do almost all my assorted acquaintances) on the street as I was walking along, trying to figure out how to send phone credit to someone who had asked for it (this happens all the time - people whom you may not have heard from in months, will call you and say, “Hi. How’s your health? How’s the heat? Send me credit? Click) and as he passed me I looked up, and after he had passed he said, "Bonjour" and then I looked over my shoulder and said "ish-haal-ak?" (how are you?) and then he looked back and smiled at my Hassaniya, and I looked back at him smiling, and then I smiled and then we backtracked, walking towards one another and shook hands and did greetings.

This would be weird in America, but strangely enough I do this all the time, and with people I couldn't tell from Adam, so when I said that we met by chance, it was a lie, and what I meant was that we met because I gave chance a chance. Even though that sounds like a lyric from a Karen Carpenter song, the question remains: why did I look over my shoulder? Why did I go back? More on that later....

Anyway, on his head, Hazaa had a ball cap, well worn to frayed-ness and with a bent brim, from under which his great crop of dark curls was visible, curving delicately around his ears and shading his black eyes. He looked Greek, maybe, or maybe he just looked like I think Greeks look, but Syria (in my mind) is off over there, in that part of the world where the difference between "Arab" and "Mediterranean" becomes more a question of the proper lighting.

In fact, it's usually very easy to spot people who are actually Arab, (as opposed to Moor which isn't the same thing), from North Africa or otherwise, and not just because they are usually lighter-skinned, (which they are) but also because of more subtle and complicated factors, like 'base tones' and 'color warmth' and all those science-things which are hard to describe though easier to recognize.

He was good-looking, clearly, though I don't remember specifically why, other than his square, clean-shaven chin, and interesting lips, which were not unicolor, but which instead contained patches of varying shades of pink.

He had a good voice though, clear and mellow and pleasant, which is something I am always quick to jealously notice in others, given the diffuse, fickle, chameleon of an irritating purr that I've been cursed with. Now I'm just hoping someday he'll speak to me in Syrian Arabic, while I sit there attacking a plate of humus, or twiddling my thumbs.

His clothes were all dirty, like he'd just come from work, which I later verified, sleuth-like, when he said "I've just come from work". He said he's a "builder" - one of those vague job descriptions people are so fond of using here, that could mean anything. I'm sorry, a builder of......? Toy helicopters? Sports stadiums? Grammatically incorrect sentences?

After he asked if I was French (always everyone's first question) he said that I looked like the brother of some university professor he knew, and then we talked for all of 5 minutes about nothing in particular, which I am oddly good at only in foreign languages, all the while holding hands - a culturally appropriate habit I'm going to miss, but that I'd better learn to break before I return to America, lest I become some kind of touchy-feely freakazoid whom people avoid at social gatherings.

Part of what's involved in having conversations about nothing is posing questions you already know the answer to, and so I asked if Hassaniya was quite different from the language in "Sooriiya". He said yes, because it totally is, even though this is a fact many Mauritanians whom you meet will steadfastly deny, insisting that they can be understood all the way to the Saudi peninsula and back, but nevertheless, he seemed to speak it just fine, only more lightly and gracefully than natives, for obvious reasons.

One thing he did was pepper his phrases, Mauritanian-like, with "yaa, khu-ya" meaning "my brother", as in "where did you learn Hassaniya, yaa, khu-ya?" which is another thing I am going to miss dearly, as it has the instant effect of making one feel better, but sadly it's something that I don't think is very common in the US outside of maybe, parts of the black community, and like, monasteries, neither of whom, I think, would let me in the door.

I should listen to Mom, and not speak to strangers, especially the ones who are eager to speak to me, as he could have been a theif, a seller of something I didn't want to buy, or much more likely, and almost worse, annoying, but I'm a big boy now, and as it turns out he wasn't any of those things.

Still.... why the second look?

One reason, in particular, I acknowledge to be more or less ignoble, (which is to say, would I have turned and looked had the person in question been a Plain-Jane? I think we all know the answer to that question) but A) I ain't no saint, and B) that is not within the scope of this entry.

But aside from that, I have a possibly not un-dangerous tendency, it seems, to follow the course of events wherever they may lead, or more specifically, to selectively encourage those events which seem to have the best chance of coming to an intriguing end. Now that I've set that down, I realize I said it in what is possibly the most boring way possible, and also that there is nothing noteworthy about wanting interesting things to happen in one's life (not that I am at all averse to writing about 'nothing noteworthy.')

I guess the only reason I'm thinking about it is that if I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I don't separate dangerous from interesting. Having said that, the sunbaked streets of Nouakchott at 3pm are surely less threatening that a rural road in New Jersey, but I've found (read: put) myself in plenty of situations here which either did, or could easily have gone sour, and I was led there not by my better judgement, or even necessity, but by the simple truth that I would rather be anything, anything, but bored.

Well, I'm nothing if not a fool, though we knew that already.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

like the street loves slang

There are two kinds of taxis. Well, clearly that's a lie because there are many more than that, but the only two I'm concerned with are the kind that are cheap, and the kind that are cheaper.

Every day now (except weekends, which, because we are so Muslim, means Friday and Saturday) I go to our bureau (I'm sorry, is that even a word in English? it means office) to work, which is in the tallest building in the country, all of nine storeys, and which, with its glass, automatic! doors and shiny, snazzy steel, and three, count them, three elevators, one of which lights up at night, is quite unmistakably Mauritania's version of a (pretty, but needless) chunk of glittering, national diamond in the sky, known otherwise as bling.

The building is called 'el khayme' which can translate literally as 'the tent', and is located just far enough away so that I can take a cab without feeling very guilty, but not far enough away so that I must. I live one street over from Chinguitel (as in Chinguit(ti) tel(ephone)) the company who, with their bright blue signs depicting a starburst, and their air of both new-mystery, and an urbane Arab-ness which no one can resist, started moving in on Mauritel's virtual monopoly over phone service sometime last year-ish, and has, ever since, been scaring their pants off. They also happen to be a subsidiary of Sudatel, which is owned by the Sudanese government, so it's like " watch out....".

On the other side, in a diagonal shot from my doorstep, is the restaurant slash English-school-with-creepily-subversive-Christian-undertones, "Equinox". It's housed in a gorgeously restored home with Arabesque filligree work, and plaster moldings on the ceiling, and tiles, more suitably located in some country with actual culture, like Morocco, (ooops!). The sign out front, in green and black, the "o" made into a half moon, looks more like that for an insurance agency than an eatery, but the food's good, so all is forgiven.

It's the only restaurant that I know of in the city (read: country) which is owned and run by an American- a middle-aged, white ex development worker- and there are three things which would tell you this even if you didn't already know: their french-fries are crunchy, like something out of someone's ideal of a mid-western diner, smoking is prohibited, and when you sit down, they bring you ice-water (as in, "water with ice in it") which is, if you didn't know, notoriously American to everyone except Americans themselves. They also have white pepper (wtf?) on the table, and meatball sandwiches, so I just ignore the Christian reading material, and stuff my face.

The thing about walking to work is not the distance, but the heat - I'm sorry, it's hot here. Did you know?- but more than that, it's the humidity. This might seem like a joke, because Nouakchott's humidity, as a desert city, is doubtless extremely low compared to the rest of the world, but it's on the coast, and I just came from living two years on top of a sand dune, so anything wetter than, say, 'deathly parched' makes me feel like I'm swimming. Shneeks.

I feel as though modern living, and houses, and mores are not compatible with this place on the earth. There is a reason people live in in tents in the rest of the country. In the village I had one little room with two doors, six feet apart, who exchanged the breeze with one another, and everything I owned was practically within arm's reach, and I had my white howlie to protect me from the sun. Here, walking down the almost tree-less streets, I feel self-conscious, and like a grotesque, "mitbaadi" (hick-like) Frenchman if I wear my howlie, and I feel like the sun hates people, literally hates them, pouring down distaste, instead of light. Why else is it so HOT? Why else would the heat get trapped in my labrinthine, over room-ed house each night instead of escaping up into the stars.

But this is all a lie, because in Nouakchott I have (sporadically) running water, and bananas, and the other day I made a green salad with cucumbers and golden raisins. Fuck the village.

If I walk to work I am a soaked, overheated disaster by the time I walk in the lobby, with its snooty (S)watch kiosk, and international time clocks, and even my newly bought, painfully distressed, Chinese-made jeans, and faux Armani black T-shirt with rivets can not disguise it. Meanwhile, there is Cheikh G. -the tall Wolof angel of graceful goodness, who smells, always, distinctly of heaven (I'm not kidding) and whose skin is perpetually cool to the touch, as though internally air-conditioned underneath his flowing robes- who works regular miracles in the transparent office next to my little "fly-by-night" dictionary-making station, so what's one to do?

Anway, the taxis- it's one of those things where after you notice something, it's hard to believe you never noticed it before, but virtually all the cabs in the city are the same kind of late-model mercedes (that name doesn't mean the same thing here) painted in either green and yellow, or not, and occasionally pimped-out, complete with hub-caps, and driven by what invariably turns out to be a young Senagalese cutie in a tanktop listening to Mbalax. These taxis will, without fail, charge me 200 ougiyas to get from here to there; the extra 100 is added because, and only because, there is a 90 degree turn involved.

That much I knew- the part I didn't notice was about the taxi "tout-droites" (meaning "straight (ahead)", ironically) which are all decrepit Renaults -skelatally bare-metal, and looking like the French contemporary of the Model-T- and since someone pointed them out to me, they are now as easy to spot as shining, rusting, belching beacons in the proverbial dark. These are shared, fixed-route cabs, which cost 80 ougiyas, look something like a hatch-back, and exist to ferry low-budget commuters, everyday, between capitale market and somewhere else I could care less about. The important thing is that I catch them, with almost reverent devotion, on the main route, 30 seconds from my house, and I can disdainfully ignore all the futile honking of the Mercedes, thinking, "200 ougs, my eye", until one of these perilous relics rolls slowly by. I hiss them down, and point for good measure, and try to act nonchalant as I hop chic-ly into what is, to all appearances, a vehicle made for not-me, smelling (for the moment) faintly like imitation Hugo and clean-ness, dressed in black pinstripe and scrubbed converse all stars, and pondering, just briefly, the fact that I may be cheap, and even poorer, I may be a fault-riddled, neurotic, catastrophe, but damn, sometimes, I've got style.