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.
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.
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2 comments:
Where I was for 9 years in Velingara, Senegal, it was pronounced tiga-dege, but it could be a bit different where you are! Would any of your Pulaar-speaking friends like free copies of a paper in Pulaar? See http://soon.org.uk/fulani/free-papers.php
We mail them free of charge if specifically requested.
Thanks, Jane
pb and honey is absolutely heavenly
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