people don't like fire

This is what I'm talking about.

On the back of tin cans of Nescafe Instant Classic, the potent little black powder sold all over West Africa (except my old village), next to the hyper-animated young woman in short dreadlocks, who is nearly spilling her red mug of java in fist-raising-ly exuberant enthusiasm for Nestles Inc., is a list of customer service numbers printed with white lettering inside of a brown, faux-cyber style rectangle. There's a little "play" button symbol beside it, as if it were going to burst out speaking. It lists numbers for 19 countries covering all of francophone W A. and beyond, all the way down the coast, to the reject-countries of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. The writing is in French, though it has an accompanying English translation paired with every blurb,  so The Gambia doesn't throw a fit, the kind which, Scandinavian-style are almost correct, yet still, somehow, not.

The translation for "le bon contact" is "Good to talk" (why, yes.. it is good to talk), the kind of platitudinal non-phrase which doesn't really mean anything, but which you nevertheless would nod your head at if some smiling Dutch blondie said to you, "Aaah, Kowltin - I'm going to let you with the good-to-taalk numbahs. Yes?". The translation for the "le bon conseil " blurb is:  experts confirm that 4 cups a coffee a day is moderate amount and quite safe for most people from a general health point of view!  Oh, I'm so glad. I've simply got to up my Nescafe consumption by 400 percent, in order to drink "moderate amount" and have my "general health" viewed as "quite safe".

Mauritania's name is nowhere present on this can, despite being a francophone country, or a least a demi-Francophone country, given that French has managed to hack-out half of a precarious place from Arabic at the Official Languages court, though the quiet fight between the two still rages. Very hot button. Very now.

Why are we not mentioned? Don't tell me they just forgot. This is only one example of a phenomenon which, if you live here long enough, will come to seem routine.

I remember one occasion, I was staring glaze-eyed, and maybe drunk, at some babbling French news cast giving the weather reports for the all the capital cities in the region. These are basically all on the ocean, unsurprisingly, and so the splashy, 3 dimensional map, which was someone's ill-advised idea of a splurge,  hopped from spot to spot up the coast-line, from Accra to Monrovia, to Freetown and slummy Conakry and earthy Bissau, with all their quaint and quotidian reports of rain, or not-rain, up through Banjul and the sexy mystery of Dakar.

At this point, the computer generated camera angle balked, lifted up into the "air", flew neatly in a one-second pause-hop over the whole length of Mauritania's sprawling desert disaster, including her ragamuffin poster-child, Nouakchott, like they were nothing more than a bad smell, and landed lightly on Morrocan soil to continue on its merry, virtual, way.

This is what I mean: can this snub send any clearer a message? You are not worth our time. In fact, it says  we will go out of our way to snub you, since surely it was more trouble to skip over Nouakchott, than it would have been to throw us a bone in the form of a two second weather bulletin. It wouldn't even have had to be accurate. They could have just printed the words, it's going to be hot. what the hell did you think? and that would have been enough.

Oh M.....get yourself together.

The sad part is, most Mauritanians of the Moor persuasion (who are the only ones who count here) look on the Arab world as their cultural brethren, but I've never met anyone from said Arab world who reciprocates this feeling. Mauritania is almost never considered a member of the larger Arab/North Africa/ Levant/Middle East community, by anyone who knows. I've even heard of Sudan being grouped-in, and not Mauritania, which it sort of below the belt, if you ask me.

A friend who just recently went to Morocco mentioned the disdain with which Moroccans talked about Mauritania. One person did not even know what Hassaniya was (this is the neighboring country), another said, "but the women are all so fat, and the men so tiny....how does that work?" and another: "why are they always chewing on sticks?" Another friend reported that the Tunisians she met characterized Hassaniya as being what would happen if you tried to speak Arabic "with rocks in your mouth". 

Oh, really?.... Only I'm allowed to say things like that. Hassaniya sweetie, you can put rocks in my mouth any day.