Hi weirdos,
For today we have a couple of poems, or things which resemble them. Tomorrow maybe something else. I have many pictures to post, in addition, but at least most of them will have to wait until I get to Nouakchott and have a connection that will handle more than a kilobyte or two every hour.
Number one is about the weather....or maybe other things. Number two isn't really a poem but sort of a stream of consciousness ( even though I hate that phrase) musing. I hope its doesn't sound too poetry slam or something but oh well.
-Yours
Number 1
There is no thunder when you come
There is only the silence of white lightning.
There is only the wind from the west
and the eastern ash.
You are beloved by us
(even your rages)
You are beloved,
(but you seem ungrateful).
You are… a beloved green envelope of grace,
(left to be mailed
on a countertop,
left by the frenzy of hot hazes in the hurry of
their preoccupied departure),
which everyone anticipates receiving like a birthday check.
It’s set up, propped up, on a salt shaker.
It leans, blank-posed and unashamed,
a paper island on the glossy expanse,
its neat, frank lettering in capitals intones:
ITS TIME
Ugh, you are so good at
"setting to right", at
"starting anew", at
flooding our lazy wounds with the austere, clear water of good sense.
How do you do that? You must have had practice.
And while everyone longs for you, dream-like, like a good dinner,
I can’t help but fear for my collapsed house, and for
what you might find inside with your blunt, bright eyes.
I know its petty, beloved, but, your
wide gazes, pitiless as lasers-
(that is -less about seeing than looking),
what might they discover under the old, crusted dust of decay?
Oh damn.
If you dissolve the habits,
if you crack the habits, the hubris, my aloofness,
how will I ever make good again?
(Do you care? You don’t care.)
You are beloved by us,
(but there’s this):
though you cool,
you also corrupt.
Though you move soothingly,
you also rupture things which are none of your business.
You know? Beloved?
How will I ever make good again?
I suppose the best solutions make new problems,
while correcting the old,
containing the cause of their own reincarnation,
-aggressively running in circles and galloping,
heedless and fortunate, slipping the trail and
enamored with chasing the tale of the past-
I’m tired of looking at skies with anxiety.
I say: screw the green things! Screw those…things.
Let them turn towards sick turquoise and sea-foam,
let those screaming, antique yellows and
brittle, blonde whites,
-weak and flaked as apologies-,
go to hell.
Hell, I’m tired.
Plump my pillows, pussycat – I want to dream.
Dreamgirl? Beloved? Be a good kitty.
Don’t punch - just, like.. pitter.
Don’t grumble, just flatter me with liquid.
I’ll let you come.
I said, come down here.
Come on in, wise guy, but shyly, remember.
No funny business. No flames. I mean this.
I’m hot enough for the two of us.
I needa keep cool.
Hey-
Bring me something cool to drink.
I think that’s enough.
Number 2
lying prostrate on brightly colored floor mats
patterned in squares,
blowing smoke towards the palm-branch ceiling,
thinking about thinking about the nature of reality (really?, please)
trying to come to elusive epiphany,
to decipher the intellect of Bertrand Russel,
brown lizards scale the walls, nicotine floods veins but improves nothing,
a goat screams person-like, for her lost, irresponsible children
across the barrier of a stone wall (no ivy),
the hot wind, the low hum of voices carrying,
the ingratiating, ecstatic throb of flies,
the embarrassed rattle of paper pages fluttering,
a child with a snot-nose,
and the most adorable eyes,
perched in the doorway playing with a length of wire
(don’t touch that!)
fatigue, fatigue.
Minetou walks on Mbarka’s back,
the sickening slurp of cous-cous munching in repose,
too-sweet tea, (where’s the mint?)
blank stares, curious stares,
antipathetic stares across impassable voids,
veiled mouths, wrinkled mouths,
wrinkled, dirty lengths of unwashed cloth billowing,
beautiful, beautiful lips, regal, unaware, ignorant cheeks.
the deceit of faces.
flies burrowing in my eyebrows.
trapped, an inability to go either forward or backward, big needs
thwarted by laziness, by an inferior constitution,
brown soap cakes, thin sandals from China,
molded into the shape of tired feet,
scrawled words in margins in another language,
once alien, but now only feels like a provincial past.
no self pity. so much self pity.
unintentional, or intentional, oblivious rudeness.
(keep pushing, keep fucking pushing and just see what happens!)
walking in sucking sand,
tripping on rocks which blurt out sharp edges to
slice the ends of toes, just to be noticed
just to make the blood flow more freely.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
love-wrought
Hi Pals,
How's things? I just wanted to update everyone who is not "in the know", that I have left El Qidiya for good, so I will now remain more or less perpetually contactable ( a word?) to those who might wish to do so (hint hint) Anyway, leaving made me neither sad nor happy, but just irritatingly regretful about all the things I should have, maybe could have, done but didn't. Oh well, that's a long story. I mean, Mauritania(n brousse) is no picnic, but then again, on picnics, ants get all over your food, and who wants that?
Right now I'm in Tijikja for the next week or so, before I go on a trip to Mali for two weeks - to, you know, see what that's like. I will of course post on it when it's over, assuming I still have the use of my digits, although it bears noting that I still haven't finished writing my giant leviathan of a post about my trip to Guinea last year, so that's slightly depressing. I promise I will finish someday, but keep in line about it.
After I come back from Mali, I'm moving to Nouakchott until the middle of December to finish rewriting the Hassaniyan Arabic dictionary, for Peace Corps, and that is sure to be an intricately detailed nightmare, so lots of fun in store.
Okay, there are many things I would like to post, and there is even a remote chance that I will actually do that, now that I have extended contact with computers, so stay tuned.
Be well
-Colton
How's things? I just wanted to update everyone who is not "in the know", that I have left El Qidiya for good, so I will now remain more or less perpetually contactable ( a word?) to those who might wish to do so (hint hint) Anyway, leaving made me neither sad nor happy, but just irritatingly regretful about all the things I should have, maybe could have, done but didn't. Oh well, that's a long story. I mean, Mauritania(n brousse) is no picnic, but then again, on picnics, ants get all over your food, and who wants that?
Right now I'm in Tijikja for the next week or so, before I go on a trip to Mali for two weeks - to, you know, see what that's like. I will of course post on it when it's over, assuming I still have the use of my digits, although it bears noting that I still haven't finished writing my giant leviathan of a post about my trip to Guinea last year, so that's slightly depressing. I promise I will finish someday, but keep in line about it.
After I come back from Mali, I'm moving to Nouakchott until the middle of December to finish rewriting the Hassaniyan Arabic dictionary, for Peace Corps, and that is sure to be an intricately detailed nightmare, so lots of fun in store.
Okay, there are many things I would like to post, and there is even a remote chance that I will actually do that, now that I have extended contact with computers, so stay tuned.
Be well
-Colton
Friday, June 27, 2008
And his heart was quiet in the night
This is a lost entry, written long ago, about my first time in Nouakchott. It's wicked long, so sorry....
Let me tell you about Yaqob-Amidou ould Njaay.
It's difficult to know where to begin. It's difficult to know how to tell this story in a way that isn't trite or laundry-list-esque or garbled with melodramatic detail…. but I suppose the best way to begin the story of this bizarre and lovely day I had is to start at the beginning, and that was at the marché Capitale.
The marché Capitale is probably like any number of other frenetic, open-air, third-world markets with its crazy, cozy disorderliness, its dirt, and smothering crowds, and has probably been described, or at least its more famous proxies, by legions of other pretentiously literate Western travelers just like myself. So I'll spare you- just picture those other markets that have been the buzzing backdrop of all those spy movies and adventure novels and remove a bit of the color, cast a pallor over it and you'll have it about right.
I wasn’t looking for it, the market, I was looking for something else, and because I couldn’t find it I was going to leave. And then I was looking for a cab.
Across the street, jammed-up and filled with cars I saw a man and then our eyes met. He was young (my age) and dressed in Western clothes, a white long-sleeved tee with something flashy emblazoned on the chest, a knit skull-cap, an urbanly cool one, trendy jeans and non-plastic sandals. He had a little goatee and a good chin, and his eyes were widely spaced. He smiled and I smiled, I think we both looked twice, and then he crossed to me through the trash and the river of cars. He told me afterward that it was because he knew in that instant that I was all alone in the city, and needed his help, that we had formed a connection that passed beyond words. (He’s like that). But at the moment I didn’t know any of that. I thought he might have just been a nice man from whom I could ask directions, and so that’s what I did.
I’ve had a bit of trouble in Nouakchott, because, unlike my village I can never tell who speaks Hassaniya, and who only "speaks" Hassaniya – it makes me a bit hesitant. I’m pretty confident otherwise about my ability to immediately discard the odd bubble of foreignness that inevitably surrounds me here, by speaking a language no one expects me to know, and by being cheekier than anyone expects me to be. But speaking Hassaniya to Pulaar or Wolof people feels creepy and imperialist, like Mauritanians speaking French to me – ‘I’m not French, you’re not French, so what are we doing?’
Anyway, it turns out that Yaqob is the child of a Pulaar father and a Moor mother, in other words a born bilinguist, so our communication got along just fine. And I was as cheeky as ever.
From the beginning, he took my hand and led me around like a little child, I became his pet in an instant. He must have thought I wanted to buy something that I could not find, he must have thought that I needed a guide. And though I almost immediately realized I had been misunderstood, I allowed him to drag me along through the thick crowds like a dog on a leash because of several reasons, 1) because I am weak willed and want everyone to like me, (even at a cost to me personally) and 2), I want things to always progress smoothly, like a screenplay and 3) because he was handsome (they all are) and 4) because he was tall and elegant and 5) because I was hypnotized.
A little later, when we were wandering through the labrynthine dark booths of identical shops of the marché, where he seemed to know everyone, where he dressed me up in new clothes and sandals, zipping and fastening and unbuckling me, mannequin-like, I though he might be a scam artist. But I didn’t stop because I thought "Oh my god, I’m being scammed, how exciting!" If you think about it, it would have been a pretty good scam- a well-heeled (seeming), cleaned up young man seeks out suckers (tourists), trolls them around to buy overpriced junk and then swings by later to take his cut off the top. The only trouble is that tourists/whities are so rare here that I’m not sure anyone could make a living out of being parasitic in this way, and in any case, it wasn’t true.
Then later, when he invited me back to his house to drink tea, as we strolled, winding through the neighborhood-y streets of cinquieme, people staring at me like the misplaced fragment of a strange dream, hopping from one ancient cab to another, ducking into dark epiceries (« Do you seen anything you like ? » he asked, playing the host, as if I couldn’t have made my way around the boutique blindfolded. I picked out a package of biscrème coconut cookies and a coke,) and when he scored a dime-bag of pot from a chum on the street in one casual, fluid exchange, I thought he might be a prostitute, but I didn’t stop because I thought, "Oh my god, I’m going to get laid!"
And finally, when we were back in his room-after I had greeted his startled old mother- his poor little threadbare, yet meticulously arranged, plywood shack, postered with old Nokia cell-phone adds (cool, urban asians, hip whities with pixie cuts) partitioned by ratty bed-sheets, and furnished with mattelas, where he rolled joints like a practiced pro, spit-wetting the paper with slow licks of his pink tounge and smoked them like he was sucking air, where (the smoldering joint in one hand) he tea-ed me (to tea being a verb here) and layed me down to rest on his tacky, motel-esque comforter, and told me his wishes and cares, I began to realize what he actually was, which was sad and strange and slightly crazy, moody, haunted, childish yet selfless, full of color, full of ego and longing, half finished, tragic and doomed. At the same moment I realized that I should get my little self the hell out.
But by then I was trapped, sort of, and wasn’t going anywhere. I was stymied, again, by (courtesy, but also) this weird kind of curiosity, a for-the-wrong-reasons sense of fearlessness that comes from putting less stock in safety than in avoiding dull-ness, which afflicts me here. At home in the US, my sense of curiosity was always deadened by routine, by a rationalism and a crippling self-consciousness. Here, it’s not restrained by anything, and more and more this makes me believe what they say about the cat.
Yaqob-Amidou brushes the dust from his sandals (and mine) with a little broom before he lays them to rest on a low, uneven table of scrap-wood. Yaqob-Amidou wraps everything in crinkly plastic bags, like my old shirts –after he dressed me in new ones – and cell phones. Yaqob-Amidou dabs me with cheap cologne and lends me his jeans and fixes the way my shirt falls.
Over the hiss and bubble of the boiling tea, Yaqob-Amidou told me about how we were brothers, he and I, about how his mother was now my mother as well. I couldn’t help but think she might not have agreed. He showed me the amulets on his arms and ankles, and told me how they protected him from all people who wished to harm him, and that if someone tried to strike him they would fail. One was carved from wood and beautiful, and one was a single braceleted bead and one was a piece of frayed black yarn around his ankle.
He told me about how he liked toubabs, though I couldn’t understand his reasons why, and that now he was a toubab because we were one and the same, and brothers. « My mother is your mother » he repeated, « my home is your home, » but by now his eyes were heavy and marujauna glazed and as he draped his long arm over my shoulder it was hard to tell where he ended and where the smoldering weed began. He breathed smoke in my face and showed me clips of softcore porn he had stored on his cell-phone. « Black and white, » he said, gesturing to the black man and the Latino-ish woman on the screen. It was hard to see what they were doing, it was small and fuzzy, but it was clear enough that this was something not in the possession of the average Mauritanian. Yaqob-Amidou was nothing if not an irregular Mauritanian. I thought he might try to kiss me then, but he didn’t.
After tea, we went to the baths, which though it might sound like something luxurious, one should remember where we are, and that it was the cold season (ish_shte). It was frigid. Sixieme, where Yaqob lives, is pretty much a classic shanty-town, with corrugated tin and plywood shacks flung down in disarray over a few square kilometers, with no plumbing (obviously), and in a central part of the neighborhood there is a cement building with stalls and drains where you were given a bucket, a scrap of plastic sack to scrub with and a sliver of soap for 100 ougiyas.
When he mentioned the baths, I was thinking steam and/or at least warm water (why was I thinking that?) I thought we might have taken one together – the logistics of this and their improbability didn’t worry me much at the time. But a no go on the joint bathing. Strike # 2.
I wanted to go back to my hotel room. I was angry that I had just used my time doing something I had to do in my village every day, when I had a hot shower just waiting to be used by me for the first time in six months. Still, I didn’t go. It was like I was drowning, but without the danger of death – just the wonder of the water and the wasted time.
Then we went out again, after he had styled me up in new and borrowed clothes, (my orange, assymetrical sweater, his high-fashion jeans) fussing with my shirt for an absurd lenghth of time, with a cigarette hanging from his lip, and fixed in expressionless concentration.
There’s a word in Hassaniya, "yisseder" which means "to walk around" and because there is almost always nothing else to do in Mauritania, it’s also a legitimate pass-time. On the street outside his family’s shed, we caught a little green and yellow (cab) heading up further into 6ieme. I think. To be honest, I was hopelessly, yet unimportantly, lost. "Yissedering" in Nouakchott can and does involve the periodic jumping in of cabs, which are so plentiful and cheap and easy and perfect here that they become a seamlessly melded part of the beautiful game.
After less than a minute we hopped out, and broke my clumsy 1000 ougiya bill (these are dead weight) at an epicerie to pay the driver, who waited patiently, black-howlied and cigarette-ed listening to his cassettes of Mauritanian wailing in the darkness of the smoky interior.
Then we ducked into the black alley and wove through back-streets, and emerged again near a ‘restaurant’ on a quiet path. (please forget all images that this word conjures for you) It was, if I may be so bold, a working-class restaurant, much unlike the western ersatz and patrony establishments I had been frequently recently before. No mod-chic plates, or waiters ( please), just a small closet of a room with a grimy fan blowing, two small tables with plastic chairs pushed together and a couple of howlied figures hunched over their grub bowls. Ironically, a few days before I would have felt more comfortable here than in the former, from all my time in the no-frills village, but a few days in Nouakchott had begun to draw out my buried Western self.
Plus there was the orange sweater.
Yaqob anchored me down in one dirty plastic patio chair and breezed out the curtained door. For the next 15 minutes it was his headquarters of sorts, he popped in and out frequently as he made the circuit of the surrounding shops, a wannabe tailor's, a friend's music stall, just big enough to be stuffed with two enormous, blaring speakers, etc.
He was scheming, trying to figure out a way to get 30,000 ougiyas (like a 120 bucks) by tomorrow – some sort of debt he owed, or so I had gathered. Earlier he had told me :
"I have a problem to the tune of 30,000 ougiyas at the marché"
"Okay," I said, then after a moment offered, "I’m sorry." I knew where this was heading and tried to change the subject. He then reminded me that we were brothers, (I had almost forgotten), that he had welcomed me into his home and helped me when I had (apparently) needed it (absolutely, he had). And that what goes around comes around. That wasn’t quite how he put it, but it came out smooth, floating on his smoky breath as he crouched in front of me, looking down.
I said what I say to everyone else who asks me for money (which is everyone) –that I don’t have a lot of it. I didn’t bring any money from America, I don’t have any money in America and Peace Corps only pays me enough to live on. It never seems to penetrate very deeply.
"Oh, no, no." he said, looking hurt. "I didn’t ask you to give me the money, I only want you to give me some money." I wasn’t sure I knew what the difference was but soon enough we stopped talking about it when he grew more interested in performing his strange and somewhat pitiful dance routine to his tape Sénégalese music.
But honestly, though it’s true I don’t get payed very much , just enough to get by, and though that 30,000 represents two thirds of my monthly stipend, I still could have probably given him half that, or even the whole thing with out suffering too great a loss. Nothing would be at stake for me, (unless you count the cushion of money which allows me to periodically leave my village, and thus remain sane). I will always get more. I have no fear of that. That is the difference between us. So the issue becomes I could, but why should I ? With Yaqob-Amidou that question was easily answered. It’s not so easily answered with everyone else who asks. Especially when they live in your village and when they give you tea and biscuits and when you care about them.
How do you say ? "I can’t give you money because I think you’re going to waste it" or "I’m trying to help you help yourself," or "I want to break the cycle of paternalism." I don’t know the Hassaniyan words for those things, and even if I did, sometimes it feels like the only one people want to hear is the one spelled C-A-S-H.
At the restaurant where Yaqob had installed me, I stuck out like an overdressed sore thumb in my new digs, amongst the tired, frumpy workers who had no one to cook for them at home (the only reason any self-respecting traditional Mauritanian would eat at a restaurant ). I wanted to leave the poor men in peace so I wandered over to the little music shack to see Yaqob. He was perched on a small, broken bench, leaning against the wall of the music stall, fiddling with his phone, trying to fix the ringer. He looked glum.
He showed me the phone. "When someone calls, it doesn’t ring. Only the lights light up." He made me call him to demonstrate, "See ?" he said, pointing to the flashing LEDs, "the lights light up." I nodded, and watched him for a minute. "What’s wrong with you ?" I asked. This is literally the most common phrase in Hassaniya. "Nothing," he said, frowning, "I am very happy."
Then suddenly as if roused he said he wanted me to tell him a story, in English, so that he could practice listening. "When I listen I understand almost everything." Right. He got up and started walking, me trailing behind, and after a moment he glanced over at me and said, "Speak, you !" (in English)
Then I told him the story of the 3 little pigs (I know), because it was the only thing I could think of on the spot. He kept nodding his head sagely, like he understood, (he didn’t, not a word) and I tried to use hand motions to make it interesting, but really, what I’ll always remember, is how impossible it was to predict, this event, me walking a dark, humming street in the very ethnic heart of Nouakchott, telling a children’s story to a moody and slightly crazy African in a language nobody understood but me. It’s like talking to ghosts, or maybe being one.
He wanted me to come have tea with a friend. I had already secured my escape route for later, saying I had to get back to my hotel because I was leaving for Sénégal early in the moring. (A half-truth, though a necessary one) He had a plan – we would spend the night at his place catch an early taxi in the morning and we would all go to Sénégal together. Just him, me and my, as yet, unknown American friends. But, I knew what he was doing- he was planning an escape. He wanted asylum in this world which he thought existed and which partly did, of people he hadn’t met, of freedoms he couldn’t experience, of some measure of sex(uality) and alcohol, and carelessness, and easy, taken-for-granted powers, and simple, forgotten-about rights, and all other manner of things one can only find here in small pieces, like the broken up parts of an asteroid that fell to earth.
Still, for me, this is where his character takes on a complicated sort of sadness – because I could sympathize with him, he is something that his country isn’t ready for, he doesn’t really fit here, in a country run by a displaced (and racist) bedouin culture, and that his naive yearning for something fulfilling, because it is stifled, takes on the stunted forms of this superficiality of clothes and manner, and this chemical habit.
Though that hardly makes him any kind of martyr, or even unique, because who can’t these things be said about ? I guess my point is that it’s all the sadder for being common, and that what he wanted to escape was not persecution or violence but the dissatisfaction of his life. God. That’s the oldest and most unsolvable riddle in the book kiddos, and makes me suspect that if he was able to manage flight, all he would find would be a change of scenery.
Still, I can never resist tea, so we hissed down the next cab we saw and were off in a flash of green and yellow………
--To be continued--
Let me tell you about Yaqob-Amidou ould Njaay.
It's difficult to know where to begin. It's difficult to know how to tell this story in a way that isn't trite or laundry-list-esque or garbled with melodramatic detail…. but I suppose the best way to begin the story of this bizarre and lovely day I had is to start at the beginning, and that was at the marché Capitale.
The marché Capitale is probably like any number of other frenetic, open-air, third-world markets with its crazy, cozy disorderliness, its dirt, and smothering crowds, and has probably been described, or at least its more famous proxies, by legions of other pretentiously literate Western travelers just like myself. So I'll spare you- just picture those other markets that have been the buzzing backdrop of all those spy movies and adventure novels and remove a bit of the color, cast a pallor over it and you'll have it about right.
I wasn’t looking for it, the market, I was looking for something else, and because I couldn’t find it I was going to leave. And then I was looking for a cab.
Across the street, jammed-up and filled with cars I saw a man and then our eyes met. He was young (my age) and dressed in Western clothes, a white long-sleeved tee with something flashy emblazoned on the chest, a knit skull-cap, an urbanly cool one, trendy jeans and non-plastic sandals. He had a little goatee and a good chin, and his eyes were widely spaced. He smiled and I smiled, I think we both looked twice, and then he crossed to me through the trash and the river of cars. He told me afterward that it was because he knew in that instant that I was all alone in the city, and needed his help, that we had formed a connection that passed beyond words. (He’s like that). But at the moment I didn’t know any of that. I thought he might have just been a nice man from whom I could ask directions, and so that’s what I did.
I’ve had a bit of trouble in Nouakchott, because, unlike my village I can never tell who speaks Hassaniya, and who only "speaks" Hassaniya – it makes me a bit hesitant. I’m pretty confident otherwise about my ability to immediately discard the odd bubble of foreignness that inevitably surrounds me here, by speaking a language no one expects me to know, and by being cheekier than anyone expects me to be. But speaking Hassaniya to Pulaar or Wolof people feels creepy and imperialist, like Mauritanians speaking French to me – ‘I’m not French, you’re not French, so what are we doing?’
Anyway, it turns out that Yaqob is the child of a Pulaar father and a Moor mother, in other words a born bilinguist, so our communication got along just fine. And I was as cheeky as ever.
From the beginning, he took my hand and led me around like a little child, I became his pet in an instant. He must have thought I wanted to buy something that I could not find, he must have thought that I needed a guide. And though I almost immediately realized I had been misunderstood, I allowed him to drag me along through the thick crowds like a dog on a leash because of several reasons, 1) because I am weak willed and want everyone to like me, (even at a cost to me personally) and 2), I want things to always progress smoothly, like a screenplay and 3) because he was handsome (they all are) and 4) because he was tall and elegant and 5) because I was hypnotized.
A little later, when we were wandering through the labrynthine dark booths of identical shops of the marché, where he seemed to know everyone, where he dressed me up in new clothes and sandals, zipping and fastening and unbuckling me, mannequin-like, I though he might be a scam artist. But I didn’t stop because I thought "Oh my god, I’m being scammed, how exciting!" If you think about it, it would have been a pretty good scam- a well-heeled (seeming), cleaned up young man seeks out suckers (tourists), trolls them around to buy overpriced junk and then swings by later to take his cut off the top. The only trouble is that tourists/whities are so rare here that I’m not sure anyone could make a living out of being parasitic in this way, and in any case, it wasn’t true.
Then later, when he invited me back to his house to drink tea, as we strolled, winding through the neighborhood-y streets of cinquieme, people staring at me like the misplaced fragment of a strange dream, hopping from one ancient cab to another, ducking into dark epiceries (« Do you seen anything you like ? » he asked, playing the host, as if I couldn’t have made my way around the boutique blindfolded. I picked out a package of biscrème coconut cookies and a coke,) and when he scored a dime-bag of pot from a chum on the street in one casual, fluid exchange, I thought he might be a prostitute, but I didn’t stop because I thought, "Oh my god, I’m going to get laid!"
And finally, when we were back in his room-after I had greeted his startled old mother- his poor little threadbare, yet meticulously arranged, plywood shack, postered with old Nokia cell-phone adds (cool, urban asians, hip whities with pixie cuts) partitioned by ratty bed-sheets, and furnished with mattelas, where he rolled joints like a practiced pro, spit-wetting the paper with slow licks of his pink tounge and smoked them like he was sucking air, where (the smoldering joint in one hand) he tea-ed me (to tea being a verb here) and layed me down to rest on his tacky, motel-esque comforter, and told me his wishes and cares, I began to realize what he actually was, which was sad and strange and slightly crazy, moody, haunted, childish yet selfless, full of color, full of ego and longing, half finished, tragic and doomed. At the same moment I realized that I should get my little self the hell out.
But by then I was trapped, sort of, and wasn’t going anywhere. I was stymied, again, by (courtesy, but also) this weird kind of curiosity, a for-the-wrong-reasons sense of fearlessness that comes from putting less stock in safety than in avoiding dull-ness, which afflicts me here. At home in the US, my sense of curiosity was always deadened by routine, by a rationalism and a crippling self-consciousness. Here, it’s not restrained by anything, and more and more this makes me believe what they say about the cat.
Yaqob-Amidou brushes the dust from his sandals (and mine) with a little broom before he lays them to rest on a low, uneven table of scrap-wood. Yaqob-Amidou wraps everything in crinkly plastic bags, like my old shirts –after he dressed me in new ones – and cell phones. Yaqob-Amidou dabs me with cheap cologne and lends me his jeans and fixes the way my shirt falls.
Over the hiss and bubble of the boiling tea, Yaqob-Amidou told me about how we were brothers, he and I, about how his mother was now my mother as well. I couldn’t help but think she might not have agreed. He showed me the amulets on his arms and ankles, and told me how they protected him from all people who wished to harm him, and that if someone tried to strike him they would fail. One was carved from wood and beautiful, and one was a single braceleted bead and one was a piece of frayed black yarn around his ankle.
He told me about how he liked toubabs, though I couldn’t understand his reasons why, and that now he was a toubab because we were one and the same, and brothers. « My mother is your mother » he repeated, « my home is your home, » but by now his eyes were heavy and marujauna glazed and as he draped his long arm over my shoulder it was hard to tell where he ended and where the smoldering weed began. He breathed smoke in my face and showed me clips of softcore porn he had stored on his cell-phone. « Black and white, » he said, gesturing to the black man and the Latino-ish woman on the screen. It was hard to see what they were doing, it was small and fuzzy, but it was clear enough that this was something not in the possession of the average Mauritanian. Yaqob-Amidou was nothing if not an irregular Mauritanian. I thought he might try to kiss me then, but he didn’t.
After tea, we went to the baths, which though it might sound like something luxurious, one should remember where we are, and that it was the cold season (ish_shte). It was frigid. Sixieme, where Yaqob lives, is pretty much a classic shanty-town, with corrugated tin and plywood shacks flung down in disarray over a few square kilometers, with no plumbing (obviously), and in a central part of the neighborhood there is a cement building with stalls and drains where you were given a bucket, a scrap of plastic sack to scrub with and a sliver of soap for 100 ougiyas.
When he mentioned the baths, I was thinking steam and/or at least warm water (why was I thinking that?) I thought we might have taken one together – the logistics of this and their improbability didn’t worry me much at the time. But a no go on the joint bathing. Strike # 2.
I wanted to go back to my hotel room. I was angry that I had just used my time doing something I had to do in my village every day, when I had a hot shower just waiting to be used by me for the first time in six months. Still, I didn’t go. It was like I was drowning, but without the danger of death – just the wonder of the water and the wasted time.
Then we went out again, after he had styled me up in new and borrowed clothes, (my orange, assymetrical sweater, his high-fashion jeans) fussing with my shirt for an absurd lenghth of time, with a cigarette hanging from his lip, and fixed in expressionless concentration.
There’s a word in Hassaniya, "yisseder" which means "to walk around" and because there is almost always nothing else to do in Mauritania, it’s also a legitimate pass-time. On the street outside his family’s shed, we caught a little green and yellow (cab) heading up further into 6ieme. I think. To be honest, I was hopelessly, yet unimportantly, lost. "Yissedering" in Nouakchott can and does involve the periodic jumping in of cabs, which are so plentiful and cheap and easy and perfect here that they become a seamlessly melded part of the beautiful game.
After less than a minute we hopped out, and broke my clumsy 1000 ougiya bill (these are dead weight) at an epicerie to pay the driver, who waited patiently, black-howlied and cigarette-ed listening to his cassettes of Mauritanian wailing in the darkness of the smoky interior.
Then we ducked into the black alley and wove through back-streets, and emerged again near a ‘restaurant’ on a quiet path. (please forget all images that this word conjures for you) It was, if I may be so bold, a working-class restaurant, much unlike the western ersatz and patrony establishments I had been frequently recently before. No mod-chic plates, or waiters ( please), just a small closet of a room with a grimy fan blowing, two small tables with plastic chairs pushed together and a couple of howlied figures hunched over their grub bowls. Ironically, a few days before I would have felt more comfortable here than in the former, from all my time in the no-frills village, but a few days in Nouakchott had begun to draw out my buried Western self.
Plus there was the orange sweater.
Yaqob anchored me down in one dirty plastic patio chair and breezed out the curtained door. For the next 15 minutes it was his headquarters of sorts, he popped in and out frequently as he made the circuit of the surrounding shops, a wannabe tailor's, a friend's music stall, just big enough to be stuffed with two enormous, blaring speakers, etc.
He was scheming, trying to figure out a way to get 30,000 ougiyas (like a 120 bucks) by tomorrow – some sort of debt he owed, or so I had gathered. Earlier he had told me :
"I have a problem to the tune of 30,000 ougiyas at the marché"
"Okay," I said, then after a moment offered, "I’m sorry." I knew where this was heading and tried to change the subject. He then reminded me that we were brothers, (I had almost forgotten), that he had welcomed me into his home and helped me when I had (apparently) needed it (absolutely, he had). And that what goes around comes around. That wasn’t quite how he put it, but it came out smooth, floating on his smoky breath as he crouched in front of me, looking down.
I said what I say to everyone else who asks me for money (which is everyone) –that I don’t have a lot of it. I didn’t bring any money from America, I don’t have any money in America and Peace Corps only pays me enough to live on. It never seems to penetrate very deeply.
"Oh, no, no." he said, looking hurt. "I didn’t ask you to give me the money, I only want you to give me some money." I wasn’t sure I knew what the difference was but soon enough we stopped talking about it when he grew more interested in performing his strange and somewhat pitiful dance routine to his tape Sénégalese music.
But honestly, though it’s true I don’t get payed very much , just enough to get by, and though that 30,000 represents two thirds of my monthly stipend, I still could have probably given him half that, or even the whole thing with out suffering too great a loss. Nothing would be at stake for me, (unless you count the cushion of money which allows me to periodically leave my village, and thus remain sane). I will always get more. I have no fear of that. That is the difference between us. So the issue becomes I could, but why should I ? With Yaqob-Amidou that question was easily answered. It’s not so easily answered with everyone else who asks. Especially when they live in your village and when they give you tea and biscuits and when you care about them.
How do you say ? "I can’t give you money because I think you’re going to waste it" or "I’m trying to help you help yourself," or "I want to break the cycle of paternalism." I don’t know the Hassaniyan words for those things, and even if I did, sometimes it feels like the only one people want to hear is the one spelled C-A-S-H.
At the restaurant where Yaqob had installed me, I stuck out like an overdressed sore thumb in my new digs, amongst the tired, frumpy workers who had no one to cook for them at home (the only reason any self-respecting traditional Mauritanian would eat at a restaurant ). I wanted to leave the poor men in peace so I wandered over to the little music shack to see Yaqob. He was perched on a small, broken bench, leaning against the wall of the music stall, fiddling with his phone, trying to fix the ringer. He looked glum.
He showed me the phone. "When someone calls, it doesn’t ring. Only the lights light up." He made me call him to demonstrate, "See ?" he said, pointing to the flashing LEDs, "the lights light up." I nodded, and watched him for a minute. "What’s wrong with you ?" I asked. This is literally the most common phrase in Hassaniya. "Nothing," he said, frowning, "I am very happy."
Then suddenly as if roused he said he wanted me to tell him a story, in English, so that he could practice listening. "When I listen I understand almost everything." Right. He got up and started walking, me trailing behind, and after a moment he glanced over at me and said, "Speak, you !" (in English)
Then I told him the story of the 3 little pigs (I know), because it was the only thing I could think of on the spot. He kept nodding his head sagely, like he understood, (he didn’t, not a word) and I tried to use hand motions to make it interesting, but really, what I’ll always remember, is how impossible it was to predict, this event, me walking a dark, humming street in the very ethnic heart of Nouakchott, telling a children’s story to a moody and slightly crazy African in a language nobody understood but me. It’s like talking to ghosts, or maybe being one.
He wanted me to come have tea with a friend. I had already secured my escape route for later, saying I had to get back to my hotel because I was leaving for Sénégal early in the moring. (A half-truth, though a necessary one) He had a plan – we would spend the night at his place catch an early taxi in the morning and we would all go to Sénégal together. Just him, me and my, as yet, unknown American friends. But, I knew what he was doing- he was planning an escape. He wanted asylum in this world which he thought existed and which partly did, of people he hadn’t met, of freedoms he couldn’t experience, of some measure of sex(uality) and alcohol, and carelessness, and easy, taken-for-granted powers, and simple, forgotten-about rights, and all other manner of things one can only find here in small pieces, like the broken up parts of an asteroid that fell to earth.
Still, for me, this is where his character takes on a complicated sort of sadness – because I could sympathize with him, he is something that his country isn’t ready for, he doesn’t really fit here, in a country run by a displaced (and racist) bedouin culture, and that his naive yearning for something fulfilling, because it is stifled, takes on the stunted forms of this superficiality of clothes and manner, and this chemical habit.
Though that hardly makes him any kind of martyr, or even unique, because who can’t these things be said about ? I guess my point is that it’s all the sadder for being common, and that what he wanted to escape was not persecution or violence but the dissatisfaction of his life. God. That’s the oldest and most unsolvable riddle in the book kiddos, and makes me suspect that if he was able to manage flight, all he would find would be a change of scenery.
Still, I can never resist tea, so we hissed down the next cab we saw and were off in a flash of green and yellow………
--To be continued--
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Off the top
The barber is 19 years old.
His name is Mohamed Lamine ould Ahmed and he lives in the house directly behind (south) of mine, so close I could touch it across the 2 meter wide path which separates us. He is the son of an outrageously obnoxious sack of belly-laughing fat named Ahmed ould Asswaylou who I cannot stand.
Mohamed Lamine is not the 'barber' (hallaq) in the sense of having a shop, or a sign, or tools. Or skills, to be perfectly honest. Rather he just is the barber and almost all the young men I know at some point or another make their way over to his unassuming little plastic chair to take care of business.
He's a nice guy, though not uncommonly bright, and has always been one of my better friends here, being able to find that correct balance between familiarity and respectfulness that has proven so elusive for so many others.
He giggles a lot and has a giant, unashamed smile and a comical voice which tends to skip all over the place like a deer, jumping registers. He is very handsome, in a youthful sort of big-eared way - he has clear, milk-chocolatey skin and inherited his mother's full, dramatic eyebrows and dark lashes like the rest of his siblings (fyi, they're all gorgeous).
He tells me that, though my time here is up soon, I can't leave El Qidiya, that they are going to tie me down and make me stay. I smile, but inside I'm like, "girl, good luck..." He cherishes vague hopes of learning English, but who doesn't?
A few afternoons a week I'll see him out there on the gravel, set up in the long, cool shadow of his house, busily snipping away at someone's fuzzy head. Yesterday I stopped by on my way back from the well, loaded down with thirty pounds of water and watched him for a few minutes, as he passed a comb topped with a razorblade through Lemrobbit's coarse, black hair, which then ended up all over my arm when I went to shake his hand.
These are the poorman's (literally) electric hairclippers, and though the comb/razorblade combos seem to work well enough I won't let him try them on me. Even though all I ever do with my hair anymore is buzz it to within an 1/8 inch of its life, I still like to be the one in control.
Except of course, I have been known to duck into those little hole-in-the-wall (again, literally) establishments that are sprinkled around just about everywhere in Nouakchott, the ones with a billowing sheet hanging over the doorway, and the hand-painted pictures of sharply-coiffeured ethnic gentlemen out front, and get a 300 ougiya 'do', including a surly attitude, a razor-defined hairline, and a dusting of babypowder, because sometimes it's nice to be pampered.
His name is Mohamed Lamine ould Ahmed and he lives in the house directly behind (south) of mine, so close I could touch it across the 2 meter wide path which separates us. He is the son of an outrageously obnoxious sack of belly-laughing fat named Ahmed ould Asswaylou who I cannot stand.
Mohamed Lamine is not the 'barber' (hallaq) in the sense of having a shop, or a sign, or tools. Or skills, to be perfectly honest. Rather he just is the barber and almost all the young men I know at some point or another make their way over to his unassuming little plastic chair to take care of business.
He's a nice guy, though not uncommonly bright, and has always been one of my better friends here, being able to find that correct balance between familiarity and respectfulness that has proven so elusive for so many others.
He giggles a lot and has a giant, unashamed smile and a comical voice which tends to skip all over the place like a deer, jumping registers. He is very handsome, in a youthful sort of big-eared way - he has clear, milk-chocolatey skin and inherited his mother's full, dramatic eyebrows and dark lashes like the rest of his siblings (fyi, they're all gorgeous).
He tells me that, though my time here is up soon, I can't leave El Qidiya, that they are going to tie me down and make me stay. I smile, but inside I'm like, "girl, good luck..." He cherishes vague hopes of learning English, but who doesn't?
A few afternoons a week I'll see him out there on the gravel, set up in the long, cool shadow of his house, busily snipping away at someone's fuzzy head. Yesterday I stopped by on my way back from the well, loaded down with thirty pounds of water and watched him for a few minutes, as he passed a comb topped with a razorblade through Lemrobbit's coarse, black hair, which then ended up all over my arm when I went to shake his hand.
These are the poorman's (literally) electric hairclippers, and though the comb/razorblade combos seem to work well enough I won't let him try them on me. Even though all I ever do with my hair anymore is buzz it to within an 1/8 inch of its life, I still like to be the one in control.
Except of course, I have been known to duck into those little hole-in-the-wall (again, literally) establishments that are sprinkled around just about everywhere in Nouakchott, the ones with a billowing sheet hanging over the doorway, and the hand-painted pictures of sharply-coiffeured ethnic gentlemen out front, and get a 300 ougiya 'do', including a surly attitude, a razor-defined hairline, and a dusting of babypowder, because sometimes it's nice to be pampered.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Quo-tedium
Today I was mildly productive and brought two Neem trees from my nursery in the garden back to my house to plant. One of the trees, in my nearly two month absence from the village had grown more than a half meter, indicating once again that things tend to happen better if I’m not around.
I had dug the holes to put them in, out of the hard gravelly earth, a few months ago, so that’s a relief. Today I just busied myself carrying over large rocks from other places in my compound to fashion into "impenetrable-(hopefully)-to-ruminants" walls around each little sapling, meanwhile trying to get the rocks to balance correctly and not tumble down and crush the poor things to death.
When that was satisfactorily, if rather shoddily done, I came inside and sat on the floor and made a half liter of Crystal Lite On-the-Go Rasberry-flavored green tea (only Americans could slam together that many flavors), which I guzzled. Then I stood up and paced around my one room shack for 10 minutes, poking into various pockets of my make-shift shelving looking for something interesting. Then I ate about 8 dum-dum sized loolipops, one after another, trying to suck on them slowly and not, after a few seconds, crunch them into bits, something I find almost impossible to refrain from doing with hard candies. This time was no different. Then I sat down and perused a miscellaneous pile of papers about colleges, degree programs and scholarships and felt bad about myself, my lack of all skills, and my future in general. Then I looked inside of my pack of ‘Congress’ cigarettes, which are the cigarettes that are made from whatever is left over when all other cigarettes have been made, and found it empty of everything except tobacco crumbs. Then I laid down, fluffing my pillows, and slept fitfully for 40 sweltering minutes in front of the doorway in the hot breeze and dreamt something about a banker. Then I made tea and tried to take an interesting picture of my charcoal stove hanging on the wall, but failed. Lately, since taking pictures of people comes with too much baggage. I’ve been concentrating on close-up pictures of the inanimate objects in my life, like pieces of burlap, my shoes and dirt. Then I crunched on a bag of dry biscuits for a while. Then I got up and stared at myself in a hand-mirror, until I felt really bad about my nose. Then I looked in my package of cigarettes again and found it was still empty. Then I listened to a bootlegged ‘Akon’ CD, but today, even his adorable, and highly obscene attempts to come off as Senegalese and/or gangsta, (of which he is neither) couldn’t cheer me up. Only 6 more hours until bedtime…..
I had dug the holes to put them in, out of the hard gravelly earth, a few months ago, so that’s a relief. Today I just busied myself carrying over large rocks from other places in my compound to fashion into "impenetrable-(hopefully)-to-ruminants" walls around each little sapling, meanwhile trying to get the rocks to balance correctly and not tumble down and crush the poor things to death.
When that was satisfactorily, if rather shoddily done, I came inside and sat on the floor and made a half liter of Crystal Lite On-the-Go Rasberry-flavored green tea (only Americans could slam together that many flavors), which I guzzled. Then I stood up and paced around my one room shack for 10 minutes, poking into various pockets of my make-shift shelving looking for something interesting. Then I ate about 8 dum-dum sized loolipops, one after another, trying to suck on them slowly and not, after a few seconds, crunch them into bits, something I find almost impossible to refrain from doing with hard candies. This time was no different. Then I sat down and perused a miscellaneous pile of papers about colleges, degree programs and scholarships and felt bad about myself, my lack of all skills, and my future in general. Then I looked inside of my pack of ‘Congress’ cigarettes, which are the cigarettes that are made from whatever is left over when all other cigarettes have been made, and found it empty of everything except tobacco crumbs. Then I laid down, fluffing my pillows, and slept fitfully for 40 sweltering minutes in front of the doorway in the hot breeze and dreamt something about a banker. Then I made tea and tried to take an interesting picture of my charcoal stove hanging on the wall, but failed. Lately, since taking pictures of people comes with too much baggage. I’ve been concentrating on close-up pictures of the inanimate objects in my life, like pieces of burlap, my shoes and dirt. Then I crunched on a bag of dry biscuits for a while. Then I got up and stared at myself in a hand-mirror, until I felt really bad about my nose. Then I looked in my package of cigarettes again and found it was still empty. Then I listened to a bootlegged ‘Akon’ CD, but today, even his adorable, and highly obscene attempts to come off as Senegalese and/or gangsta, (of which he is neither) couldn’t cheer me up. Only 6 more hours until bedtime…..
Friday, June 20, 2008
Eat it
I'm going to miss the bread. One thing you can reasonably expect to find in most average sized boutiques in the morning is bread - little 9 inch-ish loaves of bread the thickness of a banana which make up the better part of many Mauritanian breakfasts.
Usually no two places make their bread the same way. One major variety, which we call, colorfully, electric bread, is, not surprisingly, made only in places that are on the grid. El Qidiya is very, very, not, which is great because I hate electric bread anyway, excepting certain instances which do not include traveling, because electric bread is like a light, crusty baseball bat and makes a tremendous mess of crumbs every time. In El Qidiya we have mburu li htab (wood bread) which is made in a small stove, or a big, car sized shack with a mud-brick dome and a wood-burning oven. When the loaves come out they are small, chewy and golden brown packets of empty carb calories, perfect for those on the go.
El Qidiya's bread uses too much oil. Tijikja's loaves are rather tasteless and dry. Tokomaji's are perfectly symmetrical elipses, with crunchy, artisanal crusts. Nbeika's are skinny, like weaklings, taste like mesquite and are made in a dirty little hole of a garage, blackened with greasy filth, by wife-beatered young men sweating from the heat. The sign on the door spells garage like this: GARGE.
In Nouakchott we have boulangeries and possibilities open. Every morning they radiate out their doughy offerings to the the surrounding boutiques, enabling one to get a pretty decent croissant, or a semi-sweet bun, but my favorite is still the traditional, the adorable little mburu Qur'an, five thin little loaves stuck together in a 100 ougiya lump like the fingers on a hand.
Whenever I'm in Nouakchott and have the time, I get two croissants, and have the boutique owner spread on a slab of 10 ougiya butter with his short, wide knife. (Jelly is also an option). I love this. I love, so much, food created right before your very eyes, which has multiple parts or in which your choices are an integral part of its preparation. This is why I love street food. For example, one of the best things about (car) garages (not so much in Mauritania) is that they always have food to sell, and much of it comes to you in a rotating parade of vendors. There is usually a boy or two carrying a 30 count egg carton on his head filled with brown, hardboiled goodies and you beckon to him with your finger, or you hiss, and you tell him that you want two, holding up your fingers like the peace sign, and he cracks them on their pointy heads with the butt of his knife, then he peels them with expert ease in 3 seconds flat, nestles them in a piece of torn brown paper and slices them into squishy, jiggling quarters. If you want black pepper (why wouldn't you?) he'll sprinkle some over the top from the make-shift shaker, fashioned from an old pill vial with holes poked in the lid, tied with a string to the end of his little blue knife. I'm not sure why I find this so beautiful and honest and good, in a world of ambiguous good, but I really, really do. I feel like saying, "do you know who you are little guy? Do you know how much color you're giving to the world, drifting out from your cardboard egg-tray? It's worth so much more than 50 francs. But don't you dare overcharge me..."
Usually no two places make their bread the same way. One major variety, which we call, colorfully, electric bread, is, not surprisingly, made only in places that are on the grid. El Qidiya is very, very, not, which is great because I hate electric bread anyway, excepting certain instances which do not include traveling, because electric bread is like a light, crusty baseball bat and makes a tremendous mess of crumbs every time. In El Qidiya we have mburu li htab (wood bread) which is made in a small stove, or a big, car sized shack with a mud-brick dome and a wood-burning oven. When the loaves come out they are small, chewy and golden brown packets of empty carb calories, perfect for those on the go.
El Qidiya's bread uses too much oil. Tijikja's loaves are rather tasteless and dry. Tokomaji's are perfectly symmetrical elipses, with crunchy, artisanal crusts. Nbeika's are skinny, like weaklings, taste like mesquite and are made in a dirty little hole of a garage, blackened with greasy filth, by wife-beatered young men sweating from the heat. The sign on the door spells garage like this: GARGE.
In Nouakchott we have boulangeries and possibilities open. Every morning they radiate out their doughy offerings to the the surrounding boutiques, enabling one to get a pretty decent croissant, or a semi-sweet bun, but my favorite is still the traditional, the adorable little mburu Qur'an, five thin little loaves stuck together in a 100 ougiya lump like the fingers on a hand.
Whenever I'm in Nouakchott and have the time, I get two croissants, and have the boutique owner spread on a slab of 10 ougiya butter with his short, wide knife. (Jelly is also an option). I love this. I love, so much, food created right before your very eyes, which has multiple parts or in which your choices are an integral part of its preparation. This is why I love street food. For example, one of the best things about (car) garages (not so much in Mauritania) is that they always have food to sell, and much of it comes to you in a rotating parade of vendors. There is usually a boy or two carrying a 30 count egg carton on his head filled with brown, hardboiled goodies and you beckon to him with your finger, or you hiss, and you tell him that you want two, holding up your fingers like the peace sign, and he cracks them on their pointy heads with the butt of his knife, then he peels them with expert ease in 3 seconds flat, nestles them in a piece of torn brown paper and slices them into squishy, jiggling quarters. If you want black pepper (why wouldn't you?) he'll sprinkle some over the top from the make-shift shaker, fashioned from an old pill vial with holes poked in the lid, tied with a string to the end of his little blue knife. I'm not sure why I find this so beautiful and honest and good, in a world of ambiguous good, but I really, really do. I feel like saying, "do you know who you are little guy? Do you know how much color you're giving to the world, drifting out from your cardboard egg-tray? It's worth so much more than 50 francs. But don't you dare overcharge me..."
Friday, April 25, 2008
white thread becomes distinct from black thread
*This is a long over-due entry, but don't give me lip about it*
Two nights ago, there was a shooting star so bright, that as it burned in the sky and fell behind my back, casting its greenish glow on the wall of Mohamed Ali’s house, I thought it was the light from a car. When I turned to face it I was just in time to catch it snapping out of existence forever.
Now is Ramadan.
If you don’t know what that is, then look it up (I would have had to), because it’s a shame we all don’t know a little more about each other. I’m fasting this year as a result of accident and pridefulness more than anything else. By the third person who asked me if I was going to be fasting, I found myself saying ‘yes’ just so that I wouldn’t have to endure the embarrassment of answering ‘ no’ .
Hardly what the prophet must have had in mind, but we are who we are. Surely it goes without saying that any of the appropriate religious reverence is, in my case, absent, and that I find such beliefs - that the omniscient creator of an unimaginably gargantuan universe (in comparison to which, of course, we are smaller than a bugger in an electron’s nostril) should or could give a celestial crap about when, what or how we eat/drink - patently absurd if not insane. Nevertheless, there is something about the concepts of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘stoicism’ and ‘struggle’ that are as irrationally appealing, at times, as addictions.
The first day - I spent it frolicking, (really) in the waterfalls which flow from miles and miles away over the cliffs to collect in a modest pool, the first and only time I got to do so this year, because the rains were so short that the waterfalls have already evaporated. It rained about 3 times here, and I missed 1 and ½ of them, though this probably for the best, because you see, my house is broken.
Thirst is …. interesting. I mean surely it’s obvious but it’s the thirst which gets you; hunger is nothing. Everyone knows that humans can live an inordinately long time without food, what is it, a month? Two? Without water you’re dead, or wishing you were, before the sun can rise twice. Well, here anyway. The thought of ‘thirsting to death’ probably holds a colder sense of horror for everyone than comparable forms of death, (what are comparable forms of death?) maybe partly because in addition to being unimaginably bad, it’s also rare. I mean, who dies of thirst? Of course fasting is hardly the same thing, yet my point is that it’s like tiptoeing around the lip of the same terrible canyon. In the late, endless hours of the afternoon, I was stuck thinking a lot about how I would be feeling if I didn’t know that my thirst was temporary, if I didn’t know down to the minute when I would be able to quench it. As it was, knowing gave a sort of thrilling edge to its overall, soul-destroying awfulness, but any illusions I might have held about using it to build a capacity for dealing with thirst are fantasies. There is no capacity for dealing with it, whether you’ve done it 3 times or 30, just like there is no capacity for dealing with having your tongue cut out. You just hope that it doesn’t ever happen to you and if it does then nothing can prevent you from being utterly screwed.
The only thing better than that last minute before you drink, as the prayer call rings out, with your skin and your thoughts all buzzing with the anticipation of gulping down a big plastic cup of something liquid, is possibly the minute after that, when you do it.
I always drink too much, too soon – this is the way it goes. It’s hard to stop; smart people drink from small cups, they pace themselves. Stupid people, like yours truly, drink from giant Nalgenes and don’t stop until they’re lying prostrate on the floor with a stomach ache. And such is my offering to the glory of god.
Immediately you begin to sweat, of course, something which you haven’t really done since 1 pm. Other things you have ceased to do with ease hours ago include blinking, and/or focusing your eyes, swallowing, peeing freely and licking your lips. Interestingly, one night I was having Yusef explain to me the meaning of a word he had used, and all that I was getting was that it was something like, ‘to snarl’ or ‘to bare one’s teeth’ which I thought was pretty dumb until I later realized it referred to the condition (which in English we feel no need to name) where one’s teeth are so dry that one’s lips keep getting stuck on them.
Do I get any respect for fasting? Well, results are mixed, but generally no, not that I want it. I’d actually prefer that no one really talk about it either way, because people that are all over it and encouraging make me feel queasy about my ulterior motives, and the people who deny me with ‘you’re not fasting’ just make me angry. ‘Okay then,’ I say, ‘then neither are you.’
To be fair, it can’t be easy for them to decide whether this ‘Christian’ who fasts but doesn’t pray or go to mosque is making a mockery of their faith, or whether he is only trying to understand them better. It doesn’t help that I don’t even know which one is closer to the truth.
When I go next door to Mohamed Ali’s, we break fast (officially) with shniinmwasi m’a it-tsuum?” (how are you with the fasting?) which like questions about the rain the heat and the cold, all have their little season in the sun, Christmas tree-like, before being packaged away until the next, identical year.
Fatimatou looks grave as she pours tea and answers me with, ‘Ramadan mtiin’ (Ramadan is strong/hard), “Huwe vaater-ne” (it tires us). She shakes her head, not unhappily, and gives me my little caisse of tea. Then a giant stainless steel bowl of shniin. Yusef gives me a pillow to recline on, and asks me if I ‘thirsted’ today, which is a question that I still find amusing, because, really? Are you kidding me? No, I’m a mountain spring over here. But that’s just the way things go, and you reply ‘mashallah, mashallah’ Unless of course you were on the brink of death today, and then we can talk about that.
The oddest thing of all, is that for something which, in the end, consists of a month of slow, parched days of torture, Ramadan has a pretty good rap. In the same breath, Yusef will tell me that today he got so thirsty that the hours seemed endless and then flash me a look with his lambent eyes and grin ‘Ramadan Zeyn!’ (Ramadan is great). It would be inadvisable to say anything to the contrary.
Young men, for whom fasting at 17 or 18 is a sign of manhood as one might well imagine, love to be flamboyantly exhausted in the afternoon, and come plop themselves and their dry red eyes, in a heap on my patterned plastic floor mats. I love to needle them and say ‘I don’t understand why you’re fasting – you’re just a child’ or, ‘here, let me make you some tea’. Actual children, like my often bratty, but useful friend Cheikh, will sometimes lie and say that they are fasting and I just roll my eyes.
One thing that sets me apart, out of thousands, from everyone else is the fact that I don’t go to the ritual reading/recitation of the entire Qur’an, which is called it-terewah. Each night everyone gathers at the mosque to listen to a recitation (or to recite themselves) of a portion of the Qur’an, and throughout the month the entire thing is strung out in its meandering, mellifluous beauty.
As for me, I would love to go to the recitations (people are constantly asking me) if I were able to go strictly as an impartial observer, but I know much better than to think that is possible. In fact, one of my larger regrets about my time here, is that I have not learned nearly as much as I would like about Islam and its many practices, because I’ve been burned so many times that I know not to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
So while everyone else goes to it-terawah even Mohamed Ali’s three daughters who never venture out after dark, I stay behind with the simmering pots and the soft moonlight, lying curled on my side dreaming of fruit salad. When Mulbarka, the husky and fabulous, not-young-but-prematurely-elderly matriarch stays with me (which is often) she lies moored in the middle of her wooden bed of sticks, (a tabourit) chanting and humming and singing the name of god, the safe, the merciful, the beneficent, ‘Yaa, mulaane il aaviya, Yaa mulaane il aaviya!’ She will groan out painfully when making a difficult maneuver such as fluffing her own pillow. The rest of the time she casually sings bits and fragments of various songs in her Julia Child-like falsetto, whose lyrics generally contain little more than the word ‘al-Lah’, and passes the time in her rather world-weary yet dreamy, opiate-esque fashion.
Her hair is like an iron-grey puff of dirty cotton under her ubiquitous, thread-bare veil.
One frequently used method of coping with thirst is to bathe, although this is somewhat ironic because doing this involves one putting water everywhere except where one actually wants it. It’s a little like being really tired and then occupying yourself making a beautiful bed in which you cannot possibly sleep. And yet, it does strangely help, if only by making the thirst so acute that it is somehow easier to bear.
Aside from bathing proper people will often dump whole buckets of water over their heads, clothes and all (a sure sign that they are fasting) which in fact is just about the most lovely, rejuvenating feeling one can get outside of a swimming pool. Or a Corona with lime. Neither of which are things Mauritania offers.
As the month goes on, the moon balloons out to become like a pearly floodlight in the sky. It’s really so lovely, moonlight. I’m sorry, I can’t get over how I never knew it, living all those years under all those roofs that we work so hard to build. Then suddenly one day they are taken away, and there is nothing between you and the austere sky, and the moon grows and opens up to illuminate everything that was always happening below it, like the life under a rock.
The children play noisy soccer on these kinds of nights in a vacant plot between me and the market, and every sound carries. I can tell who each one is by their laughter, by their harsh, barking shouts and admonishments in that prematurely adult tone, which everybody learns to learn from the first day of life, the one in which affection has been masked and replaced by a smirk, so that no one will ever find it.
Ramadan is expensive, and no mistake. Meat (in some form or another) and potatoes every night in tajiin, and endless kilos of sugar and tea, do not come cheaply, but I suppose the terrifying idea of a god who cares would make the splurge seem worth it. I don’t know where the money comes from – we have no savings worthy of the name, animals are the only banks and instead of account numbers they are branded with the sinewy letters of Arabic.
Awkwardly, I ran out of money during the month, and so even though I ate with them every night the only money I had to contribute to my neighbors was stored inaccessibly in my bank account, 4 hours away. I made up for it by eating very little, and trying to hide the fact from their inevitable protests that I should eat more, something which is easier to do before the moon waxes, when the location of one’s hand in the communal bowl is anyone’s guess.
Money is such a dirty subject anyway, anyhow, no matter where you go in the world. About a month after I first moved in next-door to them, my neighbors just started sending their daughters, one by one in a veiled parade, bringing me unasked-for bowls of food every day. Because I could not bring myself to talk to them about money, fearing as always, embarrassment and tactlessness, I just started to give them little gifts of sugar, onions, peanuts and dates. Then I started giving them food and tea. Then just a lot of tea. And then one day, because I could no longer stand the feeling that I was being a burden, I took the chance and included a little white envelope filled with ougiyas along with the tea, labeled in unable-to-be-read-by-them-French, ‘pour la famille de Mohamed Ali ould Assweylou, and that was that. Now I give them white envelopes of cash in a bag of tea every month and we’ve never said a word about it, which is just how I like it.
On night 27 of the holy month of Ramadan, the reciting of the Qur’an comes to a close and absolutely everyone goes, except me. I was snoozing on the tabourit when they returned and was woken up by Mohamed Ali sprinkling droplets of cold, Qur’an-blessed water on everything in the compound that seemed to need it - the tent, the sand, the goats, the house, the pots and pans, and, apparently, me.
So now, after all this time, I have been blessed. Thank God.
Two nights ago, there was a shooting star so bright, that as it burned in the sky and fell behind my back, casting its greenish glow on the wall of Mohamed Ali’s house, I thought it was the light from a car. When I turned to face it I was just in time to catch it snapping out of existence forever.
Now is Ramadan.
If you don’t know what that is, then look it up (I would have had to), because it’s a shame we all don’t know a little more about each other. I’m fasting this year as a result of accident and pridefulness more than anything else. By the third person who asked me if I was going to be fasting, I found myself saying ‘yes’ just so that I wouldn’t have to endure the embarrassment of answering ‘ no’ .
Hardly what the prophet must have had in mind, but we are who we are. Surely it goes without saying that any of the appropriate religious reverence is, in my case, absent, and that I find such beliefs - that the omniscient creator of an unimaginably gargantuan universe (in comparison to which, of course, we are smaller than a bugger in an electron’s nostril) should or could give a celestial crap about when, what or how we eat/drink - patently absurd if not insane. Nevertheless, there is something about the concepts of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘stoicism’ and ‘struggle’ that are as irrationally appealing, at times, as addictions.
The first day - I spent it frolicking, (really) in the waterfalls which flow from miles and miles away over the cliffs to collect in a modest pool, the first and only time I got to do so this year, because the rains were so short that the waterfalls have already evaporated. It rained about 3 times here, and I missed 1 and ½ of them, though this probably for the best, because you see, my house is broken.
Thirst is …. interesting. I mean surely it’s obvious but it’s the thirst which gets you; hunger is nothing. Everyone knows that humans can live an inordinately long time without food, what is it, a month? Two? Without water you’re dead, or wishing you were, before the sun can rise twice. Well, here anyway. The thought of ‘thirsting to death’ probably holds a colder sense of horror for everyone than comparable forms of death, (what are comparable forms of death?) maybe partly because in addition to being unimaginably bad, it’s also rare. I mean, who dies of thirst? Of course fasting is hardly the same thing, yet my point is that it’s like tiptoeing around the lip of the same terrible canyon. In the late, endless hours of the afternoon, I was stuck thinking a lot about how I would be feeling if I didn’t know that my thirst was temporary, if I didn’t know down to the minute when I would be able to quench it. As it was, knowing gave a sort of thrilling edge to its overall, soul-destroying awfulness, but any illusions I might have held about using it to build a capacity for dealing with thirst are fantasies. There is no capacity for dealing with it, whether you’ve done it 3 times or 30, just like there is no capacity for dealing with having your tongue cut out. You just hope that it doesn’t ever happen to you and if it does then nothing can prevent you from being utterly screwed.
The only thing better than that last minute before you drink, as the prayer call rings out, with your skin and your thoughts all buzzing with the anticipation of gulping down a big plastic cup of something liquid, is possibly the minute after that, when you do it.
I always drink too much, too soon – this is the way it goes. It’s hard to stop; smart people drink from small cups, they pace themselves. Stupid people, like yours truly, drink from giant Nalgenes and don’t stop until they’re lying prostrate on the floor with a stomach ache. And such is my offering to the glory of god.
Immediately you begin to sweat, of course, something which you haven’t really done since 1 pm. Other things you have ceased to do with ease hours ago include blinking, and/or focusing your eyes, swallowing, peeing freely and licking your lips. Interestingly, one night I was having Yusef explain to me the meaning of a word he had used, and all that I was getting was that it was something like, ‘to snarl’ or ‘to bare one’s teeth’ which I thought was pretty dumb until I later realized it referred to the condition (which in English we feel no need to name) where one’s teeth are so dry that one’s lips keep getting stuck on them.
Do I get any respect for fasting? Well, results are mixed, but generally no, not that I want it. I’d actually prefer that no one really talk about it either way, because people that are all over it and encouraging make me feel queasy about my ulterior motives, and the people who deny me with ‘you’re not fasting’ just make me angry. ‘Okay then,’ I say, ‘then neither are you.’
To be fair, it can’t be easy for them to decide whether this ‘Christian’ who fasts but doesn’t pray or go to mosque is making a mockery of their faith, or whether he is only trying to understand them better. It doesn’t help that I don’t even know which one is closer to the truth.
When I go next door to Mohamed Ali’s, we break fast (officially) with shniinmwasi m’a it-tsuum?” (how are you with the fasting?) which like questions about the rain the heat and the cold, all have their little season in the sun, Christmas tree-like, before being packaged away until the next, identical year.
Fatimatou looks grave as she pours tea and answers me with, ‘Ramadan mtiin’ (Ramadan is strong/hard), “Huwe vaater-ne” (it tires us). She shakes her head, not unhappily, and gives me my little caisse of tea. Then a giant stainless steel bowl of shniin. Yusef gives me a pillow to recline on, and asks me if I ‘thirsted’ today, which is a question that I still find amusing, because, really? Are you kidding me? No, I’m a mountain spring over here. But that’s just the way things go, and you reply ‘mashallah, mashallah’ Unless of course you were on the brink of death today, and then we can talk about that.
The oddest thing of all, is that for something which, in the end, consists of a month of slow, parched days of torture, Ramadan has a pretty good rap. In the same breath, Yusef will tell me that today he got so thirsty that the hours seemed endless and then flash me a look with his lambent eyes and grin ‘Ramadan Zeyn!’ (Ramadan is great). It would be inadvisable to say anything to the contrary.
Young men, for whom fasting at 17 or 18 is a sign of manhood as one might well imagine, love to be flamboyantly exhausted in the afternoon, and come plop themselves and their dry red eyes, in a heap on my patterned plastic floor mats. I love to needle them and say ‘I don’t understand why you’re fasting – you’re just a child’ or, ‘here, let me make you some tea’. Actual children, like my often bratty, but useful friend Cheikh, will sometimes lie and say that they are fasting and I just roll my eyes.
One thing that sets me apart, out of thousands, from everyone else is the fact that I don’t go to the ritual reading/recitation of the entire Qur’an, which is called it-terewah. Each night everyone gathers at the mosque to listen to a recitation (or to recite themselves) of a portion of the Qur’an, and throughout the month the entire thing is strung out in its meandering, mellifluous beauty.
As for me, I would love to go to the recitations (people are constantly asking me) if I were able to go strictly as an impartial observer, but I know much better than to think that is possible. In fact, one of my larger regrets about my time here, is that I have not learned nearly as much as I would like about Islam and its many practices, because I’ve been burned so many times that I know not to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
So while everyone else goes to it-terawah even Mohamed Ali’s three daughters who never venture out after dark, I stay behind with the simmering pots and the soft moonlight, lying curled on my side dreaming of fruit salad. When Mulbarka, the husky and fabulous, not-young-but-prematurely-elderly matriarch stays with me (which is often) she lies moored in the middle of her wooden bed of sticks, (a tabourit) chanting and humming and singing the name of god, the safe, the merciful, the beneficent, ‘Yaa, mulaane il aaviya, Yaa mulaane il aaviya!’ She will groan out painfully when making a difficult maneuver such as fluffing her own pillow. The rest of the time she casually sings bits and fragments of various songs in her Julia Child-like falsetto, whose lyrics generally contain little more than the word ‘al-Lah’, and passes the time in her rather world-weary yet dreamy, opiate-esque fashion.
Her hair is like an iron-grey puff of dirty cotton under her ubiquitous, thread-bare veil.
One frequently used method of coping with thirst is to bathe, although this is somewhat ironic because doing this involves one putting water everywhere except where one actually wants it. It’s a little like being really tired and then occupying yourself making a beautiful bed in which you cannot possibly sleep. And yet, it does strangely help, if only by making the thirst so acute that it is somehow easier to bear.
Aside from bathing proper people will often dump whole buckets of water over their heads, clothes and all (a sure sign that they are fasting) which in fact is just about the most lovely, rejuvenating feeling one can get outside of a swimming pool. Or a Corona with lime. Neither of which are things Mauritania offers.
As the month goes on, the moon balloons out to become like a pearly floodlight in the sky. It’s really so lovely, moonlight. I’m sorry, I can’t get over how I never knew it, living all those years under all those roofs that we work so hard to build. Then suddenly one day they are taken away, and there is nothing between you and the austere sky, and the moon grows and opens up to illuminate everything that was always happening below it, like the life under a rock.
The children play noisy soccer on these kinds of nights in a vacant plot between me and the market, and every sound carries. I can tell who each one is by their laughter, by their harsh, barking shouts and admonishments in that prematurely adult tone, which everybody learns to learn from the first day of life, the one in which affection has been masked and replaced by a smirk, so that no one will ever find it.
Ramadan is expensive, and no mistake. Meat (in some form or another) and potatoes every night in tajiin, and endless kilos of sugar and tea, do not come cheaply, but I suppose the terrifying idea of a god who cares would make the splurge seem worth it. I don’t know where the money comes from – we have no savings worthy of the name, animals are the only banks and instead of account numbers they are branded with the sinewy letters of Arabic.
Awkwardly, I ran out of money during the month, and so even though I ate with them every night the only money I had to contribute to my neighbors was stored inaccessibly in my bank account, 4 hours away. I made up for it by eating very little, and trying to hide the fact from their inevitable protests that I should eat more, something which is easier to do before the moon waxes, when the location of one’s hand in the communal bowl is anyone’s guess.
Money is such a dirty subject anyway, anyhow, no matter where you go in the world. About a month after I first moved in next-door to them, my neighbors just started sending their daughters, one by one in a veiled parade, bringing me unasked-for bowls of food every day. Because I could not bring myself to talk to them about money, fearing as always, embarrassment and tactlessness, I just started to give them little gifts of sugar, onions, peanuts and dates. Then I started giving them food and tea. Then just a lot of tea. And then one day, because I could no longer stand the feeling that I was being a burden, I took the chance and included a little white envelope filled with ougiyas along with the tea, labeled in unable-to-be-read-by-them-French, ‘pour la famille de Mohamed Ali ould Assweylou, and that was that. Now I give them white envelopes of cash in a bag of tea every month and we’ve never said a word about it, which is just how I like it.
On night 27 of the holy month of Ramadan, the reciting of the Qur’an comes to a close and absolutely everyone goes, except me. I was snoozing on the tabourit when they returned and was woken up by Mohamed Ali sprinkling droplets of cold, Qur’an-blessed water on everything in the compound that seemed to need it - the tent, the sand, the goats, the house, the pots and pans, and, apparently, me.
So now, after all this time, I have been blessed. Thank God.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Conge part III
We parted on the opposite shore with a thoroughly unanticipated and awkward little hug, and promised to meet up later.
After several hours we emerged from the dark and rainy woods into a small town, and they led me, half asleep, into a low, tin-roofed little shack with long plywood tables plastered with old contact paper, and little benches, and no room anywhere, and Guinean music from a boombox. It was after midnight and everyone was eating rice with red or green sauces, so naturally I did too. This is simultaneously one of my least and most favorite things to do, to be as intolerably conspicuous as a siren, to pop up like a weed in places no one could have been expecting to see me, and to appear blankly unaware that anything is out of the ordinary. What the hell is a farm boy from Upstate doing in the midnight of a Guinean forest? It is important to betray no unease, though still better to have none, so as I commandeered a space on a rough bench, I returned any curious looks with one that said, "What?", and rested my head world-wearily on one hand as I spooned rice into my mouth with the other.
I had my first experience with the mythical 'cafe noire' of Guinea, but found that it got cold too fast because the cups were so small, and something about the sweetness tasted rotten.
In Boke, I spent the whole next day sleeping in a damp hotel filled with clumsy and musty wooden furniture. Because, unlike Mauritania, Guinea has trees from which to make such things, I found myself over and over in hotel rooms crowded with needless and tacky headboards and end-tables, thinking, 'what in the hell could I put in this giant cabinet?' I'd take the lazy austerity of a Mauritanian mat, or a simple bed and chair with clean lines over these boastful, awkward imitations of god knows what, anyday. That evening I watched their stangely shorter and fatter goats grazing endlessly on greenness, as I walked the long and hilly road toward the central town, where I ate fried plantains with piment sauce, which are peerless.
I found a little restaurant and when I walked in the young waiter greeted me like he had been expecting me. I thought I had made a mistake. "Ohhh," he said smiling, " le grand, le grand!"
The treatment is relatively common from people who are either exceedingly ebullient, or who want something, and though normally I find it irritating, or am at best indifferent to it, something in his eyes was honest and well intentioned. His name was Jibreel, like the angel. He wore corduroy pants. There was no one else there all night, except a couple on motorcycles who left early. I was the only customer. I drank Skols, a Guinean beer, and treated Jibreel to one orange Fanta after another as he sat in the chair beside me with his feet up and talked endlessly. They they fried me up a big fish which I picked out from its icy bed in the freezer.
On the way out Jibreel caught me a moto-taxi, just a quick whistle to a figure gliding by in the darkness and almost before I knew what was happening, the shadowy driver mumbled 'montes' and I did, and we sped away. It was raining just a little, the clotted clouds were streaming through the sky, the moon glowed green. Had I ever been on a motorcycle before? Maybe not. In truth, the motos they have here are closer to a dirt-bike than a Harley, but so much the better; what could be more thrilling than popping around on a zippy, svelte little craft, clutching the driver's tight-muscled tummy, the wet wind in your face, and feeling more alone that you ever thought possible? If there are better ways to traverse distances, I don't know of them. The taxi brought me right to my door, and I think I tipped him in gratitude. At second glance, the moto-man appeared to be about 14, but it didn't matter. I stumbled back to my over-furnished room and slept.
Conakry is a bit of a hole, to be honest, even though surely it can't compete with the holest of holes, our very own Nouakchott. Still, it seemed at times like just one long autoway, branching off into other dirty autoways, which branched off into confusing, slummy backstreets. But I know nothing.
I arrived in the rain, or rather just before it. This was to be a recurring plotline - it seemed to rain about every 3 hours. Clothes I washed took 2 days to dry, in Mauritania its about 30 minutes. I ducked under an overpass for shelter, along with several other random characters, including one young, sparsely mustachioed teenage guy on crutches, (or was it a wheelchair?) who managed to get me to give him some cash. Normally, I don't give to beggars, (if you do you will never stop, you will be bombarded by problems you can not fix) but he was extra spunky. I don't think he said two words, in fact, neither of us did. Our negociations were done all in the eyes.
After a while, a cab came like a chariot of dubious worth, and soon me, the distinguished Peul woman in the back, and the driver were all energetically trying to figure out where in the hell I was going. This happens all the time here, no one (including, and especially, cab drivers) knows where anything is in their own city, though they will nevertheless try very hard to help you get there. This is in varying degrees infuriating and endearing. When you ask the driver if he knows the "Mission Catholique" he will either lie and say yes, or with refreshing honesty say, 'no, just get in'. The taxi's window handles had all been broken or removed. This happens all the time here, too. The car was stifling and humid, the rain outside making it feel like I was on the inside of someone's science experiment. Worst of all, like always, I was the only one who seemed to mind. I kept tugging on my collar and staring at the broken window handles lie a crazy person. All of my nightmares since coming here involved riding in cars with every window rolled up. That is a joke, but just barely.
The Mission Catholique is exactly what it sounds like (good luck finding one of those in Mauritania) and it's inhabited by real live nuns, (not withered old white ladies, but young and beautiful African women) with habits and everything. Though, unlike their 'Sound of Music' counterparts, they wore, instead of dour navy drapes, light, sky-blue habits with crisp white short-sleeved blouses, pleated periwinkle skirts and silver cross necklaces. How lovely to come down, each morning, to a long wooden dining table, peopled with these pious figures in blue, and assorted travelers (of which, I, improbably, was one) and exchange polite, non-commital 'bonjours' and help oneself to some simple breakfast - coffee and milk (all from various powders) some bread and synthetic butter in a yellow tub. Why did it remind me, strangely, of my child hood, and the farm and worn countertops? There must have been some non-nun maid scrubbing floors with bleach. There must have been a framed picture of our absurdly white, anemically wraith-like savior on the wall, him looking up through the two wooden floors, the roof, and the mango canopy, to the sky.
The nuns, despite their cheery get-ups, made me feel bad for something I wasn't sure I did. What are you supposed to say to a nun? Once, when I was checking-in, the woman who sat down across the desk from me put her hands together and I spent a terrified moment thinking we were going to begin by praying. Do I have to pass a test to be able to stay, I wondered? I guess this is something that's more of my problem than theirs.
I went out to find a bit to eat and snagged some beef brochettes which are little kebobs of grilled meat and onions, and the harrassed-looking young woman I bought them from slid them off the stick for me onto a little bit of brown paper, gave me some piment when I asked for it, and then I sat down right there on a little blackened bench in the middle of the sidewalk and ate them. It wasn't very much so I had her hit me again, but brochettes do not disappoint.
This is something else, incidentally, that you will never find in Mauritania, in fact we have no street food whatsoever. The most you will find sold on the street (aside from produce) are peanuts (sugared or non) some hard candy or little packages of biscuit cookies. Then there are things like greasy beignets for travelers or children, because those are two groups of people who are routinely allowed to break rules.
And so the rule itself seems to be that it is rude to eat in front of others who are not eating, which is totally accepted and abided by, though I can't remember ever specifically learning it or being told so by anyone. I remember when I first came to Nouakchott I was so excited to find a corner epicerie who sold a reasonable approximation of a 'Nutty-Buddy' with out the nuts, (which, though good, are less important than the ingeniously delicious 'waffle cone') and then accordingly frustrated when I had to wait to get back to my room each night to eat it, my first ice-cream dessert in six months, for fear that someone might see me under the glow of a random streetlight and then feel disadvantaged because they wanted some too.... I laugh now when I think about how much I cared, because now I'm all, "screw those ice-cream-less freaks! I'm so (culturally) integrated I'm un-integrated!" But I supposed I'm honestly not that much of a bad-ass because I would still never eat the 'Nutty-Buddy' in broad day light. Some things stay the same.
To be continued...
After several hours we emerged from the dark and rainy woods into a small town, and they led me, half asleep, into a low, tin-roofed little shack with long plywood tables plastered with old contact paper, and little benches, and no room anywhere, and Guinean music from a boombox. It was after midnight and everyone was eating rice with red or green sauces, so naturally I did too. This is simultaneously one of my least and most favorite things to do, to be as intolerably conspicuous as a siren, to pop up like a weed in places no one could have been expecting to see me, and to appear blankly unaware that anything is out of the ordinary. What the hell is a farm boy from Upstate doing in the midnight of a Guinean forest? It is important to betray no unease, though still better to have none, so as I commandeered a space on a rough bench, I returned any curious looks with one that said, "What?", and rested my head world-wearily on one hand as I spooned rice into my mouth with the other.
I had my first experience with the mythical 'cafe noire' of Guinea, but found that it got cold too fast because the cups were so small, and something about the sweetness tasted rotten.
In Boke, I spent the whole next day sleeping in a damp hotel filled with clumsy and musty wooden furniture. Because, unlike Mauritania, Guinea has trees from which to make such things, I found myself over and over in hotel rooms crowded with needless and tacky headboards and end-tables, thinking, 'what in the hell could I put in this giant cabinet?' I'd take the lazy austerity of a Mauritanian mat, or a simple bed and chair with clean lines over these boastful, awkward imitations of god knows what, anyday. That evening I watched their stangely shorter and fatter goats grazing endlessly on greenness, as I walked the long and hilly road toward the central town, where I ate fried plantains with piment sauce, which are peerless.
I found a little restaurant and when I walked in the young waiter greeted me like he had been expecting me. I thought I had made a mistake. "Ohhh," he said smiling, " le grand, le grand!"
The treatment is relatively common from people who are either exceedingly ebullient, or who want something, and though normally I find it irritating, or am at best indifferent to it, something in his eyes was honest and well intentioned. His name was Jibreel, like the angel. He wore corduroy pants. There was no one else there all night, except a couple on motorcycles who left early. I was the only customer. I drank Skols, a Guinean beer, and treated Jibreel to one orange Fanta after another as he sat in the chair beside me with his feet up and talked endlessly. They they fried me up a big fish which I picked out from its icy bed in the freezer.
On the way out Jibreel caught me a moto-taxi, just a quick whistle to a figure gliding by in the darkness and almost before I knew what was happening, the shadowy driver mumbled 'montes' and I did, and we sped away. It was raining just a little, the clotted clouds were streaming through the sky, the moon glowed green. Had I ever been on a motorcycle before? Maybe not. In truth, the motos they have here are closer to a dirt-bike than a Harley, but so much the better; what could be more thrilling than popping around on a zippy, svelte little craft, clutching the driver's tight-muscled tummy, the wet wind in your face, and feeling more alone that you ever thought possible? If there are better ways to traverse distances, I don't know of them. The taxi brought me right to my door, and I think I tipped him in gratitude. At second glance, the moto-man appeared to be about 14, but it didn't matter. I stumbled back to my over-furnished room and slept.
Conakry is a bit of a hole, to be honest, even though surely it can't compete with the holest of holes, our very own Nouakchott. Still, it seemed at times like just one long autoway, branching off into other dirty autoways, which branched off into confusing, slummy backstreets. But I know nothing.
I arrived in the rain, or rather just before it. This was to be a recurring plotline - it seemed to rain about every 3 hours. Clothes I washed took 2 days to dry, in Mauritania its about 30 minutes. I ducked under an overpass for shelter, along with several other random characters, including one young, sparsely mustachioed teenage guy on crutches, (or was it a wheelchair?) who managed to get me to give him some cash. Normally, I don't give to beggars, (if you do you will never stop, you will be bombarded by problems you can not fix) but he was extra spunky. I don't think he said two words, in fact, neither of us did. Our negociations were done all in the eyes.
After a while, a cab came like a chariot of dubious worth, and soon me, the distinguished Peul woman in the back, and the driver were all energetically trying to figure out where in the hell I was going. This happens all the time here, no one (including, and especially, cab drivers) knows where anything is in their own city, though they will nevertheless try very hard to help you get there. This is in varying degrees infuriating and endearing. When you ask the driver if he knows the "Mission Catholique" he will either lie and say yes, or with refreshing honesty say, 'no, just get in'. The taxi's window handles had all been broken or removed. This happens all the time here, too. The car was stifling and humid, the rain outside making it feel like I was on the inside of someone's science experiment. Worst of all, like always, I was the only one who seemed to mind. I kept tugging on my collar and staring at the broken window handles lie a crazy person. All of my nightmares since coming here involved riding in cars with every window rolled up. That is a joke, but just barely.
The Mission Catholique is exactly what it sounds like (good luck finding one of those in Mauritania) and it's inhabited by real live nuns, (not withered old white ladies, but young and beautiful African women) with habits and everything. Though, unlike their 'Sound of Music' counterparts, they wore, instead of dour navy drapes, light, sky-blue habits with crisp white short-sleeved blouses, pleated periwinkle skirts and silver cross necklaces. How lovely to come down, each morning, to a long wooden dining table, peopled with these pious figures in blue, and assorted travelers (of which, I, improbably, was one) and exchange polite, non-commital 'bonjours' and help oneself to some simple breakfast - coffee and milk (all from various powders) some bread and synthetic butter in a yellow tub. Why did it remind me, strangely, of my child hood, and the farm and worn countertops? There must have been some non-nun maid scrubbing floors with bleach. There must have been a framed picture of our absurdly white, anemically wraith-like savior on the wall, him looking up through the two wooden floors, the roof, and the mango canopy, to the sky.
The nuns, despite their cheery get-ups, made me feel bad for something I wasn't sure I did. What are you supposed to say to a nun? Once, when I was checking-in, the woman who sat down across the desk from me put her hands together and I spent a terrified moment thinking we were going to begin by praying. Do I have to pass a test to be able to stay, I wondered? I guess this is something that's more of my problem than theirs.
I went out to find a bit to eat and snagged some beef brochettes which are little kebobs of grilled meat and onions, and the harrassed-looking young woman I bought them from slid them off the stick for me onto a little bit of brown paper, gave me some piment when I asked for it, and then I sat down right there on a little blackened bench in the middle of the sidewalk and ate them. It wasn't very much so I had her hit me again, but brochettes do not disappoint.
This is something else, incidentally, that you will never find in Mauritania, in fact we have no street food whatsoever. The most you will find sold on the street (aside from produce) are peanuts (sugared or non) some hard candy or little packages of biscuit cookies. Then there are things like greasy beignets for travelers or children, because those are two groups of people who are routinely allowed to break rules.
And so the rule itself seems to be that it is rude to eat in front of others who are not eating, which is totally accepted and abided by, though I can't remember ever specifically learning it or being told so by anyone. I remember when I first came to Nouakchott I was so excited to find a corner epicerie who sold a reasonable approximation of a 'Nutty-Buddy' with out the nuts, (which, though good, are less important than the ingeniously delicious 'waffle cone') and then accordingly frustrated when I had to wait to get back to my room each night to eat it, my first ice-cream dessert in six months, for fear that someone might see me under the glow of a random streetlight and then feel disadvantaged because they wanted some too.... I laugh now when I think about how much I cared, because now I'm all, "screw those ice-cream-less freaks! I'm so (culturally) integrated I'm un-integrated!" But I supposed I'm honestly not that much of a bad-ass because I would still never eat the 'Nutty-Buddy' in broad day light. Some things stay the same.
To be continued...
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Another thousand words
Idoumou, up close 
Some reclining palms
Myself and others in St Louis
Mahmoudy with (my) radioMonday, December 24, 2007
Snappy Holidays
Hi everyone,
Colton
My favorite picture of my neighbor Yusef and Khatiri (the latter's not a soldier, but dresses like one)
Catching Baay smoking (I promised not to show this to anyone in El Qidiya)
This is Daa making a puppy dog face
An uncomfortably close picture of me which Yusef snapped somehow.
Some of my guys working on a house (they are throwing dirt/cement to make the roof)
Some more of my best pals pose in the palmery, in their fancy new bou-bous for the recent fete.
I hope you and yours are doing well. I'm in Nouakchott for the Christmas season, on the prowl for good food, and at least one hot shower.
Here are a few more forgettable pictures of my life in Mauritania (the life's not forgettable, the pictures are, just to be clear). Anyway, hope it serves to break up the monotony of my sprawling, drawling posts (of which I hope to have a few more up soon).
Until then, don't eat too much fatsos. And use any and all free time you may have this season to write me letters.
Until then, don't eat too much fatsos. And use any and all free time you may have this season to write me letters.
With love,
Colton
My favorite picture of my neighbor Yusef and Khatiri (the latter's not a soldier, but dresses like one)
Catching Baay smoking (I promised not to show this to anyone in El Qidiya) 
This is Daa making a puppy dog face 
An uncomfortably close picture of me which Yusef snapped somehow.Some of my guys working on a house (they are throwing dirt/cement to make the roof)Some more of my best pals pose in the palmery, in their fancy new bou-bous for the recent fete.From left (top row) Ali, Ahmed, Heydallah (bottom) Yusef, Mohamed
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