No place

The other day Yusef came over.

We're in Tijikja now, so he's no longer my neighbor. He lives with his aunt and young cousins in a little run-of-the-mill house, over in an outlying section of town called Arguub.  Arguub means ‘tendon’ which I thought was a weird name for a neighborhood, until someone explained to me (demonstrating) that it meant, specifically, ‘Achilles tendon’, - the one that connects the heel to the leg- and then I decided that this was even weirder.

Before he came over, he called me to let me know he was coming. Last month, I bought him a used (okay, probably stolen but don’t judge me) telephone from Nouakchott. Ahead of time I put out a casual smattering of magazines on the table (we just got a table! This is literally the best thing in my life right now). I displayed them, nonchalantly, as though they had accumulated by chance, just in case the conversation sagged (it’s good to have a back-up plan). But in reality I had to cull the magazines scrupulously to make them Mauritanian-appropriate, ensuring that they weren't peppered with scandalous pages of feckless American hussies.

Okay, just kidding. But seriously, not every magazine that arrives in the care packages make the cut -no ‘People’, no ‘Us Weekly’ and definitely no 'Stuff' magazine (look it up). That leaves us basically with, like, The Economist and Worldview, the mind-numbing Peace Corps quarterly, neither of which are replete with pictures (he can’t read English of course) so sometimes I just throw in the hoochy magazines and figure it will be good for him – builds character.

Nine months ago, Yusef came to Tijikja to live with his aunt’s family, and study for the bac or college entrance exam. It's today, in fact. He finished school two years ago (he’s 24) although he is allowed to continue attending, like any other student, for some reason I don't entirely understand, but which I think has something to do with "connections".

He’s already taken the bac three times, and failed each one. And I don't think he'll pass the one this afternoon, either. This feels like an awful thing to say - a betrayal- but I think it’s the truth. This is not because he’s stupid. He’s not. He is, in fact, rather smart. It’s because education in El Qidiya is a tremendously un-funny joke, and because the situation in Mauritania generally is hardly any better.

What's more, I have, at best, limited faith in the integrity of the bac as a legitimate exam. Take this: frequently, young people that I tutor informally in English will bring me copies of the English sections of past bacs. Almost always, they are riddled with careless, amateurish errors, or filled with arcane phrases and tortured wording, which any native, or even competent, English speaker could have plucked out in 30 seconds. Seriously Ministry of Education? You couldn’t find one native speaker to proofread the national college entrance exam?!

English portions of the test take the form of text paragraphs and subsequent analysis questions, but the topics of the texts are apparently chosen by aliens. Two that come immediately to mind, were, respectively, about "Neuroscience", and "Cryogenics".

Okay, hold up. These are students that live in a poor desert nation, often under a tent, surrounded by animals. The majority of them have never seen a computer, never been inside a modern hospital, and most likely they have never constructed even the most basic sentence in English. Now you’re giving them texts filled with words like "synapses" and "liquid nitrogen"? Talk about a testing syllabus, and an entire government agency, divorced from reality.

This is to say nothing of all the shiny new (paperback) textbooks, recently put out by the Ministry of Education, filled with colorful animations, and cartoon-ish, laser-printed characters, that are written entirely in French, a language most of the students I see carrying them cannot read! This is akin to me trying to learn science through a book done entirely in Spanish. No matter how well the material is presented, I’m still just going to use it as kindling.

Anyway, Yusef misses his family terribly, in a heartbreakingly unabashed way. His experiment here in Tijikja, (which, btw is about four, grueling, off-road hours away from the village), is his first extended stay away from his family and his home in his entire life. Again, he is 24. He has never been to Nouakchott, not even once, and it's hard to explain how significant that is to someone who doesn't live in this country. Nouakchott is the only place in the nation that even approaches modern Western civilization, and it doesn't even approach it closely at all. Like, binoculars recommended.

Yusef doesn't have any photographs of the people he left back home because he doesn't own a camera. Over the years, his family has accumulated an arbitrary rainbow of snapshots of loved ones and relations (including one of me), but these are kept inside the house in a cheap plastic photo album to be brought out and perused only sporadically.

But I have pictures. Before I left El Qidiya, I tried, with limited success to snap un-awful photos of those people I wanted to remember. I assure you, this does not refer to everyone, but it most certainly includes all of his family, his mother, his sisters, most of his friends. I hooked up my snazzy, decadent digital camera to Ellie's computer and we had a little show right then and there, like a traveling theater.

As the photos came up, he got that surprised, big smile on his face, like the one a baby gets when you tickle it, the one only he can make, and then he put his head down a bit, and looked away a little and laughed, his mouth wide, and covered his mouth with his hand.

Yusef is one of the sweetest people I have probably ever known, in a sense. It was really very touching, and funny and sad to be witness to such an obvious, unstudied display of emotion, which is something I'm quite sure I've never expressed in my life, unless it was in anger. I showed him how to peruse the pictures - I thought that the left and right arrow buttons on the keyboard were something he could handle - and I went to make us some tiny, sweet glasses of tea, like the good Mauritanian I have so painstakingly become. 

I miss you when wheels turn

This was written about a week ago. Many many things to write about Mali, and they are going to come, when and if they come at all, in non-chronological order. Sorry for spelling and grammar mistakes, but this was done quickly, and my brain has holes in it.


I'm in Segou.

Segou is an elegant, quiet, too-dignified to be threatening town (despite being the ancient center of the Bambara empire) on the banks of the Niger River. Yesterday I arrived after four hours curled on a foul bus seat, brown and soaked with grime and the old sweat of legions of previous occupants (sorry, that's gross), the air inside the miasma that is the only logical result of clusters of humans, being in spaces which frequently approach or exceed our own body temperatures.

On the way, during one of an almost endless series of stops, I ate 3 small bananas and two bars of a sort of thin, sesame seed wafer, conglomerated by honey and perhaps other things, which was impossibly good, much better than anything sold from the top of a little girl's braided head has any right to be.

Otherwise, I mostly slept in a sweaty doze of half consciousness listening to, among other things, Soulajboi (forgive me) in my earphones, oddly juxtaposed with the staticky Malian music videos, B movie quality, playing on the one lone tv screen, with their highly stylised, almost kabuki-like gestures expressing emotions which I, not speaking Bambara - much less the siren-shrill nasal variety which singers use-, could only guess at. The stars are all highly gussied up Divas in shiny cloth and nuclear war-ready hairdos, their colorfully robed back-up dancers swaying and prancing about in the odd, it-would-be-geeky-were-it-not-so-earnest moves which are their signature. Tupac, O iconic one, rhymes, sharp as a razor, in my earphones about "just my luck that I be fuckin' with the wrong one" while the grand dame of Mali pans out her up turned hands in front of her beseechingly, before clutching her heart and averting her trowel-caked make-up'd eyes in some inexpressible sadness. Life is strange.

Segou is unequivocably beautiful, by almost any standard, but to a degree to which anyone who had not lived in Mauritania for a time, or maybe just anyone who isn't me, couldn't really get. Even its errors are correct. (I just stole that from Nikki Giovanni, so sorry). I feel extreme jealousy of, mixed with my characteristic defensively arrogant disdain for, the Americans who live here, and who I'm convinced don't appreciate it, but that's the way it goes. It is, indeed, one of our things, (but how many of those things there are is both, the quadrillion dollar question, and, as of yet, deeply, darkly undiscovered by yours truly). Humans are cellularly, impossibly bad at imagining either the future, or other, worse presents, and so we settle into our own little slotted situations, all along the spectrum of conditions, triumphing and bitching at all our petty and profound challenges, respective to our niche, no group being, in general either happier or more miserable than others, and blocking out all visceral (not intellectual) knowledge of all the other infinite levels above and below, separated by nothing more than the skin of a bubble. It's in our blood, it seems, which is at once despair inducing and beautiful.

The trees have a lot to do with it (back to the beauty) honestly, though not everything. They line the boulevards. They are, in fact, what is meant, that little picture in your head, when you say "tree lined boulevards", tall, tall, tall, old growth crooked green-capped trunks of knotty, world-wise, slumping character. I don't know what these trees are called, though they are of course not Neem, for the most part because, (though I love you!) Neem is largely personality-less in a workmanly way. Instead these trees are magicians. It's much too easy, (apparently) and not at all new, to personify these giant, lurching boughs shading the streets, as benevolent protectors, but maybe there are worse things to do with them.

Last night I took a walk down to the Niger River- it is 2 minutes away- to watch the sun set, though it was hiding behind a giant, impromptu cloud formation the size and shape of a cropped mountain top, so...so much for that. Instead, I watched the river, which was in no uncertain terms an irridescent silver-gray which bled periwinkle blues from frayed, floating edges.

It was really lovely. Honestly, it was so beautiful that it made me uncomfortable. I seriously kept shifting positions on the cement, sun-warmed sidewalk, cross-legged, and then knees up, and then arms akimbo and all such nonsense. It seems I don't know what to do with things like that. I mean, what do you do with beauty? I don't know how to meditate -I'm not Zen (Jesus, I am so not Zen, though I can do a reasonable imitation of it) - or to even begin to quiet my mind. I can not 'take-in' peace as an entity. I can't cry (no joke) from some sort of transcendent 'joy' but even if I did, I'd probably stop again almost immediately from sheer embarassment at all the weird pathos.

So instead, I just 'gave it an hour' (meaning a few minutes) -which is one of those Hassaniyan expressions that sounds awkward when translated because of its sheer no-frills kind of accuracy, which I've grown to depend on - watching the two lone fisherman (I'm not making this up) messing with their net -tall, black, and thin sillouhettes (sp?) standing in their crescent-shaped dugout canoe like illustrations in some book you might have read before bed a long time ago.

The young men nearby, down below, took their evening baths in the river, demonstrating that interesting truth that even dirty water can make you clean(er) and I watched them while simultaneously trying to not seem like I was, until I became unavoidably conscious of being a (perhaps more than) vaguely creepy voyeur (the difference between tourist and voyeur is much, much smaller than we like to admit) and so I got up, with neither ceremony nor grace, and left them alone with their honest splish-splash.

to be continued......

Exits

Hi everyone,

I'm in Mali. More specifically in a town called Mopti which is a busy, dirty little thing on the banks of the Niger River, so everyone get their maps out. Everything is fine, wonderful, awful, beautiful, vibrant, exhausting, exhausting and exhausting.

Besides that, I just wanted to freak everyone out a little with a security message that our County Director sent out a few days ago about an accident involving a bus, and some people, one of them being another Mauritanian Peace Corps volunteer. This is the same bus route that I will be taking to get back to Mauritania in about a week. Presumably it will neither be the same bus, nor the same driver but one can never tell.....


Hello Mauritania Volunteers and Trainees:

Please excuse the interruption. I wanted to take a moment to brief you on two issues that may be circulating in the general PCV discussion forums:

First off, as many of you may know, a Mauritania Peace Corps Volunteer was attacked (.......blah blah blah, this is something else......)

Secondly, early this morning at approximately 04h00 a bus traveling from Bamako to Nouakchott was involved in a serious accident 15 kilometers West of Kiffa. The driver reportedly fell asleep at the wheel and the bus rolled off of the road. One Mauritania PCV was traveling on the bus at the time. I am grateful to be able to report to you that the PCV was not seriously injured and is doing fine. Sadly, three Malian citizens were killed in the crash and 10 others were seriously injured. The Mauritanian national information service published an article on their website (see attached).

So anyway, there is that. This will almost probably most likely maybe not happen again, but if I die in a horrible crash, just know that it was worth it, and I love you! (and at the time I was probably really hot, tired and uncomfortable anyway, so it was almost surely an improvement).

-Coltie

the superiority of the unseen to the seen

I keep trying to write short entries more often, but apparently that’s not in the stars.

Mauritanians are neurotically messed about color, and no doubt.

Not that there is anything new -either here or in the rest of the world- about that, but I wanted to mention it. One (namely me) could draw some vague parallels between Mauritanian and American societies, or I suppose any other society that had an extended period in the past of enslavement by one group of another, and in which those classes continue to live together today, working and interacting together constantly in ways that are weighed down, or at least influenced, consciously or unconsciously by all their fucked up past shit.

Anyway, Mauritania is a racist society, to varying but mostly significant degrees, with a lot of it being perpetuated by so called “white Moors” (who are not white) though of course not all.

The Haratiin or black Moors are composed, ethnically, of various black African tribes (one might guess that these are those which are located geographically in the region even today, like Fula, Bambara, Wolof, Malinke and peeps like that, but I’m not an expert), which were captured and enslaved during the previous millenia by Moorish and Berber tribes across the Sahel. Don’t ask me how this happened, because I tend to think of Moors, probably to fallacious excess, as nonviolent, all-bark-and-no-bite pansies, who come to me complaining about paper cuts and couldn’t manage a successful takeover of Vermont, but surely those were different times.

So modern day Haratiin are Moor in basically every way- culture, language, habits, dress- differing only in skin color.(There does exist a spectrum of colors among black Moors, but commonly people are grouped into either: ekHal, which means "black", or aHmar, which actually means “red”, but also “brown” in some instances. And also “purple”. And “pink”.) I used to think that they were nicer, or at least a little easier to get close to than WMs but I no longer think that. They may be slightly more open and less uptight than WMs, taken in general, but this really depends on the degree to which they retain an influence from black Africa, which varies a lot.

Also, BMs can be easier for me to get interested in work and projects in the gardens because they actually have gardens and do work. In a lot of Arabic-derived societies like this, manual labor is commonly looked down upon, and sure enough many WM’s are lazy to the upteenth, because they can be. Those who have money leave the manual stuff to the BMs. In fact, my friend Dahan the other day was telling me about how the ideal, though not always attainable, is for women to actually do nothing at all but sit under the tent and make two (one ingredient) meals per day, make tea, stuff themselves until they become (sexy) bloated barges, and sleep. This is common, which, first, is like, “gag me”, and also really sad. But I’m not judging. Ha ha.

Anyway, BMs (omigod, I just realized what an awful abbreviation that was –sorry) often don’t have the option of not doing stuff because they are lower class, poorer and powerless-ish, so they do manual labor with me and everything’s great.

OK, I wasn’t going to talk about “The life and times of race relations in Mauritania”, I just wanted to talk about skin lightening creams. Yes, skin lightening creams, which you can find anywhere here and which are widely used. These are little tubs of cream which are purported to, not surprisingly, lighten one’s skin color, using a mixture of harsh chemicals which maybe include hydrogen-peroxide? and blah blah, other stuff. (What am I, a chemist?) I clearly have no experience with this junk, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is a small percentage of Americans using them. Also, I think it’s a thing in some Asian countries, maybe India, and probably anywhere else in the world where there are people with color who are trying to achieve some kind of Casper-like ideal. Anyway, I’m just talking about Mauritania.

This is a woman thing, right across the board too -white Moors, black Moors, black Africans- and these creams are basically horrible, abrasive things to put on your skin, that bleach out or destroy pigment, obviously. Black women come out looking all rosy and roughed-up, like they just went crazy with a Brillo pad, and white Moors end up looking like the scary pale victims of vampires. Neither one looks either attractive nor anywhere close to normal, and every time I see this I get heartbroken and angry and sorry and other things.

I once saw a container of one particular brand of cream, and it had two pictures of an Indian-esque woman, one where she was dark and frowning heavily, and the other one, taken presumably after she had slathered herself with this lotion, where she was fair and smiley. So, really subtle messages coming through.

In El Qidiya, this isn’t such a giant issue simply because it is incredibly isolated and these products are not even available to be purchased in the boutiques, even if most people had the money to buy them with, which they don’t. Furthermore (honestly) El Q is hardly the fashion forefront of Mauritania, so there is not so much concern about image. It's more like Appalachia to Nouakchott’s NYC. Although that analogy is almost heart-stoppingly weak, so I’ll say Albany.

Nevertheless, people have still imbibed this notion that being black, or at least really black, is bad, and women often ask me if I can give them something to ‘take the black off’. This is actually what they say (in Hassaniya of course) and though I sometimes try to argue with them a little, I mostly realize that there is no way I could alter any of their received ideas about color, even if it was any of my business, and I usually try to change the subject as quickly as possible, because it makes me feel skeevy. It’s embarrassing, I mean, I’m embarrassed for them, because while they religiously cover every square centimeter of their bodies with layers of fabric, they are simultaneously revealing to me something even more personal: a pathology.

People also ask me if I have some kind of special soap, which will make them really ‘clean’ (masguul) –which I think is a rather thin euphemism, and I’m like, “Girl, I use the same crap you do, and it comes in brick-sized blocks for 200 ougiya. Get a grip”.

Occasionally, this works in my favor like when people are bugging me about marriage (always), and someone else will come in and say “Oh, he doesn’t want to marry in El Qidiya, he’s waiting to go back to America and marry an American (read: white) girl”, and I think, uh…right, that’s why.

I don’t mean to overdramatize this: Mauritanians are hardly the first group to do messed up shit to their bodies in the name of “beauty”. So while I think it’s an important and interestingly dysfunctional feature of the culture -which, though sad, is a rather logical outgrowth of having a slave legacy and a lighter-complexioned group in power- its not like people are killing themselves left and right over this or living miserable lives. They’re not, of course. So it’s a small, if intriguing, symptom of a much larger, nuanced and contradictory condition, but if you think I’m going to talk about all that here, you’ve lost your mind.

Another interesting thing: while everyone makes a big deal over me not being Muslim (it’s a really big deal. It’s the deal), that doesn’t prevent them from creating their own little hierarchies of worth, even within the Muslim framework: WMs unsurprisingly hold themselves above BMs and black Africans, but even worse, BMs hold themselves above black Africans too (also Muslim) who are referred to collectively as li-kwar, and are, in truth, basically their distant cousins. It’s fucked, although, hardly unexpected or even unnatural, considering how humans have always acted towards other humans (you’re not in my group, I’ll cut you.) We will, if not always then at least a lot of the time, find ways to follow our biological imperative and divide ourselves into little groups, even inside of bigger ones like nation, religion, race, language. I mean, I’m doing it right now. So of course we all do it, Westerners are, or at the very least were, clearly just as culpable as everyone else. Though this excuses nothing.

The other day in Tijikja (Okay, this was like 6 months ago) I went into a WM shop to buy carrot seeds and the old man said, “OK you should continue to come here, don’t buy from those shops”. He gestured across the way. I said “What’s wrong with those shops?”, to which he replied, “They’re Haratiin shops.” And then I asked, “What’s the difference between you and the Haratiin?” And he said simply, “Oh. One is good, and the other is bad.” Guess which one is which.

In El Q, people will also tell me that I shouldn’t spend so much time with BMs (with whom I actually do spend most of my time) and when I ask why, they hold out their forearm and point to it, saying, “This.” They mean skin color. “This is better than black. Black is bad.” It sounds like I’m simplifying these statements, but this is truly as complex as their arguments are. And then when I get fed up with their crap, I’ll sometimes hold out my own arm and say, “ Oh, okay. But you’re darker than me. That means I’m better than you, right?” And then someone will chuckle nervously or get flustered and tell me that I don’t understand.

Okay, okay. But maybe I do.

There is always a shortage of things

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.

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

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--

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.

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…..

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..."