Dakar Village

Dakar is greener now that it has rained, but it still remains a dusty brown place where it is impossible to get fresh air and greenery i.e. it lacks park space. Yet after a cursory search for green space I think I have found something far more interesting than the Senegalese Central Park. My host father always mentioned going to the jardin and last week I went with him to check it out. It turns out that for some reason (I can’t believe that in a city with as tight a housing market as Dakar the real estate developers haven’t gotten to it) there is a village in the middle of Dakar. Now I don’t know how big it is yet, or how aware people are of it, but it was disorienting to leave the city and suddenly enter a village after turning right off a random street where it bends left. If not for the ubiquitous trash—as usual mostly plastic bags, bottles and wrappers along with car tires and the random torn flip flop—and the tall apartment buildings at the horizon I could have confused the lettuce and cucumber fields, the thatched huts and open-air, wood-lit stoves for rural Senegal. I chilled with my host father and his crew of old drunks, one of who got angry at me for trying to learn Wolof instead of Sereer (of course if you ask Wolof people they say that everyone in Senegal is happy speaking Wolof). Another of his friends was “nice” enough to buy me a bottle of “sum sum.” I say “nice” because that stuff is lethal. In the southern more tropical regions of Senegal it is made from distilled cashew. In Dakar Village they make it with water, sugar and yeast which they then boil and distill. They showed me the tall barrels that had already been mixed and were ready to be boiled. It tastes like if you were too leave some bread dipped in water for a week and then drank the water with some gin. In fact they referred to it as “African gin” or “African tequila” depending on which old drunk you ask. My teacher told me that drinking that stuff will make you grow crazy, when they started pouring it out of an old bottle of motor oil I thought he might be right. There are also some pig pens (and the accompanying odor) and some of the old men also have large grills set up to smoke fish. In fact, earlier they had slaughtered a pig and when I showed up, in addition to drinking they insisted that I eat which was cool except that I had to eat with my hand. I am not at all opposed to eating with your hands except that the rice here is so greasy (I am talking Havana-level greasy) that the grease drips down your forearm when you ball it up to raise it to your mouth. Which brings me to an amazing fact:

Against All Odds

No I am not going to tell you a story about how one of these urban farmers managed to make millions from selling smoked fish and now runs an NGO for street children in Dakar. I am of course, talking about myself. I hope I am not jinxing it, but somehow, against all of the odds after being here nearly three months I have managed to avoid diarrhea. I have even managed to avoid its less ugly little sister: upset or queasy tummy. Actually I have been traveling for four months and have either had an incredible streak of good luck or my stomach has turned to iron. I wonder how long my iron stomach streak will last.

Black Madonna

I spent two days and two nights last week in Popenguine, a village at the beginning of the Senegal’s Petite Cote. It’s famous for an apparition of a Black Virgin Mary and is therefore a place where many Senegalese Catholic pilgrims go. We were there for the Day of the Ascension (honestly, although my family is a member of the Ascension parish in Manhattan I don’t know exactly what that means. If I remember my catechism right, it’s the day Mary ascended directly to heaven, without dying first or something miraculous like that.) which is the biggest day of the Catholic calendar here excepting Christmas and Easter. The village also has some nice beaches. We rented a beach house, bought a case of beer, and had ourselves a good time. I have never been much of a beach person, I figured I was born tanned, I don’t like sand (and when you go to the beach sand gets everywhere, to the point that you will still find sand in your at the bottom of your backpack from that time you went to Orchard Beach in 2004) and I can’t swim. Being in Senegal, however, I have felt incredibly pale and have been to the beach much more often in an attempt to find my “true” color. As a result, the beach is starting to grow on me. This too brief a stay at a beach house confirmed it. I still can’t swim and I still don’t like sand, but waking up to the calm but loud sound of waves crashing onshore is so much nicer than the shrill ringing of my alarm clock. Thursday afternoon I went for a walk along the beach, and with the waves crawling back and forth over my feet I felt like life could not get any better. It would have been a perfect scene for a Club Med advertisement had there not been a line of trash dragged by the tide to the middle of the sand.

The Ascension Day celebration was at some sort of community center. There was an open square lined with plastic chairs with tents to (mercifully) shade the audience. The celebration reminded me that the Catholic Church will pretty much just let you worship however you want as long as you put up a picture of a White Jesus and send your money to Rome. A group of drummers and dancers performed “traditional” music and dance. After the dancers went through the choreographed sets the crowd joined in dancing. It felt rude not to dance so we too got up there and tried to imitate some of the moves. Popenguine is a Sereer village, and the Sereer have (obviously) different music and dance traditions than the Wolof. Unlike the acrobatics of mbalax—which from what I understand comes from traditional Wolof dancing—Sereer dancing is more controlled although no less energetic. After we got tired of dancing Caitlin suggested we try to name the dances; my suggestions: “the gumby,” “the funky African chicken,” “the look-a-mouse-leap,” “the ass-in-the-air-turkey-shuffle” and “the butterfly-pop.”

It also helped that everyone was drinking. I am amazed by how much Christianity here is associated with alcohol. I have an ever-growing suspicion that in an overwhelmingly Muslim country the French missionaries decided that if they let people drink they could attract more converts. I could never imagine people drinking so much alcohol at any Church event in the US or even in the “alcohol-positive” “Land of the Most Self-Hating Black People on the Planet.” And at Protestant events, especially the evangelical ones it is just unfathomable. But people were drinking right in front of the creepy looking white priest. Here it is like being Christian means that you drink and eat pork. My host family is Catholic (and Sereer from the same region as Popenguine) and therefore I have met many Senegalese Catholics and they always stress that yes they drink and yes they eat pork. But when I see pictures of Jesus at the bar I think people are taking it just a little too far. Either way, unlike the US I would love to go to a bible camp here.

Suleymane Faye Pt. 2

Last weekend we also went to see Suleymane Faye perform at Penn’Art again. He surprised me, however, when instead of doing an acoustic set with just him on guitar and someone on the drums, he had a full band with Senegalese drums, a drum kit, bass guitar, keyboards and him on lead guitar. He did a different and even better funk/jazz/rock set. It was cool cause he got really into it and started bouncing off-rhythm to the music with his eyes closed. He reminded me of the drunk rastas I had seen there last time.

SLAM!

Last Sunday night I went with Caitlin and her roommate Rachel to Just 4 U for a poetry slam. I guess it made sense that if hip hop was that big here, slam might have a following too. The event was called Slamicalement, and was headlined by a duo of young male poets born in Senegal but raised in France. I knew they weren’t raised in Senegal because I couldn’t understand their French at all. I hadn’t had a night where I just sat around smiling catching just a word or two in a while, I guess that’s progress. The links between hip hop and spoken word were further reaffirmed when several of the biggest names in Senegalese hip hop showed up and performed. Awadi, Xuman, BMG 44 and other rappers were there and some did a capella rap verses and apologized for not being poets while others did their songs with their beats. There was a random rap group that lip-synched their song for no apparent reason (it’s not like they were being filmed for television or something). The funniest thing about the whole evening is that the MCs kept puncturing the performances by screaming “slam” periodically. The poets tried to engage the audience in call-and-response where they said “slam” and expected the crowd to say the same. I am not a slam expert; but I have never heard of anyone doing that before.


I don’t speak French well enough to have understood all of the poems, but it seemed typical slam faire, some funny poems, some funny love poems, some cheesy love poems and some poems dealing with the politics of identity. Therefore there was a poem about the notorious French shooting of Senegalese WWII veterans that had fought for the Free French that were protesting peacefully for the pensions they had been denied. Then of course one of the MCs tried to hit on my friend. When that didn’t succeed he hit on the three French white girls behind me. It reminds me of the Little Brother song “Yo-Yo” where the underground hip hop rappers criticize the black coffee shop culture launching sexist and homophobic attacks on rappers “trying to battle me with sandals and capris on, come on dawg.” Yet they were completely right when they exposed the hypocrisy of male poets who “at the end of the night are just trying to fuck like me.”

Then it rained and we got rained on. A lot. No cab wanted to go to my neighborhood because the neighborhood before mine gets terrible flooding so it was difficult getting a cab. As soon as I mentioned the name of my neighborhood, and before I could try to explain in my broken Wolof and French that there was another non-flooded way to get there, the cab drivers would rudely drive off. Eventually I got one, and then the guy asked me if I was from Cote D’Ivoire. I said no, but it felt nice. It was the first time I had gotten something other white, and although African migrants get no love here I would rather be a ñak than a toubab. Slam!

Bread Riot Pt. 2

OK, so I didn’t lead a bread riot. Instead I bought yogurt one day last week and then went to the whitey supermarket last week and bought some oatmeal. Casino Supermarkets is some kind of foreign chain, and it’s the kind of supermarket where you can go if you need to get real Duracell batteries, Head & Shoulders, soy milk and well, oatmeal. All of the customers are either white folks buying shampoo and crackers or wealthy Africans perusing the wine section. You can therefore expect to pay a premium for any foreign products you buy. So my Mach 3 razors were $4 more than I pay at Duane Reade. It doesn’t matter because I am happy to have oatmeal for breakfast everyday, even if my family drank all of my milk (and then acted like they “lost” it) and I have to eat it with hot water now.

Second Childhood

I feel like learning a new language is like being a child again. All of the sudden you get reduced from adult banter, like “why are there goats everywhere and how come you are allowed to have animals in your house?” To toddler-level conversation like “thirsty where water?” After 10 weeks here, my French is decent. I couldn’t tell you how to change the battery on your cell phone but I can now construct complex sentences like “I didn’t think you were coming so I left without you.” Now that I speak enough French I have started taking Wolof lessons in French. It’s been hard. The “what-did-you-just-fucking-say?” stares and the “boy-are-you-retarded?” looks have diminished with French, not disappeared by far, but diminished and now it’s hard to go back there with Wolof. It’s even harder cause with French I can at least try to guess what the word might be. This usually entails trying to “frenchify” whatever the corresponding word is in Spanish. It actually works often with the big words, like “colonizar” in Spanish is “colonizer” in French, but when I try the same trick with other words like bed (“cama” in Spanish) and say things like “came” I get one of those “boy-are-you-retarded?” stares (the word in French is “lit”). It’s also really annoying when people tell me how easy their language is. Of course it’s easy for you, you already speak it!

Rastas

• I went back to Penn’Art with my French teacher for a reggae performance last Thursday. The band was good, the instrumentalists were good, and the singer did a good rendition of Bob Marley. The songs were mostly Bob and Alpha Blondy covers, and although they were well done I would have preferred more original material. In fact, the lead guitarist briefly exchanged roles with the lead singer, and I preferred his singing cause he sang in Wolof. The crowd and audience got even livelier. I also always enjoy seeing the various interpretations of Rastafarianism throughout the world. In Senegal apparently being a Rasta means having locks, swaying and bouncing to reggae music, smoking lots of cigarettes and then getting drunk on Gazelle and hitting on my friend repeatedly.
• The next time we heard music at Penn’Art, however, it was a different crowd. A traditional Pulaar (Peul? Fula? Toukolour? at same point the African Union should get together and decide on the names of the various ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, it can get confusing when the colonizers couldn’t agree on names) group was playing. The group featured a singer with a really nasal voice that he used wail like a Senegalized version of the muezzin calls that wake me up every day at 4:45 am for morning prayers. There was a man playing the xalam, the Pulaar banjo that ethnomusicologists claim is the inspiration for the American banjo, which sounds well, like a banjo. The music was really beautiful, but I just couldn’t get into it. It was just too calm, like something that I would want to listen to over dinner but not on a weekend night, like Senegalese "easy listening" or "elevator music."

The Autobiography

• But the colonizing influence is not just present in Senegalese food, the standards of beauty here have also been thoroughly colonized. I have now seen several men with conks, or relaxed hair. Now clearly someone needs to distribute thousands of copies of the “Autobiography of Malcolm X” because conking is just unacceptable. In the US unless you are one of the 4 Ps (Pimp, Preacher, Performer or Politician, which are the same thing when you think about it, right?) you are not allowed to conk your hair. The only exception is if you do it to be funny and even then you must proceed with extreme caution. Yet dudes are walking around here like they are extras in a Little Richard biopic. It seems perfectly acceptable to conk your hair in West Africa. In fact, one of the most famous West African footballers Didier Drogba conks his hair (pictured above). I am going back to the markets to see how many copies of the Autobiography I can pick up and starting handing out as Ramadan presents.
• Although I am seeing a lot of evidence of self-hatred, the Senegalese are still no where near Dominicans. Some people have taken issue with me unilaterally declaring Dominicans to be the “Most Self-Hating Group of Black People on the Planet.” My oldest sister, Sugeni, argued that I have not been to enough countries to be able to designate who is most self-hating and then she pointed to the example of light-skinned Bollywood actresses and the skin-bleaching creams sold in India. First of all, self-hatred is a legacy of racism worldwide therefore unfortunately there are many contenders for the title. All non-white cultures are self-hating to some degree, but we are looking for the MOST self-hating. Secondly, I am limiting the title to “black people” using the Unitedstatesian definition of blackness i.e. “anyone of visible Sub-Saharan African ancestry.” Therefore, India and other non-African cultures are beyond the scope of “our study.” But more importantly, I just cannot believe that anyone can be worse than Dominicans. I may admit to co-holders of the title like maybe us and black Poles or something like that, but I couldn’t fathom self-hatred getting worse. Like what could be worse? Self-genocide? Only if Dominicans decided to murder each other for being black could we sink any lower.

Bachata!

Over the weekend I had dinner at a restaurant by Ngor beach, La Madrague, with Caitlin and Alex two rising seniors at Harvard in Dakar for the summer doing research. I ordered some wack food ( I though I was buying fried calamari, but instead got some weird fish stick thing, the kind of "food" they hand out as public school lunches), but I loved the place because they were playing bachata. Somehow someone who works at the restaurant (I asked who) bought a bachata mix CD featuring Aventura, Frank Reyes, Luis Vargas and a couple of other famous bachateros, although the selection of songs seemed somewhat random. They played the CD several times, so somebody at the restaurant must be feeling it. I just couldn’t believe bachata in Senegal! How cosmopolitan are the people here? I could never imagine a fancy restaurant in the “Land of the Most Self-Hating Black People on the Planet” playing any music that was self-defined as African (merengue remember is Indian music, the Tainos were playing it when Columbus arrived). Actually I can’t even imagine a fancy Dominican restaurant playing bachata. Hooray for Senegal!

Bread Riot

• Through history peasant populations have revolted whenever whatever basic starchy staple gets expensive. In European history this phenomenon was always manifested in the form of bread riots (the problem is still with us, read about the recent “tortilla riots” that took place in Mexico City recently). I intend to organize my own bread riot, not because there is enough but because there is too much. Annoyed, I snapped at my host family last week that I will no long accept bread for lunch or dinner. I just don’t understand the Senegalese obsession with bread. It is cheap and filling, but the Senegalese have had millet (and the couscous made from it) to fulfill that function for centuries now. And they seriously just eat bread as an accompaniment for everything. Once last week dinner was macaroni, onions, and fries and then they handed me bread! I see now how the French have done a marvelous job mentally colonizing the Senegalese. People here love bread, love smoking everywhere, love coffee and love mayonnaise.

• The last example is particularly egregious (although coming home smelling like an ashtray whenever I got out anywhere gets annoying too). It just shows the silliness of stereotypes. In the US, mayonnaise is associated with whiteness (it’s so whitebread) to the point where in the film “Undercover Brother,” “The Man” sent a white woman to give the black male superhero mayonnaise as a kind of black “kryptonite.” The stereotype seemed true when I remembered that my brother-in-law Jashaun, one of the blackest people I know, is fatally allergic to mayonnaise. Sorry to disappoint people, but the Senegalese LOVE mayonnaise. Almost every restaurant I have been to here has put out baskets of bread and mayonnaise as an appetizer. I will hold on to the stereotype and blame mayonnaise (and the watery, sugary, diabetes-inducing tomato puree they call ketchup here) on the French and their ways, rather than admit that black folks could legitimately like to eat a substance like mayonnaise.

Platanos

• Tired of dealing with the Windows 98 computers at the internet place by my house I decided to venture out to one of the handful of places that the Lonely Planet guide claimed had wireless. My professor and I went to Penn Art, a jazz club and restaurant in Point E a wealthy neighborhood here. Things started off poorly. The bus was detoured because of a student demonstration (there were truckloads—literally—of police in the area), and dropped us off far from the restaurant. We then had to walk to through the streets in the late afternoon sun and by the time we got there were soaked in sweat and thirsty, only to find that there was no electricity meaning we couldn’t go online. I figured I may as well have a beer as I wait. I was disappointed because the beer was only mild. I have many criticisms of the “Land of the Most Self-Hating Black People on the Planet” but no matter how awful the blackouts become there you can always get a freezing cold beer. The government can’t guarantee you a job, a home, health care or education, but anyone with 50 pesos has the right to a beer so cold it will make your teeth chatter. Senegal, however, has been unable to deliver on cold beers; the beer is never as cold as it should be. It has also dropped the ball on plantains. I thought I was going to be eating plantains often here, instead I get teased every time I walk through the market and see mounds of platanos only to find out that Senegalese never eat them. Platanos, they say, are for the ñaks. We met some cool people and had dinner with them. It turned out to be my lucky night. I didn’t know but the restaurant serves platanos. After ordering we got into a discussion about platanos here, and one of my new friends was gracious enough to give me the platanos he ordered in return for my sandwich. The platanos made such sweet love to my stomach. I need to make tostones soon.
• After dinner we went next door, to the jazz club section and heard Suleymane Faye perform. He is an eccentric Senegalese folk/blues musician known for his storytelling ability. The jazz club is great, a much more intimate place than the others I have been to in Dakar. The music was awesome, although I wish I could understand the lyrics. Faye would periodically stop and set-up the story or tell jokes and the small crowd would chuckle at his witticisms. I was glad the day ended better than it started.

Where is my space suit?

Sunday I went to downtown Dakar. Now I had been downtown before—the day I went to the markets—but after spending all of the time dodging street vendors, trying to follow my teacher through the maze of market stalls and narrow streets, and looking down to keep from tripping on litter I can’t say I really got to see anything. Therefore, I decided to go on a Sunday when all the markets would be closed. I took the bus down with a friend and was happy to see all the stalls locked up. Except for a few stragglers who shoved paintings, statuettes, perfume, phone cards and watches in my face as I walked, I could actually walk in peace. Even they seemed like they were tired from a week of hustling and weren’t as aggressive as they had been earlier. As we walked calmly through the streets of Medina heading toward the Place de l’Independence, I felt like I was in another country. I couldn’t imagine it: a leisurely walk through downtown Dakar! The impression of being in a different planet was further reinforced when I reached the plaza. I had been expecting a significant difference between the downtown and the rest of the city, but it’s like they are not even in the same country. The downtown looks like the business district of any affluent mid-size city in the US like Stamford, CT or Princeton, NJ with some tall buildings and perfectly manicured lawns, no sand on the streets, no trash, no mbalax blaring from someone’s wedding tent set-up on the street, no one selling pots or car parts or furniture by the roadside, no street vendors, no groups of children playing soccer, nothing like the rest of the city at all. I even saw little, old, white ladies crossing the street in front of the presidential palace (pictured above). It was eerie.

Gringozada

In Brazil a “gringozada” is any event with too many foreigners or gringos attending. Friday night was a gringozada. I went with one of my host sisters to the bar where one of their friends works, expecting to find a regular Dakarois club. Instead, I found myself in the kind of bar where all of the clients are foreign white men and the only locals are the service staff, i.e. exactly where I don’t want to be on a Friday night. The music was awful, mostly class rock (sorry to you classic rock lovers but I didn’t come all the way to Senegal to hear covers of “Jailhouse Rock”) although it did get better when the DJ went through a more typical Dakar set of hip hop, coupe decale, reggaeton and techno before going back to classic rock. I spent the night sitting in the corner, nursing my (expensive) beer and wondering why tourists would go so far to go to then try as much as possible to recreate home. I can understand it on an intellectual level, but sitting there in this bar that could have been anywhere in Europe except for the service staff (and even in much of Europe now, I am sure they would be people of color) it just seemed silly. If you wanted to eat the same fries with mayonnaise and drink a Stella, why not just stay in Brussels?