Azilal

In Azilal I stayed with Natasha. It is a beautiful town in the mountains that is postcard ready with snowcapped mountains, lots of green and waterfalls. One of my first days we walked around and picked fresh olives. It was also cold, and small. The cold was difficult because it’s the kind of cold that gets into your bones cause due to the poor insulation it’s just as cold inside as outside. Consequently, there is nowhere to be warm but in your bed under several covers. It’s also a small town, and therefore shuts down early. Not much to do at night, especially when it’s cold outside.

Yet it was in Azilal that I ate best. Natasha cooked much amazing food, including another of the greatest meals of my life (and yall wonder why I was in Morocco for a month). We went to the slaughterhouse where we bought a chicken, saw it murdered before us, and then defeathered and gutted. The first night Natasha made—I cut some tomatoes or something too—some delicious fried chickens with its left side. But the next day she outdid herself with a Moroccan couscous dish with the right side of the chicken.

Eating Colonialism

So clearly there are a couple of things I always complain about like relaxed and fake hair, food, TV, music videos, etc. and I will always blame them on capitalism, racism, patriarchy and colonialism. It’s time to complain about food again. The eating patterns here were thoroughly colonized by the French. I have already complained a lot about the bread, butter, cheese, Nescafe, chocolate spread and powdered milk for breakfast. It is just too French for me (although it is low-budget French). I would prefer an American breakfast, eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes, waffles, cereal, fruit, etc. or some platanos sancocha’os o mangu con queso frito o salami. Although, I knew that rice was also introduced by French I was happy eating it until one day I stopped to observe the grains before putting them in my mouth. I realized that they were much shorter than the rice we eat in the US. I figured that rice wasn’t the same everywhere until I remembered something Oke mentioned a long time ago. They eat broken rice here. Broken rice is basically the waste produced from preparing and packaging white rice for market. Some brief online research (and you know you can always believe what you seen online) revealed that in the US broken rice was mostly used for brewing beer and is now used for pet food. We’re eating dog food. It’s all imported from Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries and it’s advertised as 100% quality broken rice. Why do they eat it then? Because it’s cheap. According to the website it’s low in nutrients and fiber, but high in “energy” content, i.e. it’s empty carbs meant to fill the tummy as quickly as possible.

What I have to do more research on, is why they don’t eat more Senegalese couscous which is already the most feeling substance I have already put in my mouth. Made from ground millet, a little bit of Senegalese couscous (it’s brown rather than yellow like Moroccan couscous which they also eat here) with some stewed fish or beef is guaranteed to put you to bed and make you forget any thought of hunger for several days. Millet is the traditional grain that was the main staple (they would have it with real milk for breakfast, I have no idea how they got through their days eating this stuff more than once daily) before the French introduced them to rice and bread. The imported rice is cheaper than the native produced millet although I get the feeling that there is also a social status aspect to it in that people associate millet with villagers and rice as more urban and therefore prefer rice.

But the French really did a good job overall here. Their influence is all over the cuisine. For example, people here love everything here super-sweet even though sugar is also something they didn’t know before the French. I can go on, they love mustard, mayonnaise, and gruyere. Could anything be more stereotypically French than mayonnaise, mustard and gruyere? Could the French colonial policy to “educate” and assimilate West Africans in order to create “black Frenchmen” have worked any better?

Caravan of Peace

We were hungry and decided to leave the gare and walk to the town to get some lunch before moving to our next destination. We started walking down the road not knowing how far the town was, but less than five minutes later we saw a busload of white folks getting off in front of a modern looking building randomly built by the side of the road. Figuring that where there were white people there was food we walked in to what we saw was a Ministry of Youth and Employment building. There were some drummers and we could see that it was some kind of event for a group of French people. After some welcoming remarks they started placing bandanas around each other’s necks like they were crowning people. Then to our disappointment they all headed back to the bus without eating. We were getting ready to leave as we were approached by who seemed to be their leader. He looked upset we crashed his peace party, but was nice enough to get one of the local hosts to help us find a restaurant. Consequently, three teenage boys led us into town. Two of them even help hands part of the way; it was really cute. In town they took us the kind of place where the food is so cheap it’s almost the same price as a can of coke but where you also need to keep the thought of food poisoning and diarrhea out of your mind and just eat.

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.

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.

Pork and Beer

• Every Wednesday here Odette’s boyfriend and his friend come over and we all go over to a local bar, La Fontaine, for pork and beer. It is still a combination I am getting used to, especially since like I said before the bar also doubles as a butcher. It is still weird to enter a bar and immediately see and hear a butcher hacking at huge chunks of meat. We eat the pork grilled over firewood and seasoned with onions, mustard, pepper and lemon.


• Another peculiar food custom here is that unless you ask the server not to do it any sandwich you buy in Dakar will come with french fries in it.
  
  
  
  

Food Again

• First of all, the friend's name is Mounass, meaning I was not that off.

• Second, I have spent so much time writing about the food here (if you haven’t gotten that food is a big deal for me, it is. My life is organized around food, and I never skip meals.), but I have yet to write about the most distinctive aspect of eating here for most people raised in the US: how the Senegalese eat. Food is always served in a large tray and everyone eats together. There are no individual plates, so you have to share. I think it is a great antidote to the way many Americans eat, alone in front of the TV. Instead the Senegalese way of eating emphasizes eating as a social event, more than just mere necessary consumption as it is too often seen in the US. It requires a whole different approach to eating as we are all used to being to eat everything and anything on our plate. But what do you do when there is just one plate? My French teachers has told me funny stories of foreigners (always North Americans or Western Europeans, with the random Japanese thrown in) eating in Senegal where one hijacks the fish leaving everyone else with no fish to eat, and then another steals the carrot leaving no carrot for everyone else to eat, and so on until they all get the idea that they are supposed to share. How do you share? Usually one person—the most senior person in the circle—will distribute everything or you are in charge of distributing whatever ends up on your side of the plate. So for a plate like chebuyen where there is a base of rice topped with fried fish, lettuce, manioc, carrots, eggplants, sweet potatoes and peppers, if the carrot ends up on your side you dice it and distribute it to the other folks eating by tossing it to their side of the plate. It is always fun to be mowing down on rice and then having some random chunk of fish or potato just fly onto your spoon. That’s the other thing too, we eat with spoons. Traditionally (and I hear still in most villages) people used to eat with their right hands (the left hand is taboo, but more on that later) but now many people in Dakar eat with spoons. In my host family only the person who cooked the meal (invariably a woman) eats with her hand, in this case she will also distribute the food. I actually prefer it that way because as someone who is used to eating with fork AND knife I am not used to slicing food with only one utensil. I am always scared to cut items like the manioc because I am afraid the food is going to jump off the plate onto me or—more embarrassingly—onto one of the people closely sitting next to me. As a social event the meal also reflects many of the status hierarchies and customs characteristic of Senegalese culture. For instance, if there is a large party the adult men will eat separately from the women and children, and of course the women will serve them first and include the best of the fish or meat, while the women eat later and less. Visitors—even if they are female—also receive the “star” treatment, with the distributor launching the best parts of the fish or meat your way. You also get first crack at the peppers. They are also disappointed if you don’t clean up half the plate. And like I said the most senior person will often be the distributor, so that you can easily observe the hierarchy by noticing who distributes; the “man of the house” always distributes, but in his absence it will be his wife or brother and then onto his children starting with the oldest. I like how they eat here; I think I am going to force my family to all eat from one plate as I (as the man of the house) launch huge pieces of platanos their way.


• After three weeks in Senegal I have officially had more fried fish here than I had ever had in my life before coming here.


• It is ridiculously hot.


• No clubbing this weekend. I spent Friday and Saturday nights glued to my laptop watching all of Season One of the Greatest Show on Television, “The Wire.” If you have not seen it, you should; although, I warn you that it is highly-addictive.


• On an utterly random note, I was listening to the album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” by Public Enemy yesterday (I know it came out when I was 4 years old, but it is still better than lots of what passes for hip hop music nowadays) and heard the song “She Watch Channel Zero?!” where Flava Flav admonishes black women to "Yo baby, can't you that's nonsense you watchin'? Look, don'tnobody look like that, nobody even live that, you know what I'm sayin'? You watchin' garbage, not'in' but garbage. Straight up garbage. Yo, why don't you just back up from the TV, read a book or som'in. Read about yourself, learn your culture, you know what I'm sayin'?" Does anyone else see the great irony in this coming from the “Flava of Love” star?


• The little girl has now shortened "Good morning whitey" to just "whitey." Everytime I see her she just exclaims "whitey!" and I look around like "oh, shit where whitey at? I should probably hide." And then I remember that she is referring to me. It fucks with me every single time.

Viva Cabo Verde!

• Last night my host sisters invited me to another Cape Verdean concert at Saint-Michel an old Catholic school downtown. It was not really a concert; it was more like a community festival for religious reasons with live music. The whole event was reminiscent of the Festas Juninas in Brazil, not least of all because it is June, and we were celebrating the Day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Basically, Dakarois love Cape Verdeans (or at least their music). I too am starting to really love Cape Verdeans mostly because they remind me of Dominicans. They are mixed Iberian and West African also, and therefore look a lot like Dominicans. The first time I went to the Fleet Center (TD Bank North Center, whatever “Big Bank Owns Boston, until the next merger” Center, or whatever they are calling it now) I saw a group of dudes that I could have sworn were Dominican and then they started speaking funny, or funnier than Dominicans usually speak. I found out later those people were from an archipelago off the West Coast of Africa called Cape Verde; ever since then I have been intrigued. Here in Dakar I have gotten as much Cape Verde as I can handle. But it is more than the physical resemblance, Cape Verdeans have some of the same “flair” Dominicans have. For example, the announcer had the same kind of whiny voice many Dominican women have, and although she was overweight she still wore some tight white pants and a glittery tube top with her hair in a pony tail with curls, on a pair of pointy high-heels. I was loving it. Then the main performer, Ivan Paris, also showed up rocking some tight white pants and a turtle-neck even though it was a comfortable 72 F. He also had the world’s sharpest line-up. So Dominican. Then he started singing some cheesy love songs in Cape Verdean kreyol and although they were a minority of the crowd all of the Cape Verdeans started dancing and singing along as loudly as possible. Again it reminded me of that diasporic feeling (the first band was fittingly called “Diapora”) that although we are not at home, and the beer may taste too watery or too dark and all of the signs are in a language we don’t quite understand, but we are going to ignore all of that for a second and just pretend we are not a minority in a far-away land. It reminded me of bachata concerts in NYC. Of course all of the images of a white Jesus and the constant talk of Jesus and the Virgin Mary (did you know she was a virgin? No, well I am going to mention it every time she comes up. She was a virgin. Yup never had sex. Not even once.) made me feel like I was three beers away from Santo Domingo. Next month they are crowing Miss Cabo Verde, I am definitely going to try to make it although I hate beauty pageants.
• This brings me to another problem: the “Paris/New York seal of approval.” Ivan Paris is a big deal because he lives and performs in Paris and of course he emphasizes this by using “Paris” as his last name. Here everything that comes from NYC and Paris is just that much official. It is the colonized mentality that is so funny when it’s not maddening. Half the clothing stores are either “New York” or “Paris Fashion.” Every fancy restaurant claims to have branches in New York, Paris and Dakar. I feel like I get more love cause I am from NYC, like if I was from Philly or Cleveland or some other city no one would care about me. The next time I fly out here, I am going to fly from NYC with a stopover in Paris so that my trip can be that much more official.
• I don’t know if I have mentioned this yet, but Senegalese love salsa and telenovelas. Talk about reminders of home. Right now the Venezuelan soap opera “La Femme de Lorenzo” is all the rage. And it seems like after Cape Verdean music, the second most popular non-French, non-Wolof music is Cuban salsa, especially among the older crowds. You can hear salsa everywhere, in the supermarket, in restaurants, etc. Which is of course, fine by me. The telenovelas though are awful in any language. That is one cultural export that should have stayed home.
• After the Festa Junina we went to a local bar. In the US we would call it a dive bar, but these Third World bars are much, much more than that. After all the nights of living the “jet-set” lifestyle (Thursday night I went with the white girls to Casino de Port, another lounge that simply defines chic. Plush couches. Alternative, artsy shaped cups. The whole nine. Of course, the only Senegalese people were the waiters and other staff. The moment I walked in I could feel my money flying away invisibly from my pocket.) I was glad to be in such an “unassuming” place. The chairs and table were beat-up plastic. The walls looked like they had been peed on, and probably were. The beers cost a dollar and, no, they don’t hand out you a coaster or even open your beer for you. No cute napkin wrap either. We chilled and had shelled peanuts and beers, and as they starting going in rapid-fire Wolof my mind started wandering and I finally resolved a dilemma that had been bothering me since my latest entry. I said hair weaves are a negative legacy of colonialism, but aren’t all legacies of colonialism negative? I could not think of a single positive thing brought by the French that did not serve to further exploit Africans and make them ever more dependent and colonized (like the usual things mentioned by apologists for colonialism, like modern medicine, schools, railroads and other infrastructure). But surely a sophisticated thinker like myself was willing to admit that nothing in life is ever so “black and white;” surely there must be at least ONE positive legacy to French colonialism. Then it hit me: Peanuts! Peanuts were introduced by the French as a mono-cultural cash crop export to further exploit Senegal, like sugar, cacao, cotton and coffee were used in other peripheral countries. Senegal is still enslaved to peanuts, and I am in no way arguing that the reign of “King Peanut” has brought anything but misery to Senegal. Still, I love shelled peanuts. Shelled peanuts remind me of Dominican Christmases and many late nights by Copacabana Beach eating peanuts and drinking Skols. So there, the only concession I will make to the French, peanuts. The rest is all dependency, poverty and bad hair weaves.
• What separates this “dive” bar from any other I have been to in peripheral countries (Brazil is technically semi-peripheral but I don’t want to get into the intricacies of Dependency Theory quite yet) is that it’s in a Muslim country which makes it extra special. Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol or eat pork. The Islam here is not very Orthodox (a topic for a later date) and many people drink and eat pork, but you can only do either at a bar. That’s right, you have to go to a bar if you want a pork chop. So last night they were all eating what I interpret as chitlin soup. I miss swine, but not enough to have had any of that stuff. My rule of thumb is, if you can’t identify what part of the animal then you probably shouldn’t eat it. I was content with my peanuts.
• Finally, adding to the list of people who should not come to Dakar (no contact lense-wearers remember?), no one who likes peace and quiet. If you think lower Manhattan during rush hour is insufferable then steer well clear of Dakar. This place takes hustle-and-bustle to the next level. Although sadly I have seen worse (Cairo is the worse I have ever witnessed) walking through Dakar is still like a blitzkrieg attack on the senses. Everything comes at you super fast, there is simply no respite. The sidewalks are filled with vendors and hustlers selling everything, batteries, fruits, shoes, T-shirts, weaves, etc. You have to dart, duck, and jump around them, running away from calls of “monsieur, c’est pas cher.” And that is just the human obstacle course, there are also the actual physical obstacles, the random pieces of corrugated metal (is that a really old bumper?), the potholes, the litter, etc. Basically, there is no such thing as taking a stroll through town.
• Food, once more. Dinner is also wack. Breakfast is always French bread, tea, and cheese, Lunch is always amazing and dinner is just a wild card. On good days, it is simply lunch reheated, but on bad days it is some Franco-Senegalese fusion or just random carbs piled together. For instance, last week I had peas and bread, then spaghetti lightly sprinkled with olive oil and fried eggs, then macaroni lightly sprinkled with olive oil and fried eggs, and finally spaghetti, bread and French fries. Yikes! It is like they have not eaten dinner traditionally and are just at a loss as to what to eat before going to bed.