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!