These are the varieties of love he has known.
Love of mother. Love of sister.
Love of woman, not related to him by blood.
Love of father, and of brother. Love of friend.
Love of country.
It is this last that occupies him, tonight.
Packets of chuura gerrteh, sent across many lands and many seas. A boiling of water, salted first, the pure white crystals settling to the bottom. And then an opening, and a pouring-in, of material created by loving hands in yards next to kitchens, in gaynas worn and hardened by years of use.
Pounded by hands whose hearts are connected to ours, in a parallel world where distance and time do not exist, or if they do they have no effect.
He eats the chuura, and he thinks of Gambia.
A land with a fate tied to a river, tied so tightly that when it came time to decide the shape and size of the land, the deciders used the river, as their starting point, borders rushing away from it on either shore, cannot shot distances away.
He thinks how even now this river is the thread running through the land's center, its heart and its soul, feeding and nurturing its body, on which its people live.
The chuura is a trickling of pink water, that lies in the bowl, with tiny lumps in it. He adds sugar and stirs it. He pours milk on it. He mouths a spoonful.
It is hot.
And when he looks at it where it lies in its bowl, a small cloud of steam rising from it, he thinks of his connection to the country of its origin.
The way the river pulls him back to it, draws him back by a subtle pressure on his dreams, an influence on the direction of their flow, a heaviness in his heart, that is only eased, when he is at home.
To decide to give a life to his country, then, that is the only solution.
A life given to its reforming, its remolding into a finer shape, less coarse. Into a land not only of peace, but of a plenitude.
And to what end? What, then, would such a life have achieved?
He sits over his bowl of chuura, he chews ruminatively, and he sees.
He sees the engines of development, as they traverse the land.
He sees the dirt paths open themselves up to reveal roads, sunlight on shiny tar, barefoot children putting on sandals and getting into school buses that travel the kilometres now free of dust, passing farm women who smile as they turn the handles on taps, their feet no longer torn, or worn.
He sees hospitals spring up where once there were only rocks, and sand, and trees, and children who died, stocked up on sickness, run out of time.
A man and his family, sitting in the living room. The brother from school, his head filled with pictures of falling apples and bewigged men, his first adventures with gravity. The sister thinking about her school trip the next morning, and whether Baboucarr will sit next to her. The mother what to cook for dinner, the fourth meal of the day, from the stuffed fridge.
On the television programs that are of the culture, and promote it, and spread it across the land, bringing the people together.
It is tobaski, and in all the houses there is a bleating of rams. All the children of the land wear new mbubi juli.
Across the land there is a stability of rice, an availability of meat.
The stink of desperation, the odour of need, that has hung in the air so long, has disappeared. And with it has also gone the gnawing in the hearts of the youth, that makes them seek to escape the land in droves, believing there is nothing here for them.
And he sees the beginning of a final goal, one worthy of a life. A social re-engineering, a re-imagining. A rebuilding, from the ground up.
And he finishes his chuura, and getting up puts the bowl in the sink.
And he thinks he knows, what he wants to do with his life.
Showing posts with label gambia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gambia. Show all posts
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
The Gambian Dream
Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about home. What it is, what it means. Of what materials it is constructed, how to go about building it. First start with an empty space, a place where your heart is at peace, and your mind is at rest. Add a comfortable bed, a warm interior. A living room, a TV. Portraits on the walls - your mother, your father. Dead relatives, pictures of your Serign on calendars. And then the people: a wife (or husband) who believes in you, children who give you pride. The rituals of adult life - the visits to the in-laws, the slaughtering of rams at Tobaski. All what is expected of a husband, and a father (or a wife, and a mother). And from all this, somehow, arising a feeling of contentment, greater than the sum of its parts. Going home sometimes in the car driving and listening to the radio you will imagine your wife waiting to eat lunch with you, your kids home from school, watching cartoons on TV before they go to sleep. And though it may only be fleeting still for a moment you will feel yourself and your place in the world, and the Creation and the part God wrote you to play in it - and all will be well. Is that definition true? And if it is, what of location? Does it matter, really, then? Could you not as well build this in Antarctica as in Timbooktoo?
Today was a long day at school. Ramadan and Calculus 3: two things that do not go well together. The old teacher dodders around the class - his voice seems to come from the past, muffled by layers of age, cobwebs and dusty rooms, grandchildren and world wars. He takes his time talking - his breathing measured and slow, the way everything he says begins as an almost tangible thought, slowly turning before our impatient eyes into his words, the mathematical concepts he wishes to convey. He chuckles at his own jokes, and we laugh politely (his jokes are of this kind: even the funniest ones can only be laughed at politely). What does he want from life, I wonder. Is it the same as what he wanted, once upon a time, when he was young and the road of his possibilities still stretched out before him, billboards on every side, advertising everything he could be. The richest man in the world, the cleverest, the one who discovered the cure for cancer, the one who found world peace at last. All the accolades that awaited him, the praise and envy of his peers. Ah you young people and your energy, a friend of mine told me recently. I had just finished excitedly explaining yet another idea that would change everything, and this was not the answer I expected. Yet it was a sobering answer, and the one, I realized later, that I needed to hear. In a way it was the answer that led to this writing.
The malls, I tell another friend of mine, the highways and the cars and the jobs and the money - all these things are a mask, that hide the true form of this land, that disguises from us the final fact: that we are not made for, cannot let down our roots, here. For us hotter climes, for us the "third world" (our home), for us the electric power cuts and the indifferent fire of the Sun, the thunderstorms and the lack of privacy. I say these things and I sound sad, even to myself. Why sad? Why not a rejoicing, in knowing where I aim to be, where I belong? The truth is I say these things and I do not know what they mean. The words are not of my making - they issue through me only, the aftereffects of an emotion which lies heavy in my heart. A strange thing: an aspiration, the beginnings of a hope, and yet at the same tinged with melancholy and not the soaring joy - I would imagine - of the true salvation. Where are the certainty and confidence that is supposed to accompany the epiphanies, the thoughts that burn bright and incandescent, and light the path into our future. My friend is silent, and does not reply, and I trail off in mid-sentence, and sit there helplessly looking at my hands. My thoughts are intense but nascent still, and I cannot quite articulate them to someone else, not just yet.
Once, when I first came to this country, I went to Washington, D.C., to visit a monument. In the morning, after eating a delicious breakfast cooked by a Senegalese man, who we teased half-seriously about opening his own restaurant chain. I do not remember the name of the place exactly - only that it contained a giant statue of Lincoln. And something else: on all the walls were plaques, and on the plaques there were inscriptions. I followed them from wall to wall, reading what they said. And as I read one after the other, it occurred to me that though they all spoke of different events still they were all part of a larger narrative. The story of America, and how great it was, and remains. The story of the heroic men and women who fought every single step of the way for this privilege. And I found myself carried away by it, this narrative, how inspiring it was, how it made you want to be a part of it. And then later thinking about it I saw past the rhetoric, and beneath it I saw just how profoundly powerful this narrative was, how effective, how it had linked men and women across the vast distances of this land and even across time, so though they worked individually and each in their own time and place still their minds were bent to a single purpose. And in my time here this has been the thing I have noticed most: how this narrative, this story - this idea - of the greatness of America is what lies at the heart of the nation. So central is it that every person who wishes to be successful politically - from Obama with his change campaign, to people like Glenn Beck and Palin with their hate-mongering - deploys it to their own advantage. And it all began with a colony determined to shake off the yoke of their colonial masters, the oppressive British - and ended after much hard work with the land of the brave, the home of the free, the greatest nation on earth. This is the story they tell themselves. And though there are dissenting voices, though it does not correlate exactly with history, no matter - it is sufficient for its purposes. The day of the presidential inauguration I watched Obama speak, and heard how he took this narrative and extended it, showing how it could be further refined, toward creating a "more perfect Union". I watched and for the duration of the speech, and many days afterward I thought, what can I not achieve in this country, under this President? The power of story, what it feels like to be part of a grander design, all in harmony, you and everyone else doing their part towards achieving a common goal, a noble goal.
Some - the lucky few - get to create their own narrative. To sit down and in collusion write the story of their nation, a collective dream, a way of being in the World as a people. Not so for us. "Undeveloped", "Third World", "Rampant Corruption", "Despotic Rule", "Tyranny", "Demagogues". Whether you agree with their descriptive veracity or not still you must realize: these are labels others have bestowed on us, and not ones of our own choosing. The personality of a person is an emergent phenomenon, built from the person's dreams, and the narratives the person has created to explain himself and his presence in the World. A country is no different, except in scale: it is built from the consensual narrative created by its citizens. On my last day in Gambia I went around visiting elders, to say goodbye, to have them pray for me. And without exception every single one of them told me the same thing. Torg fa deh! Bull jegeh waat fee yaip. Do not come back, when you have been fortunate enough to escape. They did not speak with bitterness - no one is bitter. We have learnt to joke about NAWEC, and the price of sugar, and how much faster your passport is processed if you buy "attaya" for the officer in charge. We shake our heads wryly, and chuckle at the state of things, and go on with our lives. This is the story of Gambia, we seem to be saying - what can we do but shrug and move on? And if somehow we manage to escape, who would be foolish enough to come back? Would that not be madness?
During the summer I met with people, and started work on a couple of projects. The digitization of government departments, the re-integration of the youth. I spoke with people about my ideas, and everywhere I was met with support and excitement - from the CEOs of tech companies to sunye boy yi sitting drinking attaya, of an evening. I was greatly moved, and filled with a sense of purpose. The first glimmerings of a destiny in waiting - the re-imagination of my country. Out with Gambia the poor, Gambia the corrupt. In with Jollof, richly cultured, filled with a people whose largesse and kindness of heart knew no bounds, who were willing to work hard for the greater good, for a time when our youth would watch the TV, and see on the news how desperate African youth from other countries tried (and died on) the back-way, and say Alhamdulillah, that I am content in my own country. Thank God, that neither I nor any of my friends would give up the comfort of our homes in order to break into our neighbor's houses, where we are greeted with neither friendliness nor welcoming. It will work, I said over and over about my plans. It will work and the youth will be saved, the country will prosper. Repeating this over and over to people I had already convinced, people who would vehemently agree with me. As if I myself needed convincing, and sought it in the faith of others.
In time our narratives come to represent the truth, until the two are indistinguishable. And then how hard it is to change them. The truth, after all, cannot be changed, but only escaped from. And so once our narratives have assumed this air of truth - because, perhaps, we have heard them so many times repeated we have lost all certainty as to their falsehood, we are filled with doubt - we give up on ever changing them. We settle into them, and define ourselves using them. And there lies the great and the sad and the true danger. For it is our narratives which define our actions, and in what ways we will attempt to leave our mark on the world.
I miss my mother, and my family. I miss my boys at T Road, and my Kombo crew, and my Lancaster youth. I miss walking down the street feeling, if not pride, at least a contentment at who I am, and how I am perceived. We like your writing, people tell me, and I smile and I feel rewarded, and I am encouraged to write more. He knows so much about computers, people say, and though this is an exaggeration still it is one I wish to grow into, to fill, and so I learn new technologies, and give lectures at our local youth computer club. Yet all these, on closer inspection, are not enough of a reason to return, when it comes right down to it. The people I miss I could see as many times as I can afford to come on holidays - many Gambians are "based" in Europe, returning every December to all-white parties and with new cars, and perhaps some more progress on the house they are building, to stand empty and as a promise of home, a placeholder for themselves in their absence. And - note that I do not say this in any mean-spirited way, or as a put-down - it is easy to be the best in Gambia at something. We are small, and have had neither the opportunities nor the experience of other nations. And so to excel in a field - whether it be writing or computers or football - one would be served much better living abroad, where good writers - to take one instance - are a dime a dozen, and the people considered emasters are truly dazzling in their virtuosity. Why come home then? I do not know what I would do in Jollof, is a common - and valid - excuse. Where would I work? Where would I live? And then there is the bigger problem, the unnameable one: our political system, and how rotten it is, and how it has somehow managed to infect every arena of our lives. So there is no such thing as staying apolitical - one must swear allegiances, or suffer the consequences. Silence is opposition, and opposition is bad. People are persecuted day and night for their beliefs. At least this is what sites like Freedom Newspaper would have you believe. The situation is irrecoverably bad, their lurid headlines scream at anyone who cares to read them. Yet this constant fear-mongering and doom-saying about our prospects is more a reflection of the minds of the people who write the articles on those websites than of reality which, as usual, is much more nuanced.
In our heads we are all writing the story of our lives, composing and editing it, imagining ourselves in the way we would like to be imagined by other people. Imagine a para and one of the boys fighting, at a Nawetaan match. The same reality for the both of them: two men struggling with each other, a shirt pulled until it ripped, an increasingly hostile crowd, tear gas, match flames under noses. And yet how differently each writes down the story in the book of himself, in his mind. The Banjul Boy: I am a citizen of Banjul, I have my rights, how dare they bring some uneducated fool from up-country and give him power over me? The Para: These Banjul boys have no discipline, they look down on us, spoilt brats the lot of them; bring one to live with me for a month and see how he fares. And both men feel persecuted, and both men feel great indignation. In the narratives you write of yourself you are always the hero, even your bad actions justified, at increasing levels of sophistication. I saw a news article once that spoke of a society in the American south, which was printing leaflets "proving" that contrary to popular belief the owners of slaves had in fact benefited the men and women under their bondage greatly, causing them to begin to get educations and become a bit more civilized. Our narratives do not start and end with us. They stretch back into the past, running over into the narratives of our ancestors, and all that they did. Or did not do. And at the same time our own role changes, we move into the position of ancestor for a new generation, our actions defining them. Our children, and their children after them, inheriting what we have left behind. Sunye maam yi denye baayorn sehn lohor deh, we say, nunye feheh beh toubab yi nah lehn?
What will be said about us, by the generations yet unborn?
A man is ugly and stupid, and shames himself every time he opens his mouth in public. He thinks, I must dress better, I have too little hair, my hands are too big, if only God had made me more handsome. I must listen to the popular ones speak and parrot them. Yet no matter how long he does this for he cannot ever seem to become happy about himself and his place in the world. He is filled with a resigned envy, at everyone who is more "perfect" than him. He lives out his days like this. Until one day he realizes: it is I who decide whether I am ugly and stupid and uninteresting, and not anyone else. Such a little thing, this discovery. Yet it changes the tenor of his life. It is OK if, sometimes, he says things that people laugh at. He laughs with them, and learns. It is OK if he is not the prettiest person in the room, or the most well dressed. He is himself, and he is imperfect and unfinished, and he realizes this and he works at improving himself. He lives happily after that, knowing no envy and no jealousy. And he notices too, that all that he admired in others he himself possesses, more or less, but that he lacked the most important thing: a confidence in himself, a belief, a narrative of his own making that cast him in the light he wanted to be seen in.
Once I used to be scared of my insomnia. The way it stretched on into the night, a flat and empty road, dull and dreary, filled with despair. Like a metaphor for life -and how heavy the rest of my days would seem, as I lay in bed and stared into the black caverns above me. I would drink sleeping pills, and surrender to merciful dreamless sleep before it was midnight. I studied, I read, I went to class. To what end? I did not ever ask myself this seriously, but only had vague ideas of what I would do. A relaxed daydream of one day opening a tech company in Gambia with Serign. All in the future, all to be approached lazily and at leisure. Sometimes what we lack is a sense of direction, of what we ought to do, now that we are here. There are Gambians abroad who have lived in the exact same apartment for ten years, worked at the same low-level job, slept on the same bed, and never aspired for anything. They may know a peace I do not know. But rather I think it is that they lack a dream, have become stuck in their situation, while time carries them along as they stand still. Living out lives of apathy, an undercurrent of desperation. Sometimes I feel that this is the way Gambia is too. Daf kor nampa, people will say, of behaviors. Might as well say chi kow suuf sim judoe la... We inherit our religion from our parents. And we inherit too their dreams of us, whether these become our guiding light or the thing we struggle against becoming all our lives. And from our country, our homeland, what do we inherit?
Ham sa borpa chi jaamu yaala la borka, our Oustasses say. We as a nation are imperfect and unfinished. How mean that sounds, how jaded. Yet look around you and tell me what nation is perfect and finished. Tell me what nation does not have its problems, qualities that its citizens do not like about it. Everyone who leaves the country to go to Europe or America comes back with the same story. How hard it is there, how difficult life is, unlike anything they were ever trained to expect, by TV, or by the common dream of America. For it goes both ways. People create narratives of us, not as detailed as the one they create for themselves. But still having the power to affect our own self-narratives. Ku nyayp tufli nga torye. If everyone you know believes you are a bad person for long enough, you WILL become one. If your fellow nations see you as poor and corrupt and beyond saving for long enough... And so we admire other nations, and look down upon ourselves.
I do not wish to suggest there is no hope. Far from it. We live in a good time, our country full of more promise than at any previous time. There are more Gambian college graduates - and even PhDs - than ever before. And that is only speaking of the educational side of things. Then there are all the Gambians who have traveled abroad and come back - even if not with new skills - at least with an expanded view of the world. Then there are the skilled and educated within the country, who have never traveled. The only Gambian I know who I would call a genius without reservation went to the University of the Gambia, and could do advanced Math problems which I couldn't solve even with the help of a computer. And then there is our greatest untapped resource: all the fine minds, sharp as whips, that have been labelled part of the illiterate majority, their lack of command of the English language a layer of ice frozen and concealing them and their talents. What if, for a whole year, all these different categories of people came together, and set aside their differences, and subscribed wholly to a new narrative of Jollof, one which traced its lineage back to our proud roots, our empires of old, and from thence made its way into the future, our present. A story of self-belief. A reclaiming of the language used to describe us: "forming" instead of "undeveloped", "sutura" instead of "baadorla", "saaku kaatan" instead of "naywe dorleh"? What if we believed this for more than a year, for five years, for a decade, what if we let this become our national dream, our common vision, convincing the people abroad to come home at last, and the ones here to stay - or leave to acquire what skills and knowledge they could, and then return.
One can spend all night, of course, speaking about dreams and narratives. But daylight throws our reality into sharp relief. We do not have that much money. We are such a tiny part of the world. And this will only work if we all do it together - I'm not going to sacrifice my happiness while others enjoy their lives with their families. All common excuses, all in some way based on "facts". Those outside dread returning, those inside think only of escape. What a way to perceive one's country: as a prison - a prison containing all the people one loves, but a prison nevertheless, the visa issuers at the various embassies the only ones who can release us from it, the all-powerful gatekeepers, elevated to almost mythical status. Sitting behind reinforced glass partitions, deciding our fates. Subjecting us to all manner of humiliations, starting out with the assumption that we are liars and thieves, who will do anything to get into their countries, and be a great burden on their social systems, that they have worked so hard to build, over the years. And though we are a proud people we take all this and more. It is not so much that we hate our country - no Gambian would choose to live anywhere else if what they sought existed back home. But what they seek - a chance at a better life - seems only achievable abroad.
We are a religious people. If I asked any Gambian, can God not make us prosperous, their answer would be swift and not even requiring thought on their part: Of course He can! Yet Yaala yaala bey sa torl, our elders say - and though it may sound trite sometimes it is all we have. To do our best, and to know we have done our best. To leave the rest to God - that which is not in our hands. It is not as if this is a new way of thinking. It has always been our philosophy as a people. Suma haalis b dama kor nyaha!, people say with great (and deserved) pride, fog mu am Barr-keh. This family has Barr-keh, people say. Meaning all in the family worked hard to achieve all they have achieved. The closest word to barr-keh is "blessing". But blessing, the word, does not cover everything barr-keh is. There will be the fruit of our labors: that is prosperity, naataangeh. But barr-keh we do not work for - it arises naturally as the result of our toil. And if we all nyaha for Jollof, how much Barr-keh will that be? For Barr-keh is not just external, something from God. That is only a part of it. A larger part is what is inside us, the ability to look at what we have done and think, we achieved this, and no one else.
There are sacrifices involved, of course. It would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. The small conveniences - access to wallmart, and movie theaters, and all the other front-facing products of a capitalistic society. And the big ones - better health care, access to better education. These things seem impossible to live without. Yet it turns out that this is not true. There are people who have returned, with their whole families, and they have survived it. We do not live in trees, after all. And though it is a slow process we are always improving. And as with all sacrifice, soon we come to realize that the things we want are not always the things we need.
A nice paragraph at the end, then, to summarize all I have said. If only it were that easy. If only I could write "let us all go home, and work at developing our country", and pretend that because I am thinking along these lines I am a "better" citizen. But though this is tempting, it is not a position that will in the end achieve anything, except perhaps make me feel better about myself, nor is it a valid one. We all have our own lives, and our reasons for what we do, and who among us has the right to decide for another. There are no easy answers. I cannot say, let us do this and it will save the country - no one can. But I want you, wherever you are, to stop for a moment and imagine Gambia, Jollof, our nation that has given us so much and never complained or asked for anything back. And I want you for a moment to think of her, not as ugly, not as a hopeless case,not as others see her. But also do not think of her as what she is not: rich, or powerful. Here is what want you to imagine instead: Once there was a small country west Africa, home to less than two million people. And this country was a young county, and though she did not possess what other, bigger countries possessed, though she lacked resources, still she held her own, and believed in herself, for one reason: her children, spread all over the world, always had her in mind, and would come back to her, and care for her, and change her into everything she was yet to become.
"Africa dream again", Youssou Ndour sings. All we need to start with is a dream. And then who can stop us.
Today was a long day at school. Ramadan and Calculus 3: two things that do not go well together. The old teacher dodders around the class - his voice seems to come from the past, muffled by layers of age, cobwebs and dusty rooms, grandchildren and world wars. He takes his time talking - his breathing measured and slow, the way everything he says begins as an almost tangible thought, slowly turning before our impatient eyes into his words, the mathematical concepts he wishes to convey. He chuckles at his own jokes, and we laugh politely (his jokes are of this kind: even the funniest ones can only be laughed at politely). What does he want from life, I wonder. Is it the same as what he wanted, once upon a time, when he was young and the road of his possibilities still stretched out before him, billboards on every side, advertising everything he could be. The richest man in the world, the cleverest, the one who discovered the cure for cancer, the one who found world peace at last. All the accolades that awaited him, the praise and envy of his peers. Ah you young people and your energy, a friend of mine told me recently. I had just finished excitedly explaining yet another idea that would change everything, and this was not the answer I expected. Yet it was a sobering answer, and the one, I realized later, that I needed to hear. In a way it was the answer that led to this writing.
The malls, I tell another friend of mine, the highways and the cars and the jobs and the money - all these things are a mask, that hide the true form of this land, that disguises from us the final fact: that we are not made for, cannot let down our roots, here. For us hotter climes, for us the "third world" (our home), for us the electric power cuts and the indifferent fire of the Sun, the thunderstorms and the lack of privacy. I say these things and I sound sad, even to myself. Why sad? Why not a rejoicing, in knowing where I aim to be, where I belong? The truth is I say these things and I do not know what they mean. The words are not of my making - they issue through me only, the aftereffects of an emotion which lies heavy in my heart. A strange thing: an aspiration, the beginnings of a hope, and yet at the same tinged with melancholy and not the soaring joy - I would imagine - of the true salvation. Where are the certainty and confidence that is supposed to accompany the epiphanies, the thoughts that burn bright and incandescent, and light the path into our future. My friend is silent, and does not reply, and I trail off in mid-sentence, and sit there helplessly looking at my hands. My thoughts are intense but nascent still, and I cannot quite articulate them to someone else, not just yet.
Once, when I first came to this country, I went to Washington, D.C., to visit a monument. In the morning, after eating a delicious breakfast cooked by a Senegalese man, who we teased half-seriously about opening his own restaurant chain. I do not remember the name of the place exactly - only that it contained a giant statue of Lincoln. And something else: on all the walls were plaques, and on the plaques there were inscriptions. I followed them from wall to wall, reading what they said. And as I read one after the other, it occurred to me that though they all spoke of different events still they were all part of a larger narrative. The story of America, and how great it was, and remains. The story of the heroic men and women who fought every single step of the way for this privilege. And I found myself carried away by it, this narrative, how inspiring it was, how it made you want to be a part of it. And then later thinking about it I saw past the rhetoric, and beneath it I saw just how profoundly powerful this narrative was, how effective, how it had linked men and women across the vast distances of this land and even across time, so though they worked individually and each in their own time and place still their minds were bent to a single purpose. And in my time here this has been the thing I have noticed most: how this narrative, this story - this idea - of the greatness of America is what lies at the heart of the nation. So central is it that every person who wishes to be successful politically - from Obama with his change campaign, to people like Glenn Beck and Palin with their hate-mongering - deploys it to their own advantage. And it all began with a colony determined to shake off the yoke of their colonial masters, the oppressive British - and ended after much hard work with the land of the brave, the home of the free, the greatest nation on earth. This is the story they tell themselves. And though there are dissenting voices, though it does not correlate exactly with history, no matter - it is sufficient for its purposes. The day of the presidential inauguration I watched Obama speak, and heard how he took this narrative and extended it, showing how it could be further refined, toward creating a "more perfect Union". I watched and for the duration of the speech, and many days afterward I thought, what can I not achieve in this country, under this President? The power of story, what it feels like to be part of a grander design, all in harmony, you and everyone else doing their part towards achieving a common goal, a noble goal.
Some - the lucky few - get to create their own narrative. To sit down and in collusion write the story of their nation, a collective dream, a way of being in the World as a people. Not so for us. "Undeveloped", "Third World", "Rampant Corruption", "Despotic Rule", "Tyranny", "Demagogues". Whether you agree with their descriptive veracity or not still you must realize: these are labels others have bestowed on us, and not ones of our own choosing. The personality of a person is an emergent phenomenon, built from the person's dreams, and the narratives the person has created to explain himself and his presence in the World. A country is no different, except in scale: it is built from the consensual narrative created by its citizens. On my last day in Gambia I went around visiting elders, to say goodbye, to have them pray for me. And without exception every single one of them told me the same thing. Torg fa deh! Bull jegeh waat fee yaip. Do not come back, when you have been fortunate enough to escape. They did not speak with bitterness - no one is bitter. We have learnt to joke about NAWEC, and the price of sugar, and how much faster your passport is processed if you buy "attaya" for the officer in charge. We shake our heads wryly, and chuckle at the state of things, and go on with our lives. This is the story of Gambia, we seem to be saying - what can we do but shrug and move on? And if somehow we manage to escape, who would be foolish enough to come back? Would that not be madness?
During the summer I met with people, and started work on a couple of projects. The digitization of government departments, the re-integration of the youth. I spoke with people about my ideas, and everywhere I was met with support and excitement - from the CEOs of tech companies to sunye boy yi sitting drinking attaya, of an evening. I was greatly moved, and filled with a sense of purpose. The first glimmerings of a destiny in waiting - the re-imagination of my country. Out with Gambia the poor, Gambia the corrupt. In with Jollof, richly cultured, filled with a people whose largesse and kindness of heart knew no bounds, who were willing to work hard for the greater good, for a time when our youth would watch the TV, and see on the news how desperate African youth from other countries tried (and died on) the back-way, and say Alhamdulillah, that I am content in my own country. Thank God, that neither I nor any of my friends would give up the comfort of our homes in order to break into our neighbor's houses, where we are greeted with neither friendliness nor welcoming. It will work, I said over and over about my plans. It will work and the youth will be saved, the country will prosper. Repeating this over and over to people I had already convinced, people who would vehemently agree with me. As if I myself needed convincing, and sought it in the faith of others.
In time our narratives come to represent the truth, until the two are indistinguishable. And then how hard it is to change them. The truth, after all, cannot be changed, but only escaped from. And so once our narratives have assumed this air of truth - because, perhaps, we have heard them so many times repeated we have lost all certainty as to their falsehood, we are filled with doubt - we give up on ever changing them. We settle into them, and define ourselves using them. And there lies the great and the sad and the true danger. For it is our narratives which define our actions, and in what ways we will attempt to leave our mark on the world.
I miss my mother, and my family. I miss my boys at T Road, and my Kombo crew, and my Lancaster youth. I miss walking down the street feeling, if not pride, at least a contentment at who I am, and how I am perceived. We like your writing, people tell me, and I smile and I feel rewarded, and I am encouraged to write more. He knows so much about computers, people say, and though this is an exaggeration still it is one I wish to grow into, to fill, and so I learn new technologies, and give lectures at our local youth computer club. Yet all these, on closer inspection, are not enough of a reason to return, when it comes right down to it. The people I miss I could see as many times as I can afford to come on holidays - many Gambians are "based" in Europe, returning every December to all-white parties and with new cars, and perhaps some more progress on the house they are building, to stand empty and as a promise of home, a placeholder for themselves in their absence. And - note that I do not say this in any mean-spirited way, or as a put-down - it is easy to be the best in Gambia at something. We are small, and have had neither the opportunities nor the experience of other nations. And so to excel in a field - whether it be writing or computers or football - one would be served much better living abroad, where good writers - to take one instance - are a dime a dozen, and the people considered emasters are truly dazzling in their virtuosity. Why come home then? I do not know what I would do in Jollof, is a common - and valid - excuse. Where would I work? Where would I live? And then there is the bigger problem, the unnameable one: our political system, and how rotten it is, and how it has somehow managed to infect every arena of our lives. So there is no such thing as staying apolitical - one must swear allegiances, or suffer the consequences. Silence is opposition, and opposition is bad. People are persecuted day and night for their beliefs. At least this is what sites like Freedom Newspaper would have you believe. The situation is irrecoverably bad, their lurid headlines scream at anyone who cares to read them. Yet this constant fear-mongering and doom-saying about our prospects is more a reflection of the minds of the people who write the articles on those websites than of reality which, as usual, is much more nuanced.
In our heads we are all writing the story of our lives, composing and editing it, imagining ourselves in the way we would like to be imagined by other people. Imagine a para and one of the boys fighting, at a Nawetaan match. The same reality for the both of them: two men struggling with each other, a shirt pulled until it ripped, an increasingly hostile crowd, tear gas, match flames under noses. And yet how differently each writes down the story in the book of himself, in his mind. The Banjul Boy: I am a citizen of Banjul, I have my rights, how dare they bring some uneducated fool from up-country and give him power over me? The Para: These Banjul boys have no discipline, they look down on us, spoilt brats the lot of them; bring one to live with me for a month and see how he fares. And both men feel persecuted, and both men feel great indignation. In the narratives you write of yourself you are always the hero, even your bad actions justified, at increasing levels of sophistication. I saw a news article once that spoke of a society in the American south, which was printing leaflets "proving" that contrary to popular belief the owners of slaves had in fact benefited the men and women under their bondage greatly, causing them to begin to get educations and become a bit more civilized. Our narratives do not start and end with us. They stretch back into the past, running over into the narratives of our ancestors, and all that they did. Or did not do. And at the same time our own role changes, we move into the position of ancestor for a new generation, our actions defining them. Our children, and their children after them, inheriting what we have left behind. Sunye maam yi denye baayorn sehn lohor deh, we say, nunye feheh beh toubab yi nah lehn?
What will be said about us, by the generations yet unborn?
A man is ugly and stupid, and shames himself every time he opens his mouth in public. He thinks, I must dress better, I have too little hair, my hands are too big, if only God had made me more handsome. I must listen to the popular ones speak and parrot them. Yet no matter how long he does this for he cannot ever seem to become happy about himself and his place in the world. He is filled with a resigned envy, at everyone who is more "perfect" than him. He lives out his days like this. Until one day he realizes: it is I who decide whether I am ugly and stupid and uninteresting, and not anyone else. Such a little thing, this discovery. Yet it changes the tenor of his life. It is OK if, sometimes, he says things that people laugh at. He laughs with them, and learns. It is OK if he is not the prettiest person in the room, or the most well dressed. He is himself, and he is imperfect and unfinished, and he realizes this and he works at improving himself. He lives happily after that, knowing no envy and no jealousy. And he notices too, that all that he admired in others he himself possesses, more or less, but that he lacked the most important thing: a confidence in himself, a belief, a narrative of his own making that cast him in the light he wanted to be seen in.
Once I used to be scared of my insomnia. The way it stretched on into the night, a flat and empty road, dull and dreary, filled with despair. Like a metaphor for life -and how heavy the rest of my days would seem, as I lay in bed and stared into the black caverns above me. I would drink sleeping pills, and surrender to merciful dreamless sleep before it was midnight. I studied, I read, I went to class. To what end? I did not ever ask myself this seriously, but only had vague ideas of what I would do. A relaxed daydream of one day opening a tech company in Gambia with Serign. All in the future, all to be approached lazily and at leisure. Sometimes what we lack is a sense of direction, of what we ought to do, now that we are here. There are Gambians abroad who have lived in the exact same apartment for ten years, worked at the same low-level job, slept on the same bed, and never aspired for anything. They may know a peace I do not know. But rather I think it is that they lack a dream, have become stuck in their situation, while time carries them along as they stand still. Living out lives of apathy, an undercurrent of desperation. Sometimes I feel that this is the way Gambia is too. Daf kor nampa, people will say, of behaviors. Might as well say chi kow suuf sim judoe la... We inherit our religion from our parents. And we inherit too their dreams of us, whether these become our guiding light or the thing we struggle against becoming all our lives. And from our country, our homeland, what do we inherit?
Ham sa borpa chi jaamu yaala la borka, our Oustasses say. We as a nation are imperfect and unfinished. How mean that sounds, how jaded. Yet look around you and tell me what nation is perfect and finished. Tell me what nation does not have its problems, qualities that its citizens do not like about it. Everyone who leaves the country to go to Europe or America comes back with the same story. How hard it is there, how difficult life is, unlike anything they were ever trained to expect, by TV, or by the common dream of America. For it goes both ways. People create narratives of us, not as detailed as the one they create for themselves. But still having the power to affect our own self-narratives. Ku nyayp tufli nga torye. If everyone you know believes you are a bad person for long enough, you WILL become one. If your fellow nations see you as poor and corrupt and beyond saving for long enough... And so we admire other nations, and look down upon ourselves.
I do not wish to suggest there is no hope. Far from it. We live in a good time, our country full of more promise than at any previous time. There are more Gambian college graduates - and even PhDs - than ever before. And that is only speaking of the educational side of things. Then there are all the Gambians who have traveled abroad and come back - even if not with new skills - at least with an expanded view of the world. Then there are the skilled and educated within the country, who have never traveled. The only Gambian I know who I would call a genius without reservation went to the University of the Gambia, and could do advanced Math problems which I couldn't solve even with the help of a computer. And then there is our greatest untapped resource: all the fine minds, sharp as whips, that have been labelled part of the illiterate majority, their lack of command of the English language a layer of ice frozen and concealing them and their talents. What if, for a whole year, all these different categories of people came together, and set aside their differences, and subscribed wholly to a new narrative of Jollof, one which traced its lineage back to our proud roots, our empires of old, and from thence made its way into the future, our present. A story of self-belief. A reclaiming of the language used to describe us: "forming" instead of "undeveloped", "sutura" instead of "baadorla", "saaku kaatan" instead of "naywe dorleh"? What if we believed this for more than a year, for five years, for a decade, what if we let this become our national dream, our common vision, convincing the people abroad to come home at last, and the ones here to stay - or leave to acquire what skills and knowledge they could, and then return.
One can spend all night, of course, speaking about dreams and narratives. But daylight throws our reality into sharp relief. We do not have that much money. We are such a tiny part of the world. And this will only work if we all do it together - I'm not going to sacrifice my happiness while others enjoy their lives with their families. All common excuses, all in some way based on "facts". Those outside dread returning, those inside think only of escape. What a way to perceive one's country: as a prison - a prison containing all the people one loves, but a prison nevertheless, the visa issuers at the various embassies the only ones who can release us from it, the all-powerful gatekeepers, elevated to almost mythical status. Sitting behind reinforced glass partitions, deciding our fates. Subjecting us to all manner of humiliations, starting out with the assumption that we are liars and thieves, who will do anything to get into their countries, and be a great burden on their social systems, that they have worked so hard to build, over the years. And though we are a proud people we take all this and more. It is not so much that we hate our country - no Gambian would choose to live anywhere else if what they sought existed back home. But what they seek - a chance at a better life - seems only achievable abroad.
We are a religious people. If I asked any Gambian, can God not make us prosperous, their answer would be swift and not even requiring thought on their part: Of course He can! Yet Yaala yaala bey sa torl, our elders say - and though it may sound trite sometimes it is all we have. To do our best, and to know we have done our best. To leave the rest to God - that which is not in our hands. It is not as if this is a new way of thinking. It has always been our philosophy as a people. Suma haalis b dama kor nyaha!, people say with great (and deserved) pride, fog mu am Barr-keh. This family has Barr-keh, people say. Meaning all in the family worked hard to achieve all they have achieved. The closest word to barr-keh is "blessing". But blessing, the word, does not cover everything barr-keh is. There will be the fruit of our labors: that is prosperity, naataangeh. But barr-keh we do not work for - it arises naturally as the result of our toil. And if we all nyaha for Jollof, how much Barr-keh will that be? For Barr-keh is not just external, something from God. That is only a part of it. A larger part is what is inside us, the ability to look at what we have done and think, we achieved this, and no one else.
There are sacrifices involved, of course. It would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. The small conveniences - access to wallmart, and movie theaters, and all the other front-facing products of a capitalistic society. And the big ones - better health care, access to better education. These things seem impossible to live without. Yet it turns out that this is not true. There are people who have returned, with their whole families, and they have survived it. We do not live in trees, after all. And though it is a slow process we are always improving. And as with all sacrifice, soon we come to realize that the things we want are not always the things we need.
A nice paragraph at the end, then, to summarize all I have said. If only it were that easy. If only I could write "let us all go home, and work at developing our country", and pretend that because I am thinking along these lines I am a "better" citizen. But though this is tempting, it is not a position that will in the end achieve anything, except perhaps make me feel better about myself, nor is it a valid one. We all have our own lives, and our reasons for what we do, and who among us has the right to decide for another. There are no easy answers. I cannot say, let us do this and it will save the country - no one can. But I want you, wherever you are, to stop for a moment and imagine Gambia, Jollof, our nation that has given us so much and never complained or asked for anything back. And I want you for a moment to think of her, not as ugly, not as a hopeless case,not as others see her. But also do not think of her as what she is not: rich, or powerful. Here is what want you to imagine instead: Once there was a small country west Africa, home to less than two million people. And this country was a young county, and though she did not possess what other, bigger countries possessed, though she lacked resources, still she held her own, and believed in herself, for one reason: her children, spread all over the world, always had her in mind, and would come back to her, and care for her, and change her into everything she was yet to become.
"Africa dream again", Youssou Ndour sings. All we need to start with is a dream. And then who can stop us.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Returning Home Part 2: Of Age & Time
He walks beside the old woman, down the street - her escort. She walks slowly, laboriously, each footstep seeming to take forever by his reckoning. Because he is young, and life for him is speed, the never-ending rush to somewhere, anywhere, the perpetual next moment. He forces himself to slow down with her, and he does as long as he is thinking about it. But sometimes his thoughts wonder, and he walks ahead. Only to suddenly miss her by his side, only to turn and find her a distance behind him. Her back bent, her gaze on the ground as she measures each part of the road before ever she puts her foot down on it.
They sit on benches side by side - the old woman and the old man they have come to visit - and talk. He sits between them, closer to the old man. She talks about trips to Tunis, riding in boats and the backs of cows, nights in Mecca lying on prayer mats with no pillows, getting zam-zam from a well. The cruelty of the Arabs. How 500 dalasis could take you and bring you back, and still leave you with change to spare, to go shopping with. He fills in the pauses in her story with interjections. Allahu Akbar. Laa Illaha Illalah. Hm! Chey! And he sits there and their words fall all about him, and into him and through him, and in the distance there is the call to prayer being broadcast over a mosque's PA system, and he feels age - not old, not advanced in years like these people he sits between - no, he feels age itself, like the aether, and it is all around him, and it is a slight heaviness in the air and it is in the slow ponderous way they speak, and it is in the way their voices are distorted by their fallen mouths, how their words are measured, how they speak a wolof without slang, untainted by terms from other languages. He has never been in the presence of age like this, has never noticed the way it creeps after him and follows him everywhere he goes, like death, like time. It fills him with a feeling of awe - he has felt like this before only in mosques and at religious gatherings, or in the presence of great art. One day, he thinks, I will be like this. And it occurs to him that these two will be dead, long before then, transformed and no longer themselves.
Again they are out on the street. She asks him to walk her to the hospital. Now the rhythm of his footsteps has become aligned with hers, his heartbeat slowed. One step…. then another… the distance before them seeming never-ending. All urgency gone, a world slowed down. Or rather, the passage through it, the world itself a still thing, a thing of permanence. And in this slower rhythm he discovers a new understanding of time. It captures his imagination. Right at the end, how it is stretched out, how it is no longer a river, flowing, but honey dripping from a spoon. A little left on the tip, and then there will be nothing more, hanging in space. Subject to the vagaries of gravity.
And then there is the other kind of time, the kind between people, existing in the space between them. Again and again she asks him: how long have you been away? And when he tells her she holds her mouth. That long! It seemed only yesterday, when we took you to the airport! And he feels the same way about his time there too - it has seemed to pass in a flash, condensed by a trick of memory into a short series of instances, a place here, a person there, an experience, a thing he has touched, a food he has eaten, an embarrassment he has endured. These are all the artifacts of the three years he has spent abroad, a summary of time. A shortening. What is long, what seems to have taken forever, is the time that exists between them, in a hidden place neither of them are able to observe or scrutinize, except cursorily. This time-between will not be condensed or summarized: it is all the experiences he has missed, all the things that have happened at home in his absence. In conversation people will sometimes tell him of one of these things. Did you hear about such and such happening? Were you aware that so and so died - ndeysaan! So and so got married, so and so's house was sold, and he was evicted. But these are mere drops of water from the ocean he knows he cannot ever submerge himself in again, because it exists only in the memories of those who were here and not away, those who were present for its enactment. This curious (and sometimes merciful, and sometimes maddeningly frustrating) quality of life: that once we have passed a point we can no longer go back to it, that we can never visit a place as it was at a time in the past.
And he thinks, too, about death. (All these thoughts about time have put him in a melancholy mood). He looks at her walking, how old she is, he looks at her sitting, stooped over, her face weathered and worn with the years, her dentures clicking as she laughs. And he thinks, who will be here on my return. Who will be here, and who will be gone. And he thinks, there are people I am seeing now that I will never see again. And he resolves to take each experience he has in this place, to crystallize it and hold it in his head, store it in the deepest caves of his memory where they will forever be preserved. So in the future he will have them to console him. And he knows he will fail at this, he thinks of all the time memory has failed him in the past, how walking past people now they greet him and he does not remember their names, and has to mumble something in reply. His memory will fail, and all that will remain in its place will be grief, and he does not know how he will be able to handle it when the time comes, how other people have lived through it, people who have lost their family, and their friends. He thinks perhaps it would be easier to be the lost one, that the grief would belong to others, that the weight would be theirs to bear.
Crossing the street she is timid, the process of looking left, then right, then walking across the road - something he does every day without thought - slowed down to almost painful meter. Rude taxi drivers honk their horns as they pass. A lone streetlight looks down on the scene, and under it sit the cherreh sellers and the sellers of oranges, their wheelbarrows before them. She greets everyone they pass sitting down. Jaamangenam. Is there peace with you? Perhaps a greeting adapted from the salaam of Islam. Or perhaps - as he prefers to think - one dating back to pre-Islamic times, rooted deep in the past of the culture, this seeking after peace. Jaamangam. Jaama Rek. Mbaa Jaama Nga Fanaanor? Aaga Jamm. Jaama Jamm. It occurs to him that there exists a national pre-occupation with peace, in the same way other nations seek after success, or happiness. We have nothing, but we have peace - how many times has he heard this said. And how many times has he dismissed it as the last refuge of a desperate people, unable to claim anything else as their own. Yet now walking down this road with the old woman, he begins to get an inkling of what it means. The first glimmer of understanding, the beginnings of an epiphany. For Jaama is more than just a state - as peace is - it is a quality, possessed by the lucky, which allows one to move with lightness through the world. Jaama with the neighbors, jaama with friends, jaama with family. Jaama with strangers on the street. And the ones who practise it - for like kindness it is not only possessed, it also must be acted upon - best, at their funerals people will say: Kee ku baah la worn - amorn jaama ak ñep. He wonders if this will ever be said of him. He feels suddenly, inexplicably as if this epitaph is the most important thing he can achieve while he is still alive. That in the end nothing else will, could ever, matter.
When he takes her home she fumbles with the key at her door, before finally getting it open. She takes an age to climb the step, and he stands waiting, and he does not feel a shred of impatience. He follows her into the living room, watches as she takes off her kaala and drapes it over the couch, takes a deep drink from the water cooler she filled before they left. She wipes her mouth, and sighs, and looks at him. She remarks on the rejuvenating qualities of water. And then he takes his leave. Goodnight, she replies, using the English word. Let me lock my door - there are so many mad people in Banjul. He leaves her laughing at her own joke, and as he walks down the street he thinks he can still hear it, and it arouses in him a feeling he cannot quite describe, though it is fierce, and it is passionate, and it seems to have no source nor any goal. A kind of melancholy, a kind of happiness.
They sit on benches side by side - the old woman and the old man they have come to visit - and talk. He sits between them, closer to the old man. She talks about trips to Tunis, riding in boats and the backs of cows, nights in Mecca lying on prayer mats with no pillows, getting zam-zam from a well. The cruelty of the Arabs. How 500 dalasis could take you and bring you back, and still leave you with change to spare, to go shopping with. He fills in the pauses in her story with interjections. Allahu Akbar. Laa Illaha Illalah. Hm! Chey! And he sits there and their words fall all about him, and into him and through him, and in the distance there is the call to prayer being broadcast over a mosque's PA system, and he feels age - not old, not advanced in years like these people he sits between - no, he feels age itself, like the aether, and it is all around him, and it is a slight heaviness in the air and it is in the slow ponderous way they speak, and it is in the way their voices are distorted by their fallen mouths, how their words are measured, how they speak a wolof without slang, untainted by terms from other languages. He has never been in the presence of age like this, has never noticed the way it creeps after him and follows him everywhere he goes, like death, like time. It fills him with a feeling of awe - he has felt like this before only in mosques and at religious gatherings, or in the presence of great art. One day, he thinks, I will be like this. And it occurs to him that these two will be dead, long before then, transformed and no longer themselves.
Again they are out on the street. She asks him to walk her to the hospital. Now the rhythm of his footsteps has become aligned with hers, his heartbeat slowed. One step…. then another… the distance before them seeming never-ending. All urgency gone, a world slowed down. Or rather, the passage through it, the world itself a still thing, a thing of permanence. And in this slower rhythm he discovers a new understanding of time. It captures his imagination. Right at the end, how it is stretched out, how it is no longer a river, flowing, but honey dripping from a spoon. A little left on the tip, and then there will be nothing more, hanging in space. Subject to the vagaries of gravity.
And then there is the other kind of time, the kind between people, existing in the space between them. Again and again she asks him: how long have you been away? And when he tells her she holds her mouth. That long! It seemed only yesterday, when we took you to the airport! And he feels the same way about his time there too - it has seemed to pass in a flash, condensed by a trick of memory into a short series of instances, a place here, a person there, an experience, a thing he has touched, a food he has eaten, an embarrassment he has endured. These are all the artifacts of the three years he has spent abroad, a summary of time. A shortening. What is long, what seems to have taken forever, is the time that exists between them, in a hidden place neither of them are able to observe or scrutinize, except cursorily. This time-between will not be condensed or summarized: it is all the experiences he has missed, all the things that have happened at home in his absence. In conversation people will sometimes tell him of one of these things. Did you hear about such and such happening? Were you aware that so and so died - ndeysaan! So and so got married, so and so's house was sold, and he was evicted. But these are mere drops of water from the ocean he knows he cannot ever submerge himself in again, because it exists only in the memories of those who were here and not away, those who were present for its enactment. This curious (and sometimes merciful, and sometimes maddeningly frustrating) quality of life: that once we have passed a point we can no longer go back to it, that we can never visit a place as it was at a time in the past.
And he thinks, too, about death. (All these thoughts about time have put him in a melancholy mood). He looks at her walking, how old she is, he looks at her sitting, stooped over, her face weathered and worn with the years, her dentures clicking as she laughs. And he thinks, who will be here on my return. Who will be here, and who will be gone. And he thinks, there are people I am seeing now that I will never see again. And he resolves to take each experience he has in this place, to crystallize it and hold it in his head, store it in the deepest caves of his memory where they will forever be preserved. So in the future he will have them to console him. And he knows he will fail at this, he thinks of all the time memory has failed him in the past, how walking past people now they greet him and he does not remember their names, and has to mumble something in reply. His memory will fail, and all that will remain in its place will be grief, and he does not know how he will be able to handle it when the time comes, how other people have lived through it, people who have lost their family, and their friends. He thinks perhaps it would be easier to be the lost one, that the grief would belong to others, that the weight would be theirs to bear.
Crossing the street she is timid, the process of looking left, then right, then walking across the road - something he does every day without thought - slowed down to almost painful meter. Rude taxi drivers honk their horns as they pass. A lone streetlight looks down on the scene, and under it sit the cherreh sellers and the sellers of oranges, their wheelbarrows before them. She greets everyone they pass sitting down. Jaamangenam. Is there peace with you? Perhaps a greeting adapted from the salaam of Islam. Or perhaps - as he prefers to think - one dating back to pre-Islamic times, rooted deep in the past of the culture, this seeking after peace. Jaamangam. Jaama Rek. Mbaa Jaama Nga Fanaanor? Aaga Jamm. Jaama Jamm. It occurs to him that there exists a national pre-occupation with peace, in the same way other nations seek after success, or happiness. We have nothing, but we have peace - how many times has he heard this said. And how many times has he dismissed it as the last refuge of a desperate people, unable to claim anything else as their own. Yet now walking down this road with the old woman, he begins to get an inkling of what it means. The first glimmer of understanding, the beginnings of an epiphany. For Jaama is more than just a state - as peace is - it is a quality, possessed by the lucky, which allows one to move with lightness through the world. Jaama with the neighbors, jaama with friends, jaama with family. Jaama with strangers on the street. And the ones who practise it - for like kindness it is not only possessed, it also must be acted upon - best, at their funerals people will say: Kee ku baah la worn - amorn jaama ak ñep. He wonders if this will ever be said of him. He feels suddenly, inexplicably as if this epitaph is the most important thing he can achieve while he is still alive. That in the end nothing else will, could ever, matter.
When he takes her home she fumbles with the key at her door, before finally getting it open. She takes an age to climb the step, and he stands waiting, and he does not feel a shred of impatience. He follows her into the living room, watches as she takes off her kaala and drapes it over the couch, takes a deep drink from the water cooler she filled before they left. She wipes her mouth, and sighs, and looks at him. She remarks on the rejuvenating qualities of water. And then he takes his leave. Goodnight, she replies, using the English word. Let me lock my door - there are so many mad people in Banjul. He leaves her laughing at her own joke, and as he walks down the street he thinks he can still hear it, and it arouses in him a feeling he cannot quite describe, though it is fierce, and it is passionate, and it seems to have no source nor any goal. A kind of melancholy, a kind of happiness.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Returning Home Part 1
In the beginning there was your country, and you knew nothing else. When was the first time you began to develop a sense of the World, as a place, and World events as a time, in which your country was located? Perhaps it was from the TV, bringing in news of the industrious Chinese, the technological Americans, the warring Ethiopians, the starving Somalians (everything at this age painted with the brush of broad stereotypes - this was all you needed to know). Or perhaps it was from your parents and the other adults in your life, when they spoke about their travels to lands where it is always cold, and people so rich everyone has a car, and holy lands where prophets and great marabouts had been discovered in days of old.
Yet despite all this your spatial apparatus, that part of your brain which situates you in the World and all in relation to you, was filled with the sense of your country as all there was, and all that there needed to be. One of the poorest countries in the World, the encyclopedia claimed - and how surprised you would have been if someone had told you this. What poverty, when you ate three meals a day and every Juli your father bought you a new mbubi juli, you and all your sisters and all your brothers, and all your aunts and uncles came to your house and you killed and ate a ram and celebrated? You went to school, and your cousin in England sent you Nikes, and you watched pirated copies of the latest DVDs, and you played football on the streets, and you were happy. How could this be poverty?
It was in high school that you first learnt about corruption, and accountability, and transparency. You had seen these things sometimes before, in certain of the opposition newspapers in the country, usually in an interview or essay by an opposition figurehead. But now as the port through which you viewed the world widened and you read about your country in books and magazines, and began to see yourself as others say you, you came across the words more and more often. In studies by toubab universities and think thanks and human rights organizations located in faraway Europe and America. You believed them, of course. You never had reason to doubt their statistics, their human rights and corruption lists. And yet a strange thing - in the government of your country, against which they made such grave accusations, the people who worked were your aunts and uncles, and the aunts and uncles of your friends and neighbors. People well known, regular people who showed no outward sign of being evil, or dishonest, in the execution of their duties. A quandary then - how could these same people be the ones in the studies, their primary cause, people who ought to be punished for their excesses, made to change their ways - how could these same people be the people you knew.*
And then you got a chance to travel, to leave your country and go to another one, that by all accounts was more developed, that had its own problems but nothing like the ones your country was reputed to have. You thought leaving - leaving your family and your friends and the country you had lived in all your life - would break your heart. You swore to yourself you would come back as soon as possible, you comforted yourself with this thought of eventual return, and it could not come fast enough. For the first few months in this new country all your thoughts were filled with your own country and your life there, all your speech about what you left behind. You called every opportunity you got, and though already people and the trajectory of their lives had begun to drift away from that of yours still you firmly held on to your memories.
A country is more than the land of its placing, more than the people of its inhabitation. These are all important parts of a country's definition. But there is something else, something intangible, which is necessary - the dream of the country, a quasi-mystical thing created by both citizens and, mysteriously, the very land of the country itself. The dream of your country, the one you had left behind, was a dream of everlasting peace, of a place so blessed by God there were proud recountings of Marabouts who had travelled across Africa to come there to pray. A place where evil was so foreign to the kind souls who inhabited it that the general agreement whenever a violent crime had been committed was that it had been done by a foreigner. A dream in which everyone helped everyone else, and all the doors to all the houses were open all day and all night, and food was everyone's food, and home happened to be wherever you were visiting at the moment. No matter how bad it is in a country under the gaze of external eyes still those within the country, the ones who have to live out their lives there, the ones who have the most stake in the country - these are the ones protected by the dream of the country, for that is its primary purpose: protection. (This is what people mean when they say they are more patriotic than others - they mean they are farther along in the adaptation of the dream, have embraced it more fully. And the ones they accuse of being unpatriotic, these are the ones who have not subscribed wholly to the dream, the ones ready to point out its flaws and just how much it deviates from reality.)
It was not only your country that had a dream, of course. This new country you went to, it had its own version too. A dream which in time came to thrill you, a dream much larger than the one you had left at home, grander and more majestic. A dream, after all, is a magical mirror we hold up to our reality, in order to distort it to our satisfaction. And what reality you came into contact with in this new country: fast-paced, ruthlessly efficient, larger than any life you had become accustomed to. A reality in which it took more money to create a movie - a work of fiction - than the entire GDP of your country in a given year, where the wheels turned with such energy, and people worked with such enthusiasm verve, even to the lowliest of janitors.
You met other people from your country who had fallen in love with this new country, who wanted nothing to do with going back home, and in the beginning you felt a weird pity mixed with contempt for them. How could they have been so brainwashed, you wondered. How could someone give up the rich self-contained-ness of mbahal bu tilim for the shapeless lump of fat that is the American burger, the largesse of our people for the tight-lipped smiles of the toubab stranger on the street, the sense of belonging that followed you around everywhere you went in your country, filling you with warmth and direction, as if the very land had been made for you and others like you. You thought of home as the ultimate destination, to which all roads led no matter how crooked they ran, no matter at what way stations they detoured - and you thought of these people as poor lost wanderers who had lost their paths, who would never fit in anywhere else and yet did not know it. You looked on them and you thought I will never turn into that, I will never become that.
And then an opportunity presented itself for you to go home. An unexpected one, that seemed to come out of nowhere. You became greatly excited. All your memories of home had in truth begun to fade with time, replaced by the harsh reality of your experiences of life in this new country. You had in effect begun to settle in, without ever noticing it, slowly like sediment into a riverbed, while the soft gentle watery flow of life in this new country washed over you. Things that were not in the immediate centre of your attention, but got picked up by your subconscious anyway. The way there were no soldiers walking about town, exercising their powers to arrest and intimidate. The way there was such a greater variety of food, from every culture you could imagine. How even with only a low-level job at one of the supermarkets you could still live a life that back home only higher-level government officials could live, own a car and go full-cart supermarket shopping every week. So even while a part of you pined for home, always at work in the background, your memories of it they became dimmer, as the light of the compelling new experiences you faced became even brighter.
And so while you were excited at the journey you were about to make back, tiny little slivers of doubt began to creep into your excitement. One morning you woke up and the thought occured to you - what if there is a problem with my visa and they do not let me come back, at the end of my trip. And here was an indication of how much you had changed - while in the beginning, immediately after your arrival this thought would have filled you with relief - you could go back, and you could stay home, where you belonged - now it filled you with alarm. You found though you wanted to go back still, you did not want to stay. This was the simple matter of it, despite the excuses you came up with in your head: that you only wanted to come back because there was still a degree waiting for you, that you would go back eventually, eventually, when everything was through and done with, that you would never abandon home. And this reluctance was the truth, and it was perhaps to keep denying it to yourself that you fought with such ferocity over the reputation of your country, deriding toubabs who did not understand it yet spoke up against it, filled with a righteous anger that threatened to choke you with indignation - what country after all did not have its problems.
But your innocence had been lost. Whether you were in the end able to shrug off this new dream that this new country you were in had thrown over your shoulders and over your head so it filled your sight and obscured the dream you had left behind, whether in the end you were able to return or not one thing had changed: you would never be able to look at your country the same again, as when you were a child and it was the only country in the world, or at least the only one that mattered, and its dream filled your head so there was no room for reality, that country-dream-robbing bastard, in collusion with age and experience to work its dark magic against you.
Footnotes
* This is one of the current problems of political thought in Gambia - from the inside, where we see the human face of all the charges made against us, and see that this face is indeed human and not diabolical, we come to the choice many Gambians are forced to make - and they choose either: a) to diabolize everyone who has anything even remotely to do with the government (which is the path sites like Freedom have taken) or b) to ignore everything wrong with the current system and pretend nothing could be better. And yet what we truly need is people who are willing to walk the middle path.
Yet despite all this your spatial apparatus, that part of your brain which situates you in the World and all in relation to you, was filled with the sense of your country as all there was, and all that there needed to be. One of the poorest countries in the World, the encyclopedia claimed - and how surprised you would have been if someone had told you this. What poverty, when you ate three meals a day and every Juli your father bought you a new mbubi juli, you and all your sisters and all your brothers, and all your aunts and uncles came to your house and you killed and ate a ram and celebrated? You went to school, and your cousin in England sent you Nikes, and you watched pirated copies of the latest DVDs, and you played football on the streets, and you were happy. How could this be poverty?
It was in high school that you first learnt about corruption, and accountability, and transparency. You had seen these things sometimes before, in certain of the opposition newspapers in the country, usually in an interview or essay by an opposition figurehead. But now as the port through which you viewed the world widened and you read about your country in books and magazines, and began to see yourself as others say you, you came across the words more and more often. In studies by toubab universities and think thanks and human rights organizations located in faraway Europe and America. You believed them, of course. You never had reason to doubt their statistics, their human rights and corruption lists. And yet a strange thing - in the government of your country, against which they made such grave accusations, the people who worked were your aunts and uncles, and the aunts and uncles of your friends and neighbors. People well known, regular people who showed no outward sign of being evil, or dishonest, in the execution of their duties. A quandary then - how could these same people be the ones in the studies, their primary cause, people who ought to be punished for their excesses, made to change their ways - how could these same people be the people you knew.*
And then you got a chance to travel, to leave your country and go to another one, that by all accounts was more developed, that had its own problems but nothing like the ones your country was reputed to have. You thought leaving - leaving your family and your friends and the country you had lived in all your life - would break your heart. You swore to yourself you would come back as soon as possible, you comforted yourself with this thought of eventual return, and it could not come fast enough. For the first few months in this new country all your thoughts were filled with your own country and your life there, all your speech about what you left behind. You called every opportunity you got, and though already people and the trajectory of their lives had begun to drift away from that of yours still you firmly held on to your memories.
A country is more than the land of its placing, more than the people of its inhabitation. These are all important parts of a country's definition. But there is something else, something intangible, which is necessary - the dream of the country, a quasi-mystical thing created by both citizens and, mysteriously, the very land of the country itself. The dream of your country, the one you had left behind, was a dream of everlasting peace, of a place so blessed by God there were proud recountings of Marabouts who had travelled across Africa to come there to pray. A place where evil was so foreign to the kind souls who inhabited it that the general agreement whenever a violent crime had been committed was that it had been done by a foreigner. A dream in which everyone helped everyone else, and all the doors to all the houses were open all day and all night, and food was everyone's food, and home happened to be wherever you were visiting at the moment. No matter how bad it is in a country under the gaze of external eyes still those within the country, the ones who have to live out their lives there, the ones who have the most stake in the country - these are the ones protected by the dream of the country, for that is its primary purpose: protection. (This is what people mean when they say they are more patriotic than others - they mean they are farther along in the adaptation of the dream, have embraced it more fully. And the ones they accuse of being unpatriotic, these are the ones who have not subscribed wholly to the dream, the ones ready to point out its flaws and just how much it deviates from reality.)
It was not only your country that had a dream, of course. This new country you went to, it had its own version too. A dream which in time came to thrill you, a dream much larger than the one you had left at home, grander and more majestic. A dream, after all, is a magical mirror we hold up to our reality, in order to distort it to our satisfaction. And what reality you came into contact with in this new country: fast-paced, ruthlessly efficient, larger than any life you had become accustomed to. A reality in which it took more money to create a movie - a work of fiction - than the entire GDP of your country in a given year, where the wheels turned with such energy, and people worked with such enthusiasm verve, even to the lowliest of janitors.
You met other people from your country who had fallen in love with this new country, who wanted nothing to do with going back home, and in the beginning you felt a weird pity mixed with contempt for them. How could they have been so brainwashed, you wondered. How could someone give up the rich self-contained-ness of mbahal bu tilim for the shapeless lump of fat that is the American burger, the largesse of our people for the tight-lipped smiles of the toubab stranger on the street, the sense of belonging that followed you around everywhere you went in your country, filling you with warmth and direction, as if the very land had been made for you and others like you. You thought of home as the ultimate destination, to which all roads led no matter how crooked they ran, no matter at what way stations they detoured - and you thought of these people as poor lost wanderers who had lost their paths, who would never fit in anywhere else and yet did not know it. You looked on them and you thought I will never turn into that, I will never become that.
And then an opportunity presented itself for you to go home. An unexpected one, that seemed to come out of nowhere. You became greatly excited. All your memories of home had in truth begun to fade with time, replaced by the harsh reality of your experiences of life in this new country. You had in effect begun to settle in, without ever noticing it, slowly like sediment into a riverbed, while the soft gentle watery flow of life in this new country washed over you. Things that were not in the immediate centre of your attention, but got picked up by your subconscious anyway. The way there were no soldiers walking about town, exercising their powers to arrest and intimidate. The way there was such a greater variety of food, from every culture you could imagine. How even with only a low-level job at one of the supermarkets you could still live a life that back home only higher-level government officials could live, own a car and go full-cart supermarket shopping every week. So even while a part of you pined for home, always at work in the background, your memories of it they became dimmer, as the light of the compelling new experiences you faced became even brighter.
And so while you were excited at the journey you were about to make back, tiny little slivers of doubt began to creep into your excitement. One morning you woke up and the thought occured to you - what if there is a problem with my visa and they do not let me come back, at the end of my trip. And here was an indication of how much you had changed - while in the beginning, immediately after your arrival this thought would have filled you with relief - you could go back, and you could stay home, where you belonged - now it filled you with alarm. You found though you wanted to go back still, you did not want to stay. This was the simple matter of it, despite the excuses you came up with in your head: that you only wanted to come back because there was still a degree waiting for you, that you would go back eventually, eventually, when everything was through and done with, that you would never abandon home. And this reluctance was the truth, and it was perhaps to keep denying it to yourself that you fought with such ferocity over the reputation of your country, deriding toubabs who did not understand it yet spoke up against it, filled with a righteous anger that threatened to choke you with indignation - what country after all did not have its problems.
But your innocence had been lost. Whether you were in the end able to shrug off this new dream that this new country you were in had thrown over your shoulders and over your head so it filled your sight and obscured the dream you had left behind, whether in the end you were able to return or not one thing had changed: you would never be able to look at your country the same again, as when you were a child and it was the only country in the world, or at least the only one that mattered, and its dream filled your head so there was no room for reality, that country-dream-robbing bastard, in collusion with age and experience to work its dark magic against you.
Footnotes
* This is one of the current problems of political thought in Gambia - from the inside, where we see the human face of all the charges made against us, and see that this face is indeed human and not diabolical, we come to the choice many Gambians are forced to make - and they choose either: a) to diabolize everyone who has anything even remotely to do with the government (which is the path sites like Freedom have taken) or b) to ignore everything wrong with the current system and pretend nothing could be better. And yet what we truly need is people who are willing to walk the middle path.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Independence Day
"Any of y'all remember independent stadium independence day marches in primary school ?"
- sjobe on twitter
The preparation started weeks before the actual independence. Every day some thirty minutes would be given over to marching practise. In our red and white uniforms (I went to J C Faye) we would march past our classes, winding our way around the school grounds, in the final days waving Gambian flags we had constructed from crayons, A4 paper, and thin sticks of wood. We sang the National Anthem, the teacher conducting us with his hands from his position at the front of the line. The only other time we marched like this was when we practised for the Commonwealth - and the main difference was that then there would be more flags, not just of the Gambia. (I still carry the remnants of these Commonwealth celebrations with me: "Oh Canada we stand on guard for thee" and lines from many other national anthems which pop into my head at odd times).
The day itself finally arrived, after much waiting. In the morning you'd wake early, not even knowing how you'd slept the previous night, you were so excited. And there was your mother (it was always your mother, in the early hours), getting things ready for you - your breakfast, your clean and ironed uniform, stiff under the weight of starch. Jump into the shower and jump out again, get dressed (don't forget your shiny belt), wolf down your breakfast, and then run out onto the almost-empty streets, past houses where other sleepy-eyed mothers were getting their own children ready. At the school all the students would be lined up into neat rows (at least the teachers would try to keep them neat - occasionally they became messy), then led into wide buses which were what took us to the stadium in Bakau. Each bus had a number, like flights - you were told to commit your number to memory so you would not get lost later, in the confusion at the end of the event.
And get lost you could do - it seemed every child in the country was at the stadium, when you got there. Your first experience of being part of such a collective, doing everything together, from singing and marching, to the co-ordinated movement of your hands and feet ("left! right! left! right!"), the police band belting out the tunes to which you sang with great exhuberance (quite likely the only live music performance you saw every year, at that age (the annual Youssou N'dour came later) - and how well they played, and how well the police marched, the source of much pride. Gambian joke: "if marching was a world competition our police would always win it"). And it felt good: because you were part of a crowd, yet still felt your own individual presence and contribution, and saw how the crowd and what it produced would not be possible without you. Your first intimations of what it meant to be a citizen of a country, at an age when you were too young to know what it meant when people called Gambia a "third-world country", or claimed it was one of the poorest in the World - young and innocent and full of patriotism (for lack of a better word: what you felt was childlike and beyond words). The closest you would ever get in your life to the citizen ideal, country and you merging into one, you ready to live and die for it, and asking for nothing in return.
So other children and their teachers stood as far as the eye could see, in hundreds of lines, all the colors of the rainbow present in the uniforms everyone wore (even the teachers had their own uniforms, spotless and clean, each the general in charge of their own small army of pupils). And the regional officers (the school districts were divided into regions: from 1 to, if I remember correctly, 6) commanding the teachers in a hierarchical construction with the President and his government up on a dais watching over it all. By midday the Sun had risen to its highest point in the Sky, and beat down with a fury on everyone assembled, yet no one flinched or complained. It was rumoured that someone had fainted - in fact many people would, with the red cross running to and fro to administer to them. This all added a certain sense of urgency to the proceedings, ice and water sellers making their way through the crowd hawking their wares.
This was all before the changes, before it was announced that to make the logistics easier to manage everyone would hold a small celebration in their own region. This meant my younger brother would never experience Independence in the way we had, in all its majestic splendor - it instead became merely another holiday, remembered only when the teachers announced it perhaps a week before the event itself, and not looked forward to the whole year. And the Gambia as a whole is the poorer for it.
- sjobe on twitter
The preparation started weeks before the actual independence. Every day some thirty minutes would be given over to marching practise. In our red and white uniforms (I went to J C Faye) we would march past our classes, winding our way around the school grounds, in the final days waving Gambian flags we had constructed from crayons, A4 paper, and thin sticks of wood. We sang the National Anthem, the teacher conducting us with his hands from his position at the front of the line. The only other time we marched like this was when we practised for the Commonwealth - and the main difference was that then there would be more flags, not just of the Gambia. (I still carry the remnants of these Commonwealth celebrations with me: "Oh Canada we stand on guard for thee" and lines from many other national anthems which pop into my head at odd times).
The day itself finally arrived, after much waiting. In the morning you'd wake early, not even knowing how you'd slept the previous night, you were so excited. And there was your mother (it was always your mother, in the early hours), getting things ready for you - your breakfast, your clean and ironed uniform, stiff under the weight of starch. Jump into the shower and jump out again, get dressed (don't forget your shiny belt), wolf down your breakfast, and then run out onto the almost-empty streets, past houses where other sleepy-eyed mothers were getting their own children ready. At the school all the students would be lined up into neat rows (at least the teachers would try to keep them neat - occasionally they became messy), then led into wide buses which were what took us to the stadium in Bakau. Each bus had a number, like flights - you were told to commit your number to memory so you would not get lost later, in the confusion at the end of the event.
And get lost you could do - it seemed every child in the country was at the stadium, when you got there. Your first experience of being part of such a collective, doing everything together, from singing and marching, to the co-ordinated movement of your hands and feet ("left! right! left! right!"), the police band belting out the tunes to which you sang with great exhuberance (quite likely the only live music performance you saw every year, at that age (the annual Youssou N'dour came later) - and how well they played, and how well the police marched, the source of much pride. Gambian joke: "if marching was a world competition our police would always win it"). And it felt good: because you were part of a crowd, yet still felt your own individual presence and contribution, and saw how the crowd and what it produced would not be possible without you. Your first intimations of what it meant to be a citizen of a country, at an age when you were too young to know what it meant when people called Gambia a "third-world country", or claimed it was one of the poorest in the World - young and innocent and full of patriotism (for lack of a better word: what you felt was childlike and beyond words). The closest you would ever get in your life to the citizen ideal, country and you merging into one, you ready to live and die for it, and asking for nothing in return.
So other children and their teachers stood as far as the eye could see, in hundreds of lines, all the colors of the rainbow present in the uniforms everyone wore (even the teachers had their own uniforms, spotless and clean, each the general in charge of their own small army of pupils). And the regional officers (the school districts were divided into regions: from 1 to, if I remember correctly, 6) commanding the teachers in a hierarchical construction with the President and his government up on a dais watching over it all. By midday the Sun had risen to its highest point in the Sky, and beat down with a fury on everyone assembled, yet no one flinched or complained. It was rumoured that someone had fainted - in fact many people would, with the red cross running to and fro to administer to them. This all added a certain sense of urgency to the proceedings, ice and water sellers making their way through the crowd hawking their wares.
This was all before the changes, before it was announced that to make the logistics easier to manage everyone would hold a small celebration in their own region. This meant my younger brother would never experience Independence in the way we had, in all its majestic splendor - it instead became merely another holiday, remembered only when the teachers announced it perhaps a week before the event itself, and not looked forward to the whole year. And the Gambia as a whole is the poorer for it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Taste of Gambia
About a week ago my taste buds finally gave in to the attack of remembered Gambian tastes that have so relentlessly been dogging me since I came to this country. Everything I ate tasted bland and without chafka1, like the white part of boiled eggs, or cold too-wet rice cooked with no salt. My desire for food from back home had finally overpowered me, staked a mini-coup in my taste buds and set up camp, allowing no other taste in, forcing me to the conclusion that American food is tasteless (a complaint I have often heard made by other Gambians, about non-Gambian food), so I could not enjoy anything I ate here - always it fell just short of the food from back home. Chicken, e.g., tasted like chicken back home, but minus a vital component which the cooks here just cannot get right. I was at a loss what to do. I plied my food with tabasco, asked the fast food people to add extra hot buffalo sauce to the wings I bought. All to no avail - even the hot sauce tasted like a sour, older, less efficacious version of Gambian kaani, which explodes in your mouth when you eat it and produces streams of sweat on your head and a running nose.
Something was off, and I didn't quite know what it was. The same dish may taste completely different as cooked here, from when it is cooked in Gambia, and it was not just a matter of getting the right ingredients. If cooking is a language all humanity speaks, and one that with globalization contains increasingly similar idioms (the cheeseburger, e.g., seems lately to be spoken everywhere) then the difference is in the dialects spoken. The dialect of spice, practiced in the Indian countries. The dialect of cheese, which is so common here. The dialect of maggi and jumbo, spoken with such verve back home, used to express everything, from domoda to sossi chereh (and also the dialect of mayonnaise, and also the dialect of vegetable oil).
One can attempt to build up a catalog of tastes, a mental collection but one which you wished you could carry around, removing a taste to show your friends, when they ask what foods taste like back home (and also for yourself, re-visiting and re-savoring a taste in your times of greatest need, when you miss home most). Not just the taste but also the association of memories contained within it, and also its place, and its time. For instance Churaa Gerrteh (Groundnut Porridge) in the early evening, just after timis/dusk: first the slightly damp, slightly burnt smell of it from the backyard as it is being cooked, bubbling, hungrily fed sugar which it swallows with satisfied belches as the day departs and the evening comes in. And then it is done, but so hot you have to run your spoon through it for a while to make it cooler2, tasting it at intervals to see if it is ready yet. During these tastings it feels loamy or watery, depending on the cook's decisions concerning water - but in either case it runs down your mouth and into your throat almost too easily, leaving behind it a trail of sugar and a new taste which is more than the sum of the water and the groundnuts-and-rice mixture it is made of. And after the stream has run down there are left tiny balls in your mouth to chew on (all of this happening all at once, and not in the slow detached way words seem to portray). Milk (sour if you can get it), dilutes the sugar in the porridge, making it even less consistent and spreads out the tiny balls in your mouth even more, making them float about as your tongue tries to get a hold on them, all the while swimming towards your expectant gullet. For a food so light in the eating, chuura fills you up surprisingly well, having the same weight in your stomach as a good bowl of chereh - which is much heavier - getting you through the day when you heat it up for breakfast the next morning.
Another entry: Supah Kanja, of the best kind - the aku kind - creates a synergy of rice and palm-oil-okra stew which it is hard to believe could come from its constituent components. Once it is in your mouth, of course, you cease to be able to distinguish where the sauce ends and the rice itself begins (as you can, e.g., with chuurah, where you can still separate the rice-gerrteh mixture from the water, even in your mouth). It begins an assault of salty tastes on your palate, while the okra making each spoonful slide around and be ready to swallow almost immediately. (In contrast, Domoda does not have this slidy quality, nor does Benachin). One has a choice of bases too, in addition to rice, each one changing the central feel of the meal: findi, to take away some of the slipperiness and force the supah to form lumps with a grainy base, giving you more chewing time, making the meal a more ruminative one; or foofoo, which takes away the center of attention from the Supah itself and makes it merely sauce, while the main part of the meal becomes the lumps of foo-foo, whose toughness puts rice to shame.
And then there are the foods in the catalog which are eaten here too, but treated differently (it is like finding a language close to Wolof, but in which words have a subtly different meaning). Salad, e.g., is never eaten alone, as a dish in and of itself, as it is here as part of a vegetarian diet3. Instead it is always a base, a foundation on which is spread the true meal, usually fried fish (brittle and stiff from too long exposure to the hot oil) or meat sauce. Eating salad alone would be like eating rice alone, with no sauce. Then there is peanut butter, which is placed here in the category of butter and jam, with almost all of the oil removed, processed and put in a jar ready to be spread out on a layer of sliced bread to make a sandwich (the famous PBJ sandwich, whose very though turns my stomach). At home it is made at the market from fresh peanuts in machines which do nothing to the oil, leaving it all intact so when you cook your domoda, as a sign that it is done, the oil will float to the top, the meat, okras, and jahatu floating in it, little Islands under which lie the submerged mainland.
Domoda is peanut butter stew in the same way bread is flour - one would not eat raw flour, and claim they had known bread. By the time the domoda is done, the peanut butter has lost all the qualities it had which made it eligible to be spread on bread, and has come to discover the oily side of its nature, a quality which only came out over a hot fire, at a slow boil. All the chunkiness is gone by this time, and the taste of peanuts - which dominated before - has now receded into the background, becoming a more subtle taste, more sophisticated as it moves in the higher society of meat (or fish) and vegetables. At least in the best domodas - the better the domoda the less you can taste its original peanut butteriness. So well does this peanut butter sauce work with rice that you can, in fact, instead of having sauce and rice separate, mix them both together and heat it up to eat that way, and it still tastes as good (or better). Supah alone of the other foods possesses this quality.
Even the methods of food preparation are different. At Subway: Asian men standing behind counters in neat uniforms, their hands sterilized and wrapped in plastic, their smiles fixed as your just-baked bread travels down the assembly line of its conversion into a sandwich. Back home: the obese woman selling mboroe-nyebeh4 , who sits at a bench behind a table, her big bowl of beans (which will get progressively emptier as the evening progresses) still warm from the charcoal stove, set before her. What size, she will ask, and when you tell her she reaches into a bag of loaves on the ground at her side, cutting off the requested size and slicing it in half, dipping into the nyebeh5 , and liberally coating the insides of the bread with it. And what sauce, she asks, even as your mouth starts to water. Palm oil or regular oil, it goes on top of the nyebeh and drips over the sides of the bread, so you can't wait to lick it off. Perhaps there is something lost in the process of moving that lone woman selling sandwiches to a factory process, even as gains are made in the economies of scale - the feel of the process itself so different the end-result - the food - tastes very different.
I miss all these things, on a surface level. But it occurs to me that my missing is deeper, and concerns another catalog, one which lies under the main catalog of tastes, and is less well-defined but just as important. It is perhaps easier to explain it using smell: growing up in Gambia, one came to recognize a certain smell which attached itself to packages from America. Clothes and toys and books had this smell, when they first arrived - you couldn't easily describe it (how to describe a smell?) but you came to associate it with newness and fanciness, and childish excitement at getting new presents. It wore off after a while. Thinking back on this now I imagine Gambia also has its own set of smells - though I stayed there too long to be able to distinguish them - and that if the situation were reversed kids here would smell the same smell of Gambian newness on packages their Dads had brought back from trips to Gambia. It is the same with taste - there is an under-taste which underlies all the food you eat in a country - it survives in your mouth between meals, refreshed by every meal you eat, informing your belches and the after-taste in your mouth (and also, ahem, expulsions of a less polite nature). This ur-taste, underlying all other tastes and taking years to build up, is what haunts my eating, and what I search for so fervently. And of course I cannot find it - the Ur-taste of America is colder and less spicy, and also geared more towards the sweeter center of the spectrum. To revisit our metaphor, it is created by a different dialect, one that is not spoken here.
Yes, very well, you say. So you come from Gambia - of course the food there will taste better for you. What of it? But the refusal of my taste buds to adapt, to give me any respite in their continuous search for the tastes of home, is intimately tied with the difficulties I (and I imagine other immigrants) have settling in. I believe were one to cease the other would too. Puzzlingly, sometimes I wonder whether it was really as good as I remember. Now I have this new foreign experience to contrast against, the taste of my homeland is the taste of heaven, of no possible earthly compare. Everything - recalling the way ditah tasted in my mouth, a smell that reminds me of mboxa-bu-laka - will set off a wild round of sentimentality, that leaves me paralyzed. Yet there are memories of my interactions with food back home, ones that I suppress and do not often think about, ones that tell a different story. It turns out that in fact I hated Chu (a dish I dreamt about eating only the other day, waking up with tears in my eyes) - we cooked too much of it back home. My love for mbahal, at one time one of my favorite foods, had died, in an incident involving a goat.6 For days I would go without eating rice, instead going out at work to one of the restaurants on Kairaba Avenue, to buy chawarma and... cheeseburgers and pizza. I am sure if a Subway chain had opened at this point I would immediately have become a happy customer.
What, then, to make of this apparent taste hypocrisy? While my memories had been firm and without contradiction my problem had been easy to diagnose: I missed home, and the smell of it, and its taste. I missed all these things because from my perspective they were the best possible options in the World. Yet my memories had never been as firm as I first believed. All this time I had been standing on treacle, which I had taken to be concrete.
Looking back, everything is coated in the soft glow of evening after it has just finished thunderstorming7. This is the peculiar form missing home takes, and if it is anything it is the feeling of absence8 I feel, all the time. This absence makes me pass judgements on everything here, and it is easy to forget it is the root cause, to begin to think of the judgements I pass (on the food, the weather, the people) as valid ones in their own right, opinions I have reached by acute observation and actual (and fair) comparison with the things back home. Something which these judgements are not. The ideal situation would be one in which I could both appreciate everything here while still holding on to the space of home in me, always waiting to be filled. And perhaps this is impossible without first ditching the dichotomy of "home" and "over here".
notes
1 taste, in Wolof
2 "Jay-ri", this repetitive action is called in Wolof - I am aware of no English equivalent.
3 A meal consisting entirely of salads and vegetables is as surprising, and as much of a culture shock, as the old women who pick up waste after their dogs, walking them down the street.
4 mburu bread, nyebeh beans; put together they become mboroe-nyebeh, one word running into the other just like the bread and beans.
5 the Wolof word for beans, the perfect word for their mushiness in your mouth when you chew down on them boiled
6 With a bowl of mbahal before me, I saw a news report on GRTS about a goat born with two faces. At the exact same moment they showed the goat's wet, slithery double-face I chewed on a spoonful of mbahal whose main component was a wet, slithery okra. The association was built, and mbahal never tasted the same to me again.
7 over here it rains, a gentle patter you do not know about if you have not stepped outsidel in Gambia it thunderstorms, glorious displays of power that shake the Earth and send the power company scurrying to turn off their generators before something terrible happens.
8 A word I use often to describe my homesickness - when one is far from home one becomes acutely aware of this simple word, with its many connotations of emptiness.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The Longing For Home is An Absence, Felt Deep Within You
It started with the kabaa. I woke up this morning and there was the taste of kabaa just eaten in the back of my throat - the sugar coating of the yellow seeds making me salivate, the salt (and just a hint of pepper, just a dab of jumbo) out at the sides, toward the back of my mouth. It disappeared after I had eaten breakfast, then came back again while I stood in a line on campus. And this time when it came it was not so much a taste in my mouth as the absence of one, a tiny hole in my tasting where the sweet-souriness of kabaa would have resided, if I was still at home and could walk to the old merr sitting at the gates of Gambia High to buy one. (Ya Jaarai was her name, and she - like a physical landmark - is present in my school memories right from the beginning. Through primary school and beyond the common entrance exam into middle school, and then beyond that into high school, she is always there: selling whatever was the season's fruit, and guron-soup, and solom-solom, and the other little sweet and sour things which any Gambian school-goer is intimately familiar with. The school kids here have their dispensing machines - we have the old women we give our coins to after school. Ya Jaarai was one of these. Over time we came to develop a friendship of sorts - she would charge me less, or I would pay her more, and always choose her over the other old women who sat outside Gambia High. I do not doubt she is there still, the shawl over her shoulder, the basket of whatever is in season set out before her).
It didn't end with the kabaa. I had stayed up half the night, unable to sleep - perhaps because of the bottle of coke I drank with dinner. And so in the afternoon I went back home and climbed into bed, and let my mind drift and tried not to think of sleep so I could fall into it... a river running before me... my thoughts all a-whirl and a-swirl... and then I was awake again, and it was not so hot anymore, and I sat up in bed feeling very sad. I had had a dream, but the only thing that remained of it was a longing, as of when we have just said farewell to someone we are convinced we are going to miss very much, even though we do not remember who it is. And one other thing: there had been rice.
And so from these two things my waking self re-created my dream: the longing was for home, for my mother, for Friday afternoons after Jumaa (a voice inside me reminded me it was not Friday; I ignored it), for lazy lunches and even lazier conversations under the shade of a mango tree in my front yard, waiting for the Sun to set, for newspapers scattered about the ground as they were read and re-read and their contents discussed, for men and women dressed modestly and speaking to each other with great courtesy, enjoying each others' company. Let us be clear: I do not remember dreaming any of this, but the longing I felt - a deep gaping hole which sent echoes back to its surface, as if it contained something long lost and forgotten - needed a story commensurate with it. And so my waking self provided the details. The rice, I decided, was supa kanja, ratakh [slippery, the English word, so unbefitting of our supas, with its connotations of eels and slime and cunning criminals in back alleys; ratakh so much better, left in the end resting in your throat, like the supa which was so good you wished you did not have to swallow, only to hold it there forever, tasting it again and again all your waking moments, and then in your dreams...], the art of supa as practised by the akus, who have mastered it and left nothing more to be said on the subject - this was what I "remembered" eating in my dream reconstruction.
Memory is a hole, and sentimentality a spade with which we dig ourselves only into deeper and deeper trouble, making the hole so big and so wide we cannot escape from it in the end, the sides become too ratakh (and how the word becomes menacing now, beginning so solid yet at the last evading us, leaving us grasping for nothing while we imagine we can hear laughter in the distance). I lay back in bed and felt sick. As I do in these situations I tried (and failed) to make a deal with whoever was out there: let me, I thought as hard as I could, go home this once, let me sit next to my mother with my head on her shoulder, my stomach so filled with supa I can scarcely swat away the fly which hovers to my left, buzzing away in the fading evening light, my father and his friends speaking to each other of the World, I with no opinions and no decisions to make, only sitting there listening to them. Let me, I beamed out the thought as hard as I could to whoever was out there listening, get this and I will come to meet whatever terms of exchange you wish to set.
Nothing happened. Chinese Food, I thought, getting up, that is the answer. I was broke. In the fridge was a banana, and some bread - the practical thing would have been to save the little money I had left, to eat these and drink water and forget my dreams of rice. The Chinese cook rice, but it is not our rice, it is different - fried rice and broccoli would not fill up the hole my dream had created, but would only fail halfway, leaving me even more bereft and empty. Yet even as I stood considering this I knew already that I would leave, I would go to the restaurant and order some fried rice with the last of the money I had, in the service of a dream.
And so I left, walking to the Golden Gate restaurant. I ordered rice and chicken with broccoli, then sat inside eating it off a plastic plate with a plastic fork. In place of our nyang-katang I had fried rice; in place of okra I had broccoli, and as I chewed on the little stalks and their feathery heads I thought how broccoli was nothing like okra, how furry it felt against my tongue and palate in the moment before I champed down on it, like a little baby animal instead of the firm plant-ness of okra. And the atmosphere of the restaurant - sterilized and impersonal, as even the bathrooms here are - fans whirring overhead and chairs set around tables each forming its own little individual section, alone in the World even though they were all in one large room with no partitions between them. I chewed sadly on my chicken, opening the packets of soy sauce and liberally pouring them over the rice (back home I had liked my supa with lots of maggi sauce). A middle-aged African woman stepped in with her daughter to pick up her order. The daughter gave me strange looks and held on to her mother's arm. They stood waiting at the counter while their order was brought from the back room.
Then the woman turned to me.
- Where are you from?, she asked.
- Gambia, I replied.
- Oh - I'm from Senegal. And she smiled. I couldn't help smiling back. Her daughter ignored us both and returned to the door, where she stood impatiently hopping from foot to foot.
- Good - kon deg nga Wolof?, I asked.
- Wawe - deg nga bu bax yow?
I nodded and she smiled once more and turned to go. I asked her her name in Wolof, feeling desperate, as if I had to prove myself and my mastery of the language. She told me, and asked mine. Finally her order arrived and she left, wishing me good luck.
After my meal I sat outside the restaurant, out in the parking lot which served the mall of which the restaurant was a part, drinking a coke and looking at the passing cars and people. I thought of this blog post, of these words I would write later when I got home about the experience, the feeling within me I was still trying to name: the taste of kabaa, and missing supa kanja, and the buzzing of the fly as I sat with my mother. I thought how I would write all this, and it would all come together in a final paragraph which would show the reader how all these things added up to equal my longing, which was more than the sum of them combined.
But the important things within us are beyond language (the Great Reality Impostor), beyond attempts to be encapsulated in neat blog posts. As I sat outside I noticed there was a Shell gas station on the opposite side of the road, like the one we have in Banjul on Independence Drive. Sitting outside the one in Banjul in the gloaming you can hear the sounds of the muezzin from the mosque up the street, even though you cannot see the mosque. As I sat there looking at the gas station the noise of the passing cars seemed in my hearing to acquire a rhythm, a continuity brought on by the increase in traffic as I watched, melding the now-rising-now-falling noises of the separate car engines into one noise, rising and falling yet continuous, like a plaintive voice calling out, broadcast over the bad sound system of a nearby small mosque.
Then a strange thing happened. The world of my imaginary being - the one I have carried around in my head all this time I have been here, so finely remembered in its every detail that I still tell people I have only been here three months because my capacity for memory is still so taken up by Banjul - this World came at last to the fore, and by some trick of the declining light became super-imposed on the real world in which I sat looking at traffic. Once more I sat on Independence Drive, and people passed - familiar, Gambian - and the voice I heard transported through the heat and humidity was the voice from the mosque calling out for the timis prayer, and the taste of kabaa in my throat was not a hole waiting to be filled, but one that had just been made because I had just finished eating it. And all the people I had known - my family, my friends - were just around the corner, and as long as I did not get up to go check there they would remain, waiting for my return.
I sat there a while until a policeman walked up to me.
- Hello, he said.
- Hello.
- Just stretching my bones, he said, and and I nodded and he turned and walked away again.
Then I got up and left.
It didn't end with the kabaa. I had stayed up half the night, unable to sleep - perhaps because of the bottle of coke I drank with dinner. And so in the afternoon I went back home and climbed into bed, and let my mind drift and tried not to think of sleep so I could fall into it... a river running before me... my thoughts all a-whirl and a-swirl... and then I was awake again, and it was not so hot anymore, and I sat up in bed feeling very sad. I had had a dream, but the only thing that remained of it was a longing, as of when we have just said farewell to someone we are convinced we are going to miss very much, even though we do not remember who it is. And one other thing: there had been rice.
And so from these two things my waking self re-created my dream: the longing was for home, for my mother, for Friday afternoons after Jumaa (a voice inside me reminded me it was not Friday; I ignored it), for lazy lunches and even lazier conversations under the shade of a mango tree in my front yard, waiting for the Sun to set, for newspapers scattered about the ground as they were read and re-read and their contents discussed, for men and women dressed modestly and speaking to each other with great courtesy, enjoying each others' company. Let us be clear: I do not remember dreaming any of this, but the longing I felt - a deep gaping hole which sent echoes back to its surface, as if it contained something long lost and forgotten - needed a story commensurate with it. And so my waking self provided the details. The rice, I decided, was supa kanja, ratakh [slippery, the English word, so unbefitting of our supas, with its connotations of eels and slime and cunning criminals in back alleys; ratakh so much better, left in the end resting in your throat, like the supa which was so good you wished you did not have to swallow, only to hold it there forever, tasting it again and again all your waking moments, and then in your dreams...], the art of supa as practised by the akus, who have mastered it and left nothing more to be said on the subject - this was what I "remembered" eating in my dream reconstruction.
Memory is a hole, and sentimentality a spade with which we dig ourselves only into deeper and deeper trouble, making the hole so big and so wide we cannot escape from it in the end, the sides become too ratakh (and how the word becomes menacing now, beginning so solid yet at the last evading us, leaving us grasping for nothing while we imagine we can hear laughter in the distance). I lay back in bed and felt sick. As I do in these situations I tried (and failed) to make a deal with whoever was out there: let me, I thought as hard as I could, go home this once, let me sit next to my mother with my head on her shoulder, my stomach so filled with supa I can scarcely swat away the fly which hovers to my left, buzzing away in the fading evening light, my father and his friends speaking to each other of the World, I with no opinions and no decisions to make, only sitting there listening to them. Let me, I beamed out the thought as hard as I could to whoever was out there listening, get this and I will come to meet whatever terms of exchange you wish to set.
Nothing happened. Chinese Food, I thought, getting up, that is the answer. I was broke. In the fridge was a banana, and some bread - the practical thing would have been to save the little money I had left, to eat these and drink water and forget my dreams of rice. The Chinese cook rice, but it is not our rice, it is different - fried rice and broccoli would not fill up the hole my dream had created, but would only fail halfway, leaving me even more bereft and empty. Yet even as I stood considering this I knew already that I would leave, I would go to the restaurant and order some fried rice with the last of the money I had, in the service of a dream.
And so I left, walking to the Golden Gate restaurant. I ordered rice and chicken with broccoli, then sat inside eating it off a plastic plate with a plastic fork. In place of our nyang-katang I had fried rice; in place of okra I had broccoli, and as I chewed on the little stalks and their feathery heads I thought how broccoli was nothing like okra, how furry it felt against my tongue and palate in the moment before I champed down on it, like a little baby animal instead of the firm plant-ness of okra. And the atmosphere of the restaurant - sterilized and impersonal, as even the bathrooms here are - fans whirring overhead and chairs set around tables each forming its own little individual section, alone in the World even though they were all in one large room with no partitions between them. I chewed sadly on my chicken, opening the packets of soy sauce and liberally pouring them over the rice (back home I had liked my supa with lots of maggi sauce). A middle-aged African woman stepped in with her daughter to pick up her order. The daughter gave me strange looks and held on to her mother's arm. They stood waiting at the counter while their order was brought from the back room.
Then the woman turned to me.
- Where are you from?, she asked.
- Gambia, I replied.
- Oh - I'm from Senegal. And she smiled. I couldn't help smiling back. Her daughter ignored us both and returned to the door, where she stood impatiently hopping from foot to foot.
- Good - kon deg nga Wolof?, I asked.
- Wawe - deg nga bu bax yow?
I nodded and she smiled once more and turned to go. I asked her her name in Wolof, feeling desperate, as if I had to prove myself and my mastery of the language. She told me, and asked mine. Finally her order arrived and she left, wishing me good luck.
After my meal I sat outside the restaurant, out in the parking lot which served the mall of which the restaurant was a part, drinking a coke and looking at the passing cars and people. I thought of this blog post, of these words I would write later when I got home about the experience, the feeling within me I was still trying to name: the taste of kabaa, and missing supa kanja, and the buzzing of the fly as I sat with my mother. I thought how I would write all this, and it would all come together in a final paragraph which would show the reader how all these things added up to equal my longing, which was more than the sum of them combined.
But the important things within us are beyond language (the Great Reality Impostor), beyond attempts to be encapsulated in neat blog posts. As I sat outside I noticed there was a Shell gas station on the opposite side of the road, like the one we have in Banjul on Independence Drive. Sitting outside the one in Banjul in the gloaming you can hear the sounds of the muezzin from the mosque up the street, even though you cannot see the mosque. As I sat there looking at the gas station the noise of the passing cars seemed in my hearing to acquire a rhythm, a continuity brought on by the increase in traffic as I watched, melding the now-rising-now-falling noises of the separate car engines into one noise, rising and falling yet continuous, like a plaintive voice calling out, broadcast over the bad sound system of a nearby small mosque.
Then a strange thing happened. The world of my imaginary being - the one I have carried around in my head all this time I have been here, so finely remembered in its every detail that I still tell people I have only been here three months because my capacity for memory is still so taken up by Banjul - this World came at last to the fore, and by some trick of the declining light became super-imposed on the real world in which I sat looking at traffic. Once more I sat on Independence Drive, and people passed - familiar, Gambian - and the voice I heard transported through the heat and humidity was the voice from the mosque calling out for the timis prayer, and the taste of kabaa in my throat was not a hole waiting to be filled, but one that had just been made because I had just finished eating it. And all the people I had known - my family, my friends - were just around the corner, and as long as I did not get up to go check there they would remain, waiting for my return.
I sat there a while until a policeman walked up to me.
- Hello, he said.
- Hello.
- Just stretching my bones, he said, and and I nodded and he turned and walked away again.
Then I got up and left.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Binda Gambia
I set up a new blog where I am hoping to promote Gambian writing, and give Gambian writers a platform to publish their work without having to go through all the troubles involved in doing this at home. The address is http://bindagambia.blogspot.com. Some very interesting pieces up there right now, including an appreciation of Lenrie Peters's work, an excerpt from the memoir of a Gambian living abroad, and various short stories. Check it out.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Paradise FM [Gambian Online Radio]
Paradise FM [owned by former GRTS-ite Harona Drammeh] now have online streaming - you can listen by going to http://paradisefm.gm/.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
New Gamwriters.com
Cherno Barry has revamped the gamwriters.com website, making it into the one place you need to go to if you need to find out about Gambian writers and their work. It's got tons and tons of resources, from reviews to complete plays and poems to author info, and will only grow more complete with time. Check it out at http://www.gamwriters.com.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The Constitution of The Gambia Online
You can download a draft of the constitution online here (it's in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Reader to view it).Could be helpful if you need to quickly look something up.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Reading the Ceiling - A Review
In the slit between my bedroom curtains I see a triangle of sky more grey than blue. [...] I plan to be loose today. But who with?
Ayodele is a young Aku girl growing up in The Gambia. The book starts when, at 18, she has to make a monumental decision: who to lose her virginity to. But it's more than just who she loses it to that is important, it's that she is losing it, rebelling against the strict moral system of her mother's generation where a woman only lost her virginity on her wedding night, to her husband. This sense of rebellion against the rigid structures binding women in place in Gambian society is something that underlies the whole book, always subtly in place, always at the base of all the choices Ayodele makes (or fails to make).
Ayodele has a short-list of possible candidates, and at the beginning of the book we find her running through them in her mind, weighing them against each other. (And the largest mango in my pile? The biggest bonga on my stall?, she asks at one point during the descriptions). It is at this point that the book splits into three, the three possible paths Ayodele's life could take, depending on which choice she makes.
Given the plot of the book, it would have been very easy for it to become nothing more than a cheap gimmick, swamped in righteous sentimentality and a bias for certain choices over others on the author's part. Not so in this case - all the choices Ayodele makes are as valid as any other: there is no preaching, no overbearing moral tone. It is told in the first person, and the storytelling is watertight, and very convincing - the author never gets in the way of her characters, or interferes with them. There is a discipline in the storytelling, and it pays off: Ayodele is ready to step out of the page at any moment, and during her moments of sorrow - and this book, like real life, does not shy away from those - you feel great sympathy for her.
We often think of the choices we make as linked together in a long line, from start to finish, one choice leading to another, which leads to another, and so on until we expire. This view is overly simplistic, and not very realistic. Our choices are more like a web, each choice linked to a hundred other choices, which are linked to a hundred others, the linkages running backward and forward and letting you arrive at different parts of the web via different paths. Dayo, rather than taking the simplistic view here, takes the more complex one: things in one choice-line are echoed in a second one, certain things are repeated in all three lines, even though different choices were made by Ayodele. You find yourself wondering whether this complex interaction between the many choices we (and others) make, are not what we glorify and call Fate (with a capital F).
I feel like I do when I stand on the wet sand on the beach [...] and try to guess which of the waves will reach my toes before their weight pulls them back. [...] It's not the obvious ones, not necessarily the big ones that ride by themselves. More often than not, these waves never touch my toes.
Dayo Forster is a great stylist of prose, and you get the feeling much work went into crafting every word on these pages. The sentences are beautiful, and there are turns of phrase which demand that you re-read them, their lyricism almost poetic in its effect. Yet Ayodele never takes herself too seriously - all through the book there is a thin film of humor lain over everything that happens, and matters are dealt with with a great subtlety, and a very, very fine hand. Take, for example, this description of... well, just read it:
[He] can drive. I direct him all the way. Will you take me home? Why don't you stop here for a bit? Shall we move to the back seat? I have the good sense to take out the condom in my disco bag.
The book is set in The Gambia, and the descriptions and dialogue are very authentic. When Ayodele and her classmates travel up-country to celebrate their graduation with a picnic, you are there with them: the mud and the mosquitoes and the river with the canoes on it. There are many layers to this book, and many excursions into subjects which intrude into the life of every Gambian, despite your best efforts to guard against them: from the large (politics, religion, polygamy) to the small (how many mburu to buy for breakfast). But everything is always viewed from the perspective of Ayodele, and how it affects her life - there are no lengthy excursions into topics which have nothing to do with the plot, but which the author thought were pertinent in a Gambian novel anyway.
All this adds up to create a really good novel, one which transports you breathless from the almost-childish musings of a teenager lying on her bed making plans for the rest of her life, to the end, when Aodele has grown - in more ways than one - and is left, not bitter, not even regretful, but settled into her life, time and experience wrapping her up in a heavy old shawl and sitting her down in an armchair to await.... whatever comes next. Ayodele is a very sad character: one of the themse of the book is how she searches for love in her life continuously, yet never truly finds it (except in one instance when she has it cruelly wrested away from her). The work hovers on the edge of being existentialist - Ayodele is not very religous at the best of times, and outright atheistic at others, yet she always seems to be searching, for herself, for others, for meaning, most of the time without even knowing what she looks for - and you are left with a sense of the futility of all the choices we make, ultimately. By the end of the book, Ayodele has done everything, and done nothing and, as we know (having caught glimpses of her other possible futures) this is the only way it could end. 'I wish I could go back and... and change things", a thousand bad movie actors have said. Maybe someone should get them a copy of this novel, so they'll stop being deluded.
Reading the Ceiling is Dayo Forster's first novel. You can get it on the publisher's website here.
Ayodele is a young Aku girl growing up in The Gambia. The book starts when, at 18, she has to make a monumental decision: who to lose her virginity to. But it's more than just who she loses it to that is important, it's that she is losing it, rebelling against the strict moral system of her mother's generation where a woman only lost her virginity on her wedding night, to her husband. This sense of rebellion against the rigid structures binding women in place in Gambian society is something that underlies the whole book, always subtly in place, always at the base of all the choices Ayodele makes (or fails to make).
Ayodele has a short-list of possible candidates, and at the beginning of the book we find her running through them in her mind, weighing them against each other. (And the largest mango in my pile? The biggest bonga on my stall?, she asks at one point during the descriptions). It is at this point that the book splits into three, the three possible paths Ayodele's life could take, depending on which choice she makes.
Given the plot of the book, it would have been very easy for it to become nothing more than a cheap gimmick, swamped in righteous sentimentality and a bias for certain choices over others on the author's part. Not so in this case - all the choices Ayodele makes are as valid as any other: there is no preaching, no overbearing moral tone. It is told in the first person, and the storytelling is watertight, and very convincing - the author never gets in the way of her characters, or interferes with them. There is a discipline in the storytelling, and it pays off: Ayodele is ready to step out of the page at any moment, and during her moments of sorrow - and this book, like real life, does not shy away from those - you feel great sympathy for her.
We often think of the choices we make as linked together in a long line, from start to finish, one choice leading to another, which leads to another, and so on until we expire. This view is overly simplistic, and not very realistic. Our choices are more like a web, each choice linked to a hundred other choices, which are linked to a hundred others, the linkages running backward and forward and letting you arrive at different parts of the web via different paths. Dayo, rather than taking the simplistic view here, takes the more complex one: things in one choice-line are echoed in a second one, certain things are repeated in all three lines, even though different choices were made by Ayodele. You find yourself wondering whether this complex interaction between the many choices we (and others) make, are not what we glorify and call Fate (with a capital F).
I feel like I do when I stand on the wet sand on the beach [...] and try to guess which of the waves will reach my toes before their weight pulls them back. [...] It's not the obvious ones, not necessarily the big ones that ride by themselves. More often than not, these waves never touch my toes.
Dayo Forster is a great stylist of prose, and you get the feeling much work went into crafting every word on these pages. The sentences are beautiful, and there are turns of phrase which demand that you re-read them, their lyricism almost poetic in its effect. Yet Ayodele never takes herself too seriously - all through the book there is a thin film of humor lain over everything that happens, and matters are dealt with with a great subtlety, and a very, very fine hand. Take, for example, this description of... well, just read it:
[He] can drive. I direct him all the way. Will you take me home? Why don't you stop here for a bit? Shall we move to the back seat? I have the good sense to take out the condom in my disco bag.
The book is set in The Gambia, and the descriptions and dialogue are very authentic. When Ayodele and her classmates travel up-country to celebrate their graduation with a picnic, you are there with them: the mud and the mosquitoes and the river with the canoes on it. There are many layers to this book, and many excursions into subjects which intrude into the life of every Gambian, despite your best efforts to guard against them: from the large (politics, religion, polygamy) to the small (how many mburu to buy for breakfast). But everything is always viewed from the perspective of Ayodele, and how it affects her life - there are no lengthy excursions into topics which have nothing to do with the plot, but which the author thought were pertinent in a Gambian novel anyway.
All this adds up to create a really good novel, one which transports you breathless from the almost-childish musings of a teenager lying on her bed making plans for the rest of her life, to the end, when Aodele has grown - in more ways than one - and is left, not bitter, not even regretful, but settled into her life, time and experience wrapping her up in a heavy old shawl and sitting her down in an armchair to await.... whatever comes next. Ayodele is a very sad character: one of the themse of the book is how she searches for love in her life continuously, yet never truly finds it (except in one instance when she has it cruelly wrested away from her). The work hovers on the edge of being existentialist - Ayodele is not very religous at the best of times, and outright atheistic at others, yet she always seems to be searching, for herself, for others, for meaning, most of the time without even knowing what she looks for - and you are left with a sense of the futility of all the choices we make, ultimately. By the end of the book, Ayodele has done everything, and done nothing and, as we know (having caught glimpses of her other possible futures) this is the only way it could end. 'I wish I could go back and... and change things", a thousand bad movie actors have said. Maybe someone should get them a copy of this novel, so they'll stop being deluded.
Reading the Ceiling is Dayo Forster's first novel. You can get it on the publisher's website here.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Gambian Musicians and how to Identify them
Though it may not be obvious at first glance (or second, or third), there is quite a burgeoning music scene in The Gambia. Because it does not work in the same way as traditional music scenes in other countries, it is sometimes hard to make sense of it. This guide is written to help you identify the different types of musicians, which is always a good first step towards general musical enlightenment. By the time you finish reading this guide, you will know 90% of what there is to know about the current state of music in the country, ensuring you will never be left out again in conversations with your musical friends.
The Different Types (and where to find them)
1) The Rapper Dude: Usually in their late teens or early twenties, from upper-middle class / upper class families. This type of musician can be recognized by the way they dress (jeans, basketball shirts, and blings are good, belts are not - see any 50 Cent clip), the way they talk (a lot of 'nigga!'s and hi-fives), and the way they walk (the swagger: a rapper dude's best friend). They are heavily influenced by rap music, and will swear to you that 2pac is a highly-underappreciated visionary prophet who is still alive somewhere, and is only waiting for the right time to re-surface and once more rule the world. Somehow, in between all the clubbing and 'living the good life', they manage to find a way to actually sit down and make music. This music, which is of varying qualities (from mediocre to just bad), usually consists of the rapper dude desperately trying to sound like their favorite rap star (or, failing that, at least American) over a computer-generated beat. The lyrics of the songs almost never have anything to do with reality, and instead switch between talking about how 'bad' the rapper dude is, and how they are 'gonna shoot you up with their fo-fo' if you mess with them. Don't be scared: the rapper dude is usually harmless, and wouldn't hurt a fly, despite all the posing.
Where to find: Any hip and hap'ning club in the country (currently Cotton Club, but check with hip and hap'ning teenagers in your locality), Sunday Beach (at Palma Rima during the summer).
2) The GRTS Clip Artist: Back in the day, there was a musical explosion in The Gambia, with everyone and their cousin forming a rap/ndaga/reggae group and making a video-clip for GRTS. Some of these were even good, and are still remembered with sentimentality by some folks (Born Africans, anyone?). Then the material from the explosion came back together and folded in on itself, ending in a disappointing whimper (more like a sigh, really). All that remains of that once promising time is... the GRTS Clip Artist. This type of musician can be recognized by their many clips on GRTS, all the same repetitious claptrap, illustrated with wildly-forced-grin-bearing dancers windmilling their arms every which way, as the camera zooms out and then pans in on our artist, also proudly displaying all their teeth and trying to sing at the same time. Due to timing issues, the audio of the song is usually not in sync with the lip movement of our hero artist, and so you get the painful effect of watching the artist miming a (bad) song they didn't even write. The subject matter of the GRTS Clip Artist's song is pre-defined, and can only be chosen from a few topics: 1) The President, 2) Football (esp. the Under-17s, who are hot right now), 3) Any current summit/conference/international meeting currently being held by world leaders in the country, or 4) How nice Gambia is.
Where to find: Watch GRTS any day of the week, especially around 7pm (immediately before the news).
3) The Jamaican Aya-man: This type of artist is usually older than the rapper dude (in their mid to late twenties), but they have a lot of similarities. Whilst the rapper dude is interested in Black American culture and endeavors to make it his own, the Aya-man chooses Jamaican culture, and all that entails. The Aya-man usually is dreadlocked (you need dreadlocks, to shake wildly in the air whilst you sing, if you ever get to make a video-clip for GRTS), and is heavily influenced by Jamaican artists ranging from Bob Marley (the old-school Aya-man), to Capleton (the crazy Aya-man), to Sean Paul (the me-wan-get-laid Aya-man). The Aya-man's song topics of choice, though not as limited as the GRTS Clip Artist's, still needs to be selected from a (rather vague) list: 1) how they wanna fight us, but in the end they will fall down. (they here, though usually used to refer to the West (Babylan), can also mean rich people in the Aya-man's own society, the government, the Aya-man's next door neighbor, and even past friends the Aya-man has fallen out with). 2) how 'da weed' should be freed. (These songs usually include vague [the Aya-man loves vague] arguments about how 'da weed' keeps people healthy, etc., and how they want to prohibit it simply to have more control over us [which ties in nicely with (1) above] ). 3) Jah Rastafari - it is very rare to see an Aya-man devote a whole song to this topic, unless it also has Muslim overtones, as most Aya-mans are also devout muslims, and understand that Rastafarian beliefs can be accepted only up to a certain point, beyond which one becomes blasphemous and liable to burn in hell.
Where to find: Aya-mans give free shows sometimes, which you can find out about via word-of-mouth. The less shy and introverted ones also create video clips of their music, which can be viewed on GRTS.
4) The Hotel Entertainer: Of the many types of gambian musician, this is probably the most respectable. The HE (His Excellency [of musicians] - get it?) can be found in hotels and other tourist locations. HEs usually form bands, and most of the time have some amount of skill at playing at least one musical instrument, even if it's only drums (some HEs have been known to play two, three, or even four instruments). The HE band also includes a singer, more often than not a female (perhaps with a gravelly-voiced male backup, perhaps not), and whilst some HEs do write their own songs, they also perform covers of popular classics. The reason for the HE's comparatively higher quality of performance/skill is probably that most HEs perform music for a living, and there's nothing like knowing that the probability of you continuing at an essential-for-your-survival job is directly linked to how well-received your show was, to keep you working hard.
Where to find: At any hotel / tourist location, especially in the Senegambia area.
5) The Ngenteh Entertainer: This type of musician, the poor country mouse cousin to the Hotel Entertainer's town mouse, is to be found at ngentehs (naming ceremonies), weddings, and other social events. It is probably best to think of them as the poor man's Hotel Entertainers, as they earn less, and are in most cases not as skilled. Whilst the Hotel Entertainers get to perform in an air-conditioned environment, the Ngenteh Entertainer most of the time have to content themselves with a street set up with a "No Entry" sign at both ends, barring cars from entering and ensuring the NEs have full reign for the duration of their performance; the crowd forming a circle, with the NEs at the head, dancers moving to the middle of the circle and back to their seats, as the evening progresses. The equipment of NEs ranges from simply drums of different shapes and sizes (for the less sophisticated), to an almost-orchestra (or as close as you can get, under the circumstances), with guitars, a keyboard, amplifiers, speakers, and maybe even the odd synthesizer.
Where to find: At any celebratory social function (i.e. not funerals, charities, etc., but at weddings, naming ceremonies, and other such happy occasions).
5a) The Lesser Ngenteh Entertainer: There is some argument about whether this type of musician should be categorized as a subtype of the NE. Whilst the Lesser Ngenteh Entertainers claim they were the original entertainers at social functions and so deserve the pejorative 'lesser' to be dropped from their names, the Ngenteh Entertainers claim the LNE are nothing more than glorified beggars, and should not be encouraged by being called artists. The LNE are griots who, having become impatient with their roles as humble oral chroniclers of the people's history, have decided to concentrate on their other (albeit lesser) social responsibility: going to social functions and singing praise songs for money. Usually women (though there are also some men LNEs), it is rare to see an LNE acting alone - groups are the favored form of operation, though an unwritten rule is that you try to make as much money behind the others' backs as possible. The more talented LNEs can make up epic songs on the spot, sometimes doing research within minutes of arriving at an event. [There is a joke about an LNE who, arriving at a funeral, was told by a gang of rascally boys that it was actually a wedding. He walked into the funereal house, singing loudly the praises of the dead man, and was promptly chased out by enraged mourners. This joke is probably not a true story, but you get the point].
Where to find: See (5) above.
Conclusion
These are the main types of Gambian musicians. As with any list, there are musicians who do not fit within any of the categories above, either because:
a) they are hybrids (e.g. a rapper dude who has then gone on to make it on GRTS, becoming a Super-Rapper-GRTS-Clip-Dude) or
b) they are exceptions (e.g. Jaliba Kuyateh, who actually makes good music that is local and on TV).
We hope you find this guide useful. Happy Gambian Music listening.
The Different Types (and where to find them)
1) The Rapper Dude: Usually in their late teens or early twenties, from upper-middle class / upper class families. This type of musician can be recognized by the way they dress (jeans, basketball shirts, and blings are good, belts are not - see any 50 Cent clip), the way they talk (a lot of 'nigga!'s and hi-fives), and the way they walk (the swagger: a rapper dude's best friend). They are heavily influenced by rap music, and will swear to you that 2pac is a highly-underappreciated visionary prophet who is still alive somewhere, and is only waiting for the right time to re-surface and once more rule the world. Somehow, in between all the clubbing and 'living the good life', they manage to find a way to actually sit down and make music. This music, which is of varying qualities (from mediocre to just bad), usually consists of the rapper dude desperately trying to sound like their favorite rap star (or, failing that, at least American) over a computer-generated beat. The lyrics of the songs almost never have anything to do with reality, and instead switch between talking about how 'bad' the rapper dude is, and how they are 'gonna shoot you up with their fo-fo' if you mess with them. Don't be scared: the rapper dude is usually harmless, and wouldn't hurt a fly, despite all the posing.
Where to find: Any hip and hap'ning club in the country (currently Cotton Club, but check with hip and hap'ning teenagers in your locality), Sunday Beach (at Palma Rima during the summer).
2) The GRTS Clip Artist: Back in the day, there was a musical explosion in The Gambia, with everyone and their cousin forming a rap/ndaga/reggae group and making a video-clip for GRTS. Some of these were even good, and are still remembered with sentimentality by some folks (Born Africans, anyone?). Then the material from the explosion came back together and folded in on itself, ending in a disappointing whimper (more like a sigh, really). All that remains of that once promising time is... the GRTS Clip Artist. This type of musician can be recognized by their many clips on GRTS, all the same repetitious claptrap, illustrated with wildly-forced-grin-bearing dancers windmilling their arms every which way, as the camera zooms out and then pans in on our artist, also proudly displaying all their teeth and trying to sing at the same time. Due to timing issues, the audio of the song is usually not in sync with the lip movement of our hero artist, and so you get the painful effect of watching the artist miming a (bad) song they didn't even write. The subject matter of the GRTS Clip Artist's song is pre-defined, and can only be chosen from a few topics: 1) The President, 2) Football (esp. the Under-17s, who are hot right now), 3) Any current summit/conference/international meeting currently being held by world leaders in the country, or 4) How nice Gambia is.
Where to find: Watch GRTS any day of the week, especially around 7pm (immediately before the news).
3) The Jamaican Aya-man: This type of artist is usually older than the rapper dude (in their mid to late twenties), but they have a lot of similarities. Whilst the rapper dude is interested in Black American culture and endeavors to make it his own, the Aya-man chooses Jamaican culture, and all that entails. The Aya-man usually is dreadlocked (you need dreadlocks, to shake wildly in the air whilst you sing, if you ever get to make a video-clip for GRTS), and is heavily influenced by Jamaican artists ranging from Bob Marley (the old-school Aya-man), to Capleton (the crazy Aya-man), to Sean Paul (the me-wan-get-laid Aya-man). The Aya-man's song topics of choice, though not as limited as the GRTS Clip Artist's, still needs to be selected from a (rather vague) list: 1) how they wanna fight us, but in the end they will fall down. (they here, though usually used to refer to the West (Babylan), can also mean rich people in the Aya-man's own society, the government, the Aya-man's next door neighbor, and even past friends the Aya-man has fallen out with). 2) how 'da weed' should be freed. (These songs usually include vague [the Aya-man loves vague] arguments about how 'da weed' keeps people healthy, etc., and how they want to prohibit it simply to have more control over us [which ties in nicely with (1) above] ). 3) Jah Rastafari - it is very rare to see an Aya-man devote a whole song to this topic, unless it also has Muslim overtones, as most Aya-mans are also devout muslims, and understand that Rastafarian beliefs can be accepted only up to a certain point, beyond which one becomes blasphemous and liable to burn in hell.
Where to find: Aya-mans give free shows sometimes, which you can find out about via word-of-mouth. The less shy and introverted ones also create video clips of their music, which can be viewed on GRTS.
4) The Hotel Entertainer: Of the many types of gambian musician, this is probably the most respectable. The HE (His Excellency [of musicians] - get it?) can be found in hotels and other tourist locations. HEs usually form bands, and most of the time have some amount of skill at playing at least one musical instrument, even if it's only drums (some HEs have been known to play two, three, or even four instruments). The HE band also includes a singer, more often than not a female (perhaps with a gravelly-voiced male backup, perhaps not), and whilst some HEs do write their own songs, they also perform covers of popular classics. The reason for the HE's comparatively higher quality of performance/skill is probably that most HEs perform music for a living, and there's nothing like knowing that the probability of you continuing at an essential-for-your-survival job is directly linked to how well-received your show was, to keep you working hard.
Where to find: At any hotel / tourist location, especially in the Senegambia area.
5) The Ngenteh Entertainer: This type of musician, the poor country mouse cousin to the Hotel Entertainer's town mouse, is to be found at ngentehs (naming ceremonies), weddings, and other social events. It is probably best to think of them as the poor man's Hotel Entertainers, as they earn less, and are in most cases not as skilled. Whilst the Hotel Entertainers get to perform in an air-conditioned environment, the Ngenteh Entertainer most of the time have to content themselves with a street set up with a "No Entry" sign at both ends, barring cars from entering and ensuring the NEs have full reign for the duration of their performance; the crowd forming a circle, with the NEs at the head, dancers moving to the middle of the circle and back to their seats, as the evening progresses. The equipment of NEs ranges from simply drums of different shapes and sizes (for the less sophisticated), to an almost-orchestra (or as close as you can get, under the circumstances), with guitars, a keyboard, amplifiers, speakers, and maybe even the odd synthesizer.
Where to find: At any celebratory social function (i.e. not funerals, charities, etc., but at weddings, naming ceremonies, and other such happy occasions).
5a) The Lesser Ngenteh Entertainer: There is some argument about whether this type of musician should be categorized as a subtype of the NE. Whilst the Lesser Ngenteh Entertainers claim they were the original entertainers at social functions and so deserve the pejorative 'lesser' to be dropped from their names, the Ngenteh Entertainers claim the LNE are nothing more than glorified beggars, and should not be encouraged by being called artists. The LNE are griots who, having become impatient with their roles as humble oral chroniclers of the people's history, have decided to concentrate on their other (albeit lesser) social responsibility: going to social functions and singing praise songs for money. Usually women (though there are also some men LNEs), it is rare to see an LNE acting alone - groups are the favored form of operation, though an unwritten rule is that you try to make as much money behind the others' backs as possible. The more talented LNEs can make up epic songs on the spot, sometimes doing research within minutes of arriving at an event. [There is a joke about an LNE who, arriving at a funeral, was told by a gang of rascally boys that it was actually a wedding. He walked into the funereal house, singing loudly the praises of the dead man, and was promptly chased out by enraged mourners. This joke is probably not a true story, but you get the point].
Where to find: See (5) above.
Conclusion
These are the main types of Gambian musicians. As with any list, there are musicians who do not fit within any of the categories above, either because:
a) they are hybrids (e.g. a rapper dude who has then gone on to make it on GRTS, becoming a Super-Rapper-GRTS-Clip-Dude) or
b) they are exceptions (e.g. Jaliba Kuyateh, who actually makes good music that is local and on TV).
We hope you find this guide useful. Happy Gambian Music listening.
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