My Life as a Kabaa Eater (tentative title. Other tentative titles: "How I learnt to Stop Worrying and Eat Some Kabaa.", "In America they call it candy

My preferred way of eating kabaa is with my fingers, while pacing frenetically in the backyard and thinking random thoughts (such as the ones that I'm writing now). The kabaa - along with the solom-solom, the gurun-soup, the flocks, the mborkha-bu-laka, etc. - are our version of candy/the American snack ("our version of" here not used in the sense of having a derivative product, since kabaa definitely is not a copied and changed version of candy, but rather used in the sense of two products used in the same fashion in different cultures, neither of which take precedence or claim originality over the other). Sucking on a kabaa seed it struck me how different our "candy" is from the ones in the West (and again we see the factory-ization that is a theme I have been visiting again and again lately): over there candy (and by candy here I mean all dispensed products, from bottles of coke to Pringles to those little groundnut bags) is created in factories, where programmed mechanical arms put them in bags and label them with, among other things, their caloric content and what ingredients went into their making. These are then sealed into boxes and transported in their thousands to giant warehouses, from whence they move to supermarkets and vending machines. In contrast, our "candy" grows on trees and is harvested and bought by old women, who sit outside school gates and at street junctions haggling over their price with customers. There are no laws (health of otherwise) which the producers of this "candy" have to follow (and here again I take a detour to talk about the issue of consumer trust: all over the Gambia there are men and women selling all kinds of food - from the narr selling yaapa-bu-laka ("forokh chaaya" to some of you) to the peul selling taapa-laapa - though there is a health department that is in charge of regulating all these food-selling places, it rarely does anything, except in the most egregious cases - instead we have an implicit trust in all these people to stay healthy and not, for example, cut open our bread right after they finish wiping their noses. Despite the occasional horror story about razors being found in taapa-laapa, e.g., the system works surprisingly well - there is rarely a case of food poisoning (whether because we have developed stronger immune systems a more qualified person will have to tell us) and everything goes along relatively smoothly). And while over there the end of the line is a food dispenser, programmed to work without human intervention (and, the melodramatic novelist in me wants to add: cold, distant, austere), here it is the aforementioned old woman, experimentally cutting open your kabaa for you to see if it is bad, or turning your mborkha on the charcoal fire to prevent it getting burnt (interesting-but-useless-fact-about-the-author: I actually prefer some of my mborkha to be burnt in this way - there is to me something satisfying about scraping off this black burnt crisp and chewing on it - this makes me understand at an instinctual level why people suffer from pica, eating ash, or chalk, or clay).

The kabaa's preparation is as important as its consumption. Novice (or just lazy) kabaa buyers will leave the details of the mixing (aside to the uninitiated: kabaa in its virgin form is usually a sour, almost-juiceless fruit - a mixture of sugar, salt, etc. are needed to flavor the kabaa and bring out its juices, and allow one to eat it without the mouth-tightening which is the visible result of sourness) to the kabaa seller (who usually has a mixture of sugar, pepper and salt in a plastic container ready for just such events), who adds a smidgen of this mixture to the kabaa with his knife and stabs again and again into the kabaa, introducing along with the stabs a swirling motion meant to imitate the motion of a mixing finger (one of the disadvantages of having the kabaa seller do it for you: a knife just can't reach into the inner recesses of the kabaa like a well-aimed finger can. Plus you can't lick and suck on a sugar-covered knife). And so the better way to do it is to take the kabaa home, and cut it open, and carry out the mixing ritual, yourself. The downside to this of course is that if the kabaa is a bad one (in my experience about one in every forty or so kabaas turns out irrecoverably bad (recoverably bad is when the badness is limited to just the top of the kabaa, so you can cut it out with a knife and enjoy the rest; irrecoverably bad is when the badness has spread throughout the kabaa like a disease, so all you can do is throw it away)) you have to either take it back to the kabaa seller to have it replaced, or, if they're located too far away, throw it in the bin and curse the waste of money (speaking of which, the price of kabaa has gone up quite a bit in the last two years - whereas two years ago it cost a dalasi for a small one, and five dalasis for a big one, now the starting price of big ones is ten dee and the smaller ones cost pound (hip nongo slang for currency: pound = five dalasi; sugu-fem = twenty-five; arch = hundred (geddit? arch as in the Arch which adorns the hundred dalasi note. Don't ask me what sugu-fem means)). Anyways so once the kabaa is opened (with a knife - as in when cutting open an orange you must make the lower part larger, and the upper part smaller, giving a cover and a main part - this is just one of those things everyone does automatically, which just seems to be the right thing, and does not need rationalizing), one then has a selection of condiments to add. Sugar is the most common, with a dash of salt on the side to add a hint of, well, saltiness. It is by no means the only possible combination however: I have seen people who prefer just salt; or just sugar; or sugar and salt and pepper; or salt and pepper; or any of the above but with jumbo added as well (I myself am not a big fan of jumbo in kabaa, which is funny because I liberally apply maggi sauce to every rice dish I eat, yet adding even a little jumbo to my kabaa leaves me feeling faintly nauseous). Instead of working within the confines of the kabaa shell there are some who prefer instead to offload the whole thing to a cup (including the skin, of which more later), which gives them more space to maneuver but abstracts a little from the mother-naturey feel of the whole exercise - these are also the people who will, after they have finished mixing the kabaa this way, put it in the fridge to have it chill a bit before they eat it, a practice frowned upon by kabaa purists but which I have been guilty of on occasion. (I have heard as well that doing this, and freezing the kabaa, is the only way to get it past US customs, as the whole kabaa - pod and all - seems to pose too much of a threat to national health security (not surprising, given that the kabaa - much as I love it - is not exactly the most good-looking of fruits (that award would probably go to the vain apple, or the frivolous banana). I haven't had occasion to test this yet, though I fear I will soon).

Swallowing kabaa seeds does wonders in the, ahem, fibre department, strengthening (and here I ask the more sensitive readers to skip a line or two - or in fact the rest of this paragraph - before they continue reading) what would perhaps be rather watery in nature, or, at best smearful (as in leaving smears during its passage), leading to some very satisfying, ahem, sessions in the bathroom (there is a palpable sense of relief that follows these sessions - after a particularly good one, one finds oneself feeling lighter, as if divested of a great load (which, in fact, is the case) - this relief is built up over the course of the session in increments, each release of matter increasing one's level of satisfaction, until one is finally done. The solidity of the matter being released is directly proportional to the general feeling of satisfaction and relief one feels - which is where the kabaa comes in: the swallowed seeds mix in with whatever is already in there, adding a firmness and a certain well-roundedness which contributes greatly to the final feeling result).

After one has eaten the seeds there is the skin of the kabaa (skin here having faintly cannibalistic connotations (at least to my, admittedly quite dark, imagination), but don't think of human skin, think of the skin of, say, a banana). The kabaa has a hard casing in which the seeds are contained - coating the inside of this hard coating is an edible skin, which can be scraped off and eaten, either with a spoon, or with the edges of the teeth. This is where the sugar/salt/pepper/jumbo mixture proves it second use, in addition to un-souring the kabaa seeds: by the time all the seeds are gone all is left is the kabaa juice created at the beginning of the exercise. This adds a measure of sweetness/saltiness/jumbo-iness to the skin - while one sucked on then spat out/swallowed the seed, the skin is made for chewing on. There is a certain sourness around its edges, which along with the sugar make for an interesting combination, and one which I would urge you to try if you have not already.

Home is not just a place - it is useful instead to think of it as a construction, a collection of things we have experienced enough times that they become a part of our core identity, and we yearn for them every time we are absent from them. One of these things for me in my construction of Gambia as a home is the house-shaking thunderstorms, which send thrills (thunder! lightning!) through you one moment and then gently send you to sleep the next (the gentle waft of a breeze through an open window, as voices drowned by the rain sounds attempt a conversation in the next room…). Another is the kabaa, and the experience that is eating it - silly as it seems this is one of the things I missed most about home, and is one of the reasons I can't wait to come back for good.

The Mosquitoes

There are our old friends, the mosquitoes. From the first evening, outside on the verandah praying, they make their presence felt. They descend from the skies in ones and twos, and settle daintily, almost fondly onto the bare patches of skin that wait, like fields buried beneath which lie globules of blood, waiting to be harvested. There are two main reactions to the mosquito. First there are the swipers, who cannot sit still for a moment in a mosquito's presence, because even hearing the whine of the insect in the air (or imagining they hear it) sets their skin to crawling. And so they swipe their hands through the air, and clap them together.

These are the two generally agreed-upon and most effective ways to kill a mosquito, apparently: the swipe (a swinging of the forearm through the air to a decided-upon point in the sky, at which point the hand is suddenly clasped closed, the idea being to fool the mosquitoes ("oh look - there - an empty palm facing upward and moving down toward me - I'll just continue flying in its general direction - how could it hurt me"), and then at the crucial moment intercepting their flight path and squashing them flat (or as flat as a mosquito can be, given that it is already so tiny).

The swipe casts a wider net, though its disadvantage is that it leaves you with a palm full of blood and is not as satisfactory as the clap, which is like a sudden sharp shock in the life of the mosquito bringing it to an end (we don't just want our enemies to die, we want them to die painfully, with thunder rolling down from the skies and lightning illuminating the scene and everyone witnessing it). The clap begins as two palms facing each other in the sky (as at the beginning of a clapping motion, hence the name) - the mosquito flies between them like - well like a mosquito really

There is a tale of a pharaoh who, fooled by the excess of his earthly wealth and power, dared challenge the name of God himself. And God, ever patient, said nothing, only watched as he boasted and pounded his chest* and pointed out to his people how God was doing nothing, because he was so great. That night while he slept God sent a mosquito, the tiniest of creatures - it flew and flew, whining all the while, until it reached the sleeping pharaoh. It did not bite** him, oh no, it did something infinitely more cruel: it flew into his ear. The pharaoh (we imagine) awoke with a start, to the whining which seemed to be coming from his very brain. And so the mosquito stayed, driving the pharaoh to madness and eventually death. (At this point in the story the Oustass who was narrating it would point out just how powerful God is, and how He can use even the tiniest creatures (imagine! - a mosquito) to his advantage. There is also in the story a metaphor, in which we replace the pharaoh and the mosquito stands in place for the thousands (millions? are they really that much? the thing about counting mosquitoes is that because they zoom around so fast and are so small there always seem to be an infinitely greater number of them than there are in real life) of mosquitoes that bite us every day.

The mosquitoes in my memory are much larger, their stomachs bloated, basically jars of blood with wings attached, leaving stains on your sheet where you wiped off your hands after killing them. The ones in my room now seem to be much smaller, barely-there mosquitoes, driven this way and that erratically through the air when I put the fan on. When this happens they will fly to a curtain and hang on for dear life, waiting… Why have the mosquitoes shrunk (or, alternatively: why has the mosquito in my memory become enlarged to inhuman (in-mosquito?) proportions).***

The war against the mosquitoes is an ongoing one, fought in backrooms and front rooms and parlors and bedrooms all over the land. In the morning the mosquitoes rest in their stagnant pools of water, so light on its surface they barely cause any ripples, sleeping, gathering energy. At dusk they set out.

[ Or rather the female mosquitoes set out. The males drink nectar, and do not have a thirst for anything else. It is the females who need blood, in order to reproduce. There is something tragic about this: the female mosquito, ready to reproduce, going out in search of an animal to supply it with the only thing left, the missing ingredient: its blood. A dangerous mission, especially if the animal in question is human, a suicidal mission in order to ensure the species continues. The tenacity of mothers everywhere in nature, to bring their offspring into the world and raise them at any cost. After the female mosquito has fed it retires for few days, until it has developed and laid its eggs. And then off it goes again to search for another animal to bite, repeating the cycle. There is something poetic (of the gruesome school of poetry) and moving about this. ]

And in the houses the ritual killing of mosquitoes begins. The first line of defense is the insecticide (Bop, Baygon, Spritex - every house has its favored brand). All the rooms of the house are sprayed, causing noxious fumes which force everyone to go outside for a bit…

…where the mosquitoes are waiting. It is there, sitting outside, that the first battles are fought - the swiping and the clapping, the dodging through the air, the itchy skin, the whining. The spilling of blood. And it lasts all night, or at least until the humans are asleep, lost in their dreams and unable to react. Then the lucky ones, who have survived the onslaught on them - they feed in peace, with sighs of relief (or whatever the mosquito equivalent of a sigh of relief is - perhaps a different pitch to the whining, as their wings slow down and they settle).

Why we hate them of course is the malaria (and also the yellow fever, and the dengue fever, and the exotically-named Chikungunya), something they can never understand. But in Gambia the malaria especially: the weakening of the joints, the fire that threatens to consume you from within. 700 million people infected every year, 2 million dying from it. All from an insect so tiny you can only see its features if you lean in real close and squint.

We dream of exterminating the mosquito, of annihilating it from the face of the earth. The mass extinction of a species that not many people will complain about, or miss. And the mosquitoes? As they lie in their swamps what do they dream? Who knows - but perhaps this: a man, middle-aged and healthy. During the day, while the mosquitoes sleep he goes about his business. He eats good food, and exercises. He goes about his life as normal (while the mosquitoes dream). And then in the night he retires - he goes back into his house. In his room he takes off all his clothes, and lies on his bed naked, and closes his eyes. He stays perfectly still, does not move a finger. And in a minute the mosquitoes, who have been waiting, will descend. In their hundreds, the young and the old, from the closet and the corners of the room where they have been biding their time. And softly, softly, so as not to wake the man from his trance-like state, the only sound the their gentle whining, so softly, they will land on his body. There will be no fighting amongst them, for there will be enough for everyone. And they will feed, they will satiate their thirst, not wasting a drop, not taking a drop more than they will need, their covenant with the man. There will be no swiping, and no clapping. After fifteen minutes they will rise as softly as they descended and in a dark cloud they will leave the room, leave the man where he lies sleeping, a small smile on his face. Perhaps this is what the mosquitoes dream.

* Needless-but-cool-(I think) Aside: The Wolof phrase for pounding one's chest is "foga dayna", which is completely unrelated to mosquitoes but has a certain lyricism and poetry to it - say the phrase to yourself, softly and for a moment you will see a puffed-out chest and a hand pounding on it, and hear the sound it makes.

** the dictionary says mosquitoes bite, but there seems to me an association between bite and teeth within a mouth that mosquitoes do not possess, and so I hesitated at using it here. Sting, perhaps, would work better, though it too has its shortcomings. Perhaps suck. Or, if we're feeling adventurous, feast ("the mosquitoes descended on the man, and feasted upon him as he slept").


*** the cats, too - though the cats have always been different animals: the cats in America are fat and spoilt, protected by law and loving owners. In contrast to our cats, which are lean and look underfed, always kept on the edge by the stone thrown by a bored kid, and the increasingly empty waste bins. Two communities, each hated by the other: "there is a place", the older Gambian cats will tell the younger ones, "where the cats do not believe in God and live decadent lives of over-nourishment. If you do not behave we will send you there" (and in America the opposite story).

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.

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.

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.

Fiction I enjoyed in 2009

Doomi Golo: Netali by Boubacar Boris Diop - When I read online that there was a novel written entirely in Wolof, I immediately set out to find it. At worst, I thought, it would be good for the fact of being written in my native language, even if it was a terrible novel - I approached it ready to excuse any amount of bad plotting and writing. I had nothing to worry about - it turned out to be one of the best novels I had ever read. My gushing review does not do it justice - I wish I had enough time to spend many years studying this novel, so I could write a dissertation about it. In the end it was more than just a novel to me: it also opened up a window into the world of Wolof possibility, and let me peer through, and what I saw was breathtaking, and beautiful, and heartbreaking, and everything I never imagined I would ever encounter in a written work in my language.

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig - Possible my favorite book of 2009. Novel about two men - one of them gay, the other a political prisoner - locked up in a prison cell together. One tells the other stories to help alleviate the boredom of being imprisoned. This is the main premise of the novel, but it comes together as so much more. Each of the embedded stories is in itself fully fleshed out and could have made this a great novel; the frame story in which they are embedded however is what makes it spectacular to read in the end, a touching portrayal of the point at which two people's lives touch in unexpected ways which leaves your heart heavy.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware - I have been trying to read more graphic novels lately, and the more I read them the more I find them as good as the best novels in their own right. Jimmy Corrigan is astonishing - it is the story of a sad little man, and a chronicle of his family. Before I read this I knew the meaning of the word "anti-hero", but only on an intellectual level - reading this I finally realized what the word truly meant. Jimmy is not very likeable - neither are some of the other main sub-characters (such as his grandfather), and yet never once through the book do you feel disconnected from them, or stop pitying them, or see themselves and their searches for a good life reflected in yours.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - This year I realized David Mitchell was in fact one of my favorite writers. I had read Black Swan Green (which does not appear here but was a book I enjoyed immensely), and was about half-way through this book when I realized that I was almost breathless, and kept going back to re-read sections I especially admired, all symptoms, it dawned on me, I had suffered from while reading other David Mitchell books. Cloud Atlas is made up of a collection of inter-connected stories, and while the connection is rather tenuous at times, the stories never fail to entertain. They all possess that cliff-hanger quality which is usually reserved for trash lit - so much "real literature" is boring. Boring this book is not, and I eagerly await the next book from David Mitchell.

Graceland by Chris Abani - "Dis Elvis, you no get faith. Television is the new oracle.", said by one of the characters in Chris Abani's Graceland to another character, is my favorite quote of the year. I have always admired the Nigerian novelists for their sense of humour, which coupled with their penetrating understanding of humans makes them fantastic writers (see, e.g., the war rape scene with the house boy in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, which manages to make you laugh even as you feel absolutely horrified). Chris Abani is a writer I need to read more of in 2010 - I saw his TED talk about telling stories, which is what led me to this book, which I gulped down in a few days, and was greatly captivated by.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvin - In 2009 I discovered the magic of Italo Calvino. I had previously tried reading "If on a winter's night a traveler..." but had not finished it. I picked this up and from the first story I was hooked. It is not so much a collection of stories as an exploration of the symbols that make up stories, and how they come together, and the effects these symbols have on us the readers. After this I read "Invisible Cities", and enjoyed that very much, though there will never be another collection of stories quite like Cosmicomics for me.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Deitch - About a comic artist driven mad by a creature he imagined one night during a weed high, I read this book in a haze on a visit to San Francisco. It is one of the strangest books I have ever read, its very structure like a plan for madness, with just enough sanity to make everything logical and connected (in a twisted kind of way), but not quite enough to escape the black hole of insanity around it.

Lush Life: A Novel by Richard Price - I am a great fan of The Wire, and greatly envy my room mate, who is on his first time through the show, his ability to go home at the end of the work day and open a new episode fresh, without knowing what will happen next. Now imagine The Wire in book form, complete with the realistic, gritty dialogue that series is known for, as well as the pace driving the action forward with never a stop for respite. This book is that, and more. I read it on a 7-hour bus trip to New York. When night fell, and the bus overhead lights refused to work, I leaned against the window and still read it, first from the insufficient daylight coming in, and then the passing lights of other cars on the highway. I could barely put it down.


The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,... by M.T. Anderson - There are books which set off at a fast pace, and keep up that pace throughout, such as Lush Life, and Cloud Atlass. Then there are ones which start off slowly, and keep this slow pace throughout, so if you are not paying attention you may dismiss them, but if you are at some point the payoff will happen, and it will suddenly dawn on you that you have been reading for two hours straight, and your internal rhythm had become synchronized with the rhythm of the book, and your internal thoughts had started to sound like the voice of the book. This book - and its predecessor in the series - are those kind of books. It is set in the time before the American Civil War, and follows the live of a slave called Octavian Nothing, who is part of an experiment by a college of scientists. You know a book is good when you are reading a long discourse on philosophy in a section about the behavior of man, and it is one of the most touching things you have read all year.


Aya of Yop City by Marguerite Abouet - A comic book set in Ivory Coast, following the adventures of a young girl called Aya. So much of this felt so real it would feel for a moment as if I was back home, sitting in the front yard watching my sister do her friend's hair, while outside on the street the woman next door sold fried pancakes which she mad while you waited.


The Book of Night Women by Marlon James - Set in Jamaica during the days of slavery, and told entirely in Jamaican Patois, this is another book I found it hard to put down. Like Doomi Golo, the author could have based the success of the novel on the gimmick of language alone. Instead he used the language merely as a means, telling a compelling story with characters so human you can imagine them after you close the book.

Doomi Golo: Nettali by Boubacarr Boris Diop [A Review]

Suppose a man, a Wolof man, were to write a novel. Not simply a novel about a Wolof man, you understand, but a novel written by its main character (the Wolof man) in Wolof, documenting a Wolof life. Suppose this man wrote, not for critical acclaim or a wide readership, but out of a sense of obligation to record the facts of his life for his grandson, who had traveled overseas and not yet returned. The man at the sunset of his life, certain he will not see his grandson again, this lending a certain urgent sadness to his prose. And yet every word weighed down by the many years of his life and what he has done (or failed to do) with them, and also a resignation that all was as it was predestined to be. Such is the central conceit of Boubacarr Boris Diop's Wolof novel Doomi Golo: Nettali.

Set in Dakar, Senegal, in the district of Nyaarela, it tells the story of one Ngiraan Fye, an old man waiting for his death, sending out this last communique to his absent grandson, a "hardworking and disciplined young man who the whole district still talk about with great respect". Ngiraan writes to tell him of all he has missed in his absence, but also to give an account of his own life, and his son's (the absent grandson's father). Divided into multiple books, each book dealing with one facet: the boy's mother, the boy's stepmother who came from France when his father died, the political state of the country (including a short exploration of Sheikh Anta Diop, as well as colonial occupation), and many more.

One could spend many years reading all the different levels in the novel, and finding interpretations for them. Wolof culture is permeated with Islamic values, and so a peculiar form of existentialism is manifested by Ngiraan. He believes in Allah, and that when he dies he will return to Him, and that He is the source and root of his life; and yet still he cannot stop wondering what his life was for, and what he did with it. These questions nag at him throughout the book, refusing to go away or be easily dealt with. In one section he is set upon finding out about his ancestor, who he has only memories of from childhood, but who he holds in great reverence. He goes on a journey which gets more and more allegorical as it proceeds, becoming a representation of the search for the soul and the ever receding self. In the end what he finds upends all his initial thoughts about this ancestor, who turns out to be an evil man reviled by all and not the hero he had thought. "The search for oneself", the narrator tells his grandchild (and the Reader), "is the most difficult and seldom ends in places we prefer or expect - one must be strong in order to attempt it". This continually happens in the novel, with Diop taking us to places we did not at all expect, and forcing us to revisit our original assumptions. Parallel to this,there runs through the novel a Borgesian fascination with mirrors, as a means of telling us what we are - a task they often fail at, partly because we put our own interpretations on even the things we see in mirrors, rendering them not as objective as we would like to believe. In one memorable scene a pair of gorillas which cause strife between the colonizing white men and the locals, and more than one death, by destroying the constructs created at sea for incoming ships, are finally trapped using mirrors. They end up tearing each other apart.

Ngiraan's search for identity is only the whole culture's search for identity writ small. Again and again we return to the question of who we really are, by way of Sheikh Anta Diop, by way of Lumumba, by way of the young people walking down the street dressed in the latest European fashions. But if this were only a recounting of African heroes and their achievements then it would not be anything out of the ordinary, and would tell us nothing new - that is well-covered ground after all (and tired ground, in the hands of the many dictators on the continent self-styled after these heroes, ready to namedrop them at the slightest shake of a microphone in their faces). Diop goes much deeper - Ngiraan's daughter-in-law returns from France to bring his son's corpse back, and from the moment she steps off the plane she distances herself from everyone around her, claiming she is white and does not belong amongst them. Immediately we begin to see the metaphoric possibilities.1 If Ngiraan is the part of us earnestly painstakingly attempting to build an identity that falls in line with our history and heritage, she is the part that has given in to the strong temptation to float away on the river of the new culture all around us, where every one else seems to be floating these days. ("This need to continually assert our pride in our culture and our belonging to it", Ngiraan asks, "does it not point to a deeper dislocation? Surely the one who is does not need to continually assert what he is. Why would he imitate himself?" - words, after all, cannot make us - they only describe what we are; no matter how fervently one hopes, one cannot become something by merely repeating over and over that one is not its opposite). She does not stop at merely telling people she is toubab, she goes to see a Marabout, who promises he can turn her into what she has always wanted to be. He does so, changing the color of her skin and giving her a grand name, but the price he asks is high (aren't the prices for these things always): that she will give one of her two children to him. She refuses, and he turns her into a spectacle every one in Dakar travels to see, almost causing a riot. Finally soldiers from the French embassy arrive to rescue her. She rushes out to greet them, tears in her eyes, thankful that her ordeal is over at last. They ask her to come with them but they will not let her bring the children, who "cannot possible be hers - look how dark they are, and how white you are". She hurls herself on the ground and asks for their mercy, but they will not budge, and in the end she is compelled by the soldiers to leave them, wailing where they stand in front of the house. The reader is left to reach their own conclusions.

All this - the play with internal and external representations, the characters' misadventures and how deeply they are engrossed in them - make for intriguing reading. But the highest accomplishment of the novel is its powerful presentation of the Wolof language (and by extension all the other local/native languages) as a language which is fully capable of holding one's model of the World in all its complexity, and able to navigate this complexity with ease. This statement may seem like a self-evident fact to people not familiar with the local languages and what happens when one begins to learn to assume a foreign culture. Not learn a new language: the process by which we the previously colonized bit players in the epic play of globalization come to adapt the language, customs and mores of our colonizers is much more involved than simply learning a new language. It runs much deeper than the level of mere word substitution (the words of our local languages for the words of the foreign tongue), instead coming to be a gradual substitution of large swathes of our World View for the foreign one. Yet all this happens so subtly and creeps up on us so gradually - one moment we're learning to read Peter and Jane in primary school, years later we're writing essays in English - we barely even notice it. But the consequences are far-reaching: by the time we have reached enough mastery in English to be able to go to college it is too late. Somehow, through a process of selection over the years, English has become not just the language we communicate in but the language of our thoughts. All forms of sophisticated thought - from science to literature - having been presented to us in this language, we come to equate it with sophistication and the higher forms of intellectual reasoning, far and above any local language we speak.

This is where Doomi Golo succeeds so well as a novel. There are novels in which the voice and the narratorial presence do not matter so much as the events that are narrated: one could conceive of these novels translated into other languages with ease, with not much being lost in the process, beyond the usual quibbles over what word or sentence structure best maps to the one in the original language. Doomi Golo falls squarely out of this category. It presents to us the possibility of a man who speaks only Wolof, yet has the same complicated thought processes we have come to associate, in our Anglicized minds, with people who can speak that language. The language used in Doomi Golo is constantly beautiful, sharp and spare in places, in others rising to grand heights of description. One gets a thrill every time one reads Ngiraan's many plays with words and ideas, at the freshness of his insight, at his wisdom. In one section he represents the days as men marching through time, each vying for more popularity than its fellows. He takes this idea and uses it to explore days in history on which significant events happened, changing the perspective - now instead of these events happening with the day being merely an unimportant background, instead the day comes forward as - if not the causer of the event - at least as important in its creation as the people involved. And while the people did it for their own reasons, the day did it so it would be remembered in history.

By the end of the book Ngiraan has gone into a delirious state2. The narration in the final section is (fittingly) picked up by a mad man, Aali Kebooy, who also lives in Nyarelaa. Aaali Kebooy has been murdered multiple times, and seems to have some form of magical power, as well as an incredibly long life. It is he who explains to the grandson about the death of his grandfather, and writes the postscript to the book. By the end of the book we are left with the impression that we have read a truly great work, and it is a pity that more people cannot read this book and understand what it is saying.






notes


1 yet, I hasten to add, these metaphors are not stilted, nor do they seem forced. The people represented are fully fleshed-out characters, with lives beyond the metaphors.

2 there is a whole section in which he is captured by monkeys and made their slave - there are strong indications this only happened in his mind