In Which We Steal Mangos from Mauritania

I think people who come to Senegal as tourists must miss so much. To really understand the country you have to talk to the natives and share people's lives. Living Routes is the only study abroad program in Senegal that puts Senegalese and American students in the same classroom, which I find slightly shocking. Why do people go abroad, if they're just going to recreate the same familiar world around themselves?

Having a native show us around the Guede-Chantier area, really helped us learn the true story of the country. For instance, there was the tomb in the dusty city near the river. An imposing-looking slab of white marble. Ousmane explained that it belonged to a French official who was constantly insulting and degrading the Senegalese people. The mockery came to a peak when he went to a Koranic school, a holy place, and pissed on its floor. This was considered an unbearable insult against the whole community. So Ousmane's grandfather killed the French official to defend the honor of his people. Then the grandfather was brought to a French court of justice and put to death. I hope I got the details of that story right-- its been awhile since I heard it. But it made a huge impression on me. Especially when Ousmane finished telling the story, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "And so, in honor of my grandfather--" and gave the tomb a hearty kick.

It made me realize that colonization is not just the extraction of resources. The French weren't just pillaging the land of its wealth-- they were waging war against the very spirit of the people. Trying to make them ashamed of their most sacred customs and valued institutions. Trying to make them lose belief in themselves. It's a higher level of cruelty altogether-- not a war against bodies, but a war against souls. And in the war against souls, weapons are ideas. Ideas like, "You are barbaric. You are heathen. You are primitive."

I've avoided thinking about racial issues for most of my life, but now I'm butting up right against them. I feel so strange about the way people treat me here. When Cisco (the student coordinator) was giving us our housing assignments in Guede, he said something in Wolof that I didn't understand, and Jess burst out laughing. (Jess has been here a month longer than the rest of us, and she knows more Wolof.) I asked her what was funny and she said, "He says, one 'star' per household. The American students are celebrities here." It gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach.

A stereotype is like a piece of clothing you can't take off. My skin is bleached white by the snows of my ancestral lands. I can't take off the skin, but as long as I wear it, people will see the skin, instead of seeing me. The other day a random guy said, "Toubab! Nanga def?" (White person! How are you?) I looked at him and said in French, "My name is not toubab." I then added in Wolof, "I am fine," and walked on, while the woman beside him burst out laughing. Apparently she thought it was a good joke on him. He hadn't expected me to understand him.

MY NAME IS NOT TOUBAB!!! MY NAME IS CHARLOTTE!!! What does my skin color say? It says I belong to the vicious, savage race that has ruthlessly exploited and dominated most of the world. The race that offers poison with a smile, as if it were a gift. The race that has filled literature and film with its insidious propaganda, making "light" a synonym for goodness, and "dark" a synonym for evil. The race that runs around the globe, preaching "development" and "modernity," while selling sin and death. At home, my skin color didn't matter. But here, its like the gross symptom of some sort of plague, that marks me as belonging to a race of oppressors. Maybe I'm getting a little melodramatic about this.

Its because there's something deeply wrong here. Beggars will pursue me like they're ANGRY I'm not giving them anything. When I was walking in a town near Guede, this boy, around 12 or 13 years old, pursued me down the street, asking me to buy him a soccer ball. It was the weirdest thing. He kept asking over and over, in different ways. Buy me a soccer ball. Give me money to buy a soccer ball. You're so mean, toubab, why won't you buy me a soccer ball? I'm like, "Kid! You're a total stranger to me! Why are you following me like this?" It was so weird. I was walking next to Ousmane, and when he saw I was starting to get really bothered, he put his arm around my shoulders, frowned menacingly at the kid, and said in French, "She's not a toubab. She's my wife. So scram." The kid looked disappointed and ran away, and I burst out laughing at the success of Ousmane's ruse. It was actually really funny.

One of the villages we visited was the village of Ousmane's 104-year-old grandmother. We went into the cool, shady room of an adobe hut, and sat down on the colorful mats the floor was covered with. On the bed in the corner sat an ancient women with cloudy eyes, her hair covered by a scarf as blue as the sky just before the stars come out. Although we could not understand the Pulaar she spoke, we could understand the liveliness and vivacity that animated her face and the gestures of her hands.

Ousmane crouched beside her, nodding and listening respectfully, and occasionally translating her remarks for us. She told us about the time she defended her flocks from a lion. Ousmane also told us about the time an alligator had tried to swallow one of her baby goats. She was a very strong, muscular young woman, so she simply took ahold of the goat's leg and stood her ground. The crocodile pulled on one end of the goat, and she pulled on the other. In the end, it was the crocodile that gave up on the tug-of-war match. The baby goat was dead, but at least the family got to eat the meat instead of the crocodile.

There was something really touching about watching Ousmane and his grandmother together. Here is this big tall man with his fancy education, wise in the ways of the world, strong and mature. And yet, when he kneels beside his grandmother, its like he's a little boy. Listening in awe to the stories she tells, learning from her the right ways of living in this world. And yet, even as she cares for him, he also cares for her. He is her little grandchild, but he is also the person who has to serve as her legs, her arms, her eyes. And so we have a duality of roles; he is both protector and the protected. Its very sweet, and I wish I had the words to explain it better. The vocabulary to describe this dynamic doesn't really seem to be available to me.

She tells him he has to get in touch with his cousin who has gone to Italy. This cousin has not sent any news in weeks. He is drifting apart from the family. He needs to be reconnected into the web. Ousmane hastily explains what she is saying to him, and then goes back to listening to her. Its the role of the matriarch to make sure the family sticks together, no matter how far apart they are geographically. I've seen my grandmother, my mother, my Aunt Gretchen, doing the same thing. The women who call one another up to share "news," have their own sort of power, more profound and meaningful than that which shapes the destiny of nations.

We then went to visit the village of Ousmane's sister. Ousmane had deliberately not informed his sister he was arriving with a group of fourteen people. As near as I can tell, this was because, if he had given her advance warning, Senegalese etiquette would have compelled her to slaughter a goat and have it ready for us when we arrived. He didn't want his sister to go to a lot of trouble for us. However, the surprise meant she didn't really have anything for us to eat. Ousmane, hoping to distract us from our pangs of hunger, took us on a canoe trip to Mauritania.

The Americans took a great deal of delicious pleasure in being "illegal immigrants." However, the truth is that the Mauritanians and the Senegalese cross the river all the time without much bothering about whose country is whose. Borders are a colonialist invention. Before we went over, Ousmane asked us, "Is there anybody who can't swim?" And two or three people raised their hands. There was an awkward pause and then we shrugged our shoulders and got into the leaky canoe anyway. Oh well..... just let them drown then...... (kidding.)

It was really perfectly safe, but the thrilling thing about it, was that it felt like it wasn't. The leaks were relatively minor, and somebody had plugged them up with old bandanas. But Sydney screamed when she noticed water trickling in through the cloth. Jess said with her usual dollop of gleeful relish, "we're all going to die." I concentrated on not rocking the canoe and sending us all overboard. Neither Sydney's fastidious shrieking or Jess's maniacal death wish, could shake me. I stood my ground. I kept my cool. I was more suave than Captain Jack Sparrow. I was more phlegmatic than James Bond. I was more fearless than Horatio Hornblower. And when we reached the other side, I rejected the gallant offers of my Senegalese classmates to carry me through the last few steps of shallow water. That was for the girly girls. I like muddy feet.

Mauritania was beautiful. Luxuriant mango trees hung along the banks of the river. We walked through a garden plot and chatted with an ancient man we met beside a little mud hut. Then we returned to the shade beside the green river, and I took a few leafy photos of my classmates who felt the urge to climb the trees. We were excited about the mangos. Jess cried out facetiously to a tree climber, "If you'll bring me down a mango I'll pleasure you eternally," in a drippingly seductive way. I snorted out an embarassed giggle. Sometimes I really HOPE that the Senegalese student's cannot follow Jessica's humorous English. We did finally get ahold of a mango, but it wasn't ripe. It was a measure of our hunger that plenty of people were still willing to devour it.

We sat in a circle and shared our thoughts and feelings about the day. Then we lay down among the fallen leaves or wandered our separate ways. With nothing to do but stare into the moving patterns of leaves, I fell into a sort of dreamy trance. And maybe its my sentimental, overactive imagination at work again. But I started to get this feeling that the land I was lying on was loved, deeply...... loved. Well, there was some evidence for that in the carefully tended garden patches, in the flourishing mango trees. But more than that, I started to get the feeling that the land was also LOVING. That like a tender mother, it cared for the people and creatures that lived on it. That with the wind tenderly lapping over me, I too was held in its embrace.

I know. Its hard to say things like this, without people asking you what mushrooms you've been eating. And I've been called an earth mama hippie chick more than my share of times. (It has to do with how I refuse to shave my armpits.) But is it scientific to deny the evidence of your senses? If my heart tells me something, why is that data inherently less reliable, than the data given me by my nose or eyes or ears? Is it so outrageous to say that if people take care of the land, the land will take care of them? To me it seems like logic. Relationships, even those with inanimate objects, are reciprocal. In order to receive, you have to know how to give.

Okay, now I've been enough of a flake for today. We made it back to Senegal without incident, by which time Ousmane's sister had managed to find some rice for us. Which we gobbled up like starving wolves. And forgive me for my aggressively nonchronological way of recounting events, but I think that pretty much covers the events of our Sunday tour of the Guede area. The next entry will be about my project (finally!) This seems to be a natural chapter break.