P.S. The photo is apropos of nothing, really. I saw the can in the supermarket and thought it looked like gorgeous art. Also, this week I did roast chestnuts for the first time ever. They were delightful even though half the joy of eating them is the wintry feeling and it is in no way, shape or form winter here. (Thank you, Mark Slomiany, for that one time you made them and I saw how easy it looked!)
I don’t know why I keep writing about the new year since I am possibly less enthused about it than anyone else on the planet. But, I did do two fun things to ring in 2017:
On New Year’s Eve a friend hosted dinner at his house and then we went up to the roof to count down to midnight. The annual official fireworks display was cancelled this year due to security concerns but the Dakarois took it upon themselves to pick up the slack. For at least a half hour, fireworks popped off every few seconds, every which way you turned. My photographic evidence, unfortunately, is not much proof at all… I managed to capture exactly one remotely-in-focus firework on my iphone.
I asked the people I was with to forgive my Eeyore-ness but to please help me come up with something, anything, to make me hopeful about 2017. Here’s the best we could do: a highly effective ebola vaccine has just been cleared for use in case of another outbreak, and the recent Chinese ivory ban means fewer elephants will die. (I would welcome your additions to this rather sad “list.”)
The next day, I went with Mamie, Tantie, their cousin, and a couple of friends to see Youssou N’Dour’s annual New Year’s concert. Mamie insisted that we get there before 10pm because she was sure the show would start early, it being a work night. I have been in Senegal less than a year, yet found myself setting straight someone who’s lived here her whole life. I told her, “If this show starts before 1am, 2017 really is bringing the end times with it.” And like clockwork, Youssou came onstage at 1:03 am. At 4:03 am, he was still running up and down the catwalks like a man half his age, and I had decided that third time’s the charm and I am done seeing him in Senegal. It’s a constant battle between enjoying the music and wanting desperately to be in bed, and with each show the old lady in me tugs a little harder towards the latter.
Speaking of being an old lady: at 12:30 after standing in the suffocating and pushy crowd near the stage for two hours, I had had enough and abandoned my group to go hang out at the periphery. There, I could breathe, but I also felt rather hopeless and adrift. This was a really bad omen for the year ahead. Then a man who had lugged over a plastic chair for himself offered it to me to stand on instead, so that I could see the stage. And then the woman on the chair next to mine put her arm around my shoulder, commanded sweetly, “Il faut dancer!” and led me in a distinctly Senegalese dance move with her arm around me the whole time. Normally I’m all about personal space but the woman’s generosity of spirit – bringing me into her joyful fold when she saw I was deflated and alone – changed my mind about 2017. I decided that the omen before had been a false one, and that this was in fact the real sign. We are never as isolated as we feel, and things are never as bad as they seem.
Here’s the concert, if you’d like to watch. It was so good, as always.
(I love the first song in the video above, and the one at 57:57 is my all-time favorite.)
Above, a belated shot of the Los’ Christmas spread this year. I got home from my three week-long shoot just in time to celebrate with them. Note the turkey! I have managed to make my mark in Senegal… The family loved our Thanksgiving turkey so much that they decided to make it again for Noël instead of their usual mutton. Unfortunately, I think there was a bit of beginner’s luck at play with the first one, because this second attempt didn’t turn out quite as delicious. I hope they nevertheless turn this into a new Christmas tradition, so that I can leave a legacy here!
Below, lots of links I wanted to share this month but didn’t have the time to until now:
And on that inappropriate note, happy new year to all of you! Thank you for reading my blog this year, and for encouraging and commiserating with me as I grope my way towards French proficiency (while forgetting all the Spanish I’ve ever learned). It’s been way harder than I naively thought it would be when I arrived in Dakar. Writing about the ups and downs makes it so much more bearable, perhaps because I feel a confidence in English that I lack completely in French. Nice to remind myself that I can at least speak one language well…
Anyway, I wish I were more prepared to look back at 2016 and make some sort of meaningful statement about it the way everyone else seems to do when they have a blog.. but the only thing I’ve been capable of for the past few days is listening to George Michael and wallowing in angst about my lost youth and our doomed future.
[PS the photo is from near my house in Dakar. There is a toy vendor who sometimes hangs dolls and action figures from trees in rather macabre fashion. It always makes me think of that motivational poster of the cat in every elementary school classroom in the 80s. This is the more cynical version, updated for adulthood / the horrors of 2016.]
This has been a devastating week, and I am devastated. It would be wise for me to avoid making political statements in public forums because of my work as a quasi-journalist (I say quasi because I don’t make videos for media; I make videos for mission-driven organizations). But it’s hard to convince my professional self-interest to override my personal need to acknowledge the absolute horror of the current situation, before going back to my comparatively inane subject matter of language learning and travel loving. And also, it offends me to think about what happened on Tuesday as strictly political, as though the survival of the planet and the protection and equality of marginalized groups is a question of politics rather than one of fundamental humanity.
Anyway, I will say this and then attempt to shut up about it (only on this blog, not in my personal life): humanity got us into this mess, and humanity will now have to get us out of it. The tragedy of the human condition is that we’re constantly repeating our history and digging our own graves while convinced we’re acting in our own best interest. But the beauty is that, as a species at least, we have a huge capacity for hope, community, solidarity, inspiration, creativity, resilience, organization, mobilization, and resistance, even in the darkest of times. I am going to draw upon all of those things in the coming days and months, because God knows if I don’t, I’ll succumb to absolute and utter despair not to mention fail in my responsibility as a human being in the family of man.
Actually, just one last thing. This week has been a wake-up call for me. I’ve realized that I repeatedly acknowledge my various forms of privilege as a “Not it!” of sorts, a substitute – often though not always – for doing the much harder work of dismantling it. It’s not that I’m all talk and no action; it’s just that I don’t do nearly enough.
I’m pretty good at keeping promises to myself, as this blog attests. So this week I promised myself to do more, much more, than I am currently doing. I’m still working out what doing more will look like but I know it’ll be a four-pronged approach: education/listening, time/volunteering, money/donating, and activism/policy and legislation.
Okaaaaay…. Now for your weekend links! As though this week was all just a bad Kafka dream and you can trouble yourself with anything other than how the fuck (as Aaron Sorkin said, there is a time for this kind of language and it’s now) to mitigate the damage:
What are you up to this weekend? I plan to lay low in an effort to relax away my growing anxiety about the American election. Maybe I’ll spend a day sitting by the pool at Hotel Savana, above, sipping a (recently mentioned) jus de bouye. Or maybe I’ll just hide under the covers for five days / forever, depending on the outcome.
Here are some interesting reads I’ve gathered for you over the past couple weeks, to keep you distracted if you’re as stressed as I am:
I follow a blog called “About Words,” which every week describes new English words in circulation. Last week’s were fascinating. Can you guess what a bobu or a midult is?
Speaking of maps, here is a new world map that looks bizarre but is way more accurate than the one you’re used to. (Now I understand why getting from Senegal to Ethiopia took me ten hours.)
A small sampling of signs I have been amused by lately:
It took me six months to notice the one above, across the street from my house, but now I can’t stop seeing “beware of horse-drawn cart” signs everywhere. Which makes sense, since horse-drawn carts are ubiquitous in Dakar, including on all the main roads. As well as in front of my house:
Not only do I love seeing the horses and whatever they’re carrying, but I also love hearing their peaceful hoof sounds. It’s like a little bit of the country in the city.
When I saw Orange (a French telecom company)’s sign, which says, “Recharge and win 1 sheep per day,” I thought perhaps “mouton” (sheep) in French was similar to “buck” (a kind of deer) in American English – i.e. a dollar (or in this case a CFA). But I wasn’t sure, because everyone seems to own a sheep or two around here and I had never heard of “mouton” being used as slang before. Then Tabaski aka Eid al-Adha came and went and the mystery was solved. Muslims slaughter sheep for the holiday meal and it had been a pre-Tabaski sheep giveaway… tied to recharging your cell phone. If that isn’t old world meets new world I don’t know what is.
This one just cracks me up. It translates literally to, “You do not have priority.” I suppose it is a “yield” sign, although before this I had only ever seen ones that firmly but politely say, “Cédez le passage.” This one had so much extra attitude that I found myself personifying it sort of like this:
And with that, enjoy your weekends and rest assured that you DO have priority, so go out and do something nice for yourself.
Yesterday was an unexpected day off but today was a quite intentional one. I finally made it back to IFAN to check out the permanent exhibit, which consists mostly of amazing masks from initiation ceremonies across West Africa.
After that I came back to my neighborhood for a late afternoon aquabike session. It was a very nice culture-sport 1-2 punch.
And now after two days of faux weekend it’s the real weekend. There’s an afropop dance night uptown in Almadies tonight, and I think I may search out brunch for the first time ever in Dakar tomorrow… We shall see.
Have a lovely weekend and if the spirit moves you, check out the reads that I have enjoyed this week:
I just exported the close-to-final cut of a 5-minute video I shot and edited almost entirely in French (aside from a small amount of a béninois dialect that was translated for me into French), and I’m feeling very proud of myself.
Going to the field and, in very challenging conditions, “one-man-banding” – directing, producing, shooting, recording sound, and then coming back and writing and editing a video singlehandedly – takes every ounce of everything I have. And yet I somehow found a way to do that all in French, which also requires copious amounts of my brain-space and emotional mettle. (I found a way by sacrificing some technical quality to instead concentrate on solving logistical problems in my non-native language. I’m okay with that.)
I’ve still got a lot of work to do on this particular project, which calls for a 3-minute and 1-minute version as well as the longer one. So maybe I should beware the evil eye and shut up about it…
But before I do, here’s a virtual toast to a weekend well-deserved. (Even if you didn’t work your butt off this week, I bet you made a superhuman effort not to implode emotionally while reading the news, and that is also worthy of acknowledgement.)
And here’s some news that will make you feel neither disrespected, degraded, disgusted, depressed, nor disappointed! (At least I sincerely hope not.)
“The concept of authenticity is much over-hyped these days, and it seems to me a sad state of affairs that it’s something we need to cultivate — as if being authentic is just another act. A few weeks ago, I came across a term online that stopped me in my tracks: identity fatigue. We are getting tired, it seems, of creating and fashioning our personas in a world filled with personas. We’re confusing persona with personal life.” – Dani Shapiro on authenticity.
In the two weeks since getting back to Dakar from vacation, I’ve been attempting to create a sustainable routine, something that has been lacking since I arrived here in February. It’s been hard, since my schedule has been all over the place – sometimes out of town for work, sometimes traveling, sometimes doing nothing / half-heartedly studying French. But in order for this place to feel like home, and if I want to avoid weird jags of isolation and anxiety, I need to think of myself much as I think of my nieces and nephew: little powder-kegs waiting to explode if they don’t do the same thing at the same time every day, if they don’t get enough sleep, if they don’t eat well, and if they don’t get a chance to run around like maniacs every once in awhile.
With that in mind, I went to my first ever “aquabike” class yesterday night. My usual form of exercise is running, but it’s been way too hot for that lately. I recently discovered that the place I thought was a community pool just two blocks from my house is actually a dedicated water-biking center. You’re halfway-immersed in the water and an instructor leads you through a one-hour workout that involves a combination of spinning and calisthenics-type stuff. The trial session I went to last night was awesome mostly because I got to be outside in the night air without feeling like I was going to melt or get eaten alive by mosquitos, but also because it was a just-intense-enough workout after weeks of being a couch potato. The pricing is fairly ridiculous – going twice a week would cost about half my monthly rent – but I’ve decided it’s worth it to put something regular on my schedule that’s beneficial to my mental and physical health.
Along those same lines… tonight I’m going out dancing for the first time ever in Dakar. It’s going to be a relatively early night, though, because on Saturday I fly to Benin to start my next job (!!). I – and thus my blog – will be gone for a week, but I look forward to picking up where I left off when I get back at the beginning of October.
In the meantime, here are a few interesting and relevant Web pickings for your reading and viewing pleasure. Have a good weekend / week!
talk foreign to me 