Wednesday, August 22

Well, it is my last morning in the village of Bounkiling before we head back to the bright lights (and internet connectedness!) of the big city: Dakar. It has been an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience, the riches of which I think I will be "unpacking" for quite some time, both personally and academically. I think it would be kind of boring to give a long account of the trip, so I’ll tell you briefly what I did and where I was and finish with a short story and some reflections from the trip.

The trip down to Bounkiling was definitely a highlight memorable experience. Before the trip, I was under the impression that I would be traveling with a few musicians (kora master (and warden of Blake for the month of August) Alphousseyni and his band: Cheikh (bass), Omar (drums), Barra (percussion), and the oft-disgruntled Louis (sound technician)) on their short tour of the Casamance region. I discovered on the night of our departure that we were actually traveling with a 40-person delegation of people from Dakar who were born and raised in Bounkiling, venturing down to the village to offer the community support and condolences after four young men from Bounkiling died last winter when an overcrowded boat sunk in the Atlantic en route, illegally, to Spain (this was actually a really major news story in West Africa, and this event is thought to have greatly influenced the Senegalese presidential elections in February). Anyhow, instead of an intimate journey with a small cadre of touring musicians, I found myself packed into a small van (capacity...probably 15 or 20) with 40 people. We left at midnight, and I was literally curled into the fetal position for 10 hours with a backpack and an electric bass in my lap. By the time we reached the Gambian border (the crossing of which involved a series of shady bribes that maybe I will describe later--suffice to say that the Gambia represents everything wrong with post-colonial Africa) I had only distant memories of what it felt like to have legs, and I felt more profoundly dirty than I have ever felt in my life. Still, it was a great time. I sat in the back with a bunch of hilarious, chain-smoking Senegalese guys and laughed my ass off for nearly the entire trip, at least when I wasn’t wincing from the pain of repeatedly kneeing myself in the face. It was great.

Bounkiling is wonderful. I have been staying here with the extended Kouyate family in their compound. There are about 15 people living here of all different ages, from the 100+ year-old grandmother (pictured above) to a toddler who screams with pure, unrestrained terror every time she sees me because she has never seen a white person before (admittedly, I look pretty strange here...I haven’t seen another "toubab" since leaving Dakar). Of everybody here, my favorite is most definitely Ami, who is the wife of Morikeba Kouyate, my kora teacher in Chicago. She has really taken me under her wing--cooking for me and caring for me as if I were her own son (she actually said yesterday that I was her favorite son, which was confusing to everybody, especially to her actual son Sirifo who was standing nearby...awkward). Anyway, Ami is amazing, and our relationship is pretty hilarious. Like nearly everybody here, she speaks no French, and I obviously speak no Mandinka, so the entirety of our relationship revolves around her laughing at everything I do. I learned the phrase "adiata baake" (very good), and I say that to her once every ten minutes or so and every time, without fail, she laughs nearly to the point of tears. It is actually a good thing we’re leaving tomorrow, because once the humor of me saying this phrase loses its luster for Ami, we wouldn’t really have much to talk about. But for the time being, it is great. There are far too many people here whom I now know and love for me to describe here, but Ami is a great example of the incredible hospitality, kindness, and sense of humor that people here have shown me.

We've been in Bounkiling for most of the past two weeks, except for 4 days we spent playing concerts in Tanaf, which is a village near the Guinea-Bissau border where Alphousseyni grew up. Although Tanaf is incredibly beautiful, I have to say that these 4 days were probably the low point of the trip--it rained a lot and there wasn’t much to do there...and I forgot to bring any books from Bounkiling. It was still fun, but I was glad to get back here to Bounkiling, where I can barely walk across the yard without somebody shoving a plate of delicious food in my face.

So that is basically a nutshell version of where I have been and what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks. I have learned so, so much, both from an academic perspective and, more importantly, personally as well. I would say that perhaps the most vital thing I have learned and reflected on while I’ve been here is the ability of laughter and humor to connect people. As I said, most people here do not speak French, and if they do, it is their third or fourth language (after Mandinka, Wolof, and Fulani), so they are less able to meet me halfway with my feeble French. Thus, communication has been a pretty major challenge and at times I’ve felt pretty frustrated and futile, though I’ve really bonded with the few people who do speak French, some English, and of course, Alphousseyni, who speaks brilliant English and has been a gracious translator on numerous occasions.

Oddly enough, the most effective means I have had to interact with people is...dancing. I never, ever would have predicted this, but it has been the single most valuable tool at my disposal this entire trip. I think it all started back in Dakar at one of the naming ceremonies I attended. At these events (as at most musical events here except the discotheques) the women dance and the men sit at the sides, watching, playing cards, or just generally trying to look cool and nonchalant. Anyhow, at this naming ceremony, during the last song Alphousseyni played, an older woman dancing with the rest of the ladies grabbed my hand, and I eagerly obliged her a dance. I don’t know if it was a backlog of unfulfilled urges to dance earlier in the day or what, but I just kind of decided to...go for it, I guess. I started dancing in the most ridiculous way I possibly could--I have no idea where I was pulling these moves from, I have never danced like that in my life. I went high, I went low, I shook every part of my body with wild abandon, and it actually wasn’t all that bad--it certainly was not good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was strange enough to be really funny, I think. Anyhow, it caused a huge sensation--there were maybe 50 beautiful Senegalese women chanting "Toubab! Toubab! Toubab!" clapping, and laughing hysterically. Alphousseyni and his band had to stop playing because they were laughing so hard. I am not making this up--it was literally the most overwhelming response I have ever received for anything I have ever done, good or bad. After the ceremony I had 20 women lined up to shake my hand and ask me to do another little jig for them, which I happily obliged. Anyhow, somehow the legend of that fateful afternoon has preceded me wherever I go now--people I have never met before somehow know about the "dancing toubab" and tell me they are looking forward to the next concert so they can see me groove. I danced at the first concert here in Bounkiling and the next morning Alphousseyni told me that the entire village was talking about it, and I have been asked (or nearly forced, on a couple of occasions) to dance almost every time music can be heard. It is actually getting pretty difficult to up the ante every time...I twisted my knee pretty badly during one ambitiously-choreographed maneuver and had to limp around the next day. Of course, however, I gulped down enough Advil to bust a move on the dance floor again that night.

In the midst of all of this silliness, it became clear to me that laughter (and the ability to laugh at myself) was connecting me with the people around me when language could not. My fairly extreme cultural displacement, coupled with my inability to talk to most people here, could have been (and, admittedly, occasionally was) really isolating, alienating, and lonely. My salvation, unexpectedly, came from just making a fool out of myself and showing that I had a sense of humor. Once I started laughing with the people here, our interactions and awkward exchanges solidified into relationships, and this laughter even paved the way for more serious and meaningful engagement. I guess that my most important move so far here in Senegal was that first little shimmy up in Dakar. Travel essentials: malaria pills, sleeping bag, water bottle, and a few choice dance moves.