This weekend I went to Joal, the birthplace of Senegal’s first president, Leopold Senghor. More to come, but for now here’s a photo of the sun setting over some baobabs as we rode a horse-drawn cart through these scrublands outside the city to see Senegal’s largest baobab tree. Spoiler alert: we climbed inside and walked around. How’s that for epic?
You might think I’m joking, but seriously, could I make up something this ridiculous? I don’t think so.
Right now it is 80 degrees in Dakar and -14 degrees in Denver.
WHAT???
Seven hour voyage in a sept-place, a beat-up old station wagon with a cracked windshield that you can hire (along with a driver) for long distance travel in Senegal. The car broke down outside of Tivaoune. Add another couple of hours for repair. But we finally made it. In Saint Louis there were cows and buildings and an ocean meeting a river. You could see Mauritania from our hotel. The city was beautiful in the way that things that are decaying are often beautiful, crumbling and cracking and dissolving.
Now I’m back in Dakar stumbling through the papers and presentations that separate me from home. Two more weeks.
My Senegal Today professor, the man who called the Gambia “a banana in the mouth of Senegal,” loves to sing blues songs in a Senegalese accent, and employs as his language of choice a hilarious franglish, is taking my study abroad group to Saint Louis, Senegal this weekend. It’s the former capital of French West Africa and supposedly very beautiful. Photographs will be posted and anecdotes recounted when i return, as always :-)
In the meantime, please enjoy this photograph of me watching my friend bobby and a senegalese musician play a west african version of the violin. Gawking at talented people is what I do best, basically.
My dad and step-mom in Senegal, November 21-28, 2009.
One of the best weeks of my semester :-)
I live my life in Senegal in the present tense.
This is not a metaphor. I’m not explaining my personal philosophy or trying to give an inspirational speech about experiencing each and every day to its fullest.
No, when I say I live in the present tense, I mean the actual present tense. You know:
I study abroad in West Africa. I eat baguettes. I talk in bumbling, awkward French and employ the simplest verb conjugation.
Yes, that present tense.
When it comes to speaking English, well, I don’t mean to brag here, but over the last 20 years I have become damn good. Pretty much any verb structure you need, I’m all over it. Want the present progressive? I’m doing it now. How about the future perfect? You will have had it in no time.
But put me chin-to-chin with a French verb—a heavy, angled contraption bursting at its seams with superfluous vowels—and suddenly I’m choked. It’s like being a five year old all over again. If only five year olds had terrible accents and no innate sense of their own language.
Continue reading Out of Africa, my dispatch from Senegal in this month’s issue of Towerview magazine.
alternate title: “Remember When I Was a Vegan?”
Okay, so let me just say by way of introduction…if you’re going to be a member of an Abrahamic faith, I think that Christianity is far and away the simplest. No fasts. No forbidden foods (most of the time). No five-times-daily prayers. No pilgrimage. No requirement of almsgiving. No need to learn a dense, difficult language with letters that look like braille symbols (read: arabic or hebrew).
And most of all, no ritual sheep slaughter.
Growing up Catholic, I went to a lot of bible study classes, where we learned stories like that of Abraham, the Old Testament prophet who was prepared to sacrifice his son at God’s demand. As the story goes, just before he was going to slit the kid’s throat, an angel stopped him and whipped out a ram for him to sacrifice instead.
In my world, this is the beginning and end of all things Abraham. I read the story. I agreed Abraham was a gutsy and pious dude. And on I went with my religious education.
Not so fast in the Islamic world. Muslims devote a massive feast day to Abraham, Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, which in Senegal goes by the name of Tabaski.
To understand how big of a deal Tabaski is in Senegal, imagine if Thanksgiving, Easter, and New Year’s were glued together and then stacked on top of the best birthday you ever had. Multiply that by 600,000 sheep and you’ve got Tabaski.
In the days leading up to the holiday, Dakar filled with sheep that were brought in from across the country and the rest of West Africa to be slaughtered for the festival. I saw them strapped to the top of buses and cars, being led along highways and scrubbed clean in the foamy surf of Dakar’s beaches. I saw them in people’s yards and on their roofs, tied to street lights and bus stops and trees.
And all around me, there was incessant talk of Tabaski. Have you bought your Tabaski sheep yet? How much did you pay? (by the way, the going rate for a sheep in these parts seems to be somewhere between 50,000-100,000 francs, or about $100-$200.) Have you gotten your Tabaski clothes yet? When do you leave for the village to visit your family for Tabaski?
So anyway, the day of Tabaski (Saturday) finally arrived. I returned to my homestay after a week with my parents (more on that later!) to find two sheep standing on our roof, bleeting and munching some dry hay.
I went inside and waited around until few minutes later when I saw my host mom’s son (who was in town with his family for the holiday) heading up to the roof with a knife. “Is he going to kill the sheep now?” I asked my homestay mother. She nodded, unperturbed, and handed me her infant grandson.
“You can go up with Mohammed [the baby] and watch if you’d like.”
And so I did. I watched as my host mom’s son and two other men bound the sheep and carried him over to the large outdoor sink area where I do my laundry. Then, without really any fanfare at all, he took the knife and sunk it into the sheep’s neck. Then he began to saw. And saw. As he sliced deeper and deeper into the neck, the sheep thrashed around in the grasp of the other two men.
The rest, as you can imagine, was equally jarring. The blood. The skinning. The chopping apart of the innards. And perhaps most strange of all for a sacrifice-shy white girl like me, was that 20 minutes after the sheep was killed, we were all snacking on roasted pieces of his liver, cooked up by my host mom over a fire not 15 feet from the spot where the carcass of the sheep still hung.
I have to say, the entire experience was difficult to watch, but it was also surprisingly rewarding for me to see an animal go from live to meat without the intermediate steps of being pumped full of hormones, living out a torturous existence on a factory farm, being killed and then chopped up into completely un-animal life slices, shrink-wrapped, and sent to a grocery store. I have incredible respect for the closeness that people here have to their food and its origins, and it was absolutely wild to see that in action.
Anyway, the rest of my Tabaski played out in a less fascinating manner. I guess I would compare it to Thanksgiving in the States. Really all that goes on is lots of eating and socializing. If it’s your family, your language, and your favorite foods, that makes for a pretty amazing day. If it’s people you don’t know well, conversations in Wolof, and gristly chunks of sheep meat, it loses a lot of its sheen. Like so many experiences I’ve had here, this one was simultaneously fascinating and boring. I was actually quite lonely for most of the day, because seeing other people around their family and friends reminded me acutely of how far I was from mine.
But no matter. Because when in my life will I ever have an experience like this again? And that’s what it comes down to with everything in this country. In Senegal I’m racking up bizarre, unforgettable events like it’s my job. So cheers to that.
And now, because wouldn’t you rather gawk at my pictures than hear me ramble, here are some Tabaski photographs (warning, they are graphic):
me and my charge
the sheep
the sheep
sheep innards hanging out to dry on our clothesline (related aside: i probably will never use those clothes pins again)
My host mom cutting up the meat
aaaand that’s a wrap.
over and out from a post-Tabaski Senegal.
- C’est bien vrai, n’est-ce pas, que les moutons mangent les arbustes ?
- Oui. C’est vrai.
- Ah! Je suis content.
Je ne compris pas pourquoi il était si important que les moutons mangeassent les arbustes. Mais le petit prince ajouta:
- Par conséquent ils mangent aussi les baobabs ?
Je fis remarquer au petit prince que les baobabs ne sont pas des arbustes, mais des arbres grand comme des églises et que, si même il emportait avec lui tout un troupeau d’éléphants, ce troupeau ne viendrait pas à bout d’un seul baobab.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
[“Is it really true that sheep eat bushes?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Ah! I am glad.”
I didn’t understand why it was so important that sheep ate bushes. But the little prince added:
“Therefore they also eat the baobab trees?”
I pointed out to the little prince that the baobabs are not bushes, but trees as large as churches and that, even if one took with them an entire herd of elephants, the herd could not finish one single baobab.]
-Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
