“Bienvenue à Dakar”

Someone said that to me yesterday – welcomed me here. I’m leaving tomorrow. I can hardly fathom that it’s been four months and neither, apparently, can the random tubaab-swarmers. Someone asked me, a few days ago on the street, where I’m from. Tartly, I informed him that I live here.
“Oh, that’s great,” he said. “For how long?”
I ignored him completely and, after informing me that I look like an angel, he took the hint and stopped following me. And maybe I shouldn’t have been so irritated. Maybe fending off people who are much more aggressive and inappropriate than that quite unthreatening man really has pushed me over the edge into plain reflexive rudeness. Or maybe it was the fact that he’s entirely right. I live in Dakar, yes. I have a room in a house in Mermoz, I have people I call “yaay” and “papa” and brothers and sisters, I can navigate public transit, I know (sort of) how to make ceebu jën and ataya and dress like a sénégalaise. But I’m leaving Saturday night, and I always knew I would. My entire experience, internal and external, has been defined by that impermanence.
The beggars still run at me, the men still whistle. Indeed, I think that I can still sum up most of what I don’t like about Dakar with my recent realization that my life would be greatly improved by the addition of a large nametag reading, in French, Wolof and preferably Pulaar: “Hello. I am a tubaab. Everyone in the vicinity realizes that I’m a tubaab, so your pointing it out will benefit a grand total of no one. No, I’m not going to give you money. No, I do not have a husband. No, I don’t want one. No, I’m not going to give you my phone number. No, I don’t need a taxi. Thanks so much for asking, and have a lovely day.”
I very clearly do not belong here, still. It’s funny: as a kid, watching cultural assemblies and hearing minority histories and competing with my friends for ties to “the exotic,” I always thought that if I ever had children I would take them to another country, the more different the better, so that the very identity that would make them boring in the U.S. would rather make them interesting. I don’t think that anymore. I may not fit here, but I do have a culture to which I belong, a place where my defining characteristic is not the color of my skin or my cultural mannerisms or my moral lexicon. That doesn’t mean I want to stay in that place forever, even now, but I don’t think that I quite appreciated the emotional import of knowing it exists. As a white person in Dakar, I’m not sure that it’s possible to have that, and as a person with Senegalese values in America, I’m not sure one would have it either.
And yet, especially in these last days, my train of thought is occasionally clogged up by the powerful feeling of belonging I scrape out of a few corners. I return to the house to my yaay’s singsong greeting: “Salut ma fille, très gentille, très jolie.” (For those of you not initiated into the beauties of French pronunciation – that all rhymes.) I fold the cloth under our bowl after dinner and take it into the kitchen, a smooth and comfortable routine, exchanging mischievous smiles with Sokhna as I pass her in the kitchen. I do the combination high five/handshake with the cashier at the Elton as she cries “ooh, sama xarit!” I run my familiar route along the Corniche under the “Bienvenue à Dakar” sign and eat a banana from the fruit vendors as I walk my cool down back to the house. I inform people who try to overcharge me that my name is Michelle Obama and they laugh, compliment my Senegalese-ness, and cut the price. I try out traditional dances at night on the roof to the beat of the drums at the neighbor’s party, and walk downstairs to the open air hallway or down again to the gently stirring sheer curtains in the salon. I chat with the man who makes my 50 fcfa (10 cents) Café Touba in Frolof – maybe I can’t sustain a reasonably paced for conversation longer than five minutes in Wolof, but at least I’m now falling back to French rather than throwing English words into French sentences. And, hey, if our morning news channel speaks Frolof – which it does – I figure I can, too.

I wonder what it will be like going back to my old routines. Will I be able to sleep in total silence, without the cadence of the bayefalls singing out their remembrance of God? Will I be lost in my own bathroom now that anything of reasonable cleanliness equipped with running water meets my standard of “nice?” Will I greet people too extensively or make too many explicit references to race or physical appearance? And what on earth am I going to do without my morning routine of fresh baguette with chocolate, mug of hot tea and mblax music videos?
I feel a bit discombobulated. I’ve never before left a place where I’ve actually lived knowing that there’s a real chance I won’t ever be back. I’m making my exit from my last choir rehearsal on the motorcycle of one of the basses, waving goodbye and clutching my list of e-mail addresses, trying not to wonder if I’ll forget what the faces of the people we pass look like. And I’ll be honest: I’m glad to be going home. Granted, I have occasionally to remind myself that all of my problems are not a result of being in Senegal. Even where there are crosswalks I occasionally have to wait for an opening to cross the street. Even when lectures are in English I have trouble concentrating if I’ve been chronically unsuccessful at sleeping enough. But there are some things about Dakar that are simply less pleasant than Washington DC or Ann Arbor. I feel guilty saying so, but it’s true. There are cultural differences, but there are also financial differences. People here may not make some of the life choices I’ve taken for granted but, given the option, I don’t think they’d pass up clean streets or reliable electricity or good water pressure or temperature control. That’s something I wonder about going back, too: will I bring the guilt with me? That feeling has been one of the defining characteristics of my stay here, the constant reminder that I have been so lucky and that there exists a visceral, daily reality in which things are much different. Will I go back and feel a clawing sense of being undeserving every time I take the metro or turn on a thermostat, or will I slip easily back into my normal routine without more than a hazy recollection of the way it felt to cram into a car rapide or suffocate as the already weak fan sputters to a halt with the power cut? I don’t even know which way I want to feel. It can’t be right to feel okay about the lottery win of my luxuries – but, at the same time, I don’t think just feeling guilty does any good. There was a very whimsical, naïve part of my when I left home that expected to be able to express in my final blog post the sentiment that the human spirit transcends physical conditions, that really physical conditions don’t matter, that really we’re all united in our humanity regardless of culture. And that’s not totally false: I have seen people be patient and grateful and truly happy in conditions that hit me hard at the beginning. I have even seen a few glimpses of my own ability to barely notice situations from which I would have recoiled before. And I share more with people here than separates us. We all have to eat and sleep, we all want affection and acceptance. But the ways in which we seek those things have been stamped into us by the divergent worlds in which we grew up, and that’s significant, too.
I went back and glanced at the first post I wrote upon arriving here. I entered Dakar in a sensory haze of contradictions, and that’s how I’m leaving it, too. I’m glad to go home, but I can feel the weight of separation on my chest already. I’m excited to be able to take a hot shower – to want to take a hot shower rather than a cold one – but I’ll miss being able to swim in the ocean I see along the road every day on the way to class. I’m excited to be able to walk places without getting my feel filthy and having people holler at me, but I’ll miss greeting the flock of phone-card sellers every day, chatting with Ablay about the weather or elections in Guinea, and feeling some tubaab solidarity with the guard outside the Pakistani embassy. I’m excited to get dressed without having to consider how that seemingly brilliant outfit will look when soaked several times over with sweat, but – I admit it – I’ll miss walking past the Elton Christmas lights in harem pants, a tank top and sunglasses, being able to wear a turban whenever I want without any questions asked. I’m excited to be able to study without the constant buzz of the TV, but I’m going to miss the lineup of Arabic chanting and the most ridiculous Indian soap opera I could possibly imagine, complete with multiple camera angles zooming in to the swelling intense music every time someone says that the other forgot to call. I’m excited to choose when and what I eat, to have fruit rather than the dishwashing liquid that people here call palm oil, but I’m going to miss clicking my spoon against the communal bowl, my yaay breaking food for me with her hands and those next to me steadying a vegetable or piece of meat with their own spoon when I fail too miserably at cutting it with mine alone. I’m excited to see my friends and family, but I’ll miss my friends and family.
Even now, after I’ve lived here for four months, Dakar seems like a city of contradictions. You watch commercials on TV, and then you realize that the prizes for sending in enough used packets of powdered milk include a paid trip to Mecca and a sheep. People here are both nicer and meaner than anyone I’ve encountered in the U.S. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve wanted to slap someone for hissing at me or calling me “tubaab” or grabbing me physically as though somehow the color of my skin gives them the right to my money or my gender gives them the right to objectify me. But, at the same time, I’ve lost count of how many times people have gone far beyond the call of duty to help me. Fruit vendors with almost nothing to their names will trust me to pay them later when I don’t have exact change, or even tell me that the extra 50 fcfa doesn’t matter. When I asked the stranger behind the counter of a boutique where he thought I could buy a disposable camera to take on my rural visit, he dropped what he was doing and called several of his friends, one of whom ended up lending me, a girl he had never seen before, his digital camera for the week free of charge.
I visited Touba, the holy city of the Mouride brotherhood, last Saturday, and was given the gift of a tour, a blessing from the marabout’s son, and the scarf that they had lent me at the beginning to make me mosque-appropriate; I gave a “gift” of 5000 fcfa. It was beautiful, peaceful, young and welcoming. Our guide told us the history, encouraged us to take pictures, was thrilled when I told him that I’m studying Islam even though I’m not a Muslim. For the first time I felt a tiny flicker of understanding of how someone might feel emotional attachment to a sect that teaches total surrender of individuality to another human being, what I would almost go so far as to call polytheism.



I’ll be talking to Aziz about human evolution and the accuracy of various methods of determining early hominid migration patterns, and suddenly he’ll be telling me that he thinks it’s ridiculous to say that the world will end in 2012 because the Coran outlines very specific signs. It might be soon, though, he said, because some of those signs have happened already. For example, there are people who are openly gay. There are men who dress as women and women who dress as men. “Like jeans that are like this,” he pinched his own jeans into a tapered shape around his ankles. “That’s something for girls – and you see guys who wear that. That’s one of the signs.”
I’ll be telling my yaay about my brother in the U.S. and proudly note that he has a lot of friends. “Oh,” she’ll tease, “maybe he’ll be mayor of Michigan someday, or even president of the United States. And then you’ll be happy and have a nice house and many beautiful things because you’re his sister. And we’ll be happy too because you’ll share with us.”
“What about me?” I smiled. “I could be president myself, and that would be even better.” My yaay’s eyes widened; she laughed.
“President bu jigéen?” – “A woman president?”
I laughed too, but, for the record, I didn’t drop it. A week or so later, when I proudly announced to my yaay that I’d won two elections for positions back at school next semester, she clapped and nodded her head. The next time we had guests over, she informed them that her daughter would be president of the U.S.
I’ll be watching coverage of the Festival Mondial des Arts Negres on TV, the caption “Dakar: City of Lights” splashed across images of bright garlands hanging over the street and the Statue de la Renaissance changing colors, when three of the past four nights walking back into my neighborhood after sunset felt like diving into an inkwell, the candles lit inside not bright enough to shine out to the street.
This is a place where people have to do with much less, but where the aesthetic is always about more. Women wear intricate full ensembles of brightly colored and boldly patterned fabrics every day, even on public transit or selling peanuts on the street, even in the villages cooking or working in the fields. At weddings or baptisms, the entire room glitters with the rhinestones and glitter on the dresses, the gold bracelets and earrings. There’s no such thing as too much.

There’s also, apparently, no such thing as trying too hard. I don’t give my phone number to men on the street, but I also come from a place where it’s relatively more normal for men and women to be friends with each other without a romantic component. I have trouble understanding why certain individuals think that asking me out for the fifteenth time will yield a different response from the first. I am also quite baffled by the twentieth phone call in a row: it seems logical to assume that the fact that I did not pick up on the first nineteen tries indicates that either a) I have my phone off or elsewhere, or b) I have decided that I don’t want to talk to you at the moment – and the logical conclusion from either option is that calling again will be unlikely to result in my picking up. Aziz, however, talking to me about romance one night, expressed the opinion that any girl who turns him down categorically isn’t particularly mature.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you don’t fall in love before you’re in a relationship with someone. You fall in love by being together. If you never go out, how can you know?”
I’m going to miss those conversations. I’m going to miss learning so many new things at a time. I wonder if home will seem boring, predictable, drained of challenges to face or exciting things to discover, monochromatic with plain-colored clothing and only one language to speak per day rather than three. I don’t feel ready to leave. I don’t have an internally consistent way to describe my experiences. I haven’t even come close to discovering everything there is here.
Bienvenue, Dakar. Welcome, and goodbye.

Well… not quite. Way back when, OIP did tell me I have to write a post once I’m back in the U.S. So, dearly beloved readers, never fear just yet: I’ll be seeing you on the other side of the Atlantic.