As my third-to-last week winds down and my departure date looms ever-nearer, I’m finding it harder and harder to stay focused on the here-and-now of Senegal and easier and easier to fantasize about hot chocolate. As an antidote against this kind of thinking, I’m going to compare one thing I really don’t like about Senegal with three things that I really do.
What I don’t like: The buying culture. While there are more and more “American-style” boutiques, shopping malls, and even department stores in Dakar, the majority of purchases take place in traditional markets. These markets are crowded, noisy, the stalls are crammed together so closely that it can be hard to move around, and to top it all off they’re one of the few locations where you’re actually at a material disadvantage if you can’t pass as a local. The few times that I’ve gone to a market just to soak up the experience, I’ve had a good time; but if you’re looking for something specific and are used to having a lot of time to examine the merchandise and reflect on purchases, you’d better prepare for a stressful experience. When I walk through a market I get jostled, grabbed, hissed at, yelled at, and beckoned – with my mind racing to take all that in, I’m lucky if I even notice what any particular vendor is selling! I’ll admit that people are more aggressive with me because they can tell I’m foreign and assume I’m rich because of the color of my skin, but the truth of the matter is that I’m just not used to this kind of buying environment. There’s an art to giving just enough attention to an item to keep a vendor interested without giving him the upper hand, or to sizing up the quality of a piece of clothing without trying it on, and these are skills that I simply don’t have. I’m feeling this more forcefully now as I’m scrambling to get my Christmas shopping done before finals, and I’m beginning to cave under the pressure and resort to non-market alternatives for making my purchases, even though they’re less “authentic.”
But now, on to three of the things that I love about Senegal:
Number One: Fluid standards of female beauty.
I want to make one thing very clear before I launch into this topic: Senegal has a lot of problems with sexism, women’s rights, and gender issues. This was brought home to me very forcefully last Thursday, when a conversation I was having with some Senegalese friends turned very sour when the boys started explaining why having multiple girlfriends who don’t know about each other is justifiable behavior. Apparently, one is your “serious girl,” one is “for sex,” and then you keep a couple of “bad girls” hanging around to take out on weekends when your other girls are busy. When asked why they couldn’t just have one girlfriend, they said that they would like to only date their serious girl, but if a girl comes up to them in a club looking for a good time, what are they supposed to do? Apparently the response “Say no” had never occurred to any of them.
That being said, I love the fact that women here don’t feel compelled to all adhere to the same cookie-cutter model of “attractiveness” the way we do in the States. I have a confession to make: I wear a size “Small,” and I’ve felt fat all of my life. A lot of this probably comes from junior high, when I was called fat because I read a lot and was terrible at sports (it’s interesting to note that my sixth-grade classmates thought of the word ‘fat’ as being a label for behavior, not for appearance), and because my high school graduating class was freakishly skinny – but a lot of it also comes from the fact that, no matter how hard I try, I will never look like any of the Pussycat Dolls. Small as I might be, I don’t have the type of body that looks good in a spandex body suit, booty shorts, or a string bikini. I have, as American magazines delicately put it, “problem areas” that need to be “minimized.” This wouldn’t be a problem if American media culture didn’t present the Nikki Minaj-Shakira-Pussycat Dolls model as the only ultimate ideal of female beauty. I’m not denying that they’re all attractive ladies; I’m just affirming that there are beautiful women that look nothing like any of them.
In Senegal, on the other hand, you find a number of competing ultimate ideals of female beauty. There’s the Western Minaj-Shakira-Pussycat model, of course. There’s what I’m tempted to call the “traditional Senegalese” model, if there is any such thing, of a chunky, well-muscled lady with plenty of curves. And there’s what might be called the “Devout Muslim” ideal, which features women wearing loose clothing and brightly colored headwraps, which leaves the body type up to the imagination. My experience here has been that there are enough different ideas of what women should aspire to look like that, finally, most women end up being evaluated on their own terms. Having so many different options opens up a lot of spaces for features that differ from the norm to be seen as beautiful – because what is the norm, anyway? In Senegal, if someone called me “interesting-looking,” they’d probably mean it as a compliment, and I’d probably take it that way. If someone said the same thing in the States, even if they didn’t mean to be cruel, I’d take it as a veiled insult that I didn’t meet their standards of normative female beauty.
Number Two: No perceived tension between intellect and faith
Every single Senegalese person that I’ve ever met believes in God – or at least they say they do, possibly in a reaction to societal pressure. This “Everyone I’ve ever met” includes all my college professors, the specialist-guest speakers we’ve had come in to speak on a variety of subjects, and my extremely intelligent host parents. I love the fact that when I’m having an intellectual discussion with any of these people, I don’t have to treat the fact that I’m a Christian as something outside the scope of the conversation; on the contrary, most people here would probably acknowledge that nearly all questions have aspects to them that can be looked at from a spiritual perspective. Here, I never have to worry that I’m going to be forced to defend how I can believe in God and Science at the same time, no matter who I’m talking to or what we’re talking about. Here, if I happen to mention my faith even while talking to a complete stranger, I don’t wonder if they’re negatively reassessing my intelligence because of it.
Now, I don’t at all mean to imply that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States or anything like that. It’s my denial of the idea that there’s any tension between science and God that I feel comes under attack in the United States – both by devout Christians who reject science and by devout believers in science who reject spirituality – not my Christianity itself. The flip side to this is that those of my classmates who believe that science proves there is no God have had a hard time voicing their ideas here without being shot down. I, on the other hand, have seen a dramatic expansion in my faith, and in my comfort with my identity as a Christian, now that I no longer feel like this part of me is in conflict with being “smart,” or being a good student.
Number Three: Open lines of communication between siblings, friends, and neighbors.
Part of this one has nothing to do with Senegal and has everything to do with the fact that 54 American (more-or-less) college students were thrown into a physically, emotionally, and mentally stressful situation with only each other as a safety net. It took most of us until maybe week two of the program to stop beginning sentences with, “Sorry this might be TMI” and resigning ourselves to the fact that, with this bunch of kids, almost no amount of information was going to be too much. While I understand that this no-holds-barred conversation style would probably not work super well in the States, I’ve really enjoyed the feeling over the past four months that my friends care about all of me, not just the parts of me that are seemly or pleasant-smelling.
But I also need to acknowledge that part of this has a lot to do with Senegal. People here are very focused on their extended families and on their communities; I’ve probably said that a million times in a million different ways, but it bears repeating. To put it simply, people are all up in each other’s business all the time. While it definitely gets annoying to have to always make it home for meals on time, because your family will not eat without you, this aspect to Senegalese daily life also probably goes a long way to explain why the suicide and divorce rates in Senegal are so low. In the States, we seem to think that emotional problems or problems with relationships are secret and shameful; this might keep your neighbors and friends from feeling uncomfortable, but it compounds the problem. A couple of months ago, my host mom popped her head into the living room to tell me, “I have to go to my cousin’s house. His wife wants to divorce him, and I’m going to talk her around. I’ll be home in three hours!” A couple of days ago, her cousin and his wife came over to the house. While it’s possible that they were just putting on a brave face, from what I could follow of the conversation, it sounded like all the community intervention was serving the same function that marriage counseling does in the United States. On a similar note, a few weeks ago I told my Senegalese friends that in the United States, often the first sign that a married couple’s neighbors have that they’re having problems with their relationship is when one of the couple moves out. My friends burst out laughing. At first I thought it was just from surprise, but then I realized that there was also a note of derision in the laughter. And to be perfectly honest, I can see where they’re coming from.
