The Bitter Skin, of Sweet Fruit

I’ve spoken about the beauty of Senegal and Mali and how remarkable their cities are. They are lovely. Truly, I am taken aback, floored by the majesty of the places I’ve been. As I said I was caught unsuspecting by this aspect of Africa.

Often when I’ve thought of Africa it’s been in regards to the fact that she is my mother. African Americans are African purely and beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yet so often we are completely unaware that we are actually an island, small populations of our people living isolated from the titanic land, and sea of peoples and nations from which we’ve come. My perspective has been that I, and we, need to reconnect with this place that we’ve come from. I’d been given the rare opportunity to see the immesurable wealth and ageless knowledge of Africa by professors who had learned about these things and this exposure engendered my perspective. Africa and our cultures there proposed solutions to many of our problems as African Americans and I looked towards Africa as a teacher, toward her knowledge as an obligation, a lifeline, and potentially salvation for our people in the west who are loosing themselves.

Upon arriving in the place however I have been amazed at the fact that she is Spain, Hawaii, and the Carribean. She is an alluring, hypnotizing, amazing beauty, a get away, Mexico for spring break etc. I didn’t know, nor did I have a hint of this fact. I thought Mali was the desert. The whole section of Mali I’ve been in is lush, warm, and the flora is much like my home in the south, with a few more tropical trees and plants sprinkled in. The people are Black people without the stress, domination, and existence largely on the margins of another society. So swag is up, bright colors are in, children play in the streets and the law rather than the niggardly exception is cool, polyrhythm, and ease. A paradise, if not for everyone, certainly for Black people. All these things are true, but let me tell you, the beauty is not without her scars, and my struggles to do my work here have been daunting to say the least. Let me tell you now a little bit about the otherside of this lovely adventure.

I don’t know I’ve experienced a situation this uncomfortable since diaper days. I can’t talk. I have been in Bamako a week and almost everyone around me speaks not a lick of English. I know greetings and can say hello, and I know a list of words. I am an eloquent person. If not then I love eloquence and he’s a good friend of mine. I was more a fan of his work with Barack Obama during the election than after the election, but still. We’ll he died on the plane ride over. I can only communicate with one word at a time almost all day. So lets think about what that means. Any thing that is conceptual? You can’t talk about it. Like for instance please can you tell me where to buy toilet paper. Or I’d like to leave the house now, but will be gone a few hours, and though I can’t communicate I have to get out of here or I’m going to crack. I cannot go anywhere I can’t walk because I can’t tell a taxi how to get me back home, nor do I understand the words for like $1, $2, $3.

Do you feel me yet? I’m functionally a baby. Okra is in all the food. Okra is an aquintance of mine, but not nessecarily my best friend. Ya dig? Okra is great for you though. It’s a laxative. So today trying to examine the rocks around here which seem amazingly to all be iron ore, the Okra attacked me and I barely made it home. Yikes. At times children laughingly talk to me knowing I can’t talk back and don’t understand, people watch me as a passing oddity and I feel very much at home, yet not quite able to get in the front door. There is a truth I am well familiar with that one must be reborn again and again to truly progress on the path of knowledge. I believe the bible says that one must become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of heaven is all around them yet they do not recognize it, the kingdom of heaven is within you and you must be born again to enter the kingdom. I’m not quoting here, but paraphrasing. I’ve experienced the truth of these things in my life, but this time I’ve truly become a baby, incapable of the most basic things. As humans growing in a linear progression from child to adult maybe only the old truly recognize how much we take for granted in the all powerful, all encompassing cycle and circle, or life.

Of course this means my work is stalled until I learn the language. The language is actually Malinke, Bambara and French, so I should say I must learn the languages. I haven’t the slightest problem with the idea, in fact learning languages is supposed to make you smarter, and I love expanding the mind. But how do you learn a language when you can’t be taught because no one around speaks enough English to teach you. Hmm interesting. This simple fact, so obvious as the be completely missed when I was planning my trip, transparent like air, has now become incredibly thick and humid as certain Tallahassee summers. My homeboy Ayinde encouraged me to learn as much as I can the other night. I appreciated it. So let me tell you, I’ve learned to differentiate the sound of words so that I here speaking sometimes now rather than Charlie Brown noises. I’ve learned that people are often saying words I know and can respond to, but because they speak them fast, mumble them, say them when they are not looking at you, say part of them, or some other thing I may only understand that communication has be elicited and given up on a moment after the fact. In fact, at times I thought people were just mumbling something, when they were actually mumbling something, barely looking at my while walking me, but to me. I’ve also learned that language teachers and translators get paid US money, not the Mali money I was led to believe. I’ve had a hard time finding anyone who can speak English enough to teach me because, well the dollar isn’t what it was and people need money to live their lives. After all the costs of getting here, I don’t have enough to pay for anyone who isn’t essentially volunteering their time, and everyone here is on the grind. Eventually I’ll make it to the university and ask some younger people, who would be more likely to volunteer, but that will be after I learn how to say turn here, and I live in Kalabancoro.

So can anyone say doldrums. Can anyone say floating adrift on a windless sea for a week, unable to leave the neighborhood, without a bit of breeze to fill the sails. So I learn my numbers and the names of rocks and trees, body parts, and the days of the week just like any good second grader, and nod in my head to my beautiful, wonderful lineage of masters and Gurudev, yes this posses a great opportunity to loose the ego.

You see the ego… is firmly rooted, in our sense of power with our ability to poop, choose the food we eat, leave the block, and have some sort of fashion sense. On the bus trip over we sweated hours on end, but didn’t get to bathe for two days and one night. The lovely drivers chose to stop near water and when inside somewhere and slept while we sat up waiting for 6 to 8 hours and mosquito hell, amidst stampedes of donkeys, and other night monsters. During that time my ego couldn’t even hold on to its ability to bathe itself. Imagine the fright and wonderful new flavors and smells on that baking bus without windows that opened yet open mosquito-highway doors.

So it seems I’m being reborn. I wonder what type of person I’ll be in this incarnation. This degree of being forced to de and reconstruct has to be an entrance to a remarkable wealth of new vision and opportunity right? How often do you get to be transformed at such a deep level that you experience being unable to bathe and speak again? I’m telling you, I’m coming back with superpowers! If I’m not flying and bulletproof, I’ll at least be able to hold hot metal in my hands without being burned. Lol!