Saturday, September 4, 2010

Remember me?

It's been about two months since my last blog post. I'd been writing like crazy, trying not to forget a thing from Toubacouta, since I couldn't do blog posts there. Two months since my last blog post, four months since I left Senegal. My hair, when it's braided, takes two elastics, not fifty. It was chilly today- the coldest I've been since January. Four months in Senegal, and I still feel the need to count time like this.

I still talk nonstop about last semester, and only just stopped wearing my "petit afrique" necklace Abdoulaye gave me. I have yet to play my djembe, but only just stopped my twice-a-week dance classes. It was Raissa's birthday a few days ago- we talked on facebook. I've called my families and friends several times- and they've called me. I haven't talked to any MSID friends, not face to face yet. I'm sitting alone in my apartment, my new room, with colorful pagnes hung over the windows as curtains, my drum propped up against the bed. My teapot on the shelf, but still only one cup that survived the plane ride. The cups that always come in two, to share. You can't make the frothy tea without pouring it from cup to cup, so I need two, I need someone to share with.

I just re-read some early blog posts. About my first few days in Dakar. There's one from January 18th, "Skilna∂artàra", in which I wrote about a song I sing, "who can sail without the wind?". I wrote about it the day before leaving.

Here's a story from Toubacouta:

It was my second or third day in town, in my new family. I missed Mama Binta and Liberté 3, my neighborhood and friends and family in Dakar. I missed my family and friends in the states, and was still shy around my new Toubacouta family. I didn't know what to do with myself, there wasn't any work to be done that I knew how to do, no schoolwork, no salsa. And my nephew Petit (his name is Ansou. We call him "junior") comes in, who can barely speak French, and sits down on the floor in my room (The living room, remember) and starts singing,

Qui peut faire de la voile sans vent?
Qui peut rammer sans ramme
Et qui peut quitter son ami
sans verser de larme?

I am the farthest I have ever been from home, and can't imagine being in a place farther. I have never been so far away from anyone I know. And the song most dear to me, that I have learned and sung with those most close to me, is coming out of the mouth of a boy whose family I have just been welcomed into.

I start singing along, of course, fighting back tears of relief and joy and tension all at once dispelled. I wasn't looking for a sign, but here it is; I'm home. As far from home as I can possibly be, and I'm home. I recorded him on my computer. He figured out pretty quickly that singing that song gets a rise out of me, so he invited some of his friends in one night so they could all sing it for me. Petit was correcting their pronunciation even though he didn't know what the French words meant himself. Of course, I do that when we sing in Icelandic or Swedish. He couldn't understand when I tried to tell him that I sang that song with my friends. Of course I did. It's what every Senegalese kid learns in school, in an educational system inherited (or abandoned) by the French.

I miss them.

I'll keep writing occasionally, though, just for the sake of writing and remembering and getting it all out so I don't annoy everyone around me with these stories like I already feel like I'm doing.

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