I would now be forced to follow my dream of returning to Senegal after graduating to pursue a 12-month independent research project on the ethics and aesthetics of recycling in West Africa. Nothing before or since has scared me more than getting exactly what I wanted, toward the end of my senior year at Colby, in the form of the long-coveted Thomas J. Leaving was hard, but I’d parlayed my Belgian layover into a summer au pairing in Paris, and how hard could that be, heartache or no? Besides, I was determined to find a way back. And it was there that I met Modou, the guy on the floor of whose 4’ x 8’ closet studio I surreptitiously spent almost every night over the second half of my junior year-he, paying the security guard to look the other way, and I, occasionally waking to find a mouse nibbling on my finger. Before long I had made a friend, Bombay, a bright doctoral student in philosophy who took great pains to help me find the elusive École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where I enrolled in art classes during the strike that paralyzed the university. A couple weeks into my stay, I could successfully haggle my way into paying close to the local price for a piece of fabric and wave away young street cons with a wink. Within days, I could confidently hail a taxi and deliver a proper greeting. They were buying, selling, visiting, cooking, banking, dreaming, hustling, praying, ailing, dancing, working, begging, and loving. People, I realized, were just living-sénégalaisement. Where were they all going? What could they possibly be doing?Īfter a while, the colorful blur began to come slowly into focus. The cumulative knowledge and experience I’d acquired over twenty years on earth seemed to be of virtually no use to me in Dakar, where two million people weaved with exceptional grace over potholed and congested roads in patterns whose purpose escaped me entirely. And just when I felt I’d begun to make out the peculiar mechanics of this place, some pregnant woman would, before my very eyes, buy a rock and proceed to eat it. I made eye contact with men without realizing that this could amount to an invitation. I regularly confused coconut trees and palm trees. Rather than pour water over myself from the bucket I was given by my hosts in a rural village, I concluded I was meant to crouch in it, caking both body and bucket with soap residue and dirt, to their great bewilderment. I believed that responding politely to aggressive vendors trying to sell me skin-lightening cream was the polite thing to do. I took the ocean as something to swim in. I thought that the peanut butter the women sold in plastic baggies on the roadside was meant for sandwiches, not stews. I made many such false assumptions over the following days and months of my junior year on foreign soil. Vaguely, I could make out the silhouettes of three men huddled under the portico of a half-completed cinderblock home across the street and cleverly deduced that they were thieves lying in wait, a notion dispelled hours later when two of them were introduced to me and my ten American housemates as Thierno and Alioune, our trusted guards. On my first morning in Senegal, after a furious downpour made a djembé of our corrugated roof, I heard the 5 am call to prayer broadcast by the neighborhood mosque and mistook it for a song in praise of the rain.įrom our terrace in a quiet corner of the capital I listened as a second voice joined the first, then a third, and a distant fourth, to form an asynchronous chorus of Alahou Akhbars offered up to the dripping dawn.
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