Prof. Dr. Sabine
Broeck
University of Bremen
email: broeck@uni-bremen.de
SUBMISSION FOR the
CROSS CULTURAL POETICS PROJECT
(This appeared eventually in an online magazine.)
Now you see it,
now you don't.
A gaze on Dakar: white, curious.
On the roof is a particular
place in Dakar. You are in the city, but not quite, looking on from up
there. The roofs tend to be plain concrete, square, characterized by stark
flatness and a vexing absence of shade, architectural delicacy or ornamentation.
If necessity requires - which is the case for most of the people covered
by these multipurpose surfaces (a luxury compared to corrugated iron which
does not hold things well in the wind and will stifle life underneath)
- the roofs are stacked with items of every imaginable size, shape or
age, in every conceivable state of wholeness or disrepair.
And make no mistake.
"Every" is to be taken at its most literal here. Everything will be stacked
on the roofs, in most cases gathering annual red harmattan dust, rusting
its time away. Nobody minds the aesthetic disturbance but me, or so it
seems. Everything tops the roofs, because in Dakar - a city that could
have invented recycling and has pushed it to extremes of ingenuity and
practical perfection - nothing may be thrown away. No single kid's sneaker
with holes and without heels, no shoe laces anyway; not the rustiest of
nails or knives, no Evian bottle however many times battered and reused
for oil or diverse small items; no five year old phone book, no single
brick, no pot without handle, no length of string, nothing except plastic
wrapping which, at this point, seems to be burying a third of the city's
suburban space, its manmade blue dotting the bougainvillea affluence,
wasting the remaining savanne.
This is a culture
of keeps - you never know what you might need it for, says Cheikh. And
indeed, things do turn up, like Evian bottles stuffed with peanuts, in
the most unexpected circumstances, like pure karité by the kilo - small
fortunes no doubt by the economic standards of the Western cosmetic industry
- marketed in aptly sized plastic containers that were destined for some
yummy nutella-like arachide based substance people consume by the kilo,
too.
Empty roofs remain
a mystery: Do you read utter poverty, because there is nothing to even
put on a roof, or relative riches, because things do not have to be kept?
Or do they express some uncharacteristically rigid sense of public decorum?
You are not alone
on the roof. Imagine yourself bent over a big plastic tub of soapy water,
legs straight, back forward, your hands in the suds for hours at a time;
the wash is sweaty, dusty, bearing all the stains of extensive metropolitan
use; the water is cold and it hasn't flown freely from the tap but had
to be hauled up the roof, in buckets, on your head, sometimes from wells
in the long distance; the Omo is rather too expensive for your mistress'
limited budget, so it comes rationed out in portions of five tablespoons
at a time, bought with a cup next door (where the neighbor keeps shop
in a two by two meters metal container). The solution to the challenge
of cleaning the wash seems immediate: punish it into submission.
The bonnes in Dakar,
working on the roofs, do not wash, really, they beat les habilles. The
way they deal with the endless supply of heavy sheets, towels, underwear,
shirts and other intimate items is striking: they work violence on the
textiles - remember, legs straight, back forward - distinguished in the
quartier by its squishing sound of wringing out water with aplomb, a sound
that will never be drowned out by all the other neighbourhood clatter
and rhythms (from Mozart to Mbalach from at least fifteen blasters in
a ten square meters' area) - a violence that might bespeak their aptness
at the job as much as an answer to their social position, or the lack
of it.
What you do not see
from the roof: salary 15.000 CFA monthly. Roughly thirty deutschmarks.
No contracts. Working hours: at your disposal, monsieur or madame. A man
throws his bonne out the window because she dares to contradict his mother.
She is dead on impact. News like that punctuates the bonnes' existence
with cruel regularity.
Dakar thrives on a
circulation of the minimal cash amount, adjusted to private budgets lasting
from one week to the next and to rampant poverty of the state, compensated
by extravaganzas of big man spending. The city's economy knows the buying
of the umpteenth Mercedes, of gold (which is how they call jewelry here),
of French perfume and German furniture, of Japanese tv sets and American
gadgets instead of even the most rudimentary requirements of keeping,
saving and building up. A bonne in this manichean system, young girl from
the country that she is, without family to give shelter, and there is
more and cheap where she comes from, is dispensable.
Take "minimal" literally.
On every corner you will see every desirable household item bought and
sold small: one teaspoon of mustard, one aspirin tablet, one (or half
a) cigarette, one piece of sugar, one tablespoon sized square of butter
on the smallest strip of paper torn from said ancient phone books, one
maggi cube, one teaspoon of salt, one onion, one tomato, one vap against
mosquitoes, one hot pepper, one chewing gum (the single strip, not the
package!) every number of used screws, nails, every length of plastic
tubes or sewing yarn. No mechanical device, no technical construction
is ever beyond repair, and metal scraps of ancient cars end up - ingeniously
worked over by the local artisans - as pots and pans.
Canny moguls of the
West must be making a fortune from reselling used phone books, used frigidaires,
cars used much beyond the imagination of a safety minded traveller, used
furniture, used copy-machines, all in parts and wholes. Consuméz Senegalais
extends to fish and légumes, if at all, plus some self-made marmalade
from uplift -conscious female cooperatives in the provinces; even the
daily rice, a staple food on everywoman's table without which social disintegration
and insurgency would threaten, is subsidized as an import from Vietnam:
a gift of the former colonizer, selling one colony's resources to the
next down the line, inventing rice for a people of the millet savanne.
What you see: the
women dressed to kill in Pikine, a bidonville on Dakar's outskirts, not
much and never enough electricity, no running water, no garbage collection,
no street cleaning, the most limited public transport, heat and dust stinging
- but fashion and flair abounds, skirts and shirts ironed (with 18th century
irons filled with hot coal) on the sand floor, everything white shining
spotlessly white, seemingly without effort.
Urbanity is a skilled
spectacle in Dakar, the fun and the stakes high. Friday afternoon, il
est cinq heures, les Wolof belles dames sans merci are out in the street,
carrying themselves and their robes like feudal regalia, entitled to a
glamour, a self-possession, a confidence of their sex that flies in the
face of post-Fanonian angst. Women take the town, never mind fundamentalist
codes, either. The Wolof do not practice, have never practiced, circumcision.
You do not see the
family rule(s), women keeping families of 30 and up afloat by the barest
means, their men having no jobs (wanting or not wanting jobs),getting
by somehow. You do not see the right to beat her up, still exercised freely.
You do not see the children hustling to get an education. You do not see
the bare bones, the furniture-less dirt floors of lack and malnourishment
inside.
You see the opulence
of urban colour, the laid back of daily bartering, the time everybody
has for themselves and each other, to lounge, to talk, to laugh, to hustle,
to fight, to put on a show of their own grandiose selves.
Self. Identity subject
formation relativity essentialism primitivist romanticism urban planning
playful citation defamiliarization the production of knowledge architectural
pastiche demographic shifts politics of location racism and racialisation
social fragmentation the lure of the symbolic the I and the other estrangement
seductive hybridity ethnocentric narcicissm exoticist desire the design
of multicultural societies the dangers of mono-lingualism creolization
development capital accumulation gendered economies the discourse of fundamentalism
literacy class analysis the aftermath of colonialism the ruins of empire
the Middle Passage the trauma of history can I write beyond Conrad catch
your breath. Look again.
See the scary cleanliness
of a zillion gas stations scattered across the urban landscape. Dirt and
shit (excrements, human and otherwise) of Dakar's many most beautiful
streets, including the boardwalk on the Atlantic coast. And, my friends
tell me, Dakar is not even dirty by comparison, you haven't seen Lagos.
See the arrogance
of whitewashed (often white owned) villas on Dakar's Plateau, as it is
so aptly called. Corrugated iron and torn paper walls of the huts alongside
the one and only street out from Dakar's peninsula to all directions in
Senegal.
See a meagre peanutfield's
calm in Ndande. The riot of downtown Dakar markets where it is hard for
you to even breathe, being overrun by the heat, the plenty of food, clothes,
and other wares, the gasolin in the air and the dazzling human multitudes.
See the generosity
lavished on celebrations of every fete in the Muslim, Christian and otherwise
calendars, making for weeks with hardly a day's work left in the state
bureaucracy. A willed and exclusive ecstasy of singing sects, driven by
orthodoxy to keep on repeating a single koran verse forever and doing
that publicly, circling the neighbourhoods day and night.
See opaque faces of
custom officers or civil servants in the post office; intransigent police
guards out in the streets determined to liven up their scanty income with
your contribution, exacted from you for no reason other than that you
happened to come by. Senegalese hospitality of friends, families and strangers
who will feed you without question, with gusto and their loose charme,
and wonderful fresh fish.
See Koran schools'
reglementation of and violence on children. A press as free as any you
might have had access to, people cursing and discoursing, with great care
and arms and feet, over the least little political, social and cultural
items as if lives depended on it.
See women carrying
loads on their heads, of every portable size and weight, horse carts hauling
furniture, weekly waste, fruit, fish, mechanical gadgets for all levels
of consumption. Computers in the American Express office, internet in
the bank, email for the state bureaucracy's offices, high tech for the
military.
See social workers
teaching SIDA in Guediawaye, managers, students, workers, men, women and
kids doing open air exercise on the Corniche breathing Atlantic air 6:00
pm every evening, university hospital doing computer tomography, if need
be. Paludienne eating up lives by the dozens and hundreds every season.
See national military ravishing the Casamance, authorities preaching submission
to the powers that be. Intellectuals dreaming of revamped négritude, writing
multi-culturalism, teaching Soyinka, Glissant, Mariama Ba, Whitman, Audre
Lourde, Sartre, Fanon, Morrison, - you name them - if they can get hold
of the books.
Watch CNN, American
soaps in French translation, Brasilian telenovelas per American satellite
in a Senegalese village where people do not even speak French and you
know an expansive time frame of the now. Have your nerves wrecked by everybody's
legi rek as in: very soon; telling you only that "on time is when I get
there", or "just wait, things will come to you." Europeans might have
invented the clock, we, however, have the time. Soon will be six weeks,
if need be.
What you see, is a
modernity, a hip-to-the-times-ness, creating itself before your very eyes,
breathlessly, always belated, always in advance, never enough, excessively
abundant.
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