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.