Date: 2005-01-04
To: A Yurt, Lamine, Is a Tent
Miles today: 0.0

Here is the question for the day: How do you explain, coherently and cohesively, to someone who has no idea where you¢re coming from, what you are going to do and why you want to do it?There are occasions when I find it easier to equivocate to well-meaning acquaintances who wonder what my plans are for the next year and when I am going to get a real job, anyway, than I do to tell the outright truth, consequences be damned. On these occasions the niggling voice that lives in my head says, ¢You think the Americans are bad, just imagine what the West Africans would say if they knew.¢When I left Mali in May of 2003 after four months living and studying there, my scheduled flight home had me stopping in Paris. And since I was already on the eastern side of the Atlantic, I thought, ¢Why mess with a good thing?¢ and decided to extend the second half of my plane ticket, get off the plane at Charles de Gaulle, and spend the rest of the summer backpacking around France, volunteering on organic farms. ¢Guess what?¢ I said to Sissi and Boi, my host sister and brother. ¢I¢m going to extend the second half of my plane ticket, get off the plane at Charles de Gaulle, and spend the rest of the summer backpacking around France, volunteering on organic farms!¢ Sissi raised her eyebrows and murmured noncommittally. I fared little better with Boi, from whom came an incredulous snort, followed by , ¢Quoi, pour etre une bonne?,¢ a phrase which here means ¢ roughly ¢ , ¢What, to be a dirty servant wench?¢ It was to them utterly inconceivable that I would voluntarily subject myself to precisely the kind of manual agricultural work from which they and their fellow citizens so desperately wanted to free themselves. This was not the first time, either, that the cultural divide between the American students and our Malian friends had been thrust into sharp relief. Lamine, the host brother of my friend and fellow student Artemis, was in his twenties, gregarious and bighearted and effusive. I went through a phase there where I was really excited by traditional Bambara riddles, and I went around trying to collect as many as I could. Lamine was happy to oblige. So one day he told me the following riddle:***A sign by a bridge says that if more than one person crosses the bridge at once the bridge will break. A big man crosses alone. The bridge holds. A small man crosses alone. The bridge breaks. What happened? ***It seemed to me to be very obviously a trick question, something along the lines of the one about two mothers and two daughters who are only three people total. I spent a week puzzling it over, trying to locate the loophole. I wouldn¢t let him tell me the answer, and I finally returned to him with the dubious solution that the small man ¢ ¢le petit bonhomme,¢ as Lamine put it, was actually a child in utero, and that therefore when his mother crossed by herself, there were actually two people crossing, etc. etc. It was a crappy answer and I knew it, but it was something, at least. ¢That¢s not it,¢ he said. ¢Ok then,¢ I said, giving in, ¢what¢s your answer?¢ ¢It¢s a lie,¢ he said. ¢It¢s a lie?¢ I said. ¢What kind of an answer is that?¢ ¢It¢s a lie,¢ he repeated. ¢It¢s impossible. It¢s not true. It can¢t happen that way.¢ I was flabbergasted. His explanation, however, was telling. ¢It¢s to see if you listen well,¢ he said. ¢If you pay attention, and you put it all together just so, you can see that it could not happen that way. If you are smart you will see this.¢This was unacceptable, I thought. This was totally out of control. Cultural relativity my ass. I was going insane. ¢Well,¢ I exploded, ¢my answer¢s better.¢¢Hmm,¢ he said doubtfully. ¢Maybe.¢ Lamine told me once he thinks different languages are the cause of most miscommunications on Earth. ¢When will we realize we are all the same?¢ I pictured Babel in my head, looking a little like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and wondered if the Koran¢s got a Babel story in it, or if Lamine¢s read the Bible to know it. I didn¢t ask. He tends to talk in platitudes anyway, and I didn¢t want to trigger an episode. I couldn¢t resist asking, though, whether that might be a dangerous conclusion: better not to assume, after all, that just because you and someone else speak the same language, that you actually understand each other. ¢Well,¢ he said. ¢That is true. But it is still not the same as if I go somewhere and say ¢Hello,¢ and in that village it is an insult. That is a whole separate problem.¢ He has a point.And he loved meeting American students, but they stymied him sometimes. He told me about one girl, who¢d been there several years earlier: ¢If I would do this,¢¢ he said, reaching and taking a Kleenex from the travel pack in my hands, ¢she would say, ¢Did you say please? Did you say please?¢ And I would say, ¢Nina, here in Mali, we are very close, we do not have to ask like that, we understand each other well, we can just take.¢ And she says, ¢WELL, with ME you have to say please.¢ And I said, 'Nina you should not come here and try to change my culture'¢¦She liked to yell a lot. She was loud. She would say, ¢In my family at home I am like a lion. I am the only child and my father listens to what I say and my mother is afraid to contradict me. I am the lion.¢ And I say to her, ¢Nina, ok, in this country I am the hunter.¢¢ And then, reflectively: ¢She did not like me very much.¢Lamine also told me he was going to be President someday, that it was his calling. Because he was born on a Tuesday. (Therefore.) But that was a big secret, he said, because if someone wanted to harm him, that person would only have to wait until the same day of the week as Lamine¢s birthday before doing magic against him. I suggested that if the sorcerer were all *that* determined, he could just repeat his magic every day for a week, being bound after all to eventually hit on the right day. Lamine laughed. ¢He will be very tired if he does that!¢Once, an albino walked by where Lamine and I and our (American) friend Kristin were sitting and talking (albinos being fairly more common in the Malian genetic pool), and he asked what people in the States thought of albinos. Kristin and I conferred: neither of us could remember ever having actually seen one, though perhaps they¢re just less conspicuous in a predominantly white country. He told us Malians sometimes think albinos have magical powers, and that mothers keep their albino kids at home during elections. ¢Why?¢ I asked. ¢Oh,¢ he said, ¢because if you kill an albino that¢ll help you win the election. The imams say so. So each candidate tries to kill more of them.¢ Kristin, never very subtle in her amazement, stared at him open-mouthed. I wish I had thought to ask Lamine whether he planned to kill albinos during his own presidential campaign. I¢m sure he¢d have said no, though. As Artemis says, ¢he¢s a spiritual brotha.¢ So it was to no small degree that American culture had by several weeks into my time there begun to seem increasingly, acid-trippingly dreamlike. I had left blizzards behind, and now the force of the heat every day was full and solid in a way I thought belonged only to clich©s and brick walls. I woke up some mornings to sheep being slaughtered outside my bedroom window. I dodged cattle stampedes in the street on the way to school. I was everlastingly trailed by small children shrieking ¢White girl! Hey, white girl!¢ My host cousin gave me a live chicken as a gift, which I then had to take on a four hour bus ride, swinging my knees strategically every time the bus went around a corner so as not to get pecked in the ankles. I bathed in a bucket. My hair began to dred itself. The sky white and hazy, the earth red and parched, the skin brown and brilliant, and everywhere mangos, mangos, mangos. Home itself seemed improbable at best; explaining it in a rich cultural context to those who had never been there, impossible.And one day Artemis got a letter from her mother, and Lamine asked what the news from home was. And somehow explaining it ¢ even the thought of explaining it ¢ was little more than an exercise in absurdity. Her mother, you see, was living with her girlfriend in a yurt in the California wilderness, off the grid. A partial checklist, then, of items which would have to have been communicated, somehow, in order for any of the rest of it to make sense:Item: LesbianismItem: YurtsItem: Living off the gridItem: Wanting to live off the gridItem: Even though you can afford not toItem: HippiesItem: The entirety of American counterculture, for that matterBalance all this out with the image of America held by most of the Malians with whom we came in contact - ¢I know what America¢s like! I¢ve seen Fresh Prince of Bel Air!¢ - Really, how do you begin to explain, to someone for whom ¢back to the land¢ is the approximate equivalent of ¢are you an asshat, or what?¢ Someone for whom the idea of going purposely off the grid is evidence of insanity? How do you even begin? ¢Well, see, a ¢yurt¢ is a big round portable¢¦tent, used by nomads in Mongolia, and my mother and her¢¦ ¢friend¢ want to go ¢off the grid¢ which means live unconnected to the main electric and water lines¢¦.no, no¢¦on purpose¢¦no, all of it on purpose¢¦¢I raised my eyebrows and murmured, ¢A yurt, Lamine, is a tent¢¦¢ And then Artemis caught my eye and we lost it. We gurgled and gasped and clutched our sides and wept, in a manner verging on hysteria. We weren¢t laughing because we didn¢t think he¢d be able to understand; we were laughing because somehow, suddenly, the sum and context of our culture, as seen from a distance, had become eminently surreal. We might as well have been trying to give him a map through a Dali painting, or the exact dimensions of an Escher staircase. And Lamine looked at us like he was thinking, They have finally gone off the deep end, while I choked, Yurt, and Artemis moaned, Stop, stop, you have to stop, it hurts.(Incidentally, all anyone had to do after that, ever, was intone in a deep voice, ¢A yurt, Lamine, is a tent¢¦¢ and I¢d be convulsing on the floor again, ineffectually wiping away tears. Well. Maybe you had to be there.)But my point is that there is no culture that is internally consistent. Everything is, on some level, (and I say this with great affection), equally as absurd as it is meaningful. Including but not limited to thru-hiking. But it¢s often only from a distance or in a changed context that we¢re able to see the absurdity of everything we find implicitly sensible, as well as the sense in everything we find most absurd. So I think of Lamine, and of Sissi and Boi and all the others, and I wonder what they would think of what I am planning to do. It makes me wonder what *I * think of it, critically speaking."Well, see, I want to carry a big heavy bag and walk, um, um, thirty...four hundred? kilometers, in the rain and everything, and...no, noone's paying me...actually it will cost me money...no, no, on purpose... no, all of it on purpose..." And I think of green spaces and how we engage with them and how we theorize them, of what they mean in changed contexts, of cultural transference and the wild blue yonder, of the social and historical context through which we have come to identify and define the Natural, of landscape and identity. But as this journal entry is already poised to test the stamina and scroll-down skills of even the best and bravest, the rest of the thinking will have to come another day.