Truth
I promised last post I would get back to the topic of truth, and so I am. It’s such an elusive thing here in Senegal/Africa, and maybe everywhere, too. Sometimes, it seems the truth is so simple : clear values and moral codes about respecting one another and being part of a larger community make it easy to rave about the advantages of living with such clear social lines and how healthy a space Africa, in general, and Senegal specifically, offers children.
But it also is becoming clearer to me that one person’s medicine is another person’s poison and all that glitters here is not gold. The tendency is always to big up Africa culturally, to offer it as a model and cultural reference point – especially for African Americans – as a way to do things better. But lately, I have been realizing that this culture has its stifling mechanisms, its killing points.
I work with young people. LOVE my work because they are all, each and every one of them beautiful, bright, and teach me a whole lot about strength, courage, and ethics. The biggest moral lesson they are teaching me currently is about being truthful about who you are and what and where you have traveled to and through.
It was such a bugged out and crazy day… The kind where I find myself giving thanks for my experiences growing up as a teenager and all the performing a.k.a. acting out I put my parents through. At the time, I remember feeling as far away from my Senegalese mother and my Senegalese family as possible. It’s hard to believe how grateful I am now for that once upon a time distance. Hard to believe that yet again, as I detail to some wide eyed disbeliever my own crazy journey to now, they’re looking on like they’re taking mental notes.
At first, the kids never believe me. My current incarnation as Momma, wife, teacher, consultant places me on the status of almost an elder in their eyes : meaning I have done what I have supposed do, I have done what is expected of me. And though this happens to be true, it is hard for them to believe that this :
1. just happens to coincide with my own path to happiness
2. At one point I never would have thought this place and space to be imaginable, so rough were the bad times for me.
But eventually they do, and they begin to probe deeper, asking the squirmy questions that only young people know how to do. Case in point. My extra good friend, Tara Roberts, who I love because she ALWAYS keeps it real (I don’t think an Aquarian can do anything else without becoming physically ill) wrote a book that blatantly spoke to young women about sex in language that was their own. Some people who know me, and know of my beloved tendency to be uhm- shall we say off color? at certain moments may be laughing at the thought of me being squeamish, but the book’s publication caught me at a time in my life – or rather a space in my life where in Senegal, good girls not only didn’t, good women didn’t talk about it.
Be clear, Senegal, although 95% Muslim, is far from being the land of the prudes – far be from it. Anyone who knows any Senegalese woman knows she has plenty a secret trick to “keep her man” (I promise future posts will include juicy photos of the sabar dance and all the other juicy, juicy secrets). Rumour has it we are famous in Africa for it. However, straight sex talk for young girls runs the risk (or so the line goes) of promoting anything other than virginity before, obedient monogamy afterwards. I remember one of my female students sharing with me her father’s declaration that he chose his second wife because she was “pure”. Not information his daughter wanted or needed to know, certainly – and not something she wanted to have over her head, either.
What would happen if these young women read my selection? What would happen if their parents caught them reading it? Would they ban me from teaching? Okay, I figured, highly dramatic and unlikely, but the popularity I was enjoying as a role model, someone, parents of my mother’s generation looked to pointing with pride, saying, you see, can’t you be like her? Look what a good girl she is, look at how she came home, came back? Married and with children.
Yet all around me I could see the young people suffering. The ideal held out to them by a society was a high one indeed. One they wanted to meet. Whereas in the States the “rebellion” of the teenage years has produced a whole demographic of MTV shows and clothes aimed at maybe even encouraging this sorta rebellion (someone has to get paid), kids here largely are expected, rightfully so I think, to work hard, get an education, honor their family, and sacrifice themselves in the name of their family. The notion of individualism doesn’t exist, at least not the way we’re used to on the other side of the pond.
Now this has certainly produced some incredible, wonderful, young people. Young adults who value their communities, prize their relationships with elders and who (mostly) have a terrific sense of pride about who they are, where they come from, and what it all means. And while this is also true for the States, I realize, the notion of being free to be who you want to be (remember Marlo Thomas?) has never quite taken root.
But more and more I am running into young people who while having these values are also finding that life isn’t so neatly wrapped, these notions ill fitting, and, especially in the case of young women hearing the global dialogue with popular culture of sexuality as a measure of their value, remaining “pure” is a hard and unpopular alternative. I have met many young women, who having their innocence stolen way from them through molestation, abuse, and rape at shockingly early ages find it hard as hell to put their confidence in community, much less believe in personal redemption because of any more sacrifice to community. What more does society want, their angry but silent eyes flash. Blood?
You could call it the impact of westernization (somewhere I know some aged hippie is sighing at the very thought of the paradise of the Motherland becoming corrupted) but in the modern fantasy of westernization the West in its role of the big bad corruptor reduces Africa to passive reactor, a dead concept if ever there was one (a great example of this is Chris Abani’s Graceland). The global phenomenon of the generation gap widens as African children and teens (particularly those in urban areas), absorb the myriad of new languages swirling among their indigenous eco-systems. Each language bears culture tightly wrapped to their backs the way their mamas and siters once bore them.
Sometimes it is the language of new affluence as the money from overseas remittances literally enriches entire families and communities (I have lost count of the Ford Explorers in my seaside village community); other times the digital twinkling of cyber cafes and I-pods revolutionize intimacy, giving it an otherwise unknown personal space: me and my screen.
This new languge certainly includes hip hop and the bling bling appeal of its fantasy lifestyle. Here in the Mother, in the home of Goree Island and Saint Louis, key ports in the Translantic Slave Trade, niggas and bitches seem to be born every hour as TRACE TV blares the extremes of male and female relationships.
Wolof, Senegal’s most widely spoken language has made room for niggas. It occurs to many young men as the “perfect” word to encapsulate who they are, as they are no longer certain of who they’re supposed to be. Like the “niggas” across the way, some kinda homecoming exists in this word, some ownership of who you are, of the space you occupy in a world that would rather see you dead in a pirogue, half shark eaten, dehydrated, and ruined, than open its borders to you and the menace of your ambitions for economic justice and equality.
I have known and loved so many of these young brothas on both sides of the Atlantic… Have been a sista like so many of the young women seeking me out today. So why is it so hard for me to ‘fess up?
Today, faced with yet another young face, another question hidden in the eyes, I realized something.
Truth is unsteady. Particularly in Africa, it is volatile and shaky like the tiny tree we planted in the front yard that bravely fights the bitter howling wind blown off the sea every night. Truth can question status quo, inquiring into the double standard of allegiance to tradition and community all the while blatantly worshipping all things foreign including hair, skin tones, and inflated standards of living. Truth does not always mean decency and propriety, it is the realization that parents are people and not demi gods, that mistakes can be made and accounted for, that sometimes young people need and require apologies and ownership of error and wrongdoing by elders. Stifling young voices will always mean stifling myself.
The truth is, I have needed very badly to be here and fit in. I have needed so terribly to be accepted and seen as being part of this society, I never once noticed if I was not vigilant, propriety and acceptance could sneak in with the noose of sacrifice for community and social well being over the individual, destined for my neck, hijacking me coup style. After all, the very best dictators in Africa have used (and continue to use) tradition and community perversely to silence all sorts of dissent.
These young people, future leaders, want only to talk; have the space to question and know their lives as different. They want to know their communities as powerful, able to stand up to questioning and discussion; democracy no expensive import but organic homegrown nourised through discussion, feedback and support. It is always possible, they want to see, to turn and take the long and sticky paths back to our communities, and still be whole and functional. These young folks, I realized with a start, are doing the work the world was pouring millions of guilty dollars for Africa to acheive: they are in fact Africa’s development AND developers. They, with their questions and longings, are envisioning something bigger for Africa, and in this case Senegal, than I could ever have imagined or seen myself part of.
In their vision, my voice, my truth, offered a powerful example of no outdated either/or logic (African or American. Senegalese/toubab) but the very best of both worlds. The blend of worlds was not always easy and never, ever simpBut it is what I am, just like they know what they are. In such vision, I knew, I could truly be free.
Yet another reason to blog.
Leave a Reply