so here, and it is september.... where am I? ....i rode out of a village flooded with august rain that kept on falling even with the change in moon, pushed my already-worn bicycle through knee-high mud, across old puddles and new streams, into the purple morning sky of maybe-i-won't-rain-just-yet, peddled leg-exhausting revolutions down the lengthening road, used to be three hours but in this perpetual rain-pool it is more of a day-long affair... collapsed in a kedougou hammock and have since been car-hopping my way west, first to a peace corps training in Thies, and now to the strange modernity of a Dakar which seems to be so much more incredibly sexy and European than i remember... today i spent rinsing Village from my skin, letting salt heal my mosquito-bitten ankles and submerging myself in a different kind of water... the fact that Dakar kisses a shoulder of ocean is my only respite.... it somewhat balances out the strangeness of being tra! nsported from my familiar more-Guinean-than-Senegalese singing Pulaar corner of the world to This one, so distinctly different, slightly abrasive, and, well, i've never been a city-girl...this Senegal contains so many worlds... the flow between them is not always so soft...
but today on the beach watching men wash their sheep in the salt-water and drummers setting their djembes out to dry in the sun, i lay in a refreshing spot of anonymous sand, no one calling my name, i could think, reflect, breathe.... sometimes you have to go far far away before you can see where you really are...
this last month has been one of water.. i am remain wet here in sandy Dakar, i have been soaked to the core, if you wrung me out, ankles to chest, puddles would form at my toes i'm sure....in Kedougou the rain of the last thirty days alone has more than doubled last year's entire season... it is a gravity-river, a pitcher of the gods, a sky determined to fall... and it falls...sometimes for twenty-four straight hours... all is a deafening green, a drenched aLive... even among the tragedy i cant help but think it beautiful.... but everywhere...trees uprooted, village paths turned to mid-calf streams, seasonal rivers overflowed into fields.... the corn sags and the peanuts wilt a drowned yellow....huts melt into their own earthen puddle, walls of mud fall like sand castles worn by waves, families evacuate are taken in by other families are taken in by other families... and in this famine before the harvest everyone scraping togeth! er coins to buy rice, chickens to trade for peanuts, but then tuesday arrives and the rain doesnt remember it is market day and the current is too swift to go to luumo, a cow is swept away, a goat drowns, everyone stays put in lantern-lit domes, it is story-telling and tea-drinking; a putting off of everything for some ambiguous tomorrow, and the tragedy slides from everyone's hearts as easily as the water that perpetual drips from my hung-straw roof... i havent been to the well in weeks, my beignoirs just fill and fill again...
and life continues... our bean field has been picked seven times, the moon went dark and came bright again, I watched my best village friend get taken away in the night wrapped in hand-woven white bridal cloths, a veil over her eyes so she couldnt see the road...
...her wails still echo in my head the night it rained and she ran to the other end of the village to hide and a blood-red feast simmered on outdoor fires, flames and rain-steam and women in batiks and indigos offering handfuls of bush-chiles, fresh-picked okra, a luumo onion... the bride's last meal must be cooked by ALL of her mothers.... and i ran off with the nervous bride Neenegalle, weaving through an overgrown path at twilight, to a compound at the far end of the village where there was a radio and two guinean cassette tapes, and she turned the volume loud and told us to Dance Dance!!, refusing to talk about the bad-luck rain that threatened to keep falling, refusing to acknowledge that these moments were her last in the village, her last in the only world she has ever known, she danced hips churning, pulling us all out into the fading wet light, laughing intoxicated and crazed, the movements of a girl still free...
but the groom's brothers arrived to carry her away and we heard them from a distance, the village children sent out to find the hidden bride, running giddy, stirring puddles, parting corn-stalks and peeking in hut-doors, and Neenegalle breathed faster and continued to dance, and when they arrived at our door she gripped my hand and pulled me with her into the chaos, a swarm of little girls shrieking and rushing us towards the feast, little hands tugging on her skirts telling her 'you're leaving now you're leaving!'.... and no moon the darkness is still i can see there are people gathered along the compound fence i can't see who they are, it is a throng, a current, i am pulled under into a dark dark hut lit by a single candle so i can just see the shadows of the miracle of women stuffed inside, the walls are beaded with perspiration, it is a sweat-lodge, a sauna, i feel faint, the griot takes Neenegalle and strips her clothes, the silhouette of her body is smooth an! d young, a shadow of herself, she raises her arms into the blackness and is quietly bathed... and, surrounded by her mothers, sisters, grandmothers, she is slowly, ceremonially, wrapped in white, she moves as if in a trance, passive and quiet, the griot sings a wordless lullaby... and when the veil is placed over her head she sits back down beside me, i am mystified, captivated, completely unprepared for this silent white being to part her lips to the sky and let out a night-shattering body-stiffening otherworldly wail... the noise seems to come from somewhere larger, from the well-bottom, from the earth herself, no one moves, i am afraid to breathe, and then suddenly EvERyone starts to shriek....they are swaying, hot bodies leaning on hot bodies... i find myself swimming in an eerie ocean of chest and limbs, of sound... it was not a song, it was not crying as i've ever known it... it was an animal call, a howl-to-the-moon... the rawest most piercingly pure&! nbsp;cry from the belly of a world of women without choice... they are wives that must share their husbands, they are mothers forced to bear child after child after child until their bodies refuse and breasts shrivel up like prunes dried in the sun, daughters who will be taken....grandmothers who have seen it before a thousand times and will watch it pass again... i caught Neenegalle's mother in the candlelight, struggling to get up on her feet and collapsing instead to the floor in sobs... when everyone was preparing me for her marriage rites, not a word was said about this...
and then as swift as it began we are all outside and everyone is rushing, the village is far and they have to get her there before dawn or it is bad luck, and they have come on bikes, traditionally it is piggy-back but thirty kilometers so she is loaded instead onto the baggage rack of a blue one-speed, her feet can not touch the ground from the moment she leaves her home village to when she enters the hut of her husband, and off they go into the night the mud the blackness, everyone runs behind them singing and clapping, she can not see us all but oh she can hear... her mother stands to the side watching quietly, women surround her saying 'it was her time, you have to let go'... i find out later she has never been where her daughter is going, has met her husband only once before, knows only the back of a bicycle disappearing into darkness...
and she goes, and the village returns to its cycles, the fields flood and dry-out again, the air feels like harvest, everything ripening, bean-pods, the canteloupe bellies of women, the high sways of corn... young boys come after dark with flashlights knocking on my hut door, 'c'mon!' and we sneak off into someone's field, snap amber ears from ready stalks, run behind an abandoned hut, light a fire, grill the fresh delicious corn on slow coals, eat until our stomachs hurt, laugh at our mischieviousness...
and feeling the need to run around i've been going out to the cow-graze patch at sundown to play soccer with the men, they are hilariously competitive and unskilled... ages 7-35 are welcome, they all think i am crazy for wanting to play with boys.... and one wonder of a day i remembered my frisbee gathering dust in my hut, and i broke out the magic orange disc, and now "free-free" as they call it is threatening to steal this village's heart away from the soccer ball, these guys are made to throw, it is fantastic...
and the moon rounds, i have lost track of time so am shocked the afternoon that Neenegalle returns, a bride, appears like an apparition on the horizon, wind filling the spaces of her sheer amber gown, her wrists and ankles and waist and head ringed with scarlet-bead neclaces, her hair braided into one continuous spiral around her head and fixed with hundreds of the same beads... they dangle from her scalp like a chandelier... she is a princess, a goddess, an african bride...
i smile to know i will see the beginnings, middles, and ends of many things.....
and the rain falls, and we dance in puddles beneath the moon, and i wonder if there will be an autumn...
be free in your respective breezes
breathe with the wind
thanking you
linz