Girls you better – watch out! Some guys are only – about! That thang, that thang…
Hi friends,
It is increasingly difficult for me to find time to write things here, but I am proud of myself for having set aside this night to do just that. Life here contains more things in it than it ever has before. I’m noticing with increasing alarm that time for reflection is becoming an extreme luxury. Without time to actually narrate the events of life to myself in that distinct internal voice which perpetually translates for each of us even the most bizarre realities into something we can readily speak about, I begin to feel like a sort of empty vessel, frantically gathering fragmented bits of experience, and storing them away somewhere for much later, hoping very much that instead of just fading, they’ll undergo some magical synthesis, crystallizing forever into some amazing master structure. I can’t have total faith in that though – I’m still afraid that mostly we forget way too much for it to really work that way.
One of the most difficult things to get used to here is walking to places. I always use walking as almost a kind of sleep – I can think about things in exactly the way I want to when I’m putting one foot in front of the other, with the perfect mixture of process & repetition. Ideas will come and go without me ever making any sort of effort, like dreams, and when I’m done, I feel like I’ve worked through some sort of huge problem, even though I can rarely say what it is. It’s easier for me to walk than to not walk.
Here, however, I’ve had to say some serious farewells to all of that. The moment I set foot outside is the very moment when whatever private world I’ve painstakingly constructed for myself while brushing my teeth gets totally skullfucked. And all of this has to do with one simple fact: people here want to be BEFRIEND THE SHIT out of you.
I’m pretty sure the average Tanzanian spends 40% of their waking hours exchanging greetings. I have heard that among the Maasai, an exchange of how are yous can take upwards of 15-20 minutes. I’ve been told also that failing to greet your neighbors can sometimes be seen as an active signal of extreme enmity, and with the sort of population density we’re talking about here, there are a damn good lot of neighbors to not be extreme enemies with. Nearly 3 weeks into my stay, I am still hearing forms of greeting I’ve never before encountered. In one of the more bizarre linguistic developments I’ve ever seen, Kiswahili even features a special corrupted greeting form for white foreigners who are assumed not to comprehend what the “actual” system of greetings is; it’s sort of like if instead of teaching babies how to actually talk, we were like, “All right, fine – ‘thbpbbptt!!’ isn’t QUITE a word, but since it’s as close as you’ll ever come to one, we’ll just go ahead and stick it in the OED anyway…you dumb FUCKING baby!”
But yeah. My walk to work is exactly 7 minutes if I ignore everyone & offend people, which I’ve only done once for purely experimental purposes. If I do it normally, it can take well over half an hour – note that this is before 7 in the morning. I see the same 15 people about 4 times a day, and every time, it’s as if we haven’t seen each other in like a week. Once you get used to it, it’s pretty nice, but at least once daily, my craving for even one empty street to walk down in oblivious, introverted silence becomes an overwhelming physical lust.
My friend K. has been introducing me to all the neighborhood “thieves”, so I can walk around at night without fear of trouble. One of the thieves was burning a giant pile of fish on a huge bonfire, & had a bunch of bones through his face! The bones said to me, “I am not impressed by your pitiful attempts at assimilation”. Still, though, you know a place has got hospitality down to an artform when part of the agenda involves formal introductions to the people who will in future be trying to mug you.
The part of life here that has managed to coalesce into some semblance of routine has proven quite difficult. I have to cook all of my meals, which is made a significant strategic challenge by the fact that when the temperature outside reaches a certain level – which it does every day – the city institutes a policy of rolling blackouts, announced ominously on neighborhood-wide loudspeakers. This can mean no electricity for anywhere from 1-6 hours a day, usually at precisely dinnertime. The idea behind these seems to be that semi-predictable scheduled blackouts are slightly preferable to completely unexpected ones due to an overtaxed power grid. I love power outages, but when I haven’t eaten for 12 hours, my love for them swiftly transforms into more of a sexless marriage where we stare at each other icily across a long dining table, in the dark, scornfully gnawing on raw ziti. Since I have to be in bed as early as 10 pm to be halfway functional in this heat, over half of my meager spare time is spent finding, preparing, and eating food. I have learned to eat like a soldier, wolfing down gigantic bowls of pasta in under 10 minutes. Those of you who have ever had the misfortune of eating a meal with me know that this constitutes a pretty comprehensive self-transformation. This is not because I tried to learn this, but because my impatience with the cooking process causes me to eat about once a day, and by the time I finally scrape something together, my hunger has generally acquired an unmistakable spiritual dimension.
Other simple amenities, like hot water, are nonexistent. Only in the rich white foreigner ward of a third world city is it possible to live in a house with wireless Internet & no hot water.
Last weekend, I attempted to go grocery shopping African-style, bypassing the two local supermarkets, which have been putting me off a bit lately with their $8 boxes of imported Frosted Mini-Wheats already made spongy by tropical humidity, sweaty grey wads of “Irish cheddar”, trays of pre-cooked goat sausage invariably defrosted from the last blackout, and tiny tiny little breast-implant-like sacs of milk labeled LAC-NOR. This involved going to a place called Kariakoo Market, which is widely understood by all to be Dar es Salaam’s most charming inferno. My American boss has lived in Tanzania for 2 years, and went to Kariakoo Market once during his 2nd week here. He has never gone back.
Kariakoo is a place which vaguely resembles Hieronymous Bosch’s famous tryptich of the afterlife, except with slightly less trepanation. The area is so clearly beyond hope for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing that I am pretty sure it actually has an event horizon. Once you enter the perimeter of Kariakoo, your best bet is to discover that it is a wormhole which, after an initial period of identity-shattering disorientation, will eject you unharmed into a totally different quadrant of the universe. Because if it’s NOT that, tentative outsider observations hint that a distinctly horrible demise is the only possible alternative.
Getting to Kariakoo involves 2 1-hour dala-dala rides. Zooming over crater-sized potholes at 50 miles per hour with the feel-good Swahili hip-hop hits of the summer blaring from crackly beer-can radio speakers (one song is about being pressured to have sex, another is about not worrying!); Maasai warriors accidentally trying to sit on the top of your head; women breastfeeding two children at once while hanging out the open door; sweat dripping down into your eyes and across your lips, so fresh it’s like pure mineral water; huge clouds of road-dust obscuring everything in sight… By the time you’ve arrived, all the squealing, desperate, terrible, triumphant, murderous fermentation of intelligent biological existence has clogged every thought-channel. One time long ago, we looked out at an empty earth, and somehow carved everything we have from that cruel mystery. These deadly tin cans careening through slums blasting G-Unit translated into African languages are comically chaotic, but they are no joke; people weren’t fucking around when they built this infrastructure, this entire world, and there is only this, and then the void. To quote a very frequent exclamation from one of my regular companions here, “This is how we livin, men!”
Kariakoo itself is more of the same sort of dense desperation, except stationary. The market was once famous for being a center of the American slave trade (one of the few not in West Africa). Most of the produce is located inside a gigantic warehouse made of 90% rags and 10% tin. It is absolutely sweltering, and every square inch of ground is covered in commerce. There are potatoes, chillies, dozens of varieties of rice, raw fish baking in the hot sun, big tender mango pods with monstrous flies alighting on them, licking the blushing rind with their fat tongues, Chinese men with huge machetes running everywhere and shouting in Hindi, giant trolleys with tubs of fresh milk blundering precariously down pitch-black, cattle-clogged alleys, vast mountains of pulses from all over India, little dwarf-like vendors hawking eggs with the chickens that produced them still milling around, the shells crusted with what looks like bird excrement, exhausted-looking girls hacking at cassava root and frying out the cyanide on open flames, extremely muscular men who must nevertheless be in their 70s scrambling to stop avalanches of bell peppers…
After totally losing my shit for like an hour, I got it together enough to haggle my way through a few extremely basic transactions. Somehow I found myself with a pound of rice, a bag with 24 eggs, and a 12-pound sack of potatoes & onions. Quickly I realized that I had to figure out a way to carry all this back out & get it through the two dala-dala rides back home. In retrospect, the entire trip was so ill-conceived it almost qualified as Dadaist performance art. The good news is, whatever horrors you’re imagining didn’t happen. The bad news is, I don’t know how to cook 30 potatoes.
So that’s how Africans get their groceries, and that’s how basic facts of life in Africa cause me to meditate on the nature of existence! Whee! Thank you!
The next few things – Meeting the Maasai people. The mystery of the Russian Cultural Centre. Tanzanite mining in Arusha. Rastas & migrant laborers. Tanzanian girls are weird & local gender relations are squirm-worthy. Life in the Swahili slum. Questioning the non-profit sector (a.k.a. what the hell I’m actually working on here). The bizarre mystery of the HIV pandemic. The perils of idealist humanism.
What is your job?