Mali

Trying to write is trying to create a symmetry of thoughts, actions and emotions, but Africa turned my brain to mush. There is no symmetry in what I feel, and there is nothing but chaos in the shape of the baobab tree unless it is viewed from a distance. It is a month and thousands of miles later, but still I have no distance. How many rewrites, which bucket of mush is this?

Stephan Eicher’s manager, Martin Hesse, had invited me on the spur of the moment to join him, Stephan, Daniel Affolter and many others in Mali. I rushed my malaria shots and left. Martin wanted me to write of the trip; I was to be his scribe, he said. This is that document. He hasn’t asked for it.

I was alone for the first two days of my first trip to Africa. I knew that my French needed improving – a thing made clear when taxi families mobbed me at the airport, all jabbering that the other families would cheat me – but I didn't know the other two things that I know now: I am rich, and I am ugly. Looking back, no other conclusion is possible against such a background of poverty and beauty.

I flew to Senegal and landed in Dakar, staying for one night in a ramshackle hotel that my driver found after a great deal of confusion about its name; there were two hotels with the same name, and if it one spoke it with “correct” French pronunciation, as I did, one would arrive at the wrong hotel, as I did. After examining my room I went down to the bar. An incredible band was playing. I ordered a vodka drink and was charged exorbitantly. No one else was drinking, even at the lesser price they would have paid. Like them, I couldn’t afford to drink there. I went up to my room, stood on the bed and swatted mosquitos on the ceiling.

The next morning I flew to Bamako, capital of Mali. We all walked out to the enormous jet and left our bags with the attendants below it. It was the first time I’ve been worried on takeoff. The two countries are next to each other, but Africa is enormous, and it was a very long flight, with chickens.

I was alone for a day and a half before the rest of the Eicher crew joined me. That time was filled with miscommunications about hotels and desperate phone calls to Switzerland from the lobby of one of them. At one point I was in a hotel room, thinking that I was speaking on the phone to the manager of the hotel where I thought I should be. Then I heard an echo: it was the manager speaking to me from his phone from the other side of the wall. Another night swatting mosquitos. Soon enough my friends arrived, and all was well. The chaos was transformed into controlled chaos as the Swiss, French, and German crew broke through the language barrier for the lone, monolingual American. My French is better now, but I don't think it would have helped much. (Much later I write, Yes, it would have.)

We drove a long way to Sangha, a central village of the Dogon People. From the roads between cities one sees all the different colors of dry dirt, topped with a sparse layer of thirsty green. The dwellings, mosques, and other buildings are gray; this is Mali in the dry season. I thought of a certain song, pretty and sad. But the people appear as a shock, like a horn section in a song so often does. They are wonderful, loud blasts of color, and the landscape is transformed from a simple lament to high drama. The people – they are so beautiful in their bright robes, the flowered wraps and the blinding white longshirts. Such clothes are not for pale people.

In the first days, the layer of dust on my white skin was like cinnamon on snow. Later, as I began to bronze, the dust became difficult to see, so in a few weeks I never thought of it. When I returned to my somewhat racist town, I was admired for having a skin color that approximates that of the poor African. Attaining status by adopting the skin tone of the lower class. (As I retype this on April 26th, 2000, I should point out that I totally avoid the sun, choosing to remain pale at all times. And I refuse to play the Blues.) (As I retype this again in May, 2007, I still avoid the sun, but I play the blues as often as possible.)

Everywhere the children asked for money. Demanded it, in fact. It's necessary, they said ("Il faut!"), and so it was. The adults were more subtle: they told stories, true or not. They said anything, as I would do. A Dogon village chief was more direct: if there is no rain, we must buy food. We need money. So we, their guests, bought things from them. I was rich. We gave any extra medicine or drug store items to the empty pharmacy. The Dogon have a hospital and it also is empty. Who will pay the doctors? No one. The children have distended bellies.

We visited. I watched women thresh grain and men do nothing. We called upon a soothsayer who divined the future through seeds on a tray, animal tracks and a complex mythology. I watched men and boys carve elaborate wooden doors illustrated with stories from the creation of the Dogon. I was happy because everything was strange and beautiful, satisfying a hunger bestowed upon me by a lifetime of reading science fiction, which I read to feed a hunger for the faraway, believing it to be strange and beautiful. Stephan filmed a video from the top of the Fallaise de Bandiagara, the two hundred-kilometer long chain of sandstone cliffs that the Dogon live on, under, and in the side of. Sheep were herded before and behind him as he lip-synced for the camera, birds wheeled above and the sun set below.

We stayed in a campment, a U of rooms around a dry courtyard situated on a rise above the onions fields. For several days I couldn't understand how to open the shutters to the night breeze, so I pulled my mattress outside and slept under a starfield of dimensional depth – I thought I could see that some stars were farther away than others, and I could see this without my glasses. It was an illusion of great clarity. I would wake up in the night, carefully walk to the edge of the fallaise, look up at the stars, then down to the distant and isolated campfires starring the vast, darkened plain. Hyena howls echoed ominously, just like in the movies.

One day I wondered aloud where our shower water came from. Daniel, whose art graces this site, pointed, and I saw an adolescent girl balancing one of the ubiquitous aluminum bowls on her head, walking up the hill toward us. They carried our water to us. I felt stupid, and vowed to learn French and to pay attention for the rest of my life.

One day it was like this:

On top of the fallaise, the highest point. The day's filming is finished and we are getting into the beat-to-shit Land Rovers for our return to the campment before complete darkness falls. A black cloud of Dogon children surround each car, loudly begging for anything. Ismael Lo (a famous Malian singer who had played the International Festival in my town six months before this trip) sits beside me, talking, touching them, giving whatever he can to them. It’s then that I see an image that I will carry burned into my synapses for the rest of my life because, somehow, it means everything:

In front of the car is a low wall of rock, perhaps a foot and a half high. On our side of it we are in shadow as the sun, on its other side, sets below the plain's horizon. This is the first element. The second is the sky, a sunset sky, gunmetal gray consuming a fading blue, shot through with brilliant flecks of neon red. Now I see the three women: backlit, they are only black silhouettes, three tall, thin forms in two dimensions without depth. They are perfectly still, and each is balancing with her hand a large bowl on her head. This is so beautiful that it's just not possible. I say they are perfectly still; they are frozen, everything is frozen. Time has stopped, and I don't hear the noise of the crowd. Then the women begin to move: first the one on the right, then the others. They flow across the violent sky, slow, sinuous and sensual. Time’s gate has opened and mundane reality comes flooding back with its press of children and il faut, il faut, il faut. I turn to my new friend, "Ismael, t'as vu ca?" but he is busy with his video recorder. Would that I had had one, so I could share this, burn it into another head.

These are the things that make one a better person. You have seen something beautiful and precious, you want to see it again, so you will always be looking. Daniel had told me that before, but I hadn’t paid enough attention.

Every day I watched the women. I do this; men are no mystery, neither me to you nor them to me. Sometimes I tell myself that I live in a constant state of desire for something, and women often seem – but only seem – to embody it. Work flows from this. Most of the young West African women have a poise, a carriage that comes from balancing several pounds of whatever on their heads. The walk is an unhurried sway that seems to radiate from more than one center of gravity, and the intricacies of shifting musculature, like the flowing of liquid tectonic plates, are revealed to the imaginative and stunned observer. If the observer is alone and wanting and awestruck by everything, he sees the full spectrum, from joie de vivre to squalor, all occupying the same square inch of flesh. He sees through the brightly patterned fabric that few white women and no man should wear and yes, it appears that within the way she carries herself that the back of the head is directly over the heels, and here is the rosetta, the paradigm, the penniless original for the parade of expensive runway models: the dignified walk, and the physical hunger.

We went among the villages of the Dogon with and without our guides. We filmed among them, we talked and joked with them, exchanged addresses, and from time to time some of us disappeared, swallowed into black clouds. I went into their homes with the German film crew, a young ex-couple who had been to Africa ten times without malaria shots, and after this trip contracted malaria together.

I didn't need to wear my glasses or use deodorant, and at night I slept under those layers of stars that I could clearly see as layers of stars. Meteors flared green every five minutes or so. (Once in Alaska I held a piece of a “falling star.” I thought about what I was holding, probably a hundred or a thousand billion year-old piece of unformed planet, and I got dizzy. If one thinks too far, vertigo can follow.)

After some weeks, back we went to Bamako through the large Niger port city of Segou, with a night passed in ancient Djenna near the enormous mosque. Many months before, Stephan and Martin had sent a postcard of this mosque, and now here it is, framed by another sunset. Before a Malian sunset I would often find myself frozen in my footsteps, staring at some commonplace thing as if for the first time, like the broken tractor in a shadowed alley, above it the black silhouettes of low buildings, and above that a mauve sky burned electric by the streaming rays of a low sun. In Djenna, Daniel squirted hearts of lighter fluid on the hard dirt floor of the bar, then lit them to the delight of our drivers. He put snuff in his nose and sneezed, then goaded the drivers into doing it. Sneezing and laughing, and burning hearts in hard dirt.

I will never have writer's block, I said back then, although I have. I seem to have forgotten that I cannot.

I was always looking around wherever we were, but Daniel was always looking at the dusty ground. Now and then he would stoop to pick up some piece of trash like a matchbook cover or a torn-off scrap of bright clothing. I began to do this also, and now I have a precious pile of colorful scraps. Rural Africa had no trash before cellophane and plastic; everything just rotted away. Daniel and I still put these scraps into our letters or gifts to each other.

In Segou I ordered a djimbe made for my nephew. We sat on a terrace drinking Cokes, and I could see into the next room as workers hollowed out a piece of log for his drum.

Later in Bamako we would all have our palms tattooed with henna. I was sad when mine faded a month later, very sad, but it is supposed to fade.

Now I have a song called The Onion Field. It took a long time to write; nothing for two years, then all of it very quickly.

The onion fields, the treasures and trash inside a hollow tree, a funeral blanket, a funeral dance with muskets and stilts, water carried on heads, a field of stars, an impossible elegance, and too often I still bitch about my life.