My Nextdoor Neighbor is a Goat
Peter Forberg
My name is Malick Kasse. At least, that’s the name assigned to me by my host mother, Maman. She has claimed me as her son, so I have become Malick Kasse. Our host father was given Nick, who is now Papa Kasse, named after his new father (who we call Papa). Like papa like papa.
For the next two months, I’ll be living on the 5th floor terrace of a tall, narrow apartment building. When the windows are open, red-breasted songbirds perch on my bookshelf until I move too suddenly, sending them back into the heat of the winter sun. I share the terrace with a long clothesline where maids will come to do the family’s laundry, but I share the Dakar roofs with a number of neighbors. Large satellite dishes and radio towers scour the sky, birds of prey and various gulls circle the streets below, and just outside my window a goat watches his owner wash clothes from a rooftop pen, baaing when the spirit moves him. Two smaller goats keep their distance. Today, I called to him in French, but he did not respond. Tomorrow, I will try Wolof.
Nick lives in a smaller room on the second floor. He didn’t lose the coin toss, he lost the “I can speak French” toss. Papa has strong English, as does his daughter, but Maman only speaks French. Their home is lovely, which makes sense because it houses lovely people. They are immediately welcoming, communal, and kind. At every turn, our compliments are questioned: “You really like the house?”, “You think this is beautiful?”, “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it.” But it’s all true, and more than that, it’s inexpressible how true it is. There are no words—in Wolof, French, English, or elsewhere—that demonstrate the gratitude and appreciation we have for a home that is gorgeous, food that is delicious, and hosts who are so kind. Our only complaint is how paranoid we are of offending them.
To delay offense, we gave them a lot of gifts. Notebooks, mint chocolates, a snow globe, and, best of all, a large, gaudy blanket decorated with a montage of Obama’s startling patriotism, his proud, stern expression looking far into the distance. Perhaps he knew where he would one day end up. Maman and Papa flipped, but I’m not sure if it will ever be hung up as promised. If it is, I’ll make sure to send pictures.
On the subject of food, I’m dying. When we came home for dinner, Maman said that she would prepare us something small. I ate more than I would on Thanksgiving. I ate until I was full, and then I ate three times that. The plan is to abandon clothes in Senegal when I leave. If I keep eating like this, I might have no other choice.
It’s hard to separate the beauty of the city from its immense poverty. While there are homes like ours, populated with hard-working laborers, even the most well-off do a disproportionate amount of work for the amount of money that they receive. We can glamorize their trades and rationalize their quality of life in comparison to the less fortunate, but the fact remains that life is hard. And for the people on the street, the children running barefoot from car to car, skinny as skeletons, it is difficult to turn a blind eye. The presidential palace is buffered by slums on either side, and tourists walk through tin huts to go to luxurious beaches. Seaside slums are lobbed effortlessly down cliffside by French construction companies, tossing debris into the ocean and turning homeless camps into collections of dust and garbage. The hotels of wealthy tourists, the embassies of foreign governments, and the homes of Dakar’s few ultra-rich and politicians share sidewalks with mounds of trash, share beaches with destitute peddlers, and share the sky with plumes of smog and dust. Wealth cannot change the air one breathes: it is dust all the same. In Dakar, a society built on sharing must also share pain.
Today we toured the city with a guide whose bitterness towards colonization was integrated into his explanations of history. Sixty years after independence, the French influence makes citizens furious, yet the apathy for a foreign government that takes so much and gives so little is strong: but what is Dakar without France? According to him, colonization is alive and well, just with a new skin.
On a lighter note, we went to the beach. The taxi ride back was a mixture of terror and amusement. When we weren’t going 90kmh, we were breaking 90 laws a minute. Sidewalks became shortcuts, one-ways all-ways, and medians mere annoyances, still nothing to prevent our driver from crossing a 6 lane road like he was playing Frogger. Taxis here are a staple of transit for citizens, and for tourists a necessity. If I could take anything from the Senegalese traffic system, it’d be the polite honks directed at drivers in the left lane going too slow. In America, we’d never allow for polite honks.
Here’s where photos of my room will go. The sun was so bright that I couldn’t even look out the viewfinder. A bientot.
