Peanut butter and the pursuit of perfection

In a homily during Fourth of July Mass, a priest said: “Don’t let the pursuit of the perfect become the enemy of the good.” I found myself thinking, “I do that all the time.” I think Father Brennan was talking about, you know, community service and mending relationships and being an all-around good person, but it’s a pretty widely applicable principle. A friend recently talked about how it’s difficult to motivate her colleagues, who are waiting for a perfect occasion to make changes, rather than seizing a good one. You know, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and all that jazz? Easier said than done.

I am often paralyzed because I’m afraid to make the wrong move. Nowhere is this more evident than with my writing; I’ll just write nothing and think, “If I did write, it would be perfect.” As long as I haven’t started, I haven’t disappointed. Ira Glass pegs me on this. He says that since there’s a disconnect between an aspiring writer’s taste and her craft, she’ll always be dissatisfied with her work. Unless she writes, and writes, and writes.

Anyway.

I’m trying to get over that hump and share some good stories with you.

In the meantime, let’s talk peanut butter. A Washington University researcher named Dr. Micah Manary runs a successful nutrition program called Project Peanut Butter in Africa and elsewhere. I may or may not be biased, having a couple friends who have worked under his direction, but it’s this week’s Riverfront Times cover story. Here’s a six-month-old The World Today interview with Zach Linneman, one of those friends I mentioned, that goes over the basics, and a link to a blog by Gregg Kennedy, who is working with Project Peanut Butter in Malawi.

These guys are not letting the pursuit of perfection get in the way of doing good. And they’re getting closer to perfection than those who pursuit it.

(And before you point out that Haiti is not in Africa, the ancestors of most black Haitians were brought as slaves to the island from West Africa. The Beninese claim that Emperor Jacques I of Haiti is from the Beninese coast, where a statue of him still stands. And Haitian-American Wyclef Jean traces his roots to Benin!)

Fuel truck disaster in Congo

See this story.

Walking down the street

In Benin, every music shop (“disco”) has its 15-inch speakers blasting, like a communal iPod. Perhaps just to assure you that its often-pirated wares actually work. Here’s an example of a tune I heard as I walked down the street in my neighborhood in Calavi.

Amikpon

Michel Akodjenou (called “Amikpon”) and the Folkorique Kpalogo de la Capitale, performing “Eyi yao gninton” and “Omidjale do nan.”

“Ami” means “oil” and “kpon” means “to watch.”

Blog format is changing

You thought it was all over. But like bad blockbuster franchises, it’s time for a sequel. Though I’m back on American soil, I’m keeping the blog alive. But I’ll put up much shorter posts, much more frequently, now that my Internet access is consistent. Look for daily updates that contextualize Africa from now on.

Today, I encourage you to check out the blog African Heroes: stories of brave badasses by freelance media consultant Emily Meehan, who is currently living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here’s an excerpt:

Africa comes in because the continent does not rely on teachers, professors, or politicians for its moral and psychic development. This is not a choice of Africans but more a condition of they suffer with when they aren’t relying on God to guide them, which is perhaps half the time. Therefore they are ghettoized in a global context, and must achieve only by doing, doing, doing (or stealing, stealing, stealing). On the other hand, Africans certainly take solace in God, and although the West sees fatalism as a ghetto sensibility, it gives them the strength to carry on doing, doing, doing. Even if the mentality of fatalism may debilitate African endeavors at various junctures, we can’t know how unsuccessful they might be without faith in a higher power — nihilism certainly doesn’t bode well and scientific pragmatism is not yet feasible for the masses in a context where education is impoverished.

Meehan’s currently also doing a series for Slate.com called the Humanitarian’s dilemma. It examines how (and whether) Westerners should help Africans.

(And root for Ghana tomorrow!)

I Moved

I moved.

From the clinic, where I slept on a hospital bed that makes a twin bunk seem the size of a soccer field. Conveniently, the bed came complete with one of those hanging gurney things for your broken leg. Like most hospital beds, mine was adjustable, but unfortunately, it never adjusted all the way flat. (I spent many a night fighting, and then pleading, with the implacable metal contraption before coming to this conclusion.) More unfortunately, the non-flat end faced toward the hanging thing and away from the ceiling fan. It was on wheels, but the room is too small to flip it and the bed too big to fit through the door. So, lying in bed, ruminating on how the bed made it into the room (like one of those ships in the glass bottles), I had to choose between all the blood rushing to my windblown and unobstructed head, or the sweat beading on the non-addled forehead that I just might hit on the plastic triangle dangling half a foot above.

But I had a ceiling fan, a dim fluorescent light, and a rusty showerhead that worked most of the time, and I was grateful. Most of my friends live in cement-block concessions, like decrepit apartment buildings turned on their side in a vast weedy sandbox, whose colorful names are their only distinguishable feature: Santa Barbara City, the Embassy of Harmony, Peace Between Neighbors. They share an outdoor latrine that necessitates the following response to a request to use the bathroom: “Are you going to pee or to poop?” If you pee, you squat over the hole in the shower. By shower, I mean unroofed cement prison cell with a hole in the floor. If you have to poop, you squat over a hole in the latrine, whose unique perfume makes a Porta Potty, in comparison, seem like a good place to spend a hot July afternoon.

Now I am renting a room in Cadjehoun, just outside of Haie Vive. “Haie Vive” may or may not mean “high living,” because no one exactly knows what language it’s in. The French, who pronounce it without the H, earn derisory smirks from the Beninese. Cadjehoun is a mangled version of “Let’s eat!” in Yoruba, a holdover from when Nigerians peopled the neighborhood known as the “quartier des riches.” It’s true that all the good restaurants — Indian, Thai, Chinese, French, Italian — are stacked up along Cadjehoun’s main thoroughfare. There are sidewalks lined with cascades of bourgainvilla too pink to be real. I’m surrounded by diplomats and merchants, some legit, some much less so, but all moneyed. Their clean black SUVs are driven by clean black drivers, and everyone smiles at me. I now have comforts I can’t even afford at home: along with air conditioning, a washing machine, and wireless Internet, I get a staff. I’m no longer sweaty, dusty and perpetually scratching at sand flea bites. All this for less than a third of a studio apartment in downtown Saint Louis.

So why do I feel so guilty?

Even though Calavi and Cadjehoun are only ten miles apart, there might as well be an ocean in between (well, there sort of is. It’s called “let’s ‘fix’ the road in Godomey for several years without actually accomplishing anything and, while we’re at it, send gendarmarie to block all possible detours for no apparent reason except to make drivers even angrier and even later than usual”). The average price of a filling dinner in Calavi is $1. In Cadjehoun, it’s $12 (plus tip). In Calavi, I ate blefoutu and akassa; in Cadjehoun, tandoori chicken (Indian), horatiki (Greek), arayess (Lebanese) and sausage pizza (well, you know). A friend of mine told me that, in his eyes, I’d already left Africa, and it feels true. Not that Cadjehoun is Manhattan; all the minor roads are still sand, the electricity still goes off from time to time, the inescapable cloak of dust hugs even the $1.2 million “presidential villas” underwritten by the Libyan government. But it is the single most expensive neighborhood in the nation.

So have I abandoned my duties somehow? Am I supposed to live in relative discomfort when I can live in luxury for a reasonable price? Did I snub my friends by moving if I still spend a couple nights per week out in my old ‘hood? Or am I rationalizing the move with unconvincing justifications?

I see a lot more white faces — and foreign faces in general — in Cadjehoun, and this doesn’t assuage my guilt. Am I self-segregating? Or simply tired of sharing a room with giant ants and malarial mosquitoes? (Plus, servants make me uncomfortable. I don’t even know if that word is politically correct anymore. Are Celestin and Zina servants? Or are they house employees? Or do we worry about political correctness in a country where a good salary is $4 per day?)

The most inconsequential decisions seem to take on cumbrous dimensions here. Everything has unwelcome implications. Choices become a matter of poverty and wealth, black and white. Or is it just me?

Three Stories

Readers, as a token of appreciation for your continued support, I wanted to give a blog entry that might come in handy. I imagine you, dear reader, at a cocktail party (law firm meet-and-greet, work lunch, interview, family birthday party) searching for something to say. Here’s a few options with plenty of details you can discard if your audience has an American sense of the passage of time.

“Hey, do you know…”

1. why people and lions aren’t friends?

Once upon a time, a man and a lion became friends. Each was a hunter of remarkable skill, and they shared their meals in a spirit of mutual respect. At one such meal, the man sighed, and his friend the lion asked what was wrong.

“Deception is the lot of man,” replied the hunter. “Our joys never last. From birth until death, we live in anxiety, while you animals, you don’t know how to laugh or to cry. You don’t know suffering.”

The lion was mystified, and he wondered what this “suffering” was. He insisted on knowing. The man refused several times, for he didn’t want to hurt his friend, but he finally gave in. He brought a bell and tied it around the lion’s thick furry neck. The lion was confused.

“Is this what you call suffering?” he asked. “The sound is beautiful; it’ll be fun. Besides, you don’t wear one of these.”

“Be patient! In life, many are the causes of suffering and often, they seem insignificant compared to their disastrous effects.”

Then the hunter and his friend the lion parted ways. The hunter promised to check on him in a week.

After just a few hours, the sonorous tinkling began to annoy the lion and, tired of the game, he tried to remove the bell. But his great paws, so deft at tearing chunks of steaming flesh from gazelles, weren’t well-adapted to remove a knot of string, and he only succeeded in pulling out tufts of matted fur. He shook his head violently, and was met only with the insolent clinking of the bell. He hit his head against a tree, but the rough bark scratched him. Angry, after falling into a troubled sleep, he awoke with a gnawing hunger. But his would-be prey, alerted by the din-din-din of the bell, vanished before he could get close. They seemed to be laughing at him from afar. As he got more and more desperate, even other predators refused to come near, alarmed by his wild-eyed grumbling, cuts and missing fur.

When the hunter returned, he found his friend the lion lying in a stupor, starved and miserable. The lion told the hunter that the bell had been cursed.

“In itself, it has no power,” the man explained. “But it causes emotions in you that you can’t master. At first, it was fun, and you, the king of the forest, you frolicked like a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. Then, annoyed, you tried to get rid of the tiresome toy, and you made the mistake of getting angry with the insignificant bell, in truth, with yourself, because you realized that this little nothing could bring you to your knees, you invincible lion with the red mane. Incapable of providing for your own needs, you were ashamed to see even the smallest animals taunting you.”

“Is that how you humans complicate life?”

“Yes, my friend the lion.”

The lion was not prepared to accept his own helplessness, and he felt betrayed and he couldn’t forgive the hunter. He roared and roared, and the hunter fled, and from then on, humans and lions have been enemies.

(Courtesy of Jean Pliya. Citations translated directly from the French, the rest adapted from his story “La Peine.”)

2. that there’s a debate over the hippopotamus?

The hippo has an unusual (kind of gross) habit. As a hippo defecates, she spins her tail around and around to spread her feces over a large territory, like a fertilizing machine. Western scientists contend that the hippo wants to show her potency to other hippos and protect her food source. But there might be another explanation. The habit might have originated from a conversation between the hippo and God.

God made the hippopotamus a land animal, designed to chomp down on bits of grass and underbrush, a sort of living lawnmower. But the African sun burns, and the hippo, lugging around up to 7,000 pounds of wobbly, wrinkly gray flesh, was hot. The hippo went to his Creator.

“God,” he said. “I know you made me a land animal. I want to fulfill Your purpose for me. But God, it’s hot out there in the steaming savannah, among those dry crackling grasses, and I’d love to go for a dip in the lake from time to time.”

God refused at first. But God is merciful, and after several supplications, God allowed the hippo to bathe. God reminded the hippo not to neglect his job: to keep the savannah well-trimmed.

At first, the hippo obeyed. But little by little, he got attached to the deep, cool water, and began spending every day submerged, surfacing only to breathe. The hippopotamus saw that the lake was full of life, and, reluctant to lug himself ashore and leave the smooth muck of the lake, he tentatively tasted a freshwater fish. It was delicious. He began eating only fish, leaving the grasses to grow unchecked and upsetting the delicate balance of the ecosystem.

God hoped the hippo would realize the error of his ways, but a hippo is not a human, and the hippo kept it up, blissfully draining the lake of its fish, while the grass towered higher and higher.

Finally God thundered down at the hippo.

“Hippo! I told you not to neglect your purpose, but you have allowed the grasses to grow to unforeseen heights. From now on, you may only eat grass. Most animals prefer to bury their feces. But you, hippo, when you relieve yourself, you will have to show me that there are no fish bones and that you have only eaten grass. You will be shamed every time you defecate, and all the other animals will know that you have disobeyed me.”

From then on, the hippo has contented himself to munch on grasses, though you will still see him submerged in the water after he defecates, hiding from the other, more obedient creatures of God.

(Adapted loosely from Adamou Akpana, whose maternal grandfather passed him the story in Djougou, Benin)

3. that the best job interview may be a dance competition?

Once upon the time, the king of Abomey needed a treasurer. He was a wise and benevolent ruler, and the kingdom had grown wealthy under his direction; he could no longer manage the coffers on his own. His advisers gave him a list of names of financially successful merchants, students who excelled in mathematics, well-connected nobles who could facilitate relations with nearby kingdoms. But the king was not satisfied. He thought long into the night, and the next morning, he gave an adviser a decree to be read throughout the land.

“Citizens of Abomey, the kingdom is in need of a treasurer to care for all the riches in the land. Payments and profits will be the responsibility of you alone. Citizens of Abomey, one and all, come to the castle in a fortnight to cast your lot for this position. No experience needed. All the king asks is that you dance for him. The best dancer will receive the position of the king’s accountant.”

The adviser was astonished. Why would the king, who could choose anyone he wanted, wish for a dancing accountant? But the people were used to the whims and caprices of their rulers, and the decree was met with great enthusiasm. Men, women and children set about practicing. They danced throughout the night, dreaming up new and ever more complicated steps to demonstrate their flexibility, agility and skill.

When the day came, every citizen of Abomey lined up outside the castle. The stooped old men, week-old babies and pregnant mothers who could not participate stood to the side to cheer on their families and hear the results of the contest.

One by one, an adviser called each participant forward. The citizen, garbed in his or her most beautiful pagne, trailed the adviser through the castle gate, some anxiously, others serenely, for many, the first time they had entered the castle. The adviser took the participant as far as the outer chamber, but the king had been very explicit: show each citizen to the outer chamber, point them in the direction of the great hall, but allow them to find their way alone.

So each citizen found herself at the head of a long and dazzling corridor. Buckets of gold jewelry, rubies as big as key limes, swords and shields lined the walls. Strewn carelessly on the floor were coins of bronze, tiny diamonds, silver scrapings. Most people couldn’t help themselves. They picked up a diamond and tucked it in the hem of their pagnes, or inserted a few small pieces of silver in the lining of their sandals. The king would never miss it! No wonder he needs an accountant! Look at these treasures just tossed on the ground! Then they hurried forward to dance for their sovereign.

But a strange thing happened. The kingdom of Abomey had a wide reputation for dancing, a long tradition that had produced the quickest, strongest most graceful dancers in all the world. But before the king, the dancers were distracted, anxious, conservative, and they didn’t show their best work. The king dismissed each citizen before he was even finished. Finally, one young woman came forward. She was as skillful as the rest, but she danced with a wild abandon unknown to the others. The king stopped her, too, before she had finished her performance. She turned, dejected.

“No,” the king of Abomey said. “More than mathematical ability or political connections, a treasurer must be honest and single-minded. You showed me that you were loyal to the kingdom of Abomey by your forthrightness. You did not succumb to the Corridor of Temptation. And you showed that you were single-minded in your commitment to your dance. You will be the new treasurer of the kingdom, should you accept.”

She did, of course.

(Traditional Yoruba tale, recounted by Bachard Liamidi. Some details added.)

In Honor of International Women’s Day

In 2004, Benin officially outlawed polygamy.

This doesn’t mean it doesn’t still go on, of course. Existing polygamous marriages are grandfathered in under Law No. 2002-07, and obviously, six years isn’t long enough to change a millennia-old practice.

I have at least two good friends who are the products of polygamous marriages (I may know more; it’s not something a cosmopolitan 20something Beninese will easily admit to a Westerner these days). They’ve shown me pictures of their proud papas surrounded by their nombreuse progeny: 28 children in one case, 22 in the other, kids ranging from two to thirty-two. Mothers nowhere to be seen. Sometimes these families are like an alternative-universe Brady Bunch. Though drama between co-épouses sometimes, understandably, could best Jerry Springer, it’s true that co-spouses are sometimes best friends, even sisters, who just happen to share one man’s bed.

The 2004 law that supposedly will put an end to such relationships is called the Code des personnes et de la famille (Code of Persons and the Family). This code, the CPF, also acknowledges formally for the first time that all people are equal before the law. (A Beninese friend pointed out, though, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The CPF, while explicitly declaring equality, codified certain inequalities. For example, children must take their father’s name by law; a man can get divorced and remarried in a single day while a woman must wait 300 days before taking a second husband; the dot, which I will explain later, is both legally binding and obligatory.) However, the fact that the CPF was passed at all is a step, and a remarkable one at that. My hope is that the CPF will prove to be one of those forward-looking laws that, in a generation or two, succeeds in changing cultural norms (like the repeal of Jim Crow laws). But for the moment, it hasn’t changed the daily reality for most women.

I see some positive signs: female military officers, female Rotary Club presidents, I’ve been told that nine of Benin’s 77 mayors are women. The country had a serious female presidential candidate before the United States; there is a female member of the Constitutional Court; twelve of the 28 students in my master’s program were women. The government has started a reasonably successful campaign to underwrite girls’ school fees.

But instead of being an equitable amelioration of the human condition, I see a line drawn in the sand, a demarcation between paysanne (peasant woman) and femme instruite (educated woman). Men discuss the marriage options available to them: is the wider skill set and higher earning power of a femme emancipée (emancipated woman) worth the trouble she’ll cause? (The two men with whom I’ve had this conversation decided yes, that they’d seek out educated women, so the times, they are a-changin’.) We have to ask ourselves frankly: what is the alternative to a “free woman”? Isn’t it a slave? Maybe not a slave in the physical sense (though such cases are not unheard of), but a slave to her husband’s life choices and her own ignorance.

A few weeks ago, I spoke about some of these issues with an American prosecutor and some Beninese classmates. The American told us that, at last year’s International Women’s Day, the president of the Republic of Benin opened his remarks by saying, by way of appreciation and admiration: “Wow, I’ve never seen so many beautiful women in the same room!” I cringed. “Ew! I can’t believe he said that, and on such an occasion, no less!” My Beninese friends looked at us expectedly. “Wait, what? What did he say?” They didn’t understand that to draw attention only to a woman’s physical appearance demeans her strength, her intelligence, her skills.

The objectification of women is so deeply embedded in Beninese society that its members don’t recognize its existence, much less its consequences. It’s true that to call a woman beautiful is complimentary, a pleasant thing to say and to hear. But it’s an objectification nonetheless, an implicit degradation, if not equally applied to all people. My Beninese classmates staunchly refused this characterization of what, to them, was a simply a kind word.

So in honor of International Women’s Day, I wanted to share with you a few of the disheartening things I’ve seen, heard and experienced about women in Benin. Be forewarned that I provide only anecdotal evidence. I’ll try not to editorialize too much and let the experiences speak for themselves.

1. I don’t know a single Beninese woman who wears her own hair. Nearly everyone I see wears a wig or plaited weave, giving them the choice to drastically change their hairstyle every week. I wanted to experience this for myself. So in January, I got my hair braided. Though it was nice afterwards, not to wash my hair for two weeks and to feel the wind on my scalp, the braiding process itself turned out to be a five-hour, $20, almost unbearably painful experience that I likely won’t repeat (the old adage “suffering for beauty” took on new meaning). But while I was in the salon, a man entered, presumably a friend of the stylist. He exclaimed over my hair. Then he said, “You have such long hair. It’s good for a woman to have long hair, so that a man can l’arracher (literally, tear her away) as she’s walking down the street and take her home with him to have his way with her.” The hairstylist giggled, so I did too.

2. I attended a Mass for the tenth anniversary of a devoutly Catholic couple I know. The Mass was in Fon, but upon realizing that some Bangladeshis were in attendance, the Beninese priest recapped his sermon in English. (Linguistically, this was fascinating. The French missionary spoke Fon, the Beninese pastor spoke English, and no one spoke French, the official language of the country.) In his sermon, the pastor congratulated the couple on ten years of marriage and admonished other couples to emulate this relationship based on mutual respect. Then he gave some practical advice: it’s not good for a man to beat his wife for no reason. A woman should dress up in the home and always “stay beautiful” or she shouldn’t be surprised that her husband seeks out other women.

3. A few weeks ago, a Beninese professor emphasized to us the importance of stage presence when defending our theses. Yes, the quality of the work is important, but it must also be presented clearly and convincingly (advice my fellow law students have heard thousands of times). As he wrapped up his lecture, he said: “By the end of your presentation, the members of the jury should be ready to give you their daughters in marriage.” Later, I tried to explain to some classmates why I found this shocking (of course, the practice of arranged marriage is shocking to a European-American these days, but it also presumes that the presenter is male, something almost equally disturbing when you’re talking to a class of 12 women and 16 men). They tried to reassure me: it’s just an expression. The professor’s daughters are already happily married anyway.

4. I’m taking Fon classes. My teacher is a wonderful guy from Zoungoudo, in the region of Pahou, just northwest of Cotonou. During one of my first lessons, he explained basic introductory questions: Nε a nò nyi? What’s your name? Fitε a no nō? Where do you live? Azotε a nò wa? What kind of work do you do? A δo asu/asī à? Are you married (Lit., do you have a wife or husband)? He cautioned us that a woman, married or not, will say yes. A man, married or not, will say no to signal that he is open to a new relationship. Since I’ve witnessed a good friend nonchalantly pick up a woman in a nightclub and bring her home to the house he shares with his wife (and heard of dozens of cases secondhand), I can only imagine this is true.

5. One of the most infuriating conversations I’ve had here started at a birthday party. I can’t even remember what the initial topic was, but a friend of mine off-handedly threw in: “But of course that’s how it is, because women only seek out things that are easy.” A murmur of general accord went around the table. I smacked the table with my palm, and six shocked heads turned toward me. Haltingly, since this was within a month of my arrival, I said, “Do you mean that all women look for easy things, while all men seek challenges?” My friend, a law student, nodded like this was old news. “For example,” he said. “Tell me why women don’t study science.”
“But women do study science,” I said.
“Sure, but not as many as men.”
“Don’t you think it might be because people like you tell them they shouldn’t?”
“No,” he said. “Women just look for things that are easy.”
“Are you saying science is hard?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And that men seek out things that are hard?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why don’t you study science?”
“Oh, it doesn’t interest me.”
I stopped arguing. I tried a new tactic, which was met with the same response I get every time I use myself as an example.
“But I am here. I am in Benin. It would have been much easier for me to stay in the United States, but I sought out a challenge.”
“Yes, but you are a yovo, a white woman, an American. You are different from Beninese women. They look for things that are easy.”
“But look at ‘Mary,’ your Beninese classmate. She is getting her master’s degree, same as you, which is hard.”
“Yes, but it’s only because she’s trying to be Western.”

6. There is a Beninese family with whom I visit frequently. The two children are 13 and 15 years old, a girl and boy, respectively. I’ve remarked that the boy is articulate, confident, active, but the girl seems to languish. She is a nice girl but tongue-tied, immature, reluctant to express opinions. This could be the product of their ages, or their individual personalities, but I don’t think so. I’ve noticed that when relatives come over, the girl is relegated to the kitchen. The relatives address the boy like most relatives do: “How is school? What do you think you might want to be when you grow up? What’s your favorite subject?” On the contrary, no one asks the girl to express her hopes and dreams. When the family eats together, the girl doesn’t speak and isn’t spoken to. Perhaps it’s a question of chicken-and-egg.

7. I have a good Beninese friend who is remarkably intelligent and who earns some of the highest grades in her class. Unfortunately, she is also strikingly beautiful and conducts herself with elegance. This has led to some uncomfortable situations for her. She accompanied a (married clergy) professor to a foreign city for research, and he entered her hotel room uninvited. Fortunately, when she refused his advances, he relented. But she introduced another professor at a public lecture a few months ago – where I was in attendance. She and this professor, a fifty-something married man, were seated behind a table onstage and my friend had some papers on her lap. The professor, in retrieving one of these papers, took the opportunity to feel up her skirt. He then sent her a wildly inappropriate text message. (A caveat: of course, of course, there are individuals who behave this way everywhere in the world, but here, they happen without even the potential protection of sexual harassment laws.) My friend believes she cannot do anything about these experiences, because any action she took would only serve to close the already limited job market to her.

8. Hodgepodge: a large minority of Beninese magistrates believe that spousal rape is not possible because a woman gives blanket sexual consent upon marriage. I have heard of a mother who brought her eight-year-old daughter to the hospital in Calavi to get a rape test solely to see if she could still market her as a virgin. A person I know who conducted field research told me a woman in a polygamous relationship was sad when her husband beat his other wife more because it showed his love for the co-spouse was stronger. A classmate from Ménontin told me that he knew a woman who paid the dowry for her husband’s second wife herself, just so that she would have someone to help her with the household chores. In northern Benin, the practice of levirat is widespread: a widow is made to marry her husband’s brother upon his death to keep the property in the man’s family. In a book I read about voudon, or voodoo, the predominant indigenous religion, a woman who cooks a meal for a man other than her husband will have her head shaved to show her shame.

9. Here, a marriage cannot be legally sanctioned without the payment of the dot, the dowry. (Customarily, there must be parental permission; in my experience, it’s extremely rare that a couple will marry against the wishes of their relatives). The legal dot is 10,000 FCFA or about $22, but families with means pay much more. A woman receives jewelry, pagnes (cloth) and shoes, her family receives money, and most importantly, her paternal uncles receive bottles of alcohol. In wedding albums I’ve seen, the woman is wrapped in cloth and guided to her husband’s family’s home, where she is unwrapped. A few months ago, a Beninese professor asked the women in my class if they really wanted equality. He said, “And how many of you would marry without the dot?” They all shrieked with laughter; the idea was simply absurd. At first, I was judgmental. But the value of the dot here is about the value of an engagement ring, which most American women wouldn’t give up; the portion that goes to the woman’s family may equal the cost of the rehearsal dinner (customarily paid by the groom’s family chez nous). Perhaps it would make more sense to give women sensible things like clothing, and their family a useful thing like money, rather than diamonds and a fancy meal.

Though I didn’t know exactly what I would find here, I expected to be shocked by anti-feminist practices. I didn’t expect learn to understand polygamy or the dot, why Christian women aren’t free to date Muslim men and vice versa, why infidelity is encouraged, or why a family’s word can annul a marriage. I expected to teach but not to learn, and I was wrong. American women may be the freest in the world, but we ought to know how we got to be that way and what other choices are out there.

In the United States, we live with veritable gender equality. Has something been lost in the process? Should women choose to do the things men do? Do they lose something of their femininity in doing so? In ignoring the differences between men and women – because we do this in the U.S. – do we devalue both sexes? Shouldn’t a politician be able to acknowledge female beauty? Does equality mean sameness? Some of the things I’ve witnessed here make the current fights we have in the U.S. (though not necessarily those of our suffragette ancestors) seem ridiculous. We owe it to other women to stop quibbling about misunderstandings with well-intentioned men and use our equal footing to help our tatas (sisters) catch up.

These are hard, perhaps politically inappropriate ideas for a feminist like me. But I just finished a collection of letters penned by the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke (a book given to me by the feminist English department at Nerinx Hall). Rilke says many remarkable things, but one of the most remarkable is the following passage:

The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday … someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.

Agree? Don’t agree?

Benin is stumbling along on the path to women’s empowerment just like we are, and we don’t know yet who will finish first.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Collective Thoughts

A few months ago, someone told me a story about his neighbor. This neighbor had installed solar panels on his home. My acquaintance told me he had long recognized the potential of solar energy capture in Benin, where sunshine is free and plentiful more than half of the year. But he hadn’t known, until he saw his neighbor’s house, that the technology had progressed to the point where it was now affordable to attach solar panels to single-family homes.

He approached his neighbor. They had a lively conversation about the changing world, the preservation of the environment, the price of the solar panels, the investment in efficient energy. My acquaintance asked his neighbor for the name and contact information of the company that had installed the solar panels. His neighbor apologized; he had left the business card at the office. They set another date to talk in greater detail and parted ways. When my acquaintance arrived at his neighbor’s house at the appointed time, the neighbor wasn’t there. Since that time, the neighbor has refused calls and visits from his friend. My acquaintance sighed; he said he knew that would happen.

“But why?” I interjected. He shrugged. The solar panels were his neighbor’s idea, not his own. His neighbor wants to be the only one with solar panels, for others to commend his for his good idea, to be revered for his idea. He wants to ensure he gets the respect he’s owed, my acquaintance said. Sharing the idea would dilute – if not the sunshine – the real reason he installed the panels: to be envied by his neighbors.

At the time, I took the story with a grain of salt. I figured this neighbor had some issues, and I left it at that.

Fast forward.

This week, my classmates and I turned in our 30-page partner papers on democratic transitions. My partner and I met, discussed our theme, did considerable research, agreed on an outline and split the work. He took the first half; I wrote the second. The day before the paper was due, we met to put the parts together. I scanned his half, he scanned mine, and we printed the paper. Later that evening, I read over his section again, in order to prepare myself for our eventual presentation. I realized, after this more careful reading, that it was plagiarized. Not one sentence, or one paragraph, but all fifteen pages, from the first word to the last. Not from the same source, mind you, but a copy-and-paste here and there to glue together the thoughts of various authors. Furthermore, if he had taken a paragraph from Author A, who cited Author B, he inserted a footnote for B (as A had done), but included no reference for A himself. I was chagrined – my name was on the paper! It was, at this point, due in eight hours. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to meet deadlines, but even I can’t rewrite fifteen pages in a foreign language without sources or a computer in a single night. I went to sleep in trepidation.

The next morning, fortunately, after providing some guidance on the subject, the professor gave us another month to correct our work and turn in a final version. I gently approached my partner. I pointed out various passages (tactfully avoiding saying “you plagiarized everything you wrote”). I told him that for me, in my culture, plagiarism is very, very serious, especially for a journalist or a lawyer, and I couldn’t turn in this work. I told him firmly that we would have to redo his section. He listened respectfully, and at the end, he told me that he didn’t quite understand what I meant, but he agreed that work could always be better and he was ready to help me make the work meet my standards.

Then I popped my head in the office of the administrator. “What are the rules about citations here?” I asked casually. “I don’t think I’m quite familiar with them.”

She looked at me, annoyed. “Didn’t you have a class on research methodology?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well, if you use someone’s words, you use a footnote. Didn’t your professor tell you that?”

“Yes, but it happens so often with my classmates that I didn’t know if I’d understood correctly.”

“Well,” she said. “Work can always be improved.”

So I’ve realized, finally, that “forgetting” a reference, or fifteen pages of references, is viewed like poor writing, misspellings, or incomplete research. It’s just a typo.

My program is counted among the most prestigious in West Africa. It’s where the current Beninese minister of justice earned his master’s degree. The current president of the Constitutional Court is one of our avid supporters. Its establishment was underwritten by UNESCO, and NGOs from Germany and Italy, and a Danish governmental commission, provide its operational budget and small living stipends for the students. More than 250 students apply every year; around thirty are accepted.

I’m not saying that every student plagiarizes. But I’ve been confronted with this problem in four of my five group projects; this 15 pages just happened to be the most flagrant violation of copyright.

So why does it happen?

When you combine a culture of collectivity, a culture that insists that young people their ideas are worthless, a culture colonized (which tells everyone that their ideas are worthless), with a lack of research training, an inability to use the Internet, a library that doesn’t loan books or permit photocopies; when you take my partner, who had two exams the Sunday before our paper was due for classes rescheduled from the year before, this is the recipe for plagiarism.

Back to the solar panels.

Now I can understand the neighbor. I sympathize with him. If everything you say or do or wear or eat or build becomes communal property, for others to criticize or praise or claim as their own, it’s no wonder he wanted to keep the solar panels to himself. It might be the only idea he’s ever gotten credit for.

If a culture agrees that ideas are collective and references superfluous, that’s fine. A lack of credit, though alien to our conception of research, is not a problem in itself. Rather, if you don’t cite, it becomes easy to hid the fact the you are contributing nothing, that you are moving sideways at best in a given field, that you are at best compiling (and badly) the ideas of others. It’s difficult to move forward. But when that’s all that’s expected, or even desired, of you, by professors who did the same thing throughout their education (and look how they turned out; they’re doing well enough for themselves), it’s hard for student or professor to even recognize the problem, much less recognize or welcome a new idea. That is, students are not taught to think. I always dismissed as empty that “critical thinking” prong in the high school and college graduation requirements. But now I know it’s possible to have classes, even at a high level, that pretend to impart real knowledge, without incorporating critical thinking skills. It’s like how I used to play school in the basement with a hand-me-down chalkboard.

Add families that get impatient when their 20-something-year-old isn’t supporting himself, a closed university faculty, a closed Bar, a closed diplomatic corps. The incredible amount of will, confidence, ambition, intelligence, diplomacy, faith, juggling it takes for a Beninese man to even graduate, much less find a job (less than 10 percent of Abomey-Calavi graduates work in a career related to their field of study) is incredible, even incomprehensible for Americans. And to become a leader in the community? To change the system that you just fought tooth and nail to beat? The chances are one in a million, and half that for women.

The saddest thing is that these students are very smart. I’ve had conversations with my plagiarizing friends about philosophy, the rule of law, international relations, sociology… These are the students who have pressured their families to let them stay in school, who scraped together their nickels to make photocopies of textbooks, who read Rousseau and Montesquieu in their spare time, who earned scholarships from foreign NGOs, who each landed one of the 30 coveted spots in this program, and who are studying not accounting or business, but human rights. They want things to change. If they were just given a slip of a chance, they could turn their communities right side up.

Scratch and Sniff

I used to park on West Pine, a good half-mile from the SLU law building in St. Louis, because I am too cheap to buy a garage spot. When I walked past Vandeventer, I was routinely bowled over by vivid memories of France. It took me a while to figure out that the catalyst was the smell of just-baked bread mixed with diesel fuel.

I can define Calavi by its city-street perfume too.

A miasma of red clay …

… and unrefined gasoline …

with hints of overripe fruit …

… and manioc root cooking fires.

But I don’t think there’s any spot at home whose scent replicates this bouquet.

Un Seul Mot

A few word-related musings, lest you think it’s possible for a linguist to ever stop thinking about language.

Most days, I find myself trying to fit unfamiliar phenomenon into my same old American schema. That is, I observe something and think: “This is weird! Why do people say it this way when I would say it another way? What shared goal do we have that our cultures (or climates or collective memories) make us express differently?”*

This works relatively well with individual words and phrases. For example, ça va? Has (which means, literally, “it goes?) is the pragmatic equivalent of how are you? But it’s often replaced with Comment tu vas?, Chez toi?, Tu es en train? Tu es en forme? and even just Comment? (literally, How do you go? From your perspective? You are in the middle [of doing something]? You are in good shape? And how?) This is a little confusing. I sometimes wonder why they don’t just stick to one thing. But grafted onto the English language, it makes perfect sense. We say not only how are you? but what’s up? What’s new? How’s it going? How’s life? How (are) you doin(g)? and even How is it [today]? with same goal: basic greetings. Thus, I can make sense of the varieties by fitting them into the linguistic patterns I already expect.

Mawu, il fait tellement chaud!**

But I have to abandon my schema to understand the relationship between different languages here. Diglossia (that is, two languages used simultaneously within a community) is diametrically opposed to my linguistic cognizance. You can drive a thousand miles in any direction from Missouri and still speak English; even a Georgian and a Bostonian can understand each other. We tend to exaggerate our regional pride (three words: soda vs. pop) in our linguistic differences because there are so few. Outside immigrant communities, fluency in a second or third or fourth language is something of an aberration.

Here, though, life is totally crazy. Between Fon and French, everyone is bilingual***. Figuring out when to use what (if I were able to do so) would be a fascinating process. I’m reminded that the basic purpose of speaking is communication, and the reason we communicate is to get things done. I would sacrifice the subjunctive for the names of Cotonou neighborhoods any day.

I’m commonly with a Beninese friend trying to negotiate something with a person in a service profession (a zem driver [kakéno in Fon], a waiter, a shopkeeper). My friend will start in textbook French out of courtesy to me. But after realizing that their street cred is dwindling (and therefore, they’re not getting a deal), they switch to Fon, sometimes leaving a few key words in French (prices, for example) so that I can still follow the discussion. When speakers mix the two, it reminds me of Jemez, New Mexico, where Native Americans speak Towa but mix in English words for modern concepts like “marker” and “third grade.” It’s like linguistic symbiosis.

Many people speak a third language. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard a conversation flit lazily back and forth between French, Yoruba and Fon, depending on which is appropriate for any given remark (for example, a joke about the Togolese government — and believe me, there are a lot — might be in Fon, a reference to the Nigerian pop-gospel group Styl-Plus in Yoruba, and a recap of the day’s classes in French). If that weren’t enough, it’s not unusual for me to find other university students who can stumble passably along in English or Spanish. But French is the lingua franca, the language that allows my Togolese and Malian classmates to adapt to school in Benin as easily as I would in Illinois.

In our Anglo-centric orbit, I tend to forget that other languages exist and that other countries communicate just fine without interference from the United States. (Why, despite listening to The World on KWMU every day, was I mildly surprised to find Japanese-Beninese cooperatives and Dutch NGOs in Cotonou? How embarrassing!) But French has long been called (more or less deservingly) the language of diplomacy. At the rentrée solennelle of my department (the ceremonial start of the school year), the panel of five speakers hailed from Benin, Gabon, Denmark, Germany and Belgium. They all spoke French fluently, of course, though technically only the Belgian is (I assume) native. Pretty neat.

A few more technical notes.

(If you don’t also dream of the day you have a paying job so you can subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary, stop reading. I’m a nerd.)

French has, quite literally, thousands fewer words than English. If we assume that speakers of all languages think the same way (rejecting altogether, like most linguists, the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), this means each word is imbued with more meaning.

Take something as basic as bien, which means, most simply, “good.” It complements all of these phrases: Tu es bien rentrée?  (You got home okay?) Il était bien content. (He was really happy, somewhere between sincerely and very) Tu veux y aller ou bien? (You want to go or what? [but without that impatient note in the English version]) Bien, on peut aller? (So can we move on?), and Le cours, c’était bien passé? (Class went well?) (Not to mention the noun version, as in the translation of John Rawls’ theory of justice, biens primaires: primary goods.) And this is a word that means something similar to its English cousin, benefit.

Faux amis

The words that look like English but mean something tangential, or totally unrelated, are the trickiest. They’re called, fittingly, faux amis (false friends). Here are a few common examples; I’ve taken just their most fundamental meanings. Actuel means “currently.” Réunion and séance both mean, simply, “meeting.” Normal means, often, “proper.” Susceptible means “capable of.” Sûre means “safe.” Quartier means “neighborhood.” Range means “pick up.” Essence means “gasoline.” Salarié means precisely its opposite: “hourly wage-earner.” Evident is stronger than the English; it means “obvious.” Monnaie means “change.” Collier means “necklace.” Crayon means “pencil.” Sensible means “sensitive.” Secte means “cult,” but culte means “religious sect.”

As you see, shared roots don’t necessarily make the learning process easy. English may be a West Germanic language syntactically (see “classification and related languages”), but superficially, it’s an incurable romantic: more than half of English words derive from Latin. It’s been hundreds of years, though, since the Battle of Hastings. Languages are too fidgety to sit still for a millennium: we don’t even say groovy anymore.

Sounds and noises

Since French, for better or worse, made its debut here hundreds of years ago, there are plenty of West African peculiarities on all levels****. There’s an evident rhythm to Fon-accented French, since Fon is a tonal language. To my untrained ear, its pitch rollicks up and down, up and down, phrase by phrase; whereas in France, speakers always accent the penultimate syllable of declarative statements. The Beninese rhythm distorts the standard pronunciations of words (think of the English “record” the noun and “record” the verb). It’s easier, consequently, for me to understand my friends who speak Yoruba natively and Fon as a second language, rather than the other way around. Yoruba, though it’s also part of the Niger-Congo language family, sounds more mono-pitched.

I’m sure you’ve heard “ Language is only seven percent of communication!” repeated ad nauseam (e.g., uncited in fashion magazines advertising confidence-building mascara). But it’s true that the first thing I noticed about communicating in Benin***** were nonverbal cues: to get someone’s attention, you make an elongated “pssssssst” or a series of tongue-clucking kissy sounds, like the tsk-tsk you make to a cat or dog. It makes sense to me to use these noises to call a zem driver over (or rather, under) the din of traffic. But they’re also used, with no disrespect, to attract the attention of waiters, police, even professors. Also, to express surprise (where we might gasp or screech What!?), the Beninese have a high-pitched ehhh! (as a consequence of tonal Fon, it’s always the same pitch) that I’ve already accidentally adopted.

A word or two.

Now that I’ve been here a while, I can affirm that the differences are more than sound-deep. Morphologically, for example, the Beninese say fréquenter à for “visit a person,” while in standard French, it’s “visit a place.” And they tend to say doucement! for “Be careful!” or “Watch out!” instead of the standard French attention! The word is translated directly from Fon’s dédé. Both dédé and doucement mean, literally, “gently.” I can imagine it leads to some cultural confusion. A Beninese person will say doucement after running into you, by way of “Excuse me!” But to a French person, this might seem like an accusation.

I’ve noticed a few generational differences: my French host mother says emission for “television show,” her children say serié, and my Beninese friends, more often than not, say film.

There’s also the apporter/amener split. Both words mean “to bring,” but my textbooks told me amener was for people (“I brought him to the airport”) and apporter for things. But most people here use amener for people and things. I’ve been corrected for using apporter!

Most French speakers have the tendency to add quoi (literally, ”what”) at the ends of sentences, and the Beninese do it a lot. It took me a long time to figure out its semantic purpose, since it can’t go with just any sentence. I triumphed in the end, though. I think it’s the equivalent of the Japanese yo (よ), more or less a shorthand “you see.” It’s used by way of explanation, to reinforce that you’re offering new information. In its barest form, it’s used to contradict: “There’s a lot of traffic because of the rain.” “No, it’s because of that accident near the stadium, quoi.” Now it’s expanded, quoi. I also have been searching for an equivalent of the “like” that, like, peppers our speech. The closest I’ve come is fin. If you speak French, let me know if this is accurate.

Finally, I’m learning textspeak: tt is tout (all); 1e is premier (first), s8 is suis (am), o is au (at the). It’s basically phonetic, but it took some getting used to all the same*****.

How you know you’re getting somewhere.

All this would be meaningless if I weren’t internalizing, right? It’s sort of like waking up really, really slowly: I knew how to communicate, suddenly forgot, and now am gradually regaining consciousness. My biggest problem now is that I know I’m making progress, but it takes every neuron I’ve got. So I’m engrossed in conversation when it abruptly occurs to me that My gosh! I’m following this complicated conversation! I’m so awesome! Then boom — the concentration train derails. Here are my six stages of language learning. I’m somewhere between steps four and five.

(1) You dream or talk to yourself in the second language.

(2) You remember the meaning of what someone said but not her exact phrasing (and it’s not because you only caught the key words). For example, you might recall Vous devez aller rather than Il faut aller. In context, both mean “you have to go.”

(3) You can think of a handful of ways a native speaker would say the same thing, like pays x ou y, tel ou tel pays, n’importe quel pays, and pays quiconque, which all mean “a given country.” (literally, “X or Y country,” “such and such country,” “no matter what country,” “whatever country”)

(4) You understand even when you’re not really listening (conversations overheard on the street, snatches of radio, your sociology professor).

(5) You can follow a dinner-table conversation and a TV show at the same time.

(6) You can understand Nietzsche quotes read aloud after six hours of philosophy of human rights class.

Footnotes

* I do this with all things nonlinguistic too. For example, all shopkeepers always put your merchandise in a black plastic bag, no matter how big, how small or how unnecessary. But the explanation is simple: like everyone else, the Beninese want their purchases to be private and secure. But here you mostly travel on foot or on a motorbike, so you might have to carry a lot, and the bags have to be opaque. (We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the proliferation of plastics, and all the discarded bags, which fulfill a role for Cotonou much like tumbleweeds did for the old televised West. We’ll also leave aside that certain Beninese people complain voraciously about the black plastic bags, which they blame on covert Nigerian imperialism.)

** God [Fon], it’s so hot outside! [French]

*** This is a little bit of an exaggeration. Everyone should be bilingual, since school is both obligatory and taught entirely in French. But in reality, not everyone goes to school. That said, in Cotonou, even the unschooled have a limited working French vocabulary.

**** Language is like an animal. If you introduce it to a new ecosystem and let it develop independently from its original environment, there will obviously be mutations over time. The variances I mentioned above omit those things that arise just from climate and culture. For example, even speakers with a meager French vocabulary invariably know the words for “dust,” “mango tree,” “cobblestone,” “muffler,” and “ripe,” even though these might not be essential in French-speaking Europe.

***** After I noticed that all types of businesses — when they’re named at all — have very funny (often devout) names: God Is Everywhere fish shop; Jesus Loves You barbershop; Pleasure construction supplies; Peace Love and Good Taste restaurant; Fire of the Holy Spirit clothing store. 

****** Notice I haven’t even talked about slang, my growing Fon vocabulary, the chasm in comma use between French- and English speakers or the honorific form of “you!” It’s like a cliffhanger. It’s to give you the fun of looking forward to a sequel.

(Un seul mot, by the way, means “just one word.” It’s the title of an uber popular Beninese hip-hop song that has become something of a catchphrase. I’ve even seen it in white-out on a bathroom stall door at an upscale conference center. It’s a bit ironic,  so I took it here to describe the length of my blog entry.)