On Race and Identity

Yovò, yovò, BONSOIR! / Ça va bien, MERCI!  

I hear this song at least once a day. It sounds innocent, even charming, when a five-year-old in a pink gingham uniform skips by, singing and waving excitedly. 

Yovò means — as you might have guessed — “white person” or “European” in Fon. When someone says yovò to me, they usually just want my attention. (However, as everyone talks to the one white girl in a five-mile radius, the form of interlocution varies pleasantly between yovò and blanche, madame, mademoiselle and coucou cherie.)

But taken more broadly, the word yovò comports an incredibly complex set of ideas depending on who uses it and in what context: it can be deferential or defiant, courteous or aggressive, or simply a means of identification (as in, “bring that soda to the yovò over there”).

Here are a few examples. I bought 100-franc tissues a few days ago with a 500-franc coin (roughly a dollar). As the vendor was digging through her pockets, she sighed, “Yovòs never have exact change.” Last week, as I was negotiating with a motorcycle taxi driver, he grinned and told me that I seemed nice and he wouldn’t add the yovò surcharge. A Beninese man who works at the swimming pool told me he didn’t like to sit in the sun with all the yovòs because his skin was already dark enough. A fisherman at the beach last weekend informed me that he was going to marry a yovò and move to Europe with her. And when a friend of mine introduced me to her grandmother, she explained in Fon that I was a yovò from the United States.

None of these encounters were offensive. But still the word rubs me the wrong way: it makes me sad. In a way, the children’s song forces kids to cling to the country’s colonial past. I was shocked to learn that it is taught in preschool, that children are officially encouraged to sing a subservient little ditty to white people. I asked a friend about it. He explained its utility: the song helps kids (who speak Fon or Gun or Yoruba) remember simple French phrases. Great. But why not replace yovò with monsieur, madame? I asked. He seemed startled by the suggestion. But that’s the way the song goes, he told me.* (And how can I do anything but grin and wave back when a darling little girl sings this song to me? I’m helping her do her homework!)

Maybe getting called a yovò feels uncomfortable because I’m aware of its implications. But maybe it’s just that the speakers frankly acknowledge my race. Like most white Americans, I don’t think much about my race. I definitely don’t think about my skin color (except after I’ve fallen asleep at midday on a Florida beach).

And, like most white Americans, I don’t talk much about my race or anyone else’s. I go out of my way to avoid it. It seems vaguely politically incorrect. If I notice a woman with a pretty blouse, I’m likely to say, “Look at that woman’s blouse, the one with the black hair, rather than “Look at that woman’s blouse, the black woman.” Like I can become literally colorblind by sheer force of will (which begs the question: what is the point of diversifying workplaces and schools if no one actually talks about diversity?).

Here, on the other hand, I have to think about race, and for the first time, I define myself as the other. Maybe this is the experience of American minorities, as least those who struggle with their identities. I’m surrounded by people of a different race, many of whom stare at me curiously and call out to me with a word that recalls my skin tone. It’s not like western Europe, where if I just avoid tennis shoes and T-shirts and keep my mouth shut, other people on the street might think I’m German or French or Italian. The white woman with whom I’m staying is French by birth but Beninese by marriage. After sixteen years and citizenship, she’s still considered a tourist outside her own neighborhood. 

If it were only a difference in “tan” (oh, Silvio Berlusconi), reconciling my conceptions of myself would be easy. Instead, skin color is bound up with culture, nationality, and language, and most of all, the ugly stories of slavery and colonization. To many Beninese, white skin equals wealth and power. That’s why street vendors flock to me and why drugstores sell lightening creams, both relatively futile ideas. It’s why a boat captain told my Beninese friend that the price for a lake tour was 8,000 francs, but if my friend wanted to tell me a higher price and skim off the top, the boat captain would pocket the money and give it back later. It’s why there’s a popular (and really catchy) Ivoirian song called Couper décaler, whose connotation is steal a little from rich Europeans and shift that wealth back to your African brothers.

The more self-righteously indignant I feel (“I’m just a student! I’m not made of money! My life’s not perfect either!”), the less I can justify those feelings. Because, in a way, they’re wrong. At home, when I complain about being broke, I’m not really broke: I could put a purchase on my credit card, or take out an emergency loan, or borrow money from someone else, or take up another job, or sell my old clothes on eBay. None of those options is available here. Personal poverty is never the problem in a stagnant economy; it’s societal poverty. No one has money to help you fix your computer, start a business or take night classes. Furthermore, when someone actually finds a well-paying, stable job, they sometimes get poorer because their unemployed brothers, cousins, aunts and neighbors (who fed them or let them sleep in a backroom or did their hair for free or sold them beer on loan) now expect to be supported too.

In a global economy of which Africa counts for only 2.6 percent — the entire continent! — is it any wonder that the concepts of race and wealth get tangled? People here wonder: they ask me (in admittedly more polite ways) why Americans are unhappy, consumption-crazed, self-interested, soulless creatures who live in isolation from their families**. Some Africans claim that they’re chronically unhappy and in the same breath that their way of life has the monopoly on happiness. For me, this is the saddest byproduct of the intersection between colonization and globalization: whole generations of African apologists simultaneously trying to reclaim, justify and improve their traditional ways of life.

I ask myself questions a billion times a day, give or take. Sometimes my questions have simple, albeit unknown, answers (Why are all the waitresses in Godomey from Togo? Why is spaghetti served with eggs? Why are the world’s DVDs divided into five incompatible regions that make it impossible for me to play movies on my computer?) but sometimes a complete response would require a superhuman understanding of history and identity (Why is Benin a bona fide multiparty democracy when its neighbors — Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea — make a sham of elective government? Why do I feel guilty watching a documentary about apartheid with a couple dozen black Africans? How can something as universal as time be perceived differently here?). And the biggest question of all never goes away: How would the story of Africa have been different if we’d left it alone?

* And that’s the problem. Here, things go the way they go because that’s the way they go. There is literally no reason. That’s why my classes start thirty minutes late, that’s why the roadwork in Calavi won’t be done for two more years, and that’s why I spent seven hours today listening to a tenured professor dictate class notes from printed pages. It’s why we spend more time in class talking about what we’re going to talk about than actually talking about it (much less analyzing or discussing or building on it) and why my group members sometimes don’t show up to our scheduled meeting times. It’s why not a single person, besides the other Rotary scholar, has finished his or her thesis from last year’s class (and why the administration simultaneously chastises them and asks them why they’re in such a hurry). It’s why the professors charged with overseeing these theses take three months to give back a copy on which they’ve written, “Rethink” and nothing else. It’s why zem drivers leave their motors running while they try to convince their customer to pay more to offset the rising cost of gasoline. It’s why there are thousands of half-finished houses on half-finished streets that have become done just because it’s been a decade since anyone worked on them and now everyone’s used to the perpetual puddle, the chicken wire or the heap of scrap metal and now they just go around. It’s not that time is priceless here; it’s valueless. 

** Patiently, I explain that this is not true, that just like the media portrayals of Africans are not always accurate, neither are those of Americans. But when I hear, as I actually did today, an American say to a German, “Oh yeah, I forgot, I did get a new iPod for my birthday. … No, I forgot because I haven’t opened it. … Yeah, I already have two. … Yeah, I’m going to return it. … No, because this one’s not big enough,” it’s hard to stick up for my compatriots. Or myself.