Life, Wild.
How the animals I encountered in my fieldwork in Senegal taught me about what it means to be human
Tropical House Gecko (Hemidactylus Mabouia)
In the hour of suff sedd, or cold ground, the deep phase of night in which the jinn spirits come out to play and mess with any humans who wander out alone. A wet, green house gecko scurries across my face while I am sleeping. Claws tap. An alert: something is coming loose. In recent days, my husband has started to shove me around when he is frustrated, which is all of the time. I fled my previous relationship for the same reason and became what the anthropologists call a field rat. I never want to come back. And now, this: my academic fieldwork has become my life, and my life has loosened into something unpredictable. The gecko tiptoes back out the window. Something wild is always stirring.
Nile Monitor Lizard
We have left the city now and are careening through the desert in our bush taxi. Last week, a woman scholar who was visiting told me that she regretted not having a baby before tenure, and that she was entangled in a cycle of fertility treatments that were going nowhere. “Now is the time for you.” I resented this command, which felt like a curse. I never said I wanted to be a mother. In my womb, a fibroid kicks around; I have stopped my cycle altogether, except for unpredictable bouts of intense hemorrhaging. The taxi bounces toward Podor, to the fine silt of the Senegal River, where the women devotees invite me to jump in their long canoe. They are crossing the river to visit their Sufi teacher in the Mauritanian desert. A monitor lizard, five feet long, watches us quietly from the bank: she is known for regeneration and rebirth. It almost feels like she recognizes me, and I witness her witnessing as I float. Mystery arises in the watching.
A Skinny Chicken
Ndeye Diop lives on the outer reaches of the Sufi holy city of Touba, where the very poor support each other through a contemplative, communal life in the desert. She can only afford to build two mud-brick walls for her home, enough to protect her family from the dust of the Harmattan winds while they sleep. A single chicken clucks near the waste pile, her only livestock. Ndeye pulls a mattress into the shade for us to rest, and we close our eyes. We awaken to platter of rice and circle around it, each using our hand as a kudu yallah: God’s spoon. Ndeye distributes small bites of chicken to each of her three guests from Dakar, her widowed neighbor, and her two teen children. This is the principal of teranga: we offer the very last of what we have to anyone who crosses our threshold. Allah is good and will provide for us.
Gambian Epauletted Fruit Bats
It is my 32nd birthday. The Sufis in patchwork robes take a small donation and usher me into the inner trunk of the sacred Samba Dia Baobab Tree. Their dreadlocks fall to their knees, swinging. The tree measures 30-something feet around and is almost 600 years old. Over its lifetime, it has become a tomb for the griots, the village poets who hold the dangerous power of sacred speech. They cannot be buried in open ground: their voices seep into the dust and their unpredictable magic makes trouble. Above our heads, a bevy of quiet brown bats hang, dropping their thick guana to the ground. For a moment, I disappear, sealed into quiet communion with generations of praise singers, whose eloquence earned them rice to eat and huts for shelter. The poets’ bones feed the tree; its fruit, in turn, feeds the bats, who pollinate crops and disperse seeds. Words nourish ecosystems and back again.
Dwarf goat: Djallonké, the Fouta Jallon
A neighbor with a searing black eye stands at the threshold of a woman marabout healer. Her name is Mame Sagar - “Mother Rags” - a device to keep the bad spirits from taking too much interest in her. The visitor’s husband has been abusing her. Bowl by bowl, she has sold enough porridge by the bush taxi station to save up a donation: Mame Sagar tells me she will perform a ritual of protection. As I watch her work, she tells me in passing that she knows there is something wrong with my womb, but not to worry. I laugh: my dissertation is my baby. A little Djallonké goat - the kind whose sweet, tiny horns are still covered in mottled fur - dutifully bleats its last breath on the concrete roof of the healer’s home. I really loved this one in particular, feeding him good rice when no one was looking. His blood falls into a gutter in the sand below. The woman will sleep tonight, and the hungry neighborhood children will have meat with their rice. There is no healing without sacrifice.
Senegal Parrot
It is prayertime in Khelcom: the compound has, for the hour, emptied of its holy people as they bow their backs to Allah. Here, on the edges of the Sahara desert, we leave our bush taxi and enter. Khelcom is a Sufi farm, named after a Wolof principal that means “the economy of the mind.” Material sustenance arises from true belief. Khelcom is brought to life - irrigated, tilled, and seeded - by tens of thousands of faithful. They take a vow of poverty and give their lives over to raising peanuts from the dust. In the courtyard, a parrot with an electric green crown watches from her little cage of thatched twigs. This hangs from a Baobab branch, and inside she sings herself the ancient praise songs she has been hearing all her life. She turns and welcomes us inside: Salaam Malekum. Malekum Salaam: peace also be with you, I offer. Blessings oscillate between us and the environment that suspends us here: from the human to the natural world and back; to the talking drums that pace work in the field, to the secret aquifers we coax from the dust of the desert, to the peanuts that nourish us all, in commune. Nothing is truly barren.
Southern African Desert Locust
We spend the day sitting on the dirt floor with the humble director of the peanut fields. He wears patchwork and eats maafe: rice with peanut sauce. I shift on the hard ground and think of the thousands of Sufis who have given their lives to feed the people of Senegal through their work. I don’t know where this idea comes from, but I tell him that if I have a son, I will name him Serene Saliou, after the saint who founded this farm to feed the poor. He tells me that if I do, my child will carry blessings, and be strong and protected. He speaks those blessings in the form of ajjami Sufi poetry, which I have been taught to collect like falling leaves in my cupped hands. As my Senegalese friends do, I take those collected words and splash them against my face. I breathe them in as nourishment. A fat desert locust lumbers through the dry air to meet the red sunset. Life arises, again and again, from what seems like nothing.