A Tale of Three Cities, December 1970
“Have you thought about what you’ll teach next term,” asked Madame Coulibaly.
Mariama Laetitia Koité – she liked to be called by all her names – sat across the table and let the silence lengthen. “I haven’t decided,” she said at last. “The Senegalese futurists? Or maybe the early French ones.”
A look of disappointment crossed the older woman’s face. “I wish you’d make up your mind to teach poetry.”
“I taught it this term. The Nana Asma’u and the Malê women.”
“Mariama” – the use of just one name signaled disapproval, as did the tightening of Madame Coulibaly’s hand around the grip of her coffee cup – “you know that’s not what I mean. You’ve taught poets, not poetry. Everyone else in the class has shared his craft: you’re the only one who hasn’t.”
Mariama’s gaze had fallen to the table as her teacher spoke; now she returned it to the open window and the red-brown buildings outside, but she still wouldn’t meet Madame Coulibaly’s eyes. “It isn’t… it isn’t a craft that I can teach. I’m not sure it’s a craft that
can be taught.”
“Everything can be taught.”
“Breathing?” Even as she said it, Mariama knew that this was a puerile answer, and that the Belloist truism had never been meant to apply to autonomic processes. But she let it stand anyway and looked her teacher in the face; a puerile question in response to a pat answer seemed a fair trade.
This time it was Madame Coulibaly’s turn to be silent, and the ceiling fan became audible as it stirred notes around the table. “Of course we can teach breathing,” she said. “You learned to breathe when you learned to sing, and you learned to breathe for exercise and meditation. Have you been doing that so long that you’ve forgotten it was taught to you?”
To that, Mariama had no answer. “Maybe poetry can be taught,” she said. “But I don’t know how to teach it.”
“I think if you try to teach it, you’ll find that you can. But I won’t force you. I
can’t force you.” Madame Coulibaly rose to her feet in a rustle of blue patterned skirts. “You’ve had an outstanding term and you’ve passed your exams; you’re free to go.” And as Mariama rose in turn and turned to the door, she said one more thing: “I hope you enjoy Dakar.”
The lycée consisted of low red buildings with geometric patterns inscribed on the walls and parapets, set among sparse gardens and iron-tinged soil. Mariama shouldered her pack and moved quickly toward the gate through a stream of departing students. She was determined not to notice any of them, but as always, one noticed her.
“Mariama Laetitia!”
She slowed down to let Amadou, who sat at her right hand in class, catch up to her. “Have you had your interview?”
“Yesterday. I just had one more exam this morning.”
“What are you teaching next term, then?”
“Football offense.” From someone else, that might have sounded frivolous, but Mariama had once helped Amadou prepare his lessons, and he did so with the same passion that an imam might use in teaching the Koran. He’d spent years at the feet of professional players, and he read books and watched films, and after playing the game fanatically since the age of four, he could survey anyone else’s technique with a keen eye. Even when they’d been in kindergarten, when they’d only been called upon to teach once a month and when the usual lesson was a repetition of the previous day’s work or show-and-tell of something they’d learned at home, he’d always taught football.
She sighed theatrically. “I’m afraid I’ll be a hopeless student. Again.”
“Oh, you’ve learned. You just don’t see it.” They passed through the gate and out to the streets beyond. “Does Madame Coulibaly still want you to teach poetry?”
“Yes. I can’t imagine how, though.”
“You can teach people to write…”
“But you can’t teach them to feel.”
Amadou met her eyes with his. “Then teach us to write about whatever we’re feeling.”
“You have to feel something in a way that makes you want to write. And not everything will make you feel that way.” She felt at sea in the conversation, something that didn’t happen to her often, and searched for a way to make her meaning clear. “If your mind’s on something like…”
“The Consistory?”
She laughed. “People
have written poetry about that. ‘The hope of peace, the hope of sharing…’ it’s awful, maybe, but people have been inspired by it. The problem is that inspiration is different for every person.”
“Then maybe you need to teach people where to find it?”
“But everyone finds it in a different place…”
“I don’t know, then,” he admitted, and changed the subject. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“So soon? Your visit at the Dakar University isn’t till next week, no?”
“I’m going to Timbuktu first. The University of Sankoré invited me yesterday.”
“
Sankoré?”
“They admit women now.”
“To be imams?”
“It was never just that, even when Oumar Tall reopened it. If I’m going to study classical poetry, there’s no place better, and there’s no harm in giving God his place in the humanities…”
“Because he inspires?” Amadou brushed the thought off in mock dismissal. “I think you’re leaving early to get out of a repair day.”
Mariama laughed again, as much from the conversation’s sudden shift in tone as from what Amadou had said. She liked repair days, actually; the term might be over, but the lycée students still did their work obligations at the school, and maintenance duties brought friends together. And learning
how to do the repairs had been a welcome break from book lessons, and had proven very useful.
The thought carried her beyond the central district and into the park that separated it from her neighborhood. The suburb where she and Amadou lived was laid out much the same way as the whole of Ségou: a civic and commercial center surrounded by a greenbelt that was surrounded in turn by clusters of houses. A cluster of elementary students, whose term lasted a week longer, were in the park, chattering as they did
their work obligation. Mariama had supervised the younger children sometimes, as all the older ones had, and she knew they might be cleaning litter, or cataloging the plants in the greenbelt. It would always be a half-playful assignment for children that age, designed to show them that work and learning and teaching began together and that work was as much a social event as play…
“Which can be a damned hard lesson if you aren’t very social,” she murmured.
“What was that?” asked Amadou.
“Nothing.” But she was remembering other days when Belloist sharing had turned into bullying, and how long it had taken before a sympathetic teacher had let her work on the school accounts rather than chiding her for not wanting to share. It had been so much easier to learn solidarity when she could grow into it on her own time.
Or maybe she hadn’t. Some people never did. They were the ones who moved to the old city… or who went to the university in Dakar.
“Some football tomorrow, before you leave?” Amadou was saying.
“Why not?” Football wasn’t the worst way to start a day, and she was imagining other things the two of them might do in the private places where tufts of grass gave way to reeds and bushes along the Niger. He was imagining them too, she could tell.
“If you’re inspired.”
The houses in Mariama’s neighborhood looked like larger versions of the houses the urban Bambara had built for centuries: low, dun-colored cement buildings that gave the impression of mud, with shuttered windows and flat roofs to which families repaired in the evening. The new things, electricity and running water and furnishings, were concealed in the walls in the way the village futurists favored. There were many things concealed within those walls.
She and Amadou had gone their separate ways at the greenbelt boundary, and now she stopped in the neighborhood office to sign herself off the labor rotation for two weeks. Her civil obligations were registered here, even though she still did them at the lycée – that, and teaching for half an hour twice a week, and helping with research projects for the government or the University of Mali.
Work and learning and teaching, all together…
Her own house was down the street and to the right, past a community garden, and her mother was home when she walked in – her mother, who’d come to what was then Soudan as a nursing sister attached to the army, and who’d paid her father the ultimate compliment by leaving holy orders for him. She was chopping vegetables, and she leaned over to kiss Mariama on the head and motioned for her to help.
“Are you packed for Dakar?”
“And Timbuktu,
bá.”
“Yes, Timbuktu.” The older woman made no secret that she didn’t think Mariama belonged in Sankoré University, even though she’d never spoken a direct word against it. “You had your interview?”
“I did. I’ll be teaching the Senegalese futurists for my last term, I think, but Madame Coulibaly wants me to teach poetry.”
“You should,
den.” Mariama’s mother shooed Oumar Tall, the family cat, off the counter. “You’re never more alive than when you write it; teaching it would make you bloom.”
“How do I do that, though?”
“The same way you teach anything else. You learn it first.”
“You don’t learn inspiration, though. It’s something that just happens.”
“Mariama Laetitia.” There was no disapproval in that voice, as there had been in Madame Coulibaly’s, but a great deal of seriousness. “Nothing just happens. It can seem that way – you’ve been searching for it since you were a child, so it’s become unconscious. You need to make it conscious again –
that’s how you learn how to find it, and that’s when you can teach it.”
Mariama concentrated on slicing an eggplant and tried to think that through. It was the kind of thing her mother would say. If there were such a thing as a Belloist Catholic, that was what her mother had become during twenty-eight years in Mali. She believed that everything should be considered, everything shared, and nothing done without thought because that would be slighting God’s creation. And Mariama, a product of the Belloist-Tijaniyyah planned towns even if she suspected that she was an imperfect one, didn’t disagree.
Have I been slighting my inspirations? she wondered as she put the eggplant on the skillet and inhaled the smell of her mother’s peanut sauce. She started chopping an onion while she watched and stirred the eggplant; her brother and sister would get home from school soon and want dinner, and she was starting to realize how hungry she was herself.
The smell of peanut sauce surrounded her, and drove out thoughts of Dakar and Timbuktu, of leading Amadou to a hidden place on the Niger’s banks, even of next term’s lessons. It took a moment only for her to notice that it was inspiring.
Mariama wasn’t impressed by Timbuktu’s age. She had been to Djenné, and there was no place in Africa older than that; the people of the upper Niger were an ancient race. But there was something about the city that struck her – something more than being in a foreign country for the first time in her life, or seeing the wealth of the markets, or the harshness of the desert, or the way veiled Tuareg men with swords and women in plain headscarves mingled with others who wouldn’t have been out of place in Ségou or even Paris.
After a time, she realized it was the way history
pervaded Timbuktu. The train had left her on the very edge of the old city, and she wandered through winding streets of brick and mud buildings with silver-inlaid wooden doors. The houses and mosques, and even the shops, were centuries old, and they carried the memory of the days when salt-caravans had crossed the Sahara and Timbuktu had been a marketplace and center of learning. It seemed she could almost see the white-robed scholars with their charges and the trains of camels bearing riches from the north in exchange for salt and gold.
And at the end of her journey lay the Sankoré University. Most of its buildings were in the new city to the north and east, a city of tall glass and concrete and broad streets, but its offices were still in the madrassa of six centuries ago, and that was where she was to meet Professor Ikhia.
The man was dressed as a Tuareg; he was darker than most of that nation, but that was hardly unusual in Timbuktu, where there had been much marriage between peoples since the city came under Toucouleur rule. He might have been fifty or sixty, and he showed the courtliness of another time as he poured Mariama a cup of chai and led her to the parapet.
“I can see you have a passion for the classics,” he said, looking west to the old city below them and the industrial suburbs beyond. “I was impressed by your paper on the Epic of Sundiata – it was far more mature than what we usually see from lycée students.”
Mariama wondered whether to demur at the word “passion.” Classical poetry and epics had always inspired her – that had been so as long as she could remember – but she wasn’t sure if it were a
passionate inspiration. Or was inspiration always passionate?
“I was teaching the epic that term,” she said instead. “You learn something very thoroughly when you’re teaching it. I thought I’d write up some of what I found when I compared the story to historical records.”
“You did it very well.” Ikhia turned around and leaned back on the parapet. “Just so you know, though, undergraduates don’t ordinarily have teaching responsibilities here. The first year is mostly Islamic studies, of course, and we all learn that together, but other than that, the lectures are more traditional. Some of the second-year students do work as private tutors, and there may be families that would want you to work with their daughters, but you’d have to arrange that yourself…”
“I’d come here to study,” Mariama said, and wondered if she meant it. The rest of the conversation was about academic programs, and afterwards about Soninke poetry and the differences between Belloist solidarity and Oumar Tall’s commonwealth of scholars, and teaching wasn’t mentioned again.
Afterward, Mariama wandered around the city, trying to open her senses and absorb it into herself. Was that how she was inspired? No lyrics came to mind now – the newness of the sensations overwhelmed everything else – but maybe that would happen later.
Her path took her out of the old city and the commercial district by the station and into the western outskirts. This was a place of apartment buildings and small houses, street markets and clotheslines, old men in peasant dress smoking kif on stoops, the sun setting behind the looming factories. The people here were the ones who’d come from the pastures two generations ago to find industrial jobs, or more recently as refugees from the troubles in Mauritania.
She noted in passing that the poor of Timbuktu lived apart from the rich. That was nothing unusual, of course; that was also the case in Ségou’s old city and many other places in Mali. But the Tijani who’d built the planned towns believed that rich and poor should live together, and that a quarter of their income and two days’ work a month was fair rent for both. That seemed the more natural way to Mariama, although she knew it wasn’t, and the sight of poverty being isolated as if it were a disease was jarring.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that the people here were traditional – “they’d brought the village with them,” her father had said of similar neighborhoods in Mali – and Mariama felt many eyes on her bare head. She hastily reached into her pack and wrapped a scarf around her hair, suddenly conscious of the few strands that it didn’t cover, and turned onto another street to restore her anonymity.
That street ended after two blocks at a red-brown gate connected to a low wall which stretched hundreds of meters in each direction. The compound it enclosed held more houses, with wells outside and sparse desert gardens. There was something else different about them too, and after a minute, Mariama realized what it was: the power lines that were everywhere in the surrounding neighborhood were absent there, and in place of music from unseen radios, there was silence.
She saw a young Mauritanian girl playing cat’s cradle in front of an apartment house and pointed toward the gate. “Who are they?” she asked in Sudanic, and when the girl didn’t understand, in Arabic.
“Them? They’re Shelterers. They don’t believe in modern things – they say all that’s a temptation to sin.”
Mariama had heard of them, but never seen them. “Medicine too?”
“Not them. I’ve seen some of them at the doctor’s. They work in the factories too. But they say the ones in the country are even stricter.”
Mariama looked over the wall again, taking in the scene in the gathering darkness: women taking down washing, men praying, children playing ball as they did everywhere, the smell of cookfires. There was something in there she couldn’t understand – why would anyone want to live in the past, to call an end to history? The past was inspiring, but without present and future, where was the grand sense of motion, the vastness and depth that
made it so. She would feel trapped among the Shelterers, and she wondered if any of the children felt as she would: trapped by the strict fence they put around sin, as others might be trapped by Belloist solidarity…
She returned abruptly to the thought of motion and depth, and wondered, suddenly if
that were the key to inspiration – the feeling of vastness, the touch of the divine, the sense of something beyond the material world. She had found that in history and the classics; maybe the Shelterers found the same thing in forsaking the material things that surrounded them. One person’s inspiration, another’s prison: the ideas that could liberate could also oppress.
As she made her way back toward the hostel near the station, she wondered if she could teach how to tell the one from the other.
Dakar! Where Timbuktu had been the past, Dakar was the future. The Futurists had controlled the city for much of the century, and it showed: the sun reflected off cream and ivory and glass buildings fifty, sixty, even eighty stories tall, and they were curved and arranged so that a traveler approaching by train from the east or by sea from the west and south would see a skyline that suggested a flame burning beside a minaret.
Mariama had seen pictures of the Dakar skyline – who hadn’t? – so that, at least, had come as no surprise to her. Nor had she been surprised by the wealth; Timbuktu had been richer than Ségou, but Dakar outdid both. It was the impersonality that struck her: the sheer size of the buildings and streets and marketplaces that made a single person shrink to insignificance. Diagne, many years ago, had urged futurists to pay attention to the “architecture of the soul,” and the village futurists in Mali had taken his lesson to heart; in Dakar, that had happened only sometimes. There were refugees from Mauritania here too – the Wolof and Pulaar from the southern provinces – and she wondered how the city must seem to them.
But even amid impersonality, there could be beauty. She was in the Grand Diolof Garden, a thousand hectares of flowers and trees from all Africa and even South America and the Pacific, with Parisian cafés on sculpted lakes and hardwood sculptures that blended with the forests. It seemed to Mariama almost like one of the fabulous cities that Funmilayo Abacar had imagined in
The Country of Woman’s Dreams, although the sculpted beauty here hid mere indifference rather than evil.
And the people were as colorful as the flowers: French and Senegalese women in patterned boubous, men in practical white, and also Algerians and Vietnamese and travelers from across the ocean. There were few cities that could lay claim to being ports of the world, but Dakar was one of them, and its life mocked the concrete and glass that loomed above it. Dakar had grown around itself; it was its own ancestor-mask.
The professor from the University of Dakar, a thirty-year-old woman of Soninke appearance, had suggested meeting here instead of her office, and she insisted that Mariama call her Andrésia. They left the park and wandered the city for an hour, with the professor pointing out Mouride shops, the old medina, the municipal parliament with its guards in the ceremonial zouave dress of the Diouf Regiments. They spoke French, but Andrésia was unapologetic about her occasional code-switches into Wolof:
ouoçais, it was called, and it was spoken in Paris as well as Senegal.
They finally found themselves in a Vietnamese restaurant near the harbor, and Mariama had her first taste of
pho as Andrésia talked about the programs in literature and languages. She knew exactly what the professor was doing: trying to overwhelm her with Dakar’s cosmopolitanism as Ikhia had done with Timbuktu’s ancient learning. But she
was overwhelmed. The sense of motion and enormity was there again, as if all Africa had combined in this place and was moving into the future.
“Would there be a chance for me to teach here?” she asked, taking hold of the conversation.
“Students from Mali often ask that,” Andrésia answered. “Those from Bornu too, or from the Belloist schools in Malê country or the experimental schools in France. And because so many ask, we have an answer. Students can teach courses by subscription and submit their lesson plans for credit. There are also chances to take part in original research. We take pride in creating knowledge here together.”
Mariama considered that in silence for a moment, comparing it to the lycée and to the ancient colleges of Timbuktu. It was something that cosmopolitan Dakar made possible, she decided: the impersonal city could also be liberating. The thought came to her again:
Solidarity, Shelterer simplicity, the Futurist skyline - what can be oppressive can also be inspiring, depending on how you see it.
Maybe she could teach that – if she couldn’t show people how to
find inspiration, she could at least teach them how to look for it, now that she’d started to teach herself.
She didn’t say any of that to Andrésia, at least not now. “You’d mentioned the Fulfulde collection in the university library…”
“Why don’t we go see it?” the professor said, and they paid the bill and left the restaurant.
Mariama Laetitia Koité came home three days before the new term. Her mother made fonio with peanut sauce and fish straight from the Niger, and Oumar Tall demanded only a small share. Later, she and Amadou met in the greenbelt and sat together on a bench by the river.
“Do you know what you’re teaching this term?” he asked.
“Poetry,” she answered.
