Toubab! Toubab!

“Toubab, ça va? Toubab, ça va?”

Small, black bodies crowd around me. Their arms are outstretched, palms face up. I glance, count six, seven of them. Knobby arms and legs stick out from torn, gray shorts and T-shirts. The boys, with shaven heads and protruding eyes, push each other and jostle. One girl’s belly button pokes from beneath her T-shirt. She spins to giggle with a friend behind her, and on the back of her head, her hair is braided into tiny rows. From top to bottom, all the children are covered with white dust. They are barefoot.

“Toubab, ça va? Toubab, ça va?”

In English, the greeting is absurd: white person, how are you? White person, how are you?

“Donne-moi cadeau! Donne-moi cinq francs!” the children shout at once.

I have no gifts, no money. “Amuma xaalis,” I say, trying out my brand-new Wolof.

They are not charmed, though some of them smile.

“Déedet,” an older boy disagrees, wagging his forefinger. “Amngë xaalis, toubab.” He mocks me, emphasizing the Arab word. All white people have money.

No, I want to lecture them immediately, defensively. I am a teacher. I show them open-faced palms, pull out the pockets of my new batik pants. Still, the round faces smile brightly at me.

“Toubab!” one of them says, with a burst of courage. I don’t know what else to say.

I shrug.

“Cadeau! Donne-moi cadeau!” the children insist. They push, giggle, plead with their eyes. “Cinq francs! Dix francs!” They try increasing the stakes.

“Pas de cadeau! Pas d’argent!” I say. I am more comfortable in French, and my voice comes out teacher-like, reprimanding.

Barely past noon, the sky shimmers with desert heat. I have been in Senegal now for a couple of months, and I crave cool. Here, even the beer is warm. It’s damn hot, I write in my letters home. All I do is sweat. My Senegalese students complain. Il fait chaud, they say, fanning themselves in our darkened, stuffy classroom. Now, sweat gathers at the base of my neck and like tributaries feeding a stream, rolls down my spine. Underneath my backpack, my tank top sticks to my skin. I am grateful for Clémentine who washes and irons my clothes daily.

And cooks. I wish hard for cheb u jen today, fish and rice, the national dish. I want it with lots of red hot pepper. And okra. And manioc. I wonder how to say I’m hungry in Wolof, but all I come up with is Defë tang–it’s hot. I have been teaching since eight o’clock without a break, two two-hour classes back to back, but today is Wednesday and my afternoon will be free.

“Toubab! Toubab!” Small voices giggle behind me. I ignore them and walk on, shuffling orange dust that swirls and settles on my toes. Only an occasional eucalyptus tree offers shade and a soothing bit of green. Coolness on a stick. Pink bougainvillea, lush and vibrant, drapes over gray cement walls and iron gates.

“Toubab! Toubab!” Small voices giggle behind me. I ignore them and walk on, shuffling orange dust that swirls and settles on my toes. Only an occasional eucalyptus tree offers shade and a soothing bit of green. Coolness on a stick. Pink bougainvillea, lush and vibrant, drapes over gray cement walls and iron gates.

I walk past the Housing Office where I spent half a day, hot and restless, sitting in a dusty room, in the one regulation office chair, waiting for a key to the house I am living in. I pass the market, empty today, that smells of rotting fruit and overripe fish, past Doudou, my tailor, who made the pants I’m wearing, Keur Clara, the restaurant where the food–steak frites and bony chicken–is lousy but drinks are good, and past the Rond Point and the cinema where “Chinatown” is playing. Bits of torn paper, poster remnants of the other films, stick glued to the peeling wall on the far side of the Rond Point, like a papier maché collage. Kung fu movies are the most popular, then anything with images of New York. It’s such a strange experience seeing New York here on a movie screen, Jack Nicholson’s mouth turning out tortured French. Anything American is so far from me now.

I keep walking. Hot and hungry. I pass the Nar boutiques, the Senegalese equivalent of the corner convenience store, run by Mauritanians, or Nars, as the Senegalese call them. With light skin, the Mauritanians look Tunisian or Moroccan, and they wear long, white robes that flutter behind like sails when they walk, their feet covered by pointy, elfin-like shoes. At their boutiques, small wooden structures with one long counter and flimsy shelves lining the rear wall, the Nars sell anything from a single Marlboro cigarette to a bottle of orange Fanta. Condensed milk, eggs, long crusty baguettes, kola nuts, single cubes of sugar and vats of palm oil. And Maggi cubes, the secret ingredient of Senegalese cooking. Maggi cubes are a kind of bullion sold in small, single cubes or in large “Super Maggi” sizes.

Clémentine insists I keep one or two on hand.

“We don’t have Maggi cubes in the States,” I warned my students. My youngest class, my sixième, had decided in those first weeks of school, to begin corresponding with my American students. I thought they might like to exchange favorite recipes. Just the other day, my Senegalese students had come into class with elaborate explanations of mafé (beef or chicken in peanut sauce); poulet yassa (chicken marinated in lemon and onions); and cheb u jen, all with the inevitable Maggi cube.

“What do you eat in America?” Saratou wants to know. What is the American equivalent of cheb u jen?

“We eat lots of things,” I tell her. “Fish and seafood, like you.” I launch into an explanation of regional cuisine and tell of New England clam chowder, Maine lobster. I demonstrate corn on the cob while my students, all sixty-one of them, laugh shyly behind their hands or exchange glances with their bench mates about this crazy American redhead who has come to teach them English. They call me “Miss” and snap their fingers when they want to be called on. They seem to enjoy learning “American” and all want to come to the States. To them, the United States means New York City. They have not imagined Vermont farms or small towns and seem unwilling to believe my stories.

“Kids in America like to eat at McDonald’s. They eat hamburgers, do you know what those are?”

Some heads nod. Most faces stare.

“McDonalds? You know, fast food?” I continue, seeing one or two frowns but mostly blank looks. “Fast food, where you drive to a window, order your food–it’s quickly made.” I walk fast to show “quickly,” make hamburgers with my hands, drive my invisible car.

El Hadji, my brightest, snaps his fingers. “El Hadji, do you understand?”

“Yes, Miss,” he answers. “In America, time is money.”

Sixty-one heads nod. This, they understand. The American motto.

The year is 1989 and I am in Senegal on a Fulbright Teaching Exchange. Twenty-seven years old when I arrive, I have been teaching French for four years in a private school in Andover, Massachusetts where my students are largely white kids of privilege, kids with lives radically different from what I knew growing up, but kids, I now recognize, who will someday be the very type of classmates I befriend in college. When I arrive at Wesleyan University, not yet eighteen years old, I’m woefully underprepared–not academically, though even in that realm, I feel like college is the first time in my life I’m really being asked to think and I’m not sure in the beginning if my brain can handle the request–but in every other way possible, I’m unready. I don’t know what a syllabus is and don’t realize, for several days at least, that I have homework and by then I’m already far behind and have to scramble to catch up. I don’t own a stereo. I don’t have posters, a night table or any other dorm furniture, and I certainly don’t own a fraction of the sweaters that the girl in the room next to mine has stacked in crates along one cinder-blocked wall, a Phillips Andover banner hanging opposite. When I meet her, she is sitting cross-legged on the Indian tapestry that covers her bed. She is smoking, and I think she must be the most sophisticated person I have ever met.

When I meet her, she is sitting cross-legged on the Indian tapestry that covers her bed. She is smoking, and I think she must be the most sophisticated person I have ever met.

I don’t really know much about the world beyond my Irish Catholic Boston suburb–but I know I’m excited and a little nervous to be at Wesleyan, much the way I am when I discover I have been granted a Fulbright to go to Senegal, on the coast of West Africa, a country I had to find on the map, a place I could not even begin to picture in my mind.

Near to my house, my peanut ladies squat in what little shade exists.

“Natta?” the oldest asks. The wrinkles in her face droop and sag. She is dressed in bright purple, from the turban that wraps her head to the edge of her pagne that brushes her ankles.

I pull change from my backpack and ask for twenty-five francs worth. The old woman flashes a yellow-toothed smile and makes a cone from somebody’s schoolwork, a piece of graph paper with perfect handwriting, careful loops in blue pen. With knotted, cracked fingers, my peanut lady counts peanuts by scoopfuls, five francs a scoop and adds an extra heap on top because I am her regular customer. I pay and nibble on a few peanuts, my junk food in Senegal.

The younger woman, her baby beside her, lies on a straw mat. One breast sticks out from her loosely-fitting top. The baby sucks noisily.

“Ana sa jekker?” She asks, like she does every day, where my husband is.

“Nunge fe.” He is there, I tell her, meaning back in the States. It is a lie I get a little better at telling. I learn early on not to correct the questioner. I no longer say “there is no husband” because when I tell the Senegalese man, the dancer, the man I eventually sleep with, that at home my lover is a woman, he says in a puzzled, distracted way: I think, once, I have heard of a woman like that. I can’t lie about the children, though, and when I tell my peanut ladies, the employees at the gas and electric company, the man who sells stamps at the post office, the wives of my English-teacher colleagues who ask in their routine greetings about my family, my husband, my children, that I don’t have any, they look at me and say immediately why not? It strikes me as a funny question, one that Americans would never ask each other ever. I shrug. It isn’t time yet, I say. And they laugh, because who is a woman if she isn’t a mother? How does she make her way in the world without a husband, without children? What else is there?

I have come to Senegal newly single after spending four years with my first girlfriend. When she left me to move in with another woman, I was flattened, and, at twenty-seven, disoriented enough to think my life was over.

Until the call came from USIA offering me the Fulbright to Senegal.

I accepted the offer immediately, in spite of my friends and family who were worried that my decision to go so far away might be simply an excuse to escape.

“Mangi dem.” I wave and tell my peanut ladies I will see them tomorrow.

“Inch’allah,” they answer, leaving nothing to chance, only to God’s will. They laugh as I walk away, and I imagine their comments about my Wolof or maybe my Toubab ways– the strange clothes I wear, my backpack. They think it is funny I ride the car rapide to school and don’t have my own car or at least a motorbike. Often in the morning, my peanut ladies are already sitting on the corner as I run, Birkenstocks loose, my heels cracked and dry. I fly by, wave hello and smile but don’t stop for the traditional greeting. More than a few times, they have flagged down the car for me while I race past, out of breath, to catch it. On those mornings, it is clear, at least to my peanut ladies, that I will never be africainisée, never change the fundamental ways I am an American woman, a toubab.

In my house, the table is set. Two plates. Two sets of silverware. Two glasses.

Clémentine has waited, has not eaten without me. From the kitchen, she shuffles, flip-flops scuffing against the tile floor, around the corner in a T-shirt and faded green pagne, the one she wears for work wrapped tightly around her waist. She carries a platter and bowl.

Buttered noodles and beef, a glorified school lunch.

In French, I say, “I’m hungry.”

Clémentine does not say much. When she speaks, her voice is soft, gentle. “Serve yourself,” she says in French and turns the spoon handle towards me.

I scoop out noodles, pass the bowl to Clémentine, and help myself to beef. The curtains hang dark in front of the window and keep it cooler inside. Beyond the opened doorway, pigs grovel for food at the edge of my stone wall. A rooster crows. Goats wander the dirt path. Tin basins clang. Women’s voices rise and fall. A child wanders over to my gate, peers through.

“Toubab,” he says, loudly enough for me to hear. I look at Clémentine. She shakes her head and cuts into a piece of meat.

“Clémentine,” I begin and hesitate. I don’t know how to ask for what I want. I’ve never had anyone work for me before. Up until now, I have let Clémentine take the lead. If she wants beef and noodles for lunch, that is what we eat. I have let her set her work schedule, the time she arrives and leaves. It is strange enough to have a maid, and I am satisfied having my lunch cooked for me every day, my laundry done, ironed and put away. “Clémentine, can you–do you think you could sometimes prepare Senegalese food?” I ask in French.

She stops eating, fork in mid-air. “Le cheb u jen?” “Or poulet yassa, mafé…”

It is too hot for mafé, she tells me, and puts a forkful of meat in her mouth.

I eat my beef and noodles without enthusiasm. I know that I’m not following the rules. I’m not like “Madame,” her previous employer, in Dakar. I don’t throw dinner parties. I ask Clémentine to eat her lunch with me at the table and not alone in the kitchen as she prefers. I haven’t hired a guardien, and against the advice of the French expats living in the other side of the house, I invite Senegalese people into my portion of the house, a decision that my French neighbors blame when I am robbed of everything I own–clothes, books, cassette tapes, my boxes of tampons, the sheets off my bed — though I suspect a thief who doesn’t know me personally rather than any of my Senegalese students or friends.

Clémentine, like the expats, wishes I would adhere to the rules. But I have a hard time accepting that there are rules–guidelines to live by, one set for the Senegalese, another for the Toubabs.

All white people have money.

Clémentine and I finish lunch in silence. I don’t ask, as I usually do, about Clémentine’s daughters, Lucie and Susanne, nor does Clémentine ask the perfunctory “And the school, how was it today?” After I push my last noodle on my fork with my knife, swallow the last bit of meat, I pick up my plate and utensils and carry them to the sink.

I am a white girl in Senegal.

As much as I want to fit in and belong, as much as I want to adopt the slow, languid walk of Senegalese women, I am, after all, an American. An unmarried woman without children.

Irish Catholic. A lesbian.

This is the identity I bring with me for one academic year, an identity that is complicated and complex, that has me wondering who I am really, how it all works together, and where I will finally belong and call home. In Senegal, I will learn to dance and to drum, to love cheb u jen and mafé, to not be in a hurry, to greet everyone when I enter the room. I will learn the rules as I’m supposed to follow them, even as I sleep with a Senegalese man, trying on another identity that I will not keep. In the end, I will return to the U.S., an American girl in West Africa, a toubab.