“Ready?” Um, not really. But I don’t think that any of us ever are. It’s a rhetorical question.
I had vague ambitions of wrapping up my séjour in Senegal with a few tightly-worded blog entries that encapsulated how I was going to remember this place…but that is clearly not going to happen.
As I move closer to my departure date, I can feel the ground below my feet start to accelerate with patient urgency. It’s just a matter of time before I suddenly realize that I have hurtled through the time-space continuum and now find myself staring at over-packed suitcases that sit patiently next to an anonymous hotel room door.
In fact, that midnight moment is just around the corner.
So with that little Like Sands Through The Hourglass thought in mind, I’m going to get on with accepting my inevitable slide back into occidentalism and start to talk about the things that have left a mark on my tour in Dakar. Here is installment number one:
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Before moving to Senegal, watching a plane move across the horizon would only ever invoke the association of one thing. That’s right, the opening credits to The Golden Girls.
Tu me manques. La mer me manque. This is the French way to express, “I miss you” or “I miss the ocean”, respectively. But we all know that languages are far more interesting when you apply a literal translation- because in doing so it often it exposes you to a way of looking at something that you may have never considered in your mother tongue. Or even in your mind’s eye. This expression of missing something is one of those examples.
If you want to say that you miss someone in French, what you are actually saying is “You are missing me” (the same goes with the ocean statement: “The ocean is missing me”). I don’t know about you, but for a language that usually fails in the word economy department, I think that the French have succeeded in created the most pithy yet descriptive phrasing of a powerful but often ineffable human sentiment.
A room with a view. This was taken at the end of my first day in Dakar.
I don’t want to sit here and draft a list of things that I will miss and things that I will not miss about Senegal. That just doesn’t seem like an accurate way to go about discussing life in this country. Instead, I want to talk about the things that will be missing me- things that have for one reason or another helped to shape my being at this exact moment in time- for better or for worse. You may love something or dislike it, but once it has been removed from your daily routine, you will indeed remark upon its absence. It will be missing you.
Night number two. You will soon discover that in some ways my interests haven’t changed all that much in almost three years.
I am very well aware of the fact that I repeatedly post the same view from outside my apartment. But you’ve got to understand where I’m coming from….
I’ve done my fair share of photoshop manipulation for this blog, but je te jure this was Senegal’s exact eventide about two weeks ago. I’ve got more photos to prove it…
Incoming weather, trash-strewn fields, circadian rhythm….it’s a holistic experience that is impossible to justifiably capture, but at the same time it’s an effort that we are all quite happy to fail in the attempt.
I don’t even know what this thing is used for, but that’s kind of beside the point.
This night provided a sunset that was literally stumbled upon. You can’t pre-stage these things. They just sneak up on you when you’re looking in the opposite direction. Just imagine if none of us ever turned around…
I have trouble accepting the fact that everyone else in the world won’t be able to see what I am seeing when I watch the colors change over here. This probably explains why I spend so much time fishing my camera out of my purse and photographing the same vantage points day after day. And there is always the ensuing disappointment that comes with a glance at my display and observe that there is really no comparison between what the digital image shows and what I am looking at in front of me. It is always this way. Even as a kid when I had my purple Le Clic 110 film camera and took photos of sunset on John’s Pond, the resulting images were endlessly disappointing (even though those photos did score me a blue ribbon at the Barnstable County Fair that year). But I digress…
There are a lot of Senegalese mementos that I’m going to be packing up in my household goods shipment, but I am sad to say that this view is one that simply won’t be tamed by my container’s dimensions.
I’m going to have to leave the sky here for others to enjoy. I guess that’s not so bad- especially when I remember that it is very Senegalese to share. And if this thought can make me happy, and I recognize that I have altered how my mind’s eye interprets something, then maybe I will somehow succeed in bringing a bit of this back with me.