Giant Fight

If you're up for it- check out the fight from Sunday. Large men. But the fight is still very skillful. I found myself arguing with my mother, sister, and the maid yesterday about how exactly Yekini beat Tyson II. Everyone is into lutte, or lamb in Wolof. This is the superbowl.

Do yourself a favor and start at 6:00 minutes into the video. Notice screaming in Wolof. This language no longer sounds strange at all to me.

Can I Get A Little Wolof?

My Wolof class, with our teacher Sidy (Monsieur in Wolof), who also goes by Q-Tip.

The Wolof language is very, very different from any other language I've learned. While the cadence and sounds of the language itself are unique, the grammar is the part that is most surprising for me.

Actually, Wolof grammar was developed in the last half-century. It was only a spoken language for centuries and most people in Senegal never get the chance to learn Wolof in a classroom. Or even see how it is written. Throughout Senegal, words have their Wolof spelling and their French spelling. In Gambia, they also speak Wolof but they have an English spelling there since Gambia was a British colony formerly. Confusing.

But I've developed a little list just to give you an idea of how different it is. Wolof has:
- 13 kinds of pronouns which place emphasis on all different sorts of things
- Verbs aren't conjugated, but there are lots of prefixes and endings you can add to change the meaning
- Each verb has its own article and its own adverb
- No adjectives
- Numbers only go up to 5

So given all that, you can imagine it's pretty fun to learn. Wolof class is pretty much all questions.

I'll write another post later to give more examples of phrases, etc. For not I'm off to pack for a full weekend in Toubacouta!

Joal-Fadiout

I’ve been wanting to return to my list habit, so here we go, this time with pictures, describing last weekend.

Things accomplished in Joal-Fadiout:

1. Took a sept-place- a shared taxi that goes most places in Senegal, our ride was $4 a person for a 3 hour ride. One suggestion- don’t sit in the back.
2. Averted being majorly ripped off, twice.
3. Saw childhood home of Senegal’s first President Leopold Sedar Senghor. His father (nickname: The Lion) had five wives, he had 40 brothers and sisters and they don’t even know how many grandchildren there are.




4. Made friends with a Serer traditional lutteur (wrestler) who told us he had “chocolate abs.” (Think like a chocolate bar.)
5. Saw one of the regions (Senegal’s?) biggest baobabs. Went inside said baobab. Was ripped off by artisans there but also got free coffee.



6. Survived horse-cart ride to and from baobab with complementary bruised butt and doggy friends.



7. Saw a mixed Christian muslim cemetery built on an island of shells collected for hundreds of years by the in habitants of Fadiout.


8. Discovered the island of Fadiout, also completely shells, on our own with no guide, a true feat given the touristy nature of the place and the omnipresent tourist syndicate.
9. Spent a lot of time on bridges.


10. Entered the veritable sea of colorful mou-mou’s (traditional Senegalese dress and head wrap for women) to enjoy the Serer hymns at Fadiout’s Sunday mass. (Wish I had a picture for this one.)
11. Backgammon fail, sand checkers success.


12. Rocked French, threw in some Wolof and picked up some Serer.
13. Pulled off the shoe-string, student, backpacker’s weekend outside Dakar with less than a column of Lonely Planet to guide us.
14. Saw some great sunsets.

Feast Your Eyes (And Ears)

Must sees of this week (All of them! I promise!):


1. Photos of Senegalese wrestlers that were awarded by World Press Photo. I will have to write another post on wrestling here, it is hard core and dripping in cultural differences.

2. Akon (Senegalese rapper who made it big in the US) was chosen to compose a song for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The video below has a traditional Senegalese beat, paired with the Soweto Gospel Choir. It also features my favorite African footballer, Drogba!



3. Salagne Salagne by Youssou Ndour- the most famous Senegalese singer. This song is played everywhere here and it's rhythm feels almost ingrained in my life here. It's beautiful.

Feminism, Senegalese Style

In my Gender and Development class on Wednesday morning, we watched the film Faat Kine, created by Ousmane Sembène. Sembene used the film to address issues that people don't want to face in Senegalese society and to present an alternative to the traditional African woman, and to some stereotypical aspects of African culture.

The film shows a lot of Dakar, but it also shows something that I haven't experienced very much here- free, independent, powerful women (although the woman who owns the beignet shop previously mentioned is certainly doing well, there's a line all the time). Faat Kine had two children out of wedlock, owns her own business, drives a car, is sending her children to college, bought her own house, and is what we would call in the US, sexually liberted. Now, I don't believe that the last aspect is necessary to be a happy woman, but all in all, Faat Kine is a formidable and welcome character.

The questions that I was left with after watching the movie were the following:

• How was this film received by Senegalese society? Or was it at all? While Sembene is well known, a small portion of the population has access to films in the theatre or in their homes. And if the film didn't reach very broadly, that raises the question...
• How is or isn't this film a depiction of Senegalese society? Where did Sembene draw his idea of an indpendent woman? Is it Western, or do I just think it is because I'm American? Clearly some aspects of the film are true to my experience here, but the film looked a lot different from the scenes I usually see on the TV here.

Below is a 5 minute scene from the film wherein three unmarried, successful women talk openly about issues that sometimes aren't addressed in Senegal. Check it out.

Heureuse

My favorite moments from Senegal thus far are the following:

1. My mother telling me that if I whistled at night Harry Potter would come for me.

2. My first French spoonerism: pot de masse. (In place of mot de passe- password.)

3. Learning Alhumdililah, which is the equivalent of Hallelujah in Arabic and Wolof.

4. The juxtaposition of the following phrases. “Je suis la folle. Je suis la foule.” They mean, respectively, I am the crazy person, and I follow the crowd. Je me demande, pourquoi le français me deteste?

I’m sorry that the blog posts for the past couple of weeks have consisted of disjointed thoughts and reactions. I plan to continue, dutifully, TWTW Dakar 2010 (Sounds sort of like an MTV show) and a thorough review of Senegalese history and culture in the weeks to come. Also planning on more pictures presented in a more thematic manner.

Maangi fi rekk.

Maangi fi rekk is "I am here only" in Wolof, which is the typical response to "How do you do?".

We had our first Wolof class yesterday at WARC, where I'll be taking most of my classes this spring. Our professor's name is CD, which I don't know how to spell in Wolof, but his nickname, given to him many years ago, is Q-Tip. (He's super skinny.) All our other classes will start next week.

For now, I'll just give you my favorite slip-ups en français.

1. Instead of saying I caught a cold from my father, I said that I caught my father.

2. Instead of saying I like Lebanese food, I said that I like Lebanese cousins.

But, everyone is very pleasant when I say that in French, I sound stupid. They don't say that I don't sound stupid, they just say that it's okay and that it will come. Luckily, my host family speaks decent English in case I don't understand.