Baguette Redux

=== Baguette Redux ===
“Mr. Rabbit!” the man calls out in French, taking care not to unsettle the loaves of bread resting on his turbaned head. “Mister,” he repeats impatiently, “rabbit!”

I hear this plea whenever I enter Kiffa’s market, and when the mood strikes me I form bunny ears with my fingers and ask, as if for confirmation, “Mr. Rabbit?”

Before explaining I’d like to go out of my league for a minute. It seems that Mauritania absorbed little from its colonial days, when it comprised a large hunk of French West Africa until finding independence in 1960. Whether this can be attributed to the proud and sometimes insular Moorish culture, geographical isolation, France’s hands-off approach, or other factors, it’s difficult to tell, but on a daily basis one confronts two things to remind them that the French flag once flew here. The first looks like a baguette, and the second sounds like French.

But I’ll get to that and the rabbits in a minute. Daily life in Mauritania in my estimation tends to focus on “making do.” A house is a house if it keeps out the rain. A car gets you there, eventually. And a meal fills you up, however low in nutrients or flavor.

But it works, and there’s a rhyme and a reason. Poverty, isolation and an unforgiving desert are not the whimsical fantasies the developed world tends to see on PBS or guided tours, and the utilitarian nature of life here stems from these realities.

It boils down to a simple belief, strongly held by many the people I’ve had the pleasure to know here. Life is hard, my way works, and I probably couldn’t afford a “solution” anyhow. This is my life, as God has willed it.

So, then, the bunnies and the baguettes, you ask? We’re almost there. Those of you who read the New York Times food section might know that Wendy and Michael London (www.mrslondons.com) are two of the most respected bread and pastry chefs in New York, and maybe the world. As their nephew I’m in a biased position to judge anything edible, but I assure you that the bread here is mostly awful. It’s dense, wet, dirty, and at its best its flavor-less. I shudder to think what my uncle would have to say about it, after all, he practically lost his cool once when, I admitted to him that I’d been eating at Subway a lot. “That’s not bread!” he hollered, as though he’d just been shown a picture of a tennis racket.

“That’s not French!” is what many Parisians would probably say if they heard the language people speak here when they’re not using an indigenous language. I am complicit in this defamation, and in fact my French is just good enough to allow me to see its face. C’est pas jolie. But I’ve got one thing on these mobile bread hawkers. “Pain” is masculine, so when they preface it with la instead of a manly “luhhh,” they’re actually saying “lapin.” You probably just yawned and guessed that lapin means rabbit. Exactement!

The ghost of Edward Said might accuse me of sneaking my Orientalist arrogance into this column, but I don’t mean to imply that life here is a garbled translation of French culture. Far from it. From the surface down into the depths of the languages, customs, and beliefs, life in Mauritania evokes a certain charm that I’m willing to assert exists no where else. The frothy pour of tea from one glass into another, smoke wafting off the grey-white coals cooking the evening meal, the distant shriek of a bearded goat in seek of a companion. Stalked by the sun, life’s various manifestations often come to a boil as well.***

Is my role in this system to teach the bread sellers “le pain,” or to teach them to say it in English? Or to design a feasibility study to help the local bakeries streamline production, expand their product lines and reach new customers?

It’s all a bit overwhelming sometimes, so the truth is I tend to keep it simple. Sometimes I buy a rabbit, and sometimes I don’t.

*** During WAIST, teammate Keith was forced to drop for pushups after making infield errors. I did 20 on my knuckles after writing those two sentences.

=== No More Three By Fives ===
Timewarp Album Review For No Good Reason
Room For Squares
By John Mayer
Sony

Dreamy nostalgia sculptor disguised as pop singer John Mayer presents listeners with a laundry list of issues on his debut “Room for Squares” album. He loves your body, misses his mommy, and cherishes his freedom in an album that doesn’t always gel musically but contains many compelling moments.

More specifically, Mayer’s lyric writing is hit-or-miss, his songs place brilliance alongside meandering slop, and one song (Love Song For No One) feels like the intro music to a sitcom about a flight attendant. But the fatal flaw of the album as a whole is that it’s impossible to hate, and I weep predictably with each listen.

Jon Mayer The Guitarist is obviously proficient, showing his Berklee College of Music (didn’t graduate) pedigree when appropriate. He is able to craft original progressions and textures without bogging down the music with pretentious solos.

But Jon Mayer The Poet doesn’t come off quite as well. Sometimes he’s quaint, as for instance in “83” when he conjures up a touching vision of childhood, waxing “These days, I wish I was six again/ Make me a red cape/ I want to be Superman.” Then he shatters the mood by wondering out loud “what ever happened to my lunchbox.” Let’s see… rotting in a suburban landfill, reincarnated as a breadbox in a developing country…neither of these images help me enjoy your song, Mr. Mayer.

Other tracks suggest he’s shooting a bit high, like “Neon,” which reveals a limited understanding of the Periodic Table of Elements, while others convict him of writing directly to high school sophomores, as in his promise to “bust down the double doors” at his ten year reunion. Maybe it’s because mine is in September and I really would like to show ‘em, but puhleeze!

The beautiful and seemingly harmless little tune “3x5” warrants attention, as it actually contains life-shortening idiocy. The song hinges on the following false triumph: “Today I finally overcame/ Trying to fit the world inside a picture frame.”

The scenario Mayer paints could be imagined as something like the following. An up-and-coming performing artist has three major problems: (1) his travel schedule affects his relationship with his girlfriend, (2) he struggles to describe visual phenomena in words, and (3) he is battling a deep distrust – possibly stemming from his relationship with his father – of cameras.

He tells his lady friend that he wants to share his on-the-road experiences, yet he is proudly sending her a letter with no photos because the 30-second process of pulling a camera out of a fanny pack somehow drains his life force.

He recalls, awestruck, “You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes/Brought me back to life.” Excuse me? Obviously something prevented his sweetheart from being there that morning, let’s say her final exam before becoming an emergency medical technician. If he had merely gotten over his unhealthy hang-up he could have taken a nice picture. True, sometimes it’s hard to capture the sky’s nice bright colors on Kodakrome, and maybe it wouldn’t have “brought her back to life.” But maybe the girl isn’t as brain dead as our protagonist to begin with.

Then he claims “You’ll be with me next time.” Girl, don’t believe this two-faced, conflicted jetsetter for a second. You trust him enough to allow him to travel the world solo to please thousands of young female fans, and he returns the favor by never taking pictures? Don’t throw your life away to travel with the band. You’ll see plenty of sunrises through the windshield of an ambulance during your graveyard shifts.

But as I said, I love this album. It helps that some songs are near-perfect, like “St. Patrick’s Day” and that others serve as a sort of blanket apology. “Oh I’m never speaking up again” he laments at the end of the beautifully crafted chorus of “My Stupid Mouth.” Writing this review years after the record’s release, I can relax, knowing that Jon Mayer did not give up, and in fact has produced another album and is more popular than ever. I just hope the poor guy has come to terms with photography.

Mango Softballs in the Sun

I’m sitting on the porch of my house in Kiffa, drinking deep from mother Africa* as I watch my sunflowers sway in the wind and eat the beignets delivered to my door by a sullen veiled girl. A typical day in Mauritania, making it almost impossible to believe that one week ago, I was playing “Living on a Prayer” on an upside-down acoustic guitar at a free beer bonfire overlooking the ocean in Dakar while a retired Marine Corps officer screamed at dozens of Peace Corps volunteers to immediately terminate their topless relay race.

Incoming Mauritania Peace Corps volunteers are told about the annual West African International Softball Tournament, (thrown by the US Embassy in Dakar and known as WAIST) with stories such as streaking at the Marine Corps bash, making Willie Mays catches in centerfield with a bottle of Senegalese whiskey in hand, or overwhelming the local home-stay families with around the clock drunkenness. Meanwhile, teams from other countries (with names like Team Asia, the Baobab Bashers, and the Guinea Fowls) are warned not to get too close to those crazed Americans coming out of the desert. After an almost nine month incubation in Mauritania, the first year volunteers in my group were ready for fun, and the second years were keen to show us how to keep the legacy, and the lunacy, alive.

At its core, WAIST is a softball tournament, and Peace Corps Mauritania fielded two teams, Pirates #1 and Pirates #2. Our better team placed second last year and could have held their own in the competitive draw, but alcohol is not allowed on the field so they opted for the still rather serious social league. I was smartly deemed unworthy of our A team and spent the tournament with Pirates #2 at first base yelling things like “play’s at any base,” and my Little League coach Joe Blinn’s head shaking lament, “walks will kill us.”

After losing two games the first day and staying out downtown through the night and partly into the morning, Pirates #2 trudged unhappily to the field at 8:30 in the morning after a breakfast of instant coffee and ibuprofen. The opponents, a team of 14 and 15 year-old American missionary girls, were already doing infield drills. Our warm-up consisted of a couple of lunges, a pep talk from our captain Mitch, and a round of Senegalese beers.

The game started on a typical Pirates #2 note when a routine ground ball sent our shortstop down to the ground, crawling on all fours looking for the ball. Or a contact lens, it was hard to tell. The ball was well in left-center by that point, heading towards the wall after finding its way through one and then two sets of outfielders’ legs.

One of the several runs that inning was driven in by the opposing pitcher, a 12-year-old boy who looked confused when I smacked him on the rear-end with my glove and said “way to go with the pitch, Mr. Carew.” I winked at their first base coach and said “kid probably doesn’t even know who Rod Carew is.” The coach laughed but failed to find the humor when I asked the next base runner, a pretty little blonde with tight running shorts and several years to go before operating a motor vehicle, what she was doing after the game. He called time and suggested I keep my bottle of beer in foul territory and my language in fair territory. (No one can prove that this actually happened.)

The final score was 16-6, and we were lucky to keep it so close. In the next contest we faced a team of Senegalese who spoke only French and Wolof. A Wolof speaker on our team tried to distract our opponents by yelling “TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!” but this seemed to make them play better. After several rule disputes, we began to hear whispers that we were cheating. I lost patience when they refused to believe that a ball that starts fair but rolls foul can be ruled out of play, letting out a scream of “WE INVENTED THIS GAME!!!!” We lost by one or two runs, a difficult defeat that we lamented together but celebrated privately as it meant we could focus on cheering for our winning team and sampling the many varieties of local distilled spirits without the demands of hand-eye coordination.

Meanwhile our A team was playing incredible softball, making great catches in the field and clutch hits with runners on base, and I started up our national anthem at the beginning of the championship game, standing just meters away from the previous night’s topless relay race (which maybe I didn’t even see with my own eyes). Team Asia, a group of mostly Japanese and Koreans living in Dakar, was our unlucky opponent, and to a certain degree this was a grudge match. At WAIST 2004, they defeated us in the title bout that may or may not have involved some “minor” racial slurs. Details are fuzzy.

But in 2005, old wounds were healed, Pirates #1 were in fine form, and after our victory the two teams exchanged handshakes and even some jerseys in a spirit of generous cultural exchange. I cringe to think of what would have happened had we lost, however, conjuring up only the image of NATO accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

That about covers the softball. Each WAIST the US Marines who guard the American embassy throw a party, and this year a hundred or so Peace Corps volunteers and others packed the Marines’ beachside residence. Jared and I got our hands stamped at the door, and were immediately coerced by two enlisted Marines into a foosball massacre. At 3-0 down, we realized we were in trouble. At 6-0 we saw our last glimmers of hope dashed by the sarcasm that can only come from a salty sailor on his own turf. “Hey man, I think these guys are hustling us,” one jarhead said to the other. We kept our mouths shut and blindly spun the levers. At 9-0 we finally scored but were mercifully closed out by a phantom give-and-go that made me wonder if the table were somehow rigged. War Corps 10, Peace Corps 1. I kept my mouth shout and thanked them for the game, heading towards the throbbing of music I haven’t heard in a long time.

What I’m about to say is pure speculation. Allegation is too strong of a word, and none of this can ever be proven, even with photos, which are surely fakes if they do exist. Some members of the Mauritania contingent may have possibly, kind of, sort of gotten naked and ran around the house. I wish I could give you a more concrete account, but I’m going to have to leave it at that. Me, I was there, I think, though I’m not convinced that it even happened. And maybe I wasn’t there, after all.

And then at some point in the evening I may or may not have seen the Pirates de-facto leader, an enigmatic, mysterious, almost mystical figure I’ll call Darius, walking around the party wearing only a banana leaf tied around his waist. This may (or may not) be the same fellow who called from a Mauritanian jail to say that he was caught crossing the border illegally after hours on his return trip. It’s hard to say, and again, even harder to prove.

It’s safe to say that Team Mauritania, using it’s own twisted metric system, made a strong showing at WAIST 2005. Other Peace Corps teams seemed to admire us (you guys are so crazy!), and the non-Peace Corps teams dreaded our very existence, resorting to strategies such as trying to intimidate us with logic. However, I’ve learned that criticisms from expatriate soccer moms like “you guys have too many batters in your lineup!” tend to sound a bit off the mark when countered with comments like “take off your pants!”

After a few days on bush taxis I returned to site, self-sentenced to a thousand hours of volunteering in my community until WAIST 2006. English classes and computer lessons are gaining momentum, the beignets are still fresh every morning at 7:30, and my home and garden are slowly coming together. But no matter happens in Kiffa, I’m unlikely to forget what may or may not have happened last week in Dakar.

* Not to be confused with my legitimately bad writing, this is a reference to Susana Herrera’s novel Mango Elephants in the Sun, a re-telling of her two long, boring years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon.