Activity's killing the actor

Nouakchott, Mauritania - The southern edge of the Sahara. The sands and the scrubs, the chaos and nonsensical logic, the diaspora of hungry souls coming to a hopeless place looking for opportunity. The slums of sand and fermenting piles of garbage and animals that looks like Bombay to the cultureless nouvelle riche mansions of cheap fabrication reminescent of a suburb of San Diego. Either way the sand gets in your food.

What is this place? What am I doing here? This screed is not a guidebook; it's not a portrait of a country. Just a few simple words.

I've begun a self defined, unfunded (but verbally supported) project in search of recordings, of music, of musicians, of the sounds. An audio picture of my world, in the spirit of the Alan Lomaxs' and Harry Everett Smiths'. Guerilla anthropology of epicurean proportions in strict denial of "the collapse of the American economy." Thus, mounting a website (www.sahelsounds.com) I continue to wander around and collect pieces of something, turn down recording contracts and marriage proposals all in a fuzzy effort. I blame the dust storms.

It's most interestingly to see a city built while at the same time it's clearly headed for failure and abandoment. What a better place than to make a strong argument for the epicurean indulgences. Yet Islam, the tradition that raged across the North of Africa and down across the Sahara a millenia ago, is still strong as ever. No drinking, no dancing. And the African long standing traditions of cliterectomies sap the argument for sexual indulgences. No, the people of Mauritania live for tomorrow, whether it's the hopeful future of United States VISA or the spirtual union with Allah. Meanwhile, Nouakchott is lost in the frenzy, and continues to grow onto epic proportions.

One of the more enjoyable questions from tourists as they enter Nouakchott is "where is the center?" We laugh, as there is none. Perhaps you could call the Presidential Palace the "impact crater" of the city's birth. It was on the grounds of the Palace that the first president resided, albeit in a tent. But the city rushed outwards so quickly before it had a chance to establish itself. So we answer question with question, in poetic form: "what is it you’re looking for?"


The Bling

"You want music, go to Mali. What are you doing in this desert!?"

The cab driver explains, rather screams at me. He swerves left and right among the oncoming headlights, beams solidified by the smokey night dust. I try to expain my reasoning.

Frusturated, he shakes his head. "You do what you want, you stay here, grow old. Die here." He's been here for fifteen years, from Ghana. He shakes my hand when he learns I'm American, and he loves Obama. But he can't understand why I would be in Mauritania.

However, my schedule continues to grow, filling with appointment after rendevouz, meeting scores of musicians, lessons and collaborations, concerts and studio sessions, old songs and new dreams.

For four days, I rehearse in an upstairs concrete bunker, an apartment in one of the standard Soviet style complexes in Medina Trois. The apartment sitting room is dark and hazy, either from dust kicked upwards into the second floor window or cigarette smoke.

The room is Khadim's, the percussionist and Djembe player, a young man from Senegal who came to Nouakchott to work the grill until the early hours at his brother's restaurant, to "make it on his own, and be a man," rather than lounge around at his parents house in Dakar. The pianist and sometimes guitarist Boucar, is a sturdy person, both in character and in figure. He is married and along with his child observes the responsibility of a nonsmoking, uncaffineited lifestyle (non drinking not too difficult giving the scarcity of booze). The singer, and probably self defined ringleader is Sidi Baba. More legend then individual, the bold demeanor of a celebrity in his bright African print clothing and black boots and waving dreadlocks. Sidi is well known, a local celebrity, as I learn when we navigate the dusty streets of the neighborhood making numerous house visits and extended African greetings (ca va? ca va. ca va bien. bien, bien. ca va? bien, hamdullah. ca va. ca va? ca va....ca va.).

The procedure is quite confusing to me, as the band speaks a common first language of Wolof. A hook and piano accompanient, a grandiose ending or cinematic refrain and then:

<Unintelligble Wolof, lots of hand waving and excited gestures, nods of heads, countdown to begin playing...>

I'm expecting a small show, but when the taxi arrives it has to push through a mob of surly youths lurking outside, peering over the wall to sneak in past the heavily guarded door. The "Maison de Jeune" is a gift of the Chinese for the youth of Mauritania (and another foreshadow of imperial take over) - a two part complex, small high school sized theater, and an unnecessarily large basketball court. The bleachers are full, and other than the stage at the far end of the court it has all the resemblance of a high school football game - particularly in the choice attire of the young men, American Hip Hop fashion borrowed from the most recent music videos, a testament to global technology. Baggy jeans and backward caps, silver chains with dollar signs, we could just as well be in any American inner city.

We're ushered in past the crowd and the searching eyes, Sidi not disappointing in a white booba, about thirty necklaces, and walking with a cane to the backstage. Neverthless, the show progresses to the main act without us - some problem with lacking cables and equipment for our keyboardist. They arrive in the back, in the dark, in a new Mercedes, and as they rush the stage, the youth stream out from the bleachers to meet them.

What can I say about Mauritanian hip hop? The production is slick and professional, the most basic computer affording the opportunity to produce anything anywhere given the sufficient dedication. Whie the sound and samples are largely indistinguishable to their American counterparts, occasional songs will feature sampled traditional music, griots wail issuing out over the thumping Atlanta bass line. But Hip Hop owes much to it's lyrically structure, and to that I am unable to comment. Due in part to the diaspora, more to the fractured ethnic diversity of West Africa, the rap is a mixture of French, Pulaar, Wolof, Hassinya, and Soninke (and English: "Throw your hands in the air," etc.). I can only rely on hopeful progression of translations to gain some semblance of meaning - lamentations of social ills and daily struggles. One rapper ends on a particular note of clarity, at least for me. " F--- the Coup D'Etat," he shouts as he throws down the microphone and walks off the stage.

At the edge of cinquieme, the sandy streets widen, the houses are sparser. The city is giving way to the belt of Sahel that seperates Nouakchott from the ocean. The city planners in their infinite wisdom built the city a good 6 kilometers from the ocean. The settlement is slowly stretching outwards, extending its giant fingers of garbage to the desert sea,

Basra is the African quarter on the way to the coast, but it stands in stark contrast to cinquieme. This is the African 'burbs, the place that people come to settle and build a new house with the money they've earned from business or family in Europe. Even the air is cleaner here, the wind fresh from its transatlantic journey, the first touchdown on the continent.

It's here that I meet Yacoub Konni, a Malian guitarist from a musical family. The youngest of the family, his work is primarily with rap - sparse accompaniment, his brother plays the guitar with a short acoustic loop while he spits a rap, poetry. His brother, Papisse is also a musician, a guitarist and a producer.

"The problem with music is that it's not supported by the Mauritanian government. For example - Maison de Jeune. When it first opened, it was just that, the house of the young, a place for the youth to showcase their music. If you wanted to perform, all you had to do was ask. But over the years, the cost starts to increase. 20,000, 50,000, now it is 200,000 ougiya to have a show."

"Corruption?" I ask, the usual answer to most questions in Africa.

"Yes, that's one reason. But the real reason is that it's a place for the youth to exchange ideas. All the rappers here, they all speak about the government, about their unrest, their conditions of their lives. So obviously the government isn't going to sponsor these events, this movement."

The challenges faced by the musicians are primarily that of recognition. The government certaintly does nothing to promote the music, and it could even be argued that they work towards supressing it.

One possible explanation is that the image which the ruling families wish to maintain - the ideal of Mauritania, the conservative vision of the white Moor, the sweeping pastoral vistas, the camels and the nomad in his fluttering booboo. The music of the Pulaar is an expression of a minority in a country that would rather maintain a monolithic culture than mine it's riches in its diversity. There's also a fear in intrusion of Western Culture in the trojan horse of Western Culture, and since the Minister of Culture reports directly to the Minister of Islam, jazz and hip hop are obviously marginalized forms of expression.

But perhaps more important is the general fraternization that is ingrained in the government. In the all too recent transition from nomadic tribes to centralized government, the warlords have simply traded their camels for Mercedes, their booboos for Gucci, their camp raids for coup d'etats. The role of the musician in traditional Mauritanian society comes from the south, the culture of the griot. Their songs are nothing more than the heaping of praise for the prophet and for the family who's fitting the bill. You can hear them at nights, wailing over the walls of the compounds in the North of town. The lyrics are a somewhat tiring repetition of "what a great family ____ is, look at how much money they have" - in many ways, an appropriate manifestation of a culture that defines nouvelle riche, where self consciousness means how much money you look like you have today, where subtlety is lost in the roar of tacky shiny faux gold and glittering portraits of Mecca. In America, we would call this "ghetto fabulous." In Mauritania, you don't call it anything.

The musician laments the lack of resources, the omitance of Mauritania among the international attention of Senegal, of Mali. There is no school here, no project for advancement of the arts, no studio. The government programs follow the tried and true paths of corruption, awarding contracts and resources to family and friends.

At the root, even through all the work, I am a little worried at the brief appearance of something under the surface. The bands lament about the work that they do, and that they "get no money." Why? It is not so uncommon (but no less offensive for me) to see a musician playing on a stage, approached by a man who begins to throw money at his person, sticking them to his forehead and face. The griot only sings louder, and the audience erupts in applause (but for whom?). But this is not the Western way, nor is it the international marketplace of music. So our Mauritanian musicians are toiling away - but is it for the dream of recognition or for money?


Transmission #1

I dream that I'm on the Moon, or Venus. It's a long convoy of starships to get there, a long ways away. I'm sitting in a bank trying to make sense of the computer system when I meet my African Space Princess. Sarah is her name. Biblical. I'm invited for the company after party later that evening. I'm supposed to leave with Mohammad for Earth later, and I go to our rendevous point: an Asian restaurant run by fat Chinese, one of the waves of imperialists that have come to trample the fledgling planet. Today at least, they have their work cut out for them as a sandstorm blasts against the bamboo tables and delicate umbrellas. The Chinese are running about yelling and tying things down, a classic Chinese fire drill, when Mohammed and the other spacemen arrive. Will I be able to catch a space ride out of here someday? Sure, you can fly tomorrow. Because I met a beautiful girl... Stella, they all intone, one of the more popular interplanetary liasions. No, I plant my words firmly, her name is Sarah. Oh, sure they say, but I know they don't believe in love in the stars.


Guerilla Music

My preferred method of playing music is the most primal and savage, pure unadulterated street performance. Simply put, I sling my guitar over my shoulder (with a homemade strap fashoined from an aquamarine desert turban) and wander out into the world - the dusty garbage strewn slums of cinquieme, the gridlocked exhaust choked capital, the manicured sand of Tevragzen. My audience is whom ever hisses and motions at chance (although I've never turned down a performance for the fairer sex, or the children, god help them, I'm a true man of the people). Performances are often an excercise in the surreal, regalling girls in their pink melafas pushing their tiny cellophane bags of mint with a Chilean folk song or sending a troupe of organized children beggars dancing to Woody Guthrie.

This method, tried and true, is how I meet the bulk of the musicians of who I am to work with, in any capacity. It is also not without its troubles, mostly the challenge that comes with any celebrity. The combined aspects of being both white (and rich and powerful, by extension) and with a guitar is all to enticing to let me pass unmolested. So it is more ofen than not that I'm invited into tea, a prisoner of my own devising.

Walking out the door with the guitar I'm assailed by fans - although to be fair, many are more interested in the guitar than me:

"Please, play a song for me."

"The guitar, can I play it?"

"Give me!"

The truth is I came here to work with musicians in the pure folk environment. That is, too allow whatever happened in my direction, without actually searching them out. This proved out to be far easier than I thought, and I've encountered a huge number of musicians in short time. Too many actually. So the problem becomes to cull out the ones that I do not want to work with, because I'm not interested in their music or simply because they are not interesting people. The ones who assail me in the street aggressively - these are the ones who want to be my friends and to use music as some type of jumping off point, for who knows what. I have no time for them. So my little hand made calender is filled up with scribbled names and times, rendevous and concerts.

Indeed, it's impossibly difficult to do anything here. The problem, then, is not accomplishing things - it's the expectation that the same things can be accomplished at home that could be accomplished here. Throwing together a CD with a digital recording device is simple at home. But in Africa, the batteries you bought are knockoff brand and the other battery store is a taxi ride away, you can't edit the files on the computer because the power keeps cutting out (and the laptop battery doesn't work), you'd go to the Cyber Cafe, but it's on the other side of town, and it's closed today anyways because it's Muslim prayer day - besides you only have an hour to take a shower and you need to walk 10 minutes to the other house because you're all out of water here and the donkey cart with it's water delivery is as certain as anything else.

In exasperation, I want to throw my hands up and despair, but the hilarity of it is too much. Thrawted in my projects, certaintly, but it's a fault of expectations, of assuming what cannot be assumed. It's actually a simple law of factors - take any activity that you want to accomplish, estimate the time it will take, and then multiply it by a number to determine the time. As the number increases, dissatisfaction at not completing the task decreases, until the upper bound, an infinite amount of time, i.e. impossibility, tied to expectation of zero, only with the careful observation of the physics of Africa, cvan you keep your head.


Transmission #4

In a tiny little spaceship, blasting off into the dark. Space is defined but what it isn't. Crammed inside a tiny bubble, a little egg of environment, drifting forever in the same direction. The destination, she told me, is that constellation, that bright star there that forms the neck of the camel.

It's rife with problems, I say. We’re not professionals here and we don't even have a proper ship, just a retrofitted autmobile. Afterwards, you can't even make the proper adjustments to steer in the right direction. You’re bound to whatever line you take. And worst of all, there's no coming back. Even if you could turn around, which you can't, you burn up on reentry, like the instantaneous streak of so many in the night sky.


Anonymous

New York is a place that's not easily forgotten, and those of us who know it speak a common language - words like Nassau, East Village, Uptown.

"Out in Bed Stuy a room like this is only $300."

"Trois-cent? C'est cher!"

Abu is sprawled out on a bed in his blue booboo, difficult to ascertain where his clothing ends and the blankets begin. Besides him, his friend snores approvingly.

"Ah, this is nothing - in Manhattan you'd be spending five times."

Abu tries to do the conversion to Ougiya. "Oh, my head right now. I can't remember my mother."

"You 'can't remember who your mother is' imbecile," his Uncle says, rolling another joint.

They've been smoking "speed ball," crystal or some combination thereof, a fine white powder sniffed up into a ciggarette. The first time for the young boys, and they are reeling from the effects.

I first meet Abu, a strapping white Moor, at a private expat soirie in Las Palmas. In typical African fashion, the expat businessmen and drug dealers mingle with the UN staff and directors of aid agencies, foreign nationals and white moors and black African girls and boyfriends all getting pissed off clandestine booze funneled through the French embassy. "You must meet my Uncle, his is a crazy man. But he is amazing with the guitar."

I'm met at the Cafe by his "boy," a giant African youth, and I chase after to keep up. To my surprise, I notice he is barefoot, marching down the street over the broken rocks and garbage. He leads me through a gate where a massive house is aching and groaning, bearing a permanent unfinished look - like either in construction or deconstruction.

On arrival, I'm whisked away to the second floor, the darkened lair, the opium den, where the grand uncle is hidden away. Or so is my impression. He "was" a great musician at one point. What time has not wrecked has been consumed by alcoholism and benzo addiction. He wears a brown jellaba and a greying coat of matted hair. He's never entirely lucid, and as the night proceeds, his conversation disintegrates into jumbled fragments of half remembered New York English. And his saucer eyes are distant and misdirected into some other place or time.

His brother suffers a similar malady, with half a foot dangling over the side of the boat. When he first introduces himself to me, it's as "39th and Lexington." New York leaves its marks on all of us.

The brother dissapears with a "borrowed" four thousand Ougiya, all the money I have. I wonder how I will take a taxi home. I wish I had given it to the hungry kids rather than a disfunctional alcoholic.

There is no light tonight, except that of the candles. A flurry of footsteps echoing through the hallways precedes a little girl dressed in pink. She walks into the room with a slab of splintered wood.

"Hello, how are you," she says in perfect English.

"She is American, she has an American passport," the uncle proudly proclaims. The little girl beams.

She's distranctingly poking the stick into the candle flame, smoking and smoldering.

"Ah, this girl is crazy, she loves fire too much, she will burn down our house!" He stumbles out the room, wobbling like his shadow in the flickering candlelight. He returns with a young slave in tow, dressed in a yellow t-shirt with in the darkness I think is the resemblance of Malcom X. It's actually Ronaldinho. Uncle's waving his hands and shouting in some incomprehensible gutteral noises (Hassinya) and the young man coaxes the little princess out of the room, flaming torch in hand.

I hear a woman growling and barking from down the stairs, shouting that reverbeates through the brown dusted white tiles, cracked and sagging from all the hate. A figure in a mellafa, covering his face shuffles down the hall and peeks her head into the room, covering her face, coughing. She abhors smoke.

My phone is ringing and the little princess returns, and in her best English, "My Aunt wants you to come."

Downstairs, the giant and sparse parlor is filled with a handful of woman, puffy and multicolored, all wrapped up in round little balls in the melafas like frosted pastries. An offmark high defintion television blares Dragon Ball Z, while a little boy no bigger is all but pressed against the screen. Elevated on a bed, the matriarch is propped up, leaning against the wall. A little crumpled brown thing with a smile of one large white tooth she looks about with a perpetual gaze of astonishment - which for my continued sanity, I hope is delerium.

And as soon as I sit I'm performing a country western waltz on command. The women pause in their frenzied shouting, but for the grandmother. "Play louder!" Uncle shouts, "My mother cannot hear your beautiful voice." He's waving his hands and trying to sing the refrain. His younger sister is clutching to my side. She's covered in a green mellafa, which she's constantly tugging and readjusting to the jangle of a stores worth of bracelets dangling from her wrists and withered hands. The conclusion of the song, sends them clapping and the momentary quitetude immediately is descends into the normal chaos.

"You know, once, Madonna heard one of my songs, and she took it," she smiles, a wide gap between her front teeth (not entirely un-Madonna like).

The family was once one of the grand music families of Nouakchott, but as the night descends into further insanity, I steathily sneak out and abandon the ship, questioning my project - or how far I'm willing to go.


A word of survival in the face of the surreal:

You start by closing your eyes, and breathing deep. Counting back from ten, you let the space between each number dislodge some past memory, of another time in another country, to come tumbling down and hit you on the head. That world, which is made up of the same particles, the same textures, the corporal constant of the veins in your hands, the astronomically sameness of the way the sunlight reflects off a shiny surface to make green spots on your eyelids. The other worlds become a little clearer, and the present fades a little. The men in the turbans become anomalies, victims of mass hysteria, or at the least, theme park inhabitants. The women, hiding under colored sheets or all wrapped up like presents with a big Senegalese bow on top shed their clothes as they step off the street. You regress, and find those other places. You find that line that threads itself through all the worlds and you grab ahold of it, for the blind in the darkness clinging to the cord, the cord is the world.



Transmission #17

I'm waiting for a message from Planet Earth. The radio hisses with a constant hush of static, the blips and whoops, the waves and squeals of a sonic ghost of an ancient supernova. The port window is cold to the touch. A meter thick, but seemingly nothing against the swirling backdrop of innumerable stars. Just then, as if answering my thoughts, the radio crackles and a voice as clear as the memory springs into prominence. "Things are good here, I'm completing my elementary ethics course at the University with a bunch of annoying 19 year old existentialists..." She talks with a hesistant pause in her words, like always. In the silences, I remember, is where she would say the most. That strange kinship of cohabitation of unaudible communication, navigating her feelings through the song of her voice. She tells me she's getting married out in the Alvord desert.

I look out into that expanse of lights. Like the glinting of a drop of a dew, the full intensity and the quality of all that space. A smattering of who knows what - most of it unreachable, unknowable. From this distant, past and unrecovable. I imagine (from here I certaintly can't ascertain one light from another) that I see the Earth, a Pale Blue Dot admist the sea, that I can see the Alvord desert.

I visited there once, with my dad. I'm a grown man then, we're two persons shuttling through the scrublands, the periphery all but a blur, but mostly unchanging. The Southeastern part of the state, there's nothing here. It's a part of the Western world that Manifest Destiny forgot, by then too fatigued and anxious from the unbearable proximity of the sea to rest here. The furthest from any major highway in the continental states. It's where you've been dropped off the map, entered into another time of bizarre creatures like Antelope and Bighorn Sheep. Visitors who come indulge in a certain primitivism, hunters stalking game or astronomers listening to the night sky.

The desert lies on the Eastern side of a mountain range. It's a playa, a massive lake bed of mud, baked by the sun and broken into infinitude of shapes by the jagged black cracks. It's a blinding white in the stark sun and it horizon dissapears into a distant humps of brown mountains. Nevada, maybe.

We're camped alongside a ridge opposite the desert, and I'm looking out over the horizon. This is where the world ends. I can hear my dad nervously rustling the camp. He's starting to feel ill, thinks that his body is about to fail him. This is quite normal, I think, the voice of god is quite loud here. The desert is bleak and timeless and renders us insignificant and mortal in the face of its entirety. Suddenly, I have a similar rumbling in my body, a flourishing in the stomach that spreads downwards to an aching in my feet. "I," I proclaim, "will one day cross the Alvord desert." I speak it with conviction, because I know it to be true. My dad nods in agreement, because he's unbelievablely supportive.

She's still speaking. "I still don't understand what it is you're doing. But if it makes you..."

The first gift she bought me, I was sitting in the kitchen of her shared house in Portland. She's making coffee. I have known her for years, but not as a lover, and I'm (I think) visibily uncomfortable, trying to determine how to perform in this character role, on this feminine stage. There are lots of scented creams and oils in the bathroom, all pink and pastel colored. Everything is so clean, except for the long hairs that cling to the porcelain sink. The book is called "Backpacking Russia," or something of the sort - a navigational chart for the wastelands of Siberia, the trodden route of the Silk Road. When she first started sleeping in my bed, my wall decorations in the room were maps. Directly across from our figures, a Michelin map of Kazakhstan. Straight lines and their derivative squiggly brethren connecting unpronouncable names. It was for some time that I wanted to get lost somewhere.

"I wish you the best, stay in touch..." There is a slight pause and then as the transmission breaks, the silence disintegrates into the exhale of static rush. Quietude, resume, continue. The ship drifts on.


Happiness

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."


The curse of William Blake. Can you find happiness anywhere? Then why go anywhere? These are the questions I pose another morning in Nouakchott, Corporal aches and spirtual faitigue, unabetted by the sheets of sand that smother the sky.

I've become my task of traveling again, prior to even packing my bags. When you start to move again it's imperative to follow certain rules - to assure the departure and to ease the shock. A departure is a beginning, but that is a personal thing. Beginnings are easy. It's the ending that is difficult.

I again study the maps. There are some in the foyer of the Auberge, the room I wandered into disgruntled and restless three months ago - Mali, Senegal, Mauritania. I trace roads and lines, feel the texture as I soar over the landscape with my fingertips. I imagine scared natives fleeing their homes, clasping infants to their breasts and casting fearful looks to the heavens where a giant pink hand breaks throught the clouds. From here, in the Auberge, it all feels the same. No map is that detailed.

Tonight is a Muslim religious festival. The prophets birthday, or something. The streets are noisy, the mosque is shouting in a scracthy megaphone. Its staccato could just as well be an advertisement, the way he parses his words. They tell me they will be awake all night. But just to make prayers. I can't help but feel somewhat left out.

I am a man who thrives on variety - a true American. The Statue of Liberty lit the torch, and they came, like bugs to a flame. My genetic sequence is more "Pan-" than the most adventorous New York restaurant. My country gave birth to the television, then watched it grow in channels, until the choice wasn't enough anymore, so they made the Internet. I was forged in the matrixes of information, cybernetic attention deficit disorder. The world is full of their tradition: the French with baguettes and scarves, the Brazilians with their footballs and churasscos, the Pulaar with folk griots and erectomies. But America takes all traditions. We will listen to all under the banner of the stars and stripes, in the dedicated University halls and Editorial columns, we will invoke relativity and everything will be equally true!

And with that knowledge, what wealth, especially amongst the squalor of the world - the slave colonies of the rich countries. What more can a young American do, but revel in the epicurean life. The world is open to you. Let freedom ring!

Poverty is the great reality, said Henry Miller, but this depends on what poverty you speak. Surely, he was in refutation of the chase of wealth. In that perhaps I have succeeded, as I crouch here on the foam matress spread out on the floor basking in the low watt (but modern) bulb as giant roaches scuttle off in the shadows.

I share my room with any number of creatures. The flies are impressive in their number, the spiders in their size, and the roaches in their art of appearances. Sand and dust rains down from the ceiling, edging in around the rafters and under the corrugated steel roof. Cleaning is maintenance, like brushing your teeth.

"You like squalor, don't you?" Kelly the American schoolteacher from the secluded woods of Northern Maine. She lives on an island. We both live in Nouakchott and her for much longer than me. But in two very different cities.

My compound is all concrete and sand. The rooms behind metal doors. It is all planar and utilitarian, minimal costs of construction with materials on hand, lacing the concrete with sand and shells like a cartel cutting their cocaine with rat poision. But then, here, everything is cut with sand.

There is a hustling about when I'm leaving the house. The young boys are chasing a chicken through the courtyard, and when I kick open the door and step out side, I see they've already cut the necks of two of the three chickens. One is still lamely flapping around in the gristle a small trickle of blood draining into the ground. Later, I step up the concrete ledge into the bathroom, brimming with flies. The sticky floor is covered in plucked white feathers.

If you could strip away all the intrigue of the place, the differences - what would it be? Living in the slums, amidst refuse and barely functioning amenities, ubiquitious power cuts, water carted in by the barrel, cohabitation amongst animals. No kitchen for cooking and all meals endless variations of rice and fish prepared in the fearfully unsanitary conditions (goats poking their noses into covered pans of fish resting for hours in the equitoreal sun). A diaspora of language, mostly incomprehensible, where even in the colonial language, I'm limited to a vocabulary and self expression of a head trauma victim. My romantic relationship with a girl far too young, poorer than dirt, mostly illiterate, and who's aspirations involve choosing which hair weave to wear for the day, conversation limited, probably thankfully, to a shared language that neither of us speak with any fluency. My days are long and mostly without purpose, wandering around dust and exhaust choked streets, dodging traffic and small children who run after me to touch me and young men who want nothing more than to have a friend with the color of my skin.

New York has culture, in excess! Stimulation in the likes of like minds. And what does Western culture thrive on then the artifacts of the world, removed from their proper place? A Brooklyn loft party of tight black jeaned clad boys and girls in oversized pink sun glasses dancing to Brazilian Funk Carioca and Ivorian Coup D'Ecale is no different than had the Nepalese wooden temple freize in the Metropolitan Museum - sliced out of it's place and carried into a new context where it can be analyzed, sketched, appreciated, understood, but in the guise of authenticity, when nothing could be further adulturated. The culture has value because it's different. Therefore, shiiting into an overflowing hole in the ground is somehow more valuable than shiiting on a porcelain toilet.

Africa can quickly dash ones hopes for idealism. Europes bears its scars with pride and nostalgia, ancient castles and expired fiefdoms, monuments to another time. America's wounds covered in terraforming of plains into cornfields into strip malls, like the deft hand of a cosmetic surgeon, erasing the natives from history. But Africa's tribal sores still fester and burn, one closing only with the metasis and opening of another. Even the NGO's with their ubiquitous white SUVs seem more interested in the next expatriate function than towing their party line (propaganda and telvision for the donors, cases of whiskey for the workers). Amongst the African's, it would be difficult to hear someone claim they "want to help." Yet given the size of the family that they are obligated to support, the average African gives far more than the American capitalist (even if their income is spent on frivilous things, like a single ocupancy habitation).

So where does that leave you, young traveler? Why are you here? I answer with a simple twist of fate, perhaps a dash of madness. The American obsession with variety is my critique, it is also my burden. I have merely carried onto another level, far exceling my homebound compatriats who take their small doses of world in Park Slope, Starbucks CDs, or Sundance documentaries. However, if all these things are empty, or at least just the same, then I may as well be in Topeka than in Nouakchott.

Younger, I read the popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. At the end of a page or two of text, you would be presented with a question and two or three options, and the corresponding pages for the choices. But I would never turn directly to them, marking my place with a finger to read over all the options. There were plenty of endings, but not all of them were "the right" one. We can only make educated guesses. And in the meantime, why we shuffle the pages, the time marches on.



Epilogue

That night, in a mansion filled with candles, I fell in love all over again. I've always enjoyed making women laugh, and consider my charm to be undeniable. If they smile and laugh, then they understand my currency. I don't mean the little laughter, or the savy smile, but the eyes all lit up awaiting the next morsel, the banter that never tires.

In an old letter from an ex-lover I find a quote from Borges about the problem with destiny - which it is irrevocable, and we're pegged to the future, to the present.

So there I was at the end of the earth. The story could not be any stranger. The natives berate eachother in incomprehensible gargle. Even if it could be understood, it still wouldn't make any sense. The sand is in the wind, and it bangs against the city walls demanding entry. Little Democritic granules that are shouting with helpful compassion: "You see, everything turns to sand!" But they won’t be heard over the loud din of berating voices, the rattling automobiles chattering in exhaust and horn blasts.

Waga is from Burkina Faso, and would appear stoic and even dangerous with the three tribal scars marking his face, if he weren't always smiling and scheming after every Western girl who passes through the Auberge. Mohammad shakes his head with that perpetual cynicism which he cultivates so well - "He sees a girl for five minutes and already imagines himself as a grandfather living in Paris." The who laughed for me told me she was going to China, and I considered that I could just as well leave for a new continent. I will not blame Waga for wanting love, to be loved.

At the party again, in the kitchen. I've set my whiskey and melting ice on the countertop and I'm letting the acoustics of the kitchen lift the blues progression over the roar of the voices. People are always in the kitchen, wherever you go. A blonde Spanish girl who leans in to sing a refrain - "I'm lonely, I'm sooo lonely, I'm so lonely, I want to die." Have truer words ever been spoken?

I often dream that I'm on another planet. I like to tell people I'm in voluntary exile, but it's more like limbo. "Nouakchott is a dead city," Aly's sister told me, but I think her English was spoken in error. Nouakchott is a city OF the dead. Here at the end of the world, at the edge of the planet, teetering on the brink of an enormous void, we lose a bit of ourselves here. Sometimes I wonder if I have died. I'm here, on the phone, talking with voices that scratch and echo over the satellite delay, they're speaking to me through a seance and my laughter rattles the table. In this plane of phantoms, flitting figures from a infinitude of places and times all crammed into a waiting room the size of a city of decay, our totem is our memory, or tailsman is identity, holding on is our sentence.

Maybe when you die, you don't really die until you forget. Truly forgetting, that you are a seperate, that you are a one, and in that absence remembering that you are one with all. The love was the thing that fused us into one entity, a hybrid of two hearts and four eyes, two pairs of hands, one pair clasped together in defiance of both lonliness and god. So strong a sentiment, who could willingly forget the feeling of existence, even if the punishment is a lifetime of limbo?

At the end of the world, every three days or so, the sand takes to the air. The natives wrap up their faces like accident victims. Dust finds its way everyway, under your door, between your teeth, even under your sleeping eyelids. The desert is defined by what it is not, and as long as we hover in limbo it continues to call on us, like an itinerant lover. That only once we see the sand for what it is and stop fighting it will we find our rest, our peace.

"A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go."

- Auguries of Innocence, W. Blake

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Continuing Eastwards...

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