It starts with that sweet smell and stillness, timis' first arrival in Djilor. The smell of a thousand women cooking. All the children run in (no yelling toubab) for fear of jinnae, the men at the mosque singing throaty songs as they are now, outside my hut door (are they really the same people?)
I spend the first day in misery -the scorching sun, the bleached, pulverized sand, I'm falling with light and heat blindness from one to the other -but I can't tell what angle my body is playing to either -like skiing in a powder blizzard.
Everything I own is covered in a layer of dust. Petrified __(fill in the)___shit, horse, goat, chicken, human -and trash, no nutrients -this is dead soil, and its coating my bed and my pillows. I'm cleaning my dishes out on my hot steaming dirty slab of cement -sweat streaked down my side. This is the moments a grass hut does not seem so quaint but CRAZY. I sleep, curled up, fetal like, under the stars.
The second day is better-no longer so tired I want to drop -I wash clothes until I'm cross-eyed and weary from the heat.
But what I wanted to say, last night before I passed out face down with the candles and my back door wide open -was, its the people. They both draw me in and push me away.
The people just normal with normal xalaats and normal lives -living out here in the woods locked in by language and difficult living -its like I've passed into another world.
Are they my friends? Shooting the shit around the TV or all zigzagged on a single mat like a genie carpet out on the sand under the stars -Will they forget me? Me, not the legend of me. Will I forget them.
Ahmet Fall. Koumba Njong. Fary Sall. Diomaye Ndong. Seynabu Niin. Nabu Njay. Fatou Senghor.
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