Frambara

I believe that it is impossible for any reality to exist so miraculous that it can authoritatively prove the existence of God. However, the fact that the United States government assigned me to live and work in Mali because of my background in French is so absurd, in fact, that it ipse facto proves that if there is a God, He must have a sadistic sense of humor.

You see, the general rule among Peace Corps Assignment Officers is that if an applicant has any knowledge of the French language, they get sent to Africa, anyone who can speak Spanish goes to Latin America, and that one linguistics major who wrote her thesis on Kyrgyz poetry gets sent to Kyrgyzstan. This rule generally makes a lot of sense, for it efficiently utilizes Volunteers pre-existing skills and places them in communities where they can most readily integrate. And when PC Washington was going through my application way back when, they were apparently very impressed by the fact that I took 6 years of French back in junior high and high school – so much, in fact, that they decided that I should be assigned to a country in Francophone Africa.

The fact that I do know French has been more of a liability than an asset here in Mali. When people like me arrive with a solid background in French in this officially Francophone country, we wrongly assume that we can communicate with the locals and that they will understand what we are saying. I am one of those pretentious assholes who spends his free time reading Camus and Baudrillard in the original, so when I first came here and bank tellers told me that they too spoke French and I reflexively told them what to do with my money in the conditional pluperfect subjunctive tense, time and time again I would become enervated when they mangled my instructions. Presuming that people here actually speak French only leads to situations in which the Francophones get frustrated, the locals feel lorded over, and everyone loses.

Even in Africa where each and every tribe has developed their own language which they have been speaking for thousands of years, there are some African countries which have wholeheartedly embraced the language of their former colonial masters. In Ghana where there are 47 traditional tongues, the government is promoting English as the single national language in order to mitigate tribal identification and shore up national identity. Some former French colonies like Senegal and Benin have also forged such a post-tribal national culture that parents raise their children to converse exclusively in the official, formerly colonial language. And such profound cultural shifts don’t just happen with a presidential proclamation; the reason why English is the common vernacular in Ghana and French is so prevalent in Senegal and Benin is that the governments of these countries have spent the past half century investing in the education of their citizens, particularly in literacy and language instruction.

Senegal and Benin are exceptions in that they truly are Francophone countries. In the bulk of the former French colonies like Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, there is an elite class of government officials, soldiers, gendarmes and teachers who use French for the workplace. And there is an even smaller minority of persons who do not work in government but can command the French language because they were born to such immense wealth to have attended private lycées. Though after decades of gross government neglect of the public welfare, the vast majority of adults have never received even a cursory elementary education, more than 70 percent of the population is absolutely illiterate, and they definitely do not speak more than a few token words outside of their local tribal tongue.

… But if asked, they will tell you that they do in fact speak Tubabukan ¬– the “language of the white people”. Of course, there is no such thing – the Tubabukan spoken here is a patois hybrid of French and Bambara we call “Frambara”; the nonsense that Malians who have never interacted with foreigners mislead each other into thinking is truly the “language of the white people”; usually, it is only Bambara laced with a few French nouns, maybe "est-ce que", "le voila", or - my favorite - "peut-etty". And likewise, most Malians are taught that if you see a Tubab, the proper thing to do is to address them in “their own language”:

“Bozu le Blanc!”

Here, the colloquial “Ça va?” – “how goes it?” – has transformed into functional equivalent of “Bozu”. People will shout “Sava! Sava!” and they think that they are greeting me. It is also common for Malians to greet Tubabs “Sava! Sava sava byen!” – which must have originated in the dialogue of an introductory French textbook “Ça va?”/ “Ça va bien!” and has now regressed into a greeting uttered by one single person. Thus it is thought that "Bozu sava sava biyen" is how we white people say hello.

The most entertaining phenomenon is how Frambara has taken certain phrases and so warped their meaning that they induce cringes in anyone with a rudimentary understanding of their etymological origins. For example, in Mali it is perfectly customary for people to come up to me at 8:00 in the morning and greet “Bo swa, Monsieur!”

“Soir means ‘evening’. You cannot greet anyone ‘Bon soir!’ until the sun is setting.”

“No, when you see a white person you are supposed to greet them ‘Bo swa’.”

“That… doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what we do in our country.”

“… As I said…”

Other times I am greeted “Bo swa, Madame!” When this happens I like to think that these kids must have learned this phrase in the context of a female teacher, which must mean that at one point in their short lives they have in fact sat in a classroom. But there are other Tubabukan bastardizations that suggest more nefarious settings.

Children in the cities greet me with a bastardization of French with a mission: “Bozu cadeau? Sava sava cadeau?” When I am confronted with such obscenity, it is apparent that some asshole taught this kid that if they see a white person, all they have to do is say these magic words and the white person will smile and give them a lollipop. But when you’ve been living here for an extended amount of time and have been petitioned for a cadeau every single day by kids and adults alike who think of white people as arcade machines which will give you a toy if only you toggle the joystick and push their buttons the right way, these childlike Frambara-isms quickly become downright dehumanizing.

The absolute worst bastardization of French is when I’m in the city and I’m approached by one of the barefoot, tomato can-toting beggar children and they blurt out, “Tubabu! Do mwa cinq mille francs!” Initially, such an utterance impresses me in that it is in fact a complete sentence – a lot more than can be said of 95 percent of the "French" spoken here. However, in every such situation it is fairly obvious that if I were to reply “Préferez-vous un billet de cinq mille francs ou cinq billets d’une mille francs?” or even “Tu t’appelles comment?” the kid would have no idea what I’m saying. These kids are never going to be taught proper French greetings, introductions, how to ask for directions or the weather. “Do mwa cinq mille francs!” constitutes the entirety of that garabout’s French, because their “Quranic teacher” only instructs their cash cows in that one saying to finance their sedentary lifestyles. Accordingly, the marabouts instill the despicable misunderstanding that the language of Senghor, Césaire and Fanon is the language of humble supplication to white people.

The logic of a Malian greeting white people in Tubabukan is inherently racist – not necessarily a vicious ideology of racial supremacy, but at least the belief that all persons of a similar skin tone are indifferentiable. Of course, if a given Malian is walking down the street and they see person with pale skin, to the Malian it makes sense to greet this stranger in Tubabukan when 70 percent of all of the melanin-deficient they will ever interact with are in fact French, Belgian, Quebeçois or Luxembourgian. But there are also a lot of Americans, Germans, Spaniards and Italians who come here speaking no French at all, and according to Malian logic they too are greeted “Bozu! Sava sava byen!” because Tubabukan is “the language of the white people” – all of them. The term Tubabu refers to Aryans, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, Latinos, and all non-African persons alike. Even when Japanese or Korean tourists trek through Dogon Country with their brand new video cameras, they too are greeted by the locals “Bozu! Sava bonbon!” When Malians address each and every white person with what they think is “our own language”, it only demonstrates how profoundly unaware they are of the outside world and the crudeness of their racialism.

Even when the adult population addresses made in grammatically correct, polite French along the lines of “Excusez-moi, monsieur, est-ce que tu es perdu?” or “Je vends du pain du qualité superieur!” it strikes me as patronizing and just as innocently racist. When people speak to me in French, it means they assume that I am a lazy NGO worker or gold miner who is only here to interact with government ministers and rarely leaves the hermetically-sealed, self-contained expatriate biodome – or even worse: a tourist.

So when anyone in this country ever speaks to me in French, I instinctively reply in Bambara – and after a few lines of dialogue in which the Bambara is speaking broken Tubabukan and the Tubabu is speaking fluent Bamanankan the former eventually realizes the folly of their efforts and switches gears into their own language. Now that I’m starting to pick up Miniankakan – the really, really local language which only has any use in the tiny homeland of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe, around my home base I can show off how dedicated I am to integration with an even greater effect. The response is universally effusive, for these people have spent their entire lives thinking that they have to learn the language of their former colonial masters if they ever want to do business with the West – with much detriment to their collective self-esteem. Thus when an Occidental comes to live amongst an isolated culture and takes the time to learn to speak to them in their own obscure tongues, the symbolism is lost on no one.

When people ask me why I do not speak to them in French like all the other Tubabs do, I point out the ideological chasm between my country and the Old World powers:

Americainw Mali la kono be Mali kanw kalan tiyenna barisa folofolo Angleterre tun be an mara i na fo jonw ye, ni an ye keleke fo an ye an yere ka jamana mine. I be se ka fo ka an te fe ka jamanw were mara.

“Americans in Mali take the time to learn Malian tongues largely because of our own history of exploitation by the British and our War for Independence… You could say that our own experience has left a particular distaste for colonialism.”

More Fun With Racial Identity

Segou, Segou Province

Due to our long, sad history of racial oppression, segregation and discrimination, In America it is essentially verboten for a white person to at all acknowledge the race of a non-white classmate, business associate or anyone but your best of friends - unless they bring up the topic of race first, or you are walking out of the latest Spike Lee joint in which case it is expected.

And so in America, it is particularly rude to address someone by their race or ethnicity. To my understanding, to call the attention of a perfect stranger by shouting the name of their race is reminiscent of the days of slavery and Jim Crow when Southern gentlemen would tell the "boy" to shine their shoes. For example, if a white person walking along 132nd Street in the year 2008 were to purchase a hot dog from an African-American street vendor, the polite thing for the Caucasian customer to do would be to ask, "Excuse me, sir, may I please buy a hot dog?" and go about the transaction as if there were no racial difference at all between the two parties. It would be frowned upon for the white person to say "hey, black man, gimme a hot dog!" It would even be rude to call his attention with "Hey, hot dog vendor!" because to address someone by their profession would be to disrupt the natural foundation of equality upon which our casteless society was supposedly built.

That is why I think I have such a difficult time adjusting to the sheer literalness of the Bambara language and Malian culture. Here, it is quite customary for people in the market to say Tubabu, e be nka concon san - "Hey white French person, buy my cucumber!" Here in Mali it is no different than saying "Hey you with the blue shirt." Though every time I am addressed as Tubabu I cringe as a little bit of my liberal conceit of racial nonexistence is punctured by the inescapable fact that most people in Mali think of me as first and foremost a white person with oodles of money, and secondly that I am a Frenchman gallivanting around his former colony.

When I am at my village where people know my name and that I am an American who is there to work, it is not so bad. When in Sinsina or Sanadougou, if someone calls me Tubabu I politely tell them that my name is Madu and the next time they remember. But here in the bustling metropolis of Segou, only a handful of people know me, and so my racial identity precedes me by a full city block. In no other place have I ever before been made so conscious of my race. It is kind of like how I had never been made so aware by the society around me of the fact that I possess a Y-chromosome until The Elements of Style gigged at Mount Holyoke College.

I have become so accustomed to the crowds of children chanting Tubabu! Tubabu! that I have learned that in order to make it into a positive experience, I must seize the opportunity for cross-cultural education. When people call me Tubabu, I like to demonstrate the absurdity of the social construction of race by turning social conventions upside down. So when a kid runs up to me and points and proclaims "You are white!” I now announce with equal gusto trying to mimic their every intonation, "And you are black!" What follows is an awkward pause during which I want to believe that they realize the inferior quality of their conversational skills, and I hope that every time I do this it brings us a step closer to a post-racialist, post-nationalist global society.

When more business-oriented adults bring up my race, there is only one direction that that conversation could possibly be heading; Tubabu, wari di ya - "White French person, give me money!" So when people say that to me now - which is maybe every 5 or 10 minutes - I like to say Farafin, wari di ya - "Black person, give me money!" Often they think that I didn't understand so they ask me again, and I repeat, "Yes, I am white and you are black, so you should give me money!" The response I get is a puzzled look of astonishment as though I have traveled back in time, reversed the course of history to institute the Bambaras’ military occupation and exploitation of the French, and forever altered the space-time continuum. They often think that I am severely mentally ill and leave me alone.

It is particularly difficult in the market though when I am clearly purchasing food to put in my mouth and other people would prefer that I purchase food so that they can put it in their mouth instead, such as when I am buying a meat sandwich and a hoard of eight or ten garibu surround me and shove their plastic buckets in my face chanting Tubabu! Wari di ya! Tubabu! Wari di ya! as though it is the Qur’anic trope which they are supposed to be learning that week. For such sticky situations I need to come up with real humdingers in order to clear my path, so now I often employ a line like:

Sisan n be sogo san. N be fe ka denmisen fitini sogo dun. N be se ka wari di e ma, nka folo n ba fe ka e bolo ni e sen ta, oko n be na u dun.

“I am shopping for meat now. I want to eat little children meat. I can give you money, but first I must take your arms and legs, and then I will eat them!”

After that, the little beggar children usually put their hands in the air and run away screaming – which makes me think that I’m making full use of the novelty of my perceived racial identity.

Tubab Like Me

In the de facto class segregation of the United States of America, I have not had many opportunities to be overtly consciuos of my race. After all, though I put "white" on my census forms, never before have I ever felt really white. I mean, honestly, what the fuck is white culture? Playing golf, eating mayonnaise and wearing those stupid salmon-colored pants? I don't do any of that shit. I come from Russian, Polish, Hungarian Slavic stock, I identify with fellow ethnic Jews, musicians and earthy hippies. Ok, so my freshmen and sophomore years I accepted Hadley Arkes' invitations to the Colloquium on the American Founding - which is pretty much the whitest thing I've ever done. But I found that if being white consists of dressing up in a stuffy suit and listening to people who have had boring missionary sex exactly 2.3 unmemorable times wax philosophically about their bizarre fixation on weird, kinky sex and its compatability with Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, then I have very little to identify with white people.

Ergo, I do not think of myself as white. I think of myself as a Jewish democratic revolutionary.

But here in Mali, I am white, uptight and out of sight. Here people who do not know my name as Madu Doumbia #5 call me "Tubab" - which is a derogatory term like "honky" or "cracker", only it is even worse because it specifically refers to the French. You see, unlike us Americans who should be grateful to France for bestowing upon us le Marquis de Lafeyette, victory at the Battle of Yorktown, and the Statue of Liberty, Mali suffered under the cruel, exploitative colonial occupation of the French from 1880-1960. Granted, "Western Soudan" as it was then known, was subject to considerably less direct exploitation than more convenient colonies like Algeria for nothing more than the Bambara tribes were a long distance up the malaria-ridden Niger River. The French tried to play the role of "mission civilatrice" here with a system of Francificating and pacificating "Western" schools, and so many generations later Bambara still fear white people coming to their village because the last time that happened back in the day they took everyone's kids by gunpoint. During the First and Second World Wars there was also a lot of involuntary conscription of military-aged men.

So when I'm walking around the village of Sinsina and little kids start crying because they see my very obviously non-Bambara face, it's not because I did anything particularly wrong. They're crying because they heard stories about the Tubabs who came here 50 years ago and stole grandpa away. And thus I am the recipient of the blame for something that I did not do, something that my parents and my grandparents did not even do, but something that a race of people whom I do not even really identify with, a race which has only over the course of the past 30 years begun to accept the most Islamophobic and Arab-hating of my people as members of their exclusive country club, did before my parents were even biologically capable of conceiving me. But then again, as anyone who has ever been to Israel/Palestine, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia might know, ethnic conflicts of the past are not dead; in fact, they're not even past.

Let's just say that its very discouraging integrating into Bambara society when all the collective sins of White People are held against me.

But I manage. Adults in Sinsina treat me with more respect, and they all know that my name is Madu Doumbia #5. Though a lot of kids still come up to me when I'm trying to study my Bambara flashcards, "Tubab! Tubab! You have a camera! Take a picture of me! Give me candy!" There is nothing more emasculating than being thought of as another stupid Tubab with nothing to offer more than my bank account. I look at them really menacingly at them and ask "What is my name?" And if they say Tubab one more time, then I go right for the Achilles' heel of any naked child - the armpit - and tickle them until they call me by my real fake name. So far it has worked - none of the kids in my 'hood call me Tubab anymore.

But its when I go to the city that I really get it bad. The only white people other than vicious colonialists whom the Malians have ever known are rich, stupid white people who come on buses to see the mosque of Djenne and the erstwhile capitol of Islamic culture-turned-dusty small arms trading post that is now Timbouctou. So except for when I'm in Sinsina where people know what us Peace Corps Trainees are all about, i.e. whenever I go to Bamako, people are very, very friendly - because they think that I might give them money. Beggars are really aggressive here, because unlike American beggars they aren't looking to buy drugs to get high - they want to buy food so they don't starve to death. And they're used to French-looking i.e. white people feeling collective guilt for the years of colonial occupation and handing out money. They go right up to my face and in either French or Bambara say "Money! Money!" And they do not go away until I tell them Allah m'a son; i.e. Allah will give you money if you pray harder.

Though everyone mistakes me for a big, stupid tourist, unlike the tourists, oilmen and the Embassy staff, Peace Corps Volunteers as a rule are very poor - we eat what the peasants eat, only with enough additional nutritional content so that our teeth don't rot out. I don't feel any white guilt towards the ubiquitous beggars in Bamako because 1) I don't have any money to give them; 2) I'm spending 2 years improving their country's water sanitation infrastructure, also with no money. I have become so quickly accustomed to Malian nutritional poverty that I have come to eat anything that I can get my hands on (which is also the reason why I ended up in the Bamako Peace Corps Medial Unit for the night a few weeks back - I learned my lesson that I should be more discerning as to what potentially parasite-laden fruits I put in my mouth)

Likewise, many Malian businessmen are also used to white people being really rich, really stupid, and really manipulable. It is hard knowing when you're getting ripped off; for example, I bought this really awesome shirt for 2000 West African francs - about $4.73, which I thought was a steal. Later I found out that if I were not white, that same taylor would have charged me more like $500 francs, or slightly more than 1 dollar. The standard of living in Mali is really, really low, and so prices are so low that my Western orientalist mind cannot confound how cheap life really is.

Thankfully, over the past month I have learned enough Bambara that I can actually haggle at the markets now. My Jewish mother would be proud. Hey Mom! I can bargain in another language for things that are already dirt cheap!!!! Malian merchants are used to being able to rip off stupid Tubabs, but what they're not used to are Tubabs who actually speak their language. I can now say things to the effect of I am not a stupid Tubab. I live in Mali, and I do not have money. If you give me stupid Tubab prices, I'm giving my money to the guy next to you who sells the same bootleg merchandise. So far, the few times I have pulled that one out, the merchants have caved and lowered their prices 75% to what actual Malians pay.

As my Bambara slowly improves and I can talk about more high-level subjects than my food preferences and bodily functions, hopefully people will treat me more as an individual person than as a generic Tubab. Perhaps one day the friendlier kids who come up to me saying "Bonjour! Bonjour!" will realize that I'm not from goddamn motherfucking France. I'm from America, dammit, and I'm not white, I'm a self-hating Jew. I do not yet know how to explain Marx's theories about post-nationalist proletarian consciousness as espoused in The Jewish Question, but in time I suppose that that too will come, donne donne.