Senegal: Names and Such

Oy oy oy (or "woi ya yoi," as our friend Abdoulaye taught us in Wolof) - I'm yet again at a computer that won't let me upload pictures to go with my text, so I think I'll just write a couple general thoughts instead.

Names. Ella, which I've never thought of as particularly difficult, has proved impossible for anyone in Senegal to understand or pronounce. "Allah?" they ask in confusion, which of course would be weird, since Allah is God.

Pronouncing it very slowly, as "Ehhh-lah," has helped, but it still trips people up. Kap encouraged us from the beginning to adopt Senegalese names. (For reasons unclear and at some point when I was elsewhere, Graham ended up as Abdoulaye, even though he himself can't seem to remember the name, and it seems strange to me, since we already know the other Abdoulaye mentioned above.)

I went with Mariama, given to me by a crazy guy in the parking lot in Ngor, but I liked it, especially since it seems so close to the Jewish name Miriam (most names here seem to have a Muslim origin) and grabbed that before I could be stuck with something I didn't like. I haven't really used it, though, because it felt weird presenting this sham name that's not actually mine - until a woman in a gas station where we bought ice cream bars started quizzing us, and when Graham said his name was Graham, she brushed that away impatiently and said, No, what's your Senegalese name?

So I guess people really do prefer the half truth that smoothes social interaction to the obsessively true truth.

In that same vein, to ease my travels and slightly reduce the number of marriage proposals I receive (not kidding), I have invented myself a husband. I'm even wearing a wedding ring, which feels like a lie every time I look at it. But as Kap pushed me to understand before the trip, and I now am starting to actually understand, people in Senegal don't care so much about the truth - and definitely not as much as they want to hear that everyone fits into the social order that makes sense to them.

So, if anyone asks, my husband is working in St. Louis and I'm traveling with my cousin (that's Kap) and her husband (she and Graham are married, of course) and we're all meeting up later in Dakar. Also, my husband is German, and he's doing some kind of "research," a perfectly acceptable job description in Senegal.

(While waiting for the sept place from St. Louis to Touba, Caitlin and Kerry and I met a guy who said he was a professor, and had been to Pennsylvania to do "research." It turned out he really was a professor, of French, and had had some sort of visiting teaching post at UPenn.)

Similarly, Kap's insistence that she's German ("I'm not American, I was just born there by accident," she likes to tell people) has made it simplest for me to just be German too. So in Senegal, I've found myself in the bizarre position of being asked, often, whether I can speak English, and if so, a lot or just a little bit.