Saturday, October 22, 2005
Leaving, Benin Mid October, 2005
Leaving is not a town in Benin; I have benin Benin long enough and I mostly want to be Leaving, Benin. Although this evening, I met two wonderful food vendors who are sweetening my final night here. I stopped for the first woman because she appeared to be frying plantains and fried plantains are the business. They are sweet and delicious, slightly caramelized, piping hot and served with salty pepper sauce that makes me weep. This woman, to my asinine disappointment, was not serving fried plantains. She was not serving fried yams or fried mystery tuber or fried yellowish crescent. I learned this by forcing her to explain to me why she did not have salty weeping man pepper sauce for her plantains. She had cheese cubes.
Prior to this, I had assumed, more or less correctly, that the only cheese in West Africa is Laughing Cow (vache qui'rit) and I don't care what sinister diet craze may or may not have legitimated this synthesized troll discharge, Laughing Cow is a culinary miscarriage and an evil thing. So when this woman said she had fromage that was clearly not individually packaged for maximum waste and inconvenience, I would ordinarily have assumed that she was a liar or a fool; but the guide book had told me to look out for "red skinned cheese" in the north of Benin. In front of me was a tin bowl with dried meat bits filling the lower spaces and some chunky orange brown, rough stucco looking semi-cubes filling the top. The vendor didn't care whether I bought them or not. She seemed impatient with me for my insistence on the pepper sauce issue. But she said "fromage" and "fromage" is a very sexy word. So I bought some—four pieces—and walked to our tree shaded resting bench.
It was good. Perhaps to feel younger or perhaps because we are becoming less articulate, we have started saying "hella". The cheese was hella good. It was hella. It didn't taste anything like cheese at all. I went back and bought twelve more pieces. Nevertheless, the woman was still misguided in her decision to include no pepper sauce with her spectacularly unique and wonderful product, so I bought some from a kindly woman across the road who just happened to make her own version of pepperoncini. This she accompanied with the typical hate paste and the concert effect was fantastic. I have heard many West Africans speculate that it is a predilection for dairy products that makes white people stink so much. From white people, I have only heard baseless invective about the stench of Africans.
Anything else about Benin . . . no. Not really. It has been rather dull. It made me feverish and sleepy. It made me want the trip to stop. It almost made me hate eating paste and sauce based meals—I am a sucker for any new color of "pate" and that has lead to my consumption of some remarkably sandy, beany, gooey and flavorless varieties.
Benin also made me more aware of how many countless NGOs, volunteers and social workers are making their business off this continent. A comprehensive treatment of the human response to the AIDS epidemic would require hundreds if not thousands of people if it wanted to avoid a staggering time lapse between coverage of one country and another. It is miserable to know that one's coverage will always under everything be arbitrary. Still. We will try to find projects that are either representative or exceptional. We are refraining, for the time being, from mentioning projects that do not impress us.
Aha. Benin also gave me the opportunity to browse the best French book store I've seen in Africa. I bought for myself a lovely French novella entitled, "Police Python" and a beefy French/English dictionary with which to accompany it. I was not filled with pride when I noticed in a small box on the rear cover—after I had slaved my way to page eleven—that the book's target audience is eleven and twelve year old children; also, I was not proud to realize that the book started on page six. I don't really know how to feel about being completely absorbed by it. The lead character is a village boy from Benin trying to receive a sacred Voodoo python that a poacher sold to a Parisian jewelry maker. I have not felt compelled to share many details from the well written and moving books that have helped me to maintain sanity over the past few months; but, for some reason, I felt the need to share the basic plot of "Police Python". When I finish this book, I can start "Surfers of the Unknown" (recommended for twelve and thirteen year olds and based on the life experiences of surfers who are mixed up with the paranormal; during the upcoming landlocked months, this will be my connection to the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life—not reading minds.). This is the only way that I will practice the French language on my own.
Leaving is not a town in Benin; I have benin Benin long enough and I mostly want to be Leaving, Benin. Although this evening, I met two wonderful food vendors who are sweetening my final night here. I stopped for the first woman because she appeared to be frying plantains and fried plantains are the business. They are sweet and delicious, slightly caramelized, piping hot and served with salty pepper sauce that makes me weep. This woman, to my asinine disappointment, was not serving fried plantains. She was not serving fried yams or fried mystery tuber or fried yellowish crescent. I learned this by forcing her to explain to me why she did not have salty weeping man pepper sauce for her plantains. She had cheese cubes.
Prior to this, I had assumed, more or less correctly, that the only cheese in West Africa is Laughing Cow (vache qui'rit) and I don't care what sinister diet craze may or may not have legitimated this synthesized troll discharge, Laughing Cow is a culinary miscarriage and an evil thing. So when this woman said she had fromage that was clearly not individually packaged for maximum waste and inconvenience, I would ordinarily have assumed that she was a liar or a fool; but the guide book had told me to look out for "red skinned cheese" in the north of Benin. In front of me was a tin bowl with dried meat bits filling the lower spaces and some chunky orange brown, rough stucco looking semi-cubes filling the top. The vendor didn't care whether I bought them or not. She seemed impatient with me for my insistence on the pepper sauce issue. But she said "fromage" and "fromage" is a very sexy word. So I bought some—four pieces—and walked to our tree shaded resting bench.
It was good. Perhaps to feel younger or perhaps because we are becoming less articulate, we have started saying "hella". The cheese was hella good. It was hella. It didn't taste anything like cheese at all. I went back and bought twelve more pieces. Nevertheless, the woman was still misguided in her decision to include no pepper sauce with her spectacularly unique and wonderful product, so I bought some from a kindly woman across the road who just happened to make her own version of pepperoncini. This she accompanied with the typical hate paste and the concert effect was fantastic. I have heard many West Africans speculate that it is a predilection for dairy products that makes white people stink so much. From white people, I have only heard baseless invective about the stench of Africans.
Anything else about Benin . . . no. Not really. It has been rather dull. It made me feverish and sleepy. It made me want the trip to stop. It almost made me hate eating paste and sauce based meals—I am a sucker for any new color of "pate" and that has lead to my consumption of some remarkably sandy, beany, gooey and flavorless varieties.
Benin also made me more aware of how many countless NGOs, volunteers and social workers are making their business off this continent. A comprehensive treatment of the human response to the AIDS epidemic would require hundreds if not thousands of people if it wanted to avoid a staggering time lapse between coverage of one country and another. It is miserable to know that one's coverage will always under everything be arbitrary. Still. We will try to find projects that are either representative or exceptional. We are refraining, for the time being, from mentioning projects that do not impress us.
Aha. Benin also gave me the opportunity to browse the best French book store I've seen in Africa. I bought for myself a lovely French novella entitled, "Police Python" and a beefy French/English dictionary with which to accompany it. I was not filled with pride when I noticed in a small box on the rear cover—after I had slaved my way to page eleven—that the book's target audience is eleven and twelve year old children; also, I was not proud to realize that the book started on page six. I don't really know how to feel about being completely absorbed by it. The lead character is a village boy from Benin trying to receive a sacred Voodoo python that a poacher sold to a Parisian jewelry maker. I have not felt compelled to share many details from the well written and moving books that have helped me to maintain sanity over the past few months; but, for some reason, I felt the need to share the basic plot of "Police Python". When I finish this book, I can start "Surfers of the Unknown" (recommended for twelve and thirteen year olds and based on the life experiences of surfers who are mixed up with the paranormal; during the upcoming landlocked months, this will be my connection to the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life—not reading minds.). This is the only way that I will practice the French language on my own.
5 Comments:
I love reading your stories they transport me back in a instant.
Ya, I learned that formage is a damn sexy word. I was only there but an second and I gave into the Laughing Cow cheese, which could take the african heat better than I could.
I will never forget the fried plantain lovelness that I had in Segou, Mali, that stuff is pure heaven.
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Ya, I learned that formage is a damn sexy word. I was only there but an second and I gave into the Laughing Cow cheese, which could take the african heat better than I could.
I will never forget the fried plantain lovelness that I had in Segou, Mali, that stuff is pure heaven.
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