“ Tababu Bolo: White Man’s Hand/Spoon”—1986 THE HOCK OF THE NEW: A POSTAFR ICAN ODYSSEY By Robert Maletta Sculptures by Ronna Neuenschwander oets have ears, but the world of sound is unkept, chaotic, and barbarous. -Paul Bowles The day of my departure from Senegal, I was having my last dinner at a Portuguese restaurant. Outside, beyond the swinging pink doors, a man raised a wire cage full of shrill fluttering finches. In a moment of extravagance I bought the box and released the captives into the street. They spread like a cloud of locusts and fled over the rooftops. I felt a sudden release. . . I was leaving Africa. After three years, I realized that one phase of my life was ending and that soon another would begin. I was moving into another dimension, like someone being pulled from one dream into another. There are times when life’s ironies are not very elegant. I was barely twenty-four hours into America when I realized the absurdity of my situation. Yesterday, I was avoiding the pickpockets in Dakar; today, I am commuting from New Jersey to New York City on a Grayliner. My shoes are still dusted with the umber soil of Africa. The bus glides from tree-lined avenues to a congested tollway. Streamlined, air-conditioned comfort. This is a novelty from the anarchy of travel in West Africa with its screeching chickens, complaining goats, squalling babies, and rambunctious crowds piling onto shabby Peugeot buses. On this bus I don’t hear a whisper. It is the funereal air of people separated by vast distances. I feel like I have entered into a church. I resist the urge to fold my hands in prayer. At the Port Authority Terminal on 42nd Street I witness a curious spectacle: people in a hurry. Secretaries in tennis shoes, students clutching packs, businessmen with briefcases, a thousand others with undefinable purposes pouring into the melting pot of Manhattan. They spill past me in a slurry of faces pinched into tight masks of determination. Plugged into Walkmans, tuned out, slapping past, swinging through, dashing by—a human cataract fused into the graffitic squalor of the Lexington Avenue Express. I am, once again, in the land of the go-getters. In Senegal, my work involved living for long periods of time in villages. In a setting of enigmatic baobab trees and huts of millet and thatch pitched against the burning sun, one’s nervous system tunes into a more elemental threshold of awareness. It was not without struggle. Living outside of America meant going cold-turkey from the distractions that normally turned me away from myself. Africa meant long hours alone getting to know the blind side of this social illusion called “ I.” One ruminates upon the past. Forgotten incidents and people that had been lost in the shuffle of time were retrieved in the silence of a dark hut. What seemed like scattered, unrelated fragments of my life story began to fit into a larger pattern, even if that pattern only revealed the limited breadth and depth of my consciousness. I learned to fall in step with the natural rhythms of a day wholly predictable in its maddening routine of talk, food, and work. Rising with the sun, I worked in the cool hours of the morning. The afternoons were small eternities of desultory gossip over cloyingly sweet tea, or escapes into a sweat-soaked sleep. Around sunset another meal. At twilight I would shake out the mosquito net. I read by the light of a small lamp, listening to the mice play on the rafters. After the Moslem prayers, the night slipped into absolute silence except for the bray of a mule or a soft voice in the distance muffled in the velvet folds of evening. It was the simplest life I will ever have .. .simple to the point of distraction. I did not regret leaving it: I simply left. What I did not realize fully was the extent to which I was affected by my experience. For a relatively brief but intense period I was outside of America—the self-referencing security of America— and not allowed to walk away from my circumstance. I was forced to be with myself. Senegal was a place so hard and spare that it precipitated a series of crises within me about who I thought I was and who I really was. What I learned shook me to the roots about how I would stand in relation to America and its values. Africa was more than just a continent to me; it was an incubator—but for what I would not know until I returned. There was no way back. America lay ahead, and for me, a semblance of normality. As the Air Afrique flight cut its way westward through the night, away from Africa, I felt like Iwas scattering my ashes over the Atlantic ocean. Iemerge from the labyrinth of subways somewhere outside of Grand Central Station. Disoriented, I am not sure which way I should proceed. All around me people tramp by with an air of purpose. They are going into the ground, or escalating into the sky. They are turning wheels around and around making the world spin faster and faster. They have places to go, things to do. It is a whirligig of activity set against a cityscape of Boschian design—indigestible, surreal, hallucinatory. Henry Miller called this the “ air-conditioned nightmare,” and was revolted by the inhuman contours of the Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1987 9
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