what’s to eat #11
preparing frîtes … for a lunch fête of grand proportions.At the office, Magnambougou, Bamako, Mali.
All posts tagged: West Africa
on the journey
In the space between steps, it’s hard to imagine that the destination will be worth the passage. There’s not much about the road less traveled to inspire confidence. Wise people say it’s all about the journey. But if we weren’t pulled forward by something –call it hope– then we’d simply stop in place. It’s the destination, imagined or real, that propels us onward. If we’re lucky, we’ll find the treasure (whatever it may look like) that we seek.
on millet
Here, grown like corn, harvested, dried upside down, and then threshed by hand.
on what’s easy
Found myself guilty of that slippery, easy, well-intentioned mistake of cultural re-adjustment: Believing that all people, deep down, are essentially the same, and gripping that belief as a compass through foreign territory. It’s not true, of course; there are deep and oft-divisive differences. But the big problem with the we-are-same perspective is that it’s my same informing my assumptions. How are we the same? In what ways? If any one person answers these questions, the response is rendered invalid on a collective level. What I see or expect to be equal or translatable or essential comes from my own subjective perspective. When you get down to it we are not, in fact, the same. And we are certainly not the same in any way definable by me alone. It feels like swimming in deep water, searching with your feet for something to stand on, lurching forward–sometimes in a panic–to get to solid ground. It can be deeply unsettling to realize that, in intercultural dynamics, there is no ground to stand on: it’s all about the swim. There is no quick …
outerNotes 