A Day of Linguistic and Epistemic Revelations
I just spent an hour and a half reading the preface to a novel written in N’ko with my 10th grade student, Ousmane Diallo. He read aloud while I leaned on one seat bone peering over the $1 xerox print-out to correct his alphabetic mix-ups. He then translated our halting syllable-by-syllable recital of each sentence into beautiful, rhythmic Malinké. Following each sentence, a single rising heart beat marked the liminal apprehension between auditory recognition and comprehension that knit his brow, tightened the muscles of his lower eyelids and vocal chords, and slowed the sentence’s last few syllables. Once attained, comprehension flooded his person with a toothy grin and a satisfied lean back into his chair as he began the down hill labor of translating the sentence into our communal second language, employing multiple examples and anecdotes to overcome the barrier of our less than stellar French abilities.
It is a wonderful and enlightening experience, learning to read anew as an adult, but what I experienced paled in comparison to Ousmane’s apparent elation as he laid eager hands on the written form of his first language, for the first time. Today, we experienced not the inaccessible, academized Malinké we copy to learn grammar with his uncle in the classroom, but the vernacular Malinké rife with meaning: cultural allusion and slang (“do y’all have side-chicks? I know that you do, seeing as y’all are Kourouma”), new vocabulary that necessitated a telephone call to his uncle who recently left town for seasonal diamond commerce (turns out ߝߙߋߞߋ means “problem,” a synonym to ߞߎ߲߬ߞߏ which Ousmane had known already), and even scientific terms ( ߝ ߞ ߞ = ߛߌߘߊ= AIDS; ߓߣߊ = STI). The pleasure of being able to interact with his own family’s linguistic and cultural tradition by intellectual means – after 11 years in a school system that associates Malinké with shame, delinquency, and laziness – was infectious.
Among the treasure trove of gems Ousmane unearthed from the three printer-paper pages of preface we perused, was a story like candy to my pretentious theorist ears. The book is ߊ߬ߛߐߍ by Burama Kanté. Its preface is a male speaker’s polite, very Guinean tirade on three men who had married virgins a bit too young and who have not come to properly respect their wives as equals (and who are being assholes even further by not listening to their female friend who is telling them the same thing). One line either alluded to or recalled in Ousmane’s memory a Guinean cultural practice I have yet to hear the tiniest hint of after a year of living here: at some time “before,” perhaps during the slave trade, Guinean men were not to marry women younger than the age of 26. Why? Because whatever line of work the man did, the wife would become his primary helpmeet in, and he should only have a helpmeet who is experienced and competent enough to become his second half.
This is the polar opposite to the contemporary reality of precocious marriage the government and NGOs are trying to chip away at now. The percentage of girls in my classes drops from 33% in seventh grade to a pitiful 10% in tenth grade as the students hit the prime marrying age of 15 or 16. And those parents that do wait for 16 to hand their daughters off are considered progressive, opposing themselves to the “villageois” who send their daughters away at 13 without any schooling.
Passionate Western women like me fight so valiantly against this “cultural” practice of early marriage used to limit the cultural capital of women – we cite all the examples of valiant American women who can choose their husbands, their career, their number of children as a model for what could be enacted here. I have missed whole days of school and shed many a tear trying to stop families from forcing my eighth grade students into marriage.
According to Ousmane’s account, this “cultural” practice could find its origins not from Guinean culture, but rather from the dislocations and forced transplantations of colonialism. That is, from hegemonic European culture. That is, from the culture of those very same American role models who are able to wait for marriage.
I have done no research as to whether Guineans once preferred the marriage of older, educated women, and have no reliable evidence as to this claim’s validity. Whether or not it is true is irrelevant. Rather, the anecdote served as a powerful reminder to me that what can be so frustrating and upsetting to me as a feminist [white person intervening] in Guinea, may very well be a result of white, colonial intervention, in Guinea.
26 is the age my mother chose to give birth to me. Perhaps 26 was once the age Guinean women were expected to do the same. 26 is my magic number – I was born on the 26th, and it’s always felt like my connection to my mother, the number that promised I would live up to her venerable example. Today, 26 was a slap in the face to remind myself that it is the structures of white, western hegemony that are my enemy and never the humans around me or their culturally valued traditions.
The couple that refused to allow their daughter to follow her brother’s footsteps and attend first grade are not evil enforcers of backwards traditions. They are my boyfriend’s parents who care about their children more than anything. They are the people that sent 4 separate messengers across an entire country to give me some potatoes as a present, just because.
The teachers that put cows’ horns and the moniker “ASS” around the necks of children who misconjugate “être au présent” at school are infinitely less responsible for suffering inflicted upon my students than our globalized capitalist economy that preferentially permits humans able to speak European language (and able to perform some labor deemed valuable by Western standards) to live without the pain of malaria, of typhoid fever, of carrying every drop of water your family uses on your head.
The knot of gendered violence is a beastly tangled thing. Working as a volunteer for gender equality, it is easy to let the single threads of human choice and action fill my field of vision, but it is the iron vincula of global capitalism that need to be unsnarled for gender equality to ever be attainable.
Yes, if only Aïcha’s father would tell the wealthy Angolan man that Aïcha is too young and if only Aïcha’s mother wouldn’t condemn her for going dancing with friends, Aïcha might finish middle school. And then she might finish high school. And then university. And then she might become a world class molecular biologist and invent a vaccine to eradicate polio once and for all!
Or, she might find a high school to match her current middle school – so strapped for teachers and resources that any slight deviation from a certain psychosocial profile renders school impossible. And then perhaps a university whose medical program was declared so bad as to be more detrimental to the country than beneficial, and thus cut entirely by the President himself. And if she struggled through all of that to come out clutching a hard won diploma, would she find a job that could lead to intellectual production and exploration like my post-bac professional research position? Or would she find, as did my 4 closest college-educated friends here, an empty job market that leads her straight back to her family’s boutique that she ran by the age of seven?
While it is so rewarding to lay smooth those immediate tangles that say girls shouldn’t be scientists or have clitorises or choose their life partner(s), it is those big knots of global inequality that need to be severed with the heaviest ax we can muster before Aïcha can have anywhere near the same access to even the basic necessities of life as white, cis Emily from Colorado.
Donc. Assemble comrades…
