photography « Six Mois à Dakar

October 26 marked this year’s Tabaski, a celebration of Abraham’s loyalty to god which he demonstrated by almost killing his son Isaac/Ismeal at God’s request. Tabaski is a huge holiday in Islam celebrated by purchasing new, nice clothes, eating a big meal, being charitable, and slaughtering a sheep/cow/goat in commemoration of the sheep that ended up getting scarified instead of Isaac/Ismeal. You can probably imagine that i had feelings about sheep getting slaughtered in the courtyard of my family’s house, right outside of my bedroom door, as it were. Not only am i a vegetarian, i’d also never seen an animal slaughtered in person.

My mom told me past host students had avoided watching the slaughter, but i resolved to watch the whole process very closely. It was a matter of principle: shouldn’t i be familiar with something i’m so vehemently against? And besides, the slaughter is more or less the focal point of the holiday, from what i observed, so i think i would have felt sort of disingenuous if i’d skipped it. And while i expected the killing to be an upsetting but pretty straightforward experience, it turned out to be a whole lot more perplexing and evocative than i thought, and not even because of my personal politics. As it turns out, i find it generally very affecting to watch a living creature die—or, more accurately, get killed. That was what got me the most: watching the eyes of the sheep after their throats had been slit, seeing them struggle, trying to breathe, and eventually giving up.

I stood right among the men my family hired to butcher the animals, observing and taking photos. I didn’t cry, but i did feel faint a few times, not so much from disgust as just being purely overwhelmed at the scene before me, which intersected life and death in a way i’d never quite experienced before.

And just for the record, i find the practice of slaughtering one’s own sheep to be refreshingly honest. Anyone who’s ever celebrated/participated in Tasbaki knows exactly what goes into meat eating, and is free to make their own judgements from that knowledge. So while i abstained from the barbecued ribs my family smashed on a few hours after the slaughter, i didn’t feel any particular ill will toward them for partaking.

The other holiday i celebrated was less thought-provoking but just as powerful and, for me, slightly more lovely: Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday, and this past one being both my first without my family and my first abroad, i wanted it to be special. “Special” ended up translating into spending a lot of money on imported ingredients like cheddar for mac and cheese and fresh cream for green bean casserole, but hey, it only comes once a year. I also managed to slap together a sweet potato caramel pie (made out of the infuriatingly mysterious white Senegalese sweet potatoes), which i was pretty proud of. We did a potluck-style celebration at our friend Tim’s apartment, complete with the aforementioned dishes, apple pies, roast chicken, stuffing, homemade rolls, bissap sauce (Wolof word for hibiscus, which is really popular here), mashed potatoes, gravy, roast veggies, and two types of salad. Naar na lool. Everyone had more than enough, and everything tasted so much like America.

Even though i missed my loved ones at home, i couldn’t really ask for a better celebration with my family of friends in Dakar—complete with imported New England foliage!

A few weeks ago, our group was led on a trip to Richard Toll by one of our professors, a rural area in northern Senegal on the shore of the Senegal River, which we’ve been studying since arriving here. The week involved a lot of visits to various agricultural concerns in the area, including rice, milk, and sugar (we ate sugar cane cut fresh out of the ground!). Nino, Fiona and i also shared a lovely host family who didn’t have electricity (not nearly as inconvenient as i’d expected) and who did have two adorable kittens, one of which i fell in love with. Because the house had no AC or fans, Fiona and i frequently opted to sleep outside on mats beneath a huge mosquito net, and our family was cute enough to stick the kittens in the net with us. But! I can’t start talking about that or i’ll become mired in a perhaps premature nostalgia. So let’s talk about other things. Serious Things:

Our trip also included a visit to a tiny, traditional rural village maybe an hour outside of the already very small town of Richard Toll. The politics of a group of predominantly white Americans showing up to a small village—and being unable to communicate directly with the villagers, as they spoke Pulaar and we’ve been learning Wolof—made a lot of us in the group uneasy, especially since we hadn’t had a discussion about those politics/the dynamics that ensued beforehand. (When we tried to bring this up with our professor post-trip, a whole slew of cultural misunderstandings ensued, which in itself was an interesting experience: while a professor at, say, K, would have been all over a reflective discussion on the racial dynamics/subtext of such a visit, our prof here didn’t seem to see much merit in such a discussion, especially when we explained that we weren’t particularly looking for answers from him or anyone else, that we just wanted to explore our thoughts. Very interesting difference in pedagogy.)

Anyway, i don’t at all regret the visit, which was fascinating and enriching. I just wish we’d had some sort of discussion beforehand, which i think could have helped curtail some of the dis-ease i felt while visiting. A big source of this discomfort had to do with taking photos: i was having an experience extremely unique to studying abroad in Senegal, and was surrounded by a bunch of very beautiful people. Of course i wanted to take pictures of them, especially given my fledgling interest in photography. But it felt…weird. It felt exploitative, and voyeuristic, and rude. But was it? I couldn’t tell if these sentiments were just paranoia, or general anxiety, or knee-jerk liberal/privileged guilt that, while well-intentioned, didn’t really hold water. For a while, i was frozen in my uncertainty. But eventually i was overwhelmed with desire to capture my surroundings and, upon showing the villagers Stesha’s camera (which she was kind enough to allow me to use) and receiving smiles and nods in return, photographed to my heart’s content.

I wasn’t going to let myself off that easy, though. That afternoon, as Fiona and i lay in our hotbox of a bedroom for a brief sieste, i decided to spin some Socratic method: Why did i feel bad about taking pictures? Because it reeked of colonialism/exploitation/othering/objectification/exoticizing, and other nasty things i didn’t want a part in. Well, was it colonialism or exploitation if i wasn’t going to derive any benefit from the photos except a preserved memory? Was it objectifying if permission had been asked and eagerly been granted (the villagers, especially the children, had clamored to get into group shots once the discussion part of the visit was over)? Was it exoticizing if i’d have done the same thing in, say, any other group of people i was meeting for the first time who had invited me to their home for an interesting experience?

I had to say no. Yet, even though i could find no objections to the photo session intellectually, i still feel a strange anxiety in my gut about it. Maybe i’m just worrying too much, but i’m reluctant to shrug this uneasiness off: this was one of the very first experiences of real discomfort i’ve had as an American abroad—not just a vague sense of not-belonging/otherness, which i’ve felt since arriving, but true discomfort born from facing my privilege, legacy, and reputation as an American head-on, particularly in a post-colonial context. So, even if i’m making too much of these photos, i’d rather make too much than too little. I’m sharing them here because i trust that whoever who reads my blog knows i post them with the best of intentions and a lot of consideration and respect for the subjects.