A Primate's Memoir, page 17
While collecting my thoughts as to what to say, I turned my head and smiled sunnily at him. I think I even chuckled, to show him that I was relaxed and that they could relax too. Still showing his teeth, the soldier punched me hard in the stomach.
Something was odd about my perception. My stomach was hurting terribly, but the pain seemed to be inside my head as well. My head seemed thick, stuffed, imploded. There was a taste of vomit, and I could not catch my breath. They were punching me in the stomach again. Or maybe it was still the first punch I was feeling. I seemed to be having trouble paying attention.
Suddenly, I was paying attention. One of them was holding a knife to my throat. Again, there was a chant of “You have a problem, bwana, this is very bad, you have a big problem.”
A thought repeated through my head—Be careful with that thing. Be careful with it. It was close to my throat. I didn’t speak, just looked from face to face. They had grown still as well.
Someone yanked off my watch; I felt the band break in the process. A voice boomed, real close, “Now you have no problem, bwana.” Abruptly, they began laughing as the knife was lowered. And then one of them struck me on the side of the head, knocking me to the ground. They were already walking away, examining my watch among them.
I stood up, uncertain, wondering if I should run. One of them gestured angrily at me, at the car—“Go on, get out of here.”
I left as they hooted. Never since that time has it occurred to me that I can talk my way out of anything.
13
Hearing Voices at the Wrong Time
Now, part of the fascination in hanging around with folks from an utterly different world is seeing things that were unprecedented back home—someone’s particularly flamboyant scarification pattern, the nice fresh tureen of cow’s blood all set for the drinking, the brash kid carried back from the bush after being mangled by a lion but with the lion in even worse shape than he.
But sometimes, what I was seeing was something just like back in my world. And what was fascinating was the completely novel explanation given for it.
I’d seen one version of that when Hudson, my on-again, off-again research assistant, had passed through on his way back from the other baboon site where he now worked, and we had decided that I’d go on with him for the half day’s trip west of the park to visit his village. We were sitting around, chewing the fat with the old men, when into our afternoon kaffeeklatsch came a sudden apparition from out of the bush. He was late-middle-aged, dazed. Unshaven scraggle face, vacant. Barefoot, pigeon-toed, mildewed blanket wrapped around him, balls hanging out the bottom. Drooly face, seemingly not a thought in his head. The others regarded him with the accepting indifference that village idiots are always accorded here. Conversation resumed, and after mumbling now and then, he wandered back from whence he came.
So what’s with that fella? I asked Hudson.
“You see how handsome he is, terribly handsome.”
“Yes, I noted how handsome he was,” I said. Actually, he looked like a halfdrowned squirrel, but I was being agreeable.
“That man has two wives, and he is so terribly handsome that they were always fighting, fighting to see which one he would be staying with at night. He favored one wife, and the other one got angry and went to the witch doctor and put a curse on him, and now he cannot even remember his name.”
“If you have two wives, it can be dangerous to be too handsome,” one of the old men concluded, chortling.
Early onset Alzheimer’s, I decided. But a few months later, I saw something similar in Rhoda’s village. It had been a wonderfully calm day with the baboons. Nebuchanezzar hadn’t been giving anyone any grief, Job hadn’t been getting any. Benjamin had sat for a while on the roof of my vehicle, peering in through the windshield now and then, his face upside-down. Joshua seemed closer to grasping the concept of play, watching his son, the now juvenile Obadiah, wrestling with the other kids, Joshua only occasionally making a threatening face at the others. And Isaac was up to the usual. He had nonchalantly relinquished a consortship with a young female the second Menasseh had shown any interest in her, and had instead spent the rest of the morning grooming with Rachel. So that was the day, when, back at camp, I got to see some of the Masai dirty laundry being aired. I don’t think it reflected any particular intimacy that was emerging between the Masai and me. It was that I was convenient. I had a vehicle.
That day Rhoda and some women from the village came running into camp in a panic. Now, to see Masai in a panic is a sufficiently rare event that it really does quicken one’s heart. They needed my help, there was no time to explain, I had to drive to the village immediately, we had to get rid of her!, there was no time to lose, imagine, killing a goat. It was all an unexplained jumble, but it was clear that I was not going to get out of driving to the village with them.
Once we were under way, they were able to calm a bit and tell me what was happening. There was a woman in the village who had gone mad, done some terrible things, and she had to go. They wanted me to drive her to the government clinic, many kilometers away, at the other end of the reserve. I tried to protest, to no avail. They were desperate. As they gave me details, it sounded like a classic psychotic break. The clues were there, as they described her. In my many visits to the village, I had never seen her—she was either kept hidden away or kept herself that way. She had done dreadfully inappropriate things—disrupted ceremonies, disobeyed the elders, and, today, the final straw, she had run amok and killed a goat with her bare hands. She had to go.
We approached the village, and I braced myself for a scene: perhaps a tearful departure as her family clustered around, telling her to get well soon and hurry back. Perhaps the woman, frightened, begging not to be taken away. Maybe a sullen cooperation. Instead, as we got out of the car, we were attacked by an apparition of frenzied, terrifying energy. The woman came sprinting toward us, howling god knows what war cries in Masai. She was huge. She was naked. She was covered with goat shit, goat blood, goat innards, the bulk of which was smeared downward from her mouth. She still had part of the dead goat in her hand as she barreled into us, knocking us down. The goat was flung free, and, instead, she seemed intent on strangling me.
You know, I have as healthy and varied a fantasy life as the next guy, but being strangled by a huge naked banshee smeared with goat bowels has never even once infested the darkest corners of my musings. I thought I was about to die and wondered if my parents would bear some scar of shame for my having gone in such a bizarre, embarrassing way.
While I pondered my mortality, Rhoda and the women fell upon her and managed to wrestle her away. Goat guts spraying everywhere, they pushed her into the back of the Jeep, into the back of my Jeep for god’s sake, and piled in on top of her. Go, go, they shouted, and we roared off.
It was as awful a ride as one might expect. A Jeepful of Masai is quite an olfactory experience, under the best of circumstances, given their paucity of water, and the effect is positively sickening when everyone is frantic, sweaty, and frightened because at their epicenter is the equivalent of a water buffalo roaring on angel dust. And that doesn’t even mention the by now sun-warmed goat innards. Throughout the trip, she bellowed, rolled about, and made repeated efforts to grab me from behind and pull me into her goat shit lair; Rhoda and crew, thank god, continued their wrestling and kept her at bay. We bounced along for a good forty-five minutes that seemed interminable, crossed a river, went through the gate of the park headquarters past sullen rangers who seemed to consider the tumult commonplace. Once, as if to calm her, imbue an air that all was well and we were merely tourists on a game drive, I pointed out some giraffes, but she continued to bellow.
Finally, we came to the government dispensary—a ramshackle building with a single nurse who had a tendency to treat all illnesses as malaria and dispense chloroquine. This time, the man did not appear to make that diagnosis. He told us no way was she staying there unless the women got her in the back room themselves—he wasn’t going to touch her. More wrestling, pushing, bellowing, and Rhoda and the women eventually got her in the room, which was locked and barricaded.
We could hear her yelling from the room. The nurse shook our hands nervously. We stretched and yawned in the sun. So what do we do next? I asked. Wait till she feels better, talk to her through the door, discuss her case with the nurse? Let’s get outa here, said Rhoda, and they propelled me back to the village.
I had just gotten my first taste of cross-cultural psychiatry. The Masai, living a life as different from us as anyone can manage, appear to have about the same tolerance for mental illness that we have. Push her in the room, lock that door, let’s scram. As we drove back and calm returned and the opened Jeep windows began to air things out to a tolerable level, I recognized a wonderful opportunity to learn more about their view of mental illness, do some nifty medical anthropology, see how something like schizophrenia seems in such a different culture.
“So, Rhoda,” I began laconically, “what do you suppose was wrong with that woman?”
She looked at me as if I was mad.
“She is crazy.”
“But how can you tell?”
“She’s crazy. Can’t you just see from how she acts?”
“But how do you decide that she is crazy? What did she do?”
“She killed that goat.”
“Oh,” I said with anthropological detachment, “but Masai kill goats all the time.”
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Only the men kill goats,” she said.
“Well, how else do you know that she is crazy?”
“She hears voices.”
Again, I made a pain of myself. “Oh, but the Masai hear voices sometimes.” (At ceremonies before long cattle drives, the Masai trance-dance and claim to hear voices.) And in one sentence, Rhoda summed up half of what anyone needs to know about cross-cultural psychiatry.
“But she hears voices at the wrong time.”
Postscript: a year after the naked goatwoman launched herself at me, I returned to my field site for my annual season. I soon encountered Rhoda. What ever happened to that woman?
“Oh, they locked her up, and then she died. Masai do not like to stay inside like that, so she died,” she said, dismissing the dull subject.
14
Sudan
My first evening in Sudan and I couldn’t find a toilet anywhere. Up until then, my luck had been good. I had flown into Khartoum that morning—Sudan Airways had had enough fuel to do that week’s flight. I had immediately caught a ride coming out of the airport. Dropped off at a ramshackle hamlet on the edge of nowhere, the desert rubbing up behind each hut on the single street. Reported to the police, as required. “The police” turned out to be a lone man in tattered uniform. Friendly guy, quizzed me at length about my last name, seemed amused and taken with it. “You are not from here,” he concluded. I confessed he was right, and he invited me to put my tent up in the yard at the police station, amid the half-dead rows of corn and chickens and obscure debris. Everything was turning out hunky-dory, except that I had had to go to the bathroom all day, and by now, evening, it was becoming critical. There wasn’t an obvious outhouse, and I figured I shouldn’t take a crap in his yard, didn’t want to make some horrendous faux pas my first evening. I wandered up to him, he lost in twilight thoughts.
Do you have a bathroom? His English is good, but he isn’t familiar with the term.
A toilet? He nods assertively, assuringly, disappears in the back and returns with more hot tea, which he thinks I am asking for. I am getting antsy and desperate.
An outhouse? Huh?
A men’s room? A loo? Befuddlement.
A water closet? The little boy’s room? The john? No dice.
Frantically, I squat and pantomime defecating. He suddenly roars in happy comprehension.
“Oh, you mean the latrine! Here in Sudan we call it a latrine! Do you know the word’ latrine’?”
Yes, yes, I know the word “latrine,” please, do you have one close by?
“No, here in Sudan we do not have latrines. Here in Sudan, we just relieve ourselves as we are, for we are a free people.”
With that, he grabs me by the wrist and marches me onto the main street of the hamlet, leading the way with his flashlight through the dark. He stops, points emphatically with his flashlight at a spot in the middle of the street.
“This is your place! Here in Sudan we do not have latrines, so you just be free right there!”
What the hell. I drop my pants, squat down, hope desperately I still have some toilet paper in my pocket. He has his flashlight trained on me. That’s all right, I say, I’m fine now, thanks a lot, no need to wait here, I’ll be back in a …
“No, I must stay here and see that you are fine! This is Sudan! You just be free!” He is shouting. “You are our guest!”
“Our”? I realize with horror that a crowd has drawn, the entire population of the hamlet. Who among them could resist? I hear a number of snickers and an unmistakable high, feminine giggle. His flashlight beam is held steady, on my ass. I resign myself, rest my chin in my hands, and make my mark on the village amid what sounds almost like murmurs of approval. And throughout, above it all, like a circus barker, “This is Sudan! You are our friend! We are a free nation! You just be free!”
I had come to Sudan to go on a vacation following the overthrow of Saul by the Gang of Six. The largest country in Africa, one of the poorest, howling empty desiccated wasteland of the Sahara, cut through the middle by the Nile. Chaos, famine, a northern Arabic Muslim half and a southern black animist half that have been having a civil war for decades. Searing heat, flash storms that produce rivers in seconds, hundreds of miles between bridges on the Nile, four paved kilometers of road in all the south, roads impassable six months of the year. Mutinies, coups, refugees from every neighboring country, locust swarms, tribal insurrections. It was in Sudan that I made the worst literary mistake of my life.
I was accustomed to making food mistakes on trips like this. My first backpacking trip ever was a disaster because of a food mistake. In high school in urban Brooklyn, we decided it was time to become outdoor hippies and made plans for an Easter vacation hike on the Appalachian Trail on a stretch a mere forty miles from Manhattan. We had no idea what we were doing. Word spread, and soon twenty-four were in on planning the trip. It turned out that it was going to take place on Passover. We divided into food groups. Those who were Jewish and keeping Passover diets who were also vegetarian. Nonvegetarian non-Passover keepers. Vegetarian non-Passover. And so on. We planned shifts of who would stay awake during which night hours to guard against mountain lions and poisonous snakes. We argued over placement of sleeping bags, determining who got to sleep near whom, rife with titillation over the various pointless crushes that various people had on others. We spent weeks meeting after school daily, planning the one-night trip. As our final stupidity, we wanted some sort of communal gesture to tie us all together into a utopian backpacking collective. We would carry supplies for each other—four or five people would carry everyone’s water. Someone else would carry everyone’s crackers. Someone else the cheese. We would be strong and united and interdependent. We would strike socialist-realist work poses around the campfire while others sang folk songs.
By the first half mile of the hike, eight people had quit in exhaustion. Within a mile, in some manner that defies spatial logic, the remainder were already scattered miles apart. I wound up with a friend named Kenny Friedman, having no idea where anyone else was. We never saw another soul. Unfortunately, all we carried by way of food was the chocolate and celery, nothing else, including water. We survived our gorging on chocolate but stayed up half the night, torturing each other with descriptions of things to drink and lamenting Alana Goldfarb, the flautist we had unsuccessfully tried to convince to go on the trip with us.
My food luck was even worse on desert trips. My first visit to the desert in Kenya had been by accident. I had hitched out to Mt. Elgon, straddling the Ugandan border, a snowy, 15,000-foot honker with elephants living in its caves. Went with my thermals and woolens, good mountain food as well—oranges and cheese and chocolate. It turned out that Idi Amin’s soldiers had been kidnapping foreign climbers, and the place was closed to whiteys. Disappointed, hitched back to the nearest town and spotted a lorry heading north to the desert. Jumped on, spent the next week wandering half sunstroked in the desert on the Ethiopian border with my wool socks and down mittens and liquefied cheese. Oranges, when sufficiently hot, actually shrivel to the point of contracting inward, tearing free of the peel. You open it up, and out pops a marvelous inedible petrified orange.
The next desert trip I planned better, which is to say, I planned for a desert trip. I went to one of the spanking new supermarkets in Nairobi, got my salt tablets and crackers and fluids. I wanted dried fruit; dried fruit is perfect for the desert, I’d decided; I’d always thought of myself as wandering through the desert eating dried biblical fruit. It was damn expensive. The dried pineapples or dried coconut or dried bananas were going to bankrupt me. Clearly not basic subsistence foods around here. Suddenly, I spotted a block of dried tamarind. Had no idea what tamarind was, but it was phenomenally cheap. Bought two bricks—two kilos of the stuff.
First evening, hiked off from the only town in the western part of the Turkana desert, made it up to the top of a desolate cinder cone by dusk. Set up my tent, dizzying floating view of the entire empty scorched planet below. Settled down to eat, unwrapped my block of tamarind, and bit off a hunk. A stupefying gustatory sensation screamed through my head at that instant. Imagine opening up an entire salt shaker into your mouth. Quick, before swallowing, pour a bottle of mustard in. Then, just a second, toss in a hunk of Marmite, some fetid French cheese, and an old fish. Multiply by a hundred thousand. That begins to approximate how strong the taste was. “Taste” almost stopped making sense as a term. It transcended taste. It was as if every neuron in my brain had been recruited into gustation, as if each cell were being rubbed with sandpaper made of tamarind. It turned out I had brought enough dried tamarind along to give gustatory hallucinations to every man, woman, and child south of Cairo. Wizened tough leathery murderous desert chieftains would pinch off a tiny smidgen of this sort of dried tamarind and still get queasy and weak in the knees. I lay up all night, trying to spit the taste out. Another ruined trip.
