Yet more adventures in Mali, they started quickly after I got back here. The two months I spent in the US this winter seems so long ago and distant now with all these things happening. By the way, this story is farcically long, so try to take it in pieces or just skip over the boring parts
First, my drum teacher and good friend here Matché, is being featured on a compilation CD of Malian Music and Rhythms. The label is Kanaga System Krush and the album will be coming out soon although I don’t know all the details yet. He is doing four songs on the album and the rest with be filled with other artists who have yet to be decided I understand. So, he and his students were busy for a couple of weeks rehearsing and preparing and I tried to help wherever I could. The guys who are recording the stuff were nice enough to let me come to the recording session, so I got to watch the magic unfold. Their playing was really hot; I’m excited to hear it on a loud system somewhere with the bass cranked up. Soon enough.
The day after, we were kind of sitting around drinking tea in my room when, as kind of an exclamation point to the end of the whole endeavor, Matché spontaneously proposed that we take a trip to Ségou on my new motorcycle to check out “le Festival sur le Niger”. This is a gigantic event with all kinds of implicated elements like good Malian music, food, crafts, art and plenty of foreigners to flood the city with cash. It sounded ridiculously impromptu and suspiciously foolish to just up and run to another city like five hours away, so naturally I accepted instantly. Plus we got to break in my new bike.
I told Matché we could go only if he goes to change the oil first, which I made sound like a big deal to get him to do it as fast and easily as possible. In the meantime, I threw some stuff into my backpack and spent most of the hour I took packing contemplating what music I would bring with me to listen to on the bike. I settled on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and Steppenwolf.
We loaded up the bike with an ice cooler, my backpack and a little food his wife had made. I drove the first couple of hours, but was constantly distracted by the surreal Malian landscapes. Trying to describe Malian landscapes to someone who has never been here is like trying to describe music to someone who is deaf, so ill try to focus on the emotions these images evoke instead mostly because it’s more fun for me to write. Freedom comes to mind first; like the feeling you have in a dream when you suddenly start flying and realize you can go in any three dimensional direction that you want, without anything stopping you. The other part of it is this vague notion of some external, fourth dimensional force that’s holding you in its hand, just kind of looking at you, perfectly able to crush you at any second but for the moment just waiting. That’s how you kind of feel, as a tiny particle of energy moving through all powerful space in the infinite desert of Malian countryside.
And then while your totally lost in your own little reflections on life, all of a sudden a bus loaded to probably double its normal height in crap attached to the roof comes roaring out of nowhere in your lane from the other direction because he’s trying to pass someone and you see he’s not going to make it to the other side in time and you veer as sharply to the shoulder as you possibly can as fast as you can and almost crash the bike trying to save your life. Then, you look at him as he passes, he smiles and waves at you as if you’ve been friends since birth. And you yourself realize how funny almost dying can be. Ahhhh……….Mali, the land of ambiguity.
I’m pretty sure that most of the people in the small villages on the main paved road (they’re not all paved) to Ségou use it as a tool to cure boredom. If all else fails, they just pull up a chair and watch the traffic roll by, waving when they feel like it. I made it to Fana, the “big” city on the way to Ségou and decided it was time to let Matché take over. We decided to stop for a drink in Fana, and he took the chance to lay out his plan for me:
Matché is an awesome djembe player and a great person. But he’s getting old and he’s starting to think about his kids. The problem is that there are a lot of them and at some point he’s going to have to get a house for all of them. Right now all seven of them live in a small two room shack that you probably couldn’t convince even one white person to live in. He sees that his luck is going well right now: the CD is coming out soon, he has people that help him out when he needs it, etc. But he also knows that it is very unlikely that he will ever have the equivalent of about 20,000 US dollars necessary to get a house here unless he works for a couple of years abroad. He thinks this might happen soon, but needs the advice of a fortune teller in Ségou that he knows to help know for sure what to do. “Fortune Teller” is kind of a misnomer in the sense of the connotations is creates; People in Mali would go to see a “fortune teller” in about the same way that a westerner would go to see a therapist or psychologist.
I stewed over Matchés’ story as I listened to “Magic Carpet Ride” and let the countryside sink into my consciousness. Just as my ears start to feel this strange kind of pain which I think has something to do with four hours of hot air pushing on them, we arrive to the outskirts of the city. The first things you notice about Ségou that distinguish it from Bamako are: it’s not god-forbiddingly dirty with trash strewn everywhere, the roads are wider and more spacious, people don’t drive like insane children, it’s not crowded, and it’s actually kind of pretty (which I don’t think anyone in his right mind could ever describe Bamako as).
Before we even had time to ask ourselves the question “Ok, what next?” we randomly see a friend of Matches’ who plays in ceremonies with us sometimes in Bamako. Evidently a bunch of musicians from Bamako ended up in Ségou for the festival and they all are staying in an abandoned school a couple of kilometers away. Then, about five minutes later, two American guys that I know from Jeremy’s house in Bamako walk by and we start talking. I go with them to eat while Matché heads over to find our friend Mark, a very cool French guy who is in Ségou too. The two guys end up telling me that I can crash in this little room by the river they have rented.
By this time, Matché comes back to where we are staying with Mark the French guy and his Malian girlfriend Rose. We headed down towards the river to where the event was. There was already tons of people mingling around; black, white and everything in between. The couple actually had tickets to the concert, which we didn’t have yet and ended up costing an exorbitant amount of money (like 150 dollars).
So while they went inside, me and Matché hung around outside, soaking in the party atmosphere. We ended up in a corner where they happened to be a couple of Malian guys roaring on the djembe while a bunch of French hippies cheered them on. We watched them for awhile and sized up the skills of the two guys drumming and the one guy dancing. They were good, but Matché was better. So, during one of their pauses, he walked up to the guy playing and asked him if he could take a turn. The guy, seeing that Matché was obviously his elder, let him take it and Matché immediately called me over to play accompaniment for him. Thirty minutes later, Matché had the crowd in an ecstatic frenzy of energy with everyone screaming and dancing. I got to think about how wonderful that feeling must be for him, to know that at any given moment he has the power to affect everyone around him so profoundly through the music he plays.
We tried to maintain the high we had created by trying to find a solution to the problem of our ticket-less situation and getting into the concert. Everything we tried failed though because security was so tight around the place. There were three layers of security guards checking tickets for people, a first for any Malian event I have ever seen. Later on I found out that they actually started shooting tear gas at people who were trying to get in illicitly, so maybe its better that we didn’t make it.
Somehow in all the chaos of the evening we ended up separating and I wandered around for awhile by myself. I ended up running across a French girl named Claire who I knew from Bamako and her group of friends. We hung out together for awhile, bouncing from place to place. My ridiculous Malian French accent provided a constant source of amusement for her friends who claimed that they weren’t used to seeing white people talk like that. For some reason, I seem to take some strange pride in that. Then I spent the rest of the night practicing my mongrel Bambara with one of her Malian co-workers. He spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to convince me how important it is to get married and have kids as early in life as you possible can. I just smile and nod, smile and nod.
Although I don’t know her super well, Claire has always been an interesting case study for me. Her story kind of illustrates how this place has the power to just chew some people up and spit them out. When I first met her, it was on her preliminary visit to Mali as she was preparing to settle permanently here from France. It was exciting to see someone with so much enthusiasm and positive energy for Mali. Then she moved here. At first, every time I saw her she seemed to be living it up and enjoying everything. She would tell me how much better life is in Mali than in France, and how glad she was to be here for good. Then, I lost her phone number and didn’t see her much for awhile and things started to go bad. The magazine she put her heart and soul into working on went down. She didn’t find very many people here she could really trust. Each time she seemed more jaded and depressed being here, culminating in our conversation that night. We agreed to see each other again in Bamako. “We better do it soon” she said, “because I don’t think I’ll be here much longer.”
It was about 2am by this time so I decided to head to the room, hoping that those guys were back because I didn’t have a key. I lucked out and they were there already inside. I settled in under a mosquito net someone had been smart enough to bring along and started to fall asleep. Then I was awakened by what sounded like people arguing outside. I went out to see what the commotion was all about and, predictably enough, the owner of the room was hyper perceptive enough to notice that one extra person (me) returned with the group. He was demanding that these guys pay him more money because of it. I was tempted to tell him that he should be paying me to sleep there, “doest thou haveth any idea who thou art talking to?” but I was too tired and it was all over anyway.
I didn’t sleep well because of the malaria medication. When I finally did get to sleep around 6am, I dreamt of a Mexican food buffet (?) and some random Chicano guy who was asking an employee if his grandma could eat for free there. I woke up hungry and very far from any cheap taco stands. Matché walked into the room where we were staying with some other guy and started telling me how this guy used to be his student. Evidently, back in the day this guy (named Korole) used to live at Matchés place and go to ceremonies with him all the time. Then, one day he pulled a knife on one of the other musicians over the equivalent of one dollar and Matché told him to move very far away. It’s kind of an ongoing joke because he really isn’t that hot of a drummer either. The drummers in Bamako say that only the people who are not good enough to play in Bamako end up in Ségou.
Korole tells us that his troupe is playing by the river during the daytime part of the festival today so we agree to head down and check it out. Since the thing was free during the daytime, there were all kinds of people from the dirt poor to the super rich. And everything in between. I became entranced by these gigantic puppet-like structures dueling it out in the center, kind of half hoping they would fall. But they never did. We watched Korole’s group perform and they were ok. I spent the rest of the day rambling around watching the various musical groups and baking in hot sun.
Later on, we headed over to Rose’s (Mark the French guy’s girlfriend) house. They had cooked a gigantic feast for us and obviously spent the entire day preparing. To be honest, I don’t exactly remember what we ate but it seemed really good at the time. Ironically enough, I thought at the time “damn this is one of the best meals I’ve had in Mali”. Mark, who is a pastry chef in some fancy restaurant, made this awesome desert with sweet fried plantains in homemade caramel.
After the meal, it suddenly it occurred to me that we still hadn’t done what we came to do. Matché hadn’t gone to see his fortune teller yet, but we were supposed to be leaving early tomorrow morning. So I brought it up to him and he gave me a very wise explanation. He basically said that since we got here, he’s tried three times to see her. But every single one, something comes up at the last minute and it makes it impossible to go. Watching this happen each time has made him come to the conclusion that it’s not the right time. He proceeded to go on at length about how this is just one of the things he’s learned from being a musician. Life has its own rhythm and you can’t try to superimpose your will onto it. You, ultimately as a human being, have to be accepting of the course of things and find the strength in yourself to adapt to it, not the other way around. Things happen in their own time. It was somehow profoundly funny to hear him explain this lesson to me, which we have never talked about before, yet is one of the deepest things I’ve learned from being here.
Only in Mali could the best tasting meal you remember having make you so sick. I woke up the next morning feeling like I was run over by one of those overloaded trucks on the road from Bamako. I told Matché I wasn’t feeling too hot, but he told me that it would probably go away after we got on the road. About an hour into the trip, I stopped fighting it and liberated all of last night’s good food from the captivity of my stomach. I pulled out a little trick I learned from one of the guy’s at the NGO where you drink a disgusting mixture of Nescafe and tonic water. Regardless of the taste, the stuff works and within five minutes I was worlds better.
Usually when it comes to transportation here, you just end up assuming that there will be a problem of some kind along the way and that kills any expectations you might have. We continued to make progress towards Bamako. About halfway into this deserted forest called “Faya” with nothing around for at least thirty kilometers in either direction, we got a flat tire. We tried to hail down passing cars, but a lot of people are superstitious about the Faya and wouldn’t stop. After about thirty minutes of trying, a white Mercedes Benz stopped and asked us what the problem was. They said we could ride with them to Bamako. Matché told me to go on ahead and that he would take care of the bike. I didn’t want to go at first, but then it occurred to me that it would probably be easier for him to get the bike to the nearest town and get it fixed if he didn’t have me in his way. And plus, he was just looking out for me.
The guys in the Mercedes were actually really nice. I had never realized what a luxury driving in an air conditioned car can be. They told me about the village Markala, which is near Ségou and invited me to come by sometime. We made it to Bamako in about half the time it would have taken on the bike. I couldn’t believe how tired I was. The trip ended like they usually do; I slept for about a day straight and dreamt of Mexican food.