by Aimee Molloy
“Are you serious?”
“I am, yes.”
Molly was incredulous. “But why?”
“It’s an ancient ritual, necessary for a girl to be respected in the community and find a good husband.”
“But isn’t it terribly painful and even dangerous for her?” Molly asked.
“It is.” He explained that an older woman with no formal medical training performed the procedure using a razor blade.
“But how can you—? You’re studying to be a doctor,” Molly said.
“I’m against it, but the tradition is stronger than my will,” Mamadou said, his eyes fixed on a tree in the distant fields. “It’s partly why I came home. I told my wife I didn’t want her to do it, but I knew she and my mother would do it anyway. I’d rather be here, close to home when it happens. It can lead to real problems.” He looked at Molly with sadness. “I’d rather be here than far from my daughter right now.”
For the rest of the day Molly couldn’t get the conversation out of her mind. She wanted to ask Ndey about it, but she could tell by her friend’s silent reaction during the conversation that Ndey was not open to discussing it, and despite Molly’s curiosity, she knew it was far more important she not offend her friend.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Molly and Ndey packed their belongings and headed back to the road to take them to the train. Once aboard the Bamako Express, Molly slipped off her sandals and settled into her seat for the long trip back to Dakar. She couldn’t help but think more about her conversation with Mamadou. It seemed unbelievable that a mother could do this to an innocent young girl, to her own daughter. How could it be that in the twentieth century such things still occurred? Surely there was something behind this potentially harmful act she just didn’t understand.
As Africa’s dry savannah rolled past outside, her mind darted back to a childhood experience of her own, one she hadn’t given any thought to in many years. It was, of course, in no way comparable to having one’s genitals cut, but it was the closest she could come to understanding why a mother would knowingly allow her daughter to go through such pain, and the memory filled her with empathy.
By the time she was three years old, Molly had developed severe buckteeth. When she turned six and started school, she often returned home distraught. “The other kids make fun of my teeth,” she complained to her mother. “They call me Bucky Beaver.”
Ann took Molly to an orthodontist. “I’m afraid that Molly is causing the problem herself,” he said. Molly had developed a habit of aggressively sucking on her bottom lip with her top teeth, causing her front teeth to grow outward. “Until your daughter breaks this habit, her teeth cannot be fixed.”
Despite Ann’s best efforts, she could not get Molly to stop this behavior. It was a long-held ritual, one that brought her tremendous comfort. At night, lying in bed with her cherished stuffed dog named Pluto, Molly would rub Pluto’s soft fur and suck on her lip.
Ann was beside herself with worry. She didn’t want Molly to be considered unattractive or be ostracized because of her looks. Not if there was something she could do about it.
The next night Ann snuck into Molly’s room while she slept. She quietly took Pluto from where he lay next to Molly’s pillow, and she cut away a tiny piece of his worn, gray fur. The next night she did it again, this time taking a snip from his tail. Night after night, as Molly slept, Ann came into Molly’s room and cut away a piece of Pluto. It didn’t take long for Molly to notice her beloved dog disappearing during the night. She ran to her mother. “What is happening to my Pluto?” she cried out.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ann would say, shooing Molly from the room. Each morning Molly would wake, worried that Pluto had further shrunk during the night, and each morning she would find it to be true. Eventually Molly awoke to find that, beside her, all that was left of Pluto was a small piece of his ear. She put the ear away, heartbroken and lonely. But she never did suck on her teeth again. The braces she was given a few months later were extremely painful, giving her headaches and making her gums bleed, and the headgear she had to wear to school just caused her further embarrassment.
She complained to her mother. “Why do I have to have these on my teeth?” she insisted.
“Because they’ll make you more attractive, and the kids will stop picking on you,” Ann replied. Though she was not an affectionate woman, she placed her hand on Molly’s cheek. “Later, when it’s time for you to date boys, you’ll understand. It might not make sense now, but you’ll eventually thank me for what I’ve done.”
5
Teraanga ji (Welcome)
So, why is a girl like you staying on in a place like this?” Sitting at a table in a Dakar restaurant next to Molly and her sister, Diane, who was visiting her in 1975, this American college student couldn’t believe Molly had just said she was going to remain in Senegal. “I came here to live for a while,” he said, “but now all I want is to go home. It’s the trash and the flies.”
“If you look over the flies and into the eyes of the people,” Molly replied, “Senegal will grab you by the waist, as it has me; you won’t want to let go either.”
For a lot of Westerners, this might be hard to imagine, and for that they should be forgiven. The country is certainly beautiful in its way—overwhelmingly so at times. Teraanga, meaning hospitality in Wolof, is more than just a word; it’s a way of life. And the culture presents an interesting mix of refined French culture and third-world need. But it’s arguably not the easiest place to live, especially for anyone accustomed, as Molly was when she arrived in 1974 (at the hottest time of the year, no less, when the threat of malaria is constant), to the modern conveniences of America—hot water, air-conditioning, reliable electricity, paved roads, and fewer flies.
Even after the years she’s now spent in Senegal and how well she has come to know the country and its culture, she has a difficult time articulating what it is that initially drew her in so fiercely and immediately. Perhaps it was the simple fact that in Senegal she’d discovered a place where she felt people truly cared about other people, in a way she hadn’t experienced before. She also physically fit in. She’d always been the tallest girl in her class, a characteristic that, growing up, made her feel “awkward and gawky,” and despite her thinness, her mother had often been quite concerned with Molly’s weight, urging her to watch what she ate and to exercise more so that she could be happier and would look better in her clothes. In Senegal, Molly found the opposite to be true. Senegalese women are statuesque—the revered queens of Senegal, the lingéers, had all been tall—and large women are considered beautiful, so much so that some of the girls in Molly’s dorm at the University of Dakar took pills to help them gain weight. As Diane explains, “Molly was as skinny as a rail in high school and very tall. She was popular and liked, but I don’t think she ever felt fully at home in her body there. When she got to Senegal, she was accepted as a tall woman, and that allowed her in so many ways to just be who she was.”
Perhaps. As Molly wrote in her journal not long after arriving in Senegal: “I have a great desire to describe Dakar. How easy to laugh and dance and talk here. To live the daily existence in this town … I’m a woman in Dakar. A woman.”
Or perhaps it was the distance that living in Senegal put between Molly and her parents. The cost of phone calls was far too expensive, and though she frequently wrote letters to her parents, sometimes as often as twice a week, Molly told them very little. She’d write superficially about the African novels she was reading for class, the things she wanted them to send from home, or the translating jobs she eventually took to earn extra money, working for a range of clients—staff from French-and English-speaking NGOs, a blues band visiting from the United States, a fertilizer company. “I’ve already begun studying my fertilizers,” she wrote to her father soon after getting that job, adding a Melching pun of her own. “But it’s kind of a shitty job.”
What’s remarkable about how little she told her pare
nts was how much she actually had to tell. As she settled in to life in Dakar, Molly—the likable, once-awkward girl from Danville, illinois—quickly became an integral part of the social circle of some of the most well-known and influential artists and intellectuals in Senegal. She was brought into this world through Ousmane Sembène, considered one of Africa’s most important and celebrated filmmakers, and his American wife, Carrie Dailey. Ousmane and Carrie, to whom Molly had been introduced through a professor at the University of illinois, lived in a house that Ousmane had built himself on the Atlantic Ocean, not far from the city center. Carrie had grown up outside of Chicago and had come to Senegal two years earlier as an Indiana University graduate student to interview Ousmane for the Ph.D. thesis she was writing on him and his work. They’d fallen in love and married in 1973.
Standing nearly six feet tall, Carrie was strikingly beautiful. Known for her sharp intelligence and bold style, she would often shave her head and wear beautiful African clothes, and with her confidence and elegance, she could capture the imagination of every person as she walked into a room. She and Molly became quick friends. At the time, Ousmane was occupied with directing his film Xala, which many critics would later consider his finest. While he was off writing in his study, Carrie and Molly would take the dinner they’d made together in Carrie’s small kitchen to the terrace overlooking the ocean’s rocky shoreline—near where Ousmane had inscribed on the house GALLE CEDDO (THE HOME OF A FREE MAN)—or they’d share it Senegalese style, from a common bowl set on a colorful African pagne spread on the living room floor. In February, when the dusty harmattan winds began to blow in from the Sahara desert, turning the sky hazy and the evenings chilly, they’d build a fire in the fireplace, make cookies, and sip tea.
The timing of their friendship was perfect for them both. Ousmane was nearly twenty years older than Carrie, and as an African-American living in an isolated community with a husband who spent most of his time, pipe in mouth, off in his study, Carrie longed for the closeness of a strong female friendship. And in Carrie, Molly found someone in whom she could confide about her experiences in this new culture, the insecurities she felt at the university, and her desire to better fit in. Carrie, who at thirty-two was eight years older than Molly, taught her much about Senegalese culture, showing her the proper way for a woman to sit around the communal dinner bowl and lending her gorgeous, embroidered boubous from her closet, telling her to throw away her miniskirts, because a Senegalese reaction to bare thighs on the street was equivalent to an American’s reaction to a Senegalese woman walking bare-breasted through a shopping mall.
“The way you dress in America reflects your individuality and how you feel about yourself,” Carrie explained. “The way you dress here reflects how you feel about others. Dress as they do, and people will know you respect them.”
While the Sembènes never extended formal invitations, it was well known among many members of the world’s intelligentsia—European musicians, African writers and filmmakers, and international journalists who came to interview Ousmane—that on Sunday afternoons, the Sembène house was the place to be.
Jean Brière, a Haitian refugee and poet, was a frequent guest at these gatherings, where he was often spotted sitting in a corner writing in a notebook. When he finished, he would stand to interrupt the party, breaking up the conversation and dancing, and loudly announce, “It is time for my poem!”
After he had dramatically recited the ode he had written for the occasion in flourishing academic French, his wife would run screaming from the back of the room to throw her arms around her husband. “Jean, tu es si brilliant! Quel poème extraordinaire!” she would exclaim.
Molly was most impressed with the Africans she encountered and would often have to contain the excitement she felt in finding herself sitting at the heavy wooden table on the Sembènes’ patio, which offered spectacular views as the sun set over the ocean, beside the same person whose work she was currently reading in her African studies program: Camara Laye, a well-known Guinean novelist, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, the Senegalese writer whose novel L’Aventure Ambigue (The Ambiguous Adventure) gave Molly insight into the dilemma of straddling two cultures—French and African. She got to meet people like Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and poet who had been very active in Nigeria’s struggle for independence from Great Britain and who would go on to win the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The experience of meeting the Sembènes, of getting involved so quickly after arriving in Senegal with some of Africa’s greatest artists, deeply affected Molly. Despite her love of the culture, she had been questioning how she might better assimilate. The misunderstandings she experienced while living in the university dorm—the requests for money from the other students, the persistent feeling of living on the outside and looking in—often left her lonely and confused. “But how can one judge a culture from the outside?” she wrote in her journal at the time. Her biggest question was one she wrote a short time later: “How can an outsider ever really integrate, and do I really want that?”
The answer to this question would come not long after, when she met Cheikh Anta Diop, a man who would forever change her life.
CHEIKH ANTA DIOP’S OFFICE was a radiocarbon laboratory at L’Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noir (the Fundamental institute for Black Africa) at the University of Dakar. Molly met him in May 1975, seven months after arriving in Senegal. By this time, she had begun to learn Wolof; with her love of language and her intense curiosity about the world, the experience of not being able to communicate had proved too frustrating. For two months she studied at a language center in Dakar, learning dialogue, basic vocabulary, and grammar, and then continued to study on her own through books, study guides, and conversations with anyone who would take the time to speak with her and answer her seemingly endless questions of what certain words meant, as well as put the words into context so she could better understand those that had no equivalent in English. She quickly mastered the language. (In 1980, just five years after beginning her study of the language, the U.S. ambassador to Senegal would assert in a letter to a potential funding agency that Molly spoke Wolof as well as native speakers.)
Molly loved the sound and rhythm of the language, but perhaps what drew her in most were the secrets it revealed about this country to which she was becoming so attached. She’d always understood that the culture and values of a people were often hidden deep within their language. In an article Molly once wrote, published in the Danville newspaper when she was a senior in high school, she said, “To understand the heart of a nation is to know and communicate with the people.” And now, through this strange and foreign language, she was discovering a way to experience the world and relate to others that was vastly different from her Western worldview. Unlike the familiar American values she’d always been expected to embrace—progress, individual freedom, material wealth and prosperity—she was coming to find that what mattered most among the Senegalese was concern for the group and taking care of one’s family and neighbors. Unlike the celebration of privacy in the English language, the word does not exist in Wolof; instead, words for hospitality, peace, unity, and friendship abound.
Despite how far she’d come in speaking and understanding Wolof, she decided on the way to her first meeting with Cheikh Anta Diop that she would not attempt it with this professor. “People were often so surprised that a young American woman would make the effort to learn Wolof that I couldn’t get them to speak about anything else,” she says. “And on this day, I didn’t have time for that.” She was simply in search of a book she needed that he had checked out of the library. But when she arrived at Cheikh Anta’s office and was called back to see him after a lengthy wait, Molly was immediately taken. In his early fifties, he was tall and athletic—he’d been a renowned boxer during his student days in France—and in his crisp white lab coat, Cheikh Anta struck an imposing and impressive sight, causing Molly to immediately change her mind.
“Na nga def?”
she offered. (How are you?)
“Maa ngi fii rekk,” he responded, laughing with delight and offering the traditional response. (I am here only.)
Molly stayed at his office for three hours. She spoke of her life in America and her newfound love of Africa, of the literature she was studying, and of her growing interest in the Wolof language. The next Sunday, while the Sembènes’ guests gathered on the large patio, Molly mentioned this meeting to Carrie.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Carrie said. “Do you know who he is?”
“He’s a professor,” Molly responded. “I know that he studied in France before returning to Senegal.”
“He’s not just a professor, Molly. He’s arguably one of the most well-known and influential Africans of our time, and one of the world’s most important thinkers on African history.” She went on to explain that nine years earlier, in 1966, he’d been honored alongside W. E. B. DuBois as the scholar who had exerted the greatest influence on African thought in the twentieth century. With a specialty in Egyptology, Cheikh Anta believed that the struggle for African independence couldn’t succeed without acknowledging the African origins of humanity and civilization, arguing that the ancient Egyptians were black. “His thinking is controversial but so important,” Carrie said. “If I were you, I’d try to spend more time with him. People would kill for that opportunity.”
Molly took Carrie’s advice and soon paid Cheikh Anta another visit. He welcomed her, offering her a seat across from his desk, and before long these meetings became more frequent. For hours, they would engage in philosophical discussions about his work in Egyptology, which traced current practices in black African culture back to the ancient Egyptians. This new perspective provided Molly with an alternative to dominant colonial narratives, and she saw its power to reshape historical accounts of Africa.