two things i forgot last time... (reader discretion is advised for the first)
1) one of the more foreign experiences i've had so far was to watch a bull be slaughtered in the street. my brother and i were visiting a house not far from us where a fellow american student was staying: we were checking on her because she'd been sick, but she was asleep. i stuck around for a little while chatting with another visitor on the patio about various malian customs, and when we were about to part they asked if i wanted to watch them kill this bull that had been next to us the whole time. the idea of watching a slaughter take place a couple feet away made me a little nervous, but i'm always preaching about how slaughterhouses in the US should have glass walls, and i knew i would regret it if i went home empty-minded... so i stayed. the bull was a truly massive animal, and it took several men a good while to knock it over with ropes lassoed round its neck and two legs. when it had shaken the earth with all that weight tumbling to the unpaved street, they tied its legs together and the young man who turned out to be the main slaughter-authority got behind its head and wielded its two giant horns to keep it still while someone procured the knife. the horn-man twisted the horns until the neck popped and he then made a really wide cut across the floppy, dangling skin of the bull's throat. it bled for a long time and another guy had to stand on all fours on its stomach to push out the air and restrain the spasms that occurred as all the different parts of the body realized that the jugular vein had been irreprably damaged. i recognize that this description is extremely graphic, and for that reason it's not necessary to waste more time telling about the skinning and gutting process, but i did watch this whole event take place, and it had a pretty profound effect on me. it occurred with such nonchalance in the middle of a neighborhood where plenty of people passed by, albeit night time. i wish i had something to say about the look in the eye of the animal or something like that, but it seemed so necessary to the survival of the community, so ordinary among the sheep and goats roaming the streets or the bizarre animal parts on sale in the marketplace, that the ethical question never really occurred to me. the treatment of animals here is very bothersome if i consider how much i've loved certain pets in my life, and quite frankly it has surprised me thus far. children, in particular, are visibly really mean to the animals that roam the streets, but then again the idea of domestication for pleasure or companionship doesn't seem to exist because a dog or cat is another mouth to feed and they often carry diseases. i'm looking for something to say to sum this up but i'm not finding anything --
2) my mailing address here is:
isaac fosl-van wyke
c/o modibo coulibaly
world learning, school for international training
BPE 2953
Bamako, Mali, West Africa
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5 comments:
Idrissa Berthe' - hellow from Pennsylvania! - I was so grateful to hear you were safe alive and adventuring -Plus I truly identified & understood you where you said my unpopular (in america) and wild dance skills were finally appreciated with much acclaim.
Being the epicurean that I am, I wanted to ask if you could describe some of the foods you eat - what might be on your plate at a particular meal & perhaps in connection with your independent study project - what types of food they sell at the markets & how the indigenous people use these foods.
Best Fishes
Uncle Joel
Hey Idrissa and the always-time of the Internet,
A wild story about the bull, indeed. It got me wondering about whether there were any religious dimensions to the slaughter? Facing the bull towards Mecca? Hallal-like issues? And what about the public health dimensions? How is blood cleaned up from the street, if at all? Your comments about ethical questions not arising were very interesting to me, of couse, too. Do you think raising moral issues about non-humans animals requires certain social conditions or certain cultural traditions?
Hi isaac!! :) (everyone else is using the idrissa joke)
glad to hear you're having an awesome time in mali. It sounds like a truly great experirnce and i hope you think of it as one as well.
Things here are good, there's a bug that went around school but that doesn't really seem to be as crazy as watching a bull be torn apart. Hope you're getting a long with your siblings there and missing your sibling here.
love,
eli :P
ISAAC idrissa!!!
I just left you a really long awesome commentary, and your blog made me create a name for myself and promptly delted it all. oh well. here goes again.
your bull experience is very similar to my bullfighting experience, la corrida de toros, at least, some of how we felt about them was similar.
DO YOU DANCE A LOT IN MALI? I LOVE TO DANCE. I was so jealous of you, I saw this AMAZING panafrican group (we had free concerts every night in the plaza mayor, which is the best venue ever for huge awesome concerts, what with the open air stuff, and the ancient buildings on all sides) anyway, there was a group of senegalese (they´re studying here till december, yaaaay) people in the audience and they went crazy dancing and I joined them and they taught me the most fun energetic dances ever and I looked ridiculous but they were so nice and then a woman from the stage joined us and we danced and danced and they sang and played a corta and a bunch of other instruments and we communicated in broken spanfrench, (they are SO similar!) and the band came back and played an hour and a half encore, and two of the band announced that they were from mali and I cheered and screamed like a banshee for you and for mali and I kept thinking what fun you must be having. haha, the phone in the stinkhole is a good story. anyway I ran into the same group at a discotech, and we all danced again till we were sweaty and tired and everything.
how welcome you feel is how I feel in salamanca. madrid was a bit big, the basque region is not overly friendly peoplewise, but here in salamanca it is wonderful. I just insert myself into a conversation and people talk to me and clap me on the back and laugh at my terrible spanish and buy me beer and invite me to the next bar with them. I didn´t come home thursday night, I went straight to class very drunk to take my first quiz. I did very well,haha, because it was an oral comprehension-speaking quiz and I had spent the whole night practicing spanish.
haha, this is the same blog site I use with the fatal five, except that right now all the instructions are in spanish, it took me a couple minutes to set up my posting name.
anyway, el pais vasco
el pais vasco (basque region)
I´ll try and send a couple pictures, me and this girl christine built a giant sand-relief of one of my snail-head women, mi gran mujer de las conchas. we ended up going to the basque region, it´s crazy how different the language is. you almost can´'t understand anything. they have the tx = ch thing, so there is this tourist train called "txu-txu". the city we were in, San Sebastian/Donostia was exquisitely beautiful and also very very tiny. It had a gorgeous beach in the shape of a horshoe called La Kontxa, hehe, and the old part that we were staying in was probably a twenty minute walk accross. I really think the whole town is populated by tiny people that only come out when the tourists leave. Tiny people living on a tiny beach surrounded by tinytiny mountains and a very old very tiny village. I think it was that much better due to its smallness. we scaled the tiny mountain. it took us less than half an hour to get to the top, where a GIANT statue of Jesus was waiting and looking a little bit d isappointed. You can see him from anywhere in the city against the sky. It´s very discocerting when there is a storm and you see stern Jesus pointing at you against a backround of storm clouds and lighting and you can´t get away from him anywhere in the city, haha.
ok, i think that´s all I put the first time. I´ll save stories and pictures for when we get back (please come back eventually, unless you really really don´t want to)
-muchos besos, recuerda, no hay esfuerza que no es hermosa
much love,
Nooooooooooooooooona
(I just had the same thing happen as Noona did -- wrote a post then found my log-in didn't work, and lost it. Here goes again.)
I told your bull story to an acquaintance from Guinea, your neighbor to the southwest, and he laughed and said why would you go all the way to Mali and write about something so commonplace. It "happens all the time," he said, and proceeded to tell me how one guy takes the horns like handlebars and another jumps up and down on the belly, exactly as you described. A crowd gathers to buy pieces of fresh meat, still hot or, if you're lucky, still quivering. So fresh it's partly alive.
Pete asked about a religious angle. When this man's mother died he went back to Africa to offer a sacrifice in front of her house to ensure the safe passage of her soul, apparently a pre-Islamic tradition. He didn't have to kill the animal himself, but he did have to touch it beforehand, while it was still alive.
I smile that he takes this all for granted and we see it as extraordinary. I wonder what your guy who slaughtered the bull would notice if he walked around with you on Emory's campus for a day, and here I'm not refering to electronics and buildings but things you/we do... I suppose that's what anthropology is about, a study of what people (including ourselves) take for granted, a step toward understanding how amazing it all actually is.
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