A collection of short stories should be like a good record album (okay, a CD; maybe I'm old). The individual stories (or songs) should be successful in their own right, and when you've experienced the whole thing you should feel that every one of them belonged and that the whole is, in itself, also a successful creation. Peter Chilson's first short fiction collection achieves this hoped-for quality and cohesiveness.
The stories themselves are compelling. Set in either West Africa or the northwestern U.S. (as the author's life has been for years), they traffic in culture clash and hard realities, and the prevailing mood is tense and often grim. ("American Food" provides a nicely modulated counterpoint as it serves up some nearly absurdist humor along with the familiar cultural tension.) Chilson's clear, unadorned narrative voice ties the collection together well, bringing to mind George Orwell's aesthetic preference for language that allows the reader to focus on the story rather than the way it is told. And these stories, tough and humane and probing in their exploration of human relationships across a cultural divide, do reward the reader's attention.
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Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories Kindle Edition
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chilson makes a promising fiction debut with these stories about Americans and Africans who come to realize the gulf between their cultures isn't as large as it might seem (he has written a travelogue set in West Africa). In the novella Tea with Soldiers, Carter, an ex-pat teaching in Niger, mourns the disappearance of a friend and colleague and tries to reconcile himself to his powerlessness in the face of the absurdity of death—particularly that of one of his malnourished students who succumbs to malaria. The title story features a botanist's reminiscences about his dead sister, a Peace Corps worker whose work, as the narrator describes, was akin to plants that live where other plants cannot, breathing nutrients into torn-up soil so others might grow. Other stories portray the violence that plagues parts of Africa and explore the challenges of understanding and interpreting carnage. In Freelancing a journalist reflects on a photographer colleague who once asked a woman keening over a dead body to move so he could have a better angle for his shot. This affecting collection moves well beyond jaded ex-pat cliché and expertly balances the political and emotional realities of troubled people in troubled places. (Aug. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Chilson has spent years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and freelance journalist. In this vivid and eye-opening collection, he explores, via characters from one continent sojourning in the other, the vast political and cultural dissimilarities between Africa and America. In one story, a West African ecologist teaching in Oregon runs into trouble with the police when he boils a goat head behind his apartment. In "Freelancing," an American journalist in West Africa is appalled by the zombielike ability of his photographer to snap endless scenes of horror. The gripping novella "Tea with Soldiers" depicts a young, idealistic grad student, David Carter, teaching English in a secondary school in Niger and struggling against suspicions that he is really with the CIA. Chilson brilliantly juxtaposes David's gradually worsening present, marked by government harassment and the beatings of his students, with his past talks with fellow teacher Salif, who has been taken away for interrogation. As Salif says about his parents' arrests and his own beatings, the story is not awful, but rather, like each of Chilson's tales, "an African story." Donovan, Deborah
Review
Starred Review. Chilson makes a promising fiction debut with these stories about Americans and Africans who come to realize the gulf between their cultures isn't as large as it might seem (he has written a travelogue set in West Africa). In the novella Tea with Soldiers, Carter, an ex-pat teaching in Niger, mourns the disappearance of a friend and colleague and tries to reconcile himself to his powerlessness in the face of the absurdity of death—particularly that of one of his malnourished students who succumbs to malaria. The title story features a botanist's reminiscences about his dead sister, a Peace Corps worker whose work, as the narrator describes, was akin to plants that live where other plants cannot, breathing nutrients into torn-up soil so others might grow. Other stories portray the violence that plagues parts of Africa and explore the challenges of understanding and interpreting carnage. In Freelancing a journalist reflects on a photographer colleague who once asked a woman keening over a dead body to move so he could have a better angle for his shot. This affecting collection moves well beyond jaded ex-pat cliché and expertly balances the political and emotional realities of troubled people in troubled places. (Publishers Weekly )
Chilson has spent years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and freelance journalist. In this vivid and eye-opening collection, he explores, via characters from one continent sojourning in the other, the vast political and cultural dissimilarities between Africa and America. In one story, a West African ecologist teaching in Oregon runs into trouble with the police when he boils a goat head behind his apartment. In "Freelancing," an American journalist in West Africa is appalled by the zombielike ability of his photographer to snap endless scenes of horror. The gripping novella "Tea with Soldiers" depicts a young, idealistic grad student, David Carter, teaching English in a secondary school in Niger and struggling against suspicions that he is really with the CIA. Chilson brilliantly juxtaposes David's gradually worsening present, marked by government harassment and the beatings of his students, with his past talks with fellow teacher Salif, who has been taken away for interrogation. As Salif says about his parents' arrests and his own beatings, the story is not awful, but rather, like each of Chilson's tales, "an African story."
(Booklist -Deborah Donovan )
Chilson has spent years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and freelance journalist. In this vivid and eye-opening collection, he explores, via characters from one continent sojourning in the other, the vast political and cultural dissimilarities between Africa and America. In one story, a West African ecologist teaching in Oregon runs into trouble with the police when he boils a goat head behind his apartment. In "Freelancing," an American journalist in West Africa is appalled by the zombielike ability of his photographer to snap endless scenes of horror. The gripping novella "Tea with Soldiers" depicts a young, idealistic grad student, David Carter, teaching English in a secondary school in Niger and struggling against suspicions that he is really with the CIA. Chilson brilliantly juxtaposes David's gradually worsening present, marked by government harassment and the beatings of his students, with his past talks with fellow teacher Salif, who has been taken away for interrogation. As Salif says about his parents' arrests and his own beatings, the story is not awful, but rather, like each of Chilson's tales, "an African story."
(Booklist -Deborah Donovan )
About the Author
PETER CHILSON is the winner of the 2006 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction, selected by Lan Samantha Chang and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College, for Disturbance-Loving Species. His previous travelogue, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, won the Associated Writing Programs Award for creative nonfiction. Chilson teaches creative writing at Washington State University and lives in Moscow, Idaho.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
AMERICAN FOOD
Professor Keita Traore is, according to the best authorities on West African
ecology, the man on the soils of the Sahel region. He knows what should and
shouldn't be grown there. He can talk dirt across six countries, which gives
him certain marketability in a land wasting away under heat, wind, and too
little water. Governments pay him to study the land where he grew up herding
goats and planting yams with his family. He has advanced degrees in botany
and geology from France and the United States. He can pick up an infrared
satellite photograph of, say, the Madiama district in Mali and tell you what
the soil depths are at a given longitude and latitude, what plants grow there,
and how much carbon can be found at a depth of six centimeters. And he
can do it fluently in four languages.
But Keita Traore can't cook goat head, his favorite food. The
sheriff 's deputy sees this clearly. Keita, who is six feet, five inches tall and
thin as a twig, watches the deputy drop to one knee and poke a stick at the
thing floating in a pot of steaming water on a dual-burner camping stove. The
deputy, in a uniform of black short-sleeved shirt and trousers, is a muscular
man with thin graying hair, his face a little sunburned behind wraparound bike
racer's sunglasses. Keita squats beside him, wondering what he is doing.
The two men huddle like this, hidden in the lilac bushes a couple hundred
yards behind Keita's apartment building. Keita hoped the bushes would
provide cover so he could cook the goat head unseen by his neighbors and
family. Now he looks up through the leaves and wonders who called the
police. The building is part of a complex of clapboard townhouses on the
edge of the eastern Oregon town where Keita and his family live. Each
townhouse has its own burnt-out lawns, front and back, dense with thistles
and morning glories.
Keita likes this part of Oregon — so much like home, a big land,
dry and difficult. He walks to work at the state agricultural college where he
has spent ten years, first as a graduate student and now as a professor.
Rocky slopes of sagebrush and dwarf pines rise above town. For a century,
cattle ranchers have barely hung on in these hills, complaining of wolves until
they killed them all, and now of coyotes and, always, poor rains.
His children, a boy and a girl, are indifferent to the land where they
live now, and to Africa, the land of their birth. They whine when Keita takes
them on walks to show them plants like sagebrush, whose narrow, pale
green leaves he likes to rub into their palms for them to smell. They moan
and sigh impatiently when Keita and their mother, Aissa, try to teach them
Bambara, their native tongue, or tell stories of life in the village. Often at
dinner Aissa looks sternly at Keita while nodding to the children. Keita knows
it is time to tell such a story. Nearly every day, out of earshot of the children,
Aissa says to her husband, "You must talk to them about our home." So
Keita tells them things like "Children, in the early morning my mother would
take me to gather leaves for soup," and as he speaks the children fold their
arms and roll their eyes. But he talks through their indifference, telling himself
and Aissa that they are only children and they will change.
Aissa worries. She pleads carefully when she is alone with Keita
and sometimes she sounds angry. "Keita," she says, "our children do not
know the country where they were born. You travel back so often. You must
take us with you."
Keita, too, is worried, but he lowers his head as if to blunt her
annoyance and begs patience. "There isn't enough money," he says. Yet
Aissa is patient, and defiant. She savors heat, preferring bright cotton
dresses and wraps in summer to celebrate the sun, and in winter a brilliant
orange down parka, with boots. She tells people, "I dress to defy your rain."
She is beautiful, shorter than her husband, with close-cropped black hair and
cool green eyes. Aissa has known Keita since they were children in the
village, and she is used to his absences, or at least Keita likes to believe that
about her. From the village Aissa followed him to the capital where he went to
university and she trained to be an accountant. When Keita went to Paris for
a year of graduate studies in biology, she agreed to wait for him. She
returned to their village, where she worked balancing the books for a
government seed warehouse. She did not have the money to go to France,
and he could not afford to return until he finished. Nor did she go with him
when he took a job for a year studying soils on a wildlife preserve in
Senegal. "I cannot support you on what they pay me," he told her. "I must put
in my time. Things will get better."
But all that was before Oregon. Aissa knows how life would be at
home on an $800 annual civil service salary. She reminds herself that at least
now she is waiting with Keita and not apart from him. Still, her patience
wears thin, which Keita cannot ignore. He worries.
The deputy squints, his head cocked to one side as he looks
down at the pot, holding the stick at his side. Thin brown and white fur still
covers the head. He pushes his sunglasses up on his head and squints at
Keita. "What is this?" he says.
Keita hesitates. It is early afternoon in August and he and the
deputy sweat under the sun. The head bobs and rolls a little as the water
begins to boil.
"Well, you see," he says, "it's . . . goat head. We eat it." His voice
is barely audible. He stands with his hands folded in the small of his back,
expecting to be arrested, again. Suddenly, Keita thinks, My God, the deputy
cannot believe this is some person's head. The shape is obviously not
human, and there is the fur. He starts to wonder how he's going to explain
this to the deputy, but that thought is quickly replaced by the worry of how
this situation will play in the campus newspaper.
AFRICAN MAN ARRESTED
BOILING A SKULL IN HIS BACKYARD
POLICE SUSPECT HEADHUNTER CONNECTION
The deputy nods his head and smiles. He says, "Goat head, huh."
He looks about forty, and the skin around his pale blue eyes is beginning to
wrinkle. He glances over at Keita, whose long body is folded in a squat. Keita
wants to tell this man that he inherited his great height from his mother,
whose people come from the West African coast. But the deputy's face
opens in a grin and he says, "Cool!"
Keita squints at the deputy, at once startled and relieved by the
man's good humor. But he cannot quite trust the grin or the friendly word.
Keita says nothing.
This would have been, Keita figures, his third food-related arrest in the United
States. He was arrested or detained (he's never sure of the difference) a
decade earlier at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport when he first came to
the United States. He'd arrived on a connecting flight from Paris, while on his
way to Oregon to begin graduate studies in soil science. He carried a
suitcase full of Chinese green tea, dried carp from the Niger River, dried
tomatoes, and dried goat meat, all of which he'd brought to make his meals
more like those at home. He likes to tell people, particularly his
undergraduate students, that he enjoys meals that are "robust." He likes to
say it's important to understand the source — the very earth in which
vegetables are grown and the animals from which the meat is cut.
"I'm not sure what you mean by that," a student once replied. "It
sounds kind of gross."
"My friend," Keita said, "you might very well be in the wrong class."
Anyway, he'd wrapped the food items in clear plastic bags. This
way there would be no questions from customs about what he was carrying.
"I still don't understand what I did wrong," he wrote to Aissa after
he was freed from a federal immigration detention center a week later. At that
time, Aissa was pregnant with their second child, a girl. She had stayed
home in Africa with their two-year-old son until Keita could afford to bring the
family across the Atlantic. "I declared everything as 'dried and processed
foodstuffs,' " he continued in that letter,
but they took nearly all of it and then they tried to charge me with smuggling
drugs. They thought the tea was marijuana. I can tell you that one officer in
the jail was a woman. She took me out of my cell one day, just me and no
one else. We went to the cafeteria and she got me a cup of coffee. The
coffee in the jail was awful, Aissa, the worst I have ever tasted in my life. I am
sure it was not really coffee. I thought certainly I was in the most serious
trouble, but what this woman wanted was to ask if any of the items in my
luggage would help her husband during sex. I told her what I had told them at
the airport many times — that it was all meat and vegetables prepared
according to our Muslim traditions. I asked her if they do not value meat and
vegetables in America. That made her angry. She said I was
being "sarcastic." But I meant no offense. I tried to explain about food in our
country, I wanted to tell her about our village and my mother, but she would
not listen.
Indeed, when it comes to food, sarcasm has no place in Keita's
life. He is passionate and particular and proud. He wanted to tell the jail
guard many things about Africa. He wanted to tell her that when he was a
boy, in 1973, he'd learned from his mother that he could eat the leaves
straight off a balanite tree. Keita's mother pressed balanite nuts for cooking
oil and boiled the leaves for soup. But he'd never seen anyone eat the leaves
raw until one morning during planting season, when Keita went with his
mother to sow sorghum seed after a rain. Their fields spread out on a sandy
plain, a savanna marked by thin grasses and scattered acacia and balanite
trees with narrow trunks and canopies shaped like mushrooms. Not so long
ago, just years before Keita was born, grass had grown thick here and trees
had thrived — not in great density, but a few meters apart in every direction.
The acacia and balanite offered shade under canopies thick with green
leaves. Now dust hung in layers over the land that he and his mother walked.
Trees were few, like mere guests of the soil, and it was difficult to tell one
field from another. Keita and his brothers marked the corners of the family
fields with stones, or they cut a mark in a tree. Sometimes farmers from
different villages fought over the fields — bloody, terrible clashes with hoes,
fists, and knives. Keita had heard of such things, but never seen one, and his
father forbade Keita and his brothers to fight anyone over land. "The Koran
forbids violence between Muslims," the old man told his sons.
Keita's mother was then twenty-eight years old, a tall muscular
woman with skin deeply wrinkled from a life of labor in the sun. She'd already
borne seven children. Keita remembers she wore a long faded green cloth
that morning, wrapped tightly around her waist, and a matching piece of cloth
around her head, which she knotted to the side, above her ear. At the time,
Keita had no idea how young his mother really was. To him, she was an old
woman. She began working one row ahead of him, bending at the waist and
sinking her hoe into the ground with her right hand, while plucking seeds with
her left from a cloth pouch at her waist and pressing them into the hole with
her thumb. She'd move sideways almost at a run. After a few minutes he was
already several rows behind her, which was partly because he enjoyed
watching her work. She moved on her toes, her feet in blue plastic sandals,
kicking up wet sand while her hands moved up and down and around at the
end of strong arms. He marveled at those legs and arms constantly in
motion, never wasting a movement, as if she were an insect performing a
dance across the earth. Her seed rows were straight. He tried to imitate her,
tried to capture the rhythm and speed of her movements, but he fell in the
wet dirt. Keita wondered if his mother had seen him stumble.
After a while she stood up straight, and he watched her walk
across the field, grab hold of a branch of a balanite tree, and pull some leaves
off. The nuts had long since been harvested. She ate the leaves right there,
stuffing two or three into her mouth at a time. She sat in the sand, in the
shade of the tree, chewing and staring at something in the distance. Keita
didn't want her to think he wasn't working hard and he pretended not to see
her, even though he thought her eating of the leaves very strange.
Later that day, when the work was done and he had a few minutes
alone, Keita went into the bush to find a balanite tree. He had to climb up into
the dense branches to reach what he sought. He took a fistful of the leaves,
which were thick and colored a greenish gray from dust, and tasted one with
his lips and tongue. Then he bit into it. The flavor was slightly bitter. He ate
more, appreciating the easy food. Drought had killed many of the family's
goats and there was little hope that this rain would be followed by enough
water to make good on the seeds Keita and his mother had sown that
morning. But at least the trees grew there.
The deputy looks at the head in the pot and laughs in a muted way, forcing
air out his nostrils. He flings the stick into the bushes and studies Keita,
looking up at this tall man with charcoal skin and bony frame in khaki pants,
shiny loafers, and a white cotton short-sleeve shirt buttoned down at the
collar — dressed as if he's just come from a semiformal business meeting.
Keita always presents his best when he leaves the house. He wears similar
clothes into the field in Africa, though with boots.
"People," Keita likes to tell colleagues in the field, "if I am to get
dirty, at least I will be dirty and well dressed."
The deputy wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, trying to
figure out what to say. "So you're over at the college?" he asks, making a
conversational guess. Most foreigners in town were somehow connected to
the college.
Keita tilts his head back impatiently and rolls his eyes, wishing
the deputy would get to the point. He raises his arms in a little shrug and lets
them fall to his sides. He says, more slowly and loudly, "Look, it is only the
head of a goat."
The deputy purses his lips and glances down at the pot on the
stove, which has not been turned off. "Yeah," he says, nodding his head in
agreement. "Seems to me you should probably roast it first, you know?
Throw it on the hot coals in a barbecue, or else you're gonna be boiling that
thing all day long." He gives Keita a friendly tap on the shoulder with his open
hand. "But wrap it in foil or something, will you? Your neighbor upstairs thinks
you're some sort of cult freak."
He laughs in staccato and then stops himself and coughs when
he sees Keita staring at him. "Sorry," he says, scratching the back of his
neck. "I didn't mean any harm by that." He smiles weakly. "But we did get
this phone call, ya know, and if you'd just cook right out in the open, on the
lawn, you'd probably attract a lot less attention."
Keita wipes his brow with his shirtsleeve, more humiliated than
relieved — not so much about the "cult freak" thing (he's used to overwrought
American imaginations; for years, the botany department secretary wouldn't
stand near him because she feared he carried the Ebola virus), but that he
actually has to endure receiving cooking instructions from an American. From
a common gendarme.
Once, in Africa, Keita had been obliged to travel with an American
embassy official. The man had floppy red hair and worried about sunburn. He
kept asking, "We won't spend much time in the sun, will we?" They were
inspecting soil study sites funded by American money, and one day, driving
a white Chevrolet Suburban on their way to a site, they stopped in a village to
fix a flat tire. The village chief was an old man who, as a matter of traditional
courtesy to travelers, insisted on feeding them with goat meat and rice. The
chief 's wife served the food hot, spread out on a large metal plate. She
soaked the rice in a dark tomato sauce with bits of meat. Keita, the
American, and the chief washed in a bucket of soapy water and sat on mats
arranged around the plate, to eat with their hands. The American dug in with
all ten fingers, spilling rice and meat in the dirt as he ate, while Keita and the
chief ate cleanly with the right hand, rolling the food into balls with their
fingers before sucking it off their fingertips and into their mouths. The chief
smiled at the American and in his own language called for his wife to get a
spoon. When she brought one, the American politely waved it away. "No, no,"
he said in English, "I'll eat like everyone else."
Keita laughed as the man continued spilling his food. "That's not
like everyone else," he said. "Take the spoon."
The second food-related arrest — it really wasn't an arrest, but Keita thinks
of it that way — happened four years after the Chicago airport incident, in the
parking lot of a diner in Portland, Oregon, down the street from a hotel where
Keita, against his better judgment, was attending a conference called African
Food Systems: A Western Perspective. He was in his last year of studying
for his Ph.D. and had gone to breakfast with two American students, whose
work toward their master's degrees he oversaw at the college agricultural
laboratories. Keita folded himself awkwardly into the booth, rising a full head
above his companions even as he sat. The pair stared at him while he salted
his three fried eggs, hash browns, and sausage, nearly emptying the
saltshaker. But he had ordered only eggs and potatoes, and he pushed aside
the sausage because, as a good Muslim, he could not eat meat prepared by
a non-Muslim.
Keita looked up and caught his companions' eyes. "Salt," he said
to them. "I need salt." Not knowing what to say, the two men looked back to
their food. "It is an acquired taste," Keita continued. "I grew up in a place
where one sweats a great deal."
"Yeah, well, be careful, man," said one of the students.
Keita looked at him a moment. Then, from the side of his plate, he
picked up the little green parsley sprout that lay beside a razorthin slice of
melon and held it in front of them by the stem, twisting it between his thumb
and forefinger. "Ameriiiican fooood," he said. "Very colorful, but there is really
not much to it, is there?" "Hey," said the same student, a skinny kid who sat
beside Keita in a T-shirt and faded army fatigue pants. He had long, stringy
brown hair and a mouth full of waffle. "It's a diner, man, give it a chance."
Keita nodded, and with his fork he speared a sausage and held it
up in front of his face. With a deep frown of mock concentration, he poked at
the surface of the impaled meat, where there appeared to be a blue
substance oozing out. After a couple of minutes, during which his
companions tried to ignore him, Keita finally determined that the substance
was ink and that it formed a number.
"Hmmm," he said aloud, his eyebrows raised. "Did you know that
this is sausage number three-seven-two?"
"Oh, don't worry," said the skinny kid. "That's just the FDA
inspection mark. They do that with restaurant meat."
The other student at the table winced as he sipped his coffee. "I
didn't know that," he said.
Keita left the sausage on his plate and worked carefully on the
eggs and potatoes. Then, without thinking, Keita tossed a cup of lukewarm
coffee over his shoulder and inadvertently doused a waitress as she walked
by. He'd meant the coffee for the floor. Actually, for the dirt. The action was
just a reflex. Keita put his face in his hands as his lunch companions looked
on, stunned, and then burst out laughing. The waitress, in shock, looked at
the coffee dripping off the hem of her uniform dress and down her calf. She
glared at them all for a minute before quietly saying, "Jerks! You are real
jerks." Keita was horrified and tried to explain.
"I am sorry," he said. "Where I come from we always eat
outside . . . I . . . I . . . forgot myself."
Keita's companions apologized, too, but the waitress walked
away without saying a word more. At the front counter she picked up the
telephone.
"We gotta go," the Americans said, almost simultaneously. The
two men dug in their pockets and tossed three tens and a couple of fives and
ones on the table, to make up for the incident. They ushered Keita out of the
restaurant, only to see a police cruiser pull into the parking lot, its strobe
lights flashing. The cruiser must have been right in the neighborhood when
the call came from dispatch, which had been alerted by the waitress. Two
officers got out of the car.
"You the guys who can't mind your table manners?" asked one
officer.
"We got a report of an assault on a waitress," said the other.
The police left fifteen minutes later, after Keita and his friends told
them the story, frantically, explaining that what Keita had done had been a
subconscious act, an accident, the simple tossing of coffee in the proverbial
dirt, as if they had been at an outdoor restaurant. The skinny kid offered a run-
on anthropology lecture about life, food, and eating habits in hot places like
Africa.
"You see," he told the officers, "in Africa, the nutritional situation is
much less complex and that means they eat differently than we do."
The officers looked on, with blank expressions. Keita, listening to
the kid's explanation, screwed up his face in quizzical amazement. Then he
heard himself do something he'd never done before, except to his children —
he barked a command. "Mike," he said, "please shut up!" He rubbed a hand
over his face and turned to the officers, looking down at them as he spoke. "It
was an honest accident and I am very sorry," he said. "I will certainly pay to
launder her dress."
By now Keita has turned off the camping stove. The years have added curly
flecks of gray to his hair, but his lean build and face, unlined except for a
permanent furrow of his brow, give him the same earnest look he had when
he was a graduate student. He folds his arms and watches the deputy pluck
a notebook and pen from his breast pocket.
"Look, you haven't done anything wrong," the man says to
Keita, "but I still have to make out a report. Now, what did you say your name
was?"
Keita gives his full name and tells the officer about his homeland
in West Africa, his work at the university, and his wife, Aissa, and their two
children, Ahmed and Fanta, who are all, at that moment, wandering around
Wal-Mart, looking for lawn furniture. He doesn't tell the deputy that his son,
Ahmed, his oldest at twelve, and his daughter, Fanta, who is not quite ten,
were born in Africa but grew up here in Oregon. Nor does he explain how
upset it makes him that they cannot speak their parents' language and how
the children respond in English when he and Aissa speak to them in their
tongue or in the colonial French.
"Speeeeak English," the children whine, children whose lives are
as different from the lives of children in the village where Keita and Aissa grew
up as to be, well, incomprehensible to African villagers. And Ahmed and
Fanta likewise think of rural West Africa as foreign, bewildering. "They think
you and I come from the moon," Keita often complains to Aissa.
Instead, Keita politely tells the deputy that he'll go up to the
apartment and retrieve the family passports for him to inspect.
"Naaa," says the deputy, shaking his head. "I don't need those."
He scribbles in the notebook. After a while, he stuffs the notebook and pen in
his shirt pocket and folds his arms. "So," he says. "How do ya eat goat
head?"
Keita, who has been staring down at the pot and mourning the
futility of his effort, looks up at the deputy and smiles.
Keita had good reason to be boiling goat head in the bushes behind his
apartment building. He'd planned to cook a meal as a surprise for Aissa, a
taste of home, no matter what his children thought. It made him smile that
Ahmed and Fanta would be horrified at the thought of eating a goat head. His
idea was to prepare the head the way his mother had done it — on a bed of
couscous soaked in the head's juices and dressed with onions, garlic, and
tomatoes, with plenty of salt. The meal was to be a medicine for Aissa's
resentment of Keita's frequent trips back to West Africa and the fact that she
and the children had returned home only once since they arrived in the United
States years earlier. Ahmed and Fanta had hated the visit and spent most of
the time sick with stomach parasites.
"They'll get used to it," Keita and Aissa told each other. "They
must give Africa more time. We must take them back." Keita would pause
and add, "When we have money."
Keita had promised to take the family home that summer, but
plane fare and expenses for the four of them were too much, not to mention
the expectations of the extended family in the village, where most people
work steadily only during the months of planting and the weeks of harvest.
Keita is the only member of his family who has a steady income. Aissa's
family depends on him, too. Every month he wires what he can — $100 here,
$300 there — to pay for food and medicine, weddings, a uniform for his
brother-in-law the policeman, schoolbooks for the children, and gifts for the
newborns. All this on a research professor's salary. The bonuses for his
consulting work are not enough. Sometimes Aissa does the books for small
shops in town, but without a proper American university degree the pay is
poor and infrequent. So she cleans motel rooms, does seamstress work, and
watches other people's children while the bills mount.
Keita's work as a scientist brought a balance of pleasures and
problems: lots of travel (some enjoyable, some not) and the contrast (which
he loved) between his homeland and his adopted home. It took time to adapt
to eastern Oregon's cold, sometimes snowy winters, but the dry climate in
the high desert was familiar, and the dust storms and violent summer rains
were curses of the land that he and Aissa understood well.
Once he'd taken Aissa and the kids on a picnic in the foothills of
the Wallowa Mountains, where they walked in the woods and roasted meat
and corn on the campground barbecue. Late that afternoon, as they were
beginning the drive home, they watched the sky darken in the east as a line
of thunderstorms gathered over a ridge densely forested with ponderosa pine.
The sky cracked with bright lightning flashes and rain burst from the clouds.
Soft thunder sounded in the distance. Ahmed and Fanta had fallen asleep in
the backseat, and Keita pulled the car off the road so he and Aissa could
watch the storm, "like at an American drive-in movie," he said to her. They
watched the clouds move and smoke rise from lightning strikes, thick white
columns of smoke, like rope connecting earth to sky. It was raining and the
wind was blowing, but they kept their windows down because it was warm
and the smell of sagebrush was strong.
"This is like home," Aissa said quietly.
"Yes," Keita said. "It is a very big place." Aissa looked at him and
smiled. She squeezed his hand. Such a land made it possible for her — for
both of them — to live far from home and still feel a certain familiar
connection to the earth.
But Keita knew this wasn't enough. The landscape and the
complexities of its soils were his own obsession, his work, not Aissa's. He
wanted to make things up to her. A good meal was the best way he knew
how. Yet it was not until he started cooking the goat head around noon —
when he carried the camping stove and pot from the apartment while Aissa
and the kids were at Wal-Mart, made the trip back to the car to retrieve the
goat head, and then finally took the bloody thing, which had been slaughtered
that morning and wrapped in wax paper, out of a plastic bag and set it in the
pot — that Keita realized he had no clue what he was doing.
Early that morning he'd been standing outside a large barn,
negotiating with the rancher from whom he would buy the goat. The rancher,
in fact, was a friend, Sheryl Banks. She was a tall, sandy-haired, sunburned
woman who taught veterinary science at the college and had an office one
floor up from Keita's. Sheryl and her husband ran a clinic on a ranch where
they raised sheep and goats, and a few horses. In the hallway outside her
office a few days earlier, Sheryl and Keita made a deal to meet at the ranch
early on Saturday morning. She greeted him at the barn in jeans and a T-
shirt, steel-toed work boots, and a dirty khaki baseball cap pulled down over
long, thick hair streaked with gray and tied back in a ponytail.
Keita showed up in his neat office clothes, wearing sneakers and
carrying a leather shoulder bag. She took him to a small enclosure with wire-
mesh fencing and wooden feed troughs. They fed their goats here, in the
shadow of a large barn. "We give 'em feed grown without any chemical
fertilizers," she said. "Best meat you'll ever have."
He quickly chose the fattest goat, one with a coat of white fur,
except for its head, which was brown and white. They settled the price then
disagreed, politely, about how to properly slaughter the animal. Sheryl offered
to do it herself, but Keita wanted it done in accordance with Muslim ritual —
the cutting of the animal's throat with the wound facing east, the direction of
the Holy City of Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad was born. This way
the blood would spill on the earth, cleansing it and honoring Muhammad's
very memory and work in the name of Islam. Muslim hands alone must
handle the animal, Keita explained. As they talked, Keita stood a few feet
from Sheryl, his hands folded behind his back in a posture of calm insistence.
Sheryl smiled at him, intrigued and unsure whether or not she
should be annoyed. She said, "Don't you trust me?" Then she smiled, a little
flirtatiously. Sheryl Banks had known Keita Traore for seven years, since he
was a graduate student in her animal anatomy class, one of the sharpest
students she'd ever worked with. He was quiet and efficient, detail oriented,
and comfortable with animals, a good scientist. But she realized that morning
that she really didn't know him at all. She said, a little playfully, "Keita, be
honest. You won't let me touch the animal because I'm a woman, is that it?"
Keita politely told her a half-truth, and a half-lie. "I won't let you
touch the animal because you are not a Muslim," he said. This was true, but
it was also true that in Keita's experience women were not permitted to
butcher meat. "I know you are skilled," he added, "but this is not a matter of
trust. It is a matter of ritual. I am a Muslim, you see. A Muslim must eat only
meat that is slaughtered by himself or by another Muslim."
As Keita spoke, Sheryl studied him and scraped the toe of her
boot in the dirt and hay, rubbing her chin and smiling. Finally, she
shrugged. "Suit yourself," she said. "I don't mean to sound stupid, but I don't
know, does the Koran actually have instructions for butchering meat?"
"The fifth chapter," Keita said. "We call it a Sura, the term for
chapter. They are not instructions, exactly; they are more like guidelines. In
the third paragraph Allah warns us . . ." And he recited the deity's wishes,
roughly, for the translation from Arabic on the spot was difficult for him: "You
must not eat those animals which die of themselves, nor the blood of swine's
flesh, and all that has been killed in any other name than that of Allah, and
you must not eat the animals choked, or those animals killed by a blow, or
fall, or a goring, or those killed by other animals, and you must make the
animal clean by putting it to death by your own hand."
Keita looked at the ground awkwardly. He said, "Religion is not
like science, I suppose."
American women, their directness and independence, particularly
with men, made him nervous. But Sheryl's knowledge and her easy ability
with animals impressed him. At the college horse stable he'd once watched
her calm a horse that had become dangerously upset when somehow the
hoof and ankle of a front leg became tangled in a strand of barbed wire
carelessly left in an exercise corral. Sheryl entered the corral alone as the
animal ran about frantically, at one point rearing on its hind legs to shake the
wire off. She calmed the horse, talking to the animal until it stood still while
she knelt on one knee and slowly removed the wire. Keita thought she must
have special powers.
"I didn't mean to be rude," Sheryl said, suddenly.
"You weren't," Keita said. "We are both scientists. We are askers
of questions."
She entered the pen and quickly put a rope around the goat's
neck. She led Keita and the goat into the barn, to a corner where a large
cement slab on the ground sloped into a drain. He carefully washed his
hands at a large sink, using a bar of soap left by the drain. She grabbed a
pair of oversize bloodstained jeans overalls from a hook and handed them to
Keita. "You'd best wear these over your clothes," she said. Then she
asked, "You don't mind if I watch?"
"Please," Keita said, "not at all." He looked away for a moment.
Then he said, "I don't want to be trouble for you, but I must do this outside,
on the dirt. It is important, you see, that I spill the blood on the soil in the
open air in order to cleanse the earth."
She shrugged again, her hands thrust deep in her jeans
pockets. "Sure," she said, "yeah, out back of the barn. There's plenty of
room." They walked across the barn, Keita carrying the overalls over his arm.
Sheryl pushed open a heavy wooden door and they emerged in an area of
hard-packed dirt beside an empty horse corral.
"This will be fine," Keita said. He pulled the overalls on over his
clothes.
Sheryl stood back and watched this very tall man take the animal
by the head and rear, flip it on its side, press down on its head with one
hand, and kneel on the torso, as if he'd been doing this all his life, which he
had. Normally, another man would be holding down the goat's torso and legs,
but Keita would not let Sheryl touch the animal during the slaughter. Keita
moved the goat so its head and throat faced east and yanked the head back
to expose the throat. Then, with a freshly sharpened knife he'd brought from
home in the leather bag, Keita made a long, deep cut across the throat, from
left to right. He did it in one motion and carefully bled the animal as he leaned
on its gasping and kicking body, uttering prayers in Arabic to honor both
Islam and the animal for offering itself as food. "Bismillahi . . . ," he began, in
thanks to God.
Keita, breathing a little hard from the effort, took twine from the
leather bag and a long screwdriver he'd bought just for the slaughter. Raising
one of the goat's hind legs, he used the knife to cut and separate skin from
bone just above the hoof, and then inserted the screwdriver beneath the skin,
carefully working it up the leg, separating skin from bone, without piercing the
skin. This way he scraped out an inch-wide tubular space between the skin
and bone all the way up the leg. As a boy in Africa, he'd used a long,
sharpened stick. Keita put down the screwdriver and again raising the hind
leg, he put his mouth to the opening of the space he'd made and began to
blow, and blow, and blow, for several minutes until the animal was bloated
like a parade balloon, its skin tight with Keita's own breath. He picked up the
twine and wrapped it around the leg above the hoof, cutting off the escaping
air. He smiled at Sheryl and let the dead animal sit a few minutes, to give the
air pressure time to separate the skin from bone and muscle.
"Now it will be easier to skin her," he said.
Sheryl nodded. She said, "That was beautiful, the way you did
that."
After a while Keita went back to work. He cut through bone and
cartilage to remove the head and handed it to Sheryl, who looked back at
him, surprised. He smiled. "Now," he said, "you can touch the meat." She
took the head with both hands and set it on the wax paper that she'd laid out
on a table in the barn. Keita made a long incision from the throat along the
belly, letting the animal's innards and some blood spill on the ground. He
began cutting the skin away. It was almost as easy as peeling a large
orange. Then he reached inside the animal to cut and scoop out the
intestines and bladder and set them all in a bucket. He cut away the thighs,
handing each to Sheryl, who wrapped the meat in the wax paper. Keita left
the rest of the torso as it was. They wrapped it and stored it in a large freezer
in the barn. Keita washed again at the sink and removed his overalls. He'd
finished the whole job in less than an hour.
Keita and Sheryl walked back to his car, each carrying packages
of meat in wax paper and wrapped again in plastic bags. "Someday soon
you'll have to bring your family out to the ranch for dinner," she said. "We'll
eat the rest of that goat meat. And if you want, I'll let you do all the work."
Keita and the deputy have moved the pot and the gas stove out of the lilac
bushes and onto the lawn. They are standing and talking. Keita
explains, "Goat head is my favorite food. In my country people eat it most
often in the morning because a head offers a full meal for the whole day. But I
like to take it in the evening. It is good to sleep on a full stomach." Then he
pauses and frowns a little. "How did you know how to cook goat head?"
The deputy grins. "I'm a hunter," he says. "And my brother runs a
restaurant in Seattle." He shrugs. "I've never eaten goat head, but I know
animals and I can cook." He looks at his watch, which reads 2 p.m. "Get
yourself a barbecue this afternoon and maybe you can have this ready in
time for dinner tonight." Keita hikes his pants up and squats. Using a
handkerchief to keep from burning his hand, he turns the pot over to drain the
water into the grass, letting the head tumble out on the lawn. The animal's
face stares back at the men, its mouth shut and its eyes as blank in death
as they'd been in life.
"My mother prepared this for us often from the time when I was a
small boy," Keita says. "I learned only how to eat it. I did not learn to cook it."
He smiles at this thought. The deputy drops to one knee, his forearms
resting on his right thigh. Keita continues. "I remember now, she would boil
the heads for some time, all at once, in a great pot, three or four at a time,
and then throw them on a fire. She would prepare a whole pile of them once a
week and then sell them at market." The deputy listens, his eyes on Keita's
face. "But she always kept one or two for us. In the evening we would sit
around the pot where my mother had set the heads in a hot salty sauce
prepared from dried tomatoes, sometimes with rice or couscous. And we
always used the same stone to crack open the skulls. We rinsed the stone
in water, and my father hit the skulls on the forehead, just above the eyes."
Keita laughs. "We would all, my brothers, my father, and I, reach in for a
handful of the brains first and scoop it out like this." He puts the thumb and
fingers of his right hand together and curves them. "The brain tastes like liver,
you know, and is very high in protein. The brain and the liver are the most
nutritious parts of a goat. Then we would dig for the eyes and the tongue.
They are difficult to chew but good to eat."
Suddenly the distant sound of children's voices comes from the
other side of the apartment building. Car doors slam and Keita looks at the
deputy, a little resigned.
He stands up and sighs. "My family," he says.
At that moment, Keita's son, Ahmed, runs around the corner of
the building, holding a new basketball in both hands. Aissa and Fanta are
chasing him, laughing. The children are dressed similarly in shorts and T-
shirts and sneakers. When they reach the lawn and the two men, the cook
stove, and the goat head, Fanta screams, and Aissa puts her hand over her
own mouth.
Ahmed looks at his father and then at the deputy, who smiles
broadly and tries very hard to look as if nothing is wrong. The boy looks at
the head in the grass and again from one man to the other and back to the
head. His eyes grow wide and his mouth falls open.
"Dad," he shouts, "what is that?"
Fanta stares. Aissa drops her hand from her mouth and begins to
laugh.
Professor Keita Traore is, according to the best authorities on West African
ecology, the man on the soils of the Sahel region. He knows what should and
shouldn't be grown there. He can talk dirt across six countries, which gives
him certain marketability in a land wasting away under heat, wind, and too
little water. Governments pay him to study the land where he grew up herding
goats and planting yams with his family. He has advanced degrees in botany
and geology from France and the United States. He can pick up an infrared
satellite photograph of, say, the Madiama district in Mali and tell you what
the soil depths are at a given longitude and latitude, what plants grow there,
and how much carbon can be found at a depth of six centimeters. And he
can do it fluently in four languages.
But Keita Traore can't cook goat head, his favorite food. The
sheriff 's deputy sees this clearly. Keita, who is six feet, five inches tall and
thin as a twig, watches the deputy drop to one knee and poke a stick at the
thing floating in a pot of steaming water on a dual-burner camping stove. The
deputy, in a uniform of black short-sleeved shirt and trousers, is a muscular
man with thin graying hair, his face a little sunburned behind wraparound bike
racer's sunglasses. Keita squats beside him, wondering what he is doing.
The two men huddle like this, hidden in the lilac bushes a couple hundred
yards behind Keita's apartment building. Keita hoped the bushes would
provide cover so he could cook the goat head unseen by his neighbors and
family. Now he looks up through the leaves and wonders who called the
police. The building is part of a complex of clapboard townhouses on the
edge of the eastern Oregon town where Keita and his family live. Each
townhouse has its own burnt-out lawns, front and back, dense with thistles
and morning glories.
Keita likes this part of Oregon — so much like home, a big land,
dry and difficult. He walks to work at the state agricultural college where he
has spent ten years, first as a graduate student and now as a professor.
Rocky slopes of sagebrush and dwarf pines rise above town. For a century,
cattle ranchers have barely hung on in these hills, complaining of wolves until
they killed them all, and now of coyotes and, always, poor rains.
His children, a boy and a girl, are indifferent to the land where they
live now, and to Africa, the land of their birth. They whine when Keita takes
them on walks to show them plants like sagebrush, whose narrow, pale
green leaves he likes to rub into their palms for them to smell. They moan
and sigh impatiently when Keita and their mother, Aissa, try to teach them
Bambara, their native tongue, or tell stories of life in the village. Often at
dinner Aissa looks sternly at Keita while nodding to the children. Keita knows
it is time to tell such a story. Nearly every day, out of earshot of the children,
Aissa says to her husband, "You must talk to them about our home." So
Keita tells them things like "Children, in the early morning my mother would
take me to gather leaves for soup," and as he speaks the children fold their
arms and roll their eyes. But he talks through their indifference, telling himself
and Aissa that they are only children and they will change.
Aissa worries. She pleads carefully when she is alone with Keita
and sometimes she sounds angry. "Keita," she says, "our children do not
know the country where they were born. You travel back so often. You must
take us with you."
Keita, too, is worried, but he lowers his head as if to blunt her
annoyance and begs patience. "There isn't enough money," he says. Yet
Aissa is patient, and defiant. She savors heat, preferring bright cotton
dresses and wraps in summer to celebrate the sun, and in winter a brilliant
orange down parka, with boots. She tells people, "I dress to defy your rain."
She is beautiful, shorter than her husband, with close-cropped black hair and
cool green eyes. Aissa has known Keita since they were children in the
village, and she is used to his absences, or at least Keita likes to believe that
about her. From the village Aissa followed him to the capital where he went to
university and she trained to be an accountant. When Keita went to Paris for
a year of graduate studies in biology, she agreed to wait for him. She
returned to their village, where she worked balancing the books for a
government seed warehouse. She did not have the money to go to France,
and he could not afford to return until he finished. Nor did she go with him
when he took a job for a year studying soils on a wildlife preserve in
Senegal. "I cannot support you on what they pay me," he told her. "I must put
in my time. Things will get better."
But all that was before Oregon. Aissa knows how life would be at
home on an $800 annual civil service salary. She reminds herself that at least
now she is waiting with Keita and not apart from him. Still, her patience
wears thin, which Keita cannot ignore. He worries.
The deputy squints, his head cocked to one side as he looks
down at the pot, holding the stick at his side. Thin brown and white fur still
covers the head. He pushes his sunglasses up on his head and squints at
Keita. "What is this?" he says.
Keita hesitates. It is early afternoon in August and he and the
deputy sweat under the sun. The head bobs and rolls a little as the water
begins to boil.
"Well, you see," he says, "it's . . . goat head. We eat it." His voice
is barely audible. He stands with his hands folded in the small of his back,
expecting to be arrested, again. Suddenly, Keita thinks, My God, the deputy
cannot believe this is some person's head. The shape is obviously not
human, and there is the fur. He starts to wonder how he's going to explain
this to the deputy, but that thought is quickly replaced by the worry of how
this situation will play in the campus newspaper.
AFRICAN MAN ARRESTED
BOILING A SKULL IN HIS BACKYARD
POLICE SUSPECT HEADHUNTER CONNECTION
The deputy nods his head and smiles. He says, "Goat head, huh."
He looks about forty, and the skin around his pale blue eyes is beginning to
wrinkle. He glances over at Keita, whose long body is folded in a squat. Keita
wants to tell this man that he inherited his great height from his mother,
whose people come from the West African coast. But the deputy's face
opens in a grin and he says, "Cool!"
Keita squints at the deputy, at once startled and relieved by the
man's good humor. But he cannot quite trust the grin or the friendly word.
Keita says nothing.
This would have been, Keita figures, his third food-related arrest in the United
States. He was arrested or detained (he's never sure of the difference) a
decade earlier at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport when he first came to
the United States. He'd arrived on a connecting flight from Paris, while on his
way to Oregon to begin graduate studies in soil science. He carried a
suitcase full of Chinese green tea, dried carp from the Niger River, dried
tomatoes, and dried goat meat, all of which he'd brought to make his meals
more like those at home. He likes to tell people, particularly his
undergraduate students, that he enjoys meals that are "robust." He likes to
say it's important to understand the source — the very earth in which
vegetables are grown and the animals from which the meat is cut.
"I'm not sure what you mean by that," a student once replied. "It
sounds kind of gross."
"My friend," Keita said, "you might very well be in the wrong class."
Anyway, he'd wrapped the food items in clear plastic bags. This
way there would be no questions from customs about what he was carrying.
"I still don't understand what I did wrong," he wrote to Aissa after
he was freed from a federal immigration detention center a week later. At that
time, Aissa was pregnant with their second child, a girl. She had stayed
home in Africa with their two-year-old son until Keita could afford to bring the
family across the Atlantic. "I declared everything as 'dried and processed
foodstuffs,' " he continued in that letter,
but they took nearly all of it and then they tried to charge me with smuggling
drugs. They thought the tea was marijuana. I can tell you that one officer in
the jail was a woman. She took me out of my cell one day, just me and no
one else. We went to the cafeteria and she got me a cup of coffee. The
coffee in the jail was awful, Aissa, the worst I have ever tasted in my life. I am
sure it was not really coffee. I thought certainly I was in the most serious
trouble, but what this woman wanted was to ask if any of the items in my
luggage would help her husband during sex. I told her what I had told them at
the airport many times — that it was all meat and vegetables prepared
according to our Muslim traditions. I asked her if they do not value meat and
vegetables in America. That made her angry. She said I was
being "sarcastic." But I meant no offense. I tried to explain about food in our
country, I wanted to tell her about our village and my mother, but she would
not listen.
Indeed, when it comes to food, sarcasm has no place in Keita's
life. He is passionate and particular and proud. He wanted to tell the jail
guard many things about Africa. He wanted to tell her that when he was a
boy, in 1973, he'd learned from his mother that he could eat the leaves
straight off a balanite tree. Keita's mother pressed balanite nuts for cooking
oil and boiled the leaves for soup. But he'd never seen anyone eat the leaves
raw until one morning during planting season, when Keita went with his
mother to sow sorghum seed after a rain. Their fields spread out on a sandy
plain, a savanna marked by thin grasses and scattered acacia and balanite
trees with narrow trunks and canopies shaped like mushrooms. Not so long
ago, just years before Keita was born, grass had grown thick here and trees
had thrived — not in great density, but a few meters apart in every direction.
The acacia and balanite offered shade under canopies thick with green
leaves. Now dust hung in layers over the land that he and his mother walked.
Trees were few, like mere guests of the soil, and it was difficult to tell one
field from another. Keita and his brothers marked the corners of the family
fields with stones, or they cut a mark in a tree. Sometimes farmers from
different villages fought over the fields — bloody, terrible clashes with hoes,
fists, and knives. Keita had heard of such things, but never seen one, and his
father forbade Keita and his brothers to fight anyone over land. "The Koran
forbids violence between Muslims," the old man told his sons.
Keita's mother was then twenty-eight years old, a tall muscular
woman with skin deeply wrinkled from a life of labor in the sun. She'd already
borne seven children. Keita remembers she wore a long faded green cloth
that morning, wrapped tightly around her waist, and a matching piece of cloth
around her head, which she knotted to the side, above her ear. At the time,
Keita had no idea how young his mother really was. To him, she was an old
woman. She began working one row ahead of him, bending at the waist and
sinking her hoe into the ground with her right hand, while plucking seeds with
her left from a cloth pouch at her waist and pressing them into the hole with
her thumb. She'd move sideways almost at a run. After a few minutes he was
already several rows behind her, which was partly because he enjoyed
watching her work. She moved on her toes, her feet in blue plastic sandals,
kicking up wet sand while her hands moved up and down and around at the
end of strong arms. He marveled at those legs and arms constantly in
motion, never wasting a movement, as if she were an insect performing a
dance across the earth. Her seed rows were straight. He tried to imitate her,
tried to capture the rhythm and speed of her movements, but he fell in the
wet dirt. Keita wondered if his mother had seen him stumble.
After a while she stood up straight, and he watched her walk
across the field, grab hold of a branch of a balanite tree, and pull some leaves
off. The nuts had long since been harvested. She ate the leaves right there,
stuffing two or three into her mouth at a time. She sat in the sand, in the
shade of the tree, chewing and staring at something in the distance. Keita
didn't want her to think he wasn't working hard and he pretended not to see
her, even though he thought her eating of the leaves very strange.
Later that day, when the work was done and he had a few minutes
alone, Keita went into the bush to find a balanite tree. He had to climb up into
the dense branches to reach what he sought. He took a fistful of the leaves,
which were thick and colored a greenish gray from dust, and tasted one with
his lips and tongue. Then he bit into it. The flavor was slightly bitter. He ate
more, appreciating the easy food. Drought had killed many of the family's
goats and there was little hope that this rain would be followed by enough
water to make good on the seeds Keita and his mother had sown that
morning. But at least the trees grew there.
The deputy looks at the head in the pot and laughs in a muted way, forcing
air out his nostrils. He flings the stick into the bushes and studies Keita,
looking up at this tall man with charcoal skin and bony frame in khaki pants,
shiny loafers, and a white cotton short-sleeve shirt buttoned down at the
collar — dressed as if he's just come from a semiformal business meeting.
Keita always presents his best when he leaves the house. He wears similar
clothes into the field in Africa, though with boots.
"People," Keita likes to tell colleagues in the field, "if I am to get
dirty, at least I will be dirty and well dressed."
The deputy wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, trying to
figure out what to say. "So you're over at the college?" he asks, making a
conversational guess. Most foreigners in town were somehow connected to
the college.
Keita tilts his head back impatiently and rolls his eyes, wishing
the deputy would get to the point. He raises his arms in a little shrug and lets
them fall to his sides. He says, more slowly and loudly, "Look, it is only the
head of a goat."
The deputy purses his lips and glances down at the pot on the
stove, which has not been turned off. "Yeah," he says, nodding his head in
agreement. "Seems to me you should probably roast it first, you know?
Throw it on the hot coals in a barbecue, or else you're gonna be boiling that
thing all day long." He gives Keita a friendly tap on the shoulder with his open
hand. "But wrap it in foil or something, will you? Your neighbor upstairs thinks
you're some sort of cult freak."
He laughs in staccato and then stops himself and coughs when
he sees Keita staring at him. "Sorry," he says, scratching the back of his
neck. "I didn't mean any harm by that." He smiles weakly. "But we did get
this phone call, ya know, and if you'd just cook right out in the open, on the
lawn, you'd probably attract a lot less attention."
Keita wipes his brow with his shirtsleeve, more humiliated than
relieved — not so much about the "cult freak" thing (he's used to overwrought
American imaginations; for years, the botany department secretary wouldn't
stand near him because she feared he carried the Ebola virus), but that he
actually has to endure receiving cooking instructions from an American. From
a common gendarme.
Once, in Africa, Keita had been obliged to travel with an American
embassy official. The man had floppy red hair and worried about sunburn. He
kept asking, "We won't spend much time in the sun, will we?" They were
inspecting soil study sites funded by American money, and one day, driving
a white Chevrolet Suburban on their way to a site, they stopped in a village to
fix a flat tire. The village chief was an old man who, as a matter of traditional
courtesy to travelers, insisted on feeding them with goat meat and rice. The
chief 's wife served the food hot, spread out on a large metal plate. She
soaked the rice in a dark tomato sauce with bits of meat. Keita, the
American, and the chief washed in a bucket of soapy water and sat on mats
arranged around the plate, to eat with their hands. The American dug in with
all ten fingers, spilling rice and meat in the dirt as he ate, while Keita and the
chief ate cleanly with the right hand, rolling the food into balls with their
fingers before sucking it off their fingertips and into their mouths. The chief
smiled at the American and in his own language called for his wife to get a
spoon. When she brought one, the American politely waved it away. "No, no,"
he said in English, "I'll eat like everyone else."
Keita laughed as the man continued spilling his food. "That's not
like everyone else," he said. "Take the spoon."
The second food-related arrest — it really wasn't an arrest, but Keita thinks
of it that way — happened four years after the Chicago airport incident, in the
parking lot of a diner in Portland, Oregon, down the street from a hotel where
Keita, against his better judgment, was attending a conference called African
Food Systems: A Western Perspective. He was in his last year of studying
for his Ph.D. and had gone to breakfast with two American students, whose
work toward their master's degrees he oversaw at the college agricultural
laboratories. Keita folded himself awkwardly into the booth, rising a full head
above his companions even as he sat. The pair stared at him while he salted
his three fried eggs, hash browns, and sausage, nearly emptying the
saltshaker. But he had ordered only eggs and potatoes, and he pushed aside
the sausage because, as a good Muslim, he could not eat meat prepared by
a non-Muslim.
Keita looked up and caught his companions' eyes. "Salt," he said
to them. "I need salt." Not knowing what to say, the two men looked back to
their food. "It is an acquired taste," Keita continued. "I grew up in a place
where one sweats a great deal."
"Yeah, well, be careful, man," said one of the students.
Keita looked at him a moment. Then, from the side of his plate, he
picked up the little green parsley sprout that lay beside a razorthin slice of
melon and held it in front of them by the stem, twisting it between his thumb
and forefinger. "Ameriiiican fooood," he said. "Very colorful, but there is really
not much to it, is there?" "Hey," said the same student, a skinny kid who sat
beside Keita in a T-shirt and faded army fatigue pants. He had long, stringy
brown hair and a mouth full of waffle. "It's a diner, man, give it a chance."
Keita nodded, and with his fork he speared a sausage and held it
up in front of his face. With a deep frown of mock concentration, he poked at
the surface of the impaled meat, where there appeared to be a blue
substance oozing out. After a couple of minutes, during which his
companions tried to ignore him, Keita finally determined that the substance
was ink and that it formed a number.
"Hmmm," he said aloud, his eyebrows raised. "Did you know that
this is sausage number three-seven-two?"
"Oh, don't worry," said the skinny kid. "That's just the FDA
inspection mark. They do that with restaurant meat."
The other student at the table winced as he sipped his coffee. "I
didn't know that," he said.
Keita left the sausage on his plate and worked carefully on the
eggs and potatoes. Then, without thinking, Keita tossed a cup of lukewarm
coffee over his shoulder and inadvertently doused a waitress as she walked
by. He'd meant the coffee for the floor. Actually, for the dirt. The action was
just a reflex. Keita put his face in his hands as his lunch companions looked
on, stunned, and then burst out laughing. The waitress, in shock, looked at
the coffee dripping off the hem of her uniform dress and down her calf. She
glared at them all for a minute before quietly saying, "Jerks! You are real
jerks." Keita was horrified and tried to explain.
"I am sorry," he said. "Where I come from we always eat
outside . . . I . . . I . . . forgot myself."
Keita's companions apologized, too, but the waitress walked
away without saying a word more. At the front counter she picked up the
telephone.
"We gotta go," the Americans said, almost simultaneously. The
two men dug in their pockets and tossed three tens and a couple of fives and
ones on the table, to make up for the incident. They ushered Keita out of the
restaurant, only to see a police cruiser pull into the parking lot, its strobe
lights flashing. The cruiser must have been right in the neighborhood when
the call came from dispatch, which had been alerted by the waitress. Two
officers got out of the car.
"You the guys who can't mind your table manners?" asked one
officer.
"We got a report of an assault on a waitress," said the other.
The police left fifteen minutes later, after Keita and his friends told
them the story, frantically, explaining that what Keita had done had been a
subconscious act, an accident, the simple tossing of coffee in the proverbial
dirt, as if they had been at an outdoor restaurant. The skinny kid offered a run-
on anthropology lecture about life, food, and eating habits in hot places like
Africa.
"You see," he told the officers, "in Africa, the nutritional situation is
much less complex and that means they eat differently than we do."
The officers looked on, with blank expressions. Keita, listening to
the kid's explanation, screwed up his face in quizzical amazement. Then he
heard himself do something he'd never done before, except to his children —
he barked a command. "Mike," he said, "please shut up!" He rubbed a hand
over his face and turned to the officers, looking down at them as he spoke. "It
was an honest accident and I am very sorry," he said. "I will certainly pay to
launder her dress."
By now Keita has turned off the camping stove. The years have added curly
flecks of gray to his hair, but his lean build and face, unlined except for a
permanent furrow of his brow, give him the same earnest look he had when
he was a graduate student. He folds his arms and watches the deputy pluck
a notebook and pen from his breast pocket.
"Look, you haven't done anything wrong," the man says to
Keita, "but I still have to make out a report. Now, what did you say your name
was?"
Keita gives his full name and tells the officer about his homeland
in West Africa, his work at the university, and his wife, Aissa, and their two
children, Ahmed and Fanta, who are all, at that moment, wandering around
Wal-Mart, looking for lawn furniture. He doesn't tell the deputy that his son,
Ahmed, his oldest at twelve, and his daughter, Fanta, who is not quite ten,
were born in Africa but grew up here in Oregon. Nor does he explain how
upset it makes him that they cannot speak their parents' language and how
the children respond in English when he and Aissa speak to them in their
tongue or in the colonial French.
"Speeeeak English," the children whine, children whose lives are
as different from the lives of children in the village where Keita and Aissa grew
up as to be, well, incomprehensible to African villagers. And Ahmed and
Fanta likewise think of rural West Africa as foreign, bewildering. "They think
you and I come from the moon," Keita often complains to Aissa.
Instead, Keita politely tells the deputy that he'll go up to the
apartment and retrieve the family passports for him to inspect.
"Naaa," says the deputy, shaking his head. "I don't need those."
He scribbles in the notebook. After a while, he stuffs the notebook and pen in
his shirt pocket and folds his arms. "So," he says. "How do ya eat goat
head?"
Keita, who has been staring down at the pot and mourning the
futility of his effort, looks up at the deputy and smiles.
Keita had good reason to be boiling goat head in the bushes behind his
apartment building. He'd planned to cook a meal as a surprise for Aissa, a
taste of home, no matter what his children thought. It made him smile that
Ahmed and Fanta would be horrified at the thought of eating a goat head. His
idea was to prepare the head the way his mother had done it — on a bed of
couscous soaked in the head's juices and dressed with onions, garlic, and
tomatoes, with plenty of salt. The meal was to be a medicine for Aissa's
resentment of Keita's frequent trips back to West Africa and the fact that she
and the children had returned home only once since they arrived in the United
States years earlier. Ahmed and Fanta had hated the visit and spent most of
the time sick with stomach parasites.
"They'll get used to it," Keita and Aissa told each other. "They
must give Africa more time. We must take them back." Keita would pause
and add, "When we have money."
Keita had promised to take the family home that summer, but
plane fare and expenses for the four of them were too much, not to mention
the expectations of the extended family in the village, where most people
work steadily only during the months of planting and the weeks of harvest.
Keita is the only member of his family who has a steady income. Aissa's
family depends on him, too. Every month he wires what he can — $100 here,
$300 there — to pay for food and medicine, weddings, a uniform for his
brother-in-law the policeman, schoolbooks for the children, and gifts for the
newborns. All this on a research professor's salary. The bonuses for his
consulting work are not enough. Sometimes Aissa does the books for small
shops in town, but without a proper American university degree the pay is
poor and infrequent. So she cleans motel rooms, does seamstress work, and
watches other people's children while the bills mount.
Keita's work as a scientist brought a balance of pleasures and
problems: lots of travel (some enjoyable, some not) and the contrast (which
he loved) between his homeland and his adopted home. It took time to adapt
to eastern Oregon's cold, sometimes snowy winters, but the dry climate in
the high desert was familiar, and the dust storms and violent summer rains
were curses of the land that he and Aissa understood well.
Once he'd taken Aissa and the kids on a picnic in the foothills of
the Wallowa Mountains, where they walked in the woods and roasted meat
and corn on the campground barbecue. Late that afternoon, as they were
beginning the drive home, they watched the sky darken in the east as a line
of thunderstorms gathered over a ridge densely forested with ponderosa pine.
The sky cracked with bright lightning flashes and rain burst from the clouds.
Soft thunder sounded in the distance. Ahmed and Fanta had fallen asleep in
the backseat, and Keita pulled the car off the road so he and Aissa could
watch the storm, "like at an American drive-in movie," he said to her. They
watched the clouds move and smoke rise from lightning strikes, thick white
columns of smoke, like rope connecting earth to sky. It was raining and the
wind was blowing, but they kept their windows down because it was warm
and the smell of sagebrush was strong.
"This is like home," Aissa said quietly.
"Yes," Keita said. "It is a very big place." Aissa looked at him and
smiled. She squeezed his hand. Such a land made it possible for her — for
both of them — to live far from home and still feel a certain familiar
connection to the earth.
But Keita knew this wasn't enough. The landscape and the
complexities of its soils were his own obsession, his work, not Aissa's. He
wanted to make things up to her. A good meal was the best way he knew
how. Yet it was not until he started cooking the goat head around noon —
when he carried the camping stove and pot from the apartment while Aissa
and the kids were at Wal-Mart, made the trip back to the car to retrieve the
goat head, and then finally took the bloody thing, which had been slaughtered
that morning and wrapped in wax paper, out of a plastic bag and set it in the
pot — that Keita realized he had no clue what he was doing.
Early that morning he'd been standing outside a large barn,
negotiating with the rancher from whom he would buy the goat. The rancher,
in fact, was a friend, Sheryl Banks. She was a tall, sandy-haired, sunburned
woman who taught veterinary science at the college and had an office one
floor up from Keita's. Sheryl and her husband ran a clinic on a ranch where
they raised sheep and goats, and a few horses. In the hallway outside her
office a few days earlier, Sheryl and Keita made a deal to meet at the ranch
early on Saturday morning. She greeted him at the barn in jeans and a T-
shirt, steel-toed work boots, and a dirty khaki baseball cap pulled down over
long, thick hair streaked with gray and tied back in a ponytail.
Keita showed up in his neat office clothes, wearing sneakers and
carrying a leather shoulder bag. She took him to a small enclosure with wire-
mesh fencing and wooden feed troughs. They fed their goats here, in the
shadow of a large barn. "We give 'em feed grown without any chemical
fertilizers," she said. "Best meat you'll ever have."
He quickly chose the fattest goat, one with a coat of white fur,
except for its head, which was brown and white. They settled the price then
disagreed, politely, about how to properly slaughter the animal. Sheryl offered
to do it herself, but Keita wanted it done in accordance with Muslim ritual —
the cutting of the animal's throat with the wound facing east, the direction of
the Holy City of Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad was born. This way
the blood would spill on the earth, cleansing it and honoring Muhammad's
very memory and work in the name of Islam. Muslim hands alone must
handle the animal, Keita explained. As they talked, Keita stood a few feet
from Sheryl, his hands folded behind his back in a posture of calm insistence.
Sheryl smiled at him, intrigued and unsure whether or not she
should be annoyed. She said, "Don't you trust me?" Then she smiled, a little
flirtatiously. Sheryl Banks had known Keita Traore for seven years, since he
was a graduate student in her animal anatomy class, one of the sharpest
students she'd ever worked with. He was quiet and efficient, detail oriented,
and comfortable with animals, a good scientist. But she realized that morning
that she really didn't know him at all. She said, a little playfully, "Keita, be
honest. You won't let me touch the animal because I'm a woman, is that it?"
Keita politely told her a half-truth, and a half-lie. "I won't let you
touch the animal because you are not a Muslim," he said. This was true, but
it was also true that in Keita's experience women were not permitted to
butcher meat. "I know you are skilled," he added, "but this is not a matter of
trust. It is a matter of ritual. I am a Muslim, you see. A Muslim must eat only
meat that is slaughtered by himself or by another Muslim."
As Keita spoke, Sheryl studied him and scraped the toe of her
boot in the dirt and hay, rubbing her chin and smiling. Finally, she
shrugged. "Suit yourself," she said. "I don't mean to sound stupid, but I don't
know, does the Koran actually have instructions for butchering meat?"
"The fifth chapter," Keita said. "We call it a Sura, the term for
chapter. They are not instructions, exactly; they are more like guidelines. In
the third paragraph Allah warns us . . ." And he recited the deity's wishes,
roughly, for the translation from Arabic on the spot was difficult for him: "You
must not eat those animals which die of themselves, nor the blood of swine's
flesh, and all that has been killed in any other name than that of Allah, and
you must not eat the animals choked, or those animals killed by a blow, or
fall, or a goring, or those killed by other animals, and you must make the
animal clean by putting it to death by your own hand."
Keita looked at the ground awkwardly. He said, "Religion is not
like science, I suppose."
American women, their directness and independence, particularly
with men, made him nervous. But Sheryl's knowledge and her easy ability
with animals impressed him. At the college horse stable he'd once watched
her calm a horse that had become dangerously upset when somehow the
hoof and ankle of a front leg became tangled in a strand of barbed wire
carelessly left in an exercise corral. Sheryl entered the corral alone as the
animal ran about frantically, at one point rearing on its hind legs to shake the
wire off. She calmed the horse, talking to the animal until it stood still while
she knelt on one knee and slowly removed the wire. Keita thought she must
have special powers.
"I didn't mean to be rude," Sheryl said, suddenly.
"You weren't," Keita said. "We are both scientists. We are askers
of questions."
She entered the pen and quickly put a rope around the goat's
neck. She led Keita and the goat into the barn, to a corner where a large
cement slab on the ground sloped into a drain. He carefully washed his
hands at a large sink, using a bar of soap left by the drain. She grabbed a
pair of oversize bloodstained jeans overalls from a hook and handed them to
Keita. "You'd best wear these over your clothes," she said. Then she
asked, "You don't mind if I watch?"
"Please," Keita said, "not at all." He looked away for a moment.
Then he said, "I don't want to be trouble for you, but I must do this outside,
on the dirt. It is important, you see, that I spill the blood on the soil in the
open air in order to cleanse the earth."
She shrugged again, her hands thrust deep in her jeans
pockets. "Sure," she said, "yeah, out back of the barn. There's plenty of
room." They walked across the barn, Keita carrying the overalls over his arm.
Sheryl pushed open a heavy wooden door and they emerged in an area of
hard-packed dirt beside an empty horse corral.
"This will be fine," Keita said. He pulled the overalls on over his
clothes.
Sheryl stood back and watched this very tall man take the animal
by the head and rear, flip it on its side, press down on its head with one
hand, and kneel on the torso, as if he'd been doing this all his life, which he
had. Normally, another man would be holding down the goat's torso and legs,
but Keita would not let Sheryl touch the animal during the slaughter. Keita
moved the goat so its head and throat faced east and yanked the head back
to expose the throat. Then, with a freshly sharpened knife he'd brought from
home in the leather bag, Keita made a long, deep cut across the throat, from
left to right. He did it in one motion and carefully bled the animal as he leaned
on its gasping and kicking body, uttering prayers in Arabic to honor both
Islam and the animal for offering itself as food. "Bismillahi . . . ," he began, in
thanks to God.
Keita, breathing a little hard from the effort, took twine from the
leather bag and a long screwdriver he'd bought just for the slaughter. Raising
one of the goat's hind legs, he used the knife to cut and separate skin from
bone just above the hoof, and then inserted the screwdriver beneath the skin,
carefully working it up the leg, separating skin from bone, without piercing the
skin. This way he scraped out an inch-wide tubular space between the skin
and bone all the way up the leg. As a boy in Africa, he'd used a long,
sharpened stick. Keita put down the screwdriver and again raising the hind
leg, he put his mouth to the opening of the space he'd made and began to
blow, and blow, and blow, for several minutes until the animal was bloated
like a parade balloon, its skin tight with Keita's own breath. He picked up the
twine and wrapped it around the leg above the hoof, cutting off the escaping
air. He smiled at Sheryl and let the dead animal sit a few minutes, to give the
air pressure time to separate the skin from bone and muscle.
"Now it will be easier to skin her," he said.
Sheryl nodded. She said, "That was beautiful, the way you did
that."
After a while Keita went back to work. He cut through bone and
cartilage to remove the head and handed it to Sheryl, who looked back at
him, surprised. He smiled. "Now," he said, "you can touch the meat." She
took the head with both hands and set it on the wax paper that she'd laid out
on a table in the barn. Keita made a long incision from the throat along the
belly, letting the animal's innards and some blood spill on the ground. He
began cutting the skin away. It was almost as easy as peeling a large
orange. Then he reached inside the animal to cut and scoop out the
intestines and bladder and set them all in a bucket. He cut away the thighs,
handing each to Sheryl, who wrapped the meat in the wax paper. Keita left
the rest of the torso as it was. They wrapped it and stored it in a large freezer
in the barn. Keita washed again at the sink and removed his overalls. He'd
finished the whole job in less than an hour.
Keita and Sheryl walked back to his car, each carrying packages
of meat in wax paper and wrapped again in plastic bags. "Someday soon
you'll have to bring your family out to the ranch for dinner," she said. "We'll
eat the rest of that goat meat. And if you want, I'll let you do all the work."
Keita and the deputy have moved the pot and the gas stove out of the lilac
bushes and onto the lawn. They are standing and talking. Keita
explains, "Goat head is my favorite food. In my country people eat it most
often in the morning because a head offers a full meal for the whole day. But I
like to take it in the evening. It is good to sleep on a full stomach." Then he
pauses and frowns a little. "How did you know how to cook goat head?"
The deputy grins. "I'm a hunter," he says. "And my brother runs a
restaurant in Seattle." He shrugs. "I've never eaten goat head, but I know
animals and I can cook." He looks at his watch, which reads 2 p.m. "Get
yourself a barbecue this afternoon and maybe you can have this ready in
time for dinner tonight." Keita hikes his pants up and squats. Using a
handkerchief to keep from burning his hand, he turns the pot over to drain the
water into the grass, letting the head tumble out on the lawn. The animal's
face stares back at the men, its mouth shut and its eyes as blank in death
as they'd been in life.
"My mother prepared this for us often from the time when I was a
small boy," Keita says. "I learned only how to eat it. I did not learn to cook it."
He smiles at this thought. The deputy drops to one knee, his forearms
resting on his right thigh. Keita continues. "I remember now, she would boil
the heads for some time, all at once, in a great pot, three or four at a time,
and then throw them on a fire. She would prepare a whole pile of them once a
week and then sell them at market." The deputy listens, his eyes on Keita's
face. "But she always kept one or two for us. In the evening we would sit
around the pot where my mother had set the heads in a hot salty sauce
prepared from dried tomatoes, sometimes with rice or couscous. And we
always used the same stone to crack open the skulls. We rinsed the stone
in water, and my father hit the skulls on the forehead, just above the eyes."
Keita laughs. "We would all, my brothers, my father, and I, reach in for a
handful of the brains first and scoop it out like this." He puts the thumb and
fingers of his right hand together and curves them. "The brain tastes like liver,
you know, and is very high in protein. The brain and the liver are the most
nutritious parts of a goat. Then we would dig for the eyes and the tongue.
They are difficult to chew but good to eat."
Suddenly the distant sound of children's voices comes from the
other side of the apartment building. Car doors slam and Keita looks at the
deputy, a little resigned.
He stands up and sighs. "My family," he says.
At that moment, Keita's son, Ahmed, runs around the corner of
the building, holding a new basketball in both hands. Aissa and Fanta are
chasing him, laughing. The children are dressed similarly in shorts and T-
shirts and sneakers. When they reach the lawn and the two men, the cook
stove, and the goat head, Fanta screams, and Aissa puts her hand over her
own mouth.
Ahmed looks at his father and then at the deputy, who smiles
broadly and tries very hard to look as if nothing is wrong. The boy looks at
the head in the grass and again from one man to the other and back to the
head. His eyes grow wide and his mouth falls open.
"Dad," he shouts, "what is that?"
Fanta stares. Aissa drops her hand from her mouth and begins to
laugh.
Product details
- ASIN : B003T0GAK2
- Publisher : HarperVia (August 9, 2007)
- Publication date : August 9, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 2.5 MB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 243 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,394,120 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6,581 in Medical Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #7,751 in U.S. Short Stories
- #11,666 in Medical Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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PETER CHILSON teaches writing and literature at Washington State University. He is the author of the travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa (University of Georgia Press, 1999), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction, and the story collection Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories (Mariner Books, 2007), winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize and the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. His essays, journalism, and short stories have appeared in Foreign Policy, the American Scholar, Gulf Coast, High Country News, Audubon, and Ascent, among other publications, as well as twice in the Best American Travel Writing anthology. Chilson first traveled to West Africa in 1985 as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, teaching junior high school English in the village of Bouza, Niger, near the border with Ni- geria. Chilson has been a regular visitor to West Africa ever since, working as a journalist and travel writer. He returned to Mali in 2012 for the Foreign Policy magazine-Pulitzer Center Borderlands project. He witnessed one of the tumultuous year's attempted coups in the capital of Bamako and was one of the first Western journalists to visit the country's troubled northern half and travel the border of Mali's short-lived jihadist state in the north.

See more at Peter Chilson's web site: www.peterchilson.com
Customer reviews
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2007
- Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2007This book is really the story of a life in Africa - a foreigner's life, and the lives of those he meets and learns from. I couldn't put it down.
