Mbagala again

If there was one picture so far that I wish I had, it would be of the woman’s face that I interviewed this morning. There was nothing singularly remarkable about it but it was such an evocative and beautifully aged face, one that had lived through so many of the hot seasons that I am currently melting in. One of the downfalls of having to use a translator, among so many, is that often the most eye contact that happens in an interview is between you and the translator, or the subject and the translator. Zubeda though, she looked right at me every time she talked. It took me two hours at least to get home from Mbgala today. My immediate point of reference was driving home to Corvallis from the Portland airport. Snaking, exhausting queues of traffic to go maybe twenty kilometers. Our bus took a back way through a neighborhood on the way out of town and I got to see the utter anarchy of the backstreets…three lanes of cars pushing in one direction as the other side bottlenecks into unseen roads. After sitting for four hours on a wooden stool, I thought I was going to crawl out of my skin so I got off the bus a bit early heading instead to my friend Roxanne’s apartment where I borrowed her swimsuit and slipped into the rudely hot pool as darkness set in and the bats started flying overhead. Finally. I could move my body. Such an amazing and strange day. So much languid physical discomfort juxtaposed against such rich stories. At that moment, the act of getting in the pool, my ability to do that, seemed to cement the vast differences in this world…all of them…just by getting in to the pool. The ability to reflect on difference, to have the data to reflect and the analytical training to do so, makes all the truisms about how everyone in the world is essentially the same feel like a criminal misrepresentation. Yes sure ok we are. But that gets at nothing.
Zubeda doesn’t know when she was born…she knows it was during Yange, a time of famine that Kassim tells me was around 1945. She tells me of marrying and divorcing twice, of moving to the city alone with her first child to live with her brother. Of making mattresses for a living, and having six more children…in total losing all but two out of seven. She tells me about buying her own land and marks all passages of time by who was president at the time and how hard her life was at the time…a historian’s dream…she naturally seems to think of life segmented by major historical events and regimes. It seems so selfish and unscholarly that Zubeda’s life would make me think about my own…the fact that she can’t read or sign her name but she left for the city on her own, made her own money and bought her own land…that I think about those things…and then think for some reason of listening to a song for the umpteenth time on my headphones, utterly entrenched in my own drama of happiness and identity. One is not more noble than the other, nor one more ‘evolved’. Its history though… never I ever been such a champion of my discipline. Is it amazing that the world is small enough now that we can interact and understand each other and maybe learn from each other? Or is it just shameful? Because there is no one I think who would disagree…Zubeda’s life has been hard, and mine has been easy. I’m not trying to bludgeon myself or anyone else over the head with the magnitude of difference in our lives (not just materially…but the way in which we imagine the world and live in it)…in the pool though, inserting Zubeda’s life into different historical patterns and themes…oh, I don’t know…this bird’s eye view while floating placidly, looking upwards…it all sounds so trite. its there though. The difference is palpable, interesting, powerful...something to utterly respect. The difference is an outrage, the difference is a blessing.