Guilt Trip - February 18
Posted by Bruce Norris on 2/23/2006I’m finding it hard to leave my little room at the hotel. Each day is sort of an ordeal in one way or another.
Yesterday, after several hours spent arguing (or rather, being yelled at) by the woman at the bank window who insisted that she would not cash my traveler’s check because I had written the date 02/17/06 instead of 17/02/06 and after making her very angry by saying in my fractured French, “Mais, Madame, n’est existe pas un mois (month) le dix-septieme!” (seventeenth), I finally took a scooter over to the Grande Marche again to get a “bush taxi” to Porto Novo, the capital. A bush taxi, in this case, means a broken-down, rattling Peugeot 404, whose driver, after much shouting and grabbing at me, insisted that I get in and pay him 4000 CFA (approx. 9 dollars) for the 45-minute ride. I discovered on the return that this was roughly ten times the going rate, but whatever.
Porto Novo is a much smaller town than Cotonou, situated on the farther shore of Lac Nokoue, and fringed by small homes that stand on stilts above the surface of the lagoon. The town still bears the traces of its colonial past - the buildings are older, crumbling in a more picturesque way as opposed to the molded-concrete featurelessness of Cotonou. When you arrive by taxi, the drivers again manhandle you and vie for who will take you to your local destination. I took a zemi to the Musee Ethnographique (you can translate) like the good little student I am. The museum, which was no more than a few rooms of dusty cases of artifacts, was explained to me by a very nice man who spoke the first English I’ve heard in many days. The cases had masks, costumes, fetish items. I explained to him that I worked in theatre in the US so the masks were particularly interesting to me. He was more interested in whether I had a wife and children. I said something like, “C’est une histoire plus grand”. Ha ha ha. On the way out I was greeted by about 50 schoolchildren in uniforms and I had the sneaking suspicion that what I had been so interested in was really a museum for children. Hmm.
After another tour of a 19th century tribal palace (and a very economically motivated guide) I returned in another crowded fume-spewing taxi to Cotonou.
One of the strangest and most dislocating things here is televison. I sit in my room watching coverage of Dick Cheney’s shotgun story or the rising fortunes of some European company and wonder, is this what the Beninese see on TV? There is, to be fair, a Benin channel. But mostly it is reruns of “the Gilmore Girls” dubbed in French or (seriously) “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with Arabic subtitiles. The sneaky thought “no wonder people hate us” creeps into your head. Oddest of all was a BBC documentary all about the history of Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and the musical “My Fair Lady” with various people offering their opinions on the genius of a play in which a poor street vendor is turned into a quasi-duchess. I sat there watching this thinking of the hundreds of “guttersnipes” (Shaw’s word) that I had walked past that afternoon with no Professor Higgins (myself included) to offer them “lots of chocolates for me to eat”. Loverly indeed.