Guilt Trip - February 24
Posted by Bruce Norris on 3/09/2006It’s my final day here. I made it back to Benin in one piece which, given the high-speed, foul smelling bush taxi ride that got me here, coupled with the customs officer at the Togolaise border bribing me for admittance to Benin… (”What do you have for me?” is how they put it, and I got through for about two dollars) plus having to pay the driver extra to stop the fistfight he was in with another driver; etc… well, it was a rough return.
Of course, who am I to complain, really, after spending the previous day touring the forts where slaves departed, in chains, for the West? It’s a little bit, uhh… unpersuasive for me to go on about the difficulty of MY travels, I guess. Visiting the forts of Cape Coast and Elmina is surreal. Not unlike my expierience at a concentration camp outside Prague last May (do I know how to have fun on vacation, or what?) I find myself having a complicated response. First to the fact that, at least during my visit, the white visitors seem to outnumber the black. What have we all come to see? And also to the strange behaviour of pulling out my camera to take pictures of the fantastically decrepit colonial architecture - in the face of overwhelming historical significance my response is still that of the prancing aesthete. While there you are led through the structures in a guided tour that culminates, dramatically, with your passage through the “door of no return” through which slaves boarded European ships. But on the other side, when you do pass through, impoverished locals are waiting to sell you hand-made trinkets, and below the walls, kids and fishermen use the area as a free public toilet. (I watched as one young man dropped his pants and unloaded onto the rocks.) The whiplash of sensations is too fast; trying at once to be at one with the tragedy of history and not to recoil at the smell.
Look, I know what a shitty person I sound like by even raising these questions. But that, to me, IS the nagging question: I can’t figure out how NOT to be myself at these moments. Like the moment while traveling back to Accra when a man offered to sell us what they call a “grasscutter” (a two-foot long BUSH RAT, fresh or, if you prefer, smoked) for my dinner. Now of course, I have friends who would, with great sophistication, place their fingertips together and say to me “Well, have you ever TRIED bush rat?” And it must be lovely to have that degree of openness to experience; to not cling to the same dreary particulars of your life when the opportunity for change arises. There are all sorts of platitudes that would apply and you know, god help me, maybe bush rat is absolutlely delicious. I feel fairly certain, though, that I will not be finding out. (Although I did try the local speciality known as kenkey - congealed fermented corn meal and very nearly threw up.) So what the hell is my problem? Is it fear? Sure. I’d accept that. Is it insufficient acceptance for the other? Yes, guilty of that as well, and I wish I wasn’t like this sometimes, but I’m now forty-five years old and the signs don’t seem to point in the direction of my changing.
So. Tonight, back on a plane. In-flight movies. Headphones. Back to the life I know. No bush rat on the menu. And by tomorrow back in my own little bed. Does the pleasure I will take in my comfortable routine make me smug? Am I limited? Yes, I think I am, and closed-off to experience. I wasn’t redeemed by my experience. I haven’t been transformed. And as a STORY, that is deeply unsatisfying. We like stories to conclude with the rebirth of the protagonist (It’s a Wonderful Life!). But what do you do when you are the protagonist of your own story and you can’t seem to bring yourself to a satisfying conclusion? What if, at the end of Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” Scrooge said, “Ahhh screw it, I don’t WANT to change”? Would you take your kids to see it? I don’t know. All I know is I’m ready to go home.