I live my life in Senegal in the present tense.
This is not a metaphor. I’m not explaining my personal philosophy or trying to give an inspirational speech about experiencing each and every day to its fullest.
No, when I say I live in the present tense, I mean the actual present tense. You know:
I study abroad in West Africa. I eat baguettes. I talk in bumbling, awkward French and employ the simplest verb conjugation.
Yes, that present tense.
When it comes to speaking English, well, I don’t mean to brag here, but over the last 20 years I have become damn good. Pretty much any verb structure you need, I’m all over it. Want the present progressive? I’m doing it now. How about the future perfect? You will have had it in no time.
But put me chin-to-chin with a French verb—a heavy, angled contraption bursting at its seams with superfluous vowels—and suddenly I’m choked. It’s like being a five year old all over again.
If only five year olds had terrible accents and no innate sense of their own language.
This is not quite what I expected when I decided to go abroad for a semester to francophone West Africa. Actually, the reality I envisioned was far simpler. My plane would touch down in Senegal—a lumpy disk of a country scrunched between Mali and the Atlantic Ocean—and suddenly the entire French language would pour from my mouth, fluent and effortless.
Lest I seem totally deluded, I did imagine there would be some work involved. But in my head it played out as a montage set to inspirational music—there was a scene of me hunched over a library table, stacks of French grammar books towering all around me. And another of me on a beach reading Camus’s The Stranger in its vernacular, biting my lip, my entire face scrunched in concentration. And there was me befriending a Senegalese girl, beginning shyly but quickly becoming her clever and flawlessly francophone meilleure amie.
Unfortunately, this vision left little room for inconvenient things like reality. Before my semester in Senegal, I had stumbled through three semesters of beginner French courses at Duke, a B student with train-wreck American pronunciation and a grammatical knowledge riddled with dark, cavernous holes where all the things I had forgotten to study should have been. The range of my vocabulary was such that I could easily construct sentences ranging from “I have a small, black rat that eats berries” to “I have a large, yellow cat that eats small, black rats” and speak for approximately one-and-a-half minutes without stopping. If I talked slowly. And I always did.
Still, when I arrived in Senegal, I waited patiently for what I thought was the Inevitable—a rise to fluency as meteoric as a flaming ball of rock shooting through the sky. But while I sat biding my time, the world around me was a disconcertingly incomprehensible cacophony. Everything someone said to me sounded like a hybrid between the slow, well-enunciated French I had learned in my classes and the gargling of salt water, with the whole thing playing in fast-forward. Sentences became fill-in-the-blank word puzzles.
“Please qwekblkasd askasdglkb apple asdfjlaksdf bklad could you adsklags doorbell weqtiopuba oven?”
But before I could make sense of the holes, the speaker was already on to another sentence as catastrophically nonsensical as the last. Or worse, they had stopped and were waiting for my response. “Oui?” I tried timidly. “D’accord?” (Yes? Okay?)
For the first time in my life, I had been rendered monosyllabic. Stripped of my ability to crack jokes, express complex opinions or even ask for change in the grocery store, I lived in a quiet and achingly lonely Anglophone bubble.
Meanwhile, the rest of my life in Senegal began to take shape. I moved in with a host family in the bustling, seaside capital city of Dakar and began classes at a local university. Every day I walked the two miles from home to school along a dusty, cracked sidewalk, dodging goats and street children and the curious stares of people trying to make sense of the young, white woman in Duke flip-flops. At intersections, SUVs honked at donkey-drawn carts as baguette delivery boys on mopeds calmly sliced in and out of the traffic, long stalks of crusty brown bread poking out from the sacks at their waists. And five times a day—as I slept, as I ate, as I sat in class, as I walked, as I brushed my teeth—loudspeakers across the city crackled with static and the warbled chants of local mosques calling the heavily Muslim nation to prayer.
It was a country, I quickly discovered, that existed at the epicenter of a complex social and cultural fusion. Senegal is at once West African, French, Arabic, Portuguese—a nation whose history is layered with Wolof kingdoms and Islamic jihads and European colonialism. In some ways, the place seemed as shuffled and mixed up as I felt living in it.
But that didn’t change the fact that I still wasn’t fluent in French. And now there was another problem. While French, the colonial language of Senegal, is spoken by the educated classes and in commerce, most day-to-day communication among the Senegalese happens in the indigenous West African language of Wolof. So while I was still struggling to string together coherent sentences in French, I set off to learn yet another language.
But if English and French are like distant cousins, vaguely related and meeting occasionally at some big family reunion in Quebec, English and Wolof are alien life forms, separated by galaxies and light years and vast stretches of empty, uncharted space.
In Wolof you conjugate the pronoun instead of the verb. There are no adjectives and no word that expresses the English staple “to be.” And just when you think you’ve mastered the tongue-twisting pronunciation of simple phrases like Na nga def? (How are you?) and Maa ngi fii rekk (I am fine, or, more literally, I here only) they throw in a random sampling of Arabic loanwords just to keep you on your toes. “Hello” is Assalaamaalekum and sentences often end with a brisk alhamdouliyliah (Thanks be to God).
And, while true to the unwritten law of studying abroad, I rarely had exams or homework, every day tested my language skills nearly to their breaking point. A week never went by without at least one marriage proposal from a Senegalese man on the street, to which I learned to respond coolly: Je suis déjà mariée (I am already married) or Am naa jëkkër ci Amerik (I have a husband in the United States). These statements weren’t exactly true, but they did the trick. When passersby would whistle to me and yell, Bonjour toubab (Hello, white person), I grew adept to countering with a quick Tudd uma toubab (My name is not white person). And when a taxi driver or street vendor tried to give me an outrageous foreigner price, I just threw up my hands and yelled Danga dof! Je suis Americaine mais je ne suis pas stupide. (You’re crazy! I am American but I’m not stupid.)
Of course, with the tumbled confusion of languages that I was spewing on a daily basis, not every moment was a linguistic success. One afternoon I went to an outdoor market with some friends. As we wandered amid the stalls, vendor after vendor tried to lure us inside. Je ne suis pas interessant, I announced firmly, thinking I was decisively letting them know that I did not want what they were selling. Then, with a force as sudden and awkward as that of a Senegalese man you’ve just met telling you he is in love with you, I came to a realization. I had confused the word for “interested” with the word for “interesting.” For hours I walked around announcing boldly to the world, I am not interesting.
Long after that day, even as my language skills shuffled tentatively forward, conversations in French remained like games of Tetris. Sometimes all the pieces fit together, sometimes they almost did and sometimes, one of those awkward L-shaped pieces—you know the bastards I’m talking about—fell right on top of three empty rows, and suddenly the entire thing was in shambles.
Before I came to Senegal, I had heard the same thing over and over: People will be so grateful that you are even trying to speak in their language. I still puzzle over this statement. While it is true that the Senegalese delight in seeing a white American college student stumble through a few basic phrases in Wolof, they also expect me to switch into flawless French the moment I hit my limit. That French is not my first language is not important; it is not theirs, either. And if they have learned, why haven’t I? This brusqueness about language skill is not cruel. It is simply reality for most people in the world—the need to know and communicate in different languages. Here, as in so many places outside the United States, being able to speak in multiple languages is not a privilege of intellect, but a necessity of a life lived among a wide array of ethnicities and cultures.
As someone who has always been very interested in my own language, I nevertheless had never realized before coming to Senegal how deeply English is connected to my own sense of identity and self-worth. For one thing, it’s how I express opinions, convey emotions, explain ideas. And let’s face it, without my command of English, I would never be funny, at least not without a giant moose costume or perhaps the hair of Albert Einstein.
But to reduce language to its vehicular qualities, to distill it into merely a method of transmitting information, is to miss one of its most essential elements. That is, our native language is our home, as much or more as any place could be—a reservoir of memory and experience that runs through us so fully that no matter how much time you spend with another language, it can never again find a way to go as deep as the first.
Perhaps this is why, for me anyway, life in a country where I do not know the languages well is one lived in soft focus, largely empty of specificity and depth. Improving my French and Wolof has been a slow adjustment of the aperture, sharpening the details and creating lines and paths where before there had been only blurs. Each time I hear a new word I have learned in conversation or explain an opinion to someone in one of my new languages, I feel the world draw in around me, pulling me a little closer to some unknowable center of things.
Now, with my time in Senegal drawing to its end, I am still searching for a way to qualify my relationship with the languages I have studied here, and with French in particular. I certainly cannot say I am a citizen of French—I certainly could not call it my own. But I am also something more than a houseguest, crashing on French’s sofa and leaving half-eaten pots of macaroni and cheese in its sink. I am, perhaps, a timid inhabitant of French, a tenant who tiptoes her way through its dark corridors, gawking at the strange things it keeps in its drawers and closets, looking for windows and sunlight and unlocked doors. And at this moment, that is all I ask for. My present tense.
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