Hey White Girl!

Every single time I leave my compound, someone calls me some variation of "white girl" or "foreigner" at least once. Usually more like four or five or thirty-seven times. If I stay in my immediate neighborhood it's mostly just friendly little kids calling out "toubab" or "toubabou." A few of them even call me by my local name, Adama, and it's either cute or mildly annoying, depending on number and persistence of the kids that day. (When PCVs talk about this amongst themselves they refer to it as “getting toubab-ed,” as in “Oh, everyone in that village is so nice, I didn’t get toubab-ed at all while I was there.”)

When I bike around town or go over the market, I get lots of "toubabou!" and "foté!" and "la blanche!" and, every once in awhile, "Hey white girl!" in plain English. (Either some people legitimately don't understand that yelling "Hey white girl! Come here!" is not enticing in any language or they have nothing better to do. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.) For the most part the toubab-ing is pretty low-key and blends into the background noise, people seeming to call out toubabou out of habit or boredom or, very occasionally, inexplicable delight; the cat-calling is just as gross here as it is in America or anywhere else in the world.

Lately I've been increasingly noticing that some people call me "chinois," meaning "Chinese man." I do wear pants and I don't mind being perceived as Asian, though I doubt most of the hecklers really understand the concept of "Asian" because my blonde sitemate also gets called chinois pretty regularly. However, I really hate it when they follow it up with "ching-chong, ching-chong!" or a high, nasal "hii-hoong, hii-hoong!" like one of the moto-guys in the market today did as I passed up the stand of moto-taxis. Even little kids seem to know they’re being intentionally obnoxious when they do that. (And also it is SO INCREDIBLY RACIST.) It also really bothers me when some people question the American-ness of Volunteers who aren’t obviously either white or black, which - even as a bystander, even when it’s coming from a lack of education and not hostility - is still way more galling than I would have expected.

In any case, being constantly toubab–ed is mildly irritating – or, on a bad day, mildly infuriating - but still generally pretty easy to ignore or dismiss. It’s not generally malicious, and there’s no associated threat of violence or oppression - if anything, being called a toubab could be an accusation of over-privilege. Most of the time, though, it just feels like statement of the annoyingly obvious, a reminder that I’m conspicuous and foreign, and it’s something that I definitely will not miss.