Gone with the Wind

I had a pleasant weekend. On Saturday I made pancakes, did yoga, cleaned up a little, and read Gone with the Wind.

This was on the cover of the copy that I read.

(Spoiler alert in case I wasn't the last person ever who didn't know anything about Gone with the Wind.)

I've never seen the movie, but I'd absorbed enough information from crossword puzzle clues and just living in America to know that it’s an epic romance about a pretty lady on a plantation during the Civil War. I knew there was a part about Atlanta burning, something about curtains, a house called Tara, and Clark Gable not giving a damn. I figured that there would be a lot of picturesque landscapes and racism and accounts of historic battles and people falling in love under difficult circumstances.

As it turned out, there were indeed long and captivatingly yonic descriptions of the countryside, and the tumult and history of the war and the deterioration of the social order all made for good reading. I was distracted but not surprised by the racism, both depicted and inherent, and kept being reminded of a part of this David Sedaris short story called Six to Eight Black Men that goes "history has proved that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet hours beside the fire but by bloodshed and mutual hostility." 

The thing that caught me off guard was the ending. I just wasn't expecting “the greatest love story of our time” to finish with a fatal miscarriage and the post-mortem of a broken marriage. Tomorrow may be another day, but I still closed the book feeling slightly gut-punched. 

In any case, I found myself reading so much of the novel from the perspective of a Public Health Volunteer - I liked how often dysentery was mentioned, interested that diarrhea was given a place of prominence among the many undignified ravages of war and poverty. I liked that the notion that women invariably possess a “maternal instinct” was thoroughly dragged through the mud. I liked that reproductive health issues kept coming up – the unmet need for reliable contraception, the burden of unwanted pregnancies, the many forms of prostitution, the grim dangers of childbirth and back-alley abortions. (I feel compelled to point out that these are still very real problems for women and girls around the world.) I couldn't help but think that modern contraception and obstetric care could have saved Scarlett from resenting motherhood and Melanie from suffering horribly and dying. I feel like Scarlett would have been all about birth control. 

But I suppose that if Scarlett had been on the pill and Rhett had just talked about his feelings then maybe they would have figured things out and built a happy life together, but it wouldn't have made for such a dramatic saga. 

Also, I now really want to read/watch 12 Years as a Slave. I've been hearing wonderful things about how harrowingly good it is, and I feel like it would be a good counter-balance to Gone with the Wind's rosy portrayal of slavery and the whole master-slave relationship. 

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.