Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The beginning of the end

Yesterday, I had a realization about Accra. The parts of the city that you see on the surface are loud and chaotic and aggressive and congested and exhausting. But if you plunge in deeper, layer by layer the mask breaks down until at the end you just find real people, just real people living their lives and eating sleeping loving living making music and playing and working and watching TV.

Annemieke and I went to the Arts Center yesterday, which is a fearsome bazaar of tourist trappings – paintings, sculptures, jewelry, cloth, clothes, purses, instruments… As soon as we walked near it a man came up to his to steer us into his stall, and for the five minutes or so, everyone that we passed kept calling after us – “Looking is free!” “Oburoni, come!” “White sister, come and look at my shop!” We kept walking deeper and deeper back into the market, until what had been a roof covered neatly organized conglomerate of aisle upon parallel aisle of goods slowly gave way to an open air, tree-scattered sporadic winding patchwork of stalls.

After stopping to bargain for some miniature brass sculptures and laughing when Annemieke innocently asked the store owner to ‘dash’ us a ‘jiggy jiggy’ (‘dash’ meaning throw one in for free, ‘jiggy jiggy’ referring to the series of mini sculptures he had of couples in every position imaginable), we went further still. The stalls started to thin out and a pathway opened up into the sun. On our right were stalls similar to the ones we’d seen earlier, but on the left was the concrete skeleton of a building. The concrete slabs formed small three-walled cubicles, and you could see that people were actually living in them, making it livable by drapping a curtain across the middle and laying down blankets on the floor. This was starting to feel nothing like the polished and glitzy entrance to the arts center.

We stopped to check out a rasta cottage with hanging plants and a cd collection, and probably the prerequisite weed behind the counter. Moving on, we realized that the market had given way to a village – there were homes, cooking fires, craftsmen working, kids playing… and the backdrop to all of it was the ocean! We had stumbled upon a beautiful seaside village that led right up to the bluff where the sandy beach began. There was a little kid pulling a suitcase along behind him, and nestled inside of it was an even little kid squealing and enjoying the ride! There was a whole line of little kids, each waiting for his or her turn to get pulled around and everyone was so excited about their rough and tumble ride across the dusty and bumpy ground. There was a shack right on the bluff’s edge that someone had carefully decorated with masks and mirror shards and painted over and lined with stones and all kinds of colorful odd decorating flares. It was really cool to see – especially because you could tell it wasn’t made to be seen, at least not by us. Here, so far in and far from the busy city streets and the showy facades, all of the beauty that we stumbled upon was real, was there for the sake of itself and the people who live there.

We were on our way back to the main street when we ran into a man who looked a lot like one of our friends, Arouna (a really talented musician from Burkina Faso). It turns out that this man, Ablo, actually was a really good friend of Arouna’s, and invited us back to his home. It was a little one room shack in a nearby gulley, and on his porch a man named Baba was working on making a xylophone. After chatting in my broken French for a while, Ablo, who plays the kora, and his friends played a few songs for us… while they were playing I looked around to take in exactly where we were – there was a flock of goats nearby, a few little boys running around barefoot, the ocean, the outline of the seaside village, a cooking fire nearby… the music fit the place so perfectly and the whole experience was one of those perfect moments when you feel your heart overflowing and life tingles through your whole body… if you’ve ever felt like this then you’ll know what I mean.

We had journeyed through layer after layer of the city and ended up here, listening to music in front of a friend’s home. It only took a five minute walk to get back to the main street – unbelievable considering how far removed we felt from the chaos that is normally how I think of Accra. But meeting Ablo and his friends felt like finding an anchor, something solid and simple to hold on to amidst the great shifting anonymity of the city.

I will never forget that afternoon.

1 comment:

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