The Razor's Edge

There is no feeling on earth like being out in the torrential rain, not caring that you are covered in mud, that people can see through the cloth that is barely covering your body, that you have nothing to dry yourself on afterwards. It is the beauty of being part of the world and the earth, of being a living part of the moment, of celebrating the African today.

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Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

This is an extract from a book that time and time again has had had a great affect on my life. I was first encouraged to read it by a boyfriend when I was 20. I read it again when I was about 22, again at 24 and am reading it for the fourth time at 27.
The first time I read it I was struck by what a great storyteller Maugham is. The book is Maugham’s account of the lives of a group of characters in early 20th century Paris and America. One of them, Larry, bows out of ‘society’ after the first world war by refusing to get a job and marry his girlfriend and chooses instead to go on a spiritual quest that takes him all over the world, eventually to India where he receives enlightenment. The story is a beautiful account of Larry’s life, but also of the pretentiousness of ‘society’, as well as a vivid portrayal of what life must have been like in Paris at that time (which from a damp bed in Ziguinchor sounds very appealing).

Each time I read it I found something more profound in it and it acted as a marker of my own spiritual progress. I began to understand Larry’s search for the Absolute a little more than I had the time before and it went hand in hand with my own search for something more powerful than what I could see in every day existence. I also had the chance to go to India, with the person who had recommended the book to me in the first place, and although my experience there was very different to the India portrayed in the book, somehow it left a mark on me.

Then Africa happened to me and I became caught up in the every-day. Africa is nothing if not celebration of the here and now. The thing I like about Senegal is I feel physically connected to the earth, to people, because everything is tactile; it is shaking hands, it is feeling the rain on your skin while taking a shower in a storm, it is the raw knuckles from doing the washing by hand, it is the rattle of a broken taxi as you bump along a muddy road, it is eating a mango that just fell from a tree, throwing the skin on the ground where you sit and watching the water drip from your hands to the ground as you rinse them from a watering can.

Nothing is planned, no one thinks of the consequences of one’s actions because there is a total disbelief in the concept of tomorrow. If one day you decide you want a window in the wall of your house, you just knock a hole in it right there and then. If the wall falls down tomorrow, well, it doesn’t really matter. I have become caught up in this. I now buy petrol by the 50 pence-worth because if you fill the tank up, you can be sure that someone will take that as a ticket to drive around town all day using it up. If you buy a pot of coffee, the whole family will enjoy coffee for the day and tomorrow, well, tomorrow may never come.

Since I’ve been living here, I’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow, about the future of my spiritual development and instead have been concentrating on my work and on perfecting those things which are useful to me today- being able to speak Wolof and being able to dance Sabar. I don’t ask the questions that I used to ask about the nature of life and God and the soul, because I am too busy celebrating the African today.

But for someone who does believe in tomorrow, living just for today can seem pointless. Once again this book has left a profound mark on me and I ask myself if I’m not tired of being here with a people who have no sense of the future, who willingly destroy things and themselves by not building tomorrow into their today.

*****

This week the boys in my house were circumcised. They cried and wailed and it was a bloody, traumatising affair, for all of us. But they’ll get over it. What I was not expecting was to find out that Tapha’s sisters had also been circumcised, 28 years ago. Female genital mutilation (FGM), as it is now known (because the cutting and sewing up of the vagina has nothing to do with the relatively harmless removal of a boy’s foreskin) has been illegal in Senegal since the late 1990s and it’s slowly spreading that mutilating your daughters isn’t the things to do, not least of all because it often kills them.

While it rained yesterday, Tapha’s sister Mariam and I sat on my veranda and talked about FGM in general terms and I asked her if she knew of any people who still did it in Ziguinchor. During the discussion she started to tell me about an old woman in the town who was the ‘cutter’, a woman everyone was scared of. Before I knew it Mariam was recounting the day someone came for her, told her she was going on a journey, collected her sister Rama and four other girls from the neighbourhood, and took them over to the woman’s house. She remembers them taking her into a smelly outside toilet, laying a mat down by the hole, putting a cloth over her face, pulling up her clitoris and cutting it off.

She watched as the other girls went through the same thing, each one being put in a basin of hot water afterwards to stop the bleeding, until they were all done and could go home. She said for a month she was in pain but that everyone came and clapped and danced and told her she was a woman now. She was 7 years old.

Mariam is one of the loveliest girls I know here. In fact, her and Rama are my only female friends. While all the other Senegalese girls look down on me for my bitten nails and uncoiffed hair (but are secretly jealous because of my passport and long hair), Rama and Mariam have adopted me as their sister and would do anything for me. They share their children with me, they give me their best outfits when my suitcase is left on some run-way by Air Senegal, they rub my tummy when I am sick and hug me when I feel home-sick. Because of this I had forgotten how different I am from them, culturally, and from everyone here. It never occurred to me that the horror stories I hear about female genital mutilation was once going on in my own house and that my ‘sisters’ have been wantonly tortured because of a custom that appears to be about nothing but suppressing the female race.

Mariam and Rama both swore to me that they would never do the same thing to their children, even if it wasn’t illegal. Mariam rightly pointed out that they told her it made her a woman but that I hadn’t had it done to me bit it didn’t stop me from being a woman.

It’s made me realise how very different I am from these people. I wonder what it is that keeps me here. I think it’s safety, being able to understand the language and the way things are done (although some things I will never understand), having a ‘home’. I am blessed with cheap rent and it may be that it’s time to take a trip somewhere away from here, somewhere where I can start thinking once again about what happens to us when we die and why it is that we’re here at all.

*****

Since beginning to write this, my Senegalese mother has died. Mere Fouta adopted me when I moved to Ziguinchor, sending me bowls of rich oily rice and ripe mangoes just at the moments when I felt down. She was plump and warm and friendly and I liked going to see her at her little house just behind ours. She was Tapha’s mother’s best friend and we all loved her.
She died this afternoon of a lung infection. She hadn’t told anyone she was sick because she was afraid of hospitals. She had seen a marabout, a spiritual leader, but in the end it was in the hospital that she died. Her children came crying and screaming in their bright boubous down the road this afternoon and we all knew she had died. We all feel very sad here.

*****

Since writing even this last part, I have been informed that one of my clients has cut their budget for freelancers and I, in turn, have lost about a third of my work. I feel pretty shit.

Well, as one wise writer wrote, Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.