Peace Corps Mauritania - Delirium - Volume 1 January 2003

The sun’s gone down beneath the sand
Where direction spends the night.
If logic suffers in the sun,
It evaporates with the moonlight.

I walk by a dog lying in the pale
Sand on its side in a shallow
Pit of sand, motionless. Perhaps
It breathes, perhaps it dreams.

I cast my moon-
Shadow and move on,
Through the maze of gray
Powdered earth stretching home.

Where are the firmer roads
Of my former place
Where I once found reference
In familiar space?

The familiar lingers here in the small,
The superfluous; in flashlights,
The incongruous; in T.V and
Internal combustion shrapnel
That tears through comprehensible simplicity.

Past, present, future: these are tired words.
There are ten words for sand
And one for beauty. There are
Ten words for sand, one for beauty
And I don’t know which to use
For what now bogs me down.

L’esprit du terrorisme

We have had plenty of global events in recent years, from the death of Diana to the World Cup, as well as plenty of violent and real events, from wars to genocides. But a symbolic event global in reach--an event that is not only broadcast worldwide but that threatens globalization itself--had not yet occurred. For the length of the stagnant nineties, in the words of Argentine writer Macedonio Fernandez, “events were on strike.” Well, the strike is over. Events are back at work. With the attack on the Word Trade Center, we have now witnessed the ultimate event, the mother of all events, an event so pure it contains within it all the events that never took place.

The speeches and commentaries made since September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are directly proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed, because it was this insufferable superpower that gave rise both to the violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all.

That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a hegemon--this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to erase it.

In the end, it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this fact into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics that we need only repress. But we know well that such is not the case. Without our profound complicity the event would not have reverberated so forcefully, and in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.

It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited--those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order--feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides in the hearts of even those who have shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their identicality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order.

Countless disaster films have borne witness to these fantasies, and the universal appeal of the images shows just how close the fantasies always are to being acted out: the closer the entire system gets to perfection or to omnipotence, the stronger the urge to destroy it grows.

When the world has been so thoroughly monopolized, when power has been so formidably consolidated by the technocratic machine and the dogma of globalization, what means of turning the tables remains besides terrorism? In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange. All those singularities (species, individuals, cultures) that have been sacrificed to the interests of a global system of commerce avenge themselves by turning the tables with terrorism.

Terror against terror--this is no longer an ideological notion. We have gone well beyond ideology and politics. The energy that nourishes terror, no ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic one, can explain. The terrorists are not aiming simply to transform the world. Like the heretics of previous times, they aim to radicalize the world through sacrifice, whereas the system aims to convert it into money through force.

Terrorists, like viruses, are everywhere. There is no longer a boundary that can hem terrorism in; it is at the heart of the very culture it’s fighting with, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and underdeveloped nations of the world against the West masks the dominant system’s internal fractures. It is as if every means of domination secreted its own antidote. Against this almost automatic form of resistance to its power, the system can do nothing. Terrorism is the shock wave of this silent resistance.

It is a mistake, then, to characterize this as a clash of civilizations or of religions. It goes well beyond Islam and America, on which one might be tempted to concentrate in order to create the illusion of a confrontation resolvable by force. There is a fundamental antagonism at work, but it transcends the phantom of America (which is perhaps the epicenter, though not the incarnation of globalization) as well as the phantom of Islam (which likewise is not the incarnation of terrorism). This is the clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself.

In this sense, it is accurate to speak of this as a world war--not the third but the fourth--and the only one that is truly global, since what’s at stake is globalization itself. The first put an end to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide against rebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount a resistance in every cell. These confrontations are so imperceptible that it is occasionally necessary to resuscitate the idea of war by staging spectacular scenes such as those in the Persian Gulf and now in Afghanistan. But World War IV happens elsewhere too. It haunts all expressions of world order, all forms of hegemonic domination--if Islam were dominating the world, terrorism would rise up against Islam. The globe itself is resistant to globalization.

Terrorism is immoral. The occurrence at the World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. The crucial point lies in precisely the opposite direction from the Enlightenment philosophy of Good and Evil. We naively believe in the progress of Good, that its ascendance in all domains (science, technology, democracy, human rights) corresponds to the defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil increase in power at the same time and in the same way. The triumph of one does not result in the obliteration of the other; to the contrary. We tend to regard Evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, or vice versa; they are at once irreducible, the one and the other, and inextricably linked. In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there remained a balance of Good and Evil, a dialectical relationship that guaranteed, for better or worse, the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe. This balance was lost as soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good--the hegemony of the positive over every form of negativity. From that moment, the equilibrium was broken, and Evil returned to an invisible autonomy, increasing exponentially.

Relatively speaking, this is a bit like what happened to the political order after Communism disappeared and neoliberal forces triumphed worldwide. It was then that a phantom enemy arose, percolating throughout the planet, rising up through all the cracks in power: Islam. But Islam is merely the crystallized form of this antagonism. The antagonism is everywhere, and it is in each of us. Hence, terror against terror. But it is asymmetrical terror, and it is this asymmetry that leaves the absolute global power disarmed. It can do nothing but strike at its own rationale for the balance of power, without being able to compete on the playing field of symbolic defiance and of death, having deleted that playing field from its own culture.

Until now, this integrating power had succeeded in absorbing and reabsorbing every attack, every negativity, and in doing so created a thoroughly hopeless situation (not only for the wretched of the earth but also for the privileged and well-to-do in their radical comfort). But the terrorists have started using their own deaths offensively and effectively, based on a strategic intuition, a sense of their adversary’s immense fragility, of the system’s quasi-perfection, of the explosion that would erupt at the slightest spark. They succeeded in turning their deaths into the ultimate weapon against a system devoted to the ideal of zero losses. Any system of zero losses is a zero-sum game. And all methods of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counteroffensive weapon. Thus the imbalance of more than 3,000 deaths inflicted in one fell swoop against a system of zero losses. Here, everything depends upon death, not only upon the brutal irruption of death, live and in real time, but upon the irruption of a death much more than real: a symbolic and sacrificial death--which is to say, the absolute, ultimate, unappealable event.

Never attack the system in terms of the balance of power. The balance of power is an imaginary (revolutionary) construct imposed by the system itself, a construct that exists in order to force those who attack it to fight on the battlefield of reality, the system’s own terrain. Instead, move the struggle into the symbolic sphere, where defiance, reversion, and one-upmanship are the rule--so that the only way to respond to death is with an equivalent or even greater death. Defy the system with a gift to which it cannot reply except with its own death and its own downfall.

The tactic of the model terrorist is to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under its own weight; the terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself will commit suicide in response to multiple fatal suicide attacks, because neither the system nor power is free from symbolic obligations. In this vertiginous cycle of exchanging death, the death of a terrorist is an infinitesimal point, but one that provokes an enormous aspiration, a gaping void, a gigantic convection. All around this minute point, the entire system, the system of reality and power, fortifies itself, vaccinates itself, gathers itself together, and crumbles into ruin out of its own overefficiency.

It is, however, a mistake to see the terrorists’ actions as merely destructive; this is hardly an impersonal elimination of the Other. This is about having a personal relationship, the relationship of duelists, with the enemy power. It was the enemy power that humiliated you, so it’s the enemy power that must be humiliated. And not simply exterminated. You have to make the enemy lose face. And you’ll never achieve that through brute force, by merely eliminating the Other. The Other must be targeted and murdered under extremely dangerous circumstances. Accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, the terrorists’ act is, therefore, the exact opposite of an act of cowardice, as well as the exact opposite of what the Americans did in the Gulf War (and of what they are doing all over again in Afghanistan): invisible target, operational liquidation.

Everything changes as soon as the terrorists begin to combine every modern means available with the highly symbolic weapon of their own deaths. This combination infinitely multiplies their destructive capability, and it is this multiplication of factors (which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives the terrorists such superiority. The strategy of zero losses, on the other hand, of the clean, high-tech war, entirely misses this transfiguration of real power by symbolic power.

We no longer have a clue what a symbolic calculation is, the sort of calculation common in poker or potlatch: minimum stakes, maximum results. This is exactly what the terrorists achieved in the attack on Manhattan, which provides a good illustration of chaos theory: an initial shock provoking unforeseeable consequences. Gigantic deployments of Americans, on the other hand, achieve nothing but derisory effects--a hurricane, as it were, resulting in the flapping of a butterfly’s wings.

Cause, proof, truth, compensation, ends and means--ultimately, this all amounts to a typically Western way of thinking. We even evaluate death in terms of interest rates, in terms of price-quality ratios--a poor man’s calculation. We no longer even have the courage to pay a good price.

Among the system’s own weapons that they succeeded in turning against it, the terrorists exploited the real time of images, their instantaneous worldwide distribution. The role of the image is highly ambiguous. Even as the image exalts the event, it takes it hostage. It multiplies the event into infinity, and at the same time it diverts our attention from the event and neutralizes it. This is what is always forgotten when we speak of the “danger” of the media. The image consumes the event by absorbing it and offering it up to the consumer. To be sure, it lends the event an unedited impact to a point, but it remains an image-event nonetheless.

What is left, then, of the real event if the imaginary, the fictional, the virtual, intrudes everywhere into reality? The collapse of the World Trade Center towers is unimaginable, but this in and of itself does not make an event real. An increase in violence is not enough to open up reality. Because reality is a starting point, a first principle, and it’s this principle that has been lost. Reality and fiction are inextricable, and fascination with the attack is above all fascination with the image.

In this case, therefore, reality gives the image an element of terror, an extra thrill. Not only is it terrifying, it is also real. Or, rather, it is not the violence of reality that comes first, giving the image an extra frisson; the image comes first and adds a frisson to reality. A kind of fiction-plus, fiction that goes beyond fiction. Something like what Ballard (after Borges) had in mind when he spoke of reinventing reality as the ultimate and most formidable fiction.

This terrorist violence is thus not a rekindling of the fire of reality, or of history. This terrorist violence is not “real” at all. It’s worse, in a sense: it’s symbolic. Violence in and of itself can be perfectly banal and inoffensive. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And this singular event, this Manhattan disaster film, consummately combines the two elements of mass fascination in the twentieth century: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism.

In the aftermath of the attack we seek to give it whatever meaning we can, to make whatever interpretation. But there is no meaning, and the radical nature of the spectacle, its brutality, is the only thing about it that is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism forces upon us the terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it elicits universal moral condemnation) the political order can do nothing. It is our very own theater of cruelty, the only one we have left--extraordinary because it represents both the high point of the spectacular and the high point of defiance.

Any killing can be forgiven, so long as it has a meaning, so long as it can be interpreted as historical violence--such is the moral axiom of good violence. Any violence can be forgiven, as long as it is not transmitted by the media. (“Terrorism would be nothing without the media”) But this is all just an illusion. There is no such thing as a good use of the media. The media are part of the event, they’re part of the terror; in one way or another they play along.

The act or repression follows the same unpredictable spiral as the act of terrorism: no one knows where it will end or what repercussions will ensue. At the level of images and information, it is impossible to distinguish between the spectacular and the symbolic, impossible to distinguish between crime and repression. And it is this uncontrollable outburst of reversibility that is the veritable victory of terrorism, a victory that can be seen in the ramifications and subterranean aftershocks of the event--not only in the recession (economic, political, psychological) of the entire value system, the entire ideology of liberty, the freedom of movement, etc., that had been the pride of the West and its justification for exerting control over the rest of the world.

We have reached the point that the idea of liberty, an idea relatively recent and new, is already in the process of fading from our consciences and our standards of morality, the point that neoliberal globalization is in the process of assuming the form of its opposite: that of a global police state, of a terror of security. Deregulation has ended in maximum security, in a level of restriction and constraint equivalent to that found in fundamentalist societies.

A downturn in production, consumption, speculation, growth--all indications suggest that the global system is making a strategic retreat, a wrenching revision of its values. This retreat is apparently in reaction to the impact of terrorism, but in truth it is for secrete reasons of its own--regulation born of absolute disorder but which it imposes upon itself, internalizing in a certain sense its own defeat.

There is no solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war, which offers nothing but déjà vu, the same deluge of military force, the same absence of reliable information, the same pointless bludgeoning, the same stirring but deceitful speeches, the same poisoning. In short, it is the Gulf War all over again, a non-event, an event that does not truly take place.

It is not intended to take place. It has an altogether different purpose: to replace a truly formidable event, unique and unforeseen, with a pseudo-event that is as repetitive as it is familiar. In the terrorist attack the event eclipsed all of our interpretive models, whereas in this mindlessly military and technological war we see the opposite: the interpretive model eclipsing of the event. Witness, thus, the artificial stakes, the non-place. War as a continuation of the absence of politics by other means.

This Place

There is something about this place.
Whether man or woman, it leaves us mystified.
Sometimes we walk with our heads down and ears closed
Trying to keep from shedding a tear the very next day

Sometimes we walk forward
As the sun blinds our very thought of sight
Walking in a direction forever aimless
While the coastal winds bring the scent of rotten death
Washed up along the shores
And the evening call to prayer haunts our very conscience
Sometimes we desire to leave so much that it pains to crave,
Most of the time we want nothing more to do with it.
To leave and never come back.

But every time there is this irresistible yearning
A lingering nostalgia for frozen minutes, even seconds
For the familiarity of dirty hands and tired faces
That leave a sigh of unknowing relief
The thoughts of endless days
Toiling through the heat with nothing to do.
The thought of wasting away in acrid sweat
While swatting away the madness of flies
Who want, like us, nothing more than to find refuge from uncertainty
To be so far away, but forgetting why we leave in the first place.

For each day is just like the next
Nothing more and nothing less
The days become longer and longer
Drowning our every desire to move
From the shade that keeps us cool
And brings us reason when the piss encrusted
Stench becomes too putrid to endure
Another night of insomniac headlights glaring
In man-made city streets with borrowed tears
Whispering goodnight to a land forgotten
With the moment that failed to stay.

Our ephemeral existence in a place with no ground
Maybe…that is the mystery of this place
To never truly know one’s place
Between the everlasting horizon
And the deep blue of the shifting sands
Where pyramids have been built and disappeared
Where sphinx have landed and bred their children
Where men have walked with no traces of footsteps left behind
Nothing is ever permanent but perhaps
For the believer that has carried us this far
In God’s vast and great land.

Even the idea of love seems to be from a distant imagination
Like a lush oasis full of camels guided by strong hands
Whose soft caress shapes the endless mounds
Of skin-coloured sands shifting in motion
As if losing shadows never to be found again

And the next traveler will bury his hurt deep
Within the warm comfort of a mother’s embrace
In silence, so that the sun can rise
To know that love is seeing.
In this mystical place that breaks our hearts
And inspires our soul.

UM-I ANNA

From my first day in her dusty West African village, my host mother and I have played charades.

“Women in Mauritania have a lot of work,” she says, circling her hand over a pretend bowl. She’s making couscous.

“Do you dance at weddings in America?” She closes her eyes and sways with an exaggerated look of rapture.

“Did you do sports today?” She pumps her massive arms like a jogger. “One day I will come and do sports with you.” She wags her arms again, pants, wipes sweat from her forehead and finally falls into a heap. “Oh, sports make you tired.”

These pantomimes began out of necessity. When I moved in with my host family after training, I found that, away from my Hassaniya teacher’s slow talk and patient ears, I couldn’t understand anyone nor they me. Thus my host mother, Dayda, began the pantomimes: she’d compliment even the simplest dialogue with motions to ensure that I understood.

As the weeks passed, I began to replace the pantomimes with words, mastering the vocabulary that I needed to function in a Mauritanian family. Dayda and I could finally share simple stories or laugh at my little brother as he learned to walk and dined on handfuls of sand.

But although I believed I was saying the same words as everyone else, visitors to our compound got blank looks in their eyes when I asked them what seemed to me like the simplest of questions. I’d look to Dayda.

“What she means is, ‘Have you always lived here?’” she’d explain. I’d often find myself looking at her again to put their responses into language that matched my vocabulary: my mother translator.

As my language progressed, we didn’t abandon the pantomimes. Our favorite remained, ‘Mauritanian women have a lot of work.’ This expanded over the months, partly in response to my host father’s insistences that it was not true. We danced a line of making couscous, washing clothes, bending over to sweep with short straw brooms, pulling water from the well and rocking babies: a representation of women that always ended in laughter.

Throughout this time I continued my Peace Corps work teaching English at the local high school and trying to connect with this society that seemed so foreign from my own. More than anything, I wanted to uncover ways in which I was the same as these people from this different world. The longer I lived in Mauritania the more dissatisfied I became with my search. Even the elements of society that seemed the most basic to me were different. Good friends, for example, seemed to be judged not by how well they knew someone as an individual, but rather on the amount of time they spent together. I began to wonder if there was anywhere where our cultures touched.

Then one day my little brother, Daya, began to talk. At first all he said was ‘Dayda,’ but soon he began to voice many words. The only problem was that I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.

“You’re thirsty?” She’d send one of his older brothers to bring him water.

She’d lay on her back with Daya perched on her stomach and together they’d repeat word after word and they’d laugh. The same way she did with me.

So it was motherhood that shone through the density of cultural differences. In both countries, mothers serve as the first teachers and the first friends. They bring us into and guide us through the first years of life. Most, like Dayda, carry out their role with such joy. We are very lucky to have mothers.

I imagine Dayda’s pantomime of mother would contain the same elements as that of woman, accompanied, of course, by her deep, rumbling laugh.

GO TO THE CULT

She wakes him with a sigh. He begins to stir from a quick sleep and he opens his eyes to the scenery. If he trusted where he were, he could look out and enjoy the ocean, as well as the sand that comes off the dune, and twists down the beach. But he feels uneasiness. He feels it in the tightness of his joints. And he doesn’t feel rested even after sleeping for an hour, as if some enzyme has not been released that would give the easy sensation of having gained sleep.

“I still feel filthy from that ferry ride. I don’t know what I was expecting from an Italian ferry,” he says.

“I can’t tell. Or you don’t smell it. Or you smell like you belong to me.” “You look like someone who belongs,” he rolls unto his stomach and rests his chin on her naked belly. “You have brown eyes, and you’re brown all over. Everything agrees.”

She scratches her breast and turns her head toward the ocean and looks out across the dune, at the stark white saline of the sand that flows down into the ocean and at an ugly, half dead tree. She doesn’t want to think about his expression for very long. “Maybe he had an ugly dream,” she thinks, “maybe with this ugly tree in it and maybe a funeral.” She sighs again, finding her view of ocean, among other things, to be beautiful. And then she turns back towards him and almost stares at him.

Although the sun still has hours in the sky, it is not hot. Against the cold wind from the sea, it gives a deep warm on their faces. He also feels a different warmth: the warmth of being looked at, of knowing that someone else is searching for an expression and wondering what caused it. He feels the need for talk, and at that instant she says, “I like it here.”

“Yes, this place is nice. That professor, Paolo, he told me so many stories, about traveling. It seemed like he just made things up. Like he was bored or I was bored.” He considered that she might not want to hear about his professor. She turns to him, surprising him with a look of interest.

“Not so much lied to. His whole talk just still bothers me. It didn’t seem real. He told me to come here, while talking about going to the Black Madonna churches on these islands.”

“Yes. I remember his words so clearly, ‘imagine an ancient Med-iterranean peasant woman on a donkey cart, on a rocky, desolate path next to the ocean, with her child on her lap. The cart hits a bump, and the child is dropped, and falls toward the ocean. But before it hits the water, a column of earth rises out of the ocean, cradling and returning the child to the mother.’ And then Paolo tries to shock you, he almost tries to scare you, and so he says that the mother is terrorized by the experience and loses her wits to the secret cause of her child’s life. She abandons it at the nearest church, and the statues of Mary shed a black tear. It’s only a story, I guess. He just tries to get at you.”

“You do to know. You listened to him. You came here, right?” Now it is he who gazes out at the sea and sighs, not realizing he mimicked the sigh that she woke him with a few moments earlier.

POEMS: A MISCELLANY

WORDS OR DIAMONDS?

Millions of people can use the same word,
Even at the same time,
And words aren’t easily lost.

Words contain ideas.
The more words you know,
The more ideas you can have.
With ideas, you can do almost anything.
If you have many diamonds, but no ideas,
You are not rich.

A Nymph and I and The Nightingale

The fountain blurs, I see it less
A nightingale sings on in stress
The stones are wet with cold and pain
After the morning’s Autumn rain

It will be night I will be sick
The air is light the evening quick.
And if I be, be without care
The fountain nymph can be my pair.
We’ll dance and dance with wetted eyes
Beneath the grey and silver skies
Until I’m cold until I’m pale
The nymph and I and the nightingale.

A LETTER HOME

It is the most amazing thing to live amongst the camels and with people who live under tents, and to visit them at night drinking rounds of tea in little shot-glasses, speaking Arabic with them and your students stop by to practice their bad English on you ....

There's a cool wind blowing from the West through my little house this late afternoon, and it's a welcomed change from the heat of the day. For now, it is one of the few reminders that there is a West.

My birthday was two days ago. I asked my host mother, Khadijetou, to make a feast (with my money of course) so that my Mauritanian friends and family could celebrate with me. I gave her 7000 UM, which is one-fourth of my monthly allowance I live on. But it was worth it! There were twelve of us; everyone older than me except my host niece at 5 years old. She's here in Maal to learn Classical Arabic and the Quran. We started the night by drinking Zriig; a tasty drink made of soured goat's milk, water, and sugar. Then we ate dates with cream. Next came a large platter of Mauritanian salad (beats, shredded carrots, tomatoes, sweet potato, and egg). We all dug into the platter sitting around it talking about how good it tasted. We never eat veggies or fruit out here. This conversation was in French because it is our common language. Not everyone speaks Hassaniya/Arabic. Sidi is Soninke, Dia is Pulaar, Mamadou is Wolof, Mohamed Ali is a black Moor and so are Hassen and my host family. They all have their own languages, but French unites them all. My friends are all teachers. The second course was an entire goat split into two platters toppled with slices of fried potato and a very good onion meat sauce. This was followed by three rounds of tea and finally the third course, Moroccan Couscous with carrots and more goat.

I literally ate more that night than I do during an entire week! The twelve of us ate like kings even if there was no silverware. They don't really celebrate birthdays here, as most people have little clue to when they were born and at best know only the year and the season. They asked me about birthday celebrations in America and I was embarrassed to bring up alcohol more than once. It is, of course, forbidden in this country in that it is an Islamic Republic. They all thanked me for this great feast and I thanked Khadijetou for making it. By night's end they managed to sing about half of "Happy Birthday" in English before they realized they didn't really know the words, but the la la la version wasn't bad.

The thing is ... If I traded $24 American dollars for Ougiya (UM), I would get 7000 UM and hence afford this huge feast for a party of twelve. I never realized how powerful the American dollar is in the fourth world. It is the currency the black-market in Nouakchott loves the best. A Ben Franklin makes for the easiest thing to trade in the world.

The Ambassador of the United States of America to Mauritania was touring my part of the country and my village somehow made it on his list of places to stop at. It could have had something to do with the conversation I had with him at the Embassy after my speech in which I told him of Mall's beauty, though I doubt he remembers. At least he agrees now that Maal is beautiful. The Mayor, Deputy, and Hakem slaughtered five goats for his arrival and I got to attend this feast with the Ambassador. He arrived in a long procession of cars, all SUVs or Jeeps. One had the American flag insignia of the Peace Corps on it. For a village who rarely sees a car, this was a very big show. At the feast (much better than my birthday) I sat next to him on his left in a room of officials covered with a Persian-style rug. The whole room was decorated in Arabic purples, reeds, and burgundies. Next to me on my left side was the Director of the Peace Corps in Mauritania. Needless to say, I felt like a million bucks. After the feast I got into the Ambassador's car and we toured the lake and its gardens in this long procession of cars. I had a great conversation with him about Maal and fishing and then was dropped off in the center of the village, from where they soon drove off to Boghé, leaving a trailing cloud of dust in their wake. At that moment I had about 50 villagers come up to me in a circle as if I were magical. I almost felt as if they were waiting for me to say something very important. But I didn't. I greeted them in Hassaniya and walked off to my little house to eat the brownies and read the two copies of The New Yorker that the Ambassador gave to me as gifts. He really knows how to make people feel important, but then, that's his job.

The West wind brought dark clouds and a light rain last night. This morning is gray and a breeze continues to make a pleasant weather. Last night I fell asleep listening to the tapping rain on my tin roof. It reminded me of the green house when it rained in California on our old house.

This morning a little black girl came to my door with a bowl of carrots and tomatoes from her mother's garden. I bought some and made a very good vegetable soup. My friend Sidi (the French teacher) stopped by about an hour ago with bread made in the mud ovens here and I made coffee and tea to go with the soup and bread. Sidi said it was the best breakfast he's had in Maal, and so it was with me.

We talked about life; vegetable soup in England, traveling, growing old, raising children, and surviving day by day as a way of life in Africa. I know that most of what I talked about he will never experience. I wonder if he envies that different way of life impossible to him. Perhaps.

I miss home. I don't miss America, I only miss being a little kid in Diamond Bar helping dad in the garden, running laps inside the swimming pool to see how fast we could make the water turn, playing with my G.I. Joes and toy cars, complaining about hanging the clothes on the clothes-line, watching cartoons with you after school and Star Trek with dad at night and mom walking into your room on your birthday in the morning singing at the top of her lungs. I know I am only remembering the good …but this is my only idea of home. I don't know what it is now. The former is a life that is gone as much as our old house. I guess I feel displaced; out of time and place.

I suppose out here I've had a lot of time to think about life ... and in a much more profound way that the busy life of L.A. never afforded me. I have clearly thought about what is most important for me; that which makes me passionate for life.

First is love in all its forms ... for family, for life, and of course romantically. What would life be without love?

Third is the pursuit of knowledge. The more I know the more I am fascinated by who we are; humanity. Just to think and know about our long line of history and the rise and fall of the great civilizations blows my mind. Out here I have read a lot of history, literature, and about political affairs. I have followed closely the development of the Arab world and its clash with the West, and see our past colliding with our future. I know now what Shakespeare was thinking when Hamlet says, "What a thing is man..." all his plots, and wars, and struggles ... for what? Ideology? Land? Love? ... Survival? It amazes me what man has done and of what he is capable.

I have now made French as natural to me as Spanish and English and am adding Arabic and its culture to who I am. It makes me feel like four persons, each as different as speaking Spanish with mom and speaking English with friends on a night out. Four lifetimes in one. Most of these villagers are blind to the outside world and know only what they see here. They will never know what it is like to eat Chinese food with chopsticks or what the world looks like through the window of an airplane, or what it is like to have thousands of spectators clapping after your performance, nor will they stop and wonder what the last Caesar was thinking/feeling as he watched the Visigoths pour over the hill and into Rome! When I say knowledge I include experience of life and travel.

Both of these lead to adventure. By this I don't mean "Raiders of the Lost Arc." Very few of us can ever experience that. By adventure I mean the undiscovered. We all know Robert Frost's little line "And so I chose the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference." Adventure is a leap of faith into a place, or employment, or existence in which you have no idea what to expect. Mystery. The voyage of self-discovery. It is the way I felt at the airport just before I walked into the plane and said good-bye to Larisa. And again I felt that way in Boghé when a Mauritanian boy in tattered clothes told me in Africanized French to follow him, that I would be living with him now, and I completely stepped out of my known world. It is that feeling heavy in your stomach and light on your shoulders that keeps you asking "What the hell am I doing?" It is the ultimate reminder that you are truly alive.

I told Larisa at LAX that if I died right then that I would be satisfied that I had lived a full life. I said this looking into her eyes aware of all the love I had for her, remembering my childhood adventures, the students that cried for me as I did for them, flying over a car during a motorcycle accident, driving myself on the wrong side of the car in England, getting lost in the mountains of France and California, singing in front of a packed hall, and flying to Pittsburgh to find a lost love. And I turned away from Larisa and looked towards the airplane and said to her ... "the craziest part of it all is that my life will really begin once I step onto that airplane."

MY DAY: IMPRESSIONS

I wake up to the sounds of roosters and donkeys and the swelter of extreme heat. Can the day really begin this early I ask myself? A lukewarm bucket bath washes away the sweat and sand momentarily. I leave my house and start towards the center of town. It’s a windy day with a little bit of dust in the air – not what I would call a beautiful day, but I’ve seen worse. On my way to town I meet Zeinabou and Fatimatu and then Miriam and Khatu. I see Mohamed, Sidi and Ahmed as well as Tutu and Ishe. How are you? Your family? Health? Work? How is your morning? Anything new? I am fine. All is good. Thank you, thank you.

It’s time for tea. Round one. Round two. Round three. Why aren’t I married? Where is my husband? Don’t I want to marry a man from Chinguitti? How about the camel herder? Or the brother? Maybe the butcher? When I leave, will I ever come back? Do I know Mohamed the Prophet? Do I pray? Muhlafas are good, why don’t you wear a muhlafa?

The sun is rising, it is nearly noon. I make my way back across town to my “sister’s” boutique. Take the milk, drink, drink more, it is hot today. How are you? Where have you been? Did you hear about Hamid and Nina? They are getting married next week.

Back to the house. Wash our hands, gather round, the plate of food is here. Rice. Rice and meat. Could that be camel? Eat. Eat more. Why aren’t you eating? Don’t you like it? Eat. Eat. Eat. Wash our hands again. Time to relax. We pull out the pillows, find a comfy position and it’s nap time.

I must have fallen asleep because it is mid afternoon now. Does it ever cool down here? Time for tea. Round one. Round two. Round three. I start to wake up, the grogginess is wearing off. I wander back to my house. What to do? I will read, no I will knit, no I will clean, no I will write a letter…

I go to visit my friend Mariem. Let’s have tea. Round one. Round two. Round three. How are you? How is your health? Your family? The work? How is the heat? Are you fine? Yes, I am fine. My family is fine. Work is good. The heat, the heat is okay. What’s new? Your sister is getting married? When? I will come to the wedding, I will wear a muhlafa and dance.

The sun is setting as I walk back towards home. Glowing orange and red over the sand dunes and a palm tree reaches up in the middle of it. Beautiful. There is my family, sitting in the sand outside the boutique. Hello. How are you? It is hot today. Yes, it is hot in America sometimes. We sleep inside and everyone has their own room. It is different than here. Do I prefer America or Mauritania? They are not the same. I love America but I love Mauritania as well.

Time for tea. Round one. Round two. Round three. Here comes the couscous. Eat. Eat. Eat some more. Thank you. I am tired, I am going to sleep now. Good night. I walk back to my house. Where is my candle? There, now I can see. Pajamas. Mattress. Sheet. Pillow. I blow out my candle and settle into my matela. Looking up all I see are stars and the white smear of the Milky Way. A shooting star! Cassiopeia. Orion. Stars. Stars. Stars.

As I fall asleep under my blanket of stars I am happy to be here, happy to be in a place where it is more important to greet your neighbor than to be on time. So, good night Mauritania, good night Milky Way, good night shooting stars – I’ll see you again tomorrow.

Sustainable Development

I didn’t have many expectations before coming to Mauritania, or so I thought. I now realize that I had quite a few. I imagined that the desert would be a hard place to live in. I expected Peace Corps to drop off its volunteers in remote villages, not to be seen by other Americans for over two years. I expected language to be the ultimate key to cultural integration. Above all, I expected every Mauritanian to jump at the chance to work with me, a Peace Corps Volunteer, ready and willing to help. I was going to teach them how to use their local resources more efficiently in order to improve their standard of living. I was thrilled at the prospect of doing “sustainable development”! Unfortunately, after two years of doing what the twenty-first century calls “sustainable development,” I realize that what in fact I was trying to do was to teach my village how to exploit the resources they already had in ways that would make their shops more prosperous, their children more marketable in the global economy, and their community more materially comfortable (and hopefully, but not necessarily, more peaceful).

Peace Corps throughout the world, along with other grass roots and non-profit organizations, is guilty of making “sustainable development” a matter of economics, rather than a means to peace and permanence. We act as if growth, expansion, and development are all possible in a finite environment, that is, an environment of limited trees, water, animals, rains and land. The original idea behind sustainable development is the belief that environmental growth and resource development, when brought to a sufficient level of production, eventually reaches an equilibrium; the participating organizations who had helped the struggling community attain a certain degree of self-sufficiency, would then head home proud of the peace and environmental prosperity supposedly reached. But in reality, growth will never be enough.

We have been taught in school, in Peace Corps training, and through our own experiences, that the “donne moi dix” trend is typical of developing countries which have received aid for extended periods of time. However, has any industrialized country ever been known to say, for example, “thank you, we have enough oil”? Has any large-scale corporation ever been known to say “we are closing business because we’ve made enough money”? The level of need for developing environments is basic and easy to recognize. We naturally sympathize with the needy and want to help. However, in helping them meet their basic needs, we actually create more needs, disrupting the stability of families, communities and countries, moving us farther and farther away from our initial goal: peace. Never will any rich country, nor will any poor country, say they’ve experienced enough economic growth. Therefore, it seems, life will be forever unstable and peace illusive.

E.F Schumacher in his book Small Is Beautiful asks whether the rich or the poor treasure peace more highly? Are we less able to live in peace because we are afraid of losing it? We must continuously stay on our toes to compete with other consumers, producers, manufacturers, dictators in oil rich countries, and angry terrorists playing off the need for security in poorer populations. Do the poorer communities live more peacefully because they possess a greater sense of equilibrium with what sustains their existence? Sustainable development, centered around the economic motive for prosperity, seems only to have increased the needs of poorer populations. They are no longer able nor willing to say: enough. If we continue to work believing that sustainable development means economic development, life in Mauritania and in other developing countries will remain unstable, furthering rather than eliminating potential problems. The natural peace born from living off what the environment can reasonably sustain will falter, giving rise to a higher degree of civil unrest, and keeping us from achieving our intended goal: peace. So now what is to be done? I am in Mauritania one more year, and I still have time to change my modus operandi. However, even though I see the pitfalls of what we do as development workers, I can’t think of a better alternative. The desire to make people’s lives more comfortable is a noble sentiment. It leaves me to wonder, how is one to balance the desire for immediate gratification with the longer term goal of peace.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:FROM DREAM TO REALITY

Since the United Nations Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 until today, the achievements in environmental protection have been significant. Many nations have integrated environmental values into their development policies. Environmental institutions have been created at the national, sub-regional, regional, and international levels. Awareness of the environment among the general public has risen sharply, and knowledge of the environment has grown rapidly. Market-based environmental instruments have been made operational, and national, sub-regional, regional, as well as international conventions, have been instituted. The environment has become a household word and a popular topic of numerous conferences. And yet, In spite of all this, these achievements have not been able to stop the deterioration process that is taking place all over the world.

When in June 1997 the Special Session of the United nations General Assembly assessed five years of implementation at the World Conference on Environment and Development or Rio+5, the harsh conclusion was that the prevailing development pattern was still on the “business as usual” track and environmentally unsustainable.

Material consumption and production have followed a similar pattern throughout the economy of the world with the accompanying negative impacts on social and environmental development.

In the last fifty years of development, up to 1998, before the impact of the economic crisis started to be felt in Asia, the world economy has grown more than five-fold, pushed by world trade that has grown even faster. While the world economy grew at an average of 1.7 percent per annum, the Asia and Pacific region grew almost double that – an average of over 3 percent.

On the other hand, in the social sector, total world population has increased from 1.6 billion (1950) to 6 billion (1998), of which 3.5 billion persons live in the Asia and Pacific region. Urban population has doubled in twenty years (1990-2000) to 3.7 billion persons. By 2015, this may reach 4.4 billion persons, which represents 50 percent of the total population in Asia and the Pacific. And life expectancy has increased from an average of 58 years (1975) to 67 years (200) in this region.

However, most of the people in the region have low incomes and low productivity. Unemployment, under-employment, and disguised unem-ployment are high. Many of them suffer under-nourishment and low calorie intakes, high infant and maternal mortality rates, and low education levels. The list can go on, revealing the serious degree of poverty, especially in the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific.

Fifty percent of the total Asia and Pacific population, equal to 900 million people, lives on one dollar a day. This has been successfully reduced to 25 percent in 2000. When the poverty line is raised to the level of two dollars a day, however, this number will increase to two billion people.

In this process of development, income inequality has grown between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of the population.

But worst is the impact of economic development on the degradation of the environment. Land degradation, freshwater scarcity, de-forestation, bio-diversity loss, and air, water, and marine environmental pollution are examples of the negative impacts of economic development. And by eroding nature’s life support system, development becomes unsustainable and may well come to an abrupt halt.

What went wrong with this approach and pattern of development, and what needs to be improved?

It is important that at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2002, serious efforts must be made to review the development process and to elaborate further the concept of sustainable development to make it more effective and operational.

Economic development must take into account the environmental and social dimensions. Development im-pacts on the environment and social aspects must be specifically taken into account through the effective im-plementation of environmental and social impact analysis, which is further monitored and pursued through environmental auditing.

Social development needs to take into account economic and environ-mental dimensions that are then translated into economic costs and benefits, and then seriously consider the impacts on the environment.

Environmental development has to take into account its economic costs and benefits. Depletion of non-renewable resources must be depreciated, as is the case in the depreciation of human-made capital. Pollution is considered an externality but must be internalized in the cost structure of companies. For example, the loss of social value for indigenous populations as a result of environmental degradation is not considered by extractive industries operating in the jungle.

If we draw columns depicting economy, society, and environment in a box with horizontal lines divided into economic, social and environmental development, it is then possible to project the impacts of:

From this viewpoint, the need emerges to improve the process of sustainable development along the following lines:

First, to cluster economic, social and environmental aspects of develop-ment into one bundle of activities that makes an inter-sectoral process of development possible. For example, agricultural projects are not treated in isolation from their impacts on the social and environmental aspects of development. Pollution related to pesticides or fertilizer is not considered independent from its social and economic costs. Clustering these activities together makes possible the prevention of sector dominance of one over the other. But more importantly it enables development to take a holistic approach, embracing the ecosystem, and social and economic systems in their totality as a coherent entity.

Second, sustainable development takes place at multiple levels, such as the national, sub-regional, regional, and international levels. Each level has its own unique set of issues that require different solutions. There are, however, inter-linkages between the various levels that require coordinated and synchro-nized approaches. Recognizing these facts, the first Preparatory Committee of the World Summit on Sustainable Development Meeting in April 2001 decided to start the preparatory process at the national level, to move gradually to the sub-regional and regional levels, and then to identify major concepts and draw conclusions at the international level.

Third, sustainable development is supported by the economic, social, and environmental pillars, which have their respective stakeholders. Hence, it is important that sustainable development caters to the needs and reveals the interests of the various stakeholders. This is the reason why Agenda 21 specifically elaborated the various stake holders, consisting of women, children and youth, indigenous people, non-governmental organizations, local authorities, trade unions, farmers, businesspeople, and scientists. Consultations and deliberations in the venue of the “multi-stakeholder dialogue” are therefore of primary importance.

Fourth, to make sustainable development operational, it requires a concerted effort of economic, social, and environmental development that is simultaneously conducted within a geographically determined space. In the spatial area, sustainable development can take specifically into account the various unique characteristics of the economyth, society, and ecosystems that exist there. This spatial approach can be applied at the national, sub-regional, regional, as wells as international level, making sustainable development more workable.

Fifth, sustainable development requires a “bottom-up approach,” based on the principles of (1) inclusiveness-getting all stakeholders included in development; (2) partnership among actors of development in the private and public sector, as well as civil society; (3) transparency-getting the process open for all; (4) subsidiarity -- bringing the development decision-making process to the level closest to the beneficiaries; and (5) accountability by development leaders to the people in the field.

To make this process of sustainable development feasible and operational, it is important to establish a common focus that can integrate the outlook and efforts of the participants of development.

An example of employing these integrated factors is focussing sustainable development on the plights of the poor, the most vulnerable group in society. The poor are not only poor in terms of income, but also in terms of nutrition intake, low levels of education, low health, high food insecurity, high vulnerability to the impacts of disaster, and high unemployment rates.

They are poor because they lack access to financing due to a lack of collateral; lack access to natural resources because they have no purchasing power; lack access to education because they cannot pay for it; and lack access to political power and decision-making processes because they don’t have the capacity and funds for political campaigning and organizing. In brief, the poor are caught in a vicious circle-they remain poor because they started off poor.

The goals of pulling the poor out of the poverty trap, eliminating barriers to accessibility that limit progress for the poor, and eradicating poverty at its roots can become powerful integrating factors for all stakeholders in launching sustainable development.

Market failure is another problem that hampers the proper functioning of the economy to absorb and internalize social and environmental considerations. The value of forest habitat for indigenous populations has a unique social value that has no calculable direct-use monetary value. Clean, fresh air provided by nature is taken for granted and has no direct-use value. By introducing environmental taxes and surcharges, market corrections may be introduced.

However, while these efforts are necessary, they are not sufficient. Institutional arrangements are required to cope with these market failures; examples include environmental certificates or eco-labeling on products that are produced in an eco-friendly manner. Financial incentives may not be enough to influence consumers toward environmentally sound consumption patterns that would stimulate sound production systems. Public pressure may also be required to influence either consumer or producer behavior, or both.

A dispute settlement mechanism was established in the World Trade Organization to handle cases in which trade disputes cannot be resolved by the market or parties involved. Disputes may also arise involving the environment in which the market or parties concerned fail to resolve problems. Thus, similar treatment dispute settlement mechanisms may be needed, involving not only trade but investment and production as well.

It is though such mechanisms that market failures can be dealt with. In addition, complementary institutions and arrangements need to be established to allow the market to function more properly and make sustainable development more sound. The goal of overcoming market failures can become useful, integrating the efforts of all stakeholders in implementing sustainable development.

Sustainable development must support economic, social, and environmental sustainability over the long term. It basically means:

Within this framework of sustainable development there emerges the need to develop relevant technologies, such as biotechnology, material technology, and information-communication technology. These technologies are needed to raise the added values of natural resources, reduce the amount of material use, and reform methods and means of communication, transportation and information transfer with increased efficiency, less pollution, and more energy savings. In this context, it is crucial that developed and developing countries work together to overcome the technology gap and the “digital divide among the nations of the globe” ****

Development is carried out mainly by business, regulated by the government, and conducted within a network of civil society. It is important to consider development as the combined efforts involving the three pillars of government, business, and civil society. Each pillar has its role and common but differentiated re-sponsiblities, and each pillar has its own interests. Separate and differentiated interests can therefore drive development and give rise to the need for establishing consultation and dialogue between the government, business, and civil society.

Hence, sustainable development requires a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of checks and balances between the three major actors of development within a democratic environment and within the rule of law. As such, sustainable development cannot be conducted from “the top” down, looking only from the government’s perspective. It requires an approach from “below,” reflecting the interests and aspirations of civil society.

Sustainable development cannot be conducted along a singular line of the economy only while completely disregarding other dimensions. Sustainable development embraces the dimensions of economy, society, and the environment. It has to manage their relevant modes of capital -- man-made economic capital, human and social capital, an natural as well as ecological capital. It requires, therefore, an out look of living on the “interest” gained from these forms of capital, while continuously investing and enhancing their quantity and quality.

It is with this paradigm that through global action we can make positive changes to bring sustainable development from a dream to reality, in order to build the wold anew in this millennium.

Season Harvest

For two years now I have lived in Dioullom, a small Pulaar village in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, where my status as a PCV enables me to participate in almost every aspect of community life. The experiences I share with the villagers run the gamut from digging sweet potatoes alongside seventy-year-old women, to drinking tea with the somber, male village elders; from holding lively meetings with the women’s co-op, to learning the art of rolling couscous with my sisters. My active participation in life’s daily activities also means I must conform to the specific cultural standards of behavior demonstrated by my conservative Muslim neighbors. In Dioullom, as in other parts of the RIM, this requires upholding what, for me, is an extreme level of modesty and prudence. Despite the desert heat, and like the other well-dressed and heavily-draped village women, I routinely wear ankle-length skirts and shirts with sleeves, or layers of loose clothes that do not reveal curve of hip or split of legs, and cover every form below the waist–all to shield ourselves from men’s roaming eyes. I refrain from appearing too familiar in my behavior with male friends, careful to avoid lingering handshakes or an arm over the shoulder. I never entertain men at my house after dark and sit only with women during meals and formal gatherings. By now this conduct is a normal part of my life, and for the most part, I am comfortable, though somewhat weary, with the limits I must respect here.

Thankfully though, there are a few rare occasions when I am relieved to discover that the rules can be temporarily broken, and the usual conservative dictates are discarded. One of these treasured events is the yearly ritual of rice planting, signaled by the daily exodus of eager workers from the village out to the fields. During September in the Fouta, the river region, one finds farmers molding piles of mud into dykes and systematically flooding each section of their fields, getting ready to accommodate the hordes of youth who will descend on the paddies at planting time. I leap at the opportunity to participate in this venture, knowing it offers the chance to taste a little freedom and savor a rare glimpse of the sensual side of my African friends. On a warm early-September day, the planting routine begins with a group of my young friends and me collecting our raggedy rice-planting clothes and water jugs or buckets, and gathering with others for the long walk to the fields. The air tingles with excitement and, as we set out, immediately I sense a refreshing openness in the mood of my friends. I walk across the windy scrub-land with Ami, Aysata, Kumbice, and Hapsa -- all energetic young women, sassy and perky, strutting proudly in bodies that have yet to bear the strains of childbirth. We walk in colorful pagnes that blow open seductively with each step. Hapsa’s long naked brown legs seem to go on forever until they come together just beyond the overlap of the fabric. I watch their tight round buttocks as they walk, steady and proud, keeping an even pace so that the drinking water in the buckets on their heads doesn’t spill a drop. Their laughter and chiding makes me smile with appreciation, for this, simplest of pleasures.

The sun has climbed higher in the sky by the time we reach the fields, and we hurriedly navigate the maze of mud-packed dykes to my uncle Abdul’s plot. As we approach, balancing one behind another on the dyke, we are greeted warmly by Abdul and his brothers -- muscular, weather-worn black men in tight shirts and short pants that reveal the rippling shapeliness of their labor-trained bodies. My friends and I then turn to greet the young women of the family, up to their bare knees in muddy water, holding clumps of rice and leaning on shovels. I see my friend Acca -- she’s tall and gorgeous, one of those African Beauties with full lips and well-formed features, one who could no doubt model for Vogue. I’m delighted to see her confidently working in a skimpy tank top and skin-tight red velvet shorts exposing her knees. Sloshing around in the water beside her the other girls work similarly scantily clad. A clamor of whoops and hollers of excitement from our other friends fills the air as we quickly change into our planting clothes and slip barefoot into the cool water. My feet slide deep into the gooey mud, but I love the feel of its wet, soft squishiness against my skin, a rare sensation in our prickly-hot desert home.

As the planting gets underway, we all form a line at one end of the field, each holding a dripping clump of rice sprouts from the pepiniere. Then the singing and chanting begins, slowly at first, as we tear off the grass-like strands and plunge them into the mud in sync with the rhythm of the voices. We try to outdo one other, going faster and faster as the chanting accelerates, getting faster and louder with every verse. We bump into each other, splashing mud on our faces as we stagger in the brown water, groping for more handfuls of rice, trying not to step on each others’ feet while sliding in the mud. Whooping and splashing and gales of laughter overwhelm the chant until we re-form the line, and the singing begins again.

After several rounds of singing and silliness we take a break mid-field to pick off the beetles that have taken refuge in the dry folds of our clothes. I feel them crawling under my shirt and burrowing in the layers of my pagne, which I’ve hiked up in rolls around my waist. My friend Aliou casually picks the bugs from my bare back as I hold up my top, while my girlfriends freely tear off their shirts to shake out the beetles and let the breeze cool their bare skin. Out here in the rice paddies, the rules of modesty do not apply; whether we are girls or boys, men or women, becomes an insignificant detail in this revelry of physical freedom. With bare limbs shiny and wet in the hot sun, we wipe mud from one other’s faces, pick the beetles from our necks, gripping each other for support in the slippery mud. Here the confinements of village life give way to the giddiness and camaraderie naturally felt in the physical closeness and intensity of our work.

Shouts of Onjarama! Onjarama! reverberate around the field from uncle Abdul and his brothers as we near the end of the plot. Finished at last, we stretch our cramped backs and lug our mud-caked legs onto the dykes, clutching the nearest arm or leg to provide a brace against the tugging suction of the slurpy muck. Then, grabbing our clean dry clothes, we teeter with muddy feet along the slippery dykes and down to the river’s edge to clean up.

I am hot and sticky with sweat and have streaks of mud on my legs and arms. What a relief it is to strip off my shirt and splash into the river’s cool flowing water! Thrilled to be naked with only my thin pagne floating up around my waist, tangling with my belly beads, I giddily splash and dunk my laughing adolescent friends out in the deeper water. I think how refreshing it is to look around at my young girlfriends unaware of their exposed developing bodies, and the boys, seeming not to notice them, continue dunking each other, laughing while everyone takes turns lathering themselves and one another with soap. Such a rare experience this is, reveling in the sensations of wet and clean bare bodies in the water, naked clean skin in the open air, and skin hugging skin in the hot wind. This time is so precious and innocent I don’t want it to end! But the sun climbs higher as the day lengthens, and our stomachs are growling with hunger after the day’s physical exertion of work and play. One by one, exuberant, but exhausted, and being careful not to get our clean feet muddy again, we scramble out of the murky water and onto the slippery bank to find our dry clothes. Now that the day’s work is complete and our excuse for carefree recklessness gone, my friends and I suddenly become conscious of our own and one another’s bared bodies as we mingle together by the river. Jolted into an awareness of the rules of modesty once more, the teenage boys and girls giggle with embarrassment in the rush to grab their clothes, and the boys move further off into the scrubby bushes to get dressed. The littlest kids, too young yet to feel shame in their nakedness, openly stare at the older girls who, with eyes cast downward, awkwardly slip into their clothes while hiding under the pagnes draped over their bent backs. Standing at the river’s edge with the sun baking away the moisture from my skin, I take a deep breath and step into my ankle-length skirt and short-sleeved top, feeling as though I am cloaking myself in modesty once again, resettling into the restrictive patterns of village life. With Ami and Hapsa, now properly attired in layers of fabric that reduce their bodies’ beautiful curves to the efforts of my imagination, I clamber up the scrub-covered bank to the dirt track at the edge of the fields. The other kids begin to wander off in little segregated groups in the direction of the village, all carrying their bundles of dirty clothes and chatting happily with each other.

With a sigh, my friends and I set off on the long, blistering hot walk back to Dioullom in the afternoon sun. When we arrive, I know we will once again sit at a distance from our male friends and carefully keep our legs well covered as we eat lunch in gender-segregation before drinking our afternoon tea. The delightful sensuality of our jubilant foray into the fields and river will be a secret memory each of us will keep silently until we return.

He sought her in the stars, each night wishing to pull her down to his heart, in brilliant radiant caress, and fall asleep with love’s oblivion. But each morning he awoke with the stronger knowing that all he will ever wish, and once had, will forever pass with night’s sad dream. Longing, he realizes, is life’s only lasting sweetness, made sweeter by its power to elude eternity. And all that he will ever strive to hold, he knows, will be forgotten in memory of his desire to let go. The expansive soul loves, with each moment, the intolerable illusion of infinite things, undaunted by the sorrow that temporal loss brings. Thus knowing, he sought her in the stars.

ANONYMOUS

SCENE FROM EXCELSIOR:A work in progress

WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO IF THEY COME FOR YOU?
WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO WHEN THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE?
WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME TO YOU AND TELL YOU
THE WORLD YOU KNOW IT IS A LIE?

WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO WHEN THEY HATE YOU?
WHEN DO YOU DO WHEN THERE’S NO ONE ON YOUR SIDE?
WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO WHEN YOU MORALS ALL ESCAPE YOU?
YOU LEARN YOUR GOD WAS IN YOUR MIND.

AND I THINK I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA DO,
YOU.
I THINK I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA DO. OOOOOO.

CONCLUSION:Excerpt from The Renaissance

[Walter Pater is the eminent aesthetic philosopher-critic of the late Victorian world, an advocate of art for art’s sake. The selection below reprints his famous “manifesto,” banned from print for fear that it would unduly influence impressionable young Oxford minds with its Epicurean values.]

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorous and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in place most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Or, if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of color from the wall—movements from the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest—but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—color, odor, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and our extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of experience is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that to which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each one of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each one of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it ahs ceased to be than it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down. It is with this movement, with passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of impulses only is given us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greater number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts at our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and its awful brevity, gathering all we are in one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us gather up what otherwise may pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! We are all condamnes as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us know more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure that it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you promising frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

CRITICAL ESSAY:LABOR AND THE ECONOMY

The onset of globalization makes trade and competition fiercer than ever. Products from all around the world are flooding domestic markets. This in turn has placed domestic products on the same shelf at the supermarket as international ones. With trade barriers rapidly falling, the domestic firms that produce these products find themselves more and more exposed to the international competition, who often face different, and some would say unfair or unjust, conditions of production. This is a good thing. Healthy competition breeds innovation and productivity weeding out the inept and inefficient. Consumers win with cheaper, better products. There has been an unfortunate loser in this conflict, the domestic laborer. International competition sometimes forces domestic firms to downsize their operations or shut down completely. Former employees with stable jobs for the past twenty or thirty years now find themselves cursing NAFTA and the WTO from their armchair as they watch Days of our Lives. Why must domestic firms cut their labor forces? Cannot the government intervene to prevent this from happening? After all does not the domestic government have a responsibility to protect its citizens’ interests?

As learned in Econ 101, an economy is made up of many firms. These firms produce products or services that are demanded by the public for consumption. As the public is ever changing in composition and size, these demands are themselves ever changing. In a large economy, short-term changes in demand are often negligible as the average demands of the population steady sudden fluctuations. However, this is not to say that a consumer’s basket of goods does not change. Introductions of new technology, duration of aesthetic and functional fads, and the general chaos that is the consumer; all these factors can and do augment, over time, the consumption demands of Joe and Jane Public. A market needs to be dynamic, competitive, and flexible to react to these changes.

If a market is to be dynamic and flexible, the firms that comprise it need to be dynamic and flexible. If a firm is to be dynamic and flexible, it needs to be able to alter its level of production and change the product itself. How is this applicable to the laborer? A firm needs to be able to hire or fire to change productivity as the market demands. A firm needs to be able to search out new skills and fresh ideas in laborers to replace the outdated and stagnant. Sometimes old dogs really can’t learn. Keeping on a workforce that produces beyond that which is demanded will only serve to flood the market, lowering prices, eliminating profit and driving the firm out of the market. Older workers are usually not as well versed in new technologies while possessing knowledge of experience that many college graduates have only studied in theory. A firm, to remain profitable, will select those laborers which benefit production the most. How each firm analyzes the marginal benefit of each laborer is another question.

If a market is to be competitive, its dynamics cannot be stagnant. In the case of the United States, recognizing the transition of the economy from manufacturing to services would be a start. Much like the Industrial Revolution spurred the shift from agriculture to manufacturing, the accumulation of wealth and the availability of large disposable incomes make luxury and services the largest GDP generators. If a market is to recognize the current trend, the labor within the market needs to recognize the trend. But labor is comprised of people who are of the habit to be content when sedentary. Thus it falls on the firms to coax and aid laborers to recognize market trends. This can happen through migration of labor to a different field. In other words, when workers of a certain profession are unable to find work, they need to look elsewhere.

These evolutions and definitions are the qualities of a healthy economy that responds to the demands of its consumers. Labor needs to be mobile in order to successfully cooperate with the natural forces of the market, which in turn ensure the convergence of its intrinsic energies, that firms produce during competition, resulting in a happy consumer. Mobile labor means the acceptance of right and justification for firms to hire and fire at will. Government intervention in this field will thus inhibit innovation and efficiency. As a result of the policies of their governments of the big three economies of continental Europe consist of labor less mobile than the United States. Not surprisingly they also have a higher unemployment rate. When the market is allowed to operate, the general public benefits. If the government were to follow policies that encouraged the retention of employees that the market would reject, the domestic firm becomes stagnant and noncompetitive, requiring further government action of the same kind in the future.

Japan’s current financial situation can be traced to such manipulation. The Japanese government gave and still gives over 5 trillion Yen in subsidized loans each year to businesses that would otherwise be bankrupt. In addition, the government has contracted and subsidized an extreme excess of construction projects over the past two decades. Such encouragement is welcome in times of recession, but unnecessary and detrimental to the economy during boom times as were the 80’s. Some economists argue that these actions can be attributed to the Japanese fear of unemployment innate in their culture. Regardless of the reasoning behind the actions, the actions have still contributed to multitude of bad loans, and other ways of undermining market forces, that are largely responsible for the depression overseas. Government interference against market forces is destructive. This necessarily makes the American government subsidization of steel manufacturing and agriculture outdated to say the least. Last year, the Bush administration lumped tariffs near 40% on imported steel from most countries to prop up the ailing domestic industry. Some would argue that this was done to win support from such steel states as Pennsylvania. Unions were good when workers rights are abused, but this is not the case here. Regardless of the politics involved, supporting inefficient industries or those that have lost their competitive advantage only delays the inevitable collapse of the firms involved and harms the consumer by way of higher prices. We can all reminisce of the good old days of turn of the century America when we watch football; there is no need to prop up a dead dog in the face of international competition.

The farm subsidies were given in exchange for fast track authority earlier this year. Fast track is good, but the subsidies are now almost double the level they were after the reduction in the Clinton era. How is this progress? Furthermore, 75% of the subsidies will go to the largest and richest 10% of the farmers. US farms need to focus on their relative advantage, such as organic production, compared with foreign producers, and this does certainly not include wheat and corn, which are the main beneficiaries of the subsidies. These government policies illustrate the frequent lack of support that world governments and leaders give to the promotion of freer labor markets. Some point out that these subsidizations are keeping thousands of people employed who would otherwise not be. It is unfortunate that their employment conflicts with what is good for the overall economy. Instead of subsidizing inefficient industries, the federal government can expand and improve the welfare state. Unemployment benefits are certainly valid in this light, but they need to be constructed to encourage brief subscriptions. Governments of large populations need to be wary of extensive welfare systems. Europe’s big three continental economies, who have significantly larger welfare states than the more market oriented ones of the US and Britain, have consistently higher unemployment rates, at times 30-40% higher, than their English speaking counterparts.

A government can also provide training funds through welfare to those laid off during recognized shifts demand trends. The government could, for example, direct the subsidization money destined for the steel and farming industries to documented unfortunates, from the healthy downsizing, in the form tuition at technical schools (ITT Tech). In this way the recently unemployed gain skills that are more relevant to their society and they can reenter the labor market more marketable. Already exist such programs such as the Pension Benefit Guarunty Corporation, which assumes financial responsibility for the pensions of former employees of companies that went under. A government in this manner can encourage flexibility and change within a labor market, benefiting competition, without leaving its constituents out to dry. Certainly it is better for the newly unemployed to retain their old job. But this is both inefficient and irresponsible.

Liberalisation of labor migration should not be limited to a domestic level. Globalization, whether we like it or not, is rapidly becoming an integral part of the world economy. It is no longer odd to see fresh vegetables from South America at your corner grocery store, or more Toyotas than Fords on Smalltown’s Main St, or Chinese fabricated plastic goods in Mauritania, as it was thirty years ago. The incorporation of developing economies’ products into western markets, and vice versa, can be the subject of the utmost sensitivity between governments. International labor movements have been relevant to politics since before Moses asked for an early termination of his labor unions contract. Oh wait that was slavery. But it’s beside the point, which is that often times the place with the work has no workers, thus requiring the importation of labor, who can be compensated better as compared to their former place or country of employment. Either that or their new employer has a really big army.

International labor migration presents the same benefits of domestic mobility. The main benefit is the absolute increase in global capital production. Anytime a worker can naturally be paid more for his/her travails, anytime an unemployed becomes employed, whenever a person learns a new production skill, all this adds to capital production and circulation. A laborer that is restricted beneath his/her potential productiveness in his/her native country can migrate and increase his/her income generation and productivity. Service oriented economies of the developed world need unskilled labor of the undeveloped world to fill positions that are unwanted by the educated and proud domestic population. Skilled laborers from abroad bring different ideas which aid innovation. They are also more likely to start their own businesses. Increased competition for positions benefits the product. Again though, does not the domestic government have a responsibility to its citizens to protect their jobs? Education within the domestic society is an advantage that any immigrant would long for. The ability to speak fluently the language of pertinence is a skill that firms identify universally as a positive attribute. Thus the government already gives its citizens an inherent advantage over immigrants and need not give any more. Although many people legitimately subscribe to the philosophy of elitism (including certain intelligent and good looking guys in the Trarza) and while there are many places for its useful and beneficial application, a competitive market is not one of them. Further restriction of natural market forces defeats the purpose of having a market. It is argued here that governments have a larger responsibility to uphold and support the natural market forces that benefit all society, rather than restrict and block them, thus creating unnatural forces, to save a few. Therefore policies directed at limiting international migration for the reasons of domestic labor protection are counterproductive and inefficient in an economic sense.

However, limitation can be desirable, even a necessity, when looking at the social picture. Welfare states are ill equipped to handle large influxes of participants. Additionally cultural integration, or combination, takes time, and thus should be regulated to avoid upsetting social malcontents. The government can abet this integration by distributing funds to affected areas of immigration for intensive English language programs. More taxes could be generated by legalizing the millions of illegal immigrants, who currently do not pay income taxes yet take advantage of the fruits of their implementation. Nor do they receive benefits from employers, and thus drive down wages unnaturally for other laborers. Ideally workers would be able to migrate freely to where the work was, essentially becoming completely synergetic with the global market.

Broadening the scope of labor migration to an international level brings along with it many problems from language to citizenship to education to terrorism. However problems of implementation should not discourage action. NAFTA recently explored this conjunction of dilemmas, as has the EU. US-Mexico relations are largely based on these problems and solutions. Speak with any resident of California or Texas, and you would find a relevant perspective on international migration. Many solutions have been tried and many more are proposed. Germany has proposed waiting periods of seven years, regarding domestic welfare, for eastern migrants anticipating their country’s accession to the EU. Australia has a foreign born workforce of almost 25%. A Cape Verdian volunteer told me that near 80% of the capital production there is generated by remittances from domestic labor abroad. In a survey of international labor migration, the November 4th issue of The Economist explored these problems better than could done be here, those interested should read it. The recognition of the relevance and necessity of the encouragement of the globalization and liberalization of labor markets through government policies is not always apparent in today’s society. Subsidization of industries may win political votes with labor groups and large antiquated corporations, but it is not medicine for an economy, quite the contrary, it is merely makeup over the cancer. The labor within these industries need to be encouraged to change fields not stay in their no longer competitive one. This means people need to be fired or laid off. It is a sad but necessary action that sustains a healthy and competitive market. All the people in an economy cannot be happy all the time, a good head of state will serve his/her country by leading them, in contrast to being thrust forward by the energy behind, and sometimes this necessitates making people unhappy for the benefit of the economy. When the economy is happy, the participating population benefits.

LETTERS

FEATURE TOPIC:SLAVERY IN MAURITANIA

Ms. Kateri Clement
Directeur, Corps de la Paix
BP 222
Nouakchott, Mauritanie
April 15th, 2002

I am a returned volunteer from Mauritania who served in Rosso from 1988-1990. At that time I taught English at the Lycee de Rosso. Currently, I teach English and Current Events at a high school in Bremerton, Washington. My colleagues and I are doing a unit on World News. For Peace Corps Day we gave our students two articles to read about Mauritania.

The first article that the students read was Elinor Burkett’s “God Created Me To Be A Slave,” from the October 12, 1997 New York Times Sunday Magazine. I am aware that many Peace Corps Volunteers and Mauritanian enthusiasts disagree with this article, but it was chosen to raise the awareness of the existence of slavery in places other than the United States. It also puts slavery in a very different context than our own history with it. Finally, I think the article paints a realistic picture of life in Mauritania and the level of poverty in which Mauritanians live.

The second article we read was Howard French’s “Dagana Journal; Where Proud Moors Rule, Blacks Are Outcasts,” also from The New York Times, dated January 11, 1996. This article is a little more near and dear to my heart because, even though I did not see evidence of slavery in Mauritania, I was there during “les evenements” in 1989, watching Rosso go from a bustling border town to a virtual ghost town. I watched from my rooftop as my students, part of the angry mob, pounded on my neighbors’ doors, demanding “carte d’indentitie!” It was a frightening time living under the restrictions of a 24-hour curfew and a Nouakchott consolidation. By the time I returned to Rosso in the fall for the start of school, many of my friends, neighbors and colleagues were gone. It was like starting all over. The purpose of these letters is to hopefully get an update from the current volunteers about living conditions in Mauritania today. I’d like my students to ask volunteers their opinion about these articles, as well as how things have changed since the time they were written. Please share our letters with some volunteers and encourage them to write back to us. We anxiously await your response.

[Responses are encouraged. All letters received will be published in the next issue of DELIRIUM and sent to Miss Liz Finn and her students.]

My name is Deneva Broughton-Neiswanger. I live in Bremerton, Washington and attend Renaissance High School. Writing to you is an assignment for my Current Events class. I’m glad my teacher, Sam, gave me this assignment because I’m considering joining the Peace Corps after college. Through this letter I can get information about what it’s like to be a member of the Peace Corps.

In class students were handed out two articles about conditions in Mauritania. The first article, “Where Proud Moors Rule, Blacks Are Outcasts,” talks about black Africans being kicked off their own land. Some of the people who were exiled found their way to refugee camps. Some of the young refugees tried to take back their land with guns and violence. The second article, “God Created Me To Be A Slave,” is the story of Fatma, a former slave girl. She is now technically free, but in her mind she will always think herself a slave. For Fatma and her family being a slave is just how it is and there is nothing wrong with that. The only reason she ran away was because she was convinced her master would kill her. In Mauritania all slaves are technically free, but since they don’t have enough education to know this or find out ways to enforce the law, they just go on being – from the sounds of it – completely submissive slaves.

Are these two articles painting an accurate picture of what is happening in Mauritania? How in this day and age could slavery still be going on? The people in Mauritania have to realize it’s wrong. I mean they are the only country in the world who hasn’t outlawed slavery. In your opinion, is slavery going on in Mauritania? From these two articles, it seems like Mauritania is a horrible place to be if you are a black African? Would you agree or disagree with this statement?

What is the Peace Corps doing in Mauritania? Are you doing anything to help calm down the conflicts between the Moors and the black Africans? It sounds like trouble is brewing between these two groups of people. For you, what is your daily life like as a Peace Corps volunteer? Is your assignment like you expected it to be? As someone who has been a part of the Peace Corps would you recommend going to Mauritania on an assignment?

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits. Please do write our school back with information on the current situation in Mauritania. I do hope the conditions have changed since those articles were written about three years ago. We would like to know about conditions in Mauritania today, as well as personal stories from your experiences. I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you for taking the time to read our letters.

I’m just a humble high school student who happens to have a teacher named Liz Finin, who was in the Peace Corps years ago. Oh, I forgot, my name is James Benton, but that’s not important, is it?

The purpose of this letter is to ask you a few things. During my assignments I have received an interesting article, though not entirely surprising, having to do with slavery and racial tensions against blacks in Africa, of all places. It explains situations of people in Mauritania being thrown out of their homes and having their identities stolen. These tensions are between Arab-descent Mauritanians who use poor excuses to clash with the country’s black minority.

Anyway, my point is to ask if you’ve encountered similar problems in the Peace Corps. I’m sure that volunteering was a life changing experience for all of you. Good show! You honor us by reading this letter.

Hello my name is John Hunter. I’m twenty years old and I live in Bremerton, Washington and attend Renaissance Alternative High School. I’m doing research on the actions in Mauritania and the refugee camps.

In some the research I was doing, I found some articles stating facts about seventy thousand Mauritanians in refugee camps because of being black. Is this true? I also read about a full-blown crisis between Mauritania and Senegal. Did you witness these actions and watch the killings or were you also running for your life? In the articles, it also mentions Mauritania as being under attack by international human rights groups because Mauritania is one of the last bastions of slavery still in the world. Is this true? Have you seen these human rights groups trying to help?

I was told of a woman named Fatma Mamadou who doesn’t know her own age and can’t count. Are a high majority of Mauritanians like this? When Mrs. Mamadou was asked if she had been raped, she stated the following: “of course they would come in the night when they needed to breed us. Is that what you mean by rape?” These things I’ve read make me sick to my stomach. If this is true, have seen this and do others try to stop it, or do they go along with it like it’s an everyday thing?

I looked up Mauritanian living conditions like homes and accessories and things. All I found was an article stating that Mauritanians lived in little nine by twelve foot rooms cobbled together with scraps of wood scavenged from building sites, lacking furniture, chairs, beds, or tables. Is this the way you have to live while volunteering, or do you get stationed in other places?

I’d like to thank you for the time you’ve taken to read my letter. In times like these, I’d like to thank you for standing up and volunteering in places like this. I’d also like to thank you for being a role model for me; I’d like to take on something like this for our world but it takes a lot of guts, and you obviously have those. Good luck and thank you again.

My name is Tony Grossman and I am a PCV in Maderdra, Mauritania, located in the region of Trarza. I have been here for twenty-two months and can tell you that “slavery,” in all its blurry forms, is something I think often about. I can also say that it is one those things never really understood by a foreigner, even after living here for two or more years. I will give you some of my opinions related to what I see and hear in my village, a community made up of white and black Moors.

Slavery as we know it does not exist in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. There are no chains, no whips, no auctions – though there most probably were before the 1967 emancipation act. Through my talks with Mauritanians I have come to understand that as Arab/Berber tribes migrated south through the Western Sahara, they begin to take up slaves. Contrary to much popular belief, the original black slaves were not always children stolen from defenseless Pulaar and Soninke tribes. A large percentage of the original slaves, it seems, were either sold or traded to the migrating Moors. It should also be noted that many of these black Africans were already slaves in their own respective tribes. Yes, black Africans also had slaves. Over the decades, many of these slaves acquired the characteristics of their owners and earned their freedom. They are known as Black Moors today.

The current status of slavery in Maderdra is best described as a “worker caste.” Nearly all manual labor done in Maderdra is done by Black Moors. Do they get paid for this work? Sometimes. Is it enough? It is enough to live on, but rarely enough to take a day off. I would say ninety percent of black families in Maderdra struggle everyday to put food on the table and clothe their children. Quite the opposite is the case with the typical White Moor family. Many eat four healthy meals a day and spend much of the day resting, while being served by the so-called “working caste.” Moreover, it is extremely rare to see a White Moor family struggling to survive, and even rarer to see a dark-skinned Moor in a position of political power. The economic disparity between White and Black Moors is very clear-cut, while what is considered slavery much more vague.

To explain to you how blurry the lines between slavery and freedom are, I will describe for you my current living situation with my host-family in Maderdra. I spend approximately four hours a day with them, taking lunch and dinner. We usually have meat and rice with very few carrots and sometimes Moringa leaves (courtesy of yours truly – the introduction of this beneficial tree is my primary project in the Agro-forestry sector of Peace Corps) for lunch, and cous-cous for dinner, followed by tea. My father is a White Moor. My mother is a Black Moor, on her second marriage. Rumor has it that she and her daughters were slaves before marrying my father, Moctar. One of the ways Black Moors gained their independence was by marrying a White Moor. There are two black daughters and three mixed siblings in the household. There is also a grandmother of Black Moor/Wolof descent. The three mixed siblings do the least amount of work, by far. Again the “worker caste” mentality fully applies, even within the family.

My mother’s sister lives next door to us with her whole family. Although we are cousins, the black children in her household are treated different – and it’s obvious. If there is something to do, they are ordered to do it. What really bothers me, though, is when they are called, not by their real names, but by “mint mbarka” or “mbarak,” appellations considered disparaging because associated with slavery – or property, so to speak. I would think that my family would try to treat their cousins better, or would shy away from this seemingly blatant racism, echoing times of old. Sadly to say, however, the family life I observe here has all become so normal to me, I could not tell you if their actions are justified or not, right or wrong. All moral distinctions and ready-made value judgments are prone to error and misinterpretation, especially for a foreign on-looker. I wish I could fully understand this “worker caste,” and tell you that much of what we consider slavery to be is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, however, I am left asking many of the same questions as you. Will the plight of the Black Moor improve one day? All one can say is inshallah.

THE SCHOPENHAUER PAGE:A glimpse of pessimism

In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings that throng, press, and toil, restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time. Here there is nothing permanent but matter alone, and the recurrence of the same varied organic forms by means of certain ways and channels that inevitable exist as they do. All that empirical science can teach is only the more precise nature and rule of these events. But at last the philosophy of modern times, especially through Berkeley and Kant, has called to mind that all this in the first instance is only phenomenon of the brain, and is encumbered by so many great and different subjective conditions that its supposed absolute reality vanishes, and leaves room for an entirely different world-order that lies at the root of that phenomenon, in other words, is related to it as the thing-in-itself to the mere appearance…. “The world is my representation” is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it.

[Excerpts from The World As Will And Representation, volume two, by Arthur Schopenhauer.]

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy--ecstasy so great that I would have often sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, lead upwards toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered to me.

Delirium - Volume 1 January 2003

MELANCHOLY: A BOGHE MEDITATION