A Call to Prayer
I. DAWN — Bamba Merci
At five am, the goat calls from the rooftop. You swat the mosquito from your ear, and escape onto the balcony. Above the neighborhood Mermoz the voice of the local muezzin rolls over the low buildings. People descend from homes and count time with the call to prayer. Ascending in sandals, you share the goat’s perspective—a line of sight to the minaret. As the devotion clears, a black cat appears, ready to fight with a clean white cat just after dawn. Your Christian neighbor tolerates Islam but denounces horseplay and slings a stone like David, cracking the black cat’s skull, sending the yin-and-yang scrap out of their skins and tumbling off in opposite directions. Behind you, the goat is circling and you both return to sleep.
The heat and mosquitoes fight off any chance of rest. At seven am, you run a cold shower, the only place your assailants leave you at peace. In the dining and living room, your widowed host mother greets you, “Bonjour,” from her armchair as you take a seat. Her daughter serves tea and bread with chocolate spread, and although neither of them will eat anything until noon, the mother says, “Il faut bien manger.” So you sip the scalding hot tea, and dab some soft chocolate on the baguette and break your fast. Within minutes, you are sweating from your thighs and down your sides.
With no obvious alternative, you accept the sweat and walk through the sand dusted city for twenty-five minutes to the research and rehabilitation center. In the library, amongst learners of all ages, you open a book about Islam in Senegal. A black figure all in white. While an air conditioner cools the room, you say a morning prayer.
II. MIDDAY — Mother Nature
Beside the toilet you find a bucket of water, a pail, and a hose. People had warned you that there would be no toilet paper because many Muslims use water instead, yet you have found the makeshift bidet more efficient than expected, and before lunch, you finish washing up in a way that many anglophones would frown upon.
There’s a small café in the courtyard where the woman cooking charges 1500 CFA, a few US dollars, for a lunch plate. She serves traditional Senegalese dishes with rice, root vegetables, and fish or poultry. Today’s special is yassa poisson, a dish of rice with spicy marinated fish and lots of onion. To eat is to sweat, and you do both before sitting motionless in the shade, having eaten well, as your host mother had instructed. In the shade of the lunch canopy, the sweat subsides. Then, like at breakfast, hot tea is served, this time in a short glass—a hot, minty, sugary hit. Despite the satisfaction, you are sweating again and buy a pack of smokes off the cook for one US dollar. You head to the beach.
Sliding down the cliffside, you see eight men circling and pouring sand on their tight black skin by a long jetty. The cliff deposits you on the shore and you walk past the ritual wrestlers, past the black girls in long white sleeve swim shirts splashing shallow water, and past two Frenchmen in speedos, who alternate between a smoke and a swim, a routine to which you yourself adhere.
Waves crash and the ocean’s spray invites you to escape the heat. Leaving your rucksack behind, eyes fixed on the horizon, you wade in beneath the midday sun. Below the surface, there is a blissful temperature drop accompanied by an undertow which drags you into a wave; rising and falling until at the height of a one-story swell, it turns you back toward the shore and time stops: the girls’ arms raised full of water, the dried and smoked French men crisping in the heat, and to your left, the silent men wrestling, a backdrop of steep cliff, freeway, and clear blue sky.
Although a storm is forming much farther out on the ocean, along the coastline, a peaceful calm prevails. The cold salt water soothes your body and supports you until a rogue wave batters you down and for a moment, thrashed by the ocean, your body submits and your mind prays. A white flash and your body is blasted back toward shore.
III. AFTERNOON — Sun
Approaching the cliff’s sandy foundation, you reunite with your bag and consider the ascent. Then, down the beach, the Frenchmen leave the water again, reach for cigarettes, still dripping, and recline and bake in the West African Sun. You avert your eyes, then black girls in white shirts catch light like Amadou Bamba.
Whether the gleaming sand or the black and white bodies dotting the coastline, you sense that anything you see this afternoon will appear holy.
IV. SUNSET — City
You start with one of the five cent cigarettes, and it isn’t hard to sense something sacred about the cheapest smoke of your life. While the salt water dries and tightens your skin, you watch the men wrestling. Black sculptures shifting their feet through sand. One young man with a chiseled abdomen, stops kicking up sand, kneels, and cups millions of grains of sand. He raises his hands to his forehead and pours the sand back in a cascade of light that returns to the shore before washing out to sea. You regard the wrestler through silvery blue smoke, trusting the beach’s holiness, and stash the cigarette’s end in the pack. Beneath the golden hour, you gather your affairs for the journey up the cliffside, past the freeway, and through the city.
Along the way, young men and women sell fruit and peanuts on the roadside; some walk through traffic selling citrus or bags of water. From behind, you hear an engine fast approaching. Close to home, you stop at an unmanned fruit stall. The merchant appears, mentions his prayer, gestures to his rug. You understand and bargain for a few mangoes to share with your family. You fill your rucksack and head home in the direction of Mosque Mermoz.
V. NIGHT — Silence
Behind you, on the freeway, a zooming car connects with a pedestrian. The fatal crunching of bones, followed by silence. Then, silence gives way to commotion as a crowd forms around the lifeless body and fading soul. Finally, a woman in the street raises her own alarm, a chilling moan that rises into a wail that bounces off the nearby buildings and produces a slow echo of despair. A stone’s throw away, by the speechless fruit merchant, you stand equally paralyzed, both of you silently praying for an ambulance or some miracle, until it is finally clear that neither will be coming.
Oliver Diaz is a personal trainer currently living in his hometown of Queens, NY. Having been a managing editor of Gandy Dancer from winter 2016 to spring 2017, Oliver remembers the dedication and effort of both his peers and the head (and heart) of the journal, Rachel Hall. The skills we learned from working against the clock remain as relevant as ever today. His first published writing was in a spring issue of Gandy Dancer.