It took me a while to figure out that Hawa was that relative rarity in the village, a middle-class girl. The daughter of two university teachers, neither of whom I ever met, her father was working in Milan now, as a traffic warden, and her mother lived in the city and still worked at the university. Her father had taken what people in the village called “the back way,” along with Hawa’s elder brother, traveling through the Sahara to Libya and then finally making the dangerous crossing to Lampedusa. Two years later, by then married to an Italian, he sent for the other brother, but that was six years ago, and if Hawa was still waiting for her call she was far too proud to tell me. The money the father sent home had brought certain luxuries to the compound, rare in the village: a tractor, a large lot of private land, a toilet, though it was not connected to anything, and a television, though it did not work. The compound itself housed the four wives of Hawa’s dead grandfather and many of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren his unions had produced, in ever-changing combinations. It was never possible to locate all the parents to these children: only the grandmothers remained constant, passing babies and toddlers back and forth between themselves and to Hawa, who, despite her youth, often seemed to me to be the head of the household, or at least the heart of it. She was one of those people who attract everybody. Emphatically cute, with a perfectly circular, blue-black face, Disney-bright features, very pretty long eyelashes and something adorably duck-like in her full and forward upper lip. Anybody seeking lightness, silliness, or simply to be playfully teased for an hour or two knew to come to Hawa, and she took an equal interest in everybody, wanted to hear all news, no matter how apparently quotidian or banal (“You were just in the market? Oh, so tell me! Who was there? And was the fish man there?”). She would have been the jewel in the crown of any small village anywhere. She had, unlike me, no contempt whatsoever for village life: she loved the smallness, the gossip, the repetition and the closeness of family. She liked that everybody’s business was her business and vice versa. A neighbor of Hawa’s, with a more difficult love problem than her own, came by to visit us daily—she’d fallen for a boy her parents wouldn’t let her marry—and held Hawa’s hands as she spoke and wept, often not leaving till one in the morning, and yet, I noticed, she always left smiling. I tried to think of ever performing a similar service for a friend. I wanted to know more about this love problem, but translation bored Hawa, and in her impatient version two hours of talk was easily boiled down to a couple of sentences (“Well, she is saying he is very beautiful and kind and they will never marry. I’m so sad! I tell you I won’t sleep tonight! But come on: haven’t you learned even a little bit of Wolof yet?”). Sometimes, when Hawa’s guests arrived and found me sitting in my dark corner they would look wary and turn back, for just as Hawa was known everywhere as the bearer of lightness, someone whose very presence brought relief from woe, it was very soon clear to everyone that the visitor from England had brought with her only weight and sorrow. All the morbid questions I felt I must ask with a pen in my hand, concerning poverty reduction, or the lack of supplies at the school, or the apparent hardships of Hawa’s own life—to which were now added the difficulties of the rainy season, the mosquitoes, the threat of untreated malaria—all of this repelled our guests and severely tested Hawa’s patience. Political talk didn’t interest her—unless it was conspiratorial, intensely local and directly concerned people she knew—and she also disliked any too strenuous conversation on the topics of religion or culture. Like everybody, she prayed and went to the mosque, but as far as I could see she had no serious religious interest. She was the kind of girl who wants only one thing from this life: to have fun. I remembered the type very well from my own school days, girls like that have always mystified me—they still do—and I felt I mystified Hawa equally. I lay on the floor next to her each night, on our neighboring mattresses, grateful for the blue aura that came off her Samsung as she scrolled through her messages and photographs, sometimes well into the wee hours, laughing or sighing at pictures that amused her, breaking up the dark and relieving the need for conversation. But nothing ever seemed to outrage or seriously depress her, and perhaps because I saw so many things that elicited exactly these emotions in me, every day, I found myself consumed by a perverse desire to rouse the same feelings in her. One night as we lay side by side, as she again reflected on how much fun Granger had been, how cool and fun, I asked her what she made of the President’s promise to personally decapitate any homosexual he found in the country. She sucked her teeth and continued scrolling: “That man is always talking up some nonsense. Anyway, we have none of those people here.” She did not connect my question with Granger but I went to sleep that night burning with shame, that I should be so willing to casually destroy the possibility of Granger ever returning here, and for the sake of—what? Principle? I knew how much Granger had loved it here, even more than Paris—and much more than London—and that he felt this way despite the existential threat the visit had surely represented for him. We’d spoken about it often, it broke up the boredom of recording sessions—sitting in the booth together, smiling at Aimee through the glass, never listening to her sing—and these were the most substantial conversations I’d ever had with Granger, as if the village had unlocked in us a relation we did not know we had. Not that we agreed or made the same connections. Where I saw deprivation, injustice, poverty, Granger saw simplicity, a lack of materialism, communal beauty—the opposite of the America in which he’d been raised. Where I saw polygamy, misogyny, motherless children (my mother’s island childhood, only writ large, enshrined in custom), he remembered a sixth-floor walk-up, a tiny studio apartment shared with a depressed single mother, the loneliness, the food stamps, the lack of meaning, the threat of the streets right outside his front door, and spoke to me with genuine tears in his eyes of how happier he might have been raised by not one woman but fifteen.
Once, when it happened to be just Hawa and me in the yard, and she was plaiting my hair, I tried again to speak of difficult things, exploiting the intimacy of the moment to ask her about a rumor I’d heard, about a vanished village woman, apparently seized by the police, the mother of a young man who’d participated in a recent attempted coup. No one knew where she was, or what had happened to her. “There was a girl who came here last year, her name was Lindsay,” said Hawa, as if I had not spoken at all. “It was before Aimee and you all came, she was from the Peace Corps—she was American and she was really fun! We played Twenty-one and we played Blackjack. You play cards? I tell you, she was really fun, man!” She sighed, laughed and pulled my hair tight. I gave up. Hawa’s own preferred topic was the R&B star Chris Brown, but I had almost nothing to say about Chris Brown and only one song of his on my phone (“That is a very, very, very old song,” she informed me) whereas she knew everything there was to know about the man, including all his moves. One morning, just before she left for school, I spotted her in the yard, dancing with her earphones in. She was dressed in her technically modest yet intensely form-hugging trainee-schoolteacher outfit: a white blouse, long black Lycra skirt, yellow hijab, yellow sandals, yellow watch, and a snug pinstripe waistcoat, which she made sure was pulled especially tight at the back to make a feature of a tiny waist and spectacular bosom. She looked up from where she was admiring the quick steps of her own feet, saw me and laughed: “Don’t you tell my students!”
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Each day of that visit, Carrapichano and I went into the school, visiting Hawa’s and Lamin’s classrooms, making notes. Carrapichano focused on every aspect of the school’s functioning, while my remit was narrower: I went first to Lamin’s class and then Hawa’s, looking for the “best and the brightest,” as I had been instructed by Aimee to do. In Lamin’s class, a maths class, this was easy: I only had to put down the names of the girls who got the right answers. And that’s what I did, waiting each time for Lamin to confirm, on the board, that the answers of the children were correct. For anything beyond basic addition and subtraction was, in truth, beyond my ability, and I watched Lamin’s ten-year-olds multiply more quickly than me and reach long-division answers I could not even stumble toward. I would grip my pen and feel my hands sweating. It was like time travel. I was right back in my own maths classes, I had the same old, familiar feelings of shame, and still retained, as it turned out, my childhood habit of self-deception, covering my workings with my hand as Lamin passed by and always managing to half convince myself, once the answer was up on the board, that I had been very close to getting it all along, but for this or that small error, the terrible heat in the room, my own irrational anxiety in the face of numbers . . .
I was relieved to leave Lamin and head to Hawa’s session, a general class. There I had decided to look for the Traceys, that is, for the brightest, the quickest, the most willful, the lethally bored, the troublesome, the girls whose eyes burned like lasers straight through the government-issued English sentences—dead sentences, sentences devoid of content or meaning—that were being laboriously transcribed in chalk up on to the board by Hawa before being equally laboriously translated back into Wolof and thus explained. I had expected to find only a few Traceys in each class, but it soon became clear that there were more of Tracey’s tribe in those hot rooms than anyone else. Some of these girls’ uniforms were so worn they were now little more than rags, others had open sores on their feet or eyes weeping pus, and when I watched the school fees being paid into the teachers’ hands each morning in coins, many did not have their coin to give. And yet they had not given up, these many Traceys. They were not satisfied with singing their lines back to Hawa, who herself, only a few years earlier, must have sat in these seats, singing these same lines, clinging to her textbook then as she did now. Watching all that fire with so little kindling, it was of course easy to despair. But each time the conversation was freed from its pointless English shackles and allowed to fall back into the local tongues I would see it again, the clear sparks of intelligence—like flames licking through a grille meant to smother them—and taking the same form natural intelligence takes in classrooms around the world: backchat, humor, argument. It was Hawa’s unfortunate duty to silence all of this, all natural inquiry and curiosity, and drag the class back to the government textbook in hand, to write The pot is on the fire or The spoon is in the bowl with a piece of broken chalk on the board, and have them repeat it, and then to have them write this down, copying it exactly, including Hawa’s own frequent errors. After watching this painful process for a few days I realized that she never once tested them on these written lines without the answer being already front of them, or having just been repeated, and one especially hot afternoon I felt I had to resolve the question for myself. I asked Hawa to sit where I sat, on a broken stool, so I could stand up before the class and ask them to write in their books: The pot is on the fire. They looked up at the empty board, and then expectantly at Hawa, awaiting the translation. I wouldn’t let her speak. Two long minutes followed, as children stared blankly at their half-ruined exercise books, re-covered many times over in old wrapping paper. Then I went around the room, collecting the books to show to Hawa. Some part of me enjoyed doing this. Three girls in forty had written the sentence correctly in English. The rest had one word or two, almost all of the boys had no written letters at all, just vague markings reminiscent of English vowels and consonants, the shadows of letters but not letters themselves. Hawa nodded at each book, betraying no emotion, and then, when I had finished, stood up and continued her class.
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When the bell rang for lunch I ran across the yard to find Carrapichano, who was sitting under the mango tree, making notes in a pad, and told him in an excitable hurry all the events of the morning, and the implications as I saw them, imagining how slow my own progress might have been if my teachers had taught our curriculum in, say, Mandarin, though I spoke Mandarin nowhere else, heard no Mandarin, had parents who spoke no Mandarin . . .
Carrapichano put his pen down and stared at me.
“I see. And what is it you think you just achieved?”
At first I thought he hadn’t understood me, so restated my case from the top, but he cut me off, stamping a foot in the sand.
“All you did was humiliate a teacher. In front of her class.”
His voice was quiet but his face very red. He took off his glasses and glared at me, and looked so gravely handsome it lent a certain weight to his position, as if those who are right are always more beautiful.
“But—it’s—I mean, I’m not saying it’s a question of ability, it’s a ‘structural issue’—you always say that yourself—and I’m just saying maybe we could have an English lesson, OK, of course, but let’s teach them in their own languages in their own country, and then they can—they could, I mean, you know, take English tests home, as homework or something.”
Fernando laughed bitterly and swore in Portuguese.
“Homework! Have you been to their homes? Do you see books on their shelves? Or shelves? Desks?” He stood up and started shouting: “What do you think these children do when they get home? Study? Do you think they have time to study?”
He had not moved toward me but I found myself backing away from him, until I was up against the trunk of the mango tree.