Scent and Sensibility

Warning: This post contains swears

Double-Super-warning: This post contains Pinko Commie, Liberal Koombayah- Singing, Lenin-Loving Namby-Pamby sentimentalist hippie garbage

There’s something about the streets in Bamako, that goes beyond the fact that they’re louder and dustier than my ears and eyes are used to. Rather than conduits between a place you are and a place to which you go, streets are places in themselves, full of commerce and culture, a much better representation of the term “traffic arteries” than back home. But that’s not it either.

Also not it.

Here, the streets smell. Sometimes it’s a nice smell, plantains sizzling in palm oil, or the spastic cocktail of the produce market, where I struggle to identify the smell of that particular fruit or spice before the next one invades and bumps its predecessor out of the way. Sometimes the smell is decidedly not so nice – the mid-afternoon garbage burn, the puffs of dust and diesel, the part of the market occupied by meat vendors, where the same aromatic frenzy takes place, but replaces the wafts of papaya and black tea with gusts of sun-drying fish, half-plucked chickens, and whatever a goat’s head smells like. Sometimes fantastic, sometimes mortifying, but always, the streets smell.

Also, this is different - An American woman in immaculate orange drapings would change out of her gold heels before riding her Che-mobile

In a classic North American city, nothing smells of anything, not if we can help it. We go to great lengths to ensure that this is true, and if something must smell, it had better be fragrant and sweet. The great exception to this diktat is the overpowering starch-and-MSG musk that is pumped out of Subway retailers to try to suck you in for a 5-dollar footlong and some Sun Chips.

One of the reasons this newfound nasal stimulation jars me so much is purely physiological. Smell is the most basic, primal, and visceral of our senses. While the visual cortex is all the way at the back of the brain, the auditory on the sides, and the somatosensory on top, the olfactory bulbs lodge right in the middle of the brain, right next to hypothalamus and all the primal control centers, a mere hop, skip and synaptic jump from the emotional hubs. It could be the reason we can stomach unsightly thoughts and tolerate the worst sounds with little more than a shudder, but a smell can be totally overpowering, nauseating, and yak-inducing. Moreover, it can’t be turned off. You can’t not smell something, the way you can look away.

Maybe that’s the reason we, in our protracted battle with biology, focused first on the foul-smelling. It’s not new, either. We have problems with our biology, to the extent that we suppress its discussion. Our worst words, with a few hateful exceptions, come from various ubiquitous human bodily functions­, our most derided words express most universal actions: Shit, piss, fuck, and their partners – ass, cock, twat , and the like. The only other sources of such off-limits words are either references to the most vile and petty kinds of hatred, or they are the religious taboos of devout countries. “God damn!”, “Jesus Christ”!”, or the French “tabernac” and “sacrament” are the ones I’m most familiar with. So repulsed are we by our functional selves that we intertwine that which is off-limits because it is common with that which is off-limits because we are unworthy of its mention; the base and the infinite, the filthy and the immaculate, untouchable and the untouchable, the obscene and the profane, shit and God, spiraling together in the unwelcome contrast of verbal taboo. And so our fear of biology starts with, and is rooted to, the admission of unacceptability of the fact that we humans defecate and fornicate, and Jesus Christ did not.

It’s not entirely for bad reason that people have a natural aversion to at least some parts of biology. Human effluvia – shit, piss and blood, pass most of our deadliest diseases (actually, not piss. Piss is more or less sterile, and unfairly gets a bad rap). To start with just the former: Cholera, Giardia, Entamoeba histolytica, E. Coli, Ascaris lumbricoides, hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, pinworm, and motherfucking polio. Far from an exhaustive list, but google one or two (save Ascaris for last) and you’ll get the picture. All transmitted by poo. And of course there’s blood, which transmits your run of the mill hepatitis viruses, Ebola and HIV. So evolutionarily speaking, it’s a good bet that if one group of people decided to get freaked out and hide their poo, while another shat where they lived, the scatophobic would have more soldiers in fighting form on game day.

But that’s not what it’s about. It’s also evolutionarily beneficial for our bodies to let out a congratulatory signal to the brain upon ingesting fat and sugar, as these scarce, high-energy commodities functioned to allow us to store energy for the long, hard, foodless winters. And the result of that anachronistic instinct in our modern world of plenty is a society where kids can’t identify broccoli, grow up to be fat adults living through a lifetime of hypertension, type II diabetes and humiliating armrest-tests, dying early and being buried in this, which is carried not by pallbearers but by a forklift. In the developing world, it produces the uniquely modern travesty where members of the same family suffer from malnutrition, undernutrition and obesity.

If we have taken our societal cues from the gentle prodding of natural selection, then we have also Forrest-Gumped our way past the normal bounds of the playing field, through the end zone and down the tunnel. With the selection of food and our relationship to its darker end-product, we have failed to apply that other evolutionary gift – good sense. Maybe because of religious ideology extolling our rightful dominance over these lands and their pesky critters, perhaps because of the great pioneering traditions where land and its occupants were an obstacle between us and freedom, whatever the cause, we decided that we were separate from – somehow in conflict with - nature.

Nature struck back, claims Tea Party Jesus

Once there we no longer smells to smell, we had carte blanche to pursue our biophobia.We could avoid everything that is essentfial about the logic of biology. Variety, imperfection, integration, and dynamism. Our homes are surrounded with a bright green carpets of identical-lentgh blades, our grocery stores are filled with bottles, cans, jars, and tubes of maltodextrin and partially hydrogenated (although, in fairness, delicious) goop. The remaining corner of produce is standardized, mass-produced. Identical apples that must not be bruised, grapes that must be so user-friendly that they can’t have seeds, and cuts of meat that carry no resemblance to an animal that huddled in a factory-farm, mooed, and and wondered about daylight. We have sown salt so that nothing may grow to stink of the chemistry of common life, at least nothing imperfect, controversial, impolite, or authentic. It is reality-uncomfortable or otherwise - subsumed to the convenience of a comfortable aesthetic – it is Kitsch. Kitsch is both rallying cry of our ongoing victory over biology and the price we pay to win. It is the attitude that allows us, who have extricated ourselves from our messy physiological upbringings, to look down our noses at those still implicated in the cycles of life and death and disease, and - after judiciously deciding that it is their wish to continue to be mired in filth and effluvia – declare it the consequence of their own poor judgment that they get sick and die.

And so it is by turns relieving and disgusting to live briefly in a country without biophobic kitsch. Not without kitsch at all, to be sure, because every society has its taboos, some things and some people to sweep under the rug, imperfections to paper over for the sake of comfort. (Here, as far as I can tell, it is sex.) Nonetheless, it is relieving in that the biophobia has a weaker grip here, not least because it is impossible in Mali to sweep so much under such a small and tattered rug. In order for the population to sit daily on a porcelain bowl, pretending they’re not defecating over the open end of a sewer pipe, there must be sewer pipes over which to squat. It’s relieving to see problems regarded as problems, the poor and therefore dirty regarded as poor, rather than as morally delinquent and, by twists and turns of logic, complicit in their own destitution. It is a general relief from certain Pleasantville habits of the North American city. It’s not that I want to have goats grazing in front of my house, but I want goats to not be totally out of the question. There is something to be said for natural logic, that human control can never claim to be complete over every tree and bush and from and kitchen-dwelling gecko. It is relieving to cohabitate, rather than manage. It is relieving to be afforded a perspective from which to evaluate what my home city looks like from afar, and whether it needs to look like that.

On the flip side, it is disgusting to live in a world of shit. The streets are lined by cement sewers, some of which have cement panels over them that must be decorative, because there are not enough of them to serve any functional purpose. Sometimes they overflow. It is the dry season, meaning it has not rained enough for the puddles we dodge be made of "mud" in the classic “water+dirt= mud” formulation. Disgusting because the turquoise sheen that grows on the surface of open sewers speaks powerfully and unequivocally for itself. Disgusting, because the one of the stepping stones on the way to my Biology degree (not that it takes one) required me to learn in minute detail, the process by which the kids playing barefoot soccer on dirty streets are being invaded by hookworms. (through their skin, into the blood, up into the lungs, then the throat, then down into the stomach, where they find a mate and bang ad infinitum, sucking blood and producing eggs that do the same to the next kid).

Being uncomfortable with the wholesale suburbanization and demystification of life, and being at odds with the abolishment of excretion as a speakable and actionable event doesn’t mean I’m opposed to proper sanitation, just as I don’t believe that an acceptance oddly-shaped bell peppers should lead to a phase-out of intensive agriculture. Far from it. I’m thrilled not to have ever gotten amoebic dysentery, cholera, and all the rest, and I wish the rest of the world the same solid, fibrous, double-tapered good fortune. As beautiful as Mali is, and as lively as the streets smell, I could leave it all behind for potable water, and soon I will. But in a sense the water and the streets and the onion-vendors have nothing to do with it. It is an attitude they engender, or rather an attitude that a supermarket does nothing to support, and automated life where the guts of what makes us function doesn't have to be sequestered away from the allowable world.

In Mali, the funniest joke eve has long been, and will continue to be “you are an eater of beans”, and therefore a prolific flatulator. It is told by the rich and poor, young and old, in bad company and good. Isn’t that nice.