Saturday is a good day to go to the market, but every other day of the week is better. On Saturday, too many vendors’ stalls are closed, and a larger than usual number of people are shopping. Decreased supply and increased demand, if I remember correctly, this makes prices go up. It means the congestion around the active stalls is outrageous, and the ability to drive a hard bargain is absolutely lost. So the weekday is the time to check out the local open-air market.
There are about 30 stalls elbowing up against each other selling grains, sugars, veggies, a few canned goods and some dried mysterious foodstuffs. The prices are rigid, the same across all stalls. This market turns out to be the best way to keep my belly well-stocked with all the things a growing boy needs, especially if that growing boy is part venus flytrap. The egg vendors are found at the dividing line where the market itself stops and the outdoor chicken area begins. After my shopping is done, going through the chicken section allows me to slough a minute off my commute, the only thing I have to do to is, well, walk through the Malian chicken processing plant. From the egg-vendor, it’s about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, and ends after the cluster of barrels, where the women are sitting on inverted buckets beside the alleyway. It also happens to depict in a vivid and unforgiving montage, the entire life, death and processing of chicken in Mali.
I leave the egg-vendor and the shady edge of the market and make for the sunlit gauntlet, I ease out of the way of a passing woman and bump against the chicken cages. Wood and wire cages alive with the clucking and flapping of an unreasonable number of chickens. A man is almost constantly going back and forth between the cages and the barrels. He opens a cage, picks up a chicken, brings it near the barrel and, dangling it by the head, saws through its neck with a machete that he doesn't bother to clean between uses. The first barrel, a broken affair rusted down to maybe eighteen inches in height, is blackened with soot, browned with rust and reddened with blood – he throws the chicken into this ruddy arena where it runs and flaps out its last headless steps around the collapsed form of the chicken from 30 seconds ago. The second barrel is suspended over a charcoal fire and filled with water. Someone else is has been holding another headless chicken in the boiling water for a few seconds and now pulls it out – this makes it easier to pluck. He gives it to the group of women seated on buckets, who start to pluck the body while simultaneously cutting it apart. As they pluck and cut it into wings breasts and legs, they lay them out in their proper places on tarps, in sections of dozens of other wings, breasts and legs. Nobody makes the futile effort to flap away the innumerable flies. The whole effort appears casual, well-rehearsed. It is thirteen steps and seven seconds from the egg vendor out through the sunlight and into the alley, and it is impossible not to see all of this.
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| This means war |
Saturday was one of few true days off, so it was not a market day. Instead, it seemed like a good idea to go see as much interesting stuff as possible in one fell swoop. The downtown market section, next to the Grand Mosque, will do nicely It’s highlighted by the Marché Artisanal, where jewelers and tailors make earrings and necklaces for tourists, and locals shop for food and religious apparel. The market spills out of the iron gates that are supposed to contain it, the three encroaching rows of stalls pinching one of the city center’s busier streets, where cars keep driving and motorcyclists keep motorcycling at inadvisable speeds. This makes it very precarious indeed to try to step around a group of people haggling over the price some basic foodstuff. Everybody dies sometime, but I would rather my obituary a) hold off a while, b) be written by President Taylor Swift, and c) not include the phrase "sidestepped a disagreement over the going price of salt."
Malians do not like Candid Camera, and they will yell at you if you try to photograph things. Even the most innocuous attempts to document a sack of green powder signaled an opportunity for the Malian ladies, already excellent and prolific yellers, to yell a little more than they otherwise would have. They shouted things that could have been poisonous invectives, directions to Carnegie Hall, or the opening lines to Chaucer’s “Middlemarch”. It didn't really matter what, only that they were yelling. The sheer windspeed they generated was overpowering, so there are not many photos. Sucks for the blog. Suck it, posterity.
At the Artisanal Market, like any good tourist trinket shop, you get to see the jewelers working over their charcoal stove, hammering, sawing, and polishing some pretty excellent pieces of silver. And like any good public gathering, it had some challenging individuals. One Malian female that could have been anywhere from 14 to 30, followed Lauren and me around for a good ten minutes, with pleading “Mon ami, mon ami”, and pinching me just above the elbow. I avoided looking down, at all-too-common bundle of baby clothes and brown skin clutched to her breast. She wanted spare change, but the only thing I had was the equivalent of 2 cents. After entirely too much following, with her pointing to her mouth, then the bundle then extending a palm, as i tried not to face up to one of my less proud moments. I turned and looked at her, ready to confront. And stopped, realizing something about this was way off. She was staring right through me. Her whole body language was amiss – she was too… interested. I think she was snarling. I looked down at the baby and realized it was no baby, she was trying to breastfeed a doll. The kind of teddy-bear/doll with a creepy enough smile that you would pay never to see it again. I madly fished out the 2 cent coin and gave it to her, and she let out a scream and ran away.
It is often wrongly assumed that mental illness is a struggle in the developed world alone, a disease of the rich. People don’t have time for depression if they have to struggle to find food, right? Nope. Food insecurity and the stress of poverty raises the risk of depression, schizophrenia, mania, you name it. Increased air pollution, water pollution, childhood parasite infections and a host of other environmental factors impair cognitive development and lead to mental disability. Mental illness is a far more serious problem in the developing world, but the means to diagnose and treat it lag far behind the developed world, mental health programs in countries like Mali, if they exist at all, are even more resource-strapped than their malaria-fighting, HIV-treating counterparts. The ill are thought to be possessed by evil spirits, and are cast out of their homes and left to fend for their decreasingly lucid selves. Other, slightly more enlightened people will dismiss the idea of evil spirits, but will equally dismiss the notion of illness, with etiology and symptoms and most importantly, treatment. They will settle on a middle road “She’s crazy”, they’ll say, with a thumping finality.
It is only as a result of a of my insufficient writing skill that the transition from the tragedy of mental illness to the closing vignette pivots solely on the word “crazy”. Let me unequivocal: mental illness is a problem, it is illness, not just something that’s dismissible as odd, aberrant, “crazy”, or “retarded”. And then there is this. On a completely different level, without any common thread whatsoever, there is the following unfathomably crazy shit.
Intermingled with the Marché Artisanal is the fetish market. This isn’t sexual fetish, just fetish. The odd objects of worship for your various animist ceremonies. Everything your shaman needs for his freaky Voodoo shit. The number of professed animists is small, as most Malians are practicing Muslims, but Islam in Mali - especially in rural areas and especially at certain times of year - is layered onto an animist tradition that it co-opted, rather than stomped out. The way Easter is celebrated in the West by hiding chocolate rabbit eggs in the bushes, some overtly Muslim holidays are celebrated with a totally incongruous animist ceremony that I can’t begin to understand, and will not try to explain. The photography ban applies even more stringently at the stalls that sold these bizarre trinkets, so you’ll have to be satisfied with a word picture of one of the good stalls, or a shitty picture of one of the less mind-boggling insane stalls I took by pretending to call somebody on my cameraphone, taking pictures of whatever my ear was aimed at, and lurking away.
The goatskins serve as a bed for everything. One one side a thick pad of snakeskins, on display like a book of fabric samples. In front, a host of bizarre claws and horns, not always identifiable. Towards the middle, a bundle of animal spines in various length, but always truncated, never the full spine. some scattered teeth. Piles of dried fruit. Dried fruit bat, two feet across, he died with his mouth open. Dried chameleons, mounted on top of the vacant turtle shells. Now front and center, the Indiana Jones-level shit. Dried animal heads of all kinds. Goat's head, pig’s head - extra rare in a Muslim country. An entire baby goat its skin leathered. A dozen or so dried monkey heads. Dried monkey heads. It bears repeating. Real, hairy, dead monkeys, turned into dried monkey heads, sitting on a tabletop, casually staring off into space like they were all listening to MGMT.
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