Landscapes

CBT (10^th of April 2014)

Whenever I walked around downtown Oakland, I was always struck by the sheer number of boarded-up shops and apartments. The city had tried to expand outwards, only to fail so far from its main artery, Piedmont Avenue. One of my GSIs in college was fascinated by the landscape of dreams, and suggested that buildings or houses are often tangible expressions of dreams. So, to him, abandoned houses and buildings were rotting dream carcasses.

I’m often reminded of Oakland when I drive through Senegal. But here, the dreams are premature, only partially built. It’s hard to tell whether these dreams are still being fed. But for the most part, I’m told that people feed their dreams sporadically with money whenever they have it. When there is none, people can only dream their dreams.

My LCF and other PCV’s often say that Senegalese people don't plan for the furture the way that we Americans do. When we want to build a house, we plan, we budget, we borrow. Any responsible person will do all these things before initiating the building process, so that the construction will go uninterrupted until completion. Here, it is different.

The Mandinka language has a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense—but the present and future tenses share the same grammatical structure. Different time markers allow the interlocutor differentiate between them. I wonder if these sentence structures give insight into Senegalese ways of being, just as those premature houses do.