Monalia's World

Paul and Jane Bowles, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, not to mention Henry Miller and others would all envy me with my melodica and flute. With my gift of music and my ear for language, I am able to fit in. If the vibe gets bad I can tame it with music. Mark is an ardent and passionate travel writer and sound designer himself, the two of us pouring our images into one. He is an accomplished guitarist with burgeoning fluidity. This is a dream vacation for musicians who love to jam.

Unfortunately this is the only video or recording I have of us playing music in Africa, because normally I’m too busy playing my instrument to record the scores of momentous magic music moments we have. In this one, once I set down the video camera I got everyone to sing along “get up off that thang”, “huh!” and “Shake your booty”. That was was way cool! James Brown in Africa!

Mark and I are becoming one within our music which continues to be a strong force for good paving our pathway. When we engage in the endless beach jams (which often includes a run through of i Feel Rude) we both get to spread our wings and sail over the complex polyrhythms these natives provide with growing conviction. A striking image etched in my memory was the night of the big Kora player, whose name is Jalil. We sat in a circle around a campfire. Every so often, when the music really gelled a couple of guys would leap up and start dancing on the beach. These are my favorite moments. Its gratifying to me as a musician. They are starved for melodic instruments here in Africa, so I’ve found myself playing music in some form or another every single day. There is one guy I’ve nicknamed “AHA! because we play really well together. Whenever our music becomes magic he always sings out “Aha” during his favorite Monalia notes. His “Aha!” rings through, no matter how many musicians are playing and he spurs me to outdo myself musically.

Yesterday we were sitting under a palapa on the beach when I heard a rhythmically tricky one note drone with a sweet voice singing over it, Mark had just come up from body surfing, was drying off in the sun. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my piffero flute, delighted to find the voice and rhythmic drone in tune with my piffero. I didn’t even look back, to see who was playing and singing, I just joined in, complementing the vocals. I soon hear the distinctive “AHA! voice, look around to find it is AHA! playing an instrument he made out of a tuna can, a bent stick and some fishing line. We played a light song, a happy afternoon in the breeze song in which he would sing as he played his one note instrument percussively (his note being A) and I would flutter around his melody like a butterfly in the key of a minor.

Another time we jammed with a great harmonica player with his prodigy kids on djembe and sarouba drums. They were really good musicians. I have a couple photos of that:

Jamming with harmonica player and his kids.

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Solo Tam Tam is the quintessential hard working, street smart, talented, wise looking forty-something rastaman with his magical expandable chiringuito. He seems to be the head of an immediate little clan of helpers and musicians who swirl around him. Solo is the boss in his circle. He dispenses orders and is clearly the sharpest businessman of the lot.

Solo Tam Tam has a shack on the beach near the Kossey compound, where we are staying. He has built it out of bamboo and scraps of wood. It has a tiny wood burning stove where they do all their cooking and heating of water for coffee. There is an inside dining area that is just a plastic table that seats two and an area behind a curtain where Solo sleeps at night.

Solo has a small team of guys who work for him; they open up and cook and make coffee and tea and clean the beach area. Our first day on the beach we made friends with Solo and his gang, as they all play drums and kora and sing and dance. When we started showing up with our guitar and melodica we would all end up playing for hours. The guy’s just love it when we show up and hang out at their place. Matique seems to be the cook in charge under Solo and his all around right hand man. Mark goes to the shack early in the morning and hangs out with Matique while he gets the fire started for coffee.

Matique with Solo, a couple beach musicians, Mark and Solo

Matique tells Mark about his teeth which are in really bad shape. He points to one that is very loose and tells Mark he feels the coldness from it inside his body which Mark takes to mean that it is infected. After a long discussion about what is involved Mark tells him he will give him the money to travel to Ziguinchor to visit the French dentist who will be able to stop the infection and pull the tooth. Mark gives him the 7 thousand francs (10 euros) so the next day Matique goes to Ziguinchor. When he returns that night he is very grateful that the infection has stopped (antibiotics). He has to make a return trip to get it pulled though.

We have seen Solo and Matique feed more than 6 people at the same time, which is incredible considering what they have to work with. The “kitchen” conditions are a bit rough in that they are basically cooking on the beach and you will often find big clumps of sand in your food. Mark and I quickly got used to the sand in our food in Abene; the first baguette we ate here at the Kossey compound had sand baked right into it.

This morning, while having coffee with Solo, Mark notices the elaborate series of leather bands he has around the upper bicep of his arm. He asks him about it and Solo tells him it us his Juju. Mark says, “Juju? Really? What does it do?”. Solo says, “this one protects me from getting stabbed, the knife does not enter by body. This one protects me from being attacked, no enemies, they fall down and can’t move if they attack me. This one helps my business and attracts people to me. ”

Mark is completely intrigued. As we travel throughout the world we always try to buy things or do the rituals that bring luck. At Ankor Wat we climbed to the top of the tower where they have four gods facing in each direction, North, South, East and West. It is said if you pray to all four gods in the traditional Hindu manner holding sticks of incense between your hands and bowing that you will have good luck and lead a charmed life from then on.

In Bali we bought a circular weaving that was woven by women working only by moonlight and only when they are not menstruating. The weaving can never be cut to break the circle or all of the good luck will run out. It now hangs in our music studio to bring us luck through music. Our first time In Barcelona we drank from the fountain that has an inscription that says ‘He who drinks from this fountain will be enchanted and will return to Barcelona”. We now live in Barcelona. Now, in Spain we buy candles for our local bruja (witch) to help with our business. We burn incense everyday to ask for certain things (a practice we learned from the Hindus in Bali). We also pray to dead ancestors like they do in Vietnam. So with this type of history of good luck charms we just had to have a juju charm. They are called gris-gris in French and Sa-fe in Mandinga.

Mark asks Solo if it is possible to get some juju charms for ourselves and he said “Yes, we will have to visit the Marabu”, Mark agrees, “Ok, tomorrow we visit the Marebu”. A Marabu is a bush doctor or witch doctor but not like you see in the movies. This one is an elder, a teacher, a very wise man with mountains of books and text in his spartan room. His name is Mamado Swane. He teaches children the Koran everyday. He also makes juju charms.

Photos of Mamado Swane, Marabu holy man

There are three different types of juju charms to wear on the body. An arm band to wear above the bicep, a belt and a necklace. The Marabu writes messages and names on pieces of paper and puts other things inside the charms. The charms are then taken to another man who makes the goat-skin covering. The whole process takes about three days and cost us about 30 Euros for 6 charms (3 for me, 3 for Mark).

After our meeting with Mamado Swane, Solo take us on a tour of Abene which includes the sacred BantamWaro tree, a huge tree, or actually 6 trees grown into one huge tree, that people have been coming and praying to for centuries.

Then he takes us around to see all of the very rustic hidden neighborhoods of Abene. We pass an evil tree where sacrifices are made to request things from the gods or the spirits. I was discouraged from photographing it, so I refrained. However later we would luck out when were walking along our dusty trail and happened upon a group of Animastes singing around a campfire. This is them singing their Animaste chant:

recording of Animastes singing around the campfire

The base religion here in this Senegalese village is Animaste, a spiritual religion based in Africa. Many other religions have been introduced and adopted including Islam, Christianity, Rasta and something called Baishal (sp?).

Near the end of our walking journey around Abene Solo asks us what we would like for dinner tonight. I have been eating lots of potatoes and bananas all week, so I reply, “chicken!”. He gives us a funny look and says he will need some money to buy the chicken, so we give him some and he leaves to go get a chicken. To ask for chicken for dinner here is something much different than in more developed parts of the world. There are no supermarkets with chicken in a display case. It doesn’t occur to us Solo will have to spend the afternoon going from compound to compound asking if anyone has a live chicken they are willing to sell. We don’t find this out until later. Once Solo finds a chicken he brings it back to the shack on the beach. Fortunately we never saw the poor thing alive, in fact it just didn’t occur to me that yet one more skinny African chicken was about to give its life up for the whim of a tourist.

Solo plans it all like the true maestro he is: When he sees Mark and I come out for our afternoon swim he takes the chicken out behind the shack and cuts its throat. He times it to spare us of hearing the shriek of a chicken being slaughtered. Then he spends the time and energy required to pluck the chicken, which he then gives to Matique to cut up and cook. During all this Mark and I are swimming, sunbathing, blithely enjoying the warm afternoon surf after our long morning of walking.

Something unfortunate happened during the cutting up of the chicken though. Something we have never heard of before. Somehow after cutting off the legs and the wings some sort of organ was cut in the wrong manner and destroyed the breasts of the chicken. We are like “what!?!?”.
Maybe we don’t understand the story correctly but we end up with the legs and wings and a spine of a skinny chicken that was all very sinewy and tough, probably from a lifetime of trying to dodge his inevitable fate.

“At least it isn’t covered with sand though like my fish was last night.” Mark says.
“I think I’ll stick to pomme de terres and bananas from now on” I reply.

Last night’s sandy fish head dinner, Candle light meal at Solo’s expandable shack, Jalil the kora player waiting around for us to finish eating so we can jam

During the whole time Mark hangs out with Solo, Solo shares his plans for his expandable shack and the young guys that hang around. He wants to start a program where he gets a bunch of rakes and has the guys clean the beach every other day. He feeds these guys almost every night for free and wants them to do a bit of work for their food so that they connect work with food. He also wants to get an irrigation system going so he can get water from the well for free instead of having to pay for it and lugging it to the shack everyday. He also wants to plant coconut trees around the shack for everyone to enjoy.

Solo Tam Tam carrying buckets of water to his shack, “AHA” showing me something he wrote, Solo’s posse sitting around.

Solo Tam Tam is charming and consistently trying to milk literally any opportunity for advancement in life. He is also a good Djembe player. After a few days of jamming on the beach to the setting sun he begins to get a glimmer in his eyes … he is already trying to persuade us to agree to play somewhere as the main act so he can make money off our music. (we say no).

On the night of the big jam with kora, djembes, saroubas, dancers, (everyone here is a singer) Solo sends out a couple flunkies with a big pot of water which is then boiled over the fire, pasta and spices are added.

We musicians jam. About 20 minutes later Solo says to all the musicians, – you eat now and hands us all a loaf of bread. (which he has most likely purchased with the money we gave him to make us our gris gris jewelry). All the musicians jump up and stand around the pot of pasta, which has now been placed on an impromptu (ingenious) table. The musicians are ravenous. They devour it all in about 5 minutes flat. With the pitch black night, the pounding surf, the bonfire with primitive pot of boiling liquid on it, for a fleeting moment I feel like we are living in a film set in prehistoric times.

The one thing that impresses me most about Solo is that he actually protects the tourists on the beach. The guys roaming the beach can really be pests at times, especially with white women. These bothersome guys will sit next to a woman on the beach for hours hoping for some kind of charity. Solo reprimands these guys, tells them that if they bother the tourists too much they will not return.

We really respect Solo and his efforts to help and do good with absolutely no resources and no money. He is dirt poor but still manages to figure out a way to feed the hungry guys on the beach.

Mark bought him three rakes for his program and from then on Mark was referred to as the “kind white man”.

Solo and sidekick make use of the new rakes Mark buys them.

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Our ju ju/gris gris Marabu witchdoctor visits us one day at Solo’s shack, looking every inch the holy man he is. He brings us oranges and peanuts. He only stays for a short visit, long enough for me to take some more snapshots, in case I write about him on the internet. He would like people to know they can go to Solo Tam Tam to request the gris gris goat skin belt, necklace and belt and armband like we have to protect themselves and attract business.

Photos of Mamado Swane, Marabu holy man

recording of some birds in Africa:

Crossing from Gambia to Senegal

I am writing from a tiny village in Senegal. Life here is very primitive. Mark and I are staying in a bungalow with a walkway to the beach. No electricity. No hot water. No soap (fortunately I thought to bring a bar of soap), no towels provided at this facility. We use candles for light. Luckily I brought a towel, a flashlight and extra batteries, because it is very dark at night right now, with only a sliver of a moon. Our room has a bed (a thick, double bed size piece of foam placed over a cement base), sheets, 2 pillows and a mosquito net. At 15 Euros a night the rooms were so inexpensive that we sprung for 2 adjacent rooms so our stuff doesn’t get in each others’ way.

Nothing here is comfortable. Nada. I am sitting on a hard wooden chair outside my hut. I use our pillows to sit on, one for my butt one for my back. The room has no closets but there’s a corner with a wooden rod to fling things over. Another corner has 3 shelves. Basic but functional. We each have 2 candle holders, and we’re provided with an endless supply of candles.

Typical round hut, mosquito net, 2 interior shots of our rooms

Our immediate garden outside is lush and filled with exotic birds, aromas, tactile sensations.

My hut looks out onto this garden, I love this blue bird with his red ears, a shot looking out from my bathroom window.

This village is not for the luxury tourist, in fact there are official travel warnings on government websites that this region could be dangerous, mostly along the border from Gambia to Senegal. In fact we were stopped about 5 times coming into Senegal from Gambia and handed over money to a series of corrupt officials, of which Mark was able to sneak a photo of one:

border official

So far, many clichès about Africa are true – there seems to always be people banging on drums somewhere nearby, no matter where we go. Of course, this is partly because all week there has been a charming Abene music festival going on. Tonight is the last night.

Mark has made friends with a man from a nearby village who is giving him his second Mandinga lesson as I write this. Mark seems keen to learn the basics while he is here, because Africa might become our new winter getaway. It is torrid here, just as one would expect. Africa is so big – we’ll do some research and go somewhere else next winter.

On this trip Mark brought his guitar and I brought my melodica, piffero, small shakers. We have been jamming with different combinations of drummers and singers we meet and it is amazing how music brings us all together. The highlight of one jam was when we all settled on a groove that the Africans especially liked. They all knew the words to it. At one point 5 or 6 guys jumped up and started doing a choreographed line dance while singing about Abene. It was an amazing moment and I could tell from the look on Mark’s face that he was filled with joy as well.

Our new musician friends who we jam with every day.

If I were not a musician I don’t think I would care for this tiny village of Abene. There is a heavy vibe of sex tourism, and I am constantly approached by very tall, ivory black men offering their services to be “my boy”. (“I’ll do anything you ask me, Ma’m, anything.”) I find this aspect very upsetting, but I suppose these people are extremely poor and obviously they appeal to many white European women. I find all this degrading to both, but I guess to each his own. Who am I to judge? There also seems to be an innocence to the sex scene as a good percentage of the romantic trysts that start here seem to develop into full relationships and marriages where the European woman decides to stay and make Senegal her home or the man moves to Europe with his new partner.

The beach of Abene is pristine:

Jamming by the campfire, “Aha” my favorite musical cohort jumps up and starts dancing.

We spent New Years Eve playing with our favorite new musician friends, who have a basic shack on the beach that serves coffee, tea, fish, ganja, music. They love us because although there are hundreds of percussionists and singers here, its unusual to find any of them with a melodic instrument. They taught us a few African songs in which they sing the verse twice, then I have to play the melody twice, then they gleefully jump back in with their part. Meanwhile Mark plays groovy chords to hold it all together – the songs all have a verse and a chorus over and over again. Each song lasts about 45 minutes. This is good – after playing my part for about 20 minutes I start getting more experimental musically, mainly making sure to finish the last half of my given melody on my second time through so they can happily come back in with their parts. They seem melody starved and are also very impressed by Mark’s guitar chops. As 2008 became 2009 we were playing a chain gang song they taught us. which was way cool for me because I wasn’t expected to play the structured song anymore, I could just play the blues … Mark too … and boy did that feel good!

After playing that song for about 45 minutes there was a pause and one of them says to me ” you teach us something” so I taught them an old classic SKANKSTERS (my reggae band in the 80`s) song called “I Feel Rude”. This was the hit of the night. I had them all singing
“I feel rude
I feel rude tonight
I feel rude
I feel rude tonight
Come on and rude
Come on and rude with me
Come on and rude
Come on and rude with me
Rude it up rude it up 2X
Rude it down 2X
Rude, all around
Be obnoxious
drunk and loud
grab a stranger and rude him out

repeat whole song ad nauseum
(there are more words but I didn’t want to confuse them)

This is me and me SKANKSTERS cohort Arlo Zoos singing I FEEL RUDE back in the 90’s

There is an exhilarating tapestry of pure sound in a town like this in Africa, where no one on our end of the village has electricity. Even the funky nightmarish internet place at the beginning of the village only is allowed to have electricity between certain hours every day. Everything in this country is intricately and atavistically divided. There are actually two rickety internet places “competing” with each other, and only three sheds away from each other. They compete to play the loudest music; one playing reggae, the other hip hop, with the hut in between the two internet places playing Arabic music. The result is high volume cacophony, which becomes part of the strangely tactile experience of filling Partners In Rhyme orders in Abene. Its very slow, frustrating, exasperating even given the heat, but we manage to make it there every few days to fill orders and recharge my laptop and Mark’s iPhone.

We give our business to the internet shop recently opened by a French woman resident named Laurie who is married to an African musician who is presently performing in England. She is somehow mistrusted and given a hard time because she is a white woman and the other internet place was there first. Laurie is the mother of a 3 year old son born here in Africa. She lives here, is trying to help the village, is the one responsible for giving this Abene music festival a website. She has noble intentions of teaching people in the village first how to type, then how to browse the internet for information, not just games. Most importantly for tourists like us, she speaks English.

As sound designers we are in heaven. There are no generator noises, few cars, only the sound of the ocean surf, the incessant drums and birds. It is when the drums stop that we get the best sounds, the true sounds of Africa with its many exotic birds, insects, frogs, lizards and wild cats, goats , dogs et al. Pure sound is exhilarating.

birds, surf, drums

Mark really likes his new friend El Bari, the one who is teaching him Mandinga. I met him first on the beach when I was toodling on my melodica to drummers that were playing for the Catalan dancers as they had their dance class near the ocean surf. El Bari was singing to my melodica when Mark arrived with his guitar and we started to jam. El Bari has an exceptional voice and a great sense of melody. Mark and El Bari seemed to hit it off so I left to go hang out in our shack.

On the beach Mark was telling El Bari the two Mandinga words he learned from some Gambian friends he made the day before and they got talking about the language. Mark mentioned he was keen on learning it and EL Bari said he would get a notebook and a pen and write out a lesson for Mark and that if Mark wanted to walk to his his hut in Nye Frau the next day they could have lunch and a lesson.

Mark gave El Bari some francos and thought to himself ‘If he shows up tomorrow with a notebook and a pen and a written lesson I will follow him to his house and have lunch and a Mandinga lesson’. El Bari did indeed show up the next day with the book and the lesson and the pen so Mark started out on his journey with El Bari.

El Bari and Mark walking to Gambia for a Mandinga lesson

They walked along the beach for a long time and Mark, after asking a few questions, realized he was in for a very very long walk. They were basically walking to Gambia and Mark in his usual unprepared style was barefoot. They finally arrived at the hut of El Bari in the village of Niafrang. It was a circular hut like most huts here with windows and doors covered with pieces of cloth only. There was a campfire, a bunch of chickens, lots of trees and shade, lots of pots and pans and cooking utensils lying around.

Mark sat down and El Bari asked for a few Francos so he could go get something for the lunch they were about prepare. He left and Mark started practicing his flamenco guitar chops next to the campfire. A couple of local men wandered through the camp occasionally saying ‘se va’ apparently not curious at all as to why there was a white man playing flamenco guitar in the middle of their cooking area.

When El Bari returned he started preparing the food and Mark asked if he could help and El Bari really gleefully said ‘yes, you can chop the onions’ and handed him the top of a pot as a cutting board and a large rusty but very sharp machete with a bunch of mysterious symbols engraved on it. Mark sliced the onions with the machete, then the potatoes, then El Bari seemed to get the notion that Mark knew what he was doing so Mark was suddenly in charge of cooking the whole lunch. El Bari built the fire and then put a large wrought iron pan on the flames and pulled out a little bag of cooking oil that he purchased at the store. Once the oil was hot Mark cooked the sliced potatoes until they were golden brown on both sides, then sauteed the onions, then cooked a four egg omelette. When it was done Mark and El Bari ate off the same plate with much gusto. Afterwards El Bari confided in Mark that it was the best meal he had in a long time and that he felt very very good.

They then proceeded to the Mandinga lesson. Mark noticed how genuinely intelligent his new friend was. El Bari had a tough life, his parents died when he was just 2 year old and he was brought up by his grandmother. El Bari often goes without food for 2 or 3 days and works the tourists like us for whatever he can. But somewhere along the way he received a good education, probably due to the sacrifices his grandmother had to make for him. He speaks very good English, his handwriting is much more legible than Mark´s and he is constantly expounding on deep philosophical ideas. He is a very good language teacher and understands what it takes to learn a language.

After the lesson Mark and El Bari head back to Abene and Mark finds me locked in my bedroom crying with fear that he had been kidnapped by Gambian soldiers. He was gone almost 8 hours and I was really, really worried.

Mark never wanders too far from me after this. With guitar and melodica when we set out we create some of the most quasi un-imaginable memories. Last night we literally played our way out of a potentially uncomfortable situation. At the insistence of a rather pushy African drunk man, we ended up walking with our instruments to the Belle Etoile hotel with our friends Serge and Yousef. It is down a long dusty dirt road surrounded by huge Baobab trees and little huts and compounds. The road was narrow and unlit. We had to stand with our backs to the trees when a car would pass by. We finally came upon a big gate leading into a compound with bouncers standing around. Serge was deep in conversation with them I guess attempting to get us in free as reggae music is blasting from the sound system inside. I complain to one of the bouncers that it is just a DJ, where´s the band? In the meantime Mark has started playing the chord progression to the reggae music playing inside and starts marching away from the gate. I pull out my melodica and follow suit by playing a strange arabic melody over Mark´s riff. We fall into step with each other and go marching back up the dirt road, starting a strange parade. Our 2 friends see what we are doing and catch up with us to form the beginnings of a dancing parade….by the time we reach the end of the dusty road we have a happy, bouncy group following us.

This is Serge singing nonsense

Serge accompanies us half way home – he wants to get a goat head sandwich from the goat dibiterie. Mark had been completely curious about the Goat Shack or “The Dibiteri” since our very first day arriving in Abene when Marta pointed it out as we were walking past saying “that’s where they grill goat meat”. It’s just a small concrete block of a place with one window and one door. There’s one table inside for eating and one for the chopping up of goats. There’s a fresh goat carcass hanging in the window every night. During our impromptu parade Mark was surprised that Serge ended up leading us to this place. We went inside and Serge pointed to a pile of white, wrinkly goat intestines that were filled with something brown inside, I assumed it was goat shit. This is where I shut myself off, didn’t let it get to me, waited outside on the stoop, where I continued to play my melodica. Mark thought he was pointing it out to him because of how weird it was that they would leave this mess out in view of people who were actually eating normal goat meat but it turns out he was placing an order for goat intestines. Mark was astonished. The man at the counter chopped up a good portion of the intestines, dumped them in a piece of newspaper and covered them with lettuce, tomatoes and hot sauce. Serge and Mark went to sit outside on the bench where Serge borrowed my flashlight so he could see what he was eating. It finally dawned on Mark that this was ‘drunk food’, like in the US when you go get a cheeseburger and fries at 2AM, or in London when you go get a curry or a kabab. Here you get a plate of goat intestines and hot sauce after a night of drinking quarts of cheap warm beer.

Serge offered Mark some which reminded Mark of the many strange things he has eaten during his travels and hadn’t died yet, so he went ahead gave it a go. It was chewy and the hot sauce really saved it as there wasn’t much flavor. It didn’t taste like goat shit either, thank God. He even had a few more bites before we left Serge there to go home for the night.

Mark and Serge sharing a goat intestine dish

It reminded us of the time in a small town in South Vietnam when Mark drank “wine” from a jar that had a 15 foot python floating in it. Mark is pretty sure what he drank was straight snake-flavored formaldehyde as he felt very strange afterwards and began to have mild hallucinations on the way home. Goat intestines had no discernible effect on him though.

As we walked down the last dusty lane leading to our round home 3 white dogs appeared out of nowhere, like ghost dingos. No aggression, just alert. One of then grazed my hand as I walked by, just a light sniff, not at all menacing, just checking me out. As we walked to our hut I ask Mark, “Do you think those were real dogs?” He says, , “No I was thinking those were the 3 dog night, like in a dream”.

A stroll around my neighborhood (Gracia):

Above: Plaça Reloj and Ayumiento