Geography is scheduled to premiere October 1997 at Yale Repertory Theater.

August 1996

The airport is smaller than I expect, made even smaller by the many boys hustling for bags. In their rough T-shirts they seem hungry and then proud. It is at first a frightful city. The space here, the air and light, has the option of neutralizing the desperation to my eyes, and sometimes it does. Everywhere the women are radiantly dressed in endless cloth, most are growing small babies on their backs.

From our hotel balcony you can see the Treichville bridge which we are advised not to walk across day or all the time. Once across the bridge, at the Treichville Market, the women are an ocean of improvised fabric, grains and red meat, and only seem interested in my eating from their dirty hands. I feel oddly safe with most of the thin conniving men who ultimately just want to show their teeth and bargain for time.

Thursday is an unnamed holiday, open only to ChthÈdrale St-Paul, which lies on the northern fringe of Le Plateau. Hard-featured and demanding. So we sit in its oceanic pews, watching a young boy sweeping the whole of the space with a simple twig. Two young men sit behind us, holding hands. Brothers, friends, hold hands I am told.

All the while I try to contact Souleymane Koly of the Ensemble Koteba with a phone that will not accept my English. Among the BaoulÈ, BÈbÈ and Gouro of Abidjan I am looking for Lobi figured men who drum and dance. Maybe I am too far south for my little ancestral experiment.

At the American Embassy there is a man behind a thick pane of glass who warns about the violence throughout the whole of the country. How even a family of missionaries in the North were robbed in their home at rifle point. I do not see it, solemnity, anger perhaps, but not what I would call violence.

Within the compound of the home of the choreographer of the Ensemble Koteba there is a low brick dwelling. In its backyard is a thatched roof that religiously covers a concrete floor. Five young women sing in its center. Theirs are voices from a preternatural system. There was also a woman there from Paris or Belgium, a guest, who was giving voice lessons or some king of new world theatrical instruction, intrusively. She wanted them to sway while singing and to bring more volume to their songs. They slowly watched her suggesting gestures, respectful, and responded by singing what I would consider perfectly anomalous songs slightly beyond whispers.

When speaking and eating, pre-history still survives within the country’s fading French prettiness. The very poor and the maquis keep all the old secrets.

From the balcony of our hotel, this morning, the first thing that I see when I wake up is a young boy carrying pillows to sell, he stops along side the road to shit. Once I was told that the African eats with his right hand and wipes himself with left, a story from a Chinese sailor turned New York dishwasher. To the side of the balcony a man rolls in the grass completely naked. I play one of my favorite travel games and imagine no modern architecture surrounding his flailing body. Otherwise the morning is the same.

We took a long taxi ride to the AdjamÈ bus station to buy tickets to Korhogo and met the complex event of older boys, potential guides, pulling the taxi apart. I refused our exit and we drove on. This was our first experience of danger here, so far, more heroic than Port au Prince but like a twin. Stuck in Abidjan, a city, not West Africa, or, all that West Africa is today.

Sunday. Rain. 18 August. A new bed. The room is smaller than the room in Abidjan proper. There is no seat on the toilet. The room across from ours has a television blaring the entire time of its nearness. Palms surround the hotel. A dirt road of red earth marks its place in this history. There is new singing in the background, somewhere. It turns out to be another television.

We enter the Ki-Yi Villa of Werewere Liking, my second arranged contact. Today there is a baptism for a newborn, escargot and plantains and dancing to Michael Jackson. One young man was dressed for a northern U.S. winter, complete with ski boots. There are castaways here celebrating their freedom, mostly girls, given away by their Muslim fathers. On all other days everyone practices ancient performing forms from dawn to dusk.

Postcard: Not a vacation but perhaps a sensory holiday where the environs are in total control of what you see, feel, eat, speak or not, plus what comes later.

We visit Cocody’s jungle suburbia. The market here is manicured, empty. The merchants are aggressive, more than in Treichville. A tall man approaches and speaks a sparse brand of English. His name is Pierre and he is from Senegal. At first he tries to sell use some malachite and then he offers tea. I am not sure what he means. In a need to decipher his offer and in a broader plan to feel ordinary, we accept. Along the circuitous walk to a housing complex, similar to any common ghetto in America, I imagine being led to a trap, soured bodies too close, guns and a robbery. We reach our destination and enter a lovely apartment flooded with sunlight. There are books on the art of CÙte d’Ivoire, pictures of Pierre on holiday with a smiling blonde girlfriend, stunted talk of the world, and there is tea, Seneglaese style, three cups, each serving prepared in ritual.

Monday is a day of practice at the Ki-Yi Villa. I photograph a row of orphans and sons and daughters sitting on a long low broken wall drumming in dying sunlight. I watch two acrobats somersault onto ungiving concrete, again and again. The drumming continues as I fall asleep.

Ensemble Koteba rehearses not at a villa today but at the Centre Culturel FranÁais. Only the men, the women are all attending a wedding so there is very little singing. It is a work about the hunting tradition of Mali. I don’t know the title of this work but it isi the work of Souleymane Koly, who directs the ensemble. Souleymane says that there is an American in Mali who is going through an initiation to become a traditional Malian hunter, it will take the rest of his life. As I watch these performers, it is entertaining experiencing shat it is that my looking translates and does not. When they are finished I think that all that I can judge is anatomic alertness. Souleymane asks if I can come tomorrow to see the whole production. Tomorrow we leave for Ghana.

Before coming to Africa an African acquaintance, who lives in Brooklyn, told me that Souleymane is from Guinea and that Guinea and CÙte d’Ivoire are the same, the same people. I was also told that Mali is "authentic," CÙte d’Ivoire is not really and that there is no longer an Ivory Coast. "CÙte d’Ivoire" is now the official name in all languages. There is not a similar name problem with any other French speaking African country, although the French pronunciation of "Niger" is a challenge. I have always been fascinated with the chronological sequence of the names "Niger" and "Nigeria," or was it "Nigeria" and then "Niger"? I have been to neither place. And never have I been around so many poor Black people and not heard the word "nigger."

The Ghana-CÙte d’Ivoire frontier: Hours and hours spent watching and waiting. It is almost 3:00. We have traveled only a few km. I forgot my vaccination document in Abidjan. It is not much of a problem. With the help of a very friendly Ghanaian I was issued another after paying out 4,000 CFA’s. I met a man who travels with an expired passport. He says that he travels by simply paying more to the police and military for his passage. He was very proud of this regulation.

At Takoradi we took a bush taxi to Kumasi. (The British originally spelled it Kummassi. During that original time the British had African officers but would not let them wear shoes.) A four and one half hour ride through forest, bust and jungle at about seventy mph. I see no animals. Packed like a co-joined community the taxi occupants sleep. Their heads are bowed forward, resting on the most available surface, in and ancient travel prayer.

The rest of the day was spent being a tourist: the Fort Kumasi military museum, two markets, buying old necklaces and older carvings, and Adehyeman Gardens, a popular Ghanaian restaurant that had no electricity, no faces, dark hands, dark fufu and ginger wine. Tonight we are all laughing.

In Ghana some speak a mix of "Twi" and English. In South Carolina where my mother was born there is no similar sound. Most Ghanaians refer to me as a white man. I asked one man why and his reply was, "Because you are not from Africa."

Hank William’s I’m so lonesome I could die is playing on the bus radio. It is Friday morning. We have been at this bus station since 6:45 am, it is now 10:45. A taxi driver from the night before woke us up at 6:00 to rush us off to the bus station. The bus finally takes off at 10:20. It is not completely full which should make the trip more pleasant. Patsy Kline sings of crazy arms. Blue-black women adjust their head wraps. Children here barely cry. The bus stops again at 10:23. I suppose the driver needs to pick up his lunch or try to remember where he and we are going. One lone man gets on. A medium part of the bus has to re-adjust. Following the man, three women, as sparkling draped whales, expand the aisle. And then a group of plainer men. The bus is now full. Glen Campbell is singing Drean Dream Dream by the Everly Brothers. I would like to hear his Galveston. I cannot imagine these local people living where this music is made. Yesterday we hired a guide and his two friends. He said his name was Joseph. Joseph is fifteen and seemed to be dying from the physical demand of someone five times his age. He told us that he has had malaria five times. He took us back to the market where we all got too much sun, We bought them wallets and groceries; bread, crackers, butter and condensed milk. In every other sentence Joseph would say, "Oh, I am so happy to see you." During the rest of the year he said that he attends some kind of school. Now he is on the street and slightly falling apart or starving. At 10:45 the bus takes off again.

Final images. (1) An old man, then, slightly bent, his two hands, arms holding an antique transistor radio, it’s ling antennae guiding his front. (2) A place on a street corner for crippled boys. One has no use of his legs. His pelvis is frozen, peaking the pyramid of his dead legs and slopping spine. His arms and sandaled hands support his movement and begging. (3) The act of impasse. Police, military, stalling in tight uniforms on a larger body, a smaller body. (4) Squatting in an inch of urine, in a cinder block square covering, orchestrated by a thousand flies. (5) The Villa gives a performance on the last night of our trip. The dancing and singing and drumming are strip-ped down and very complex’; the last vital, desperate breathing of functional starvation, also, men with hair growing and adorned as if peacocks could grow horns, I am inspired.

738 miles from New York. Throughout the flight there are short silent films on Africa. Tourist commercials. In the films everyone is presentable, bright. The backgrounds are carefully edited and the time of a given image in no way conveys how long it takes for all of nothing to happen.

Last modified on January 16, 1999
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