Stories
Speaking in Tongues
Suddenly everyone fell silent, a look of shock on their faces. A familiar dread fell upon me. What had I said this time? The experience is common to anyone learning another language - the embarrassment, humiliation, and joy of getting it gloriously, enormously wrong.
I remember being told of one keen young English Christian, visiting a church in Burkina, and being asked to stand up and tell people why he had become a Christian. It was a French-speaking church, and he decided to use his limited school-level French language. He wanted to say that when he looked at his past, it was as if meeting Christ had divided his life in two. The inevitable happened.
"Quand je regarde ma derrière," he started courageously, "je vois que c'est divisée en deux parties."
Close, but not quite... As those of you with slightly better school-level French will realise, what he was actually saying was:
"When I look at my bottom, I see it is divided in two parts!"
Anyway, on this occasion, I had been eating with some Fulani friends. Tijani is a moodibbo, the leader of prayer at the small mud-brick mosque across the road from his house. He has learned the Quran by heart in Arabic, a language he does not understand. He has enough teaching about the Quran and Islamic traditions to be consulted by others in his area of town for advice on the basics of the Islamic faith, and for charms, curses, and cures to resolve a variety of problems of daily life in the Sahel. His younger brother, Boureima, who had been helping me with my Fulfulde, was also there, as were a number of hangers-on that Tijani was too polite to turn away. And there was one tubaaku (white guy).
Fulani meals are not social occasions. Men and women eat separately, and there is generally little or no conversation. One of the biggest laughs for a Fulani is when a person commits foonga. Foonga is when, after a time of silence during a meal, someone suddenly recalls something that happened earlier. At this, the Fulani fall about laughing. One of the Fulani ideals is self-control - not showing need or discomfort. The person committing foonga is perceived as having just shown that he had been so hungry that he couldn't think, but now that he had eaten again, he was able once more to function properly. He will be made fun of mercilessly for hours, even days.
We ate in companionable silence with our right hands. The left hand is kept for lavatorial ablutions, and is the 'dirty' hand. The standard Fulani meal is of millet nyiiri, a kind of thick stodge, eaten with fingers, and dipped into a simple sauce. The meal was piping hot - too hot for the pansy-soft fingers of the tubaaku. I did my best to maintain self-control and not grimace too much with the agony. I really like nyiiri, and was touched that my friends, rather than make too much fun of my pain, actually fanned the meal to cool it down, and slowed down their eating so that it wouldn't all be finished before I had managed more than a couple of mouthfuls.
We finished our fortunately foonga-free meal, and everyone gave a good hearty belch. Conversation started, reasonably enough, about belching.
"We have heard", my friends told me, "that in leydi tubakuube (white man's country), it is a shameful thing to belch. And that it is okay to pass wind. Is it true? Isn't it dangerous not to belch?"
I did my best to do justice to the subject, given my limited Fulfulde. They listened intently and joked about the funny ways of white men. What would someone say, they asked, if you did belch after a meal?
"Well," I said in my best Fulfulde, thinking of my own experiences on visits back to Britain, when I had not been fully re-contextualised to western society, "in some places, if you belch, people will tell you off."
Or at least that's what I thought I'd said.
That's when it happened. The silence. The look of shock. The awareness that I had done it again. My friends shook their heads in confusion and dismay. It could not be true. Then Boureima's puzzlement turned to dawning comprehension and hilarity, as he explained my mistake first to the others, and finally to me. It was a mistake anyone could make - anyone that is, with a less than discerning ear for the nuances of the extended emphasis on a doubled consonant. But, on such nuances mutual comprehension and maybe even political understanding across cultures lives or dies.
What I had actually said was:
"In some places, if you belch, people will shoot you."