Reification.

 Is a beautiful new word I have just learnt. And this is how it came about:

I have just undergone the operation which I mentioned in the post ‘Joy’ on November 4^th.  It was a success it appears, and I am now recuperating at home.
I was at the swish Chelsea and Westminster Hospital where the top floor view is the above at night, soothing insomniac post -operative in-patients like myself with a spectacular view eastwards towards  central London.

At the hospital the lady in the next bed bequeathed her Marie Claire Magazine to me when she left. I hardly ever buy women’s magazines- if I do it is Vogue, just to have some sort of idea of what is going on, since I am still involved in clothing  in a very minor way through the MaliMali studio. (We had a shoot here by the way, with the lovely Aiofe, my god daughter, the other day, since I have put some of our products on Etsy, and at least the fabrics have actually been selling, which is great news)

Anyway, it was when reading this Marie Claire that I realized how very much I feel like a fish out of water here. I don’t understand the attitudes of people anymore- they are not ‘my tribe’. The magazine is dedicated to all current trends and offers articles like:

‘How to Network Now’ : The most effective way to increase your social capital in a digital age?Optimise opportunities with a sisterhood of likeminded industry insiders’. And then it goes on to tell you how to join the conversation at your event and ‘how to strike a Power Pose’ to impress people with.

 Of course, this is not news and it may even be useful information.  I wish I could stop feeling so depressed about it.  It is just that I don’t feel at home here anymore. Spin and marketing and networking has created a world in which everyone seems much more interested in  appearance rather than reality.

There will be some events at the British Library this coming autumn in celebration of the manuscript projects that have run successfully since 2009 and have now come to an end. There will be a small exhibition with some manuscript images and pictures from Djenne and also a Private view for this event at which I have been asked to speak. That is fine. I am honoured to do so. But the next day there is a panel discussion about Mali, her manuscripts and culture in general, including the spectacular mud architecture of Mali. I am less happy about being part of this...

I am increasingly aware that one is not allowed to speak the truth about things, and that one needs to sanitize one’s public utterances so as not to veer away from the accepted attitude about anything.  Living in Mali for so long, and knowing Malians’ attitude to most matters through seeing things with Keita’s eyes, I realize how very far Malian attitudes diverge from our ‘allowed’ attitudes. The  problem is that this cannot really be expressed without causing offense, because people just won’t believe one, or worse, they will call one racist.   For instance: I know that  the majority of Malians don’t actually believe in democracy. They believe it to be the root of most evils, and equate the word ‘democracy’ with ‘license’ to behave however one wants. They believe democracy is the cause of rising crime, corruption, the spread of sexual degeneracy which is how they perceive homosexuality, a behaviour most Malians feel ought to be punished by execution.

To continue, Malians cannot understand what the UN soldiers are doing in Mali. They think the problems of the North should have been dealt with through force.

And it goes on. Malians are uninterested in other questions which occupy the West: ecology; gender equality; female genital mutilation; etc. They are of course aware of these matters because it is in their interest to pay lip-service to them in order to receive funding from the various organizations that are working in these areas.  But the most urgent need for each Malian is just to understand how he will be able to feed his family that day. The rest is superfluous luxury for Westerners. Of course, my experience is from Djenne, which is arguably the most backward (or let us call it traditional:  it is kinder.) town in the whole of Mali. 

These sorts of subjects may not come up during the panel discussion- we are supposed to be talking about cultural matters like the preservation of Mali’s precious mud architecture and manuscripts. But these are also thorny matters with different perceptions from our Western perspective. Mud architecture only keeps its relevance to Malians in so far as it brings in tourists and therefore it is linked to their ability to provide for their families.  The Malian crisis has put an end to tourism. Therefore the biggest threat to Malian mud architecture is the Malians themselves, who no longer want to live in mud buildings and once the tourists disappear and the security situation is so bad that representatives from various  funding agencies can no longer visit Djenne to see what is going on the cement buildings are mushrooming all around, and this ancient town, ‘the Pearl of the Sahel’ is rapidly losing the most important capital it has: its extraordinary architecture.

As far as the manuscripts go, very few Malians are of course involved. In Djenne the relevance of manuscripts disappeared quite recently, with the arrival of  the photocopier and printed Arabic books. Until then the manuscripts fulfilled a utilitarian function. The art of calligraphy is now much undervalued, although in the past Djenne had very skilful calligraphers.

 On the other hand among Westerners there is quite another conception concerning the manuscripts. Since the African continent was perceived as having no written history, the ‘discovery’ and study of the Sahel manuscripts , and particularly those of Timbuktu over the last few decades have been a revelation. South Africans and African Americans joined in this joyful discovery, appropriating it as part of their common African heritage. Suddenly there  WAS history in Africa. This is all good, but in people’s enthusiasm to promote the manuscripts they have been largely mis- represented. Scholars, journalists, film makers, policy makers have all come to the manuscripts with their own pre-conceived ideas of what they would like to find in them:  they have been invested with subject matter that is at best wildly exaggerated, at worse complete lies.   The local manuscript experts and owners of manuscript collections have not been very helpful. If asked what one finds in the manuscripts , the response is always that there is everything: theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, science- astronomy, medicine, history,literature , etc. This is true on one level, but if we look at the subject ‘history’ for instance there are in fact only two history works in the Sahel: The Tariq Es Soudan and the Tariq al Fattash.  The ‘Jurisprudence’ is made up of Maliki school of Islamic Jurispudence which is copied ad infinitum in thousands of copies- it is normally not a question of original material.  Literature , similarly, is made up of  poems, mainly religious, which have been copied thousands of times. Most manuscripts are not original work. This does not take away from its importance. The manuscripts are very important and fascinating, but one should go to study them and let them speak for themselves rather than going to find what one has decided to find, like the film maker who was in Djenne with me and needed me to find ‘enlightened’ manuscripts in the Djenne library which showed examples of  ‘tolerance’ ; ‘concern for women and children’ ‘proof of a merciful Islam’, ‘romantic love poems’ or anything else that would be palatable to  his German audience. After a lot of searching at the library, Saadou, our manuscript expert came up with one Islamic Jurisprudence manuscript that said that children born out of wedlock MAY be able to reach paradise under certain (quite complicated) circumstances.  Needless to say, this was not quite what the filmmaker had expected or hoped for...

So what is the point in all this rambling? Is there even a red thread running through it all, or is it just post- operative confusion after general anaesthetics? I don’t know. I suppose it is the feeling that I find disingenuousness all around me, and that I am worried about what I will say if I am put on the panel at the British Library. I want to finish the Djenne chapter off with some dignity and grace after all, and not ruining everything by opening up about all my misgivings.

My dear friend Sanjay sees everything in a very clear way- he should. He read philosophy at Harvard and Oxford. I told him I was experiencing an existential crisis and I needed him to sort me out. So he did- after an Indian meal here in my flat. And this is what he thought (if I got it right): most of my concerns about the Malian attitudes are known to be true, but that is because of a lack of education and poverty . It is no different from the attitudes in many other developing countries and they were attitudes we ourselves harboured in many places until not so long ago. Concerning cultural heritage, (which is the one thing I need to worry about mainly), it risks being  seen as neo colonial behaviour to go in and insist on the preservation of the architecture which they themselves no longer want, but that is a risk worth taking.  So instead of saying: Malians don’t want this or are not interested in democracy or whatever it is I was ranting on about above,  the way to go is to behave as if they ARE interested in it- or whatever else it is we want to promote.  The Malians themselves know how to play along. And even if it is only make -believe now, the very fact of playing this ‘charade’ will somehow, incrementally, change the attitudes. And there we have it: that lovely word: Reification. The bringing something into being. And this something is the consciousness of the importance of democracy and preservation of culture in Mali- among all the other benefits. So now I feel less likely to be negative should I be on the panel...