When you greet someone in Mandinka one of the first questions
you ask is “sumoolee?” The question is actually a contraction of suwo (house),
mool (people) and lee (where); in this language, as in most of the native
languages of Senegal, when you ask about how someone’s family is (a must!) what
you are really asking is “how are the people of your house?” which is a much
more nebulous and fitting question in a culture that defines “family” in much
looser terms than we do.
Consider the fact that after more than a year of living with
my host family I come to find out that Mamadou is not actually the son of my
host father Bouley, but his nephew. How did I not know this for so long?
Because in this culture your father’s brother is also your father. In the past
when a man died it was his brother’s duty to take responsibility for the wives
and children he left behind. While this is not usually the case anymore the
uncle/dad equation persists, which is why there are men in this village who
insist that I am their daughter and why Mamadou is Bouley’s son even though
he’s not.
Logic dictates that if your father’s brother is also your
father then his children are not just your cousins, but also your siblings. In
fact I almost never hear the word for cousin, people just use the same terms
they use for brothers and sisters (which translate to “my younger” or “my
older” and might be qualified by gender but often are not). This accounts for
the boys in my compound who are as much my host brothers as Mamdou’s children,
but have different last names and look nothing like the rest of the family.
Cousin-brothers. I have a photograph on my wall of myself with my sister, my
mom and my cousin Nicole. When people ask me who she is I say “she’s my older
sister, our fathers are brothers,” which often prompts a “Nafi speaks Mandinka!” as I’ve proved that I
understand how this stuff works; I find that this exclamation often has more to
do with demonstrating some understanding of the culture than it does with any
actual language skills.
So does all this mean that your mom’s sister is also your
mom? Nope. You only have one mom (Naa), but you may have multiple mothers
(baa). When I got to site I only had one host mother, Bouley’s first wife, a
sweet old lady who ran off to Dakar not long after my arrival and was gone for
almost a year. She is back in Saré Pathé now and still the only person I
call “Naa.” I also consider two of Mamadou’s three wives my host moms (the
third is younger than me and so more like a sister), but I guess technically they
would be... sisters-in-law? cousins-in-law?... Do you see why it takes a year to figure out some of this stuff?! Now, at the age of 75 Bouley has taken another wife
(no spring chicken, but still much younger than him) who is also now my “baa.”
When I first heard about her I resisted allowing her this role. Other family
members would sing “Nafi got a mother, Nafi got a mother!” and I would say
“She’s not my mother. My mother is in Dakar,” which got a few laughs but didn’t
stop them from using the term. Seyni explained that just as she is mother to
her own sons, she is also mother to Taani’s and Filijee’s children because all
of them are Mamadou’s. Indeed, when her cowives were both gone Seyni did more
than her fair share of parenting.
Seyni is the mother of Mamadou’s youngest child, a baby
girl also named Seyni, but after my mom, not hers. My family is under the
impression that Chaney is the American version of Seyni (itself a derivative of
Hussein) and so they’ve honored my American mother with a namesake. Everyone in
Senegal is named after someone else, which makes for a lot of repetition
(Mamadou has two sons also named Mamadou), but also a lot of interesting
nicknames. A lot of times your nickname will come from your parent’s
relationship to your namesake which is how you get babies named “Papa”, “old
man” or “little dad”. There are women in my village who call me Binki, meaning
auntie, because they are the nieces of my namesake. In the case of baby Seyni,
I doubt if many people will ever call her that. Not only would it be too
confusing with her mother having the same name, but it wouldn’t do justice to
her American namesake. So far I’ve heard people call her Seyni Toubabo
(Foreigner), Seyni Amerik, and Nafi Baama (Nafi’s mother), but mostly she’s
just Mom. Imagine me holding this little baby while Seyni takes a shower and
cooing nonsense at her, these private jokes: “Sshhh, Mom don’t cry… Mom! Did
you just pee in my lap?!” It’s too funny!
What is this baby to me? My baby mom... that's something special, but even if she wasn't named after my mother I'd still be stoked about this new addition to the household. I may not be able to tell you exactly what her relationship to me is (host cousin once removed?) but that doesn't matter. If family is "the people of the house" then why bother with all these other terms? Cousins, uncles, even this crazy white girl they've adopted, we all live in Mane kounda, we are all family.
