House People Where?

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.