Our guest this week is Edith
Maxwell, the author of SPEAKING OF MURDER (Barking Rain Press, under the pseudonym, Tace Baker) featuring Quaker linguistics
professor Lauren Rousseau. Edith holds a PhD in linguistics and is a member of
Amesbury Monthly Meeting of Friends. She also writes the Local Foods
Mysteries. A TINE TO LIVE, A TINE TO DIE introduces organic farmer Cam Flaherty
and a colorful Locavore Club (Kensington Publishing, June, 2013). A mother and
technical writer, Edith lives north of Boston with her beau and three cats.
Find her at http://www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthor,
@edithmaxwell, and www.edithmaxwell.com.
Tace Baker can be found at www.tacebaker.com,
@tacebaker, and http://www.facebook.com/TaceBaker.
Mali.
Home of the legendary Timbuktu, tall and gracious people, searing heat, the
Niger River.
Bamako.
A city of red dirt, crumbling colonial buildings next to Chinese-built
skyscrapers, a winding and mysterious Grand Marche, open sewers, batiked damask
cloth in gorgeous colors.
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| Edith and her boys |
I
spent a year in Mali twenty years ago with my (now-ex) husband and two small
sons during my husband’s sabbatical from Boston University. We found a Belgian
preschool for John David, age 2 ½ when we got there, and a French kindergarten
for Allan, age 5. By the end of the year they were both fluent in French. We
all picked up some Bambara, too, the first language of many Malians.
What
did I do there? It was at a time in my life when I was home with my children
and studying to be an independent childbirth educator. I worked on my course,
taught a class to two American couples, and helped my children through culture
shock. We, as most ex-pats do, hired someone to cook and clean for us. Doumbia,
a wonderful local man, coaxed amazing meals out of the ancient Russian stove
and washed our clothes by hand. He kept the red dust off the floors and
entertained John David after his carpool dropped him off. If I had a year off
at home in the United States, I’d be cleaning out closets, maybe picking up the
cello again, organizing my life. But in Bamako I didn’t have those options and hadn’t
yet realized I was a fiction writer.
I
felt self-conscious walking our neighborhood streets. It helped immensely when
I began exchanging greetings in Bambara with people who were staring at me.
Ritual greetings are very important. You never just walk by and say the
equivalent of, “How ya doin’?” I’ll let the book show you. My protagonist in Speaking
of Murder, Professor Lauren, who served in the Peace Corps in Mali, has
just ordered a meal at a Malian restaurant she discovered:
A plate laden with steaming chicken, onions, and rice
arrived in front of me. I inhaled the scent of lemon and oil and thanked the
proprietress. “Iniché!”
“Ntse! I ka kene
wa?” The woman laughed heartily, grabbed my hand, introduced herself as
Fatoumata Kone, and started the round of ritual Bambara greetings. They bounced
back and forth between us until we had inquired about how the other had passed
the night, how the other’s parents were, and so on, ending with a salutation of
“Herebe.” Peace among us. Followed by “Here doron.” Peace only.
We
all got sick a lot. In my first month there I was quite ill with an amoeba and
then from the medicine. The boys came down with the local strain of chicken pox
and had silver-dollar sized blisters on their backs. In January, the month John
David turned three, he contracted both giardia and malaria despite the fact
that we boiled and filtered our water at home. Luckily he was a sturdy boy and
recovered well from both.
When
the dry season hit in what in New England we call wintertime, the temperatures
soared well over 100 every day. I learned to wear loose cotton clothing—the
local garb of wide caftans is perfect for that climate—and walk slowly. The
Harmattan winds came down off the Sahara. They blew fine red dust into all our
closets and sucked the moisture out of our skin.
I
was grateful to be able to travel out of town alone in the spring for a few
days to visit a group of traditional midwives a full day’s journey from Bamako
and hear their stories of childbirth. One of the midwives even urged me to
adopt her tiny granddaughter. The baby’s mother, the midwife's daughter, had
died in childbirth. I seriously considered the offer until I asked about the
adoption process at the U.S. Embassy on my return to Bamako and decided,
despite longing for a daughter, that it was way too complicated for our family.
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| The Grand Marche |
The
year enriched all of us. My children experienced something completely different
from the rather small (and 98-percent white) Massachusetts town they were
growing up in, and they had their brains stretched from learning a second and
third language by immersion. I grew to love the gentle, generous, striking
people we met, the flavors of hot peppers and spicy vegetable stews, moderated
by the cool of a homemade ginger drink, the traditional music with djembe
and kora. My husband renewed his friendship with people he had known a
decade earlier when he wrote a Bambara-English dictionary. And you know what?
It’s all background material now that I’m a writer.
Thanks
for having me over, fellow travelers! I’d love to hear about others’
experiences in Africa, or answer questions about my stay there. Where in Africa
have you always longed to go?
