True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. - Alexander Pope

Live From the Gambia

Amran's Blog
Nov 08, 2011

The Guewel

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, the Sun, Been, energy, food, Saarata | 0 Comments
Saarata fell in love with Alieu Cham after her twenty-first birthday, and knew she would not fall in love with anyone again after that. He came into her life suddenly and without warning, through the introduction of a mutual friend, and settled into Sarata's life as if he had always been in it, so she sometimes wondered how she had ever fared without him.
 
 
 
 
Her mother disapproves, of course. 
 
- He has that guewel darkness around him, she says to Saarata, in the backyard, - don't you see how black he is.  
- Yaaa!, she protests. 
- Hai it's true. You haven't noticed it? It follows them around. That is why they have no luck.

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Oct 26, 2011

The Bumster and the Toubab

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, Boy, Boy Ala, Africa, Person Career, Ban hotel, Alabama, Business, coo, food, LAN, Maggie, Modou Peh, nurse | 0 Comments

 

Modou Peh had a Toubab. He had acquired her quite by accident: going home one day empty-handed from the beach. She had stopped him, and asked for directions back to her hotel. Directions turned into a request to go with her where she was going, and then into spending the whole day - and that night - together. Now she was Modou Peh's toubab, and they trooped around town together, during the day, as he took her to the museum and the tourist market.
 
 
 
 
When they made love they did it with the lights on, for reasons she could not explain, even to herself. She had insisted on this, from the beginning. In her hotel room with the lights on they sat on the bed naked, his penis limp and hanging down. Her breasts sagged, and covered half her stomach, nipples long and drooping extended from them, white and old.

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Sep 04, 2011

After The Wedding

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, Entertainment, food, Huja, Modou, Music | 0 Comments

 

After the wedding and the reception the time had come at last for Ngoneh to go to her husband. She was duly escorted by her aunts to Modou's house, amidst much fanfare, featuring many griots, as well as neighbors and friends, for she was a popular girl, well liked by all who knew her. In the moving van they packed her things, and accompanied by drummers they drove to her husband Modou's house. There too there was another feast awaiting them, Modou's relatives and friends, an abundance of food and drinks. 
 
 
 
At the end of the evening only Ngoneh and her aunts are left - everyone else has gone home. Discarded drink bottles are strewn around on the ground, and Modou goes up to his room, where a white sheet has been laid out on the bed by one of the aunties. He hears them bring Ngoneh to the door, he hears her pause.

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Aug 05, 2011

The Girl

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, Hakim, LAN, Omar Jallow, Social Issues, teacher | 0 Comments

 

Joh Ma feeling, your stepfather says, joh Ma feeling joh Ma feeling johmafeeling johmafeeling. 
 
His breath stinks of cigarettes. The bed creaks under your combined weight. You are not here. He is not so heavy, you have learnt, if you move a little to the side so the bed supports his weight. Then you can breathe. Joh Ma feeling. Resist the temptation to bite down on his neck. Concentrate on the way he smells - like chu, and smoke. Joh Ma feeling. His words are coming faster, his rocking is more frantic, speckles of spit fly onto your face from his mouth. He'll be done soon. The bed creaks. You want to close your eyes but you can't - when you do his weight becomes unbearable, fills the room with its density, until you can imagine nothing else but you and him in the world. So you keep your eyes open. 
 
The bed creaks.

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Aug 05, 2011

The Girl

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, Hakim, LAN, Omar Jallow, Social Issues, teacher | 0 Comments

 

Joh Ma feeling, your stepfather says, joh Ma feeling joh Ma feeling johmafeeling johmafeeling. 
 
His breath stinks of cigarettes. The bed creaks under your combined weight. You are not here. He is not so heavy, you have learnt, if you move a little to the side so the bed supports his weight. Then you can breathe. Joh Ma feeling. Resist the temptation to bite down on his neck. Concentrate on the way he smells - like chu, and smoke. Joh Ma feeling. His words are coming faster, his rocking is more frantic, speckles of spit fly onto your face from his mouth. He'll be done soon. The bed creaks. You want to close your eyes but you can't - when you do his weight becomes unbearable, fills the room with its density, until you can imagine nothing else but you and him in the world. So you keep your eyes open. 
 
The bed creaks.

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Jul 29, 2011

Election Season 2011

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Essays, Gambia, AIDS, Business, detective, Economic Community of West African States, Geography, International relations, Labor, Law, Political geography, Politics, Prince, Social Issues, T.Y.S.O.N., The Gambia | 0 Comments

 

It is election season again in Gambia. Once more the papers are filled with campaign accusations and counter-accusations, defections and threats and warnings, and endless promises. Camps are created, enemies branded, and bitter words exchanged.  For a while we will not be able to hear over the din, and then it will pass. 
 
The question in the air, the most important, on which everything depends: Are we better off now than we were before, or has our condition as a country worsened? Many things have changed, this is beyond dispute. Yet "nothing has happened", some people will have  you believe. All the supposed changes are merely fantasies. We are much worse off, the country has gone to the dogs. Or they will maintain use of the "previous regime" excuse. Yes, they will concede, there have been changes, but most of them are projects started in the previous regime, only completed by this one.

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Jun 24, 2011

Mental Health in Gambia

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Non-fiction, Gambia, Contact Details, food, Private, Social Issues, T.Y.S.O.N., the WHO, World Health Organization | 0 Comments

There was another suicide in the news today. A man hung himself from a tree, and was not discovered until days later, by a woman gathering firewood. The newspaper report had scant details, but the story is a familiar one: a man (or woman) ending their life with no explanation and no apparent reason, a final and senseless act. How could someone who believes in God do this, some will ask, shaking their heads. And yet others, who knew the victim, will try to work out a pattern in their interaction with him, a sign - any sign - that he would choose this path, that something was wrong in his life. And they will come up empty-handed, or all they will find will point at a good life, a life that no one had a reason to throw away. Only someone lacking in faith then, the conclusion will come. Someone morally weak, with hints of witchcraft as well, from jealous relatives, dark doings and spells cast by marabouts.

Last year a friend of mine tried to kill herself.

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Jun 10, 2011

The Beggars

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, America, A clink, Entertainment, Haddocks' Eyes, Index of psychology articles, President | 0 Comments

 

They sit on a sack on the ground. All about them is the mill of traffic, on foot and in cars, walking and trundling past as the day waxes and then wanes. There are people who stop, and deposit coins in the tin bowls set before them. A clink, and then a walking off, the thankful prayer trailing them. The Sun burns their foreheads, and covers them with sweat. The conversation between them is a drawn-out thing, filled with intermittent pauses, filled with the sounds of the radio tuned in to the news. 
 
- They have come into Libya. They go for the President.
- Is it America.
- America leads everyone else. But there are others.
 
A passerby, in shorts and sandals. A clink - a dalasi. 
 
When the Sun sets they leave the place of begging.

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May 26, 2011

Some Thoughts on "Shout Gambia"

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Reviews, Gambia, artist, Arts, CDATA, forward, Geography, Graffiti, Hip hop music, Nancy, The Gambia, Visual arts, XML | 0 Comments

 

- The documentary is very well done. There is a sure editing and directing hand guiding the process - it is not explicitly visible, but it can be felt behind the scenes, its deft touches shaping the narrative,  and carrying our attention. At times it approaches poeticness, at other times poignancy as the narrator links the segments, his voice just the right laidbackness, invoking a sitting around tassey attaya sharing the story of Gambian music.
 
- There are interesting juxtapositions, throughout. Why did the Gambian music industry, by all accounts a raging success in the 60s and 70s, die out so suddenly? Because all the artitsts left for greener pastures, the yoot man says. Because the artists went into "strategic retreat", the old timer says, the main factor behind the retreat being the increase in the the size of the country's population, spread out across wider areas of land.

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Apr 30, 2011

Mystery #3

Posted by amrangaye | Tags: Live From the Gambia, Fiction, CDATA, Georgia, XML | 0 Comments

 

 

You knew someone was going to be killed, but you never thought it would be him. In such a state of mind you were in, such a fit it gave you. What form of insanity had possessed the killer? You wondered at who could wield such violence. It broke your heart. 

 

And overlooking his broken body: a crude drawing of a skull, and a number: 859516921871.

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