The Baobab Tree

Kara Garbe

Appreciating beauty in a time of sorrow is a legacy of much Peace Corps service.

I didn’t plan on being drunk at the funeral. In fact, I hadn’t planned on being at a funeral at all, nor had I planned on being drunk. We were on a long ride and, as always, I was nervously eyeing the water level in my Nalgene bottle. Further contributing to my dehydration by downing a few bowls of dolo, the local brew, was the last thing on my wish list, but Michel wasn’t one to refuse the free alcohol that people always offered his white friend.

Michel was my friend, interpreter, drinking buddy and spokesperson. Everyone in Bomborokuy knew to look for me at his house if I wasn’t at my own, and shy villagers wanting to approach me with questions about America or requests for money went through him. He had recently also become my travel partner and watchful bodyguard when we were in foreign territory. I needed his help more then usual in the small villages outside Bomborokuy, since almost no one spoke French. Although Michel had been forced to quit school in fourth grade because his parents couldn’t afford the tuition, he spoke French more fluently than I did, even though he had probably gone months without speaking it before I’d arrived in the village.

Two weeks earlier, on a bicycle trip through the bush, we had been invited by a woman in some small, unnamed village to stop and have a drink, and I’d promised to return to take her picture. People were always asking me to take their picture, to give them money, to marry them or adopt their children so that we all could have a better life in America. I refused almost all those requests, but for some reason I said yes, and Michel held me to my promise.

We took photos like eager relatives at a family reunion: the woman with her baby beside the door of her hut, me holding her baby, her beside her husband, Michel and her beside the moped, me laughingly trying to grind millet on a large flat rock with something resembling a rolling pin.

A group of children crowded into the background of each photo to stare at me with wide eyes, faces so shocked that they registered no emotion. Michel told me he doubted they had ever seen a white person before.

Then we ran into Celestin—who seemed to know Michel, but I couldn’t figure out how—and the drinking began.

Celestin led us to a cabaret so familiar it could have been in Bomborokuy. Like all village cabarets, it was a family’s courtyard that had been turned into a temporary bar to sell the dolo the family matriarch had spent three days brewing. Wooden benches ringed the treeless courtyard. Three mud buildings leaned into one wall, their rusted metal doors hanging open limply in the sun. The matriarch squatted on a stool beside a huge clay pot, large enough for me to bathe in and poured dolo into bowls cut from dried calabash gourds. She glanced up as we walked in, meeting my eyes for a moment before returning to the pocket of coins she folded into the corner of her pagne.

Almost as soon as Celestin led us to an empty bench, a steady stream of villagers—emboldened by a few bowls of dolo—approached us to shake my hand and start conversations that went far beyond my basic grasp of Bwamu. Michel fielded the visitors. He grinned, laughed, gestured. The villagers nodded at me and at him, smiled, waved their hands and raised them up toward God, praising the one who had brought an American into their midst. I’d heard this story before; villagers in Bomborokuy had told me it was God’s doing that I was there, as though teaching middle-school English was going to alleviate the poverty, the heat, the high rates of infant mortality, the threat of malaria and AIDS, the dwindling supply of water as the dry season wore on. I told my students that education could give them the ability to provide answers to these problems. Some days I actually dared to believe it would.

I bought a liter of dolo for about thirty cents and the three of us shared it. Celestin seemed to understand French, but preferred to communicate with me via Michel. He asked about American food, about my role as an English teacher in Bomborokuy, about whether I would ever marry a Burkinabe. I gave my standard response: only if he did all the cooking and cleaning. (That always shut up the men.) I laughed as Michel interpreted. Smiling, Celestin lifted the half-empty liter from the ground to refill our calabashes.

As Celestin put down the empty bottle, a hunched-over old woman approached Michel, barefoot, a faded red dress clinging to her thin shoulders. She asked him a question.

“Ameriki,” Michel said. I recognized this as the Bwamu version of the French word Amérique, America.

They exchanged a few more sentences, and I recognized variations of “America” and “the United States” in Michel’s responses. He began laughing.

“What is it?” I asked without looking up, consumed by my attempt to balance my bowl of dolo in a soft depression of dirt. The calabash bowl became increasingly difficult to balance the longer you sat in a cabaret.

“She doesn’t know what America is,” Michel said, slapping one hand against his faded jeans and breaking into a laugh. “She’s never heard of your country.”

After we left the cabaret, Celestin took us to the funeral. Perhaps he thought the unprecedented visit of an American woman was a fitting tribute to the deceased, or maybe it was simply poor form to visit a village on the day of a funeral without paying respects. Celestin led us into the courtyard where we sat down quietly on a long wooden bench under the hot sun.

Women and men grieved separately, the women in the cool shade of buildings, the men on benches and mats in the courtyard. But I stayed close to Michel and took a seat with the men, breaking the gender roles as no Burkinabe woman could ever do. This funeral would go on for days, a marathon grief session involving family and friends sitting quietly at the home of the deceased. Relatives came from other villages to sit, nap, eat, sleep, and quietly shake hands with others who came to sit, nap, eat and sleep. To remind the bereaved that no one is ever, ever alone.

We sat in silence, staring at our hands, at the cleared patch of dirt beneath our feet. The solemnity of the moment calmed the giddy, dolo-induced laughter that had been shaking me free just minutes prior. Finally Celestin indicated with a nod that it was time to leave. We again shook fifteen or so hands and walked out of the courtyard. I focused carefully on putting one foot in front of the other in a dignified, un-wobbly manner.

Celestin led us back to the courtyard where the woman paused in her clothes washing to greet us like we were old friends, shaking our hands to welcome us back, grinning and chattering with Michel. When he told her we were heading back to Bomborokuy, she grasped my hands in a thick handshake, stared into my eyes and spoke a few long sentences in Bwamu. Michel interpreted.

“She says, you should find a good husband and have many many babies, God willing.”

I grinned. “Bari-a,” I said. Thank you.

Celestin rolled our moped out from the shade of the house and led us out of the courtyard and toward the path that would lead us back to Bomborokuy. He shook our hands and thanked us for visiting. Michel climbed onto the moped first, steadying it for me as I gracelessly slung one leg over the vinyl seat and slid into place behind him. He kicked the moped into gear, and we waved once more as we started down the path.

I kept my hands on Michel’s waist to steady myself as he steered the moped around rocks and patches of sand.

“How do you know Celestin?” I yelled toward Michel’s ear, struggling to make my voice heard over the moped’s engine. He half turned back toward me.

“I don’t.” The visible half of his mouth turned up in a grin. “I met him today, just like you.”

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the friendliness of the Burkinabe was always sneaking up on me. I laughed into Michel’s green nylon shirt and turned back for one last glimpse of the village, its mud houses quickly fading into the landscape. The people we were leaving were most likely judging the entire Western world based on my drunken behavior in the two-hour period I had spent in their village. I was sober enough to be relieved that the pressure was now off—it was just me and Michel, him in his green soccer jersey and faded black jeans, me in a pagne and t-shirt, my legs pressed against the backs of his thighs, my hands pressed coolly on his waist, trying not to be too aware of his body.

I looked around the fields as we rode, trying to imagine the tall stalks of corn and millet that would fill the space in a few months. The dry period had sucked each wisp of vegetation back to the ground, scattered bushes and trees were the only green spots on the brown landscape. The naked soil revealed clearly formed rows of mounded earth where millet had once grown, tall and sustaining. I stared at the land, my eyes mesmerized by the quick passage of ground closest to us, the slow constant presence of the horizon in the background.

We rode in silence, the wind whipping pieces of my hair out of its ponytail. I fingered loose strands away from my mouth and eyes and leaned into Michel’s back. To my left, a single baobab tree stood perfectly framed in an empty field. The baobab was one of the most majestic and stunning trees I had ever seen, its thick trunk swollen with water to survive the dry season, its wiry gnarled branches scratching toward the sky. As I stared at the baobab, my hazy mind registered it as the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. Beautiful. And simultaneously, the thought came unbidden: All beauty passes. And this, too, shall pass.

I was filled with awe. It wasn’t sorrow, not even knowing I would outstrip the beauty of the Baobab, that we would continue down this path until the tree was far from sight, that one day even Bomborokuy would be just a memory, that my life itself was as constrained by time as this moment was. But the ancient baobab seemed to reach beyond that, seemed to suggest a vast certainty in its steady, eternal reach for the sky. African and Arabic legends explained the baobab’s unusual anatomy by saying the tree had been planted upside down, its branches like roots, twisted and splintered and seeking. I leaned forward to Michel’s ear, bringing my entire body into contact with his.

“La vie est belle,” I said. “C’est pas vrai?”

He turned his head toward me without hesitation. “C’est vrai. It’s true. Life is beautiful.”

Kara Garbe is currently working on her MFA in creative writing and completing a memoir about her time in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso (2001–04). You can read more of her writing on her blog: karagarbe.blogspot.com.