Those who really do international travel and living often have a lot to say about how wonderful it is. How amazing it is to explore and expose yourself to different cultures. How ignorant/stuffy/spoiled/boring the United States is in comparison. How everyone ought to do it and do it often and if you just did you would really see how much you are missing and what an experience it all is.
In my humble opinion, all of the above is true.
But there is also the other side. The things that they won't say. And I didn't begin to consider it this way until a short conversation with Mr. about the number of Senegalese I'd met who wanted to go to the United States because life here is "hard." He simply asked whether they knew how tough life in the U.S. is--fast-paced, stressful, everything is too expensive and, of course, then there's the racism. But I said, no, of course not, because the hype about the United States being the land of milk and honey is so strong, that even those who leave have internalized it to the extent that they won't say all of the problems the United States has, all of the roadblocks the social and political structure here throws in front of immigrants much less people of African descent, much less talk about the different culture. They feel as though if they speak against U.S. life or express any hardship, people back home won't believe them and in fact blame them for not "making it." So they won't say it.
After that conversation, I wrote this in my travel journal (so excuse any loose grammar or typos):
And then there were all the things that she didn’t tell the people back home about how she hated Dakar. She hated its dirty streets and fishy congealed garbage smell. How she sometimes walked home railing against the inability of Dakar’s citizens to understand how critical it is to put their garbage in garbage cans, to throw things away properly, to take pride in their own city streets--this although she knew very well the structural factors that made something as simple as proper disposal of a pizza container impossible (reliable sanitation services and available trash bins for one).When I wrote this, every bit of it was true. But it was the strangest thing--as soon as I said to myself what international travelers won't say about international travel, it stopped being important to say. As soon as I stopped pretending everything was okay, I stopped being bothered by everything that wasn't okay and began to take it all in stride.
How she hated not having air-conditioning at her host family’s house and how she used too much water taking two (sometimes more) showers a day just to wipe the stink of sweat, sand, dust, dirt, exhaust and smoke from her skin. How the food gave her indigestion and the meals were too starchy--how she’d die for something sweet and creamy just once, something baked, something chocolate, something beyond a mango as the occasional dessert. How she hated the roaches and flies and ants--but especially the roaches. How she hated the toilets that were only holes in the ground, how she didn’t understand how women stayed clean using only water to wipe, how it seemed so unfair that toilets did not flush all the way down and how the water that sprayed from the small pipes next to the hole always splashed her with God knows what was on the ground that day. How walking was draining but cabs were expensive and public transportation unreliable. How she came home exhausted from fighting cars that passed too close and street vendors that became too insistent but couldn’t complain because whatever she was going through couldn’t hold a candle to what her host family dealt with on a regular basis.
How the practice of hetero-patriarchy pitted mother against daughter, wife against maid, even wife against guest in ways that bit down hard on her sense of feminism and sense of self and left her feeling isolated and drained by the micro-aggressions of internalized sexism from the women and girls around her. How she didn’t expect it to be this hard to live in a Third World country--in part because she saw Senegal as “in development” but was only now finding out how far from “developed” that really was, and in part because this was her first time grappling with how comfortable with her own privilege she’d become. In all kinds of tiny ways--from laundry machines to gas stoves to inexpensive running water---she hadn’t realized that her politics were paper thin when faced with the actual fact of living in an industrializing nation. And she wasn’t even close to the hard life--her U.S. salary put her at lower middle-class at worst.
So what she really didn’t tell the people back home was how far from grace she’d fallen in just two short weeks there, how she was not the woman she thought she was, how she was not ready for what she imagined was the constant distress of living so far away from modern conveniences, and how all of this shocked her sense of self completely. She was a Blyden, it turned out. She was a Delaney. She was a turn-coat and a traitor to the change she wanted to make in the world. And she was comfortable being that way.
But even after all of this, she did not, as some have argued of Blyden and Delaney, see herself as fundamentally different in her blackness from the Senegalese. If anything, her sense of solidarity with them, of shared history, hurt, and oppression--of raced-ness--only deepened as days progressed. From both sides of her double helix--the Puerto Rican and the African American--she felt a kinship reaching outward towards this land that felt like home. And she struggled to grasp and understand this feeling even as her toes prickled to brush past candy wrappers, old newspapers, plastic covering, crumbled water bottles and dirty Kleenex. She struggled to better conceptualize the Affinity she felt. It became difficult to do so when the sun beat down especially hot and roasted undrained water lying along the curb, lifting the smell of human waste, car oil and cleaning solution into the air, but luckily it wasn’t something she could help. The Affinity, like it or not, remained, combining and recombining with her privileged outrage and creating in her a new Afro-diasporic DNA strand all in concurrent time. So that at the same moment, she, annoyed, shoo-ed away another boy attempting to sell her sunglasses, she also admired the familiar hustle; at the same time she drank a Coke, purchased at the toubab [foreigner] price from the boutique on the corner, she cut and ate a mango with a knife she carried in her bag, sitting on a stoop in the shade near the curb, one leg curled in her lap, a sandal half-hanging from the other dusty foot, looking for all the world like any other Centre Ville worker on their lunch break. Looking like there was nowhere else she’d rather be. And at that moment--at every moment--it was true.
The entry is dated June 26, 2010, so I had about a week and a half left and a little over two weeks behind me--a justifiable halfway point. And I'm posting it now, even though I leave tomorrow so it is quite late, because I'm not a fan of silences (or illusions). Let's hype up what should be hyped but let's also be real about it. I'm posting it now because I wasn't brave enough to do it while I was here but I know someone, somewhere is having their own "what they won't say" experience and they should know: Hey. It's cool. Come holla at the kid. She knows exactly how you feel.
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