Wednesday 30 November 2011

Pepernoten

December, 1st

I can not believe it is already the first of December ! It is surreal, sitting here on the verandah, in the tropical heat, surrounded by yellow flowers of the acacias, and the sound of tropical birds, which I have got to know over the months I have been here, knowing that in a few weeks time we I will be back in Europe, celebrating Christmas with everybody!!!
So much has to happen before that time !!! The Dissertation, which weighs heavy on my mind,will be finished. On Monday, Dec. 5th, in stead of eating 'pepernoten' and celebrating the feast of the Holy Saint Nicolaas, which is tradition in Holland, I will be preparing the exhibition in the Kampala Museum . The Touch -Cabinet is finished, apart from the last layer of varnish, and I will be able to collect it tomorrow. So exciting !!!All I have to do is line the drawers with interesting African Material. Batik is not African, but originally Indonesian, in spite of being also called 'Dutch Wax-printed cloth. Shonibare is an African-British artist who uses this as an key-material. The cloth was brought into Africa , where it was adopted and, consequently reclaimed as being 'African fabrics'.
It then found its way back into Europe. I think this is an interesting example of 'material diaspora'!!!

Tomorrow I will also revisit the school , to pick up the fired clay-pieces, hoping that they all survived the process, and to check on the students ,to see what the produced posters look like. I will then also arrange the time to meet up with the small group of people who will be assisting me at the event. It all seems to be coming together !!!



Tuesday 29 November 2011

coffin for sale

Could I ever live in Africa ?My life is so radically different here than back home ; I don't drive here, and i really miss that independence. My only retail therapy here is going to the local supermarket once a week. Greedily i look at packets of soup, plastic containers, bone dry buns.I want to dye my hair, but only if I want to change it to jet black, I could . When I carefully choose some biscuits and cheese, I already know they will be a dissapointment .Everything is just not what you expect it to be; things are out of date, or packed in the wrong box, like lightbulbs so you arrive home with a bajonet fitting, ofcourse what you needed was a screw fitting.So you read with a torch until the next supermarket treat. And you know what ? You dont bother anymore with looking for the right things. Defeat sets in, and you just manage with what you have got. Your eyes register the rubbish piles, with children playing in it. The Boda Boda's , the local taxi mopeds with five , sometimes six people on it, settees, twenty life chicken in a basket.They weave in and out the crazy traffic, their ballast moving along with them. I have stopped holding my breath. The signs with' Coffin for sale', or' Jesus Saves hairsalon.'among the hundreds of street stalls, where naked children play with a rejected weaversbird nest.The markets are full of second hand western clothes, the buthers display chunks of bloody meat, covered in flies outside.their little wooden shacks. And here is the crazy thing : We , Mzungus,the white people, shop in the local butcher, which is huge, sells the most excellent steaks and french cheeses, fresh roses from the local Dutch nursery, and on saturdaymorning  wonderful French almond croissants , driven in , probably on a Boda Boda, all the way from Kampala. If there is a birthday party, everybody within the ex-pat community knows that The Serena Hotel sells the best chocolate cakes on the planet.
The prostitution of snakes and monkeys, the small rocky beaches around Lake Victoria, the chips with your omelette for breakfast,belong to a different world. The world of Africa. And I ? I am merily a visitor, will never belong. I will always be white. When I moved to Ireland, all those years ago, it was difficult at first, to fit in, but at least people didnt stare at me. Once a Mzungu, always a Mzungu.see for previous blogs also http://teatraveltien.blogspot.com

Africa

This is my fourth week in Africa.
And it is amazing how quickly one gets used to a place and life style; The beautiful weather, every day, the stunning landscape, the tropical birds , life on the veranda, just as Bill Bryson expected it to take place in his novella about Africa. The eating out, (  as cheap as when you buy your shopping ) Lake Victoria Hotel, which is my office, my place to meet friends, Agnes is running a little souvenir shop here, to swim, to eat, To meet Dutch people, ( the KLM crew is based here between their flights ),and sometimes they leave Dutch magazines, which is a real treat ! but also Irish, Italian, French; The whole world in one big tropical garden !!!
The staff are my friends; They shake hands, in this typical African style, they tell me they want to retire, but they have to keep working to keep their children in education. This doesnt mean University, but primary school.They enquire about my family, how are they keeping, we miss them ! And yes, over the summer, when we were all over, Lake Vic was a place were one could find us often. Yesterday I made a new friend; A tiny kitten , grey and white, very skinny, and I asked for a plate of tuna for him. The waiter looked puzzled at me:'Are you placing an order , madam ?' Yes I did ! Our lovely cat Tommy had just been killed on the road the day before, and I was still sad about this; He would not be there to greet us on our return  from Africa . So yes, I was ordering a plate of tuna for this little creature !The waiter returned with a napkin with some chicken on it. Fine ! As long as he got food! Afterwards he layed on my lap, purring softly, The kitten, that was.

Friday 25 November 2011

The Journey/ seselelame

The tropical rain is very heavy today. For some reason i can't access my old blog anymore !
Does that mean I have to start to tell my story all over again ?!
About my touch -project, and the work I am doing in the Michelangelo school of art ?
I will just refer to my old blog for that ( http://teatraveltien.blogspot.com)
I was reading  something very interesting in' The Empire of the senses '(ED. David Howes), in chapter nine, about a West African Theory of embodiment.
Athough the phenomena 'how we know what we know' is articulated by the Anlo-Ewe people in West Africa,
it describes accurately what happened at the work shop.As Katrhryn Linn Geurts claims that 'many Anlo- Ewe
speakers translate the term seselelame into English as 'feeling of the body'the flesh or the skin,Ewe Liguist Felix Ameka has confirmed that the phrase se-se-le-la-me can be used to translate both emotion and sense perception , and that lower level terms for various experiences in Ewe, like the subordinate level 'seseleame'
do not distinguise between emotion , sensation, perception, cognition, etc.
Instead, there are components that link to a bundle of these things at one and the same time' (Ameka 2002:44-5.

Now I am wondering , Is there such word that describes these 'feeling in the body ' in Bugandan ? The most commonly spoken language in the area where I am ?