The mango and the banana

I am sitting now at the restaurant Palmeraie on Ponty street in Dakar. I am feeling a little bad, but mostly fantastic and I should explain this and the title. It's a little bit of a long story, and very, very rambling, just to warn. Like a taxi ride in Dakar, it is a road that is messy, chaotic and full of life!

3 years ago, my father passed away. At the time, I had left behind my nursing degree due to my ineptitude at the medical surgical rotation (though in my defence I excelled in my courses and rotations in community and psychiatric). I had decided to go for my current Maitrise (excuse-moi, I have to use French words whenever they pop into my head) in Globalization and Internatational Development. For this I needed a 4 yr undergrad. Before nursing, I had done a three-year Baccauleareate in Psychology, so I decided to upgrade that. I did my undergrad thesis on students' experiences in Africa, the two global health course currently offered at uOttawa Fac. of Health Sciences had been my baby, a project I devoted years of my life too and one I had initiated with great support, in 2002-03. So, in 2005, I had taken a related job as coordinator of International Health Program uOttawa for 21 hours a week, plus I had to take six courses and five in the first semester to finish my undergrad psych. That fall, my Dad went into palliative care. I had my courses, and we were running our first event as a team with me as manager where we drew a crowd of over 200 to a Fair Trade talk and coffehouse. I also continued some duties with the global health courses to help transition year to year. I travelled back and forth to my father in Toronto, and was happiest in the moments of just being with my father, even though it was heartbreaking.

When my father went into hospital, he had become paralyzed as the prostate cancer metastasis compressed his spine. My grandmother, at 90 yrs old, was the only one with him, and I am told she had the strength to lift him to safety after he had fallen, and called the ambulance. When I got word from my uncle, I came to Toronto as soon as I could. The initial conversations were the day of that Fair Trade event as I spoke with family while the event was being prepared. For three months, I went back and forth. I was not happy with my workplace, as I felt they didn't comprehend the situation, but I have forgiven them. When I arrived to the hospital the first time with Donna, I recall how distressed my father was. He was in a medical/surgical (general medicine) ward. This was the environment that I had failed in as a nursing student, and I think that it is not just my ineptitude with my hands and time management, it is the rush and impersonality of this environment that I detested. The general medicine ward always has the worst professional to patient ratio, the staff are stressed and rushed. My Dad felt the indignity of having to be washed by others, and he had long suffered depressive episodes, and depression is one of those things that when it recurrs it is like coming to the same city after a few years. Time has passed, but much remains and one remembers where one was. So, in this state, my father was reliving his depression. He was angry, and nurses there were unprofessional. It is unfit for a nurse to complain to a family member about their dying relative because they are not a 'good patient'. Anyway, I said it was a long story. In general medicine they are not trained in palliatve care. But after a week, things improved when my father was moved to a cancer hospital, and then further improved when he arrived at the Salvation Army Grace Hospital palliative care. Ironically, Rachel Thibeault, who some of you know (Capital Educator of the Year), and who is one of our international health leaders at U of Otttawa, had worked there 20 yrs ago. The Grace is the oldest dedicated palliative care in Canada, and one of the best. There was a multitude of cultures there, and it was a time where when not with my father or passing the time with some stupidity flaming Conservative internet forums, I made heart connections with many, many people of all faiths and backgrounds. There was a courteous pastor, she at one time asked if I would like to choose a Muslim prayer for my father, but I explained that my religion is the same as Christianity (the Koran accepts all previous scriptures, excepting for some minor differences which have been blown way out of proportion), and I thought Dad would like to have Psalm 23 of David, which is exquisitely beautiful, as he slept.

Initially,word hadn't got round all the friends and the Ismaili community. The hospital and even the cancer ward hadn't treated my father's depressioin (it's a mistake to think a dying person is naturally depressed, depression should be treated aggressively in palliative care). I pushed for treatment for depression. At the Grace, he was treated, and after a while my father was the most visited patient!! The Ismaili community is very caring, and the community of East African Ismailis is very tight-nit and longstanding. There is a lot of family that came. Donna and I were there a lot. At the end, my brother had come and I had gone back again to Ottawa. I had offered to my Dad, who loved politics, to help him vote in the election of 2006. He wanted to, so I brought him an advanced ballot. He cast that ballot (legally) and died I think the day before or day after the election. I cast my own at the same time. He voted NDP, which with the Greens, had long been my part of choice though he and most of the family voted Liberal traditionally. But he liked Olivia Chow.

By the end, my Dad had gone from the depths of depression, which for me was tragic and my worst fear was that his life would end in an unhappy way. The first conversation we had had, had been a litany of bitterness, as he relived his worst moments. After a while, he began to relive his best moments and with treatment and so much community and family support, plus his own efforts, he died in peace, Shukran lilah, ul humdolilah. I remember the day he told me he was at peace, it was then that I came to peace with his death as well. He even had a peaceful smille, when I saw his face in the hospital after he had gone, he looked like Shri Chinmoy! His achievement of peace and serenity in the face of death was a powerful, deeply powerful strength for me and still is. I was proud of his efforts, even since his diagnosis, for years he applied himself. Just at the moment of his hospitalization, the indignity of his paralysis had thrust him into a darkness. But he was a great man, he fought the jihad, the real jihad, which is the life struggle, the inner struggle with one's demons and selfishness (jihad translates this way, and in batini (inner) dimension of Islam is understood in this peaceful way). He had won by surrendering. Surrendering is the meaning of the word Islam, it also means peace.

My father had a traditional Muslim funeral, and was powerful also. This Ismaili community takes care of everything, and the family is honoured and cherished, and plays a role in leading prayers. We receive all instructions on what to do. Many Ismailis attend all the funerals they can, to show respect in numbers to the family, and for themselves it is like the Buddhists, to return to the value of life by contemplating our mortality. There is a moment in the funeral, after I had led a chanto (the whole jamaat (community) chants zikhr tasbih prayers), where they cover the face of the deceased, and at this point I am with the jamaat in the front row but not leading the chanto. While I had led the chanto, there is a procession where I am with my father's body and all the people who would like to pay last respects file through in a room which is made very serene by the ceremony. So, my eyes had been with my father the whole time, maybe an hour, until this moment where they cover the face. I had been 'handling things', being a big man, playing my part, trying my best as the son for the three months, trying to keep up my courrses and my job because my father asked me not to let his illness detract from my work and progress. I told him that he could not take any guilt for this, but it was impossible for me to keep up perfectly my work and school, I preferred more and more to be in Toronto and away from it. I could not promise. But, I was 'handling' thing, handling myself, being big and mature. I tried to give peace to my Dad and my grandmother, to use my nursing knowledge to explain to the family a bit. But I am not perfect. There is a moment after the funeral is finished where the burial committee, who does a service out of a purity of heart and does it perfectly, then comes to the family to beg forgiveness if they have done anything whatsoever, unkowingly or mistakenly to cause any difficulty or to offend. It is an act of utter humility, as if we were guests at the most expensive hotel in the world and celebrity at that. It's a beautifu thing. But me, I am impulsive and I am bad with time, so I make a lot of mistakes. Then and now, I must ask the same forgiveness. I tried, but I need forgiveness.

But where I was, was to describe this moment when during the funeral they covered my father's face. That meant, never again in my life would I see my father's face except in a photograph. That was the moment of finality, the striking finality of mortality, of my father's life of our life together from the moment he held me as a baby, to the moment he yelled at me when I was mechant, to the days he made sure I could play ice hockey, tennis, alpine skiing and vacations for camping, to Stowe, Jay Peak, Eastern Townships for skiing - even though he was a modest engineer. His life, which he gave for us so much, despite his own troubles. The time where he asked me to carry my own hockey bag for practise in Rockland, so that I would be a big boy. Where he took me for tryouts for the competitive leagues, where he replaced the very serious Italian soccer coach of my little league who quit because of his angry over-competitiveness (for God's sake we were 11 years old), even though he had not played much soccer himself. Where he bought my professional sitar, where he sent me money when I needed, where he supported me entering undergrad Philosophy major, even though he felt like I should be more practical, where he supported when I left university to be ski bum, though he thought this was worse. Where he suffered because of my own first episode of pscyhosis and hospitalization in Calgary at the end of that ski season, where for three weeks I deteriorated, acted strange and eventually pushed him physically after he followed me to the hospital, I had pushed because I was ashamed. He never left my side.

So, this moment was the moment my 'handling it' ended, and my heart broke. I cried then, and I am in tears as I write.

I began this to describe the banana and the mango, and the title here. But it is all coming to the point.

I suppose after my father's death, I had grieved some already since we knew for months he would die. Right after the funeral, I was not in the mood for grieving. All the work had fallen behind. And I wanted to re-focus, and wait a while. There was some peace, because my father had died in peace. What else to do? I threw myself into work and remembering a grant deadline, in one week wrote a grant for CIDA that succeeded and with some extra budget at work, my work extended to full-time. I finished my thesis and began taking graduate courses while working full-time. But eventually, I ran into conflict with my workplace and left the job to study my Master's full-time, and TA for the same global health course. Before I came to Africa, through the courses and the International Health program, and through the blog we set up (dogooder.ca now archived), I had lived vicariously these experiences of Canadian students going to Africa. My thesis was based on 100 pages of narrative and I also conducted two 'story-telling circles' with students. Nearly 100 students maybe now, have come to Africa before me through my courses. The striking similarity to all the stories and the study of impact, was that everyone said that Africa had been a life-changing experience. I even wrote in my thesis that psychology did not have a construct for 'life-changing experience' (LCE), and suggested it develop one. LCE is based on intense experience, usually brought about by removal from one's ordinary environment, into a period of great challenge and often where the original motive is naive and is replaced by a deeper realization of the human condition and of challenge to one's basic assumptions about life, a realization humbly of one's smallness in a vast human world and universe.

If you don't mind I like to call these students who went before me 'my students', just because I played a sort of professorial role, not completely, but sort of. My students taught me a lot about Africa. Another commanlity was how they spoke of time, how they spoke of the time for communication, how they spoke of the relationship, how they spoke of the hospitality and also how the spoke of the contradictions, the muzungu effect, petty corruption, the need to be wary of being taken advantage of, the poverty, the wider range of human experience that could lead to devastating neglect and poverty in the same place where utter generosity of heart, of time of wisdom exists. Africa is a poor continent. But people have lived in Africa for over 100,000 years. Colonialism interrupted this development in a brief moment of devastating impact (a tiny amount of time a few centuries is in 100,000 years!!), but this is development I could say is a way of moving that is 'doucement', where the time frame is not the next financial quarter, not 2015, the timeframe is the present, but that present is 100,000 years old now and perhaps can view time less urgently. Doucement. But the contradiction is the urgency of the fragility and suffering that exists on the continent.

So, when I arrived in Senegal, I had done 30 extra hours of work as a TA the week before, I had commenced a full-time internship with Canadian Policy Research Networks, and finished a job with my small business Stratongina.net for morphysfallspub.com. At the same time, I kept receiving what seemed to me to be random requests from my visionary colleague in preparation for the Pan-AfricanForum on OA and OER and E-learning Africa. I deeply respect this man. We met through the Budapest Open Access Initiative listserv, on a discussing about OA and OER in Africa. Since this was my thesis topic I had responded, and a collaboration had begun. Since we are working in the network society, we have seen each other's face many times through Skype video, we have shared but mostly on an academic level, on a little on the personal but still we have yet to meet in person. Mous is trying to move mountains, and sometimes that means randomness and things that start but don't finish. I don't mind. But at this poiint, I was getting burnt out again!! And I was trying to get ready to go to Africa with Donna, who sadly couldn't come in the end. Trop stressant. And this predicament led me here.

My host, Asse Gueye, is an African novelist with a penetrating and sometimes destabilising insight into the human condition especially profound with a tete a tete conversation, a dialectic. When I arrived, he perceived my cultural baggage immediately, which had accumulated more over the last three years but of course longer, where I had consumed too much workahol!! Thus he adopted as his African son, and began lessons for me to be independent in his home, and lessons in what he calls 'the way of wisdom'. He is not saying he is at a destination, just that there is a way and one can be aware and be in the way of wisdom, or one can ignore reality and not proceed anywhere, living fruitlessly on earth, for a life that is our only, very only single opportunity for being.

For me, I have tried a little in my life to go in this way. Through my recovery from manic-depression, through my father's passing, through study and observing, writing and making music. At one point during my bout of workaholism, I was stressing about all the details of projects that I was too young really to direct, but nonetheless had some responsibility. During one night, I had a dream, and it was a stressful dream, but at one point there was a voice which cut through the discomfort of the dream. The voice was crystal clear and gental, and it parted the waters of my confusion and my anxiety, and then it was gone. It said 'Arif, Just Be'. Three words!! The only wisdom I have, and when I depart from it, I become a mess, and when I return, I recover.

So, my host perceived me correctly as a mess and began the lesson of taking time. We had bought mangos and bananas. I had spoken loftily about my love of mangos. Back home, if I see a drink or some other processed product that has mango flavour I buy it!. But only at my grandmother's do I really eat mangos, for time! So, we had bought these mangos, and I had spoken of this love of their taste, and how East African Ismailis love mangos like the Senegalese, and had gone on and on like this. But then after 2 days, I had only eaten bananas!!!! The reason is that my habit had become to take food in a way that is easiest, to save my time for projects, my workahol. So my host perceived my conceit, and drew my attention to this problem of time and stress, and exactly placed this as the central problem of our society. Africa is poor materially, but my culture is poor in time, and poor in ability to relax and to just be, in solitude and with others. My culture has more beggars for more time than Africa has beggars for money. I have preached this before actually, in my note on Time Poverty and my hip hop rhyme about the same. But I am like a poor man who preaches money management!!!

So, I began to take time. But since one month, Mous had been asking me to prepare the presentation I kept trying to get to it after the more immediate demands without success until finally I had left for Senegal not having prepared a single slide. And so, I had spent a week getting over decollage horaire (jet lag) and learning these lessons about time, and learning how to be independent in Dakar, and then going out by myself and spending long hours meeting and greeting, and haggling in the streets of Dakar, long hours talking with Asse, playing chess and lo, I had not a single slide. Finally, Mous had given me a deadline of Friday, and Friday was also a deadline for an assignment for the CPRN. So, comme d'habitude I ran one of what I call 'intellectual marathons', sessions where in fact some good work gets done in an intense time-compressed fashion. I worked 30 hours nonstop, except for breaks to eat mango (but in very indelicate way, not in the way of wisdom!), and then slept during the muggy day.

Just before sleeping I spoke to Mous on the phone, and comme d'habititude, he had then again a great ambition for global dissemination of information regarding our forum, and a number of rapid fire tasks that needed to be done, but truth be told were not tasks for an academic like him or me, but for a secretary (or plus contemporaire an adminstrative assistant). I was fache!!! My Senegalese American colleague and my African father's directions were colliding!! So, I said very directly that I could not perform any more tasks (I felt like a monkey on a string). So, like a monkey, no more bananas (I didn't say this, just being playful now). I take my time.

Today, Mous and the chef of MERLOT also arrived and are at the hotel. I had expected to start again some work for the conference today, but I had to go out to collect the antique for my mother with the rest of the money, that I had left with Abdoulla the day before. So, I went to Amadou's shop, so he could help me find it. Amadou know exactly where it was and we went there. Amadou and I have grown very close. We spent the entire day together and he showed me many things, le gare (train station), port and a beach. He took me to the inside market and up some very mysterious stairs to a rooftop balcony. No tourists could find this kind of place, because the stairs are behind the stalls, and very few would probably end up inside the market buidling. There we ate Tiepboudjan, which is a very typique dish of Senegal,with rice and fish. He explained to me that there was a madame, who was very honourable and who everyone gave great respect, who organized this rooftop area. All the people there were Mouridiyya. They insist I should go to Touba, which is a kind of constant pilgrimage where the Sufi saints would be buried, and current Shaikh (I think) and spiritual centre of the Mouriddiyah are. On Friday, though, in Dakar, there will be Bayae fil (Ithink I got that right) like every Friday, where the Mouriddiyah stay the whole night chanting like we do, but we only do it on La'il til Qadr (night of power, end of Ramadan). In the end, there are four Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal but the Mouridiyyah (Maribou) are the most prominent).

People are very happy to hear that I am Muslim, and sometimes I explain that Ismaiilis also refer ourselves as Mourids, but we have a different Shaikh in Imam Karim Al-Hussaini Aga Khan. The only person who had even heard of Ismailis was the young philosophe/Sufi from the other day, but he is reading Al-Ghazzali and anyone familiar with the histor of Sufi philosophers, Al Ghazzali was noted for not being fond of Ismailis and wrote polemics against them!! So I warned Al-Hassan, of this. Of course Ismailism in truth, is very close to Sufism, and Ismaili Imams often hid as Sufi shaikhs when our tariqah, our way, was under attack and persecution in history. When the Imams were in Andujan in Persia, there was a close relationship with the Sufis there and marriage of our then Imam to the daugther of a Sufi shaikh, I believe it was the Naqshabandi order. Ismailis were known as well as Batinis, meaning they took the inner spiritual meaning of the scriptures, and in this way Sufis are similar. This bent in Islam is very pacisfistic, it is deeply spiritual, devotional, musical, mystical.

For those of you for whom this is very esoteric, it's true. It's similar to Buddhism where there is a mysticism/philosophic bent, and you have lines of Enlightened masters who give training to their pupils in the way of wisdom, and they become enlighted Llamas or Tathagatas. Asse is in the way of wisdom, but for him it is independent thinking and he cares not for religion and mysticism. But me, I feel that we all have a myth of ourselves and the world that we carry day to day, and it is good to know it and use the myth to arrive at la verite.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the way is that one crosses over in one lifetime (becomes enlightened) but one returns to help others cross over from samsara to nirvana. The end of rebirth (samsara) is enlightenment, but those generous of heart return to the earth of suffering to help others find enlightenment, these are Llamas like the Dalai Llama for example. In Sufism it is a bit different, and in Ismailism there a hereditary leadership, which is based in Shi'a Islam and our Imam is the 49th descenent of Ali and Fatima, and therefore Prophet Muhammad pbuh. And then this prophet is a descendent of Moses the father of Hebrew and Arab people through Ishmael and Isaac, and further back descended from Ibrahim (Abraham). This was the monotheism and of course Allah and God mean the same thing.

Most Shi'a are Twelvers, which occurs because after about seven Imams in the Shi'a tradition, there is a controversy. Many people follwed one line which ended at the 12th Imam. The believe of the majority Shi'a is similar to Christians who believe in a coming again of the Messiah, except for Shi'a this Second Coming is expected to be this 12th Imam who is said to be in 'occultation' waiting for the end days when he will return. The Ismailis followed a different Imam at that time, but were in the minority so had to hide these Imams. The Imams reappeared with Al-Mahdi I think around 9th or 10th century (for some this represented the messianic coming and they reverted to Ismailism - al Mahdi is a name given to this Imam and means Messiah). The Imams of that time founded the Fatimid Empire which stretched over much of North Africa, and they founded the world's oldest university in Cairo, Egypt Al Azhar, in Africa. The Fatimids and other Muslim Caliphates entered a period of Islamic Golden Age, in part because the Fatimid Imams and other Caliphs gave patronage to scholarship, medicine, astronomy, arts, culture and architecture. Recall that Baghdad was the cradle of civilization.

This was during Europe's 'Dark Ages', and in the Muslim world medicine had advanced, they were practising early scientific surgery and even practices a kind of socialized tertiary care where people would leave the free hospital with food and money. In Alamut, Nasr Din Tusi made discoveries in astronomy that were similar to Copernicus, though in Islam I don't believe that there was a great concern that the Earth should be the centre of the universe as was the doctrine of the church-bound Scholastics of the Middle Ages. Still, the Muslim scholars were neo-Aristotelian and neo-Platonic, and had to contend with the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian model of the universe which the Church and the Scholastics had adopted as it held the Earth as centre.

Mevlana Jelalludin Rumi writes in one poem, everywhere is the centre of the universe. This is important because the Europeans had break the relationship between church and state to move forward with modern secularism in a turbulent way, with the persecuation of Galileo for instance, because of the tenacity of the Ptolemaic model with earth at centre. In fact, before we knew the earth was round, people spoke of the world, and because we didn't have the info, people referred to the world as the earthly realm, and usually saw their own people as the centre of it. Even after securalism advanced, Europe saw itself as the centre of the 'world' if not the universe. It saw it this way through the lens of writing, and since it had the printing press, it was able to disseminate the scholarship of Europe during a time when Europe also had empire over much of South-East Asia, North and South America and almost all of Africa, plus Australia and the South Pacific, the Caribbean and so on.
For a long time it read the world through its own writing, in a circular fashion, in a fashion that cannot be separated from the fact of colonialism.

But now those days are gone, though the past doesn't go anywhere and we live in the present with it.

But now we have new communication technology that has features which make it global, and difficult to dominate. It means that all the world's people can communicate, create, adapt and evolve because communication is what drives human development, actually. We must be vigilant and guard for instance, net neutrality, and we must stay offline to experience nature and real-time conversation. But we stand at the beginning of something that can change.

The lesson here is that it is actual communication of information, knowledge and even human emotion and affection, with transparency and accountability, but also understanding and sharing of wisdom and lifeways, for the universal language of music, poetry and so on, so that trust and respect is built, it is this actual communication that a technology should serve to develop opportunities for. For this we must take time for the sweetness of life, for the mango, and when we need something quicker, the banana. To develop, we must trust a little, allow a little vulnerability, we must be humble and allow places like Africa to move ahead. We must slow down. I worry that if we don't, we just hit a brick wall, or a cliff, or something worse.

So why I was feeling bad a bit, is because I refused to do some menial tasks needed by my team and someone else had to do it. But I can be forgiven for taking the time for life-changing experience and for mango, I hope! As a final note, that I write after returning home, my confidence in Dakar got the best of me on the way home. A very devious man appearing to me as a Griot and professional Cora player (Griot is a creole ethnicity here renouned for music, especially Cora) drew me into an intrigue where I lost $8000 CFA francs to him and was left in a bad neightbourhood! It's about $18 that I lost, and he was trying to con me for $100, saying his band was playing ce soir and he needed to collect his jembes from repairs, as a matter of needing to exchange for Euros! After he disappeared with my $8000 which he deviously obtained from me in a moment of weakness (hard to explain this wizardry), I was able to walk about 5km toward Place D'Independence and finally did my shopping on the way home near Palais after visiting a bank machine, carrying my antique for my mom, my bag with my mini-Acer computer, 12 eggs without a carton (the eggs here are very durable), and about 4 Litres of drinks! This was after I bartered in true need for a 1 mango and 1 banana with the little change I had left! So, I think I will leave the wandering the streets of Dakar by myself for the rest of the trip and finish the presentation, meet with my American colleagues over the next few days, maybe take a trip after the conference to Isle Goree (a history there of slave transport) and spend some more time at the university. I still haven't made it to Just for You, the famous music club at the university, but I'm sure it will happen and hopefully with my colleagues and/or host family, not alone! Comme ci, Comme ca, you win you lose!

So message to myself and to whomever needs some peace - Just Be. And eat slowly a sweet mango!

Arif in Dakar,