BOB HOLMAN

Sure enough, Amasaygou (Dolo, of course), is at the Castor for breakfast at 7am. We lay out the day’s plans, the week’s plans: visits with the elders, the diviners, the traditional healer, the griot, the blacksmith, and a celebration that includes masks, if all goes well. The village of Tireli, 19k’s and an hour+ away makes the best Dogon millet beer (“kunyan”) and has the best mask collection – we’ll go there and talk about throwing a party that we can film.

Maybe it’s because the diviners are such a part of life here, maybe it’s because everyone has the same last name, maybe it’s because Griaule left such a mixed heritage of scholarship and hoax (or, maybe, mistranslation). Whatever it is, the Oral Tradition is thriving in Dogon country like nowhere else I’ve seen. The tourists are here for one thing only: the Dogon way of life. Which is to say, the way spirituality is imbued in all objects. The odd jester’s hats with swinging puffballs. The landscape that makes the arcane, fantastic cosmology seem logical. And it’s not that tourists are here in such great numbers – the toilet is still a hole as often as not, and sanitary conditions are, let’s say, haphazard. Meeting Moussa in Tireli (everybody here is a Saye) is filled with these engaging contradictions – he runs the only hotel in town, which the Women’s Association started with a grant from Nobel winner Muhammad Yunus, he of the microgrant theories. Entrust Moussa to hold the money, and he’ll put together our Festival. Hmmm.

I like him, and we are encouraged that we’ll shoot here, but want to allow Sangha a chance to respond, so it’s an hour plus back to Sangha: 20 minutes on a sand piste including a 75 degree plunge into an empty river bed, 20 minutes dirt road past Amani, the sacred crocodile village, Irili, which is also a World Heritage site (truly extraordinary, Hobbit + Star Wars + Truli plus you name it – Mitterrand helicoptered here!), then a steep ascent up a rocky torture road that is intermittently paved, a road that curves alpine-like past villages, Telem caves, and wild west vistas. An NGO paved the road, but didn’t have enough money to pave it all  — paved means a cement slab is sunk into the earth. So they paved the most dangerous parts, so the story goes. If that’s true I don’t know what these nondangerous, unpaved parts used to be – the 4x4 sometimes slows to a roll as pointy rocks and potholes take their toll. Avberage speed is around 3kph. Finally we clear an incline and there’s Lower Sangha spread before us – hundreds of mostly women workers with jugs or rice sheaves on their hand, slowly walking from here to there through the green rice and onion fields of Paradise. In the distance the cliffs, the reed rock escarpment, the Telem caves. An indescribable landscape.

Turns out Sekou is also the man in charge of the Sangha equivalent of the Tireli plan. He asks me, Well, did Tireli work for you? Sure did. Then why not do that? Because I wanted to get a price from the Sangha. From you.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

The six-hour 4x4 trek from Timbuktu to Douentza on the Muslim Feast Day of Tabaski (i.e., no stores open in the two towns we passed) did me in. We stopped an hour or so north of our destination to shoot the sunset behind the first Dogon cliff landscape, and I felt a might queasy – or was it just the poetry of the moment? (This is the sunset conclusion riff that concludes the 2nd show, “From Timbuktu to the Dogons.”) The piste was ass-crackingly rugged, hellishly bouncy with intimations of carsick. Was it because I was memorizing Dogon salutations, which can go on for seemingly ever? Researching Douentza hotels? Reading David Markson’s The Last Novel? Maybe the heat? The luncheon salad in Timbuktu? Whatever. While checking out our quarters at Gourma Campement I became a walking projectile-vomiteer. Three times sending indecipherable stomach remnants into orbit. Diarrhea. I am sick in Africa.

So I lay down, Bea helped me, brought cold Coke and a bucket, and in this night of fitful sleep I drift unthinkingly through consciousness. No fever, so probably not malaria. I look at myself for the first time on the trip: I have aged. My face is red. My lips are badly cracked, bleeding. My hair is crazy. A tired, sad sack. Now sick.

Heave a couple times overnight as well. Really wished I wasn’t the guy who had to decide in the morning, but I am and do. The working principle for this trip seems to be Stick to Schedule. Keep On. So having skipped dinner and now breakfast, feeling “better,” not hungry, we’re on our way.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

As in the French, Mali being part of French West Africa, “pie-ee” or the area of the Dogons, whose epigraph as the “mask-builders of Africa” gives them mysterious purpose but is a dire simplification. A truly independent people, their cliff villages have an otherworldly yet organic complexity. Their cosmology, as revealed to French anthropologist Marcel Griaule in the late 40s, is similarly fantastic but grounded, with some Dogons believing in visits from aliens (from Sirius, to be exact: the Sigi Festival occurs every sixty years, ready or not, when a hidden moon of Sirius Dog Star appears in the heavens) and others possessing the ability to fly. And this is not to mention that Dogon villages are built above and below the impossible-to-reach cave-in-the-cliff dwellings of the tribe who preceded them in this Grand Canyon-like escarpment, the Telem, who evidently traveled home by rope. I’ve looked on this part of the Griot Trail, the inspiration for Nathaniel Mackey’s Andoumboulou (“We are the Failed Human Experiment”) poems, as dessert, the most different, the furthest away, the unknown, the essence.

Correct.

(Try one of Mackey’s poems — I consider him the greatest living jazz poet. His poems aren’t about jazz. They are jazz.)

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/