Thinking of Nabokov in Tanzania

“if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again”

In a week, I saw a cross-section of Tanzania. The drive from east to west, Dar es Salaam to Kigoma, cut diagonally through the country, through the vast, empty spaces dotted with the occasional town, and wove around the sporadic hills and towering mountain ranges. More revealingly, the journey from urban to rural brought me from capital city to quintessential African village with stops at each intermediate step along the way: Dar es Salaam to Kigoma to Kasulu to Makere. Each location brought me further from the comforts of home and closer to what some refer to as the “real” Africa, though I resist that equation of villages and authenticity (but sometimes find myself subconsciously buying into it).

I wrote at the beginning of my trip that I wanted to take Tanzania on its own terms, without comparison to Uganda and Rwanda. Nevertheless, at each stage in this progression, I found myself trying to fit what I was seeing into what I had seen in Uganda and Rwanda, trying to match each town or village to a parallel one in my previous travels. But nothing fit exactly and it felt like trying to hold onto water.

In Makere, the bizarre thrill of realizing that I can adjust (kind of, and a bit grumpily) to a temporary life without electricity, toilet paper, or running water (important in that order) brought back memories of Gulu and Nakivale. At the same time, this life was completely foreign, being so different from the other 20 years and 7 months of my life. Unfamiliarity clashed with familiarity as I simultaneously thought, “oh cool, I’m getting a chance to really see how other people who are completely different from me live” and “this is just like Gulu/Nakivale—and hey, why are you making such a big deal about reading by gaslight for two nights? You did that for a whole month in Gulu, silly.” When I walked past a large group of women and children singing outside a home, I thought (with the rosy tint of retrospection) of nights with my Acholi host family, Emma and Mama Winnie, when we would sit in darkness under the stars and Mama Winnie would lead us in singing, “My Jesus is Alive” while a pig wandered through the yard behind us and Nancy would tease us for our funny mzungu voices.

As refugees approached me on the path from Makere to Nyarugusu refugee camp to speak with me, I was almost back in Nakivale (and maybe Makere was the small town outside the camp where I stayed for a couple of nights while trying to arrange housing inside the camp). Even the red clay dust was familiar. Just like before, I groped my way through interviews in almost-correct French, and received many of the same answers to my very similar questions. At the same time, this village was neither Gulu nor Nakivale, and the little differences stood out, stubbornly refusing to allow Makere to conform to the neat categories I wanted to sort it into.

It wasn’t just in Makere, though it was there that I felt the disjointed dislocation of being in a place that didn’t quite fit any previous model the most. Every town feels vaguely familiar, like if I just catch it when it isn’t looking I’ll realize I’m really back in Kitgum, Uganda or that town where we always ate lunch on the road between Gulu and Kampala. But then there’s something a little bit different, a little out of place, every time.

A few weeks ago, RJS posted an article about culture shock in the comments of one of my entries. The article said that culture shock is a loss of meaning, and part of the process of negotiating and overcoming culture shock is the effort to find ways to make meaning for yourself, and I think my attempt to relate Tanzania to Uganda is my brain trying to make meaning out of my experiences in Tanzania.

In the same way that we look for patterns and recurring details in a text to understand what the author is trying to do, or compare similar situations across space and time to try to come up with a theory (both in hard sciences and in social sciences), we look for points of overlap in our lives—when one part of the pattern is superimposed on another—as if finding the thread that spirals through will give us the satisfaction of believing there is a purpose and significance to our individual existences. When these points don’t quite align, it’s harder to ascribe meaning, but I guess the point is that we don’t really want to come full circle anyways. Really it’s all about catching glimpses of comforting familiarity in new places and wondering if the thread is a precise spiral or just a wandering, erratic trail—if life can conform to artistic ideals, or if such organization is necessarily artificial by virtue of being ideal.