An American in Paris...in Dakar

Last Friday, I went to dinner and a movie - well, movie and a dinner - at Institut Francais in downtown Dakar. The Insitut Francais was founded by Senegal's first president Senghor as a "dynamic fusion that reenforces cultural and linguistic communication between France and Senegal" which for us means a easy place to go on a Friday evening.

The movie - "Midnight in Paris" - ended up being an interesting choice for our situation. It's an American film (with French subtitles) about an American writer - Owen Wilson, oddly enough - who escapes the roughness of daily life by traveling through time to a different era, the "Golden Age" of Paris and interacting with his idols in the artistic community. The movie was utterly escapist, and after being in Dakar for two months, it was almost painful to see the plush beauty of Paris. After the movie, I felt such an extreme sense of disorientation, as my friend said, the film had not entirely ended and we too were occupants of another world that was not quite real.

All around us in the calm, sparklingly lit courtyard of Institut Francais were foreigners who seemed to emerge blinking from the depths of Dakar and congregate together in a grand show of being toubabs. They all seemed to come here within the walled compound to try to ignore where they were, to dine on overpriced salads, drink wine, smoke, and rediscover their suppressed European. It was a fantastical picture, this community of outsiders who find and greet each other in their odd mixture of European and Senegalese clothing, but to me, it was completely unsettling. Senegalese waitstaff bustle through the crowd of French couples waiting for their tables, and I can't help but be overwhelmed by this living realization of continued colonialism, this sense of trying desperately to cling to luxury and familiarity as the talibes and beggars wait right outside the walls.

And it's odd the way we American students are drawn to its leafy security for the same reasons. Even though, as I think about it, I have friends studying in Paris who find that atmosphere  - the atmosphere that is recreated at Insitut Francais - in Dakar foreign and utterly unknown. Yet for us, the mere connection of being Westerners in an strongly unfamiliar world seems enough. But even here, the closest we get in Dakar to our American home, we are still outsiders. We stand out from our European counterparts with their already established community. We are not welcome as part of this group; we are still visitors that are in some ways closer to the Senegalese community than the French. I sometimes forget the fact that I am not black when I am with my host family, but with the Europeans in  Insitut Francais, I never forget that I am from the United States. At the end of the night, I go back to my Senegalese home, and return to the closest thing I have to a sense of belonging.