Hello everyone. I am Ryan Kennedy. And growing up that meant something to
me. We carry our name around like
an appendage, allowing it to grow with us and to some small degree shape who we
are. Our relationship with the
names people call us, our calling names you could say, grows and changes with
the cultures around us. Don’t
believe me? Just look around you. Do you live somewhere where your get to
call your boss Steve? Or is it always Mr/Ms. Jackson? Have you ever had a professor that insisted that you call them
“Dr. someoneso” vs. “Mr/Mrs. Someoneso”?
They did get their PhD after all, and how you address them should reflect
this accomplishment. Your insistence
on what your calling name is seems to be an insistence on who you are. Your individuality. So when living in a culture devoid of
individuals, does it make sense, or seem right to demand to be an
individual? Great question,
Ryan. Thanks Ryan. Well this isn’t
the kind of question that has an answer, but I will share my take on this
problem and would invite you, my dedicated readers to contribute to the
conversation either in the comments section or you can reach me via e-mail
because my experience is just one of many and these are the kinds of questions
that really need to be shared amongst multiple perspectives. So more on this in the bonus section at the end.
Growing up as a white, straight,
American, male I was afforded the privilege of dictating who I was. Culturally I was permitted to base my
identity off of my accomplishments, my jobs, my academic achievements, and
ultimately my choices. If somebody
did make assumptions about who I was they were typically positive and affirming
and gave me the space to develop into the person that I felt that I wanted to
become rather than spending my time trying to fit myself into a mold that
society had created for me or felt the pressure of societies expectation of who
I should be weighing down on me.
Now I have mentioned in previous posts about how even for someone like
me the groups and cultures around me exert enormous influence over who I
become, but even so I was left an enormous license in deciding who I wanted to
be. Living in Burkina challenged
that space. Challenged my
identity. But in a strange and
unprecedented way.
In the states names are very
important. You meet someone, you
shake their hand, they ask you your name, you tell them and ask them their
name, and then if you’re anything like me you some how never manage to focus
hard enough to actually hear their
name because you’re too busy thinking of other things like breathing and
saxophones and literally anything your brain can think of besides that person’s
name. At which point you are
forced to embarrassedly ask that person what there name is while assuring them
that you are going to forget it again.
And all of this because names are important. We identify with our name, we are proud of our name, we like
people calling us by our name, and we note with pride the moments when our
superiors upgrade us from “you” or “weatherby” to our actual name. It’s a sign of respect and refusing to
call somebody by their name is refusing to acknowledge that person as an
individual. So I guess it would
surprise you all to hear that for a good portion of my service I had no name.
In Burkina a person’s name serves a
different role than it does in most social circles in America.
It is used to identify somebody as part
of a group rather than as an individual because no individual is more important
then the group that they belong to.
The title of that group allows you to know something about who this
person is, what they do, and decide if they should be allowed within your group
or if you are not ready to trust them.
While in Burkina many volunteers are confronted with what I would call
the “Nassara problem”, that is the general population simply calls all of us a
single word.
In my region it was
Nassara.
In the western region it
was Tubaboo.
When I was in Togo
and Benin it was Yovo.
And no
matter where you go it is never your actual name.
It is an informative statement of who you are made by
others.
There is rarely a moment
during the introductions when you will be asked for your given or personal name,
you are simply given this new name.
Often times I will hear people translate this name as “white”, which is
often the case, but not always true.
In fact I know many nonwhite volunteers who still receive this
name.
I find a more accurate
translation to be “stranger”.
Which makes a lot of sense coming from an interdependent culture that’s
primary objective is to protect the in-group, protect the village.
Being called “stranger” immediately
identifies you as an outsider and it allows people to treat you
accordingly.
As I mentioned in a
previous
post not every call of “nassara” is the same, but this is where it was
important to practice listening so that you could actually hear what you were
being called.
Some “Nasara”s meant,
“Go away”.
Some meant, “entertain
me”, some meant “who are you”, and some meant “this is what you are”.
Now every volunteer has a different
interaction with the Nassara problem and every volunteer comes up with their
own method of handling this problem.
Because it can be hard.
Moving around the country with chants of your whiteness following you
around. Maybe starting a meeting
where you present yourself by your name and the response you get is “ok, Nassara”. I think that to some people this
refusal to be acknowledged as an individual is hard and scary. For most of us, or at least those of us
who have been benefactors of white privilege we have never lived in a culture
that dictated who we were. That
gave us a role that we were obligated to fill.
So I guess there are multiple ways
to respond to being called Nassara, or “le blanc”, or really any other term
that dictates your identity. The
path that I ended up following was to accept it. Because, as I said, the bizarre nature of this
labeling. In fact the labeling
that comes from being a Nassara isn’t inherently negative. In fact some of it is positive. Being a Nassara can sometimes open the
individual to realms of unearned privilege due to the fact that the culture
values whiteness. Oftentimes this
privilege makes us feel uncomfortable or guilty. But the response to this feeling shouldn’t be to demand the
culture to allow you to feel comfortable.
In a way, I think that it is important to feel uncomfortable about this
treatment. Accept the reality of
it and try to learn from it. I saw it as an acknowledgement of my place in
Burkina. I was not here to be an
individual. I had not earned that right and I don’t think that I should use the
privilege that comes with my whiteness to insist that I be acknowledged as an
individual. Some volunteers sit
their friends down and explain, “do not call me Nassara, in my culture that is
an offensive thing to do, my name is ______ and you should call me ______”,
which is a perfectly reasonable request.
If you were amongst Americans.
But you aren’t and sometimes you have to bend to the reality of your
situation. Imagine it from their
perspective. You see a white guy
and you call them, “hey, white guy!” just like you would expect to be called
“hey black guy!”. But then the
white guy comes over and sits you down and tells you that that was a rude thing
to do, and that you should call him Greg.
And well, he is a white guy, so you want to do what he says, so you say,
“ok, Greg”. But on the inside
you’re really thinking “but why? You are a white guy? I must not understand”. And so now if you’re Greg, I would be curious as to whether
or not that was the impression you wanted to make? I would argue that you haven’t fixed anything; you haven’t
explained some aspect of your culture to a friend or colleague in the hope that
they might learn something new.
You demanded that they treat you as if this was your home, but the
problem is. It’s not.
Another response is for volunteers
to ask to be given their “village name”.
And I would imagine this comes from a place of wanting to find a
replacement for “Nassara” and so you tell you friends in village, “don’t call
me, ‘Nassara’ call me something local’”, and normally your friends will be
delighted to do this. And so you
get a name in the local language and it is easy for your friends to remember
because it means something to them and you now have an identifier that you
become attached to. I guess the
interesting conundrum here is that essentially you have arrived and you are
called “Nassara” or “stranger” and the response comes across as “no, I am not a
stranger. I am here and I am one
of you and I will have my name”.
I felt that it did me more good to
have that constant reminder that I was not one of them.
I was not a villager from Kogho.
And no matter how hard I tried, how
much I integrated, how much I denied the trappings of a western life to
completely immerse myself within the conditions of this life I could never
truly be one of them.
My reality
wouldn’t permit it.
If something
went wrong for me the Peace Corps had me medically covered.
If the rains were bad, I received a
monthly stipend regardless of the rain so I would still eat.
Hell I’m hoping most of you, my
dedicated and detail oriented readers, noted that during my
summer
in the fields I left in the middle to go on a vacation to Togo and Benin.
It still allows you to live in your
village and integrate, but it changes the way that you address life having that
background sense of security.
Living in Burkina is hard.
There is no questioning that.
But as volunteers we all knew that any suffering that we endured was a
temporary condition and that eventually it would end, or if you needed you
could take a break.
You could
learn to adapt and accept, you could find ways to avoid it, or you could just
white knuckle your way through a service in the desert.
But it will end.
For your friends in village that isn’t
the case.
They aren’t holding on
to any idea that this suffering is temporary.
This is their reality and you just have to deal with
it.
As a volunteer or hell even as
an American when we encounter a difficult situation we can or are encouraged to
just leave that situation.
You
don’t like your town?
Move to a
better town.
You don’t like your
name?
Change your name.
You don’t like your school? Transfer to
a better school.
The way you adapt
and develop your problem solving ability is very different from somebody who
understands that these unpleasant conditions are permanent.
You don’t like your village?
Make your village better.
You don’t like your name?
That’s not up to you.
You don’t like your school?
Work harder to like your school.
It falls in line reasonably well
with a lot of the hashtags attached to different posts from the instagram
account @barbiesavior (lord the internets are amazing) such as
#gonativeorgohome or something along about being one of the average, getting
the true local experience. Its
this thinking that I really think people like the creators of this account are
trying to go after. Not
necessarily to attack, but to encourage conversation and awareness. Because at the end of the day neither
this post nor, I would imagine, the posts by others talking about this
topic. Are intended to be an
attack. I don’t want my message to
be, “don’t go out there and serve” or “don’t travel” or “don’t try to
help”. More “be aware of what it
is you are doing, what you are not doing, and accept the differences”
Your interaction with the world
around you is different depending on the cultural cycles that you occupy and
while living in your village you will always occupy a different cultural
cycle. But that’s ok. We aren’t there to be an African. Or to be a Burkinabe. To earn some sort of “I’m now an
African” badge and come back to America and start talking about how much more
meaningful life is because you’re African. No, we’re there to be different. And to share that difference, to understand why they are
different. And if they are going
to remind me of my difference every time they call me, that’s ok. Because I am different, so let’s talk
about that.
Now I did eventually get given a
village name. Which is good, I
guess, otherwise the title of this blog post would have been really
confusing. But it was because my
village decided too, and it wasn’t really a replacement of Nassara. Just an adjustment. I was given the name Ouedraogo Rayende
after I had lived in village for about a year and it was really just a
different label to describe me. To
explain what I was. My name is
Ryan Kennedy they told me. Kennedy
is the royal family in America and Ouedraogo is the royal family in
Burkina. So we will call you
Ouedraogo. And you live alone. You
have no wife and you have no kids (weirdo) so we will call you Rayendé, which
means “a man alone”. And it’s
funny. Most of my friends in
village just shorten Rayendé to Rayen.
Which sounds oddly like Ryan.
So at the end of the day I was called by my given name. But I think that the way that I got
there made all of the difference.
So what is the take away from all
of this? Besides the fact that my
village thinks the Kennedys are the American royal family (which in and of
itself excludes me from being a #truenative , but is still kind of funny). I guess the best that I can offer is
that the world is really made up of a lot of different groups. Some groups composed of
individuals. Some composed of
people who see themselves as one.
Some groups with privilege. Some without. Some groups well publicized. Some never heard of.
And while living in Kogho it impressed upon me that there are just some
groups that you don’t get to belong to.
You can insist that you belong, or you can force your way into a
different group. You can do
everything just like the members of another group, but at the end of the day,
you are different, separate, Nassara. But I think there is something connective
about recognizing our differentness while at the same time trying to take the
time to learn and listen to these other groups. So yes, after two years in Burkina I never became a true
native. But that wasn’t why I was
there. And yes during my two years
I had the opportunity to do some pretty cool work, but I didn’t really solve
any problems. I was given a unique
opportunity to go out and share something with this little village and they
were able to share something in return.
And allowing my village to remind me every day that that was all that I
did and that I was simply a small part of a larger whole leaves a bigger impact
than convincing myself that I was there to be one of them and to solve their
problems.
But what am I doing, I just spent
all of this time talking about how these kinds of things are meant to be
conversations rather than a one sided lecture.
And as I have mentioned, my experience is very limited to..well
my experience.
A white, American,
male serving in the Peace Corps in Kogho, Burkina Faso.
So I would like to invite you, my
dedicated readers, to participate in this conversation.
Maybe I missed something, maybe I
wildly oversimplified an extremely not simple problem, or maybe I am way less
smart than I like to sometimes think that I am and you would simply like to
inform me that I am wrong.
Feel
free to use the comments section as a forum or even email me your responses at
rkennedy12345@gmail.com.
I will respond, and if you want to
compose a response highlighting how wrong that I am I will even post those
later, either anonymously or with your name attached so that others can enjoy
our attempts at defining the indefinable.
Well here’s to hoping this idea actually works.
Cheers, and until next week.
Fun picture. This was taken during my ride home from my neighboring town about 10km away. It was always a nice relaxing ride once I got over the fear of becoming lost in the bush. But also a good add on to this conversation. I could ride this route 100 times with a bushel of hay on my head and I would still never know what it was like to be the guy in this picture. Only he knows, so why not spend the time to ask him?
