The Joys of Malian English

My host father, while a school teacher and very intelligent man, is older, and thus has long forgotten most of the English he picked up in secondary school. However, that doesn’t stop him from trying to use whatever bits and pieces he thinks he remembers with me–with sometimes interesting  results.

One day with lunch there is a meat I don’t recognize in the typical sauce and rice we usually eat. I ask my host dad what it is. “You eat the porky pig!” He says jubilantly. Umm, okay. It doesn’t exactly taste like pork, and the texture seems a bit hairy, but maybe, I think to myself, some pigs just taste different here. I bite gingerly into a piece of the “porky pig;” although the texture kind of makes my stomach turn (I’m a big texture person, which is why most seafood doesn’t jibe with me), the taste is not entirely disagreeable. I finish my portion without too much trouble.

Several other times throughout the week we get the same meat, and each time my host dad insists we’re eating “porky pig.“ I’m convinced this can’t possibly be pork, but don’t question it. After all, I’ve eaten countless questionable or flat-out mystery foods here. I’m used to it.

Then, last night, my host dad calls me while I’m sitting talking with my homologue’s family. “Awa, na!” he says in Bambara, “come.” Then in English, “Come see we kill the porky pig.”  My host dad’s brother apparently found the ‘porky pig’ and killed it in the bush. Well, I think, finally I can find out what this ‘porky pig’ business is all about. So I head over, and laying there in the middle of my host family’s concessions, are two giant, grey, oversized-rat looking animals with tell-tale long spikes on their backs.

Oh. Not “porky pigs….” PORCUPINES.

So, I think to myself, my stomach churning,  I’ve been eating not pork, but porcupine meat for the past week. I guess that explains something about the hairy texture. “You like the porky pig?” my dad asks. “Porcupine,” I correct him. “Ah yes. Porcupine, c’est ca,” he says with a shrug, as if it’s all the same. And I guess in Mali, meat is meat is meat.

This is why a sense of humor about language is absolutely essential. Even having lived in village now for five months, I  can’t even count the number of times I’ve been in completely ridiculous situations all because I misunderstood or someone misunderstood me. You have to see the humor in it all, or you go crazy. I’ve learned to see it all in a positive light. True, I never would have eaten the ‘porky pig” if I’d known what I was really eating. But I did, and someday, when my stomach gets over it, I may just look back and laugh at my first experience eating porcupine.