Resistance is Useless

I'm actually at the library. Next to me are three tomes:

• Anthropology Today, circa 1953
• Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge--I can't begin to tell you what that means and may not be able to explain even After reading the wretched thing
• Power and Knowledge

Thus go my 'breaks' from the office these days. But I'm listening to Gillian Welch and eating organic white chocolate. And writing a quick post. So life could be worse.

This post is about a new person in my life, six year-old Malika Bah. Malika means angel in Kiswahili. Malika is angelic occasionally, when she is sleepy. Most of the time she is fierce and energetic and playful, a little girl from Sierra Leone growing like a weed--she's always showing ankle beneath the edge of her trousers. Her mother is doing a PhD and raising two kids on her own here in Edinburgh. So sometimes Malika and I go on outings. I'm attempting to inculcate an interest in birds in her unsuspecting soul (see that bird? what kind of bird is that? Umm... It's a mute swan, remember? Keep your hands out so she can see that you don't have any bread and doesn't come over here...) so that she can become the 4th member of the Bad Birdwatchers of Cambodia when she is older--you've got to start 'em young.

On Saturday she and I and a new friend and her 2 year old daughter and 7 seven year old neice went to the Children's Museum together. There we established once and for all that the Children's Museum is not particularly interesting if one is 6 or 7 or 2. In hindsight, Malika was cross with me for making her share our time with some strangers. She and the 7 year old, another colt-like girl, took their sweet time warming up to each other. In the meantime, Malika engaged on a variety of boundary-pushing behaviors--demanding to leave, taking off suddenly without warning for another level of the museum on her own--in the historic capital of body-snatching, mind you! (There's nothing like being out with someone else's little girl in a big city to push me into a state of constant vigilance and nervous paranoia. Where's a beast-infested wilderness when you need one?) Why is this fun, she inquired to me, as we stared woefully at the vast array of old and mouldering dolls behind glass. Why indeed?

We gave it up and finally hit the streets. This is when I realized that children play in the same way in the city that I played in the bush as a child. They crawl under sandwich boards, sit on the dirty streets and slide around on shop windows, blithely ignoring the passersby. Malika and the other girl suddenly decided that they liked each other and took to walking backwards down the winding streets. By the time we reached the park, they were friends for life. It was a park with steep near-vertical sides, and I sat down with the Adults while the Children climbed up and sprinted down the sides. At some point all the shoes came off.

And then, forgetting what is was like to be 7, I told her without warning that we had to go immediately, as I had to get her home and then head off to another appointment. I essentially wrecked her world without warning. She was completely undone. I asked her to put her shoes on. The angel flat out refused. Fine, I said, and picked up her shoes in one hand, took her hand firmly in the other, and said our goodbyes. I then set off straight up the side of the hill, past the grass into a world of sticks and dirt. I don't want to go this way! the angel protested. Then put on your shoes, I suggested brightly. The angel fell silently defiant. She climbed through the sticks and the dirt while her evil guardian kept a guilty eye out for broken beer bottles. We reached the street. The angel remained defiant. We crossed the cobbled main road, stormed down the rough pavement all the long way to bus stop, the angel limping along from the rocks but keeping up. Finally at the bus stop, I resorted to the most awful adult threat of all--the threat of separation. If you don't obey me, I can't take you out, I said, hating myself. She went very silent and submitted to having the shoes put on.

The bus came. It wasn't the right bus, she said tearfully. It would do, I said, and dragged her on it. While I was paying, she escaped and went and pitifully tried to hide in the back of the bus by curling up between two seats. I sat down next to her. She wouldn't speak to me. I didn't speak to her. We sat in perfect silence for about 15 minutes.

Then she spoke. I'm very tired, she said. I'll bet, I said. She lay down with her head in my lap and sucked her thumb all the way home.

I let her linger over a lovely tomcat on the way to her door as a kind of penance on my part.