Ours was not an ordinary friendship.<\/p>\n
Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for 14 years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and intellectual companionship kept us going. <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/almagottlieb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/image-edited.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nV\u00e9ronique and me in the village (1993) (photo by Philip Graham)<\/em><\/p>\n Initially, V\u00e9ronique (given that personal name in the French colonial-style school she attended) grabbed the chance to practice her grade-school-era French with me, an uninvited visitor in her village bordering the rain forest. As for me, while I struggled to learn the tonal West African language surrounding me, I immediately felt grateful to find a woman who spoke a language I knew. Later, as my grasp of Beng developed, V\u00e9ronique turned out to be a naturally gifted language teacher. She happily shared her love of her native language, finding ways to explain the nuances of proverbs, metaphors, and secret speech. From there, our friendship blossomed.<\/p>\n During my first month in her village in east-central C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, V\u00e9ronique and I met daily as she oriented me to the new worlds confronting me. \u201cWhy do babies wear so much jewelry and make-up?\u201d was the first question I had asked our new village father. \u201cThat\u2019s secret women\u2019s business,\u201d he answered. \u201cAsk my cousin, V\u00e9ronique.\u201d I did, and V\u00e9ronique immediately explained the medical goal of this<\/em> symbolically resonant bead and face paint, distinguishing it from that <\/em>purely decorative bead and face paint. <\/p>\n Amenan readily distinguished the linear and circular medicinal treatments from the decorative eyeliner and eyebrow pencil adorning this baby boy (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Here was a villager who operated far from her neighbors\u2019 proclivity to conceal knowledge from a stranger\u2014understandably wary (from decades of colonial and post-colonial oppression) of what I might do with it<\/a>. Instead, V\u00e9ronique delighted in sharing her knowledge of her world. Quickly, she moved from informant<\/em> to instructor<\/em>, and from there, to friend<\/em>.<\/p>\n Back in 1979, both my academic mentors had firmly instructed me to choose a village with a population of fewer than 500 people for the year-plus of doctoral research I would conduct in rural West Africa, so I could get to know everyone in a face-to-face community. V\u00e9ronique tried to convince me to remain in her village of 1,500 for the next 14 months. But my advisors\u2019 instructions remained firmly in my head. So, after a month of browsing among the 20 or so Beng villages, my husband and I left V\u00e9ronique\u2019s welcoming space and moved to a village of 250 notoriously suspicious people some 2.5 miles up the road. <\/p>\n The tiny village I chose to live in during our first stay in Bengland (1979) (photo by Philip Graham)<\/em><\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique warned me repeatedly that the residents of the village I selected\u2014the seat of the local, secretive, traditional religion\u2014had strong reasons to reject me. Attentive to these warnings, my husband encouraged me to remain with my new friend in her village. Stubbornly, I ignored both their urgings and promptly experienced firsthand<\/a> all that V\u00e9ronique had predicted. <\/p>\n But V\u00e9ronique forgave me my arrogance; by the time I confessed my decision, our friendship had been sealed. As Philip and I packed up our suitcases, V\u00e9ronique made me promise that I would return once a week to spend the day with her. And, so I did. Moreover, over the following 14 years, when we returned twice to Bengland (the second time, with our son, then six years old), we lodged in her compound.<\/p>\n Amused, V\u00e9ronique<\/em> watches our six-year-old son observing two girls pounding corn (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n My writer-husband has written<\/a> that \u201canthropology is gossip with footnotes.\u201d V\u00e9ronique had never heard of anthropology when we met, but by Philip\u2019s definition, V\u00e9ronique turned out to be a consummate anthropologist par excellence<\/em>. <\/p>\n Every week of our first year\u2019s stay, I drove or biked 2.5 miles to chat with V\u00e9ronique in her village. No sooner had we completed the long, formulaic greetings required of a hostess-and-guest than V\u00e9ronique launched into a monologue consisting of all the village goings-on I had missed over the past six days. V\u00e9ronique was literate\u2014one of two women in her village who had gone to elementary school\u2014but she didn\u2019t need to jot down notes about any of the week\u2019s events to keep them in her mind. Out poured a list of the week\u2019s highlights, from quotidian to momentous. <\/p>\n From these sessions, I soon learned the meaning of f\u025bn pl\u00e3 na<\/em>. Literally, the expression means two days<\/em>. But its reach is more than that, with two<\/em> standing in metonymically for several<\/em>. A better translation would be, in the past few days<\/em> or, even more vaguely, recently<\/em>. And so, within an hour of my weekly arrival, I heard about everything that, according to V\u00e9ronique\u2019s all-seeing ethnographic eye, had happened f\u025bn pl\u00e3 na<\/em>. As Philip once described V\u00e9ronique (referring to her by her Beng name, Amenan)<\/a> as she eagerly approached us with village news, \u201cAmenan was already making a beeline to us, her juicy-gossip face firmly in place\u2014at times like this, Amenan was most Amenan.\u201d<\/p>\n Nothing was out of bounds for V\u00e9ronique\u2019s skilled storytelling. I learned about breastfeeding woes suffered by a new mother, and a strange condition afflicting the rectum of an old man. I heard how a young girl had been sent to Abidjan as a companion for a childless aunt, and about the latest rants of the village madman. I learned who had broken the weekly sacred day by cursing a relative, and whose domestic dispute ended up in the village chief\u2019s court. After this rich news catch-up, we would settle down under the shade of her coffee trees for a more systematic conversation about a topic of interest to us both, whether wily hyena folktales or witchcraft. But V\u00e9ronique\u2019s expansive mind was such that one recounting led to five more. I soon learned to restrain my impulse to return to the original story and let V\u00e9ronique\u2019s prodigious memory, knowledge fund, and chain of associations take her where they would.<\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique and me in our signature spot under her coffee trees (1980) (photo by Philip Graham<\/em>)<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n The balance of power between the two ends of this financially unequal relationship tilted constantly. V\u00e9ronique gave me intellectual gifts that became symbolic capital fueling my career. I brought material gifts that V\u00e9ronique and her family valued (first, soaps, baby clothes, and dried fish; then, furniture; finally, we funded the construction of a new house and, more recently, an adult daughter\u2019s business venture, and treatment for a serious sinus infection that threatened my friend\u2019s eyesight). V\u00e9ronique also readily offered advice whenever I solicited it (how should I respond to learning that the chief of our tiny village had blacklisted me, or to my husband who was angry with me for not fully translating something he needed to say?); I timidly returned the favor on the rare occasions that V\u00e9ronique solicited advice (two of her daughters were fighting, or her Ghanaian husband had disappeared yet again). In these ways, across the darkness created by drastically divergent social histories, the sunlight of common humanity shone through. <\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique and me walking to interview her uncle, the king of the Savanna region (1980) (photo by Philip Graham)<\/em><\/p>\n It was obvious enough what I gained from our relationship. But beyond the day-to-day gifts I could bring her (and the larger investments I was able to make later), what did V\u00e9ronique have to gain? <\/p>\n I believe V\u00e9ronique longed for a conversation partner of a different type from what her beloved family and neighbors offered. After all, she had attended school through the fifth grade. That modest level of education gave her expanded life experiences, compared to those of her peers. Following her five years at a Catholic elementary school, the nuns coordinating her education must have seen the bright spark of deep intelligence that drew her to me, for they soon offered V\u00e9ronique a year\u2019s job as an assistant, accompanying them as they conducted a regional program to promote rural health. <\/p>\n Based in the nation\u2019s second-largest city of Bouak\u00e9 some 80-miles-and-a-world away from her home territory, the program brought young V\u00e9ronique from village to village\u2014mostly, inhabited by Baul\u00e9 people, not Beng. Her cultural horizons expanded as she gauged similarities to, and differences from, her homeland. She learned how to help women birth and breastfeed, how to diagnose diseases from Guinea worm to tetanus. She came to juggle two distinct religious systems\u2014the spirit- and ancestor-based cosmology of the Beng world view, and the monotheistic cosmology of Christianity. And she gained knowledge of a new biomedical pharmacopeia that complemented the healing forest herbs she already knew. Beyond these technical funds of knowledge, making the rounds of villages beyond her own made V\u00e9ronique a new sort of cosmopolitan. Returning to the somewhat insular bounds of her own village must have felt confining. By the time Philip and I showed up unannounced one hot September day in 1979 that surely started out like any other hot September day, I must have offered food for a hunger that had long but quietly gnawed in her belly. <\/p>\n *<\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique was born to political and religious privilege on both sides: her father\u2019s older brother was king of the Savanna region, while her mother\u2019s brother was the most senior Master of the Earth of her village. <\/p>\n L<\/em>: V\u00e9ronique\u2019s paternal uncle, King Bonde Como, of the Savanna region (1980); R: V\u00e9ronique\u2019s maternal uncle, Kokla Kouassi, senior Master of the Earth (1980) (photos by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Dire poverty underlay all these rich cultural inheritances. More comfortable walking barefoot than wearing the rubber flipflops I once bought her, V\u00e9ronique did, and did not, exude royalty. <\/p>\n From a lifetime of work\u2014rising by 6 am to walk deep into the forest to chop down trees for firewood, carry a log on her head back to the village, use it to light a fire, then bathe babies, cook breakfast, and wash the dishes, all before returning to the forest for a full day of hard farming in her rice and vegetable fields, followed by cooking dinner, washes the dishes, and bathing the babies again\u2014V\u00e9ronique\u2019s clothes were as threadbare as her neighbors\u2019. Nor, at something like 4\u2019 9\u201d, did her height visually mark her status. Her tall husband sometimes teased her in his lilting Ghanaian English: \u201cShe\u2019s just a Pygmy, a regular Pygmy.\u201d <\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique carrying her baby grandson on her back and a log on her head<\/em><\/p>\n Yet, as V\u00e9ronique walked through the village, her tiny frame commanded attention far beyond its dimensions. Everyone greeted her, and, as she returned the greeting, more often than not, she was asked for advice. A baby wasn\u2019t eating, a child had developed a mysterious rash, a fever wasn\u2019t disappearing, and what did V\u00e9ronique advise? <\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique helping a young relative learn to walk (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes, she sold home-grown medical treatments for a shotglass of grain alcohol she made; more often than not, she dispensed herbal remedies at no charge. If her preparations healed, she was thanked; if they didn\u2019t have the desired effect, I never saw her blamed\u2014confidence in her knowledge, unshaken.<\/p>\n Whether working or relaxing, V\u00e9ronique was widely appreciated by relatives and neighbors as an impromptu babysitter. <\/p>\n This set of photos of V\u00e9ronique taking care of multiple infants (including \u201cdry-nursing\u201d one from her milk-less breast) was taken on a single day in 1993 (photos by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Her skill in massaging infants\u2019 heads widely was especially sought out by new mothers.<\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique massaging an infant\u2019s head (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Our own bonds spilled over beyond fictive kinship. I was present at the home birth of one of her daughters who, as coincidence would have it, bore the same Beng day name as mine. V\u00e9ronique made sure to instruct baby Amw\u00e9 that I was an important person in her life. <\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique points to me and asks her baby Amw\u00e9, whose birth I observed, \u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n Nor did her skills remain confined to the gender-stereotyped world of women. Men paid attention when V\u00e9ronique directed animal sacrifices. On several occasions, she asked me to buy trapping line in the Bouak\u00e9 market so she could set traps and hunt small animals. <\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique overseeing the apportioning of meat from a sheep that was slaughtered in honor of Philip\u2019s recently deceased father (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n This week, I learned that V\u00e9ronique had finally succumbed to an illness that had caused her much suffering over the past month. Medical care being what it is across much of the continent that Europe underdeveloped<\/a>, her illness will forever remain unidentified. Two doctors to whom her daughter Lucie took her for consultations claimed they couldn\u2019t do anything for her, and the emergency money I wired to Lucie didn\u2019t make a difference.<\/p>\n Maybe it was pulmonary complications caused by chickenpox\u2014which my American dermatologist, on hearing about the symptoms, named as a likely cause. Maybe it was something else. Maybe Western biomedicine could have effectively treated it, and V\u00e9ronique would be alive today. My dermatologist said that had V\u00e9ronique been in an ICU, round-the-clock nursing care would at least have alleviated the symptoms, and perhaps held death at bay. Or maybe Western biomedicine could not have identified or treated the disease, and no medicines yet exist that would have kept her alive. <\/p>\n Being a continent away, my imagination and guilt are both running riot. What if<\/em>? I keep asking myself. But, no What if<\/em> can rewrite history. The global North and the global South cohabit the same planet yet continue to produce human experiences worlds apart. As I contemplate how I can honor the ordinary-yet-extraordinary life that my friend V\u00e9ronique lived, she continues to peer over at me through her framed photo. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/almagottlieb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Baby-w-Face-Painted-Lines-Eyes.jpg\")
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