Sex, Marriage, and Romance

What is life like for a woman in the village of Koyan? She grows up spending most of her time farming, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her little siblings. She goes to school, but she finds it boring and discouraging; her teacher ignores her and she flunks out by fifth grade. She finds joy in playing with her younger siblings and selling fruit in the market so that she can buy fried dough for ten cents to bring home to her siblings. She dreams not of being an astronaut or a pop star but of having a rich husband who buys her things and raising many children, her boys going on to make lots of money and her girls going on to find rich husbands of their own.

At 16, her father announces she will marry a 22 year old farmer in the next village over who’s a distant relation of hers. He’s cute, but he’s not rich. He’ll make an average husband. When she leaves her parents and her siblings to move to her husband’s house, she cries. She’ll still get to see them anytime her husband lets her leave the house for a few days to go visit, probably once every couple of months. In her husband’s house, she’s not so much under her husband’s rule as that of her mother-in-law. She wants to go on birth control but her mother-in-law won’t let her.

She feels ambivalent about her husband. Sex is a duty. They never have conversations; their main interaction involves him assigning her chores like fetching his bathwater and sweeping the house. At first she’s very unhappy but gradually she develops friendships with the other women in the house (her husband’s brothers’ wives) and her status rises as she gets older and has her first child.

No man has ever told her he loves her; nor has she ever told anyone she loves them. Love is not something she daydreams about; instead she thinks about her children growing up to be rich and building her a large house and buying her beautiful clothes.

She has probably never seen her husband naked. He enters her house in the dead of night and has sex with her as she lies on her bed, awake or asleep, then leaves.

After the birth of her second child, her husband decides to take a second wife. He doesn’t tell her; instead she hears about it through village gossip. She feels jealous, and yet she knows that a second wife will mean less housework for her. When the younger woman comes to live with them, she treats her pleasantly but they never become friends.

As an American, it is easy to pity the women (and men) of Koyan for the lack of romantic love and good sex in their lives. And yet, you have to look at the bigger picture: their society does not place an emphasis on romance or love; in fact I’ve never heard anyone in my village make reference to either of these concepts unless I raised them. They’re simply unimportant to them. For the people in Koyan, marriage is about having children and running a farm. And no one ever gets divorced.

The Good, the Bad, and the To

As the days lengthen and the heat beats down ruthlessly on the fields of Koyan, with their time freed up by the lack of farming activity, more adults are becoming literate, more kids are learning English, and I finally feel almost fluent in Bambara and able to pull eight buckets of water from the well without resting. It’s a good feeling and sometimes I almost forget about the 110° heat – but not quite.

Having spent a year and 10 months in Mali, I’ve grown to love the joyfulness of the children, sitting under the stars at night with no TV – just chatting, laughing, and dancing, the heartfelt string of greetings that starts every encounter, business or personal, waking up with the sunrise and the roosters, learning to truly appreciate water, the excitement of the first big rain after six months of drought, and the way I’ve been incorporated into the community as if I had been born here after only two years.

At the same time, I’m ready to leave. I was raised to be an efficient, on-time, motivated, detail-oriented, cleanliness-loving, individualistic person and these traits don’t always serve me well in Koyan. I hope to take some aspects of Malian culture with me when I return to the States: the greater friendliness and openness, the value of family and children, the value of group consensus in decision-making, and the appreciation of and refusal to waste material goods and food, but I look forward to leaving many aspects behind: meetings that start an hour late, the attribution of all outcomes, both good and bad, to God’s will, a man’s ability to beat his wives, a mother’s ability to beat her children, a teacher’s ability to beat his or her students, polygamy, the seat of village power residing in a group of old men, resistance to improved health and sanitation practices, and, last but not least, my daily bowl of to, which does in fact taste more less like a foot.