LYE ilaha illa-Llah!

According to Islam for Dummies, “La ilaha illa-Llah” means “There is no god but God.” The book does not mention that in The Gambia, it is also used as an exclamation of shock or surprise, as in the following hypothetical situations:

• Someone walks in wearing an over-the-top sparkled and ruffled outfit. “La ilaha! That outfit is nice.”
• Someone mentions she accidentally tasted lye. “La ilaha illa-Llah! You tasted what?!”

Except (maybe you’ve guessed) that second situation wasn’t hypothetical. It happened. Here’s how:

I was leaving the Basse car park; it was quickly turning dark and even though I wasn’t hungry, I figured I should decide what I wanted to eat. I saw a lady selling large slices of watermelon and realized that was exactly what I wanted, so I bought a slice. More than one person commented, seeing me eat it: “You like the watermelon!”

All sorts of snacks were being sold along the road that I’d never seen before, like French fries, which I would’ve bought if my stomach had been in the mood for grease. I also saw, next to a plate of plastic bags filled with peanuts, little baggies filled with a white powder. I thought maybe it’d be something sweet, along the lines of that traditional candy I tried in Hong Kong. When I learned the bag only cost five dalasis, I figured I might as well. Maybe it would end up being something nice to mix with the oatmeal I had decided I would make for dinner.

I arrived at the Basse house—no power. I made some oatmeal and a cup of Christmas spice tea and got out my laptop so I could play some Christmas music, because I was in that kind of mood even though it was not yet Thanksgiving.

And then I remembered my baggy of mystery food so I jumped up to fetch it, all excited!

I dipped my finger into the bag to sample a little before mixing it with my oatmeal and thank goodness that's all I did because it burned. Not a jalepeño pepper burn, a burning burn. Like sticking your tongue in a hot beverage, hot chocolate maybe, but without the Warning: Contents May Be Hot and without the cool relief of whipped cream.

I tried to think of what I could possibly have eaten, and wondered why the lady who’d sold it to me had not informed me of the proper method to prepare this substance (like how the lady who’d sold me strange fruit one time had warned me it’d be a little sour and I should add sugar). Nope. Here is how my conversation with the white-powder vendor had gone:

Me: Good afternoon.
Her: Peace only.
Me: No trouble?
Her: Peace only.
Me: What is this?
Her: [a word I didn’t recognize]
The man sitting behind her: You hear Pulaar.
Me: A little. It is how much?
Her: Five dalasis, ten dalasis. [she indicates the different sized bags]
Me: Okay, I want five dalasis.

I give her the money, she gives me a baggy of the mystery substance. Then she asks, “Your last name?”

Me: Jallow. Binta Jallow. 
Her, pointing to the little girl standing beside her: She is also Binta.
Me: My namesake?
Her: Yes, your namesake!
Me: Tokara!

I wave goodbye and as I’m walking away I overhear the man say, “The toubab hears Pulaar, she said, ‘my namesake?’”

And that was it, the end of our conversation, no warnings, nothing.

So like I said, I was wondering what I could’ve eaten when I remembered what I’d read in Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes about improperly prepared cassava being poisonous. There was still no power at the house, but I decided to use the remainder of my laptop’s battery to research whether or not I was going to die of cyanide poisoning. I assembled the facts (but blame Wikipedia if these aren’t actually facts):

• Cassava is sometimes ground into a powder, for use in cooking whatever one cooks with cassava powder (this would explain why I’d never noticed these bags of white powder before now, cassava season. Maybe it was raw cassava that had been dried and ground into powder—was I supposed to have known this and boiled it or something before I ate it?)
• Cassava generally has higher levels of cyanide when it was grown during a drought (this past rainy season wasn’t exactly a drought, but the rains began late and were not as plentiful as expected and lots of crops never sprouted)
• Usually, but not always, the more bitter the cassava, the higher the concentration of cyanide (…then I must have eaten a lot of cyanide…that stuff was really bitter)
• Some small quantity (I don’t remember exactly) of cyanide is enough to kill a person
• There are two types of cyanide poisoning, acute and chronic (I read about both even though at this point I didn’t need to worry about the chronic kind, which has a higher frequency in populatons with cassava as a staple food and leads to paralysis)
• Symptoms of acute cyanide poisoning appear four hours after consumption (…so I need to stay awake an extra three hours later than I’d planned to, or attempt to fall asleep not knowing if I’d wake up)
• Symptoms include vomiting, vertigo, and something else I forgot. If untreated, eventually death. Treatment is simple—a shot of something (it had potassium in it or something that helps the body break down cyanide) and you get better.

I felt fine so far, but it’d only been twenty minutes. Three hours, forty minutes to go. I had no cellphone and there was no one else in the house. Here was my plan: If I began feeling nauseous and/or vertigo-eous I was going to pluck the baggy out of the trash, find the Fula night guard and say, “I am sick. I ate a little of this;” at which point I would present the baggy. Then I would say, “I want to go to the hospital.” He would know what the white powder was and be sufficiently panicked to take charge and summon a donkey cart or something. The article did not say how long after symptoms appear until death, but hopefully there’d be enough time.

Then the laptop battery finished, so I tried reading some magazines before I realized if I did wake up tomorrow, I would need to bike back to my village, so I should get a good night’s sleep. So I went to bed hoping the symptoms, if they did appear, would be strong enough to wake a person up so that I could maybe go to the hospital and stay alive and not have to leave the next visitor to the house with a dead body—that would be traumatic.

The next day I woke up (yay!) and when I returned to site, I asked Julia if she knew what I might’ve eaten. She said it sounds like I ate lye. This seemed improbable at first—why would the lady have been selling bags of lye next to bags of peanuts? Why would she have thought lye was something I would want to buy? And why would I buy anything but a snack food on my evening stroll home from the car park?

But the more volunteers I told this story to, the more probable it began to see. For one thing, it would explain why I burned my tongue. For another thing, it would explain why I didn’t die.

But at least I learned from my mistake! On a recent trip to the market, I found a woman selling what looked like maple sugar candies (the hard ones that look like amber) along with dried fish and other foods. I asked her what it was but I didn’t recognize the word. I thought it looked delicious, but I thought I’d better make sure.

Me: It is something to eat?
Lady: No, no! It is for clothes. You do this [she motions rubbing it onto clothes] and it will [explanation that I did not understand]. You understand?
Me: Yes.

Because although I did not understand just why the stuff was rubbed into clothes, I did understand it was not for eating.

*Also: according to the Guinness Book of World Records 1998 (a copy of which is at the school library), the longest palindromic word is saippuakivikauppias (19 letters) Finnish for “a dealer in lye.”