Travel and Mali

When You Decline the Dinner of Puff Adder Snake, You Know You’ve Arrived

A true tale from Mali

The canvas bag slung across Issa’s body dripped with blood. The sack changed from its original flax color at his shoulder to crimson red by his belly to deep rust at his hip. At that hip, the bag hung with a weight of something large and ponderous.

Issa beamed. He laid down his machete, a two-foot-long straight piece of steel set into a battered wooden handle, and asked me excitedly if I wanted to see what he’d killed.

Typically, Issa presented bush rats or birds; the former his wife cooked and fed to the family, the latter his son used as a toy, tying it around the neck with a string and swinging it in wide arcs.

Issa bent at the waist in his rough hunter’s shirt, made with cotton grown in the village, twisted into thread, and then woven into lengths of cloth. It may have originally been flaxen in color, too, but later matched the Malian earth, the mud huts, the feet of the children.

He wore a gris-gris amulet around his neck, a leather pouch he’d made by hand filled with materials of which he would never speak. The gris-gris protected Issa from malevolent spirits when he walked in the bush.

(Later that year, when I entered my home to find a small, bright green snake beneath my kitchen shelving, Issa brought me a gris-gris to protect me from other snakes. I would later discover that the green one, seemingly innocuous in its cheery skin, was a juvenile boomslang, capable of taking my life in a day.)

From the sack, Issa pulled a different lethal snake, short and squat like a wrestler. It measured barely three feet in length but was as fat around the middle as a well-fed python, tapering dramatically at its tail.

Its brown and white sawtooth markings mirrored its pointed fangs. The snake’s triangular skull was like the head of an axe.

A puff adder, equally as murderous as a boomslang to someone like me who lived more than six hours from a hospital.

Issa laughed as my eyes widened. “Ehh, Mariam,” he said, calling me by my Malian name. “I ba fe k’a dun?” Do you want to eat it?

Food occupies a prized position at the center of culture. Regardless of homeland, religion, or economic status, people all over the world perfect traditional dishes, give loved ones homemade treats, weave food into religious and cultural ceremonies, celebrate milestones with specific dishes, and offer meals to friends in times of need.

People tell stories over food. They linger and laugh and sip drinks. They build alliances and truces. They welcome visitors and strengthen connections. In her TED talk, journalist and food advocate Aparna Pallavi says,

Food is nourishment, comfort, creativity, community, pleasure, safety, identity and so much more.

Food, like music, communicates across cultures and bridges language differences.

In Mali, local people honor a traveler by presenting them with a live chicken, then slaughtering it and serving it to the visitor. Rather than laying it atop millet, the chicken rests on rice. A tourist might consider rice peasant food, but in Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world, rice represents a staple of the wealthiest and most honored for one simple reason: A cup of rice feeds fewer people than a cup of millet.

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.” -Anthony Bourdain

A good traveler, one who counters the ugly American stereotype, demonstrates respect for cultures by showing interest in the cuisine, dining with locals at street food stalls, using the utensils — chopsticks, hands, gourds, spoons, pita — of the locals, and above all, eating the food a host provides.

What does one do, then, when presented with a meal filled with poison?

I had no idea how snake was prepared, if the venom originated and remained only around the mouth, if the poison would appear in the finished dish, and if it stayed active after the death of the animal. It felt like Russian roulette.

Throughout my two years in Mali, I ate at bowls filled with chicken feet, guinea fowl, and goat stomach beside the dustiest children imaginable. I consumed egg sandwiches made from eggs sitting out in intense heat and corn grilled by streets filled with diesel fume. I ate salad mixed by street food vendors with their fingertips.

I wasn’t entirely reckless, though. Under dark skies in my village with no electricity, I could avoid what felt unsafe or distasteful, furtively pushing my food around, digging a crater into my pie-shaped section of millet and sauce, and constructing mounds for the hungry child on my left or right.

My soul keeper

Yet, Issa was my jatigice, a term Peace Corps translated into “host father” but actually meant “soul keeper” in the Bambara language. As my host father, Issa or his cronies came to check on me when a stranger approached my gate, tended to broken bits in my house, offered a chicken to my visiting family members, and cracked peanuts and dropped groups of them into my hand as we sat around the fire in the evening drinking tea.

The village chief honored Issa and his family by bestowing the role of jatigiw upon them, and in return, they cared for me.

In a small community of mud huts and thatched roofs where women became co-wives as young as 14 and gave birth to as many as 14 children, a village where some children never owned a single pair of shoes, a place where people died without ever leaving their region, touching ice, eating a piece of candy, or watching television, I formed deep connections. In a place so thoroughly, so completely, so utterly foreign from my home in the US, I built relationships. I made friends.

When we lingered over tea each evening together, we laughed as the little ones nodded off in front of the fire. We gossiped. We giggled when someone farted.

In a place so thoroughly, so completely, so utterly foreign from my home in the US, I built relationships. I made friends.

So in a village with grave periods of hunger where hunting for bush game produced vital protein and sustenance, I wondered if they would understand me turning my nose up at food. In my two years of Peace Corps service, I emphatically declined only two dishes put before me: the puff adder and, later, monkey.

As night fell and Issa took his bloody sack of snake home for his youngest wife, Mah, to cook, I thanked him profusely but declined to dine with him that night. (A couple of months later, when Issa killed a monkey, I offered the same response, my stomach rolling at the thought of tasting primate.)

Issa laughed, lightly shrugged, and let me know he understood. He took no offense. At that point, he knew me. I was one of them, not just a traveler, but a villager, a whole person with preferences, fears, and boundaries. I had arrived.

And that night, despite consuming the most frightening beast I’d ever laid eyes on in a dish possibly laced with poison, my jatigiw, my soul keepers, lived.

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