scent memory

Uncle Ben runs a fishing cooperative on the shores of Lake Victoria. His real name is Benedict, but he insists that I call him this, "Uncle Ben", even though for me it has uncomfortable racial connotations of which he is of course unaware. He's old, maybe 70, and his eyes have turned a pale limpid blue. At first I attributed this to cataracts, but it's such a widespread phenomenon in this part of the world that I now think it might be genetic. (Robert Mugabe is now 85, and his eyes are a washed-out blue as well.) Ben is a Luo, and I'm an American, so naturally the first and only topic of conversation is Obama, whose father came from this region and this tribe.

"Whenever the name starts with an 'O', you know you are talking to a Luo," he tells me. "We fish here, and this our lake."

Well, you and 20 other tribes who lay claim to it, but I'm not going to argue.

"And this is our food, the okena," he shows me a net full of tiny fish the size of minnows. His voice drops into a conspiratorial register. "These are good for the brain, they make you smart. This is why Obama is so smart!"

I've seen these before in the Nairobi Luo slums, mountains of silver, crawling with flies and stinking in the hot sun. But these look freshly caught, and clean, and, perhaps wishing to be smart like Obama, I take one and unthinkingly pop it into my mouth.

The taste is horrible, grease and umami, and the smell is worse, a putrifacted and nauseous stench that floods my sinuses and will stay with me for the next hour or two. The sense-memory is a dead fish that I found on the shores of Cedar Lake as a kid, and I remember poking it with a stick and watching it erupt, full of maggots. Here, in the present with Ben, I start to retch.

He looks at me with amusement, "How is it?"

"Man, that is horrible!" I say, gagging and flaring my nostrils, trying to blow the smell of fish from my nose. "How do you eat that?"

"Yes," he chuckles, "Well, usually we cook them first."



New Year's Eve in Nairobi, and we're killing a goat, as per tradition immemorial. We did this on Christmas, too, so I have a sense of what to expect. But the Christmas goat was a nanny, small and docile, who delivered her last will and testament with nothing more than a sad bleat which trailed off to quiet gurgle as her throat was slit. This one's a billy, a big one, and it doesn't want to die. Amozue and his friend are trying to pin the thing, but it just won't stop kicking, and they need my help.

So I'm kneeling on its hindquarters, Amozue on its stomach, and his friend the butcher is going for the throat with a machete. The thing is fussing and bleating and creating a hell of a racket, and its tail is pounding rapidly against the dirt. Amozue motions to his little sister, who's watching wide-eyed from the yard.

"Bibi, come over here, we need you to hold the tail!" He yells it right next to my face, and I catch the intense scent-cocktail of his breath, a pack of Embassy Lights (tobacco with notes of ammonia) and several bottles of Tusker Beer (corn with notes of soap.) I laugh and turn back to the goat, and press my whole weight on the thing, 200 pounds of pressure right on its back.

And as I get close, I smell the sweat, the fetid funk of goathide, and the animal pisses itself with fear. It's a horrible smell, this one, the smell of desperation, and it persists for maybe five to ten seconds, lingering in the air, before it's replaced by something else, as the bleating stops and the gurgling starts, a smell tinged with iron and viscera, the smell of blood spilling out onto the sunbaked dirt, and the kicking begins to subside as the animal breathes its last.

Later there's a power outage, and everybody gets high or drunk or both, and we're gnawing at goat ribs under a sky of unfamiliar stars. The meat is rough, gamy, unsauced, practically inedible, and smells of charcoal and protein.

"Pretty good, huh?" asks Amozue.

"Yeah man, pretty good."



I'm standing in a field of Assam tea plants in a remote mountain highland in Tanzania. This is outside of Mbeya, in the highlands of Livingstone mountains, which I've mentioned before on this blog, briefly. The local name is the Kipengere, and everyone calls it this, but I keep tripping over it, and Livingstone just sticks in my head better. Tanzania is hot and brown and dry, mostly, but this area is different, green and lush, with constant fog cover and the mountains jutting through the clouds in jagged tors of elemental stone. It rains constantly and the hills are verdant and plush.

I walk through close-cropped rows of tea plants and run my fingers over the beaded water on their leaves. Each cycle the farmer picks a single two-leaf sprout from the top of the plant, and lets the bush continue to flower. As a result some of the plants are over 70 years old, and still just shrubs, like bonsai. And the smell! Rain, and tea, and rich loamy soil. At a spa you'd pay $100/hour just to smell this, and here they get it for free every day.

There's something rejuvenating about this smell, but also something nostalgic. It evokes a forgotten dream of propeller airplanes and ocean liners, and leather valises stamped with stickers from a hundred ports of call. A forgotten world of imaginary adventure as presented to me by my Tintin books, my shelf full of aging, well-thumbed National Geographics, and my juvenile fantasies of worldwide adventure. Real travel in the modern world is nothing like this, of course, and probably never was, but I get in close over the two unharvested sprouts of the plant, and inhale deeply, and for a second I'm there.