People I have known: Wul Choud

“Hey, Big Daddy.”

I was standing in one of the offices at school, talking with a couple of administrative staff members about the upcoming vacation. No one had any plans that were of particular interest to the other parties involved, and so we had reverted to the usual repetition of questions about work and family. I heard it behind me. Ibrahim, one of the people I had been speaking with, was looking over my shoulder. He speaks English, but I had never heard him speak it with anyone other than myself. The look on his face indicated that the bizarre salutation was not addressed to him, and I quickly realized that I was “Big Daddy.” I repeated the address to myself. “Am I ‘Big Daddy’?” “Did he just say ‘Big Daddy’?”

“How are you, Big Daddy?”

Turning around, my hand inadvertently met his. In retrospect, it had no choice; he was standing incredibly close, and his hand all but rested directly on me during the uncomfortably long journey from my lower back, along my left side, around to my abdomen as I rotated to face the greeting. So I grabbed his hand and shook, because to do otherwise would have been a matter of grave effrontery.

My eyes were fixed waist-level, on the hand that had traced a hemisphere of my torso, the hand that I was now holding. His palm was very sweaty, and as my hand became increasingly moist I ventured my gaze upwards to meet the visage of my new acquaintance. Small chin, tenuous smile, aquiline nose, and two beady eyes, set noticeably close together under a protruding brow. And above, above, his forehead soared upwards in all directions. Not one single hair on his gleaming pate, and all I could think of as I struggled to keep my eyes from lingering so far north of their destination, was lightbulbs. He was a rabbit burrowed into a mountain, and my hand was wet.

I smiled and responded in French, fairly sure that no regular English speaker would refer to me, or anyone, as “Big Daddy.” He continued in English.

“How are you, Big Daddy? Nice to meet you.”

Despite the fact that there are a number of students at the high school who have long forsaken their teenage years for a cyclical and repetitive young adulthood of academic mediocrity, this man was not a student. I would have put him in his early to mid 40s, allowing a certain amount of leeway for general weathering by years of living in a desert. Thus I assumed he was a teacher. Ibrahim clarified, introducing me to one of my colleagues, Wul Choud, the English professor.

***

I had finished classes for the day, and was walking out of the compound. Passing a doorway, I looked in and made eye contact with Wul Choud. He was exactly halfway through an English lesson, and immediately diverted his complete attention to the departing figure.

“Hey, Big Daddy. Nice to meet you.”

By the third time I had learned to accept my fate, and found that embracing it yielded a far more enjoyable experience than trying to rush it along. As I had done several times before, I turned to address the man calling me “Big Daddy.” We did the hello’s, the how are you’s, the how’s work’s, and found ourselves in the familiar position of having run out of things to ask about. This time, Wul Choud picked up the slack and told me, rather unexpectedly, that he had lived in the United States.

“I lived in Kentucky for three years, and I worked as a dishwasher at a Cracker Barrel.”

I was struck by the vast difference between a life as a professional in Mauritania and a life working Stateside in a grimy interstate-exit buffet-style restaurant. But as the story of his life in the States continued, the walls of the yawning chasm separating those two lives eked closer. He told me stories about the people he met, regarding the American people as, for the most part, uniformly gracious.

“I went one time to take a break in the restroom…”

Wul Choud caught the reflection of his malapropism in my eye, and corrected himself.

“…I was taking a break one time, and I went to sit down in the breakroom, and some lady said to me ‘What are you doing? You can’t sit here.’ You know what I said to her, Big Daddy? I said, ‘Hey, fuck you, I can sit wherever I want to sit.’”

His emphasis on the “fuck” betrayed some amount of stylization – evidence that this phrase popped up with a dependable regularity. He continued.

“And I’ll tell you, Big Daddy. One time I was talking to this woman, trying to begin a relationship with her. Ooh, Big Daddy, she was very hot. So I am talking, trying to begin a relationship, when another woman comes and asks, ‘Hey, why are you talking to this man? He is no good for you.’ And you know what I said, Big Daddy? I said, ‘Hey, fuck you, she can talk to whoever she wants.’”

Most of Wul Choud’s stories ended this way. Still, he remained very generous to Americans as a whole. And any time that he asked if I knew what he said, the answer was generally “yes.” He explained it to me thusly:

“You see, Big Daddy, I have a higher level of English than the other professors because I lived in the United States for three years. Some of the others are no good, but I know the phrases; how to speak like an American.”

I thought back to my time as a cook at Western Sizzlin’. My immediate superior was an ex-convict with a walnut-sized keloid hanging from his left ear. He called it his “bump,” and I sometimes wondered, if you had cut it open, if you’d be able to count the rings and divine the number of years since his wife had stabbed him in the side of the face. I then thought about the 27-year-old mother of two who spent her time over a bowl of instant mashed potatoes alternatingly lauding the subtle pleasures of crack and asking me for legal advice based on the fact that she had heard my mother was a divorce lawyer. When my attention returned to Wul Choud, he was still talking about his sizable advantage as an English teacher because of his experiences in America. ‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘that sounds about right.’

By now his class was becoming restless. We had been talking for over 15 minutes, and I suspect that if I hadn’t claimed that there was somewhere I needed to be, the conversation would have continued unabated. When he turned to resume the class, I caught the words “horseback riding” on the board.

***

A few weeks later I decided to spend an evening at the Chinese restaurant reading and drinking beer. It was as dead as the dead of winter gets in Nouadhibou, and the city had long been lacquered in the opaque blackness of a moonless night with no streetlamps. About a block away from my apartment I heard a voice from the darkness.

“Hey, Big Daddy, how are you?”

I found Wul Choud’s hand hovering near my right hip. This was the first (and only) time I had run into my coworker outside of the educational setting, and it had a profound effect on our topic of conversation. Forsaking his immediate dinner plans, he began walking with me in the opposite direction. When our eyes had adjusted to absence of light, he pointed out the book under my arm.

“When I was in the United States, everyone was reading. Everywhere I went, people with books and newspapers. Here, everyone is lazy. No one reads books. No one cares what is going on.”

After eight months, I still don’t know how to respond when people attack their own country. I’ve struggled with the policies and people of my country, but have come to appreciate a certain amount of national pride. Point of origin is an inescapable factor of identity, and deriding it seems as productive as calling yourself an asshole. But his rant about the superiority of America’s reading habits eventually segued into a condemnation of Mauritania’s educational system, and I felt the tickle of anticipation at being able to voice my own concerns about how things are run. My list was exhaustive: no generally agreed-upon syllabus for any of the classes, a shoddy, inaccurate, and out-of-date student registration system, no formal communication between administration and staff whatsoever, very little transparency as to how national educational allocations are utilized and no accountability when the funds inevitably disappear without a trace, no supplies, no resources, zero nationwide uniformity concerning scheduling (or anything, for that matter), and perhaps as an extension of the last point, a total inability to plan for anything more than a week in advance. I quietly waited for the opportunity to bond with a colleague over mutual grievances. He started with the teachers.

“They are no better than students. You saw them in the staff meeting. The director couldn’t even speak because they would not stop talking.”

I couldn’t disagree, but the meeting was so pointless and needlessly dominated by an unfocused, authoritative pomp and circumstance that I couldn’t blame people for not paying any attention. His attack on the teachers moved on to their lack of commitment, and eventually, qualification. The teachers, however, are perhaps some of the most qualified professionals in the country. They attend about six years of schooling beyond high school, get paid relatively little, and exist at the whim of a capricious and overly-nationalized system. I attempted to voice my disagreement, but he did not seem to register my input. At best, my comments redirected his ire towards the students, and Wul Choud fell back on the universal, albeit genuine, concern over “kids these days.”

“Listen to this, Big Daddy. The other day I saw a student of mine sitting on the street with a girl, and they were holding hands. Such disrespect! When I was a student, you would never be so disrespectful of a teacher. When you saw a teacher, you left. That was it. Now they say ‘hello’ to me as if I was one of them. And in my classes, I often see them sitting on the back of their chairs. I tell them to sit down in the chair correctly, and they continue to sit on the back of the chair.”

The heartfelt nature of his plea softened my growing distaste for the conversation. Wul Choud was visibly distressed that students occasionally regarded teachers with a modicum of familiarity, and that this was the first chink in the foundation of Mauritanian society, the global society even. He expounded on his perspective for many minutes more, and my fervent disagreement slowly gave way to a comical acceptance. We parted ways smiling.

***

The last time that I saw Wul Choud was in the teacher’s lounge, a concrete room with a table, reserved for drinking tea, mostly. I rarely spend any time in the lounge, but joined dozens of other teachers that day in finishing up grades for a noon deadline imposed only two hours before. I sat in a corner, concentrating on my work, while conversation stormed around me in at least four languages. English is never one of these languages, so when Wul Choud entered, I knew he was talking to me.

“Hey Big Daddy, you getting the pussy?”

Considering the question that was just lobbed to me across a crowded room, over the voices of at least 15 other teachers, I would regard my calm as “zen-like.” Since our evening chat about the state of mankind, Wul Choud had begun to speak to me with a familiarity not unlike the dishwashers did back at Western Sizzlin’, and this question had joined the gamut of other questions one asks when greeting a colleague. Usually it directly followed an inquiry as to how my family was doing.

“Hey, Big Daddy, how are you? You getting the pussy?”

He realized that I had heard him the second time, because I was laughing, because I am a child. I had heard this question before, but never in front of anyone else, let alone a roomful of coworkers. I shook my head at him, indicating (poorly) that this was an inappropriate occasion for said questions.

“What the fuck do they know? They don’t fucking speak English.”

And for the most part it was true. While I wallowed in crippling embarrassment, no one else so much as turned their head.

***

When I returned from Dakar, Ousmane, a close friend who also happens to be an English teacher at another school in Nouadhibou, announced that he was being transferred to the high school. He informed me that Wul Choud had left, and that he was taking his place. I called Ibrahim to get the details.

“Yeah, it’s true. Wul Choud went to Nouakchott last weekend, and on Monday called the director to tell him that he had been transferred to a high school in Nouakchott. I couldn’t believe it. People try for years to get placed in Nouakchott, and he pulled some strings over a weekend, and just like that he was gone.”

I expressed my surprise. I openly wondered about the fate of his newly abandoned class, how they would respond to such an abrupt change. Ibrahim seemed to think it was probably for the best.

“Wul Choud. There was something wrong with that guy. He just wasn’t right in the head.”

And that was the last we ever spoke of him.