lailaah! toubab bi degg na wolof!
Sep. 5th, 2003 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phineasjonesi was just reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pritchkate's mini-rant about cultural ignorance and it made me remember this, my favorite (as in least favorite) example of american lameness...
years ago, i read the book the horse whisperer. not sure exactly why i felt compelled to do this... but that's not the point of the story. one thing i liked about the book was the the parents of the girl had met in senegal - when she was a peace corps worker (or something like that) and he was living there. there's a whole scene in the beginning where he chats about this with a cab driver. yeah, anyway. they tell their story at one point - how they met there. and it involves someone telling her to go see the 'toubab.' 'toubab' basically means 'white person' in wolof - the most commonly spoken indigenous language in senegal. (like, you're white and you're walking down the street and little kids see you and they call to you, 'toubab! toubab!' until you look and then they'll laugh hysterically. or maybe that was just me.)
so. they make a movie of this book and i feel compelled to see it. all goes fairly well until that scene when they're telling the story of how they met. for no apparent reason, they changed the location to india. pointless, but whatever. the unbelievable part is they left in the part of the story with 'toubab' and use the actual wolof word. but in india. there are no words for the lameness.
pritchkate's mini-rant about cultural ignorance and it made me remember this, my favorite (as in least favorite) example of american lameness...years ago, i read the book the horse whisperer. not sure exactly why i felt compelled to do this... but that's not the point of the story. one thing i liked about the book was the the parents of the girl had met in senegal - when she was a peace corps worker (or something like that) and he was living there. there's a whole scene in the beginning where he chats about this with a cab driver. yeah, anyway. they tell their story at one point - how they met there. and it involves someone telling her to go see the 'toubab.' 'toubab' basically means 'white person' in wolof - the most commonly spoken indigenous language in senegal. (like, you're white and you're walking down the street and little kids see you and they call to you, 'toubab! toubab!' until you look and then they'll laugh hysterically. or maybe that was just me.)
so. they make a movie of this book and i feel compelled to see it. all goes fairly well until that scene when they're telling the story of how they met. for no apparent reason, they changed the location to india. pointless, but whatever. the unbelievable part is they left in the part of the story with 'toubab' and use the actual wolof word. but in india. there are no words for the lameness.
