Who said Trieste isn't a Happenin' place?

So the other day BY CHANCE, I happened to be looking at the home page of the University of Trieste when this event caught my eye. It was a conference to be held at the Scuola per Interpreti in Via Filzi on cooperation between Europe and the United States of Africa. Well, looking at the list of presenters, I saw a name I recognized. Boubacar Boris Diop, who is a writer and journalist from Senegal whose writing I had studied in grad school in the States and whose intense, high-energy and genuine enthusiasm fascinated me in 1999 when I spent a summer studying Francophone African literature in Senegal on an NEH grant and he was our teacher for a day. During the same trip, all of the American French teachers (I was a high school French teacher in one of my past lives...) got to have dinner with an African family, mostly teachers and writers we had come into contact with over our stay. My family, as it turns out was Boubacar Boris Diop. Just me, and him. There was another guy there, too, apparently an assistant of his who worked at his newspaper. But he was only there to bring over the food. We had Senegal's national dish, which was quite tastey. We spent most of the meal talking about poetry (I later wrote a poem about the meal, which I'm tearing my house apart to find) and literature. I told him my two favorite African writers were Aminata Sow Fall (whom I had just met) and Ken Bogul. That dinner stuck with me, and, a few days later, when our delegation of teachers was ready to leave, we had a party to say goodbye to our new friends. Boubacar brought Ken Bogul. There is a picture of the three of us. They are on either side of me, and I have the smile of someone who has just met her two favorite rock stars. Where is that picture?

I got to the conference yesterday early. When the speakers arrived, I scanned them but couldn't figure out which one was Boubacar, so I asked until I found him. He looked completely different. He's bald now, different glasses, seemed a little taller. For a second I thought I had the wrong guy. He didn't recognize me, either. I was 25 back then and ten years is a long time... I hauled out that rusty French and it came back comme ci comme ça, enough for him to remember who I was. We decided to meet up afterwards.

When it was his turn to speak, EVERYBODY listened. For one, he actually spoke INTO the microphone. That, and he had this CHARISMA that made me remember exactly why I felt so lucky to have been the CHOSEN ONE who got to eat at his house on eat-with-an-African-family night. WOW!

It turns out Boubacar Boris Diop moved to Tunisia. Said he wanted to learn Arabic anyway, and that way he is close to Senegal and close to Europe. Whoever thought that both of us would leave our homelands and meet up again ten years after we met the first time, in, of all places, Trieste?

Life is funny like that sometimes.