The Monkey Woman

She sat in her wooden booth, the corrugated roof hanging loose at one end, pushed aside by tendrils of the jungle that framed her in green. Her thick black hair sat like a soft halo around her face, a perfect orb. She appraised the world through hooded eyes and dark lashes free of makeup. She took our money and tore our tickets with bored hands that afterwards reached to rub at a fray in her jeans, pulling strands of cotton to twist between her willowy fingers. I wondered how long she had sat there, the monkey woman in her booth, accepting money she could not keep from travellers who gawped and agreed with each other in whispers that she was too beautiful to work in a place like this. ‘She could be an actress, a model, a singer!’ Promises thrown about her head of contracts and glamour if she only lived in the western world. Did she know? Had anyone told her that she was ten times as striking as most beauties seen in magazines, even without the hours of gruelling nips and tucks and air brushing. If others were like me, I doubt they would have even taken a breath to speak before being distracted by the monkeys they had come to see.

At night, Sene Gambia was owned by men and I wondered where the monkey woman went. Did she sleep in her booth, upright against the wooden slats, her halo of hair a pillow against the splinters? Or did she tend to children in a home barely bigger than three booths in a row? Did she have a husband to serve, who she loved and loved her back? Did she have an elderly mother to care for, who relied on her daughter’s routine of returning every evening with a hand of dalasi and the strength to cook and clean? Did she cry at night for a miracle?  

Perhaps she was happy, content with her life. Perhaps an offer of a better world was in her mind not better at all. Perhaps our western way of thinking, of wanting more, of moving forward and craving the spotlight was just not how she thought. Perhaps it seemed fake, too far from the real world she knew and the people she loved. Perhaps she had never even thought about it.

Or perhaps, simply, she just loved monkeys.