The human body is an interesting thing: a complex machine, a stubborn engine that keeps on going despite our constants attacks on it, almost a miracle that far too often we take for granted. We, as societies, have also given bodies the task to identify, classify, and place them in space. We have insisted in creating spaces for young people separated from spaces for old people; spaces for men, spaces for women; spaces for one language and not others; spaces for Black people and spaces for White people. Behind these barriers we will always find a history of elites fighting to accumulate more power: to follow the traces that separate one colourful space from the next in a map is to track the nervous channels of a global system of exploitation that has created race, private property and governments of different kind for its own benefit. That is the case regardless of the map that we're talking about, from that published by the National Geographic to the one that a woman carries as she goes on in her daily business anywhere in the world, trying to stay in the place that "belongs" to her due to her gender, nationality, phenotype and so on.

That's a very complicated way to introduce an apparently simple story that is nagging me these days. It's a story of two White people out of place, a man and a woman in a village of Casamance on, let's say, a Saturday afternoon, at around 5pm. They were with a friend of a friend (a local as dark as a moonless night) who was showing them around. It was hot, very hot, right before the rainy season. The woman, who suffered from low blood pressure and thus had a headache, walked into a store to get a Coke (which sometimes helps if there's nothing better at hand). It was a store like any other: behind a set of iron bars with an aperture in the middle was a man surrounded by cookies boxes, soap bars, bread and other things she can't remember. As his eyes travelled from the counter to the woman's hands, and from then to her face, her eyes and her hair, and back again, from his lips came three Alhamdullillahs and other words only two of the four people there could understand.

"My sister: this man here wants to say he gives thanks, this morning he felt a smell in the air as he prayed, and now he understands it was the smell of the White people."

I don't know if this store tender was using a common formula or one of his own invention, but I certainly didn't appreciate such comment. Two things came to my mind: one, that in the smashing heat it felt like ages since she had showered her body with a bucket that morning. In fact, it's very likely I stink, she thought. Two, that one of the arguments that some White people use to express their dislike for Black people appealing to nature (which is less racist than "race") is their body odour. Was I being insulted? I certainly hasn't been raised to appreciate (and less make public comments about) any substance that comes out of any of the orifices of the human body. Was that man telling me to go "fry my mother" (a common insult pronounced something like "kata san yai") far away from his store? Did he find my White and smelly body disgusting? What does one reply to "I've smelled you from miles away"?

He saw my hesitation. "Ma soeur, this is Casamance, you're in the bush. In the last 10 years I've seen war, I've seen poverty, but what I haven't seen are Alulums (White people). I hope the wind brings more of the smell of your people, which means that Casamance is finally in peace again. This is why I say that White people smell good."

To this day, I often think about that moment when my body was so out of place it seemed to be in a good place. Being in Senegal is a constant transgression of the rule of ordering bodies in space. Sometimes (particularly in Dakar) my presence is not appretiated at all. I'm like a walking lighthouse, and although I take this as a learning experience of what it is to have a giant sign on the forehead that says "foreigner" I know the implications of my Whiteness here have nothing to do with the implications of Blackness in Europe -- or maybe it is just the reverse of a very nasty coin. When that happens I try to untangle the many layers of that sentence pronounced so long ago: "White people smell good." It seems to me this sentence is a condensed pill that contains a bit of history of colonialism, the reason and consequences of the war in Casamance, the political interest in mantaining the region isolated and in poverty, the endless hope that keeps its inhabitants going despite everything else, the meaning of Whiteness right here right now and the tentacles of global capitalism which, incarnated in a bottle of Coke, manages to be in place everywhere. In short, I think of how many things we've written on a body.