A Harmattan Soliloquy

I read a description of the harmattan winds that calls them “cool, dry winds“. It makes harmattan seem almost benign, like a cool breeze one enjoys on an evening out on the beach. It is anything but.

On the first day of a harmattan morning, the first thing you notice is the dust in your breath. From breathing smoothly the night before, you suddenly have to struggle a tad harder to get air into your lungs. It would at least be worth it if the air is the one you’re used to. Spoiler alert! It isn’t! The air is thick with dust that came from nowhere (actually it originates from the Sahara but nobody’s thinking about the Sahara on a typical harmattan morning, are they?). The dust is fine and sharp and it hurts every time you take a breathe. You want to stop breathing for a bit so the hurt stops, but then you’d die so you have to continue hurting to live. Now that I think about it, that’s a pretty great description of life in general. But I digress.

Next thing you notice is the thirst. No, not on your tongue; on your skin. Your skin is suddenly as dry as its ever been, even though you bathed and moisturized your whole body the night before. You need to take a bath. And now! Restore normalcy. It’s a trap! Don’t do it! For when the water hits your skin, the cold bears its teeth. Raw, biting cold attacks your skin like stones flying at you from the tires of a car spinning on rough, dusty road. The funny thing is it doesn’t matter if you bath with hot or cold water. Harmattan is a patient bitch. She will have her pound of flesh. You’re just delaying the inevitable if you decide to use hot water. And the cold does bite more. What’s curious though is, we usually associate cold with wet. You don’t expect to step out of the bathroom feeling like you just stepped out of a freezer only for your skin to become as dry as sandpaper as if you haven’t had water on your skin in weeks. If you don’t take action within seconds, harmattan applies the coup de grace, a white sheen that rapidly spreads all over your body, officially inducting you as a living member of the white walkers.

My first real experience of the harshness of harmattan was when I went to the boarding house in a school in the north of the country. Prior to this, harmattan season just meant a visit from the severe rheumatic pains that attacked my lower limbs, rendering me immobile and bedridden. But harmattan in the south is no match for harmattan in the north which starts earlier, last longer and is more unforgiving. My overarching memory of harmattan in the north will probably always be my first one. In a new environment, under weather conditions I was not used to and was not prepared for, I quickly developed a cold. Once, on a particularly cold morning, when we were being led around the school on an orientation tour, I stepped aside from the group to clear my runny nose. Perhaps, I should have waited for the whole group to pass before doing that. In my opinion though, it still did not warrant what happened next. A girl who I would later know as Jessica looked at me with disgust, like I was scum of the Earth. “I am only trying to breathe here, Jessica” is what my face said and I’m sure my mouth would have said if I wasn’t too busy trying to get air into my lungs. It had more effect than I would have anticipated at the time. I hated Jessica almost the entirety of high school.

Now, the harmattan barely lasts as long and isn’t anywhere near as intense as what it used to be. Maybe it’s the fact I haven’t been to the north in a while. Or maybe I’m just growing old. I heard – and read – somewhere that time moves faster as you grow older and one possible explanation is that you have no new experiences of the world relatively and so everything just blurs into one dreary experience. Perhaps that is what is driving this nostalgia. What are your experiences of harmattan?