Today marks day number three in the
festivities of my host-sister, Hawa’s, wedding.
Weddings here, much like in America, are quite the affair. Distant relations and friends started
arriving last week to spend time with our family and pay their respects to the
village. As with any celebration in
Senegal, there has been ample greeting and visiting and lots and lots of
food. For people who live in such
extreme poverty, it is also a chance to show off some of their wealth and share
what they have with others.
Like in America, all good wedding
guests bring a gift. As my village hasn’t quite gotten to the stage of using
gift registries yet, the most common thing to bring is a bucket or benoir and
fabric for the bride to make clothes.
Counting the bride’s presents, a major part of the party, revealed that
she received more than two hundred buckets and just as many swaths of
fabric. When I inquired what on earth
she was supposed to do with so many buckets, someone explained that they will
get passed on to her husband’s family.
Women in Senegal always move in to their husband’s family’s house after
they are married and part of the party is usually loading all of the gifts (and
the rest of the bride’s baggage) into a car and driving her, along with women
from her village, to her new home. As my
sister is getting married to a man from the same village, we exchanged the car
for a few helping hands to carry her baggage over to her new house. In the coming weeks, her husband’s family
will come to see the new bride and give the couple a blessing. In exchange, the bride will pass on some of
her gifts to show her respect to her new family (If you come pay your respects
here, you can bet you’re walking away with a bucket).
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| My friend, Aminata, dancing through a crowd to deliver her presents. Gotta love that hat. |
Another
important part of any wedding is the clothes.
Yesterday, the bride showcased no less than three new outfits, all
perfectly tailored and intricately embroidered.
All decent guests also bought themselves a new outfit (including yours
truly) for the occasion and here, there are yet more similarities to American
weddings. Female guests grouped
themselves according to relation to the bride and bought matching fabric with
which to make their outfits (e.g. the bride’s closest friends all matched each
other as did the neighbor’s from certain houses, as did the visiting aunts, and
so on). Along with bringing a nice gift,
this is the most popular way to show your respect to the bride as well as
showing off how much you can afford (certain types of fabric and embroidery
patterns are more expensive than others and everybody knows what’s what) so in
the next few days the most popular gossip is likely to be about what people
were wearing at the wedding.
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| The bride and I in our new threads |
No
wedding would be complete without food, and lots of it. The next time you hear a bride lamenting
about choosing the menu for her reception, feel free to remind her that
weddings here last three days and the participating families are expected to
provide all three meals (or more) for all of their guests, those from our
village and the ones who came from out of town.
And, as you can imagine, without electricity or gas, cooking for such a
large crowd is quite the ordeal. How
women here manage it in such spectacular fashion is still a mystery to me. Yet, by 10:30 yesterday morning, I had
already been offered three meals (and to my credit, only accepted two of
them). I wish I had exact numbers but I
would guess that in the past three days my family has cooked close to 75
kilograms of onions, 100 Kg of rice, 50 Kg of millet, 25 Kg of Vermicelli pasta
(a rare treat), more than a full cow, and 75 liters of oil.
Weddings
here happen in multiple stages. This
round is merely the party. A smaller
religious ceremony that accompanied the negotiations and agreements between the
two families actually happened a few years ago but as with many things in
Senegal, the party had to wait until there was enough money to host it. Unfortunately, this means that the party can
come at an extremely inconvenient time, this case being a prime example since
my sister’s groom is out of the country working. This is probably the hardest
thing for me to wrap my head around about weddings here. I understand waiting for the money but having
a wedding party without a groom (or the religious ceremony without the bride
present, which I have also seen) is a totally foreign concept.
I’ve
learned a lot over the past few days since there wasn’t very much for me to do
except sit and observe what was going on around me. I mostly hung out with the cooks since that
is where I could be most out of the way but people were also extremely excited
to show off some of their traditions to me as well as show me off to some
guests (you still get a lot of funny looks when you’re the only white guy who
can speak Pulaar). People especially
liked to call me over when the music came on.
This wedding had a combination of a DJ with massive speakers (run
painfully loudly from a generator) and the more traditional drummers and
violinists that appeal a little more to the older generation. But no matter what music comes on, you can
find someone dancing. During the day,
the older women will get up from under their shady spots and dance around more
than they seemed capable but the music goes late into the night when it’s a
younger person’s affair. Married women
will dance separately from the men to preserve their integrity but a quick
glance over and you’ll see more booty shaking than you might expect of married
women in a conservative Muslim society.
The younger, single men are also happy to make an appearance since this
is one of the few times that there are many visitors around on whom they might
make a good impression. I’m told that
until the sun came up, people could be found dancing. Even my usual bedtime of 9pm was pushed back
to a whopping 11 o’clock so that I could partake in the festivities.
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| Women from my village drumming on metal bowls and dancing to greet the bride |
All
told, this was definitely one of the best weddings I have been to in
Senegal. But, thankfully, my dancing
days aren’t over yet. The next few weeks
are sure to see a handful more weddings as people rush to celebrate and binge
before Ramadan sets in in a few weeks.
Sorry about the long post but it’s the first one in quite some time so
hopefully that makes up for it. Happy
trails!
