I realized I never wrote about cultural events here in Senegal. We have funerals all the time, and just enough happier weddings, baptisms, and circumcision ceremonies to make up for them. Here are snippets from my journal on the four:
Funerals:
rising at 5 to eat and drink before the sun can witness. sleeping again until the somber call of the drum. pound, pound, pound. someone has died. people run around frantically spreading the news, with an urgency that seems out of place in the village, head scarves flying behind like banners from a plane. when we hear, we clap our hands over our mouths and say, "waiii neene!" and recount the last times we saw the person, how sick they were. pound, pound, pound, the drum even sounds like death. a sporadic then racing heartbeat-- and then it stops. people shudder themselves into their best clothes, women hurrying to cover their heads and take off like vengeful ghosts to the house. on the way they start wailing. a cluster of hunched men under the tree, but women file through the stick fence. like bowing or kneeling or crossing oneself in a holy place, the thing to do here is crouch and wail. this wail... it reaches the spine... like dying animals, like haunted houses, like drunken over-actors, like warped amazon war cries, like murder victims, like the deaf being amputated, like if pain could only be represented by sound, captured in a pandora's box... I could not make this sound. whether I was more afraid of offending with audible fakeness or of finding myself unable to stop once I started... I couldn't. but like magnets the tears on the crumpled wet faces that are only ever composed pull out my own tears too. hunching together on rocks or on the ground for hours and hours, stomachs protesting forced thirst, shaking hands with everyone, "Kori a munyiti? Have you mourned?" every shade or shadow found itself host to grief. the men chant, forever, it seems. how do so many know all these words? perhaps it has something to do with the other person who died today, and the 18-year-old new bride three days ago, and the last villager less than a week before. Kori hida munyiti?
pound, pound, pound. the elder women pound corn for the traditional meal for deceased elders-- the same served at infants' naming ceremonies. pound, pound, pound, they crowd around, taking turns, up to five pestels in one mortar at once. it could be an act in a talent show, a section of stomp! yet something so sad about performing this grueling daily labor even in grief. like if women in america gathered at a funeral to scrub the floor-- if scrubbing gave calluses. who are these people I share my life with who fast from the little insignificant food they have and still farm an hour's walk away in the cruel sun? who deprive themselves of water by day whether it's rainy season or drought? who pound corn while weeping for their brother or sister or neighbor? who are they and when are they rewarded?
they never cry but for funerals. I suppose they come often enough. but it's clear from the haunting wails that this is all their pain and fury and plea at once. if women cry in the regular sitting areas, they are ordered repeatedly to to to the allocated grieving spot, outside the person's hut. it sounds insensitive unless I re-translate it to, "get it out; there you go." then again, it still only allows a person to mourn for as long as their can crouch in the dirt under the hot sun.
an old gypsy-like lady with multicolored headscarves starts singing. her voice is clear and beautiful and ancient. she's like an unreal disney character, her face in a tree. she calls out in her clear voice and we answer like pacified children. people keep coming in to add howls to the background, but we keep going and it sounds and feels so comforting. "muusu reedu yoni, ko nela ameng; hadi jentidoden, ko nela ameng... muusu hoore yoni, ko nela ameng; hadi jentidoden, ko nula be ni... nawna maaya yoni, ko nela ameng; hedoden, hedoden, ko nula be ni..." (stomachaches are okay, it's what's sent to us; listen up, it's what's sent to us... headaches are okay........... sicknesses that kill us are okay, it's what's sent to us; listen up, listen up; it's ours to receive.)
women get bored during the prayers, but some men take machetes and return with bamboo and bark. the latter they bite into strips to tie the body-stretcher with two arches. when the shrouded corpse is carried out over the heads of two men dressed in white, the women leap up, their anguish reawakened in a now-or-never urgency. a beautiful young girl beats the rest of the wails, score to a nightmare. she collapses; the performance draws tears from my eyes, as do other poignant screaming staggers and the supporting hands that catch them. the hair stands on my neck and i cray because it is the only answer to the sound of all that pain. sometimes I can't even recall the face of this corpse over whom I weep. I am a stowaway to horror. today I do, and cry real tears of my own when her husband walks placidly in front, singing a prayer in a quiet but clear voice. the other men go with him down the paths, winding among huts and past my own, to the burial grounds in the woods. the women are left behind. just outside the fence, talk of fields, and breaking fasts.
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