It was a beautiful wedding. We got there late, but the service had not yet started. In fact, though only a few more entered after us, the wedding party didn’t come down the aisle for at least 45 minutes after we arrived. We didn’t see our friends who had invited us, but that wasn’t terribly unusual. About 250 people were there, a good crowd in a much bigger building. Our friends were probably hidden on the front rows with other family members or helping out with last-minute, pre-ceremony details.
We didn’t know the name of the couple getting married, which calls for some explanation. You and I know how invitation lists are constructed for weddings in the U.S.: carefully and thoughtfully, and input comes only from the bride and groom and their parents. Even grandparents rarely have any say. In Malawi things are quite different. We’ve been invited to four weddings since we’ve been here. First, a lady who works here on campus invited us to her sister’s wedding. That felt really strange and uncomfortable—we didn’t know her sister. We politely declined, but afterward were repeatedly reminded that we didn’t attend her sister’s wedding. That was our first clue that things were different here. We knew the father of the bride of the first wedding we actually attended. The announcement was made in church, of which he is a member, and he lives near the church building. It was a triple wedding, three couples tying the knot at once, but separate receptions. It seemed to us like the whole village went to the reception we attended—another clue that things were different.
Then a couple who are our dear friends at church, the Gondwe’s, invited us to attend two weddings, a week or two apart, which were for children of their relatives. Our friends were responsible for many of the arrangements for these two weddings, but that wasn’t the big factor that led to our invitation. In Malawi any member of the extended family can invite his or her friends to a relative’s wedding. And family is defined very broadly by U.S. standards. We had a conflict for the first of the two Gondwe weddings, but we were here in this Presbyterian church waiting for the second to begin. With over two hundred people ready and waiting the keyboardist practiced his rifts and adjusted this and that. The music sounded great for a few bars, but invariably broke off too early for our satisfaction.
Finally the preacher appeared and the music continued for more than a truncated refrain. The first bridesmaid appeared in a purple dress and began her slow dance down the aisle. No simple walking, this procession. The beauty of the special people in special dress with special motion for the special occasion was designed to last as long as possible. As the maid neared the end of the aisle her groomsman counterpart appeared, matching her steps up the aisle to meet her then circling her on her left and catching up to her on her right, joining her in motion up and down, diagonally left across the aisle, then right, moving in multiple dimensions at once, but always steadily toward the dais. The church we were in had no center aisle, and the wedding party moved down the left cleft in the wooden theater seats. When they cleared the forward-facing main body of seats they worked their way right, toward the center, the groomsman leaving his maid to cross to the right side of the hall. As the ring-bearer, then the three bride’s maids, and finally the two flower girls (the children accompanied by supportive adults) each did their dances down the aisle and then were joined by their respective groomsmen, two gendered companies of swaying, stepping attendants assembled at the front.
Then the music changed, and after a bit the bride appeared and began her dance down the aisle, in the company of an older lady, apparently her mother. Her progress was repeatedly accompanied by the high-pitched trilling of the tongues of the women so characteristic of African celebration, a little slower than that of Hispanics, as tongues are wagged back and forth across the mouth. As the bride neared the front, the groom appeared, accompanied by an older man, apparently his father. When they met, the trilling gained intensity, and he joined her with the same circling motion his groomsmen had used, complicated a bit by the train and the extra people in the aisle. The older couple fell back and together followed the younger couple past the last few rows. The about-to-be-weds moved to the center, the music came to a halt and then all sat in the front row.
The hymns, prayers and sermon were in Chichewa, so the scattered words I picked up meant little to me, but the scripture passages were much like ones I hear in American weddings. The exchange of rings and vows was followed by prolonged demonstration of the respective rings as each in turn was held aloft for long moments on its newly found perch for life for all present to behold, as if proclaiming “this one is now wed and I mark her/his covenant made this day”. The pronouncement of husband and wife was made, accompanied by much more trilling. A final prayer was said, and the recessional of the audience began. We watched several pass by, looking for our friends, but now both aisles were being used, so we joined the exodus and sought a spot outside where we could scrutinize the door for the emergence of our friends.
Outside we found traditional dancers, a row of women backed up by a row of men, singing loudly and dancing to the traditional drums and occasional shrill piping of a whistle. No slow swaying here! Stomping forward then backward, left then right, the steps were interjected frequently by sudden, almost violent suggestive pelvic moves that should have put several joints I hardly, if ever, use out of place. Some were left and then right, some up and forward, then back and downward, but there was no sign of back trouble in this group as they celebrated the joy of the moment.
Eventually the bride and groom appeared and puzzled from the door about how to get from that observation point past the dancers to their car, appropriately decorated with colorful puffs of paper mums and broad ribbons. The dancers seemed oblivious to everything except the insistent beat of the drums and the shrill excitement of the whistle. But our friends were not present. The building was empty, and they had not been seen.
As we made our way from there, we called our friends' adult son who was Bruce’s second language helper. “Now, which CCAP church did you say your family’s wedding was to be at, the principal CCAP in Lilongwe? We’re in Mama Kadzamira’s church in Area 12. [Mama Kadzamira is the first among Malawian women, the former ‘first hostess’ for Malawi’s bachelor first president.] Your church is not in Area 12? Which Area is it in? You don’t know? Is it in Falls Estate? Yes? Ohhh.” We had attended the wrong wedding. We talked with Jeremiah a bit about the reception to begin two hours later, but as we had headed down the road we decided not to try. We had invested a lot of energy in this cross-cultural event, only to learn that it was the wrong one, and we were a bit deflated. We decided we needed a little time together, retreating a bit from our many cross-cultural experiences. We didn’t need to try a second one today. Besides, we didn’t know the couple who had gotten married anyway—at the wedding we should have attended, or the one we actually did.
P.S. To our amusement when we went to the Capital Hotel after lunch to try to find a spot where internet connection was available, who should we see but the bride’s maids from the wedding we had attended! We had inadvertently also shown up at the reception site of the same wedding.
No comments:
Post a Comment