Losing touch
So I went to a funeral the other day which almost erupted into a fistfight...
I've been really reluctant to write much lately because I'm already staring at a computer for hours every day at the video-editing studio that we've hired to make our informational short. "We" being six Americans (including me) and Kwabena Danso, the organizer of the student group that we're making the video for. The video will be used, hopefully, for fundraising efforts in the US. I've been spending the bulk of my time hanging out with Danso lately, because for one thing we really get along and seem to have the same sort of personality (touchy, passive-aggressive, worried about everything, disapproving of everyone, and overwhelmingly paranoid, for starters) and for another thing this project means we have to work together almost every day. The project itself will hopefully come to fruition soon, in which case I'll either write about it or continue to not write about it. This is the website for Danso's group, but it's sort of unimpressive at the moment. (Danso is an honestly brilliant man, but he doesn't really know HTML, which explains why the generic Tripod pictures are still listed under "Club Photo Album"; as far as I know, there are no happy, pudgy Jewish families in Yonso. There's also a photo of me trying to dance, which I'm willing to show solely because the other Americans trying to dance look even more like gnarled trolls than I do.
Danso is possibly my favorite person in this country (in a several thousand mile radius, actually). He might come to visit me in Arkansas, even, depending on whether or not this visa application business works out. Danso's mother is dead and his father has never been in touch with him (his father lives in Italy, doing something, but whenever I try to ask Danso about this part of his life, he screws up his face and says "I don't CARE about him", and that's the end of it). He was mainly raised by his moderately destitute grandmother in a rural village, Yonso; all of this means that to the American embassy, he lacks "sufficient ties to his country of origin" and he could be turned down again for a visa. He was last year when he applied, but this year he'll have the added bonus of a letter of invitation from my mom (and thank you very very much for that, Mom). Fortunately, he's lucky enough to have made connections at University, and a wealthy private sponser of the student organization (which Danso founded) is willing to supply the bank statement also required by the embassy. (A lot of the students here at the University of Ghana have actually been to the U.S. or the UK because a lot of the students here at the University of Ghana are lucky enough to have at least one relative with a bank account big enough to meet the regulations of the American or British Consulate. Really, that's the basic requirement to apply for a visa: a bank statement showing you have at least X amount of money to hedge as a sort of bet that you won't disappear as soon as you get to London or New York. In a way it makes perfect sense and in a way it's one of the sickest things imaginable.)
I hope, I hope, I hope that Danso gets to come see me. I've been to his village twice now, both times with our mutual friend Nick. (Incidentally, almost all of my friends here -- both foreign and Ghanaian -- are male, which is pretty unsettling. I've always liked to think I maintain a decent ratio of male and female friends, at least somewhere in the 60-40 range, and suddenly I feel too...male. I need platonic estrogen.) Both times in Yonso, the name of his village, were some of the best I've spent since arriving here. And then there was the funeral...
We weren't in Yonso for the funeral itself, we'd came to town to meet with a man who could possibly help us with shipping donations of books and school supplies from the US to Ghana. But, Danso had insisted that we attend the funeral as well since we were in town, and we were quite curious. We'd woken up around 7:00 that Sunday morning to find everything appropriately gray and wet, and Danso's 10-year-old half brother Bernard knocking on the door. "My brother cannot come and he wants you to come find him," he said, smiling shyly. Danso had slept at his family's home in town, while Nick and I had spent the night in the house belonging to the wealthy hotel owner whom Danso is buddies with; this house stands on the outskirts of the village and is completely empty for most of the year. It's pretty common, maybe even expected, for rich people who are originally from this or that village to build homes in their village and yet continue to live in Accra or Kumase, the big cities in Ghana. Of course, that's largely because the state of roads and communications (and the economy) in places like Yonso makes it virtually impossible for businessmen or professionals to live there. Anyway, so this rich guy had let us stay in his big, unused Western-style house with it's big, beautiful, manicured lawn and live-in security guard -- and all because of Danso, and the fact that Nick and I are trying to help with the Students' Union's efforts to improve the village schools. All in the name of philanthropy. And it was all in the name of altruism that we agreed to stay there and sleep in comfy beds. Let's move on...
So Nick and I drank some Milo (a chocolate malty breakfast drink made by Nestle that is ubiquitous in Ghana -- "The Food Drink of Future Champions!" say all the billboards, with no apparent respect for Wheaties' copyright laws) and hit the road. We walked in silence on the packed red dirt of the road. I was wearing the only black T-shirt I own, one that I unintentionally stole from Megan McMillan a long time ago and which is slowly fading into a gray rag because I'm not so hot at hand-washing clothes (I'm sorry, Megan). It says "Bob Dylan" on the front and "Number One" on the back, with some profiles of galloping horses. I'd turned it inside out and methodically chopped out the shirt's tag with a rusty kitchen knife that I found in the empty pantry of the empty house, thinking that I probably shouldn't be wearing Bob Dylan to a funeral -- but when we ran into Danso on the walk into town, the first thing he said was, "Why are you wearing your shirt wrong?"
"Well, it has text on it," I explained
"No, no." He made a gesture indicating I should turn it around.
"At least it doesn't say 'Touche'," observed Nick, which is what Nick's black T-shirt says beneath a picture of a fencing foil, and is indeed, I reflect as I take off my shirt, a pretty poor choice of words to wear to a funeral. Danso himself is wearing a black T-shirt that I suddenly realize is advertising another funeral of another person (these are not uncommon around here, I now realize -- some folks' families apparently order customized T-shirts advertising the time and date of their loved one's funerals).
So after a half mile of walking, we finally arrive at what Danso refers to as "my family's house," which is where the funeral will take place. (This confuses me because he's called at least three separate houses as "my family's house", and aside from his grandmother and his little brother, I have never been clear about which of Danso's never-ending parade of aunts and uncles and cousins and in-laws lives in which house. In any case, he seems to dislike most of them.) I guess I should mention at this point just who the funeral was for -- according to Danso, "my dead aunt." He kept saying this all weekend, and although I have never been a big fan of semantically tip-toeing around the topic of death, it got a little odd. Not "the deceased" -- "my dead aunt". "Benji, I would like you to meet the mother of my dead aunt," was an actual line at one point, as I embarassedly shook the woman's hand. It's really hard to precisely define, though, the technicalities of Danso's relationship to the deceas-- his dead aunt. I still am unsure about the ins and outs of Ghanaian family structures. (For example, we learned at University that your mother's sisters aren't "aunts", each one is your "mother", while your father's sisters are indeed "aunts", as are other female relatives of a certain generation or bearing other certain relationships. Another example: on another occasion, Danso introduced a fifty year old man to me, saying "this is my son.") But whatever his relationship, Danso didn't seem particularly close to this woman, so there was no need to worry about offending him. In fact, he seemed to regard the whole funeral as a big hassle.
So we arrived at the house, Nick and I sticking out like sore, pale thumbs among the scores and scores of mourners, and we passed into the courtyard where enormous speakers had been set up and the deceased [Danso's dead aunt] was laying in state. Nick and I followed Danso around the circle of seated men and women, shaking hands and trying to look solemn, although considering the highlife music blaring from the speakers and the group of drunken, laughing young men dancing in the midst of the gathered family, it wasn't at all clear how we should be looking. We followed Danso to the casket and awkwardly filed past it, feeling incredibly intrusive (but hell, we were invited). She looked mildly swollen among the heaps of lacey white fabric. And so we sat down with Danso amidst all the black-robed men and women.
I watched the group of young dudes dancing, puzzled and oddly annoyed. "Who are they?" I asked Danso, gesturing.
"Yeahhhh...young rascals from Kumase," he said in his gravelly, mid-range monotone, sounding angry. (Kumase is the second biggest city in Ghana, about an hour from Yonso and the home of Danso's dead aunt.)
"So is it normal for them to, um...dance and drink and laugh like that?" I asked, first eyeing the young dancing guy sporting 70s shades and a slick black shirt unbuttoned to show his wispy chest hair, then examining the rows and rows of mourners, most staring straight ahead, some with seeming apathy and others with what looked like contempt or hostility for the dancing boys.
"Yes," said Danso, "it's normal to dance at a funeral. But those boys, they were trying to start trouble last night. The young rascals."
We kept waiting, and I started glancing around at the house. I was intrigued by the place, with its inner courtyard, its many rooms and doors, its multiple dilapidated verandas, its walls painted a variety of garish colors, everything covered in a layer of grimy age and dirt. It looked almost abandoned, or would have if it hadn't looked so relentlessly lived in at the same time. I glanced over at Danso; to my horror, he was playing video games on his cell phone. At his own aunt's funeral. I nudged Nick and we exchanged the by-now familiar what-the-fuck-is-going-on-oh-well-just-accept-it-and-keep-moving glances. And after waiting for awhile longer, the whole gathered assembly stood up and moved outside the courtyard for the funeral itself. The speakers were moved, the casket was closed and moved, and the service began. Of course, it was all in Twi and Nick and I understood nothing.
Danso abandoned us as soon as we got outside, off to take care of some business presumably. We were left sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in a sea of unreadable faces. The music began pumping again, first recorded music and then later from various acapella singers bellowing out songs (again, mostly in Twi) through static-ravaged microphones and doing a remarkably good job of staying on key. The dancing really began in earnest then, with many more people joining the young rascals from Kumase, who were still frolicking around the casket with a demeaner that could only be described as lascivious. The majority of people remained seated, though, watching the dancing. And then...I don't know what happened. Someone was speaking into the mic, talking about something religious sounding (names of Biblical books stood out like rocks in an ocean of melodic, incomprehensible Twi) when I noticed an altercation on the other side of the funeral area. One of the "young rascals from Kumase" was yelling at a woman who was glaring back at him. The speaker continued on with his eulogy as more and more people began to get involved in the burgeoning conflict, speaking loudly and urgently, either trying to take one side or the other or else patch everything up. Who knows? Someone pushed someone else, and suddenly the young rascal is being dragged away from a much larger guy evidently connected to the woman in some way and who seemed to be visibly swelling with rage...
In the end, conflict was averted and the young rascal stomped away, turning around periodically to shout more things at the crowd. Nick and I exchanged another glance. Another thing we'll never know about. And then Danso reappeared and told us that he was tired and wanted to leave the service, right in the middle of another speech (by a flamboyant preacher in a purple shirt getting vehement Hallelujahs from the crowd). Yet another glance with Nick. Is it rude to leave during a funeral? Or to mess with your cell phone? Maybe it's totally ok. Or maybe it's not, and Danso just doesn't give a damn. Maybe nobody else gives a damn that Danso doesn't give a damn. Or maybe they do, and Nick and I just can't tell. What about fighting with the deceased's family? Some people sure didn't seem to think it was ok. Or maybe it's just that this culture has less rigidly defined parameters of what's acceptable at occasions like funerals. Maybe. Maybe I know nothing!
And so we walked out in the middle of the funeral and went home to eat lunch.
I've been really reluctant to write much lately because I'm already staring at a computer for hours every day at the video-editing studio that we've hired to make our informational short. "We" being six Americans (including me) and Kwabena Danso, the organizer of the student group that we're making the video for. The video will be used, hopefully, for fundraising efforts in the US. I've been spending the bulk of my time hanging out with Danso lately, because for one thing we really get along and seem to have the same sort of personality (touchy, passive-aggressive, worried about everything, disapproving of everyone, and overwhelmingly paranoid, for starters) and for another thing this project means we have to work together almost every day. The project itself will hopefully come to fruition soon, in which case I'll either write about it or continue to not write about it. This is the website for Danso's group, but it's sort of unimpressive at the moment. (Danso is an honestly brilliant man, but he doesn't really know HTML, which explains why the generic Tripod pictures are still listed under "Club Photo Album"; as far as I know, there are no happy, pudgy Jewish families in Yonso. There's also a photo of me trying to dance, which I'm willing to show solely because the other Americans trying to dance look even more like gnarled trolls than I do.
Danso is possibly my favorite person in this country (in a several thousand mile radius, actually). He might come to visit me in Arkansas, even, depending on whether or not this visa application business works out. Danso's mother is dead and his father has never been in touch with him (his father lives in Italy, doing something, but whenever I try to ask Danso about this part of his life, he screws up his face and says "I don't CARE about him", and that's the end of it). He was mainly raised by his moderately destitute grandmother in a rural village, Yonso; all of this means that to the American embassy, he lacks "sufficient ties to his country of origin" and he could be turned down again for a visa. He was last year when he applied, but this year he'll have the added bonus of a letter of invitation from my mom (and thank you very very much for that, Mom). Fortunately, he's lucky enough to have made connections at University, and a wealthy private sponser of the student organization (which Danso founded) is willing to supply the bank statement also required by the embassy. (A lot of the students here at the University of Ghana have actually been to the U.S. or the UK because a lot of the students here at the University of Ghana are lucky enough to have at least one relative with a bank account big enough to meet the regulations of the American or British Consulate. Really, that's the basic requirement to apply for a visa: a bank statement showing you have at least X amount of money to hedge as a sort of bet that you won't disappear as soon as you get to London or New York. In a way it makes perfect sense and in a way it's one of the sickest things imaginable.)
I hope, I hope, I hope that Danso gets to come see me. I've been to his village twice now, both times with our mutual friend Nick. (Incidentally, almost all of my friends here -- both foreign and Ghanaian -- are male, which is pretty unsettling. I've always liked to think I maintain a decent ratio of male and female friends, at least somewhere in the 60-40 range, and suddenly I feel too...male. I need platonic estrogen.) Both times in Yonso, the name of his village, were some of the best I've spent since arriving here. And then there was the funeral...
We weren't in Yonso for the funeral itself, we'd came to town to meet with a man who could possibly help us with shipping donations of books and school supplies from the US to Ghana. But, Danso had insisted that we attend the funeral as well since we were in town, and we were quite curious. We'd woken up around 7:00 that Sunday morning to find everything appropriately gray and wet, and Danso's 10-year-old half brother Bernard knocking on the door. "My brother cannot come and he wants you to come find him," he said, smiling shyly. Danso had slept at his family's home in town, while Nick and I had spent the night in the house belonging to the wealthy hotel owner whom Danso is buddies with; this house stands on the outskirts of the village and is completely empty for most of the year. It's pretty common, maybe even expected, for rich people who are originally from this or that village to build homes in their village and yet continue to live in Accra or Kumase, the big cities in Ghana. Of course, that's largely because the state of roads and communications (and the economy) in places like Yonso makes it virtually impossible for businessmen or professionals to live there. Anyway, so this rich guy had let us stay in his big, unused Western-style house with it's big, beautiful, manicured lawn and live-in security guard -- and all because of Danso, and the fact that Nick and I are trying to help with the Students' Union's efforts to improve the village schools. All in the name of philanthropy. And it was all in the name of altruism that we agreed to stay there and sleep in comfy beds. Let's move on...
So Nick and I drank some Milo (a chocolate malty breakfast drink made by Nestle that is ubiquitous in Ghana -- "The Food Drink of Future Champions!" say all the billboards, with no apparent respect for Wheaties' copyright laws) and hit the road. We walked in silence on the packed red dirt of the road. I was wearing the only black T-shirt I own, one that I unintentionally stole from Megan McMillan a long time ago and which is slowly fading into a gray rag because I'm not so hot at hand-washing clothes (I'm sorry, Megan). It says "Bob Dylan" on the front and "Number One" on the back, with some profiles of galloping horses. I'd turned it inside out and methodically chopped out the shirt's tag with a rusty kitchen knife that I found in the empty pantry of the empty house, thinking that I probably shouldn't be wearing Bob Dylan to a funeral -- but when we ran into Danso on the walk into town, the first thing he said was, "Why are you wearing your shirt wrong?"
"Well, it has text on it," I explained
"No, no." He made a gesture indicating I should turn it around.
"At least it doesn't say 'Touche'," observed Nick, which is what Nick's black T-shirt says beneath a picture of a fencing foil, and is indeed, I reflect as I take off my shirt, a pretty poor choice of words to wear to a funeral. Danso himself is wearing a black T-shirt that I suddenly realize is advertising another funeral of another person (these are not uncommon around here, I now realize -- some folks' families apparently order customized T-shirts advertising the time and date of their loved one's funerals).
So after a half mile of walking, we finally arrive at what Danso refers to as "my family's house," which is where the funeral will take place. (This confuses me because he's called at least three separate houses as "my family's house", and aside from his grandmother and his little brother, I have never been clear about which of Danso's never-ending parade of aunts and uncles and cousins and in-laws lives in which house. In any case, he seems to dislike most of them.) I guess I should mention at this point just who the funeral was for -- according to Danso, "my dead aunt." He kept saying this all weekend, and although I have never been a big fan of semantically tip-toeing around the topic of death, it got a little odd. Not "the deceased" -- "my dead aunt". "Benji, I would like you to meet the mother of my dead aunt," was an actual line at one point, as I embarassedly shook the woman's hand. It's really hard to precisely define, though, the technicalities of Danso's relationship to the deceas-- his dead aunt. I still am unsure about the ins and outs of Ghanaian family structures. (For example, we learned at University that your mother's sisters aren't "aunts", each one is your "mother", while your father's sisters are indeed "aunts", as are other female relatives of a certain generation or bearing other certain relationships. Another example: on another occasion, Danso introduced a fifty year old man to me, saying "this is my son.") But whatever his relationship, Danso didn't seem particularly close to this woman, so there was no need to worry about offending him. In fact, he seemed to regard the whole funeral as a big hassle.
So we arrived at the house, Nick and I sticking out like sore, pale thumbs among the scores and scores of mourners, and we passed into the courtyard where enormous speakers had been set up and the deceased [Danso's dead aunt] was laying in state. Nick and I followed Danso around the circle of seated men and women, shaking hands and trying to look solemn, although considering the highlife music blaring from the speakers and the group of drunken, laughing young men dancing in the midst of the gathered family, it wasn't at all clear how we should be looking. We followed Danso to the casket and awkwardly filed past it, feeling incredibly intrusive (but hell, we were invited). She looked mildly swollen among the heaps of lacey white fabric. And so we sat down with Danso amidst all the black-robed men and women.
I watched the group of young dudes dancing, puzzled and oddly annoyed. "Who are they?" I asked Danso, gesturing.
"Yeahhhh...young rascals from Kumase," he said in his gravelly, mid-range monotone, sounding angry. (Kumase is the second biggest city in Ghana, about an hour from Yonso and the home of Danso's dead aunt.)
"So is it normal for them to, um...dance and drink and laugh like that?" I asked, first eyeing the young dancing guy sporting 70s shades and a slick black shirt unbuttoned to show his wispy chest hair, then examining the rows and rows of mourners, most staring straight ahead, some with seeming apathy and others with what looked like contempt or hostility for the dancing boys.
"Yes," said Danso, "it's normal to dance at a funeral. But those boys, they were trying to start trouble last night. The young rascals."
We kept waiting, and I started glancing around at the house. I was intrigued by the place, with its inner courtyard, its many rooms and doors, its multiple dilapidated verandas, its walls painted a variety of garish colors, everything covered in a layer of grimy age and dirt. It looked almost abandoned, or would have if it hadn't looked so relentlessly lived in at the same time. I glanced over at Danso; to my horror, he was playing video games on his cell phone. At his own aunt's funeral. I nudged Nick and we exchanged the by-now familiar what-the-fuck-is-going-on-oh-well-just-accept-it-and-keep-moving glances. And after waiting for awhile longer, the whole gathered assembly stood up and moved outside the courtyard for the funeral itself. The speakers were moved, the casket was closed and moved, and the service began. Of course, it was all in Twi and Nick and I understood nothing.
Danso abandoned us as soon as we got outside, off to take care of some business presumably. We were left sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in a sea of unreadable faces. The music began pumping again, first recorded music and then later from various acapella singers bellowing out songs (again, mostly in Twi) through static-ravaged microphones and doing a remarkably good job of staying on key. The dancing really began in earnest then, with many more people joining the young rascals from Kumase, who were still frolicking around the casket with a demeaner that could only be described as lascivious. The majority of people remained seated, though, watching the dancing. And then...I don't know what happened. Someone was speaking into the mic, talking about something religious sounding (names of Biblical books stood out like rocks in an ocean of melodic, incomprehensible Twi) when I noticed an altercation on the other side of the funeral area. One of the "young rascals from Kumase" was yelling at a woman who was glaring back at him. The speaker continued on with his eulogy as more and more people began to get involved in the burgeoning conflict, speaking loudly and urgently, either trying to take one side or the other or else patch everything up. Who knows? Someone pushed someone else, and suddenly the young rascal is being dragged away from a much larger guy evidently connected to the woman in some way and who seemed to be visibly swelling with rage...
In the end, conflict was averted and the young rascal stomped away, turning around periodically to shout more things at the crowd. Nick and I exchanged another glance. Another thing we'll never know about. And then Danso reappeared and told us that he was tired and wanted to leave the service, right in the middle of another speech (by a flamboyant preacher in a purple shirt getting vehement Hallelujahs from the crowd). Yet another glance with Nick. Is it rude to leave during a funeral? Or to mess with your cell phone? Maybe it's totally ok. Or maybe it's not, and Danso just doesn't give a damn. Maybe nobody else gives a damn that Danso doesn't give a damn. Or maybe they do, and Nick and I just can't tell. What about fighting with the deceased's family? Some people sure didn't seem to think it was ok. Or maybe it's just that this culture has less rigidly defined parameters of what's acceptable at occasions like funerals. Maybe. Maybe I know nothing!
And so we walked out in the middle of the funeral and went home to eat lunch.