Last week I traveled about 2.5 hours out of town to attend a wedding for Abdoulaye’s cousin.
The Maba, like most of the tribes here, have a two-stage wedding. They first do what’s called the fateh, which is something more than an engagement party but not quite a wedding ceremony. The fateh takes place once the bride’s family have agreed on a bride price and the groom has provided at least part of the price. The price for this wedding was something around $500, several large sacks of sugar and rice, and a cow or two. This can vary greatly due to the status of the bride and her family. For the Maba, unlike some of the other tribes, once the’ve had the fateh the groom can “visit” his wife, even though she still lives with her parents. Yep, I imagine this leads to some awkwardness, but culturally it’s very normal.
After a time (months, even a year or more), when the groom has paid all of the bride price (or the bride’s family just gets tired of waiting and gives up), the second part of the wedding takes place. This part is called the “arrooz” and it involves officially taking the wife to her husband’s house. At this point the wedding is finished and they build a home of their own together. This stage also involves a big party, lots of good food, and housewarming gifts for the bride. Often large glass cases (with mirrored back panels) are bought to display the dishes the bride receives. So it would not be unusual to go into a mud brick house and find a large glass cabinet displaying fancy dishes.
Of course, all of this varies a bit from family to family, and from village to city, just as with American weddings. But this is the general process.
Back to our visit… The unique thing about this fateh, I learned in the car on the way there, was the the groom’s father was also re-marrying the groom’s mother after having been divorced from her for 5 years. So it was a double wedding! Divorce is relatively easy here, especially for men, but I’ve yet to fully understand the rules governing it. So maybe a later post on that when I figure it out. The time in the village was a joyous one, with lots of singing and dancing by the women and cheerful conversation by the men. Thursday afternoon, soon after we arrived, the actual ceremony for the son took place. The grooms’s representative and the bride’s representative recount the bride price and the amount paid so far to the men sitting on mats. The two representatives shake hands three times, one of them saying something that I can’t quite remember, and then the proceed with someone leading prayers. The prayers are presumably for the newly married couple, although I couldn’t hear a lot of it because the guy leading was speaking too softly. Others offered what seemed like spontaneous contributions. When the prayer was over (after about 5 minutes), that was it, the fateh was complete. All that was left was the celebration.
We stayed that night, at one point visiting the women and greeting them, at which point they began dancing and singing. The sisters of the groom were apparently overcome with joy that their father was returning home as well, and their songs were all about “good rains” and “crops being plentiful”, I think a metaphor for their joy at being reunited as a family. We ate lots of meat and sauce that night, slept out under a tree, and the next morning continued the celebrations with more dancing and singing, horse races, and lots of laughter. At one point during the morning there was another short meeting of the men similar to the night before, but this time for the father. He even had to pay another bride price!
Around noon we loaded up and took off for home, for me a bittersweet time. Just before leaving, I had gone with some of the men to visit the wife the father had taken while he was divorced from his first wife, and our mission was to inform the other wife that her husband had reunited with his first wife and that she was now #2. She held it together pretty well, at least until we left. They had said that when her husband had mentioned the possibility to her of reuniting with his first wife she had thrown a brick at him. After all the joy of seeing a family reunited, I was reminded of just how broken the institution of marriage is in the Islamic world. Something meant to be shared between one man and one woman has been corrupted, just like in the times of the Patriarchs and Kings of the OT, and the consequences today are just as terrible as they were back then.
