Kwenda Na Ulele-Ngoma (To Go With The Forever Dance)
Her bright yellow kanga, the same color as the warm Pineapple Fanta in my right hand, was accented with large pink forms that reminded me of tadpoles. I imagined that if she moved the right way the waving of the cloth would make them swim like real ones. But in this moment, her body was as still as her lips were silent. A crowd was gathered around her: men, women, no children. They were milling about and talking quietly amongst themselves as I walked through them, no one interacting with the breathing statue in the midst of them even as she silently served as the epicenter of the surrounding activity.
Something was wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but the scene was gaining some sort of invisible momentum as I walked through it, a palpable energy building to… something. It’s strange what you can sense, even through the barrier of unshared language.
Just as I passed the women in yellow, I turned back to glance at her. At this range, she appeared older than I originally thought. Reddish curls tinted with old dye framed her lightly wrinkled brown face, her eerily large pupils staring unblinking through me. Then, something clicked. Consciousness spread across her face as the culminating moment arrived.
Pink tadpoles swam past me as an old women chased a dead man.
The crowd began to follow. First a trickle, then a flood. The sound she made brought me back to the sounds women old and young made in dark, curtained family rooms and bright, sunny cemeteries when my uncle Taffere passed away. I didn’t know her, but I knew what it felt like to know her.
The first person to reach her was not one of her family or friends, but a passerby on a motorcycle, intercepting her before she reached the small morgue that sat between Korogwe District Hospital and my research building. She swung wildly, struggling to break free as stranger and kin alike wrestled her to the ground.
Eventually, she settled for sobbing against the grass, clutching clumps of earth while the rest of the crowd reached her. As they packed her into a nearby bus, one of the researchers who also worked at the hospital told me that a very young man had died in a motor vehicle accident that morning. They were here for the remains.
The one thing I failed to notice throughout the scene was Per.
Per is an engineering student from Copenhagen. This is his first week in Tanzania. He’s just here to visit his girlfriend, another Danish student doing research here in Korogwe. He wanted to get a soda, so I went with him to the store down the road to translate. It didn’t occur to me how different the entire occurrence must have been for him until he asked, wide eyed:
“What the fuck was that?”
I had seen and heard Ethiopians, particularly Ethiopian women, grieve before. The deep thumps as they beat their breast, the piercing wails that make your chest tighten, the sound of the deceased’s name bouncing off of your eardrums over and over again. This wasn’t surprising to me.
But to him, it was frightening. Confusing. In a comparatively reserved and quiet Scandinavian culture, where drawing attention or sticking out is frowned upon, this kind of display was almost incomprehensible. Even in the U.S., when I’d attended the funeral services of a friend’s father, the loudest it ever got were the muted sounds of somber Catholic hymns.
However, what has always surprised me is the suddenness with which the grieving can begin and end. Mourners approaching the household of the closest relatives to the deceased will chat normally up to the door, then suddenly burst into near hysterics, almost as if an on switch had been flicked. Every day in Korogwe, families come to the morgue and wail as they attend to their lost loved ones, only to suddenly become silent as they walk away. I wasn’t surprised by it anymore, and I kind of understood it. But as someone born and raised in the U.S., there was still some sort of barrier hindering me from truly being one with some aspects of my family and people’s mourning process.
It occurred to me that night how cyclical life can be as I watched The Lion King, my favorite childhood movie, while wedged between three Swahili speaking children. The culminating research paper of my high school experience had been about the ways different cultures dealt with death and dying. Here I was in the midst of the research thesis that my last three years of college had been building up to and preparing me for when death and culture collided once again in my life, this time on a dirt road in Tanzania. Earlier this semester, excited to be doing what I had dreamed about for three years as I worked through the International Health curriculum, I arrived in Korogwe, Tanzania trying to consolidate my interests in neurology and mental health and my preceptor’s focus on malaria. We settled on seizures caused by malaria fever and behaviors and beliefs related to the condition. Last week, while looking through old papers I had written, I found the very first short piece I had done in my first semester at Georgetown for my Introduction to International Health course. I had wanted to find a way to incorporate my interests in infectious diseases, the brain, and Sub-Saharan Africa, and so I wrote about the link between cerebral malaria and epilepsy.
It’s funny how things work out sometimes.
