Ghanaian pre-funeral drumming rites

Note: photo link at the end of this entry, for you illiterate types who want to skim...

I was invited last night to attend the first part of a funeral, or rather the wild drumming and dancing party that precedes the actual funeral itself. I don't know what the Twi word for the ceremony is, hence the mouthful of a title I have for this entry.

I agreed to go having no idea what to expect. Visions of me drinking coconut milk through a straw, sitting in plastic lawn chairs and watching performers in traditional garb dance and chant to drumming music flickered through my head for two seconds, but mostly I didn't think much about it ahead of time. I sort of thought it would be a show, like going to the Polynesian Cultural Center, as a comparison for those of you who've been to Hawaii.

Um, no. I should have known that in Ghana, they don't do the whole bystander thing.

I arrived via taxi in Latebiokorshie, a borough in western Accra, where the ceremony-party-celebration was being held. Through the window of my cab, I saw a group of 20 or so men, little boys around 5 or 6 years of age and younger and middle-aged men singing and chanting, beating drums and other tympannic instruments, blowing whistles, and shooting off firecrakers from long rusted metal cylinder cannons. They danced around and around in a tight circle, right there in the middle of the street, stopping traffic coming from both sides, and the the blaring of car horns melded into the music and voices, completely filling the night. All around, leaning on street posts and peering out of shops and houses, neighbors stood and looked on, chatting over Guinnness and Star beers, their laughter and shouting interspersed between more solemn conversation.

The deceased, I learned later, was a 22-year old man from the neighborhood who was killed in an automible accident last Wednesday. A few color ink-jet fliers were passed among the crowd, the colors blended and splotchy from the rain.

"WHAT A SHOCK," the headline on the poster read. And beneath those words was a picture of the young man, dressed in a Western suit and tie, staring unsmilingly and seriously out the right margin of the poster. Beneath the photo was printed his full name, although the Ghanaian sounds have slipped my mind now.

The ceremony had been going on since seven, and I arrived a little after eight. A little after I got there, the group of people started moving up and down the streets and roads of Latebiokorshie, pounding on drums and shooting off firecrackers in every section of the neighborhood. Seriously, no wonder everyone is fit and muscuular here. It was seriously like a neighborhood-wide aerobics class out in the dark and the rain. Everyone in America would have passed out by now, and not from the beer I mean.

A makeshift marching band joined the group, huge white Western drums we played in high school and two trumpets too. I thought of Jen when I saw the trumpets. The little children and men pulled, up and down the streets, dancing and singing to traditional songs. I danced in my lame Americanish way, but I didn't know the words and the languages so I couldn't sing.

We passed through each part of the neighborhood, officially announcing the death to everyone, although I'm sure everyone knew already. More halted traffic, more blaring of horns, but the drivers didn't seemed startled or shocked, or even amused. Just mildly impatient, but not really. They understood. So it goes: life, death, and life again.

Some of the younger boys danced wildly in the middle of the streets, inches in front of the oncoming traffic, performing acrobatic stunts and blocking off the taxis and tro tros. I was almost expecting an older Ghanaian woman to break apart from the crowd, and come rushing out to chastise these wayward kids, who were about to kill themselves exactly the way the young man died but last week, exactly the way I almost died a year ago. Ironic, I thought, and I didn't really know how to feel. The events of last year came back to me again, and I thought about what would have happened if I had gotten killed by that car in Hyde Park. Not a single car in Chicago would have stopped for me, no one would have danced in the streets. The whole event would have been a most somber and depressing affair.

Yet, I don't think one should be tempted into believing that Ghanaians are somehow less able to feel grief and pain, that they live inherently happier and more carefree existences than we do. Desensitized? There was just another funeral last week, I was told. The 20-something year old woman died of a stomach ailment. And already another funeral so soon. So maybe it's desensitization, but mostly I think that the bottles of beer that were freely passed around and the singing and dancing and the Christian lyrics that were belted out in Twi and Ga -- well, wasn't all this just another way human beings cope with the mind-blowing and incredible losses that happen over and over again, the pain that just doesn't stop as long as human beings are alive on this earth, as long as we remain human enough to think and feel? Is it possible, though, that those of us that live in the West, despite our cognitive behavoral therapy and Prozac and rehab resort facilities, really have not found the secret panacea to human desperation and sorrow? Maybe we don't have all the answers in the end, and that it is us that needs to be pacified and taught. Strange to contemplate, and wholly wonderful too.

As we went up to doors and shop fronts, more neighbors joined the group, and even a bunch of women eventually came out to join us. I don't think I've seen so many women in one place before in public during my stay in Ghana, dancing and singing freely, laughing and shouting just like the men. It made me feel incredibly shy to be around them, because I didn't know what they would think of this lone obruni lady, and in the past I've been glared at and given the silent treatment by Ghanaian women, presumably for stealing their men. But it wasn't like that at all here. A girl my age, or maybe a bit younger, started shouting and screaming and ran up to me and grabbeed my waist and we danced crazily together a couple of times that night.

A middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Peace, grabbed my hand and danced with me at the head of the pack for most of the second half of the evening. I welcomed her company, as she kept off the flocks of young men who wouldn't stop pressing themselves against me, and also quelled the swarms of school children that wanted to walk next to me. She was a large women, dressed all in bright red clothes, and she wore a matching head scarf too. She told me to stop dancing so hard, that I would tire myself out, but mostly I think she needed to talk a walking break.

It occured to me how crazy I must have looked, the only "white" person within miles of this place, dancing wildly with all these Ghanaians with their drums and whistles and firecrakers and homemade posters of the man who had died. It just did not make sense to me at all, and my laughter at myself and the whole situation dispersed into the noises of the night. Nonesense, all if it, when I tried to think about it and justify it and fit my experiences into some sort of coherent and larger theory. But when I relinquished that need to process and analyze, and simply let myself be, everything fit into place, and this piece of life suspended in time suddenly made a whole lot of sense to me.

The cars kept coming, and the dancing still happened, and somewhere out in this world another person was getting hit by a car, maybe in Accra or Chicago or Honolulu. But still everyone here was singing and dancing, and I was dancing too, and I think that night I allowed myself to let go just a little bit more. That night of dancing out in the rain and mud did for me what I look for in endless sessions of psychotherapy and hours and musing and writing and soul-searching. I came to accept myself a little but more that evening, and realized maybe somewhat more what it is to be human -- vulnerable in both body and mind, but with amazing capacilities and capacities too. And all of these strange contradictions and ironies and incongruencies, I let them all simply be so that I could simply be too.

It was a really good night full of authenticity.

"I like these people," Kojo told me after it was all over. "Everyone here is really real."

So as it turns out, nothing I experienced last night was remotely like the Polynesian Cultural Center at all.

Check out the accompanying photos here. Compliments to Kojo for taking them.