OK, I didn’t actually faint. But I was on the verge. You know that feeling when you stand up too fast, you start to feel dizzy, and your vision sort of goes black. It was like that, but a bit more extreme.
Iraque’s sister’s husband died, so we came to Xai-Xai for the funeral. It wasn’t a particularly hot day, maybe about 80, but the humidity was awful. Also, there I was, the only little white girl, in a Mozambican cemetery surrounded by hundreds of the man’s closest friends (he was actually a pretty important guy, provincial director of the ministry of health, owned a few properties and a few businesses, a few wives, so the place was pretty packed.)
When a Mozambican person dies, it isn’t just a funeral, wam bam thank you ma’am we’re finished. The first few days, friends and family pass by the house of the deceased in order to visit the family, pay their respects, say I’m sorry, etc. A few days later, is the actual funeral, and then about five days or a week after the death, the whole process concludes with the flower planting ceremony. Rather than laying cut flowers on the grave, which will only wither and die within hours, they plant flowers in the ground that covers the casket. As a result, the gravestones almost seemed out of place as the cemetery was a veritable tropical garden paradise.
The funeral, which was on Sunday, happened in stages. First we went to the man’s house, where everyone crammed in under a massive army tent in order to escape the hot rays of sunshine. Prayers and some other things in Changana that I didn’t understand were said, and finally there was a procession to view the body. I declined.
Next we caravanned to the cemetery to place the casket in the ground (fun fact: in Mozambique, or at least Xai-Xai, you don’t just buy a burial plot and leave the person there forever. The family has to continue to pay indefinitely or the body will be dug up and disposed of. Can you imagine? “Oh shoot, we have to pay for great-great-grandma to stay in the ground this month”).
More than the fact that it was hot/humid and the cemetery was crowded, there was no sense of personal space. Some old woman kept shoving her massive boobies up on me, and I just couldn’t escape.
Then, mid-service, under the pressure of hundreds trying to catch a glimpse of the casket, there was a minor roar from the crowd, and a sudden swarm of people pushing and falling over each other. It was like when your at a concert and everyone is pretty crammed together, then the artist comes out and everyone just goes crazy and jumps all over each other trying to get as close as possible to the artist. I felt like Bon-Jovi or Britney Spears or something as the hoard headed in my direction.
I quickly realized that it wasn’t in fact my star power drawing the masses towards me, but that a big cement wall, crippling under the pressure of the hundreds of onlookers and three days of heavy rain that had preceded the event, had crashed over. Luckily no one was injured, but the solemnity of the event was fatally wounded. Hymns and tears were replaced by chattering speculation and apprehension over a possible snake sighting where the wall used to be.
Any Mozambican you ask will tell you it was the surprise over the whole wall incident that caused my own fall only a few minutes later. I blame the big old lady boobies and a general lack of air and water.
“Iraque, I need to go.”
“What? Huh?”
Then my vision went completely black, and I leaned into Iraque, holding on for dear life as I expected my body to go limp at any minute.
“Iraque, I think I am going to faint, I need to go.” I proceeded to have a massive wave of anxiety as I wasn’t sure if I used the correct word for faint in Portuguese, and that he thus wouldn’t understand me, and I would be fated to fall amidst the crowd of close-standers in their Sunday best.
I am pretty sure I scared the poor guy half-to death. For one, because people around him keep dying – the year before last his father, last year his sister, this year his brother in law, I think he was pretty sure I was about to follow them. He said to me later, “if you had died there, I don’t know what I would do. And also, the Americans would kill me.” I assured him the Americans wouldn’t kill him, but he is pretty convinced that all Americans will think he is a terrorist because his name is Iraque.
Luckily he understood my plea and led his momentarily blind little white girlfriend to the shade. I was coherent enough to hear the grandma’s discussing the best place for me to sit ( they decided that shade and ventilation were both necessary) and arranging a capulana on the ground for me, but I literally couldn’t see anything, just blackness.
Thank heavens, once I was in the shade the blackness cleared into sort of fuzzy patches of light, and then actual sight returned. However, I remained shaken and confused as I sat on that capulana in the Mozambican cemetery.
Now, a week later, thankfully all is well, I am alive have my vision. I have only been pointed to on the street a few times amidst explanations, “that’s the girl that fainted during the funeral. She was surprised because there was a wall that fell.”
Ok miss gossip, that’s a lie, I didn’t even actually faint all the way.
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