The Baptism isn't a Track Meet, it's a Marathon.

So as many of you have heard, we have a new baby in our house! Many of you have probably wondered why I have been continuously dehumanizing said baby by only calling it “BABY” or “IT.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is a reason for my cruelty: the baby was born on January 13^th, but until the baptism party on February 11^th, the baby remained nameless. Some families have no qualms broadcasting the baby’s name before a baptism, but my family kept it on lockdown. I continuously tried to trick them into telling me, but to their credit, they kept the name a secret until the special day.

I’ve written about baptisms before, but I was really excited about this one because it was MY family. Not only did I want to see how this party would be different from the village baptisms I’d been to before, but I was really curious about the family dynamics that would unfold.

The baby’s mother is my host sister Mame Sumari, who is 18 and does all of the cooking in our house. She’s lived here since last January when she married my uncle, and while I think she is one of the sweetest people in the house, she’s kind of the resident scapegoat. In Senegal, it’s pretty standard for the older women to lounge and berate the younger women for not working hard enough or moving fast enough. I can only imagine that the younger ones only absorb this abuse because they know that someday, it’ll be them running the show and yelling at everyone. But yes, Mame Sumari is often criticized for sleeping too much and acting tired, which makes perfect sense to me since she works all day doing manual labor and has been pregnant for the past 9 months. I was interested to see how everyone was going to treat her on her special day, what many people had told me is the crowning achievement in a young woman’s life: the baptism of her first baby.

In the morning, everyone woke up super early to eat laarj, an oatmeal-like dish with raisins, sugar, and yogurt. My family had excitedly told me that I had to get up because the imam from the local mosque was coming. I was into that. But yeah, then he showed up and I remembered that I was a lady and aka would not get to hang out with him. So the imam and the men hung out and prayed to spirits of dead, male relatives, asking for blessings and forgiveness for the new baby. Most of the women cooked, but Mame Sumari went to the neighbor’s house to get her hair and makeup done. Because I am lazy and wanted to watch her transformation, I followed her there.

What happened next was this:

It took 3 hours. And as I watched, I remembered that she had not one, but two outfits for the day. So they dolled her up for 3 hours, only to wash it all off and reapply completely different colors a few hours later. The process was crazy! It involved tar-like black paint that worked as hair gel, hair dye, and glue, glitter painted into the parts of her hair and as a faux nose ring, and enough fake hair to hide a small terrier. But I loved the hair at the end. It looked good.

Senegalese special occasion make-up, on the other hand, is something I have trouble getting into. I am quite aware that different cultures have different standards of beauty, and maybe if I stayed here long enough, I would start to like the beauty regimen of Senegalese women. But if that day came, it would mean that I did things like shave off my eyebrows and color them in purple, wear hot pink eyeshadow and fake lashes to match my outfit, accentuate my lips with colors like purple and green to further accentuate my outfit, and bring it all home by powdering my face so heavily that I resembled a person from another race. But this was not my baptism party, and every one else, including Mame herself, was beyond satisfied with the makeup. When she was finished, all of the ladies at the party escorted her around the house, singing, clapping, and chanting things like, “Come look at the beautiful lady! Come watch the beautiful lady! She is a mother!”, even taking off their shawls and lying them on the ground in a gesture to show how humbling her beauty was.

After lunch finished at 5pm, I was exhausted, so I took a little nap. I figured by about 9pm, the party would be wrapping up and I’d be home free. But little did I know... the party hadn’t even started yet. Silly toubab! At 8:30pm, Mame’s entire extended family rolled up to the compound in two giant, 40 person vans. I’d been sitting quietly in the corner of the living room, and the crowd soon enveloped me. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by about 80 women, on chairs, couches, and the ground, ready for the REAL baptism ceremony.

Here’s how it went down: A select group of older aunts ran the show. I was a little confused to see how basically none of this ceremony/show focused on Mame, the baby, the grandmother, or even my host mom, who threw the party and will probably be like a de-facto grandma. No. A random group of aunts that seem to have very little connection to anyone dominated the group, dancing, flashing their vaginas at each other (this is something older women love to do here... hard to explain, but the entertainment value seems to be similar as to when a group of 50 year old women get drunk on wine and talk about sex in America... you know, just good times!), and displaying all of the presents. The aunts went through the presents one by one, announcing what they were, singing a song about them, demanding money from people, and then, occasionally, just giving the presents away to other people. I found it all incredibly confusing. There were also griots there, Senegalese men who attend celebratory functions for certain families specifically to sing traditionally songs. One of the griots yelled at me when I tried to take a photo of him, despite the fact that the women next to me was filming him with a CAMCORDER. So on top of my confusion, I was also dealing with prejudice.

The gift extravaganza went on for hours. I started hallucinating that it would continue all night. But in my unfocused dizziness, I couldn’t get over how different this party was than ones in America. Other than her makeover, it seemed to me that Mame was mostly ignored. Personally, as someone from an ego-centric culture, I felt offended for her. But I wondered if she even though anything of it. Maybe she even liked the fact that it was her party but everyone ignored her. Senegal: the ideal place for people who hate being the center of attention! Because the spotlight will always be stolen by your loud, singing, overbearing aunt!

But once I was able to safely escape to my room and sleep with my earplugs (necessary since they all ate dinner at 1am and partied into the night), I was able to appreciate a lot of what I’d seen. The dancing and singing was fun, and all of my sisters clearly had a ball visiting their cousins and friends and dressing up together. And in the morning, when everyone had finally left and the compound was quiet, I went to see Mame and her baby – who I finally discovered was named Astou, a beautiful name – and she had the baby dressed in the outfit and hat I’d given her, wrapped in the blanket I had given. Out of all of those presents, mine was the one she chose to use first. I couldn’t help but feel really happy about that. I don’t know how to do any of the dances or songs, but I think I am part of this family.