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| Many Africans admit that their elaborate funerals impose heavy burden on families, but no law compels anyone to attend |
As the CBC tells it, his wife HAD to go to a funeral.
Now let me pick up the rest of the story : she left a four year old alone, so naturally her husband HAD to leave NB to visit the child and then, for some reason, he HAD to go back to work in New Brunswick right away, without first self-isolating.
I come from a generation where many of our parents were too poor or perhaps too sick to go to distant funerals of even their closest relatives : people understood, people accepted.
There is, in fact, no law in Canada that compels anyone to attend funerals - and I am willing to bet there is no such law in the Congo either.
Why then did the CBC say the woman HAD to go ?
I suspect it is a form of unconscious racism from both the writer and their editors : somewhat along the lines of “those colored folks from the Congo have some pretty funny ways - they probably HAVE to attend those week-long funeral ceremonies or they are cast out of the tribe forever..., etc etc”.
I admit the cast of custom is indeed strong, but tens and tens of millions of overseas Africans don’t have the money to go home for funerals, Covid or not, and their families accept that reality.
The woman - equally - could have said to her folks back home, ‘I can’t take my kid or leave her alone and my husband cant help, due to Covid and his job. I send my regrets, love xx’
I haven't gone to a funeral yet I'm 34. Saying that my wife chose not to go to a funeral when she was a young woman that was her choice, families don't always share the same metaphysical beliefs after all. Saying that she would support her family in their shared grief in her own way? Well she might as well have been throwng acid in their face. Being in a family is to a large extent being inside that whale Orwell talked about nothing from the outside effects it. The outside world in some important ways may barely exist. A creak of unorthodoxy or dissent from inside the whale that can reverbrate like a blast from a stick of dynamite. Not all families are equal, I'm sure theres that utopia of a family out there somewhere but most of it is closer to the utopia the communists talked about just beyond the mountains. That heaven on Earth Joseph Stalin was creating. I've learned that to break off the chains of some forms of totalitarianism even if you are braced, prepared and up to the task can be a personally damaging experience. Almost makes me wish they had been silken threads made out of women's beards, the footfalls of cats, mountain roots, bird spittle, bear sinews and the breath of fish but they weren't and aren't. No one should act in a way that causes other people to die to go along to get along it's literally our moral duty to do the opposite of that. Doing so is performing the ESSENTIAL Fenrir act of shattering the chain for the sake of freedom and decency. Make no mistake if THAT chain shatters it explodes and pieces of it that don't fly into your body and shred deep into your meat, bones, spirit and mind fly so high that they:ll rain back down on you like bullets and do what the madman Dicken's thought poor people would do to each other if they ever decided to protest their conditions: "the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head like wax…" in some distant universe 1000 years from now, you'll reconstitute yourself from that ooze better and stronger for it, though you may find that shrapnel is somehow part of you now as essential as your hemoglobin and probably as ubiquitous but most people do not have that resolve. So people die in the streets dragged sometimes hundreds of meters by drunk drivers or others die of viral pneumonia as their blood turns to jelly despite a firehose of warfarin. In the end I'll guarantee you all those dead strangers will bother you a lot less than just being a passive acceptor of evil and so I imagine guys like me, maybe guys like you for all different reasons unique to our own life, use ourselves as a heavy bag rather than sit back to barbarism or prevarication. We'll be in a minority because it's simply easier to do otherwise. Some kind of mental law of thermodynamics now that I think about it. Maybe some of us are like parrotfish( wasn't it?) and were I to drop off one in the chattle eyed herd would take a look around and just *poof* be a contrarian. We don't need to be any more complex than a fish observing its environment changing sex on a dime based on local conditions. Like Laplace reportedly said while presenting his modal of our solar system to the court.(when asked where the all mighty mover was). "It can work without that assumption" one can hope. If you decide to not go to a funeral if that sort of thing is the "normal" thing to do, the good Christian thing to do in your neck of the woods (the decent family thing to do!) I suggest you read that entirety of Scott Atran's work on how to negotiation with terrorist around their SACRED VALUES. As even rational appeals and over compensations like "monetary" incentives cause explosions. Ie; based on that I bet an offer of X more time grieving to avoid funeral (sacred value,) will backfire. Good luck with that. (What crazy mind magic do throw into this blog? It always has the curious effect of making me want turn into a firehose of words!)
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