dancing and mourning

I was in the clinic at the far end of the hospital this morning when I heard the drums begin to call. Voices raised in ululation beckoned me back to my ward, and I followed the sound of the singing.

As I walked the length of the ship, the hall was deserted save for a woman clad in a hospital gown, a faded lappa tied tightly around her waist. She moved slowly away from D Ward, her eyes on the floor, hands clasped tightly behind her back. I passed by, drawn by the tumult spilling from the open door.

Inside, the room was alive with the kind of vibrance I've only ever found here in Africa. Translators and patients clapped and stomped and played any instrument they could get their hands on, from bongos to cowbells to rattles pieced together from bowls and scraps of metal. At the head of the room sat Sietou, resplendent in a bright yellow dress, her headdress piled impossibly high above a beaming face. The swirl of noise and music pulled passersby off their courses while nurses from the operating rooms and the other wards paused in their work to stand at the door. Everyone was gathered to celebrate her, to watch her dance.

Sietou's story is familiar in its heartbreak. Her parents died when she was young. She got pregnant, and the baby died inside her, tearing her apart and condemning her to the life of an outcast. She had another baby, but when she went to his father for money, he turned her away, threatened her with a cutlass, told her he'd cut off her head if she ever came to him again. So she's been alone, and she's been wet. For eleven years she's been living on the fringes of society, leaking urine from a body that betrayed her in her moment of greatest need.

Today, Sietou danced. She laughed and she sang and she hugged and she danced. And her chair, when she left it again and again to take her place in the whirling crowd, was dry.

And out in the hall, the old woman walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, the lappa around her waist slowly growing wet again as she shut her ears to the sound of a celebration she had no part in.