Before I talk about the sweat inducing experience that was meeting Linda’s family, I would like to say that dating at ALA was twice as harrowing. On a global scale, American social norms are outstandingly liberal, and the rules and conservatism infuriated me at first. A senior faculty member told me that in his 17 years of teaching, he had learned that people from my background and people from Linda’s did not go well together. Convincing some of ALA’s older teachers that public hand holding is okay would have been like trying to convince the orcs of Mordor to play Wii table tennis as my favorite avatar, “Mr. Cuddle-Bunny the Lavender Tulip”.
On the other hand, most African parents would never send their children to ALA if it did not have conservative rules, and many of the students find PDA disrespectful. The school should not change its rules. One of the major lessons I learned this year is “When in Rome, do like the Romans”. Or in other words: “When you’re the visiting minority, suck it up and adapt.”
Anyway, back to the Senegal trip.
To Americans, meeting a girlfriend’s father is like meeting a rather stern uncle, or maybe the mayor. Linda’s dad is from Lebanon though, and to the Lebanese it’s more like meeting Lord Sidious after you’ve stolen his light saber. To make matters worse, I was the first boyfriend that Linda had ever brought home, she was the first-born child, and I was staying in her father’s house for 4 days.
In my head, Linda’s dad was an angry, unshaven man with a potbelly and massive arms, and he stayed up late into the night brooding with a knife and a whetstone. He was probably going to set me Herculean challenges to prove my worth.
I arrived at Dakar airport at 1am, but my bag did not. One hour later, I trudged outside and heard someone call “Liam?” He was tall, and unshaven, with a slight belly. He had colossal arms.
“Where’s your bag?” he boomed.
“Portugal.”
Linda was not at the airport, so the journey home started quietly. Mr. Rebeiz seemed determined to drown out the silence with his SUV’s engine though. He accelerated through every corner, and showed a blatant disregard for what would normally be considered lanes. Fearful that a high-speed collision would kill me before I had a chance to complete “The 12 Tasks of Ingvar”, I put on my seat belt.
Linda’s dad looked at me through the rear view mirror and chuckled at my terror. He pressed a button on the CD player.
"There's a fire starting in my heart...
Reaching a fever pitch it's bringing me out the dark!"
He listened to Adele. Everything was going to be all right.
********
A week later, we went to stay with Linda’s mother, and I employed a plan that has been used on matriarchs for centuries: I would make her children happy, and eat all of her cooking. It was an almost flawless tactic. Almost.
Linda’s brothers loved my magic tricks, but Marina, who is three, saw me hugging Linda and decided that I was violent sadist. Every time she saw me she put her hands over her ears and stared at me with huge fearful eyes. She backed into the corner whenever I approached. I soon drowned in a misery that can only be brought on by the thought that “small, innocent children hate me”. I was evil.
Three days later, Marina forgave me and gave me a long lecture on who owned which shoes on the shoe rack. That night, I ate three plates of spaghetti bolognese.
********
I was not ready for the biblical size of Senegalese families, and an avalanche of relatives almost crushed me. I saw grandparents, aunts, uncles, great grandmothers, cousins, more uncles, and more aunts. One of them, Tatie Anne, invited Linda, her cousin, and me to dinner. She was welcoming, complemented my onion chopping skills, and said I was funny.
Yet it was all a façade.
The next day, Tatie Anne called up every living relative she had to give her opinion on my existence. It was too early for Linda to have a boyfriend; I wasn’t the right person; I spelled the beginning of Linda’s complete and utter moral decay. The last one was a bit much. I wasn’t the upstanding Senegalese man that Linda’s family had always dreamed of, but I was not ethically putrefying.
My suspicions are that Tatie Anne was at least partially opposed to my cultural background, since she had never cared about Linda's previous relationships. I hadn’t encountered so much resistance to my race since Linda and I walked through the malls of Jo’burg.
Not too many Arab-Black-White-Asian couples in South Africa.
All in all though, I survived. During my three-week trip, only 2 people disliked me, and neither of them was the father! The difference was that Marina was open about it:
And Tatie Anne was not.
If only we were all as honest as children.
No comments:
Post a Comment