Haitian Wedding

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the Sacre Coeur Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince for a special treat: the wedding of my coworker Rosy Auguste.



Beautiful, isn't she?



I don't expect to see a lot of weddings in my time here. From what I've seen and heard, they don't happen very often. There's definitely not a wedding industry the same way there is back home. I believe that Seattle has something like three different wedding magazines. Seattle Bride and Seattle Wedding and that kind of nonsense. Rosy, on the other hand, had to wait for her mother to visit the United States, where she bought the wedding gown and brought it back to Haiti.

I can't say that weddings are rare. On the whole, there's plenty of Haitians getting married. But doing the whole official wedding thing doesn't seem to be a big "must" for most Haitians. This may be due to economics; weddings are pretty expensive no matter where you are. But at the same time, Haitians both rich and poor place a very high priority on baptims and funerals, often going way into debt for the sake of these social and religious obligations. But when it comes to marriages, there is a much more relaxed attitude.

This could be because dating is taken very seriously, there's nothing casual about it. Haitians don't generally "date around" much. They refer to their boyfriends and girlfriends as "menaj," which comes from the French word "ménage" that usually refers to a married couple. There is no step below menaj. You don't work your way up to menaj. Once you've declared that someone is your menaj, it's assumed that you are quite serious, perhaps even living together as if you were married. Perhaps with children. Women in relationships like this are often referred to as the "madam" or wife, of their boyfriend. Men, however, don't earn the title of "mari" or "husband" until they produce a ring. There's also a fairly common practice of men who are already in relationships taking a "ti menaj," or "little girlfriend" or two on the side. This double-standard is a Latin America-wide phenomenon, and some would say it's much less common in Haiti than in some of it's Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking neighbors.

But maybe there is a real split between Haiti and the rest of Latin American when it comes to marriage. Whereas abortion is completely illegal here, much like other Latin countries, divorce is as easy as can be. The laws are incredibly accommoding. Steely Dan even wrote a song called "Haitian Divorce," owing to the fact that there used to be a sort of niche market for "divorce tourism" here in the 70s. North American couples that wanted to untie the knot without all the legal fuss could get it done in an afternoon, and then stay for the weekend and come home tanned and ready for life as a single once again. Haiti is to divorcing what Las Vegas is to getting married. You can even get a unilateral divorce here, no matter how much your poor spouse protests.

But like I said, weddings still happen all the time, and I'm sure they're usually as lovely as the one I saw. It's especially interesting that Rosy chose to have a traditional wedding considering this: her father was a prominent houngan, or voodou priest, who had several madams. Rosy was the last of the thirty children he fathered. We've never spoken at length about it, so I don't know if her mother had a traditional catholic wedding or not, but I would guess not.

* * *

I also wanted to follow up on one of the comments to the last thing I posted here, about sayings in Creole. Matt shared one of his favorites, which I totally should have included the first time:

M ap kraze rak
I heard this a few times in my office before asking what it meant. A "rak" is a big bunch of trees, or a small forest. The phrase "m ap kraze rak" literally means, "I'm going to destroy a forest." People say it when they're about to leave somewhere. "Whoa, look at the time, I'm going to destroy a forest." The idea is that you're going to take off, you're going to hit the road, you're getting out of there at full speed, and you'll be going so fast that there won't be any trees left standing near the path you blaze.

My friend Almarie e-mailed me about the phrase "anpil bet" or "lots of animals" referring to wisdom. Whereas I thought it had to do with valuing wisdom as much as livestock, she had a more enlightened understaning: "my theory is one more based on animism, and on all the animals really being there, talking, with input, like in mythical times." A couple of days ago, a friend used the phrase this way, "moun sa a te gen anpil bét nan tét li." Translation: That person had a lot of animals in his/her head" -- which means "that person was incredibly wise." In light of this, I think Almarie has it right.

These are a few of my favorite things...

...that Haitians say. I've said before here that Haitian Creole has a lot of colorful expressions, perhaps to offset the utter simplicity of the grammar and vocabulary. Here's some of the more interesting expressions I've learned in the last few weeks:

Tèt nèg
Literally, it means a black man's head. In normal conversation, it's used to describe something that's expensive. If Haiti had Starbucks, you'd probably hear someone say "You're getting a frappuccino?! Those things are a black man's head!" The expression probably goes back well over two hundred years, to the days of slavery, when saying that something cost as much as a human being may have been shorthand for "it ain't cheap."

Radyo trant-de
Or, Radio 32. It's another way of saying "the grapevine." Why number 32? Because there's 32 teeth in most people's mouths. "What? Those two hooked up? That's crazy! Where did you hear that?" "Oh, you know, Radio 32!" I don't know if I've ever seen people that love talking as much as Haitians, which of course means that they're also terrific gossips. I can attest to this by the fact that I've heard at least 4 other expressions for "the grapevine" in addition to Radio 32.

Bèt
A friend of mine, a Haitian journalist, was recently in Geneva for a human rights seminar. When he got back I called him up and asked how it was. He replied. "Li te vreman enteresan. Te gen anpil bet la." Translation: "It was really interesting. There were a bunch of animals there." Huh? I got off the phone with him and asked one of my coworkers about it. He just laughed and said, that's a way of saying a lot of useful information was shared. "Bèt" comes from the same latin word that gives us "beast" in English. Here, it refers to any animal. Insects are called "ti bèt," or little beasts. But in the context of a classroom, a seminar, or a long conversation with a wise person, when you say that there were animals there, or that a person had a bunch of animals, or that you gained a bunch of animals, you're saying that you learned a lot. This has become one of my favorite sayings; my theory is that it reflects how much Haitians value knowledge. Since animals are a form of wealth for most Haitians, it means that learning something new is like someone handing you a nice fat pig. But that's just my theory.

Depi berejenn goumen ak konkonmb
This one is rare, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. When something has been a certain way for a long time, Creole has a couple ways of remarking on it. You can say "se konsa", or "that's how it is." You can say "it's been like that since the king was a colonel," which has a nice ring to it, even in English. Or you can say "se konsa depi berejenn goumen ak konkonmb." Which means, literally, "it's been like that since eggplant fought with cucumber." I've asked people to explain this to me, and so far everyone is at a complete loss. Of course, those are some of the best expressions, the ones that nobody can figure out, though we go on using them, like habits we don't remember picking up.

Sa ki pa touye w, li angrese w
"What doesn't kill you makes you fatter." I'm not sure if this means the same as, or the polar opposite from "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." It could go either way.