African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [176]
She says the pattern is only superficially the same: she does not mean, either, the difference in standards of living. It is no use, she says, judging things by what is happening now, you have to look at the history, too. When she was growing up, there were four wives, each one married properly, according to form. A woman who is not married is seen as a prostitute or a loose woman. Her father had to marry the wives of a brother who died. Not until his fourth wife did he love a wife.
‘Our custom is that a brother’s widow must be married to a surviving brother; this is a good thing, because it means women are supported, but it is a bad thing too, because they are not loved by their husbands.’ I ask if the four wives got on. At first Sylvia says yes; then she admits that she has never heard of the wives of one man being real friends. Though they might pretend to please the husband. ‘Polygamous marriages are bad for women,’ she says at last, making an admission she would rather not make. When people these days say ‘our customs’, ‘our culture’, you are intended to take it seriously, even when they are seeing these phrases like unsafe life-rafts in a stormy sea.
I was lying there in the dark, listening to the women all over the building talking, laughing, splashing and singing in the showers, and I was thinking of the man who had to marry three women not chosen by him, before he could marry one he loved. But it was not possible to mention this. What atmospheres forbid you to say, an invisible clamp on your tongue, can often tell you how stupid you are being. This was not a nice dispassionate chat about cultural differences, nor could it be. Sylvia was too unhappy, a heap of misery just the other side of the partition, because of this failed marriage, when she was so afraid for her own.
A New Yorker joke came into my mind: a boy of about fifteen in his first grown-up suit approaches a worried-looking rather drunk man at a party, saying, ‘I don’t know if you remember me? We met here last year: I am your son by your third wife.’
But I couldn’t tell her this joke; the atmosphere forbade it. She would not find it funny…well perhaps it wasn’t funny…was there something wrong with me, to find it funny? If so, then what did this say about ‘Western’ culture? What jokes could Sylvia tell me that I would find shocking? But Sylvia was not telling me jokes, not that night, not that trip.
Next morning began the week’s work. Every session was introduced by a little play that encapsulated a problem, rehearsed for a few minutes after breakfast. Then there was dancing, a song. Everyone joined in.
Most of the problems were familiar from last year. There were two, provoked by the existence of the women’s book, that were–so Cathie and Talent said–really revolutionary, and challenged the fabric of ‘our culture’, ‘our customs’–and were bound to cause opposition. One was that babies are automatically registered in the name of the father, ‘who then goes to one woman after another, and we have no legal control over the children we bring up. Sometimes we don’t see the father for years, but by law he can just turn up and take the children.’ And another, ‘Why should land automatically be registered in the name of the man when it is the women who do all the work?’
And there is another new theme. Last year no one mentioned AIDS, not once, in the meetings, but the government propaganda is being effective, for a sketch by one of