Marriage.
One twist of the hook,
and there it is:
a whole new fabric.
A young Gogo woman of central
Tanzania
can expect with judicious bidding
to fetch some fifteen scrawny
cattle
and a pack of shaggy goats for
her relations.
Then she will leave her mother’s
house
to become her husband’s property,
his kin’s.
She will leave her mother behind
and reside forever after
among her husband’s people.
The Gogo are but one of a host of
tribes
whose position in the cattle belt
of central Africa
lies midway between
the
matrilineal and patrilineal.
Descent passes through the
brothers of females
but theirs is patrilocal
marriage.
This I learned in my anthropology
class
but it will be a while before
its meaning will implode in me.
Likewise the impact reading for a
history class
of the travels of a German
princess
who journeyed by coach to Russia
to become the betrothed of the
future tsar.
The distance in space and time
between Sophie Augusta Frederika
Anhalt-Zerbst
of Stettin and the Gogo girl
ensconced with her future husband
in the chamber of her mother’s
compound
cannot begin to be measured
yet the connection if gossamer,
clung enough to make me
want to brush it aside.
want to brush it aside.
First, the image of the Gogo girl:
naked with her fiancé proudly
tumescent
in her mother’s chamber,
her dark skin anointed,
aglow in the light of the oil
lamp,
as flies buzz around the cow
pats,
and brass bells tinkle on the
goats and cattle.
And from the other classroom:
a filmic sequence of the
fourteen-year-old princess
bundled in sable pelts,
sailing on her imperial sleigh
through virgin snow that twinkles,
quartz-like, in the moonlight.
Princess Sophie Augusta
Frederika,
daughter of a minor Prussian
prince
and overly-ambitious mother,
a Holstein princess herself,
is destined for greatness,
empress of the land,
but not before surmounting the obstacles,
the first of which her painfully dull
betrothed.
The Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich,
if Peter’s own grandson,
is no more a Slav than Sophie
but loyal to Prussia and Luther’s
church,
German to his military bootstraps.
Sophie, on the other hand, makes
the perfect immigrant,
applies herself to Russian,
forsakes Luther,
and commits herself unstintingly
to her adopted
people.
Naturally, I envied her, if it is
possible
to envy a historical figure.
The pangs of homesickness never
seemed to pierce her,
nor was she daunted by the ways
of her new country,
this vast and barbarous nation.
As I did, she buried herself in
study,
devouring the texts of antiquity,
Cicero, Tacitus, Herodotus,
and gobbled up the philosophes of France.
She wrote to Voltaire and
Diderot,
and they in turn wrote back.
She was grooming herself for the
throne,
although no one but she imagined
she would sit on it one day,
up there on
her own.
And what were my hopes then?
To be a teacher, I imagined,
would be enough
to make a woman of me,
tumescent husband notwithstanding.
No longer did I nurture other
dreams,
when I dared to be a singer, or an actor.
A child, I had tried my hand at
stories,
but would settle for a calling
homelier, less fanciful.
I shared her unquenchable
curiosity
but little of her discipline,
let alone ambition.
Yet in dusty, draughty Dickensian classrooms
I learned of the Gogo’s bride
price,
with women like cattle
in savannah-belt Africa
the principal means of exchange;
and that Sophie not only changed
her country,
her religion, but her given
name.
Becoming Ekaterina, Catherine,
and spent her lavish allowance
(thirty thousand
rubles no less)
creating alliances, securing power,
a strategy pursued on a grander
scale
when on the throne herself.
And yet how the humbled me
disapproved of her shenanigans!
Still, those clinging connections -
at first no more than dreamily
imaginative,
though soon it emerged
from beneath the specific
ornamentation
of our specific, separate
cultures:
this quiet insistence,
but growing ever shrill and louder,
the images flaring of the three of
us:
the Gogo bride in earrings and lip
inserts;
Sophie bundled in
her sables;
and lonesome me, scribbling in my
classrooms,
taking hurried peeks at the
sunshine
streaming through the dusty
transoms.
Sara, what a fabulous poem. The Gogo girl and the Empress, such a great story and I love the contasting mental images you draw.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Susan. Again.
ReplyDeleteinteresting!
ReplyDelete