Afghan Wedding

A few days ago, we were fortunate enough to be invited to the wedding of O's colleague's sister. Her fiance had just come back to Afghanistan, having been denied asylum after six years in England. This, as the vast majority of Afghan marriages, was arranged by the bride and groom's parents--the happy couple had in fact never met before the night of their wedding. Engagements are often arranged when the bride is very young; and the payment of "bride prices" for daughters can be an important source of income for poor families. (For more about this common, slavery-like practice, read this article in the NY Times). This wedding, however, involved two very wealthy families by Afghan standards. Thus its elaborate nature.

Weddings are a very big deal here, perhaps because it's as much a business transaction as it is a family celebration. Loans are taken out, hundreds of people are invited, and women spend days caking on makeup at beauty parlors. Who would have thought that Kabul has as many wedding shops as bakeries? In the capital, most weddings seem to take place in one of the space-age-like wedding halls that have popped up around town in the past five years. They are all concrete blocks covered in green or blue mirror glass, and they come decked out with eagle-shaped fountains (without water) and blinking neon lights, sometimes in the shape of palm trees. As these Las Vegas wannabes sit in the dust amid century-old mud houses and garbage dumps, however, they fail miserably in their attempts to be glamorous. On our way to the wedding, I snapped this picture of a newly built wedding hall. Though it has yet to be blessed with neon lights, please note the shops selling hubcaps on the ground level.
We stopped on the way to buy flowers for the couple. Flower shops here cater almost exclusively to weddings and wedding parties, and almost all of the colorful creations are fake! Why buy real roses that fade when you can buy plastic ones from China that will stay red forever? I wouldn't have any of it, though, and made sure to find a bunch of real, albeit somewhat wilted and sad-looking, flowers. And then the bride showed up holding a bouqet of fake lilies. Bride and groom walks in, the woman in green is the bridesmaid holding the Holy Koran over the bride's head. In the background is a television set showing what is going on in the men's section--men and women celebrate separately, on different floors of the wedding halls. Related men may visit the women's party, but no woman--not even the bride--ever goes into the men's section. According to my spy on the other side, the man's party was a bit of a drag, and it ended hours before the women's party did. The bride is supposed to look sad the entire night, and she has to cry as she leaves the party with her new husband. Why? Because she is leaving her family, with which she has lived her entire life. She now has to go live with her husband's family, even if the husband is living or working abroad or in another city. O's colleague said yesterday that since the wedding, he had been home crying with his parents because his sister was gone. "Does her husband's family live far away?" O asked symathetically. "No, just across the street."
The wedding cake, of which the 500 men saw nothing as it was housed and consumed in the women's section, was a study in tackiness. It had at least three tiers, five miniature bride-and -grooms, plastic flowers galore, and an inexplicable flourescent orange figurine in the center. It was almost too cheesey to be true. I cannot speak for its relative culinary value, however. Who knows, maybe it was delicious.

At first, everybody was afraid of me: I was the only foreigner, the only blonde, the only woman not wearing glitter. Within an hour or so, children were pulling my hair, teenagers were telling me to get up and dance, guys with video cameras were filming me as I was doing nothing but sitting on a chair. One of the highlights was getting to know Sharifa, the only other woman not wearing a vail, who is Afghan but lives in Sweden with her husband and two insanely cute little daughters. See picture: It was an amazing evening. Boring, for sure, and the food, service, and music were terrible. But it was such a bizarre setting that I enjoyed every single moment. I still feel like I have very little in common with Afghan women, and I still don't really know what to talk to them about, but at least now I have some insight into their world.