November 22, 2008
November 22, 2008
Ghana Journal: Mad. Martha
Mad. Martha lay on her deathbed in the center of the family living quarters. The furniture had been removed so that the viewing would go smoothly as the two thousand or more people solemnly filed through the room and paid their respects. Mad. Martha wore her wedding dress from fifty years ago including the delicate white lace gloves. She had been dead since the beginning of August. It was now mid-November. In the interim her corpse had been stored in a refrigerated morgue so that the preparations for the funeral could be made. It had taken this long to raise the money and to contact all the family members around the globe and schedule their flights to their small ancestral village of Salt Pond along the coast of the Sea of Guinea.
Four klieg lights on stood in the corners of the large empty room, while three floor fans set on high futilely attempted to mitigate and disperse the heat from the lamps. Mad. Martha lay in exquisite splendor as if she was a head of state, and in a way she was. The people of Salt Pond called her Mad. Martha, the honorific being an abbreviation for madam, not a commentary on her state of mind. At seventy nine, she had been the matriarch of the famed Allotey family whose members include the nuclear physicist Francis Allotey, who face has graced a stamp in Ghana. I was here as a guest of Francis because I am a friend of the physicist Dr. Carl-Eric Eriksson, a friend of forty years, and biochemist Dr. Magdalena Eriksson, daughter of Carl-Eric and friend of Francis. In Ghana, friendship, no matter how tenuous, holds bonds strong as steel. Even though I had arrived at the last minute and uninvited, my presence was not only welcomed effusively, but I was accorded all the rights of close family members, including a room at the local hotel, a place at the family table, and mourning clothes made especially from cloth in the family print.
Just before midnight Carl-Eric, Magdalena and I entered the reception room where Mad. Martha was laid. Immediately, the three videographers swooped down on us to record every our step. Our presence as white Westerners clearly provided concrete evidence of just how far Mad. Martha’s influence reached, well beyond the confines of Salt Pond and the borders of Ghana. This needed to be documented for family members to revisit in the years to come. We entered on her right side and circled counterclockwise. The bed was elevated, as if it were an alter, two feet off the cement floor. At first, I was hesitant and too embarrassed to look closely. A three-month-old corpse was not something I would under normal circumstance choose to examine. But as the videographers zoomed in on my face to capture what they interpreted as grief, I realized that not to look would perhaps be disrespectful.
Though I couldn’t estimate how tall she had been in life, Mad. Martha had clearly been a large woman. She made a significant presence laid out in her blindingly white wedding dress, which seemed not to have faded one iota over the years. Her dark, deeply black skin contrasted against the white fabric making the dress shimmer and glow under the bright lights in the middle of the night. At first glance her face held the lineless bloom of youth, a real tribute to the artistry of the morgue technician. As I stepped closer, though, I noticed strange, illogical lines on her face. Her brow and the corners of her mouth and eyes where I would have expected the signs of eight decades were as smooth as polished onyx. Instead, deep fissures erupted over her cheeks and vertically along her neck. These cracks were as deep as half an inch and gave the skin a texture of marzipan, reminding me more of the figures on display at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Musuem than a woman full of life’s vigor. It was clear that Mad. Martha’s face and neck, the only skin exposed, had been covered with thick layers of makeup to give her as lifelike a look as could be replicated. The misfortune was that the heat and humidity had done its own damage. In the few hours since Mad. Martha had been removed from the refrigerated morgue, perfectly sculpted, whatever efforts to restore her countenance to its original majesty had been reversed by the harshness of Salt Pond being located just four degrees above the equator. Even at midnight, the temperature hovered above ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Hours later when I mentioned this to Carl-Erik, he said, “I could not look at her closely. It felt too much like a violation. I didn’t recognize her face.”
