Yemeni weddings

Here in Yemen, the men and women hold their celebrations for a wedding seperately. Best I've been able to tell, there's not much variation in the syle of wedding celebrations. What's different from one wedding to the next is simply how many people are invited and how many days the celebration lasts. The wealthier you are, the more people and the more days are involved. Some people have a wedding celebration only for a day. Others, I've been told, can last up to seven.

Two days ago, a few of us spent a few hours at a women's wedding celebration for one of the women who works at the school here in Sanaa. The women's celebration involves all the women sitting on the low, close-to-the-ground "couch" type seating that is common in gathering rooms all over Yemen, then broadcasting the music that is live at the men's celebration. Sometimes the women get up and dance, sometimes they sit and chew qat or just talk. When the bride shows up, there is lots of clapping and shouting and dancing, and she sits on a very elaborate bed at one end of the room while the other women dance around her. The bride herself is done up in a white dress with far so much sparkle (as is the Yemeni tradition), an elaborate amount of henna, and a lot of make up that includes essentially white foundation that, with all due respect, makes the poor woman look a little fake. I've heard that this is also quite common - when the women here want to look very done up and beautiful, they opt for white foundation because they think to look white makes them more beautiful. Rather sad in my opinion because they are beautiful just as they are and the white foundation doesn't help in the slightest, but not like my opinion is going to change years of tradition, right?

The men, on the other hand, gather outside with drummers and someone playing a flute or similar wind instrument, pull out their jambias and engage in a large amount of very energetic dancing. It's quite enjoyable to watch. It's also common for more than one wedding to be celebrated at a time, as was the case in the wedding celebration we visited in Ibb yesterday. Weddings are very expensive in Yemen, so celebrating them together helps cut down on the cost. In Sanaa and the close surrounding areas, the man who is getting married pays for all the costs of the wedding, including giving a large sum of money to his wife for jewelry and other things. In some regions more north apparently the tradition is that the women's family first gives a large sum of money to the man, then the man pays for the wedding. I'm not sure if this practice is limited to certain tribes or if it's more geographical in nature. At any rate, the Sanaa practice (according to one of my profs) is one of the reasons many men here have only one wife. They can't afford more than one wedding. :)

Women are normally never allowed at the men's celebrations, but being white and a foreigner does allow you some advantages in situations like this. The men were quite happy to have our delegation that included four Western women. Heaven only knows how many videos of us are now available on some Arabic version of YouTube as I'm pretty sure that every single one of the approx 60-80 men there pulled out his phone and was videotaping us for minutes and minutes on end. Talk about the far-reaching effects of globalization. We were as strange and as worthy of pictures to them as vice versa. I also enjoyed the men's celebration a little more because the men were quite eager to talk about culture and marriage and Yemeni history and all sorts of things. The women are much more reserved around foreigners. Even with the insane amount of qat you're expected to chew and the one man who took far too much of a liking to me and about whom one of my fellow students amusingly commented "I think you're about to become someone's second wife!", it was enjoyable. After requests for my number, numerous invitations to visit his village and home and work, and an offer to visit me in Sanaa, I became more thankful for the culturally accepted excuse of "Inshallah." But I do hope you all have the opportunity to witness Yemeni style dancing for men and women. Both are different but take an impressive amount of skill, and from a very young age boys and girls learn these dances. While the men's dances are fun and elaborate, the women's dances I'm sure would make any American man instantly fall head over heels for a Yemeni woman. :) And this is probably why men and cameras are banned from all of the women's celebrations.