(By Olubunmi Familoni) – The Nigerian Wedding: Shaming the Devil and Unrelenting Exes
The
big social event known as ‘The Nigerian Wedding’ has attained Olympic status,
in size; one only wishes the status could also apply to frequency of occurrence
— once every four years — and like the athletes, all the participating couples
would gather and get the pageantry over with within the space of those 16 days,
and we wouldn’t have to endure the frenzy of any more bridal gymnastics for
another four years.
Not being a spoilsport, but one begins to get rather
bored with seeing the same matches (most of them not ‘made in heaven’, or even
anywhere close to the skies) every weekend — even the bloody Premier League
goes on break sometimes.
I don’t even mind the weddings very much — you can
choose not to go, or to look away; but they don’t even wait for the wedding ceremony
before the photographic assault begins. And throughout the months leading up to
the Big Wedding, the pictures turn up everywhere, everywhere you turn they’re
there — turn your phone on, they’re crawling up your nose; turn the phone off,
they’re all over the papers, magazines, on the news, and billboards!
Now there’s a photo-proposal trend in which the ring is
no longer king, the photos are.
Here’s what makes my nuts itch about the entire
affair — so you make plans to pop the Q and slip the ring out, all slick as an
eel, on one knee and all that mess; then you recruit one (or ten) of your
unemployed friends to lurk in the corner with camera(s) (because in this early
stage of the silliness it would be quite preposterous to engage the services of
a professional photographer). The ones that kill me are the ‘surprise proposals’,
where the girl has her friends around to capture the teary look of ‘surprise’
on her face when she sees the ring and claps her hands over wide open mouth in
utter TV-game-show shock, blubbering like a drain. That’s cute. Well,
considering how unimaginative we all have grown, this just saves us all the
bother of thinking up a ‘creative’ proposal; all that matters is the publicity
of it, just make it public and it’s the best proposal ever — public enough to
shame the ‘devil’ (that is, the girl’s ‘friends’ and the guy’s unrelenting
ex-girlfriends).
Before the poor guy is even up from his knee, the
pictures and videos have popped up everywhere — BBM, FB, Twitter, Instagram,
Snapchat, wedding blogs, and just in case you had the misfortune of missing
them in all those places, the girl is sweet enough to email them to you, cc-ing
everybody else that thought she wouldn’t make it. Oh well, you can’t blame her,
there’s a certain level of pettiness one attains upon being proposed to.
Oh, and if you see all the pictures and don’t
congratulate her, or use the pictures as display/profile pictures, you
apparently don’t ‘mean them well’. I don’t even consider you important enough
not to mean you well. An ex hit me up early one morning with “Didn’t you hear I
was getting married?” “Oh I did.” (Even Hellen Keller would have, the way you
have carried on.) “And you couldn’t even say Congrats.” “Oh, congrats.” “Aren’t
you happy for me?” “Fam, I barely have enough happiness for myself, now I have
to spare some for your wedding? Gee, I’m over the moon you’re getting married
then.” Of course I didn’t get an invite after that. Thankfully.
It used to be that the next stage in this comical
nuptial-photography business was the pre-wedding photo shoot; then somebody
thought the pictures just weren’t enough and introduced pre-pre-wedding shoots.
The ridiculousness of it is not even in the event itself, it’s the seriousness
with which couples undertake the valueless activity, posing and preening as if
at a cockfight. The pre-pre-wedding shoots are those indoor ones, shot in the
studio, with dreadful backdrops, and the photographer pushing you to strike
those awful poses that make you look like something ghastly off old
Nollywood-romance posters. The purpose of these pre-pre-wedding pictures is
just to let the world know that it’s about to go down, and, more importantly,
to let them hoes in the shadows know that this man is ‘taken’ (you can always
tell that from how tight the clasp of her arms is around the poor fellow’s neck
in the pictures).
The pre-wedding shoot is a more elaborate affair. This
is the outdoor shoot; green everywhere, blue sky, bright white sunlight, and of
course the silly matching Punch-and-Judy clothes (I hear couples come to these
shoots with luggage enough for a thousand Vogue shoots). And the poses are even
more ludicrous here, with enough space to spread their silliness around of
course.
On the wedding day, these pictures appear everywhere —
on sky-sized banners, on all the ‘souvenirs’ (from spoons to handkerchiefs to
toothpicks), on the floor of the venue, on the ceiling, on the grass, in the
water. . .
But the photographers haven’t had enough yet; they
hijack the wedding from the entrance, shooting at everyone in sight, armed with
about six cameras dangling from their necks. They have become such a mighty
militant nuisance at these ceremonies that even Soyinka had to write about them
in the article, ‘The Weapon of Mass Obstruction’, on sabinews.com.
Finally, the wedding is over, but the photographic
assault is not, there are post-wedding pictures to be posted all over the
Internet — photos of the tired couple chilling in the getaway car after the
wedding, of them driving away from the venue, of them stuck in traffic, of them
arriving at the hotel/airport to commence the honeymoon. At this rate, I fear
that, in the near future, there just might be a photographer in the hotel room
while the newly-weds consummate their marriage. I look forward to that one.
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