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4
The Impact of Culture and Community
Briana MacWilliam, Anne Briggs, Maya Rose Hormadaly, and Dana George Trottier
Cultural influences
Culture and grief
A white, middle-class, female student of mine approached me one day with a clinical concern. She worked primarily with black children of varied ethnic backgrounds, ages 11 to 13, in an urban, school-based setting. Her client was a young girl whose father had passed away the previous year. In a recent art therapy session, the normally defensive and reticent little girl had finally opened up to my student, describing the events of her father’s funeral. In particular, she noted feeling overwhelmed and fearful of the dramatic, emotional outbursts of her aunties. One auntie had even flung herself on the coffin, requiring several male family members to tear her off of it. My student’s concern was that the young girl had created outlandish memories as a way of using fantasy to dissociate herself from the painful feelings of her father’s loss. She feared this might impede the little girl’s ability to successfully navigate the grieving process.
I smiled softly, touching my student’s hand, “You’ve never been to a black funeral, have you?” Indeed, she hadn’t.
In an article entitled “The difference between white funerals and black funerals” a black, South African, male author offers an anecdotal account of the ways in which white people and black people grieve. The nuances he describes are hard to measure and qualify through empirical research and study, but are frequently observed and appreciated through the frame of humor.
The first time I attended a white person’s funeral, I thought I had landed on another planet. The service was meant to start at 9am and by 8:45am everyone was seated, all 27 of us. At promptly 9am, the organ started and everyone rose. Besides the priest, three other people spoke for about three minutes each. Around 9:30am, things were wrapped up and the family proceeded to the crematorium while we went outside to the lawn and grabbed some sandwiches. By 10:15am I was back at my desk at work as if nothing had happened.
Oh no, not our funerals… The first big event on the day of the funeral is when the casket is brought out of the house and the mourners can fully appreciate it in its glory. There’s always that aunt who takes out a hanky, dabs at her eyes and murmurs approvingly, “At least my uncle’s child is going to rest inside a beautiful ‘house’. It must have cost at least 80k.” Towards the end of the whole rigmarole comes the most dramatic part, the viewing of the body. There is always some woman—a cousin of the deceased, thrice removed—who waits until everyone has seen the body before she approaches. She’s already wailing at 200 decibels by the time [she approaches] the front, and then she truly opens her voice box and emits bloodcurdling screams that seem to part the roof of the Lord’s house, before she collapses at the feet of the casket stand and is promptly whisked away. The most curious thing about her is that her grief tends to miraculously dissipate and she’s usually spotted later in the “after-tears” tent, gyrating with a Smirnoff in her hand (Ngcobo, 2015).
Importantly, the tone in which this author examines cultural influences over grieving processes is somewhat sarcastic. This raises the important issue of understanding the group ethos when participating in the rituals of grief, as opposed to one’s personal grieving process; there might be cultural norms for ethnic groups and how they grieve, but each individual will have their own relationship to and opinion of that cultural norm.
Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to assume the little girl had better reality testing than my student gave her credit for, because one cannot assume all black funerals (let alone this little girl’s father’s funeral) involve displays of emotion that, in comparison to white funerals, appear “outlandish.” Even my choice to use the term “black” as opposed to “African–American” was a conscientious one, because not all black Americans think of themselves as African, and not all Africans are black. On the other hand, to use the term “black” may
