God Bless you la la la

RFI musique coolness had impregnated each corner of our living room when BH looked over his laptop screen and prompted me to dress up immediately. "Wear a boubou", he said. I jumped into one of my Ivorian dresses and off we headed to Boubacar's house to celebrate the fact that Abraham sacrified an animal instead of his own son.

When we arrived, la Directrice Generale, a.k.a. Boubacar's wife, was in the kitchen surrounded by pots, pans and meat, lots of fresh meat. Tabaski is not for animal huggers or those who faint when they see blood. I growed up watching bullfighting with my grandparents and I felt a sort of blood connection to Boubacar's family as soon as we entered his place. The smell of burning animal skin and the amount of kids running around the sacrifice reminded me of la matanza (literally, 'the killing') of the pork. My family would do it every single year around Easter. I remember being terrified by a 200kg pig leaving its pocilga (the beast's house) and my 3 rural uncles plus my urban dad running around him. It looked like noisy bullfighting for hungry aficionados. The moment of the killing would sadden me but Spaniards, like some West Africans I've come to learn, we have this strange habit of laughing at things that are not funny. The process of making jamon, chorizos, migas, asadurilla and all those other pork delicacies was for the directrices generales, the women of the house.

My family stopped the ritual when my grandma died, 7 years ago. It was probably too much work and the elders and the magic were gone. I sense the women in my family realized that they were actually doing all the work and the jamones, chorizos and other pork-based goodies one can buy at the supermarket were not that bad either. I wonder for how long Boubacar and his loved ones would keep on with tradition. Dewaneti.