The Art of the Party

I was eight, maybe nine, when I first went to a burial that felt suspiciously like a holiday. It was my paternal grandfather's burial, and here is the awkward truth: I did not know the man. Not properly. I knew his wife, my “Mamachine", who fed me and scolded me and remains one of my favourite humans on earth, but my grandfather was mostly a name attached to a photograph. And yet I remember that week as one long adventure. There were new cousins to discover, new games to learn, new food appearing from every direction, and my whole family piled into cars and travelled together like we were on a school trip nobody had bothered to plan properly. A child does not always understand grief. What a child understands very well is a party that lasts several days.

Personally, I have a ton of Nigerian party stories because my mother's mother kept a busy calendar. Weddings, burials, the odd naming ceremony squeezed in between; I went to more of these with my grandma than I can accurately count.

Like every other Nigerian kid, I grew up watching a lot of Hollywood movies, and as life went on, I had friends and family who emigrated to other countries and who would sometimes tell me stories of parties that they attended in the countries they moved to. A week ago, as I sat on the floor of my apartment, legs spread, finishing off the plate of jollof rice I had gotten in my gift basket the night before, I realised something: the parties I grew up watching in Nigeria and the parties my friends describe from Europe and the United States are chasing the same thing. They just chase it very differently.

Every culture throws a party for roughly the same reasons. Somebody got married, somebody died, somebody turned a year older and needs reminding that this is a good thing and not an imminent threat. The intention behind the celebration barely ever changes from London to Lagos. What changes is the volume.

In a lot of Western settings, celebrating someone is a fairly private transaction. You bring a gift, maybe you contribute to a registry, maybe you turn up with a bottle of wine because you forgot to check the registry. The gift gets wrapped; it gets opened later, usually after all the guests are gone, and everyone moves on with their evening. Generosity there behaves itself. It has manners. Nobody expects a round of applause for buying a toaster; it's just something you do because it's a party you were invited to and that was the first thing you spotted on sale at Costco.

Nigerian parties took one look at that quiet exchange and decided it was far too shy for their taste. Spraying money, the practice of showering the celebrant with cash while they dance, turns generosity into a full performance. The giving is not tucked away; it is the whole show. How much you spray, and how enthusiastically, becomes a small public statement about your affection, your bank balance, and your relationship to the person twirling in the middle of the floor. It is generosity with an audience, and if we’re being honest, it is a lot more fun to watch than a gift card exchange.

This is really the whole difference in a nutshell. The West tends to keep its warmth polite and understated. Nigerians subscribe to the belief that if you feel something, the entire room and the one directly beside it should know about it and be envious. Neither approach is wrong, though I will admit that watching a Nigerian aunty spray a bride while shouting her praises in her native tongue is considerably more entertaining than watching someone quietly slide an envelope across a table like an illicit narcotics trade. Perhaps because I grew up attending more African parties than Western ones, my preferences are biased.

My grandfather's burial taught me a profound lesson, long before I had the words for it. Grief was present at these parties, but so were noise, colour, food, and family members I never met acting like old friends, telling about that one time they met me when I was 4. At a time when I was considerably more angry at the world, the performance around Nigerian celebrations struck me as pretentious; growing up has taught me that multiple truths can coexist. Their performance was not hiding the sadness; it was standing right next to it, making sure nobody felt alone in the middle of it. That, more than anything, might be the real difference between a modest party and a loud one. One says I am here for you quietly. The other says it at full volume, with backup dancers and nagging aunts who want to make sure everyone leaves overfed.

I think about all this often now that I spend my days with artdey, surrounded by paintings that try to hold onto exactly these moments before they disappear. A good painting, like a good party, is really just a feeling somebody decided to make loud enough to notice, loud enough that one can feel surrounded by the ones that came to listen. My family gave me plenty of both growing up, and every so often, I get to put one of them on a wall.

- Alex.