I love the garish day-glo

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

O.m.g, I love pagne! This is what I wrote to remind myself what I wanted this post to be about. Pagne is a six-yard length of cloth sporting designs ranging from vitamin bottles or high heels to flora and fauna to geometric shapes. And it displays just about every color combination one can imagine, from brown and cream to olive with pastel-metallic pink and green accents. Traveling around recently, I saw a Muslim woman in her 4-piece outfit, her orange, blue, and mottled green pagne printed with onions cut in half. I want that! Men and women all over Africa buy pagne and have it made into Sunday-best dresses and pants suits, kabbahs (a.k.a muumuus), or boubous (the pants-and-long-tunic get-ups that Muslim men here wear). I have it made into dresses I find in my friend’s old Cosmo magazines or outfits I design myself and draw on paper to show my tailor Odette (who, awesomely, lives not 100 paces from the end of my porch).

I never wore dresses in the States, partly because I just never saw myself as that ladylike, but mostly because I’m four sizes smaller on top than I am on bottom. Thus, if I get, say, a size 6 dress, it would fit just fine around my waist and over my derriere, but I could put a newborn child – like a joey in its mother’s pouch – in the excess space around my back and shoulders. Here, I can have clothes that are made just for me and my quirky form, so dresses and skirts have become my new norm. It’s more appropriate for women to wear dress-like garments, anyway, so I am in Cameroon, doing as the Cameroonians do. I even wore a skirt on a 12k hike through the rainforest. In fact, yesterday was the first day I’ve ever worn pants in public at post. (It was International Women’s Day, and I had my 2011 Women’s Day pagne made into a ruffly top and Capri’s.)

I love pagne because it’s brightly colored and kooky. Sometimes it makes me laugh out loud, and I just can’t stop staring at people on the street whose pagne I admire. My bank is located in the capital city of my region, 3 hours away, so I have to travel there almost every month to access my funds. I love these trips because I know I’ll always have the chance to patronize the pagne shops at Diagon Alley. Yes. Reading Harry Potter, I’d always wanted to visit Diagon Alley and its crowded, curious shops with their eccentric array of merchandise and importunate vendors. I hadn’t a clue that all I needed to do was move to eastern Cameroon. We don’t know what locals call the narrow, stony alleyway where I buy sequined scarves and pagne printed with chickens and eggs. To my region-mates and I, it will always be Diagon Alley. It twists and turns, and there are shadowy, hidden pockets of sellers I only recently discovered when I stumbled through a secret portal to find at least a dozen young men hawking a rainbow of stilettos, sneakers and soccer socks from their shrouded stalls. This place is my costume shop. And I’ve always had a thing for costumes.

When I was young, my mother managed much of the business end of a well-respected outdoor amphitheater and the productions it would put on each summer. Thus, my brother and I were always well outfitted for Halloween, and I, usually happily enough, played the part of my mother’s dress-up doll when she would borrow girly dresses from the latest production of “Annie” or “The King and I.” To her, dressing well and appropriately was always a matter of pulling together all the right elements to create a proper costume. When I was in high school, Ma worked, instead, as executive director of a small community theater in a different town. Here, my brother and I were made into actors, now costuming ourselves for legitimate purpose as we appeared in plays, musicals, and cabarets.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve adopted my mother’s attitude toward clothes as a type of costuming. So one of the things I love best about living in Cameroon is being able to dress up as ostentatiously as my imagination will allow me. There are no wrong color combinations or styles. Whereas in the States I tried to dress conservatively, always mindful of what might be out of fashion or overly odd, here anything passes, literally, with flying colors. Here, where women wear wizard sleeves and men sport shiny suits, pink satin shirts, and lacy, embroidered pants; where boys carry Barbie backpacks and girls wear flats with mini-Koosh balls attached to the toes; where members of community associations have matching outfits and almost everyone proudly owns a T-shirt featuring Barack Obama’s smiling face – no dress design I dream up will ever seem out of place. I array myself as garishly, bizarrely, or archaically as I please.

When I first moved East, as my fellow PCVs and I strolled the streets of our regional capital, my post mate asked us something like: “How long do you think it’ll be before you start wanting one of those sequined scarves like the Muslim women wear?” I already wanted one! Now, I own two: black chiffon with iridescent gold sequins and colorful, striped chiffon with rainbow sequins. Yes, all the world’s a stage, and this player’s costumes finally fit the part she’s always wanted to play.