By Mading Ngor
Dancers burst out of a back room in a community hall, led by a tall woman in a long gold necklace, thick gold bracelet and gold earrings. They are cheerful, and cheerfully dressed: One wears a sleeveless blue dress the colour of an Alberta sky and another has on a bubblegum pink shirt; all wear bright knee-length purple aprons. As they ululate and dance their way to the tiny stage, a singer beats on an enormous blue bucket – a makeshift drum – and they sing, “I’m comfortable. The son of King is marrying a daughter of King. The song features in most weddings of the Dinka tribe, the largest in Southern Sudan.”
Sudanese-Canadians gather at a community centre in Edmonton
The crowd of roughly 200 couldn’t be further from Sudan, but the mood in this tiny hospital-white community centre, on Edmonton’s north end, borders on euphoria. It’s all part of a Sudanese wedding ceremony, one of many social gatherings of this small but robust community. Tonight they are honouring young women who were married off in traditional Dinka weddings. As much as the event celebrates those weddings, it serves another purpose: to present a positive example for a community that has seen a rise of “baby mamas.” Making sure a younger generation honours its traditions is especially important.
Outside the hall, three siblings – 35-year-old Apiu, 34-year-old Monica and 31-year-old Nyibol Jok – stand under the yellow light from the building. They joke around in Spanish as onlookers, who are more used to hearing Arabic or English, glance over curiously. Apiu, Monica and Nyibol are only three of the seven Jok siblings who came to Canada from Sudan via Cuba. They head back into the hall to join their other brother, 29-year-old Pac – who was recently laid off from his job in the oilfields in Fort McMurray – and the baby of the family, 24-year-old Achol. (The only Joks not here are Rosa, who is 37 and lives in Regina with her husband and three children, and the oldest, Benjamin, who is 40 and a doctor. Benjamin spent most of the winter working in Sudan with development efforts.)
The DJ plays music by the popular musician Nyankol Mathiang, as people parade in front of the stage, snapping their fingers, dancing sideways and singing loudly. Achol and Apiu jump in with the other younger guests when Sean Paul’s Shake that Thing and Lil Wayne’s Lollipop comes on. Generational differences go deeper than musical preferences, of course, as families like the Joks struggle with the twin challenges of honouring their traditions while their children embrace a very different life studying, working and now raising their own families in Canada. The younger Joks’ transition from school to work, to adulthood, has been shaped as much by a generational divide widened by geography as by their own coming of age. NEXT: The Jok family’s journey to Canada…
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[...] Foreign Relations [...]
[...] 2009, Mading wrote a feature about Sudanese immigrants in Alberta, which was published by Unlimited Magazine, Canada’s online business and work culture magazine for readers in their 20s and [...]