Meme tissu, or getting matching outfits made out of the same fabric, is a huge thing here. For every wedding, funeral, baptism and church party, there is a tissu chosen for everyone to wear. If you’re close enough with the family, you get to buy it, get it sewn into your own style, and look like a badass integration-wise – it’s like being in Destiny’s Child, but the outfits usually cover more of the stomach area.
Anyway. So getting meme tissu with someone means you’re close with them, and it’s a big deal.
A couple of weekends ago, my Beninese friend/neighbor Elise and her husband (“Maitre”) invited my closemate Sam and I to go over to their house for... well, they wouldn’t explain what it was for. We were worried. What if they ask us to fund a project? Or help them do something we can’t do? Having already accepted the invite, we sucked it up, put on earrings, and headed over.
Elise had made my favorite Beninese meal ever: pate rouge with tomato/onion jus, a little bit of piment, and really good fish. There was sodabi, of course, this bottle infused with citron, and they’d even somehow found a Beninese song with my name in it... I didn’t know Beninese people used “Melissa,” so that was pretty cool.
They were flat-out spoiling us, and we were loving it. Thinking it was over, we collected our things and thanked the two of them... but as we started standing up, they told us to sit our little behinds back down. They had a present for us.
A what? A present. That’s right, everyone, someone was actually giving US a present, just because they thought we were nice. Baffling, thrilling, and so encouraging. Yay integration!
We unwrapped the shiny-paper-covered boxes and discovered...
...(count to ten for drama)...
...meme tissu! But not just any old tissu. Chicken tissu. That’s right, folks, my neighbors went to the marché and picked out tissu just for us, and what they picked was red and blue with big white chickens on it. Then, they secretly took it to a local couteriere (not mine, because she’d tell me) and got it sewn into boombas for us. Ten points to Benin.
The rest of the evening involved beers at the local buvette, the head of my group of villages (Chef d’Arrondissement) asking why he wasn’t invited to wear the same thing, good stories, and a lot of adoration from me for the two of them. Meme tissu. Meme chicken tissu. My life is awesome.
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