A Labor of Love: Birth, Death, and Coffins

A Sankofa Coffin - a symbol in Ghanaian tradition for an elder who has something to teach us

 In Ghana, the days are long, the heat is unrelenting, and the work is hard.

I wake up around 5:30 am almost every day to the sound of the Tro-tros (a van that operates as public transport) beeping and the Tro-tro workers screaming out their destinations. I can tell it’s morning not because I’ve yet blinked sleep out of my eyes but because the sunlight has started to stream through the windows, ushering away the feigned coolness of the evening. I will toss and turn a few more times before getting up and ready for the day.

It never ceases to amaze me for as early as I think I wake up, the whole country of Ghana seems to rise before me. I’m still half asleep as I stumble to the coffin shop which is a part of my host family’s compound, but the entire family is already awake. Children are preparing for school, women have begun cooking for the day so that they can sell their signatures to people on their way to and from work, and the men have begun to start in the workshop. This is not a country of rest or weakness; as I watch the women mash their kenkey and the men craft the coffins, I am awed at their consistency and stoicism. This is Ghana and Ghana is work as I am told by one of my host brothers.

After landing late on a Wednesday evening over two weeks ago, the following morning I was immediately handed a saw and told to begin cutting a long piece of wood. I explained I had never truly used a saw before, a little scared that perhaps I wasn’t clear in my communication that I was completely unpracticed in woodworking. One of my host brothers, Oko, took the saw and as if slicing through Jello, showed me the body positioning and arm motions used to cut. Growing up playing ice hockey, my dad consistently reminded my sisters and I to be mindful of “hockey stance”; slightly bent knees, a transition of weight between back and front skate, a slight bend of the chest and eyes up. How funny when things come full circle as I assumed what essentially was hockey stance over my saw and wood. Unlike Oko though, my first few attempts at sawing looked a bit more like when you are trying really hard to get a brownie out of a pan that you forgot to grease. There was no semblance of smooth to my movements or of the line I was creating in the wood. Moreover, it took me about 20 minutes to cut about 5/70 inches of wood. And I was entirely drenched in sweat as this continued. The men in the shop chuckled and smiled, each taking turns to show their own technique. The rest of that first day and week continued in a similar manner. A tool was shown to me, its use demonstrated as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and I would half do something with it but mostly just sweat and ache all over.

When the following Monday came, I was surprised at how far I’d come in only the last few days. I was cutting wood faster, planing and sanding more efficiently, and I only missed a few nail heads here and there when trying to hammer. And still I had a very very long way to go to reach proficiency. Although I was proud of my accomplishments so far, I was also stunned at how my body was responding to the work and heat. I was exhausted by 9 pm every evening, my upper body was more sore than it had ever been from the gym, and I had to drink about my weight in water each day to counteract the amount I was losing to sweat in the Ghanaian heat. In other words, my mind and body were screaming “this is extremely hard.” And yet my host brothers showed up everyday at the same time, they finished entirely handmade coffins in a manner of days, and they never complained. They showed me their hand callouses, their scars, and high fived me when my own blisters started to form. Their bodies had physically responded to years of this work and they were proud to see mine doing the same; every mark on me - blisters, scratches, the stray splinter, the many scrabs from bug bites - all became my “Ghanaian marks” according to my host brothers.

Once, when we were working, I questioned how the pay was split between people in the shops as many of the brothers worked odd days or other jobs or would be present one day and gone the next. Oko laughed and said that none of them get paid for the work in the shop. I was stunned and embarrassed for what was clearly a Western assumption. Having worked in the shop continuously at this point, I simply couldn’t understand how the difficulty of the work did not translate to compensation. Moreover, having now spent enough time in Ghana, I understood that money meant survival here. There was no shopping for groceries, there was only paying for each meal separately from the houses that you knew sold certain foods. The lack of water sanitation meant that everyone bought drinking water sachets every single day. Money was survival. So I probed further, asking why they didn’t get paid. My host brothers went on to explain that the labor they do not is for themselves but for their family and for the community. The Kane Kwei workshop has been a hallmark of the Teshie community for more than 70 years and it has been passed down from grandfathers, to uncles and fathers, to brothers, and so on. The tradition of the fantasy coffins was born in this shop and the work that I witness and am lucky to learn from keeps the shop alive and in many ways the spirit of the family alive.

In reflection on this motivation for the hard work I participate in and observe everyday, I realized that it speaks volumes to the connections between labor, love, life and death. For starters, the coffins themselves are the ultimate labor of love. The hours spent under the hot sun with saw and plane and hammer is deeply motivated by love. Love for family, love for the members of the Teshie community, love for culture and country. I fear my words can’t adequately describe the overwhelming emotion that goes into the creation of each fantasy coffins. Each piece of wood is carefully chosen, shaped, placed, and painted; at the end of each day, we are all covered in the dust, paint chips, and evidence of coffin-making. It’s a task that’s taxing, frustrating, draining and the ultimate privilege to toil so intimately over someone’s final resting place. At the end, when you see the bigger picture come together and fulfill a family’s wishes, there is so much love and pride.

Moreover, my host family’s love for each other and their trade is evident in the physical space that is the workshop. The family compound - a circle of connected living spaces making an enclosed rectangle - has the workshop at the center. It’s the first thing you see when you open your door in the morning and the last thing you see as you wave goodbye to everyone at night. The children play in the workshop after their schooling, the toddlers waddle around while we work picking up stray hammers and pretending to work on the coffins that one day they will help to make, a family of kittens, a family of puppies and a family of baby chicks have all made their homes inside various wood workings (ironically the chickens have not chosen to make a home inside the mother hen coffin, that’s reserved for the kittens). The shop is quite literally the beating heart of the family, a uniting source of pride and love despite its sole purpose being to serve the dead and their family. Much like my experiences in the rooms of the dying on this journey so far, life is as much a main character amongst the coffins as death is.

This concept is only reinforced by the choosing of the coffins themselves. Thus far I’ve witnessed countless families stream through the shop to request a fantasy coffin for their family members who have died. Sometimes the dying person has requested a specific coffin shape before death but most of the time it’s up to the family to choose what will bring their loved one into the afterlife. I’ve seen the way my host brothers come then to occupy another role, the role of narrator; they can draw out a story from the family, something that is at the core of who the dead person was. Then it is up to all of us to bring that story to life. Overwhelmingly, the stories people land on is that of occupations and labors. Families seem to be most drawn to focusing on the deceased’s job as the chosen representation of life and transition into death. When I questioned why this might be in the shop, my host brothers explained that in Ghana, there is an extreme amount of pride connected to your labors. On one hand, this is because it is the way you earn money and therefore your lifeline to survival in an economically driven society. On the other, one of my host brothers described occupations as what Ghanaians have to show for how they contributed to their community. In this way, the coffin becomes a representation for how people contributed to a greater good or how they fit into the mosaic of life around them. Moreover, it is believed traditionally that when people in the community die, they travel to the afterlife where they are allowed to continue their labors. Those who were teachers still teach in the afterlife, fishermen can still fish, pastors can still preach. Personally, I think this idea is beautiful - instead of the Western conceptualization of The End or of a divisive heaven and hell, Ghanaians believe that the dead are still connected to and contributing to the communities from which they came through their work. The coffins seem to then be about acknowledging not only the transition but ensuring that the deceased continue to be members of the community even in death.

This connection between labor and the community continues to be apparent in the funeral traditions in Ghana. Typically, a Ghanaian funeral will last several days. Within this ceremony, there are days for mourning but much of the funeral itself is celebratory. Space is designated outside within the community and community members help to set up enough chairs for anyone who wishes to join.  Speakers are rented for music to echo throughout the town. Signs are posted everywhere with pictures of the deceased and information about the funeral. When the days of celebration come, the coffin is often paraded through the streets surrounded by dancing, singing and praying. Even after burial, celebration continues with food made by the community, dancing, merriment, and more. And this happens almost every single weekend in Teshie. The celebration portion however, in a common misconception, is not necessarily a celebration of the deceased person only. It is also a celebration of the labor the community has done to help transition the deceased from life to death and to have helped the family mourn and celebrate this life. Dying in Ghana then is a labor of community love. It unites a community in a way I’ve never witnessed, with almost everyone contributing in some way despite varying means of doing so. As I witness more and more of this special community, I’m beginning to conceptualize that the true meaning of a labor of love lies in the selfless nature of the act. Something like being unpaid but working in a fantasy coffin shop every day to bring pride to your family and meaning to those who have lost someone within your community.

Coming off the heels of my death doula research in Lancaster, I have labor on the brain. In the literature on death doulas, there is much discussion about the similarities between birthing doulas and death doulas. There seems to be some cyclical notion that we labor into life and we labor into death. That there is work to be done in this transition from living to dying to dead. However, I can’t help but think of the saying about child-rearing: “It takes a village.” So, while if we come into life through labor and leave it through the same, why would we not also see death as a community labor and therefore a collective responsibility? Perhaps it’s because Teshie is a community synonymous with labor that no one shirks away from the responsibility of caring for one another. They work hard for one another in every sense possible - my host brothers have shown me which house to go to if you need to buy banku, or Milo, or your nails clipped, shoes cleaned, or a Bel-Cola. As for my temporary home, this is where the people of Teshie know to come when someone is dying or has died.

It is beautiful to witness and tragic to reflect on as I think about my own home in the States, in my neighborhood where people have access to most things but where I’ve maybe met a single family on my street. Suffering is disjointed and siloed, privately taken care of in hospitals or care facilities. We grieve in small groups or alone. We do not carry each other home, we certainly do not labor for one another in the same way. It’s a difficult thing to articulate - to be both incredibly aware of your privilege in a new environment, to continually check your discomfort and be asking yourself why you feel that way AND to be painstakingly aware that in spite of this perceived luxury in my home country, we have things incredibly backwards. We have lost the ability to labor for one another. As I have seen thus far in Ghana, the way we work and show up for each other means something, especially for those at the end of life or in mourning, and this meaning is celebrated.

I am honored to be learning what it means to be a laborer alongside death this year — to work intimately with an object that will carry someone from life to death, to labor within and for a new community. I am grateful for the ways I have and will continue to learn how to bring peoples stories to life through art and how to bring out the life even in death. I am inspired at how far my project has evolved to not just be about dying well but also intimately examining global community structures and how we show acts of love. The lessons I have learned at Kane Kwei so far are emotional and challenging and incredibly important. All this in three weeks…I can’t wait to see what else Ghana has to teach me.