A week of (mostly) blessings

Some encounters I’ve had this week:

I meet a woman on the bus who tells me she was inspired to study special education from an Indian film she watched. She tells me the story—about a blind girl who was able to achieve great things from learning to read, and then she tells me about a blind professor she has at BUK, who asked how many of the students in the class would marry someone who is blind. Only 13 stood up, and he said only 3 of those were probably telling the truth. But his wife married him. “Some people don’t pick education as their first choice,” she tells me, “but I did.” Her passion is obvious in the way her face shines when she talks about how “everyone has a disability. It’s just that some are more obvious than others.” She continues on about Helen Keller--how much she contributed to the world.

I sit with the sister of one of my friends whose husband divorced her two weeks ago and would not let her take any of the children, two boys and a girl, 6, 1, and 5. Come back with me, and say you are a lawyer from abroad, she half jokes, half pleads, as she shows me their pictures—healthy beautiful children, laughing into the camera lens. Her co-wife refuses to take care of them, so they were given to the grandmother to take care of. “But she’s blind. She can’t even see to wipe their noses…. I asked him, even just give me the baby to take care of until he is three, and I’ll give him back. But he refused.” She sits in a corner, hugging herself. She wants to take her husband to court to gain custody of the children. Her sister advises her against it. “He has money, and you don’t. You know the courts will side with the one who pays them…” Whenever I visit my friend, she is there, smiling sadly. I ask her about the children, “To, suna can.”

Last night I sha ruwa (lit. "drink water"; break fast) with a friend, while watching Antz from a DVD. She tells me how much she likes cartoons, and how they teach you to live in peace with nature. Now the children whenever they see ants make sure they don’t step on them because they remember the film. “Even now, I don’t like to eat eggs because I think what if I were the hen and my child were taken away…” She tells me she has thought of becoming a vegetarian…

On Tuesday, I sha ruwa with a studio full of musicians, actors, directors, and film editors. They bring bags and bags of food, oranges, kosai, roasted chicken, koko, pure water, and put it in the middle of the office. We descend upon the food. I am delicately finishing off my first orange slice, when I realize that if I don’t hurry up, I will miss out on the food altogether. In about 5 minutes, there is nothing left but bags of peels and bones. I finish off the night with the Bollywood film Chalte Chalte on a borrowed laptop. A singer watches over my shoulder, tells me he did a version of one of the songs in Hausa. He sings along with Shah Rukh Khan in Hindi.

Last week, I sha ruwa with a friend in the old city. We go to greet his elderly grandmother. He thinks she’s around 118. She cannot see or hear, but recognizes him when she touches his face, and holds on to his hand, shaking it with every blessing she gives him. When she takes my hand, she can tell I am a visitor. She blesses me too.

Meditations on Azumi: Thoughts during the Ramadan Fast

written 1 September 2008
2 Ramadan

Ever since I knew I was going to be in Kano for a year, I thought that I would try to fast during Ramadan. First, I thought it would not be appropriate to eat in front of other people who are fasting, even if it’s just sneaking a meatpie and sachet of water from the canteen to my office (although it may eventually come to that); second, I thought it would be good to experience what millions of people, and specifically those around me, experience every year. As I told one of my friends on the first day of Ramadan. “Idan kuna jin yunwa, zan ji yunwa. Idan kuna jin kishin ruwa, ni ma zan ji kishin ruwa.” If you are hungry, I will be hungry. If you are thirsty, I too will be thirsty.” The day before the fast began, I bought a book from an Islamic book seller, 70 Key Points on Fasting by Shaikh Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid (translated by Luqman Abdur Ahman Alamu), to better understand fasting from an Islamic perspective—what my friends believe. But ultimately, what I hope to gain out of this is spiritual discipline practiced from the perspective of my own faith. Fasting is a spiritual discipline in Christianity as well (Jesus fasted for forty days in the desert in preparation for his three years of ministry), although not compulsory. I thought that, though I am Christian, I live among Muslims, so I will fast when they fast and pray when they pray. And I will hopefully grow in my own spiritual life.

Today, on the second day of Ramadan, walking wearily across campus to wait for the bus at around 5pm, I thought, maybe I should stop this. It’s not a requirement for me, and I’m finding myself dull, forgetful, distracted, irritable, impatient, on edge. It’s not easy to manifest the “fruits of the spirit,” (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, self control), when I have not eaten or drunk all day. On further thought, as I was walking from the bus stop to my house clutching two packets of dates and a sliver of watermelon I had bought to break my fast with, I realized that perhaps that is the point of fasting, at least for me. It forces me to realize, humbly, how much of my good spirits, my mostly cheerful demeanor are chemically-based, physical attributes. I have been blessed with good health, with chemical balance, with a fairly even and laid back temper (though my good friends and roommates all know the exceptions). Peeling back those layers of the physical, one comes closer to the core of one’s being, what is underneath the surface pleasantness—what comes out when there is no protective politeness—and it’s not always very attractive. I have thought often over the past few years of what C.S. Lewis says in Chapter 4 "Morality and Psychoanalysis" of Mere Christianity. About the verse that humans look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.

“Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.

"We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first tune, see every one as he
really was. There will be surprises.” (culled from http://www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt)

I meditate on this in relation to fasting. When fasting, those base-human characteristics, the instincts, the first reactions, come out more dramatically, and you have to deal with them. You are impatient but you force yourself to speak patiently. You don’t feel gracious but you make yourself be gracious anyway. It becomes a discipline, training and subduing those initial reactions that surface more clearly when you are hungry and tired, and it encourages humility. You don’t have that easy excuse—oh sorry, I haven’t eaten yet today, and I can’t think clearly—because no one else has either. You become weaker and more vulnerable to your community while stronger in your individual will. This is spiritual growth—going beyond one’s personality to something deeper.

At the same time, you also become more aware of the joys of the physical. The pleasure that comes at the end of the day, especially when you are breaking the fast with other people. (“A sha ruwa lafiya” is the greeting towards the end of the day: “enjoy quenching your thirst”)—the sweetness of the crystallized sugar in a dry date when it is the first thing that has touched your tongue all day; the fresh wetness of a tangy orange or sweet watermelon or solid banana; the way the spicy flavours of Hausa tea detach themselves and come one by one: cardamom, ginger, other flavours that I cannot yet identify; the nourishing thickness of chocolate Milo with Peak milk. The first burst of energy after the sugar enters your blood stream and the pleasant stuffed feeling when your stomach is extended with tuwon shinkafa and miyan alewa or fried yam and potatoes, peppered tofu and kosai. Denied for 13 or 14 hours a day, the senses are heightened. Listening to the Ramadan service on the radio, the chanted Arabic, the call and response, it reminds me of listening to a mass—Gregorian chants in Latin—or a BBC broadcast of the Nine Lessons in Carols on Christmas eve.

I am not sure if I will complete the fasting for the month of Ramadan or not. The training is good for me, but as an embodied spirit. I crave the blessings of the even-temper that comes so much easier when I have properly fed myself. Since it is not compulsory for me, I may only fast for a few more days, or, in my desire to be in solidarity with those around me and in my curiousity to see if I can make it, or maybe out of sheer cussed stubbornness, I may fast the whole month. We shall see…