eid, part I
hey again everybody :)
here's a rundown of how we passed the holidays in El Bayadh:
Thursday, December 30...
...we packed my uncle's Peugeaut with clothing and snacks and left Oran for El Bayadh - me, my uncle, my aunt and my cousin Nibras. We drove by way of Sidi Bel Abbes, a route my cousin told me would have been suicidal in the 1990s, when the war between the state and Algeria's frustrated Islamist rebels was being waged along the roadsides and in the mountains and in and around certain cities - among them Sidi Bel Abbes, which is southwest of Oran, and Aflou, which is east of El Bayadh and is where my uncle Ali lives with his family. Today the vestiges of the war are the ubiquitous traffic stops - a handful of soldiers posted at the periphery of each village and city, and sometimes in between cities, who peer into passing cars as they slow down and who occasionally will stop a car or truck and ask for papers. It's a minor inconveniece people complain about without really being upset, because it's better to be stopped by soldiers who aren't shooting than by soldiers or guerrillas who are.
We picknicked past the point where the soft and greeny north dries out and becomes rougher, yellower, dustier - and colder. Oran sits on the Mediterranean, tucked snug in the crook of a small mountain, and the winter feels like mid-spring in Chicago or early spring in DC. El Bayadh is at the foot of the Sahara, where there's nothing to mitigate the wind or cold in winter or the naked heat in summer. "Brd!" my aunt told me when I was packing for the trip, to emphasize that I should pack warmly. "Brd" - it's exactly the right word to express "cold." It was windy and cold where we picknicked, and we huddled together under a tree and attacked with especial vigor the roasted chicken and cold fries my aunt had packed in Oran.
And then El Bayadh, and the uncles and aunts and cousins who were there before - and my grandmother, who lives with them and who'd gone back a couple days before us with one of my uncles. A good reunion, with food and hugs and news exchanged.
Before we went to sleep my grandmother gave me an Algerian manicure, pressing henna into the palm of my hand and onto my fingertips. Algerian henna designs are much cruder than their sophisticated Gulf cousins - no delicate flowers or vine patterning, and no smooth liquid application; this henna is mashed into a thick paste and daubbed directly onto the hand in big, chunky blocks. I have on one palm a big red circle, and on the other, rough zigzag zebra stripes. The circle is partially mutated because I squashed it in my sleep. henna takes the night to dry; my grandmother wrapped my hands in kerchiefs to keep them from staining the sheets, but they didn't keep me from rolling over myself.
Friday, December 29...
...was youm 'arafat, the day before Eid when pilgrims on the Hajj go to mount 'Arafat, outside Mecca, to stand in front of God. we fasted, and two of my girl cousins took me to the bain-douche down the street to bathe. being friday, and the day before eid, the bain-douche was crowded with women and small children and carry-on luggage - bathing is an event, and it requires equipment, so people pack themselves small suitcases or gym bags with the necessities: plastic shower sandals; a small plastic bowl for pouring water onto yourself; a washcloth; a towel; a towel-like wrap to wear outside the shower room; a towel-kerchief for the hair; soap, shampoo, razors, cremes; clean clothes.
the bain-douche is like the hammam, except that instead of one big collective bathing-room there are individual bathing closets - that look, literally, like closets: the bathing area is a narrow ceramic-tiled hallway lined with turquoise-painted wooden doors, each door the entrance to its own tiled bathing room, each with a chair and hooks in the walls for clothes. Against the back wall of my water-closet-douche were two thin vertical pipes, painted red and blue, with spigots that emptied into a small stone basin, my "tub" for dipping my plastic bucket.
the rest of the day passed pretty quietly. I have an aunt and uncle who are performing the Hajj, and we talked to them briefly by phone. my uncles explained to me what happens on Youm Arafat - how pilgrims dress themselves in white robes ("As if dead," said my uncle Tayeb, "because when you're dead there's nothing between you and God") and spend the afternoon at Arafat, where the Prophet gave his last sermon, the one where he affirmed the end of the prophethood and reaffirmed the practices of Islam (prayer, fasting, charity, hajj), and issued some other reminders - to the Arabs, that there's no difference between them and other Muslims; to the men, that women also have rights; to businesspeople, that taking interest is forbidden.
Saturday, December 30...
...Eid! happened this way:
In the morning, at 8 or so, we left for the mosque - all the men, and my grandmother, me, and one of my girl cousins. The mosque was packed - we separated, after leaving our shoes at the entrance, my grandmother sitting near the door, and my cousin and I squeezed in between women further inside - and it was alive with singing. I've never heard singing at a mosque (I haven't been to many, or very often...), but this you could hear from blocks away, the men (and women) all chanting together the same few lines, over and over, in a really delicious melody:
Subhan Allah, wa rahmatullah
Wa la illaha illallah
Allahu akbar
Allahu akbar
Allahu akbar
Wa illah arham!
and underneath it, very quietly, you could hear the voices that had picked out the harmony, and it was beautiful.
The singing went on for maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour (it had been going on for longer before we came) before the sermon and the prayer started, both of which were over lickety-split (that's part of the beauty of Islamic prayer, is that it happens often but never for very long. God knows that you have stuff to do).
Then came the crush of women pressing for the door - and reaching for each other at the same time, reaching over and around each other to kiss friends and acquaintances and to wish them peace, and, implicitly, to forgive and be forgiven for offenses committed during the year. my grandmother, sitting near the door, made it out early and rescued our shoes, and we waited while she kissed her friends and chatted, and then we walked back to my uncle's house.
My uncle's house is in fact a cave, half of which is furnished like a house. the other half is unfurnished, unfinished, dark and cementy and cold and full of chambers and staircases. On Youm Arafat we climbed a couple of these staircases and descended a couple of others over and down to the garage-cum-barnyard where the sheep were being kept. three sheep: one purchased by my grandmother, one by the uncle with whom we were staying, and one by my Oran uncle.
on Eid, I learned, we had to wait til the Imam had finished his sacrifice before we could do ours. it was maybe 10 in the morning when my uncle and my two cousins, Nibras and Ahmed, escorted the first ram into the courtyard, to be petted by the younger family members and appreciated by the older ones before being offered up.
My two cousins held the ram down while my uncle slit its throat, in the halal style. I didn't watch the act itself - neither did my aunts; it's a hard thing to watch - but I did watch afterward, while the sheep bled out on the white tiles in the courtyard. It's difficult - and it's life. Death. I've never watched an animal die, or see anything I've eaten killed. But it's life, it's how it happens.
Once the sheep was dead, my cousins got down to the business of stripping it down -a process entirely unto itself. Ahmed cut a hole into the skin of the hind leg, at the crook where it joins the body, and started blowing air into the pocket, into he body of the sheep, to separate the inner pieces a bit - he and Nibras taking turns til the sheep was puffed up and sounded like a drum when you beat it.
Then Ahmed tore the hole a little wider and plunged his hands into the gap to begin separating the hide from the body - not peeling it yet, just separating. the body was hot; Ahmed's hands were steaming in the cold. before stripping off the hide completely, Tayeb, my uncle, severed the head and placed it aside, broke off the legs at the knees, and then hung the body from the hind leg on a hook in the wall of the courtyard. that's when the real mess happened - suspended without a head, the sheep vomited up the contents of its stomach and the remainder of its blood into one large puddle of yellow-green and dark red, which Nibras flushed with buckets and buckets of water down the drain in the corner of the court. (My uncle, a gastroenterologist and veteran sheep-sacrificer, remarked that the stomach contents looked suspect, and surmised that the sheep was ill in the gut.)
When the sheep was hung and drained, Ahmed finished stripping the hide, wrestling the sheep and cutting away where the skin still clung to the flesh and tendon. I left at this point for a cat nap with my grandmother; when I came back, the sheep's innerds had all been removed and carefully laid out on a table in the courtyard: pink lungs, purple heart, chocolate liver. The intestines were sitting grey in a bucket, and the green gallbladder was lying next to the drain. Ahmed washed out the stomach and proved my uncle right - the sheep had an abscess in his gut, a milky pink ball that exploded when he dropped it on the ground. The sheep's stomach is full of folds and looks like a dull yellow undersea creature; Ahmed rinsed out each fold, and then he and Nibras shaped the undigested contents into yellow-grassy balls to be thrown away.
Then the women's work began: my aunt Zahra took the liver away to be cooked, and my aunt Kultum took the sheep's head - called Bou Zellouf - to be roasted over a fire. Roasting burns away all the hair, which smells like burnt plastic when it's roasting. Afterward, Zahra boiled the bald head and then with soap and brush and more hot water scrubbed away the skin and polished down the skull - a little Bou Zellouf bain-douche.
And then we ate: Fresh mutton, liver, Bou Zellouf, with couscous, vegetables, potatoes. It was a feast.
- and I have to go! - but I'll post this as it is, and continue later.
here's a rundown of how we passed the holidays in El Bayadh:
Thursday, December 30...
...we packed my uncle's Peugeaut with clothing and snacks and left Oran for El Bayadh - me, my uncle, my aunt and my cousin Nibras. We drove by way of Sidi Bel Abbes, a route my cousin told me would have been suicidal in the 1990s, when the war between the state and Algeria's frustrated Islamist rebels was being waged along the roadsides and in the mountains and in and around certain cities - among them Sidi Bel Abbes, which is southwest of Oran, and Aflou, which is east of El Bayadh and is where my uncle Ali lives with his family. Today the vestiges of the war are the ubiquitous traffic stops - a handful of soldiers posted at the periphery of each village and city, and sometimes in between cities, who peer into passing cars as they slow down and who occasionally will stop a car or truck and ask for papers. It's a minor inconveniece people complain about without really being upset, because it's better to be stopped by soldiers who aren't shooting than by soldiers or guerrillas who are.
We picknicked past the point where the soft and greeny north dries out and becomes rougher, yellower, dustier - and colder. Oran sits on the Mediterranean, tucked snug in the crook of a small mountain, and the winter feels like mid-spring in Chicago or early spring in DC. El Bayadh is at the foot of the Sahara, where there's nothing to mitigate the wind or cold in winter or the naked heat in summer. "Brd!" my aunt told me when I was packing for the trip, to emphasize that I should pack warmly. "Brd" - it's exactly the right word to express "cold." It was windy and cold where we picknicked, and we huddled together under a tree and attacked with especial vigor the roasted chicken and cold fries my aunt had packed in Oran.
And then El Bayadh, and the uncles and aunts and cousins who were there before - and my grandmother, who lives with them and who'd gone back a couple days before us with one of my uncles. A good reunion, with food and hugs and news exchanged.
Before we went to sleep my grandmother gave me an Algerian manicure, pressing henna into the palm of my hand and onto my fingertips. Algerian henna designs are much cruder than their sophisticated Gulf cousins - no delicate flowers or vine patterning, and no smooth liquid application; this henna is mashed into a thick paste and daubbed directly onto the hand in big, chunky blocks. I have on one palm a big red circle, and on the other, rough zigzag zebra stripes. The circle is partially mutated because I squashed it in my sleep. henna takes the night to dry; my grandmother wrapped my hands in kerchiefs to keep them from staining the sheets, but they didn't keep me from rolling over myself.
Friday, December 29...
...was youm 'arafat, the day before Eid when pilgrims on the Hajj go to mount 'Arafat, outside Mecca, to stand in front of God. we fasted, and two of my girl cousins took me to the bain-douche down the street to bathe. being friday, and the day before eid, the bain-douche was crowded with women and small children and carry-on luggage - bathing is an event, and it requires equipment, so people pack themselves small suitcases or gym bags with the necessities: plastic shower sandals; a small plastic bowl for pouring water onto yourself; a washcloth; a towel; a towel-like wrap to wear outside the shower room; a towel-kerchief for the hair; soap, shampoo, razors, cremes; clean clothes.
the bain-douche is like the hammam, except that instead of one big collective bathing-room there are individual bathing closets - that look, literally, like closets: the bathing area is a narrow ceramic-tiled hallway lined with turquoise-painted wooden doors, each door the entrance to its own tiled bathing room, each with a chair and hooks in the walls for clothes. Against the back wall of my water-closet-douche were two thin vertical pipes, painted red and blue, with spigots that emptied into a small stone basin, my "tub" for dipping my plastic bucket.
the rest of the day passed pretty quietly. I have an aunt and uncle who are performing the Hajj, and we talked to them briefly by phone. my uncles explained to me what happens on Youm Arafat - how pilgrims dress themselves in white robes ("As if dead," said my uncle Tayeb, "because when you're dead there's nothing between you and God") and spend the afternoon at Arafat, where the Prophet gave his last sermon, the one where he affirmed the end of the prophethood and reaffirmed the practices of Islam (prayer, fasting, charity, hajj), and issued some other reminders - to the Arabs, that there's no difference between them and other Muslims; to the men, that women also have rights; to businesspeople, that taking interest is forbidden.
Saturday, December 30...
...Eid! happened this way:
In the morning, at 8 or so, we left for the mosque - all the men, and my grandmother, me, and one of my girl cousins. The mosque was packed - we separated, after leaving our shoes at the entrance, my grandmother sitting near the door, and my cousin and I squeezed in between women further inside - and it was alive with singing. I've never heard singing at a mosque (I haven't been to many, or very often...), but this you could hear from blocks away, the men (and women) all chanting together the same few lines, over and over, in a really delicious melody:
Subhan Allah, wa rahmatullah
Wa la illaha illallah
Allahu akbar
Allahu akbar
Allahu akbar
Wa illah arham!
and underneath it, very quietly, you could hear the voices that had picked out the harmony, and it was beautiful.
The singing went on for maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour (it had been going on for longer before we came) before the sermon and the prayer started, both of which were over lickety-split (that's part of the beauty of Islamic prayer, is that it happens often but never for very long. God knows that you have stuff to do).
Then came the crush of women pressing for the door - and reaching for each other at the same time, reaching over and around each other to kiss friends and acquaintances and to wish them peace, and, implicitly, to forgive and be forgiven for offenses committed during the year. my grandmother, sitting near the door, made it out early and rescued our shoes, and we waited while she kissed her friends and chatted, and then we walked back to my uncle's house.
My uncle's house is in fact a cave, half of which is furnished like a house. the other half is unfurnished, unfinished, dark and cementy and cold and full of chambers and staircases. On Youm Arafat we climbed a couple of these staircases and descended a couple of others over and down to the garage-cum-barnyard where the sheep were being kept. three sheep: one purchased by my grandmother, one by the uncle with whom we were staying, and one by my Oran uncle.
on Eid, I learned, we had to wait til the Imam had finished his sacrifice before we could do ours. it was maybe 10 in the morning when my uncle and my two cousins, Nibras and Ahmed, escorted the first ram into the courtyard, to be petted by the younger family members and appreciated by the older ones before being offered up.
My two cousins held the ram down while my uncle slit its throat, in the halal style. I didn't watch the act itself - neither did my aunts; it's a hard thing to watch - but I did watch afterward, while the sheep bled out on the white tiles in the courtyard. It's difficult - and it's life. Death. I've never watched an animal die, or see anything I've eaten killed. But it's life, it's how it happens.
Once the sheep was dead, my cousins got down to the business of stripping it down -a process entirely unto itself. Ahmed cut a hole into the skin of the hind leg, at the crook where it joins the body, and started blowing air into the pocket, into he body of the sheep, to separate the inner pieces a bit - he and Nibras taking turns til the sheep was puffed up and sounded like a drum when you beat it.
Then Ahmed tore the hole a little wider and plunged his hands into the gap to begin separating the hide from the body - not peeling it yet, just separating. the body was hot; Ahmed's hands were steaming in the cold. before stripping off the hide completely, Tayeb, my uncle, severed the head and placed it aside, broke off the legs at the knees, and then hung the body from the hind leg on a hook in the wall of the courtyard. that's when the real mess happened - suspended without a head, the sheep vomited up the contents of its stomach and the remainder of its blood into one large puddle of yellow-green and dark red, which Nibras flushed with buckets and buckets of water down the drain in the corner of the court. (My uncle, a gastroenterologist and veteran sheep-sacrificer, remarked that the stomach contents looked suspect, and surmised that the sheep was ill in the gut.)
When the sheep was hung and drained, Ahmed finished stripping the hide, wrestling the sheep and cutting away where the skin still clung to the flesh and tendon. I left at this point for a cat nap with my grandmother; when I came back, the sheep's innerds had all been removed and carefully laid out on a table in the courtyard: pink lungs, purple heart, chocolate liver. The intestines were sitting grey in a bucket, and the green gallbladder was lying next to the drain. Ahmed washed out the stomach and proved my uncle right - the sheep had an abscess in his gut, a milky pink ball that exploded when he dropped it on the ground. The sheep's stomach is full of folds and looks like a dull yellow undersea creature; Ahmed rinsed out each fold, and then he and Nibras shaped the undigested contents into yellow-grassy balls to be thrown away.
Then the women's work began: my aunt Zahra took the liver away to be cooked, and my aunt Kultum took the sheep's head - called Bou Zellouf - to be roasted over a fire. Roasting burns away all the hair, which smells like burnt plastic when it's roasting. Afterward, Zahra boiled the bald head and then with soap and brush and more hot water scrubbed away the skin and polished down the skull - a little Bou Zellouf bain-douche.
And then we ate: Fresh mutton, liver, Bou Zellouf, with couscous, vegetables, potatoes. It was a feast.
- and I have to go! - but I'll post this as it is, and continue later.