Mourning in Ramadan

I first fasted with my Muslim friends for Ramadan in 2008. Although I am a Christian, I wanted to experience what those around me were experiencing. I learned a lot that first Ramadan and in the subsequent two years that I fasted. I learned how hard the first day was in the Kano heat with […]

I first fasted with my Muslim friends for Ramadan in 2008. Although I am a Christian, I wanted to experience what those around me were experiencing. I learned a lot that first Ramadan and in the subsequent two years that I fasted. I learned how hard the first day was in the Kano heat with no water, how irritable and tired I get when I am hungry, how part of the blessing of the month is learning how to discipline your natural instincts, your natural irritability, and to be pleasant and patient even when you don’t feel like it. I learned the joy of food broken with friends at dusk, the sweetness of a date on a dry tongue, the wetness of watermelon, the tang of pineapple and orange, bought from the fruit seller on the corner, the hot crispiness of kosai shared out on oil-stained newspapers alongside koko in plastic cups filled with sugar, or bitter zogale salad shared from one bowl. I would break fast in recording studios and on Kannywood sets and at friends’ houses with children running around. There was joy in this communal effort, to know that everyone around me was going through the same physical discipline. Delight in breaking fast together and answering the sweet lilting question “An sha ruwa lafiya?” And though I am not Muslim, when the Maghrib prayers floated on the air, I would pause and pray to God as well, thanks for the day, for the food, for the good souls all around me. I remember Ramadan as a time of love, community, renewal.
It’s hard to imagine this month of discipline and prayer, of families and friends gathering at dusk to share food, beginning this way, with so many bombs and attacks that I can hardly keep track. The Abuja bomb a few days before the moon was sighted, a simultaneous bomb in Adamawa, an explosion in Lagos that same day, and then the attacks on churches in the villages surrounding Chibok last weekend, bombs in Bauchi, Maiduguri and Kaduna, even explosions in Ile Ife. Between the time I turn in this article and Saturday when it is published, who knows what else will happen? The over 200 girls kidnapped from Chibok are still missing, as are the women kidnapped from Fulani camps and other women and boys kidnapped from around the northeast.
How can human beings do this, and why do they do this—devastating their own home and their country, even giving up their own lives to destroy other people? In the name of God? I can’t understand it. I read of snakes and bees attacking Boko Haram in the forest, and I join the raucous praises to God for doing what the army cannot. If only God would do more…
The past few weeks as the World Cup has dominated global attention while Boko Haram has stepped up their attacks, I have been haunted by a passage from a novel I taught last semester. Murambi, The Book of Bones by Boubacar Boris Diop (translated by Fiona McLaughlin) tells the story of the Rwanda genocide from the voices of both victims and perpetrators. The opening chapter is told in the voice of Michel Serumundo, a Tutsi video marketer. He narrates the day Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and extremist Hutu militia began the genocide.
He tells his wife not to worry “the entire world is watching them, they won’t be able to do anything.” But, he narrates, “In my heart of hearts I knew I was wrong. The World Cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was interested in nothing else. […] Even Africans would say, during half-time of every match, ‘They’re embarrassing us, they should stop killing each other like that.’ Then they’ll go on to something else. ‘Did you see that acrobatic flip of Kluivert’s?’What I’m saying is not a reproach. I’ve seen lots of scenes on television myself that were hard to take. Guys in slips and masks pulling bodies out of a mass grave. Newborns they toss, laughing, into bread ovens. Young women who coat their throats with oil before going to bed. ‘That way,’ they say, ‘when the throat-slitters come, the blades of their knives won’t hurt as much’ I suffered from these things without really feeling involved. I didn’t realize that if the victims shouted loud enough, it was so I would hear them, myself and thousands of other people on earth, and so we would try to do everything we could so that their suffering might end. It always happened so far away, in countries on the other side of the world. But in these early days of April in 1994, the country on the other side of the world is mine.”
The passage feels familiar and unfamiliar. As in Rwanda, atrocities are taking place during the World Cup, in the side of the world that is our own. Yet, Nigeria was itself a contender in the games, and I’ve seen the agony on social media, as people try to balance their despair about what is happening to Nigeria with hope that it will succeed in this other place.
Last Wednesday morning, I turned in my column and headed to the sports bar at the student union, to watch Nigeria play Argentina. When I went onto Twitter to share the excitement of the match with Nigerian friends, I saw the news of the bomb in Abuja.
It was painful. People swung between excitement at the game and agony at the bomb in Abuja. It wasn’t as hidden as Diop presents the Rwandan genocide. The sportscaster even announced the bomb in the middle of the game. But perhaps that was because it touched people with the most access to the internet, the people living in the wealthy capital. He didn’t announce the bomb in Adamawa.
Later that day I watched a video someone had taken soon after the bomb went off. I put my hand over the screen to shield my eyes from images of exploded dead bodies. But what made me cry were the voices in the background, the weeping, the phone calls, “bomb ya tashi yanzu nan,” the repeated chant of “inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un.” The moaning. “Jesus, Jesus.” The dazed and bloodied woman they carried in across the road. The roiling black smoke from burning cars. The severed hand on the sidewalk. The place I know so well, that I have walked in front of dozens of times.
And yet this is only one bomb of many this week, a roll call of destruction across the north, creeping into the south. How do we then live? How do we continue to live our lives when Nigeria is being destroyed by sadistic criminals?
One of the most powerful pieces I’ve read that captures this despair is a 1 July Facebook post by Sunday Trust columnist Tope Fasua. (Read it all in his column tomorrow) He writes: “It’s not always been like this. It got worse in the last few years. Today, we bear things that we never thought bearable. We withdraw into ourselves, and keep minding our own businesses, or even seeking distraction, as it all catches up with us… this loss of humanity.[…] That is why, on a day that 20 were blown to pieces in a market in Maiduguri; innocent people minding their own businesses, perhaps poor people who don’t have enough money to run out of that zone, perhaps indigenes of the place, who have said to themselves ‘we were born here, we will die here’, I, Tope Fasua, find it more fitting, conciliatory, social, normal, even christian-like, to comment on who played what in Nigeria’s football match yesterday, and to lament about how the referees ensured we didn’t win the match. And oh, no one thought that was abnormal, because Nigeria – this present Nigeria – simply rips the humanity out of you. […] At least in Abuja, there are phone cameras to capture it all, when they decide it’s our turn to weep. Budgets are cut. Deals are made. Monies are spent. Equipments are acquired. Nothing happens. The poor keep dying. The rich keep building mansions and monuments in celebration of their vanity. The people say ‘give us some more of this… we will vote so that this continues. All we need is a little bit of rice’.”
I can add no more. Allah ya kawo mana zaman lafiya.