La Jeûne

Today was the second day of Ramadan, and it was just as beautiful as the first. Fasting was particularly difficult because of the heat, but still yesterday was worse due to the fact that I had the great idea to wash clothes on the roof on an August day. It was both torture and heaven taking a late-afternoon shower but not being able to drink after scrubbing clothes in a bucket, sweeping my room with a bundle of hay, and tidying up my few material possessions, with the cold water running down me and pooling on the floor of the dark, cool cupboard-turned-bathroom under the concrete staircase (no homo). But, alas, I knew it was worth it when after the call to prayer issued from the nearby Mosque de Mermoz no longer echoed in the tall, cinderblock walls of my family’s courtyard, we all felt further satisfaction as we downed sticky dates, cups of sweetened coffee, and a half of a buttered baguette each. Later we would sit side-by-side in middle of the room again, with the cool concrete walls and rooms and balconies of the house rising around us, and eat from a substantial platter of rice and fish with serving-size metal spoons.

Now, as I sit three stories up on the roof, the sun has fully gone down and after an incredibly warm and uncomfortable day, the night breeze is blowing. I hear the small family of cats whining (a mama and two tiny babies) who live in the space where an old wooden door leans against the short wall that separates our flat roof from our neighbors. I can pick out my eldest brother amongst the many people below shuffling from their homes towards the mosque down the dark, dusty street; he’s wearing a long, breezy blue and white pinstripe robe, with the hood up and is carrying his string of shiny black prayer beads wrapped around his wrist. Again, as it does five times a day, a man’s voice is broadcast from the mosque and his longing, indebted prayer resonates in the brick-laid alleyways, in the swaying Baobab trees, in the ears and souls of the patrons of the city.

In Senegal, right now on this roof, I feel peaceful, softened, at ease while completely submerged in a culture that is anything but familiar. More than feeling alienated or aware of the disparate separation from who I am and where I am, I’ve been feeling like I could live my life out in this place and that these people are already my neighbors and this place could easily become my home. But, right now, I feel a tinge of desperation because even if I am successful with my month-long restraint from eating or drinking water from sunrise to sunset, even if I improve my French and Wolof enough to communicate whole heartedly with my Senegalese friends, even if I learn the ways and means of cooking and dress and acceptable gestures, I sit alone on the roof as almost every Senegalese hurries to give penance to the thing that consumes them, impels them, and ordains every piece of their sensibility.

Far from converting to Islam, I long for the same peaceful spirituality that sews me into the world and wonderfully furls what now is the fragmented, agitated way that I comprehend my being. No longer will I dismiss an enduring faith in some incorporeal, perhaps divine force as a lapse in rationality, as incompatible with the material and measurable laws of science and nature that apparently conduct my days. Right now I feel the man’s song echoing from the tall minaret of the Mosque de Mermoz as a oneness, a washing away of the little fragments of rock that continuously scour against each other in the furthest reaches of my mind. It brings only a wave of harmony, dreariness, and a heaviness that settles itself down on my eyelids.