Eid Mubarak

CW: Description of animal slaughter

The countryside is not exactly green at home, but the dusty cedars and holm oaks, the upland cherry orchards and irrigated fields of young wheat in oblong patches flanked by the piled boulders dug out to make them possible are some kind of midpoint between the lush Appalachian onslaught of unrestrainable vegetation of my youth and the red-dune Sahara we’re driving into. As we slide out of the forested hills, we go through a spectrum: the fruit-tree green turns to graying olive as the red-tiled roofs become ochre villages. The wheat is replaced by long brown onion barrows packed with golden straw. 

The air conditioning begins to lose the battle with the sun through the windows at about the time the trees lose theirs with scrubby bushes, the gashes where sudden rains have washed the unanchored soil downhill looking like the trenches of this age-old war. In truth it’s the goats that did the bulk of the fighting, chewing out the new saplings and inadvertently tipping the balance of evolution in favor of plants that would either shred their mouths or poison them. Some are said to be hallucinogens, but if that’s true, goats lack the human drive to alter their consciousness and they don’t work on humans, because no enterprising youths are out there hauling a new drug to market. I spend a second wondering how anyone proposes to know a goat is tripping. 

Beyond the rain-washed canyons, the mountains are just gray, scree-strewn piles of slate sloping down, all at the same 45 degree angle, all topped by the same central mohawk of solid rock not yet carved down by the brutal wind. There’s no need for a weather vane here, where the wind is so steady, the mountains themselves point the direction, though the windmills have only just begun to dot the landscape. I point out the window for Yaniss to find the satisfying moments when two or even three sync up and spin together. But a moment later he makes a high-pitch squeal of protest at their disjointed asynchronicity. 

Rahal and Marwa make impatient sighs as they shift, the squeal penetrating the piped-in music in their ears, and irritable from the rising heat, the sweat sticking our shirts to our lower backs. The prickly pears begin well before the desert proper: they are encouraged as impenetrable sheep-pen material and the bearer of saleable fruits. But these give way to more fearsome cacti and the sand begins to blow loose across the road before a vista opens beyond the mohawk mountains, and we stop to take pictures. 

An aggressive guide pitches me a camel ride at the mind-boggling price of 400 dirhams for an hour. The camel handler, mistaking him for my guide, whispers in Arabic to my husband an offered kickback if he can convince me to pay the price. A wave of Nabil’s hand indicating the kids’ brownness of skin and tightness of curl sitting right at the midway point between us, along with a withering remark about whose money would be kicked back, sends him on his way. A mere 40 bucks, but fully three times what we pay when we go on a trek into the dunes, which we would not consider at this season. It’s at least 105 degrees, though, as they say, it’s a dry heat, which does actually help when there’s shade or breeze or water, but is currently only tolerable for two minutes of snapping family shots of the red dunes rolling into forever and the proper date-palm oasis off the right-hand foreground. The kids take just a minute to run a few steps down the path to grab a handful of sand for the novelty of how it passes through their fingers without sticking, for humidity is 0 and this is not beach sand. As it hits the dunes below, it flows like water, no moisture-induced friction to obstruct the path. Yaniss is immediately mesmerized and predictably resists getting back in the car, despite the heat. I blame the big kids, unreasonably, then the heat for my unreasonableness. 

The family pours out of the square stucco house when we pull up. Nabil’s five siblings, the European wives and one remaining Moroccan husband, the frail toothless matriarch, the passel of deep-tan kids aged college-bound to bound upon mother’s back. There is a flurry of hugs, manly back slaps, cheeks kissed, once left, once right, once left, and then perhaps twenty more right, a cacophony of chirped blessings, exclamations of how the children have grown, how this one has cut off her hair and that one has lost weight. Slowly the teens’ mocking repetition of “tabarkallah!” and “hamdullah” gives way to them just ululating and the garrulous adults finally get the message. My mother attended Eid once, many years ago when it landed in the cool of autumn. She called it The United Nations, as four children of the family had gone abroad and returned with a spouse of a different nationality. Now the children all spoke different languages too, and English supplanted Tamazight as the lingua franca, the only language all the children learned in school.

We settle in, eat almond cookies, lounge on froshes in the relative cool of the sunken ground floor and fan ourselves. On the edge of the oasis, in the shadow of the cliff, it’s considerably cooler than out in the open desert, but still, the kids are soon coming by asking for chapstick and a dip in the little stream, and the dutiful sons force the matriarch to drink water every hour, because they are thirsty and read that old people can’t sense their thirst the same way anymore. 

The sheep are delivered at nightfall, when the temperature plunges. My kids and I run cotton scarves under the faucet and wrap our heads in them. The evaporative cooling is enough to keep us very comfortable for the two hours until they dry and we get up to do it again, hearing the bleat of the uncomfortable animals tied by the horns in the courtyard. 

The kitchen is a-bustle with preparations when I wake in the morning. Cakes and cookies, dates, bread, oil and honey are set out for guests who turn up throughout the morning, the men with rolled-up prayer mats under their arms. With little familiarity with the house, the recipes, or the presentation, I’m in the way. I duck away to one of the many formal sitting areas, where the kids also begin to gather, unable to help but also embarrassed by their idleness. 

“Tell us the story about Eid,” asks one of the older cousins, a girl who lives in the Netherlands when school is in session. I’ve been telling her since she was four. None of their parents mind that I get the details wrong, mixing the version from Sunday school with the one in the Quran. Raised by an illiterate mother and an absentee father, their religious education was shaky to start and mostly abandoned as they departed abroad. Three or four of the five pillars are all that stand in the ruins of their religious life, and they find my efforts better than what they have to offer. 

“Yeah!” A little one joins, climbing into my lap.

“Okay, but it’s too hot for cuddles,” I say. 

It’s the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, except, I note, that in the Muslim story it is Ibrahim’s first son Ismael who God demands as sacrifice. The dutiful child follows his father up the hillside paths, which I imagine flanked by tough scrubby brush with thorned and twisted branches. At the crest of the hill, Ibrahim blindfolds his son. I embellish here beyond the detail provided by any text I know. The slender youth is held by his father, aged, but powerful from a life of robust work. I picture him holding the body between his knees, the boy not frightened, but alert. Tears clean a track down the father’s dusty cheeks as he grips the knife. But then the bleat of a sheep, horns and fleece tangled into the thorny brush, stays his hand before the voice of God confirms his reprieve. 

It’s unmistakable to me: the life saved is the father’s, whose decreed fate holds horrors so much worse than the son’s mere death. I reach a hand out to pull Yaniss close in spite of the heat, marvel at how I can love even his sweaty, dusty little-boy smell. Just surviving would be worse. Holding the knife would be far too much to bear. I think for a moment about Ismael, observing each year this feast to commemorate the day his father was willing to slaughter him. Did he feel betrayal, or was he the kind of loyal devotee who found his father’s faith noble, like we’re all supposed to? 

One of the uncles calls out that they’re about to start killing the sheep. The kids jump to their feet, the bigger boys talking over whether the oldest can actually make the killing cut. The older girls are expected to wield squeegee mops to train the blood and excrement down the drains of the tiled courtyard. Some of the younger kids excitedly start babbling about how the skin will be blown up with a bicycle pump. “A goat balloon!” one chirps. “No! A sheep” another corrects. 

Yaniss does not remember his last Eid, likely missed the sacrifice inside playing on an ipad. He just follows the crowd of cousins, and I realize that I have not prepared him for this, even though I know how he needs to be talked through new situations. I guess I didn’t want to talk about the slaughter. Maybe I just thought he would stay inside.

But he doesn’t. He parks himself on the wall of the stairs overlooking the courtyard and excitedly points to the first sheep they’re bringing into view.

“Let’s go inside, Yaniss,” I suggest, placing protective arms around his hot little body. “They’re going to kill the sheep. You aren’t going to like it.”

“They’re going to kill it!” an excited cousin echos. Yaniss understands the excitement more than the killing.

The men are holding the animal down, facing the correct direction, gripping the throat as the oldest cousin, under his father’s direction, tests the weight of the knife. His mother goes back in the house, not exactly disapproving, but resisting the brutal image of her son taking an animal’s life settling down beside those of him losing teeth and offering Mother’s day cards in her memory. I continue whispering to Yaniss about what’s about to happen, encouraging him to come in. But he says “I want to watch.” He seems interested by the idea that we will eat the sheep, and I think it’s good that he will understand that meat doesn’t just appear in the grocery store divorced even in shape from a living animal.

The grown cousin rakes the knife across the sheep’s throat, not quite powerfully enough. The windpipe is slit but not as decisively severed as the men want, so his father takes the knife and makes a second cut. There will be some argument later about whether this precludes the meat being halal, with the father maintaining that the first was a killing cut and he just wanted to have more control of the way the blood flowed. In either case, we are now gazing into the hole that used to be the throat, the head attached by bone and flesh at the back of the neck, the writhing sheep spilling almost unrealistically red blood onto the white tiles and down the drain. 

Yaniss’ enthusiasm remains for a moment of surprise before he begins to understand the meaning of the blood and exposed tubes. The men are working, moving the carcass around, the head comes the rest of the way off, a slit is made at the ankle and the bike pump attached accompanied by the whooping cheer of the middle-sized boys. Hooks are hung from the metal framework supporting the awning, where the skinned carcass will dangle. The women and girls are there almost at once with buckets of water, but in the heat and aridity, the blood congeals instantly into little stuck blobs that resist washing down the drain. 

Yaniss is fascinated by the inflating sheepskin, but has by now understood that the sheep will not pull through this adventure and go back to its life as an animal. He springs from the wall and runs around the corner. I know that chasing him at speed only serves to intensify his impulsive behavior, so I make myself walk, calling out in a neutral voice, “Hey, buddy. Where are you going?”

When I turn the corner, he squeals in protest, thrusting his arms out in a protective gesture in front of the remaining sheep. The humane killing of halal meat dictates this sheep cannot see the body of the other, so I know I have a few minutes to talk him through this before the carcass and gore of the other are cleared out. 

“Oh, honey, you’re so sad about the sheep.” He turns to pet the bound muzzle of the filthy sheep, and I wrestle down my need to fuss about handwashing. 

“They aren’t going to kill this one!” His tiny arms go out again, and even though I know there’s no way past this moment without a life-changing heartache, it is so touchingly adorable--the stand he’s taking, the faith that his power can change the animal’s fate--that I can’t resist calling around the corner for his dad to come and look.

I edge nearer, trying to get my arms around him, not yet to control him or pull him away, but to let him have his grief cradled in my protection. He screams. “Don’t kill it!” Several little heads poke around the corner. Two of the little girls start to cry, run off to their mothers. 

“I’m not going to take it. I’m not going to pick you up. I just want to talk to you about the sheep.” I try explaining to him again, asking if he wanted lions to die to save the zebras, the falseness of this analogy going unspoken, but patent to me.

“You love to eat meat, and meat is from animals.” 

“I don’t eat animals!” he shouts. Then, soft, heartbroken, turning back to pet the muzzle, “I love animals.”

Nabil comes to hurry this process along. “We’re going to take it to let it go,” he tries.

“Don’t lie to him,” I say, not just because I think he’s facing something important, but because he is so slow to trust, something particular to him that his father has not really adapted to yet. 

I pick him up. His protests grow more fierce, his little fists get involved as I take him inside the house, shielding the workers from the twisting pinch to their hearts his cries inflict. “I love animals!” he’s saying over and over, until it turns to, “It’s your fault!” and “You let them kill it, Mama!”

I stay calm, but he’s scratching and biting. I have to take control of him. Turning and sitting down with him, I control his hips between my knees, as I’d imagined Ibrahim doing to Ismael. I get a wrist in each hand across his body and hold my head out of the way of his flailing headbutts, whispering that I love him, and I know, he’s so sad, he’s so angry that we killed the sheep, he’s so powerless over the situation. I don’t think he knows what powerless means, but I’ve been instructed to label emotions as specifically as possible. 

I resist telling him that he can choose not to eat meat if he objects to killing, even though I think he should do that rather than hide from the reality of it. This slaughter is, after all, a great deal less brutal than the grocery store meat. His eating is so restricted as it is. 

His is no quiet grief. He screams and flails, blowing snot explosively down his face in retaliation to me. And I deserve it for my tyranny.

As he sobs, I imagine a future when he looks back to this day. Twenty-five family members eager to eat the freshest barbecue, to partake in the celebrations that bind them to home; the pressure of the busy workers, who have three more families to help, all of this will fade, and what will remain is his mother forcibly restraining him, pushing him into a reckoning with mortality and the limits of his own power to live by conviction he isn’t ready for. 

 I release my hold and he bolts up the stairs. I follow in my measured way until I hear the bang of a door on the roof and the picture of him climbing the walls sets me running. Impulsive and angry are a fearsome mix for an open fourth-floor roof. But he’s just locked himself in the bathroom beside the little office there that gets the best cellular reception, to grieve alone, and I know the heat will drive him out in just a few minutes. I wait, the sun so scorching and my skin so dry, I’m worried about sunburn before he emerges, sweating, and tumbles into my arms. I hold him tight, slick sweat blooming everywhere skin touches skin, and start navigating down the stairs to the relative cool, toward the whiff of charcoal and the celebration of parents forgiven the betrayals a harsh universe thrusts upon their precious sons.