l-Eid Kbir

12/09/08

Today is l-Eid Kbir or “The Great Feast”, a religious holiday on which families slaughter a sheep in sacrifice as Abraham once did in substitute for his own son, as Islamic history tells us.

For the past week or so I had a companion on my floor of the house. Kept in a makeshift cage in the area across from my room, he mostly ate hay and bleated dishearteningly well into the night. We never really became friends but still, I was sad to see him go. This morning he, along with what must have been hundreds of thousands of his brethren across the country, with a slash of a knife, exited this earth in a pool of blood.

Sort of. Most of him is still here.

I returned home this morning at the beckoning of my host brother; the deed was about to be done, he said. I walked up to the roof area near my room in time to see the sheep, my irksome companion, in his last seconds of life on the concrete floor. Blood was splattered about, his throat cut, body twitching and occasionally thrashing as the butcher held his legs. When he stopped moving they hung him up by the tendons of his rear ankles *shiver*. Before that, however, they inflated his skin (to ease in its separation from the body) by cutting a hole in its coat and blowing. An inflated sheep, seriously. They proceeded to skin and disembowel it, placing the organs meant for consumption into buckets and trays. In order to remove the feces from the intestinal tract, the man-- I will never forget this-- placed his lips directly to the sheep’s rear entrance and blew forcefully several times. You could see the “digestive material” moving along through the transparent bulbous tubes of viscera dangling from its abdomen and, with the aid of a little water, it fell out in brown pebbles onto the ground from some severed end.

Still reading?

Its body, legs broken, hooves chopped off, decapitated, eviscerated and hollow, hung there from the ladder propped up outside my room. Its head, eyes still open, is sitting atop the heap of skin and fur nearby. I think I ate parts of it for lunch just minutes ago. Not the head, I mean. But that will come soon enough.

Kids have been out in the street, screaming and making taunting-sounding chants down the alleys in anticipation of something ominous to come. Men dressed up in goatskin suits and others with masks and black paint on their bodies (called harmas, I believe) roam the streets with wooden sticks, harassing and chasing people, stopping cars, and terrifying children who are obviously loving it-- all in good fun (I think) in a very Halloween-esque fashion.

Halloween and Thanksgiving, that’s what this holiday feels like. The togetherness, the visiting of family, the bickering, the mass slaughtering of animals, the costumes, the kids running around outside, and of course the eating and eating and eating. Though the official holiday is just today, the celebration will continue throughout the week as we make our way through the remaining sheep parts. I think brain is on the menu. Mbruk l-Eid!