For Fatima
I saw god for the first time while drinking sweet mint tea in Morocco.
We had traveled from Chefchaouen city to a smaller mountain town nearby. I cannot remember the name and we traveled in the evening with a setting sun, so I cannot even recall what the town looked like. I know that we reached it on long winding roads that ventured through mountains that eventually gave way to a valley. The homes were all different shades of sand; they were square and their insides filled with color.
The night before we spent wandering around the ancient cobble stone streets of a holy town that was painted blue like the sky. For all I knew, it was the sky that came down and decided long ago that this town was the one meant to reflect it. Mirror it. Hold the expansive magic of it.
When we arrived at our destination that night, we poured out of the van and walked up skinny steps to the second floor of the home of our host for the evening.
The room was small, cozy and filled with the rich scents of our dinner. We sat at a makeshift table in the living room that wrapped around the room along with the bench upon which we all sat side by side. There were twelve to fifteen people in all. We spoke in broken arabic, french and english over a dinner of couscous, lamb tagine, and fresh salads sprinkled with pomegranate. The pomegranate in January in Morocco is something I will never forget. Its deep zesty pop of flavor is like an exclamation mark in my memory.
It goes without saying that dinner was absolutely glorious.
You have not lived until you have been fed by a North African woman in her home. This is true about many regions in the world, but there is something about the sense of place that you feel when eating alongside the women in this country that overrides any experience I have ever had. With our hands covered with the same lamb fat that you have smelled cooking all day long. All of us eating from the same plate with bread that was baked a few hours ago down in the medina in ancient wood fire ovens that have been baking the same bread for hundreds of years.
But I digress, we hadn't traveled that day for the food, we had traveled to witness the embodiment of the divine.
After dinner we were served mint tea and sweets. The room was warm and I remember feeling the haze of relaxation hitting after a long day's travel combined with good food and amazing company.
The group of young women that had dined with us gathered together on one end of the bench and after a quick explanation from their instructor of what they were going to sing, they let loose and filled the room with a symphony of sound.
I cannot describe it as singing as we know it in America. It was so much more than what we know. They found rhythm, synchronicity, and tone in one another. Seamlessly weaving between ancient Arabic words and instrumental pitches to create the most potent sound I have ever heard.
It was like the world was filled with their voice. It was like the world was created to simply hold their voice.
The women were all between the ages of 13 and 18. They all came from old Sufi families who had lived in the area since the beginning of their lineage.
They were the first of the women in their families to be formally trained and permitted to perform for outsiders. And when I asked them how that felt, the youngest girl with the most distinct and unique voice sat up, looked at me and smiled with her whole body.
She spoke in arabic that was translated into english by her teacher, an older man who wore a cap and had the kindest bluest eyes. She told me that she felt filled with god. Pure god. She felt as though she was an instrument of god and what a gift that was. To be able to have god work through her and how truly thankful she was to be able to perform and show the connection between god and her people.
When she began singing again, something happened. At the time I didn’t know how to perceive it or think of it, I just knew what it was that I felt and what I was witnessing take place before my eyes.
After spending five months abroad in different countries with vastly different cultures and languages, you lose the compulsive western need to understand.
We tend to analyze as we experience so we can fit the experience into one of the known, designated boxes. But what I had learned over the preceding six months was, sometimes an experience is simply an experience. Not to be analyzed and compartmentalized; but to stand alone disconnected from what is known and eventually, with time, the reason for the experience becomes more clear.
What I witnessed that night in that warm room was light. Emanating from her. With each breath she took in to fuel her voice, she became brighter. The light poured into her from above and lit her like a lantern. She literally beamed.
Tears began compulsively streaming from my eyes as I watched her glow from within.
And in that moment I knew love. I knew that I was filled with love and that I loved her. A love that was timeless, definitionless, and unconditional.
You see, I had spent months prior surrounded by the echoes of death. Of wading through people, places, stories and reflections weighed down by death.
I had spent 4 months living, studying and researching the war in Sri Lanka. A place that had been ravaged by a civil war for almost 30 years. By the time I had arrived it was ‘over’, but it still lived on in the stories, people, and land that experienced it.
It was a very violent war composed of landmines, bombing, disappearances, rape, and unspeakable occurrences of erasure that are only seen in instances of genocide.
I was the first American student to live with a Tamil family in the 28 year history of the program, because to live with a Tamil family at any point before that, would have been too dangerous. The everyday persecution of the Tamil people too relentless.
When I was there, I gathered stories from anyone and everyone that would speak to me. My Akka ( sister) functioned as my translator and we would walk from home to home interviewing both Sinhala and Tamil families about their experience during the war and what they thought of the future of Sri Lanka now that the war was over. Many Tamil families knew nothing but the war, and struggled to see how anything was different now that it was declared ‘over’.
We spent countless hours listening to stories filled with loss, death, destruction but at the end of every day we gathered with family, danced to bollywood music and ate the best curry cooked by the best Aunties. The love lightened the weight of death, but the death was still there. Still present in every room, lurking in every shadow.
I could feel it. I could feel it because I knew it.
About ten days before I boarded a plane in Los Angeles bound for Sri Lanka, I watched death take my mother. It was a slow and painful death. She was diagnosed as terminally ill days before I graduated high school, given months to live and died three years later.
It gave me time to get to know death… what it felt like, what it smelled like, what it looked like. The witnessing of the slow seeping of life from a being is a sensory filled experience. Not one that you can truly understand until you experience it for yourself; and even then it falls into the ‘experience that does not fit into any box’ category.
There is no understanding death, but it happens.
The same way god appearing in the voice and body of a young muslim woman happens.
Ummah is an arabic word meaning the body of people that exist under the muslim faith. It transcends borders, regions, and individual identity of any kind. It is a reference to the larger Islamic family that exists worldwide. It represents oneness and community regardless of where and who you are.
It has been my absolute belief that the Ummah is very real, very alive and very very important. I did not understand that until I landed in Morocco and experienced the power of Ummah in real time.
Last night, on solstice eve, while American made bombs rained down on Iran and Palestine, I experienced an extremely visceral memory of that night where I met god in that girl's eyes. And had a profound understanding that it is her sisters and brothers that we are killing. It is her mothers and fathers that we are bombing into oblivion for no reason. It is her light that we are methodically smothering with our darkness.
We are the ones making death a known entity in their world. And they are not safe. Not from us. We are willing to transcend any border with our weapons, our money, our vapid ideologies.
There is no understanding it, but let me tell you, we are watching the light slowly seep from our bodies. Being syphoned out and stolen in the name of power and patriotism.
We are not moving towards life, we are moving towards death.
And unless we start waking up and recognizing the process of death that we are living through, we will be too late.