The Month of Lamentations
29 January
It is 3:30 in the morning. Called from sleep by an eerie, alien music from the minarets, I am having disrespectful thoughts.
Lying on my back half-sunk in dreams, half-risen into warbles that I know are words, strange shadows playing on the ceiling. After 20 minutes, I throw open a window and hold out a microphone to record this. The lamp at my elbow tips & shatters against the tile. I hear Italian widows wailing as they throw themselves into their husbands coffins; I hear hungry ghosts; kazoos; madness---I hear wrongly & I know it. It’s humid. There is lightning. I hear a terrible, weird, keening loneliness. They are calling & calling with a cutting urgency now, a lost cause, and I am at the window!
But they are not calling me.
This is different than any adhan I’ve heard. I wake through the night, stop work through the day. My pragmatism assaulted: I sense blasphemy in earplugs.
This is ignorance, I say to my frustration & resolve to cure it in the morning. Ignorance! It is worse because you don’t understand. If I only knew what was going on, why they are singing now, what they are saying, I would not be going quite so nuts.
NO BLISS FOR THE IGNORANT
At 3:30 AM, this is what it sounded like to me: the loudest call seemed synthesized, the voice most resembling a kazoo. Then joining Synthesized-Kazoo muezzin comes Underwater-Sermon muezzin, his low voice garbling out prayers, stories, lamentation. Then comes Chanting muezzin, repeating the same two, guttural syllables for fifteen minutes. And finally a chorus of Haunted-House-Ghost muezzins fire up, wailing up and down the scales in the background.
It's not very loud, all of this, but it's immensely intrusive and—so far—baffling to me. I think of social anthropologists past trying to make some sense of foreign customs & only making a holy mess of things. Fortunately for me, I have an educated guess, a native speaker & the internet at my disposal (...which, as we all know, is three times the ammunition you need to make a truly stupendous mess of things).
The Day of ASHURA
I should have asked earlier.
This is Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The first ten days mark the Remembrance of Muharram: the martyrdom of Hussein—Mohammad’s grandson—in 680 (CE), at the battle of Karbala (which you may recognize as a contemporary battleground in Iraq). These ten days reach a climax on the day of Ashura (meaning tenth). Historically, Ashura commemorates two events: the day Noah left the ark and the day Moses was saved from the Egyptians by Allah. But among Shiites, Ashura specifically mourns the death of Hussein.
The remembrance of Muharram is a time of sadness & is often celebrated by public displays of grief. In Iran, taziyeh plays---passion plays—enact the martyrdom in its full & bloody horror. Some Shi'as self-flagellate with chains, beating their heads or ritually cutting themselves: embodying a connection with Hussein’s suffering and death. It also includes the public recitation of certain poems, prose & sermons to mourn, elegize or recount Hussein’s life & death. And chants of “Ya Hussein” (chanting muzzein). In Indonesia the time is also celebrated with kite races (I’ve seen dozens of kites flying in the cemetery below all week) & a ritual throwing of a giant funeral bier into the ocean.
Last night (Jan 29th) was Ashura: crescendo for the month of lamentations.
I know what I am hearing now. I finally know what is going on.
Call away, I'll still hear it, but I think tonight I will sleep all the way through.
It is 3:30 in the morning. Called from sleep by an eerie, alien music from the minarets, I am having disrespectful thoughts.
Lying on my back half-sunk in dreams, half-risen into warbles that I know are words, strange shadows playing on the ceiling. After 20 minutes, I throw open a window and hold out a microphone to record this. The lamp at my elbow tips & shatters against the tile. I hear Italian widows wailing as they throw themselves into their husbands coffins; I hear hungry ghosts; kazoos; madness---I hear wrongly & I know it. It’s humid. There is lightning. I hear a terrible, weird, keening loneliness. They are calling & calling with a cutting urgency now, a lost cause, and I am at the window!
But they are not calling me.
This is different than any adhan I’ve heard. I wake through the night, stop work through the day. My pragmatism assaulted: I sense blasphemy in earplugs.
This is ignorance, I say to my frustration & resolve to cure it in the morning. Ignorance! It is worse because you don’t understand. If I only knew what was going on, why they are singing now, what they are saying, I would not be going quite so nuts.
NO BLISS FOR THE IGNORANT
At 3:30 AM, this is what it sounded like to me: the loudest call seemed synthesized, the voice most resembling a kazoo. Then joining Synthesized-Kazoo muezzin comes Underwater-Sermon muezzin, his low voice garbling out prayers, stories, lamentation. Then comes Chanting muezzin, repeating the same two, guttural syllables for fifteen minutes. And finally a chorus of Haunted-House-Ghost muezzins fire up, wailing up and down the scales in the background.
It's not very loud, all of this, but it's immensely intrusive and—so far—baffling to me. I think of social anthropologists past trying to make some sense of foreign customs & only making a holy mess of things. Fortunately for me, I have an educated guess, a native speaker & the internet at my disposal (...which, as we all know, is three times the ammunition you need to make a truly stupendous mess of things).
The Day of ASHURA
I should have asked earlier.
This is Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The first ten days mark the Remembrance of Muharram: the martyrdom of Hussein—Mohammad’s grandson—in 680 (CE), at the battle of Karbala (which you may recognize as a contemporary battleground in Iraq). These ten days reach a climax on the day of Ashura (meaning tenth). Historically, Ashura commemorates two events: the day Noah left the ark and the day Moses was saved from the Egyptians by Allah. But among Shiites, Ashura specifically mourns the death of Hussein.
The remembrance of Muharram is a time of sadness & is often celebrated by public displays of grief. In Iran, taziyeh plays---passion plays—enact the martyrdom in its full & bloody horror. Some Shi'as self-flagellate with chains, beating their heads or ritually cutting themselves: embodying a connection with Hussein’s suffering and death. It also includes the public recitation of certain poems, prose & sermons to mourn, elegize or recount Hussein’s life & death. And chants of “Ya Hussein” (chanting muzzein). In Indonesia the time is also celebrated with kite races (I’ve seen dozens of kites flying in the cemetery below all week) & a ritual throwing of a giant funeral bier into the ocean.
Last night (Jan 29th) was Ashura: crescendo for the month of lamentations.
I know what I am hearing now. I finally know what is going on.
Call away, I'll still hear it, but I think tonight I will sleep all the way through.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 11:52 PM
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