Category: Getting Personal

Perhaps the oddest-sounding temptation remedy comes from Baumeister, the Florida psychology professor. He claims that any kind of self-discipline-holding your breath, fasting, writing like a southpaw if you’re right handed-can strengthen will power.

Don’t laugh…It’s really just a modern spin on ancient wisdom. ‘The old spiritual masters understood that if you’re good at fasting, you’re probably good at overcoming other desires. The human will works very much like a muscle…If you train yourself not to do something in one arena, it spills over.’

That’s the theory behind Ramadan. During the month-long observance, Muslims practice a daily fast from food and sex, believing it will hot-wire their ability to resist temptation the rest of the year.

Roy Rivenburg, Surfing the urge, The Sunday Independent, April 18 2004

In the kitchen for the first time this Ramadan, not as patron but presiding as chef of the post-Taraweeh pâtisserie. My worthy subjects, after much deliberation, requested strawberry mousse. I scurry around fetching and carrying fresh cream, strawberries, eggs, white chocolate and cantankerous gelatine. Forty, perfect, individually set strawberry mousse my objective. My maitre d’, affectionately known as Mum, has lofty standards. With the cream whipped, and chocolate chopped and patiently awaiting its passage to melted oblivion, I haul out the blender. The dual blades worked perfectly in sync to crush the strawberries to a blood-like pulp. Using my fingers as a spatula, I trailed the rim of the blender, lifting the last of the stubborn fruit, and gifting it to the pair of hungry blades. As the blades chomped anew at my bounteous gift, I looked at my strawberry stained hands and wondered whether the fruit was sweet enough. Would I need to add extra sugar? Like an automaton, I lifted my fingers to my lips, licking at the strawberry residue. Something was amiss, I just couldn’t understand what. The strawberries now a confirmed pulp, I use a real spatula this time to eke out the last of the hidden bits. The taste hovered on my tongue. Something about it wasn’t right. The pulp deposited into the awaiting vessel, I touch my fingers to the spatula. Another taste. It’s sweet enough. Well, as sweet as strawberries can be but still something wasn’t right. Another taste. Then a yelp of realisation. Of course something was wrong, I was fasting.

Rinsing my mouth of any trace of the strawberries, I was struck by how mechanistically I had reacted to the strawberries. Self-gratification-indiscipline with regard to sensuous pleasures. How often do I react to food like that ordinarily?

Ramadan tempers the beastly instinct. In consciously eschewing nourishment, it is to humanity we aspire.

‘Our Lord do not take us to task if we forget or make a mistake. Our Lord, do not place such a burden on us as You placed on those before us. Our Lord, burden us not with that which we have not the strength to bear. Pardon us, grant us forgiveness and have mercy on us. You are our Protector so help us to victory.’ Ameen!

(Compliments to Saaleha)

Societies need to produce materially to continue- they need food, shelter, warmth, goods to exchange with other societies; a transport and information structure to carry those processes. Also they have to produce ideologically….They need knowledges to keep material production going- diverse technical skills and wisdoms in agriculture, industry, science, medicine, economics, law, geography, languages, politics, and so on. And they need understandings, intuitive and explicit, of a system of social relationships within the whole process can take place more or less evenly. Ideology produces, makes plausible, concepts and systems to explain who we are, who others are, how the world works.

Alan Sinfield

Among the people I know, and those that they know, all schools of thought informing kitchen related activity, are industriously encouraging the harvest of that Ramadan obligation, the savoury. Traditionally, assuming the form of the humble samoosa and pie, today’s savoury, all clicked out for the appeal of the gourmet-fare quaffing, has generated a new variety of food.

Singleguy’s recent post has got me thinking. Particularly this part, ‘I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like children before, let alone a woman?’ No, I’m not going on a feminist rant (again), rambling on how love for children is not intuitive to women, that bit is obvious. I’m wondering rather about fulfilment. Where do we find fulfilment? Shouldn’t all women find fulfilment in children? Shouldn’t the possibility of a child of one’s own, be driving us? I’ll be honest to admit that I derive some sense of fulfilment from writing. It releases me into an autre universe when a present set of sullied circumstances don’t give me much reason to stay within. In taking from others and giving of my own, I feel fulfilled. It’s not so much the release from within me as much as touching others that drives me here. So too, my studies fulfil me, or so the more noble me would claim, but it is a selfish kind of fulfilment. I wonder if the present set of circumstances would turn out to be more perfect would I still find fulfilment in doing this? And then there’s this person of my acquaintance, everything to which I aspire, married, a beautiful baby girl, educated to an advanced post-grad level, critically-acclaimed work in her field, yet she spends every second she can claim, chatting on facebook and IM while her home lays in abject squalor. Surely to be seeking out through facebook and IM, the present circumstances can’t be that fulfilling? Is it just the individual? If she’s fulfilled in all that she is why can’t she be prevailed upon to maintain her fulfilment? Or do I have a warped sense of fulfilment? Perhaps fulfilment doesn’t lay in the ever-after. I remember someone telling me of an Egyptian actress, who had said that she had been married to Saudi men, Egyptian men and Lebanese men (if I remember correctly she was quite a rival to Elizabeth Taylor) but said she was never truly fulfilled until she tasted the feeling of prostrating to a higher deity. Perhaps that’s it. Because it would be unfair if the unmarried an un-motherly among us, were to never taste fulfilment. Beyond the material world we crave, beyond the ideologies we create, beyond the socialisation patterns spawned to maintain the material, fulfilment is spiritual.

I remember years ago, watching an episode of Ready, Steady, Cook when a contestant confessed he didn’t like puddings, he much preferred savouries. Ainsley Harriot, remarked on his use of the word ‘savouries’ , calling it old-fashioned. In the UK, perhaps, but in this part of the world, a weighty section of the South African Indian Delights (Indian cooking for dummies) is devoted to savouries. Who am I to argue with Zuleikha Mayet? I’d like however, to propose a slight alteration to the definition, seeing as we do use the word more than the British whose lexicographers have labelled it a small dish, served before a meal.

Savoury, n , South African Indian English, A small dish, pricked, prodded and packed to contain a semblance of a large meal, consumed in large, movement-impeding quantities by the ravenous and harvested with aplomb in the weeks preceding Ramadan.

My granddad called me yesterday. ‘You don’t call me anymore,’ he said. It wasn’t a rebuke, I sensed hurt. I was duly rebuked. I mumbled some feeble excuse, ridiculous even to my own ears, but he only laughed, his hearty laugh. It made me smile. ‘I love my granddad,’ I thought. ‘Have you heard of a poet called Mahmud Dharwish?’ he asked. I smiled again, ‘I love my granddad’. And we spoke of Dharwish, Rumi and Said, of poetry and prose and the Israeli school curriculum, of diasporas and modern nomads. I promised to send him my copy of The Essential Rumi and some of Dharwish’s work too.

When I was eight, my English teacher, Ms. White, insisted I either join a library or buy a book. Mum and Dad, unwitting of the obsession they were about to foster, took me to CNA and chose for me an anthology of Enid Blyton short stories, The Fairy Shoemaker (I shudder to think what I might have chosen had I been left to my own devices). As I bumbled my way through the book, so too, the book was hauled around with me. So when the weekly trip to Mama and Papa came about, so too, The Fairy Shoemaker was hauled to Laudium. After jostling for granddad’s attention with cousins and siblings, I proudly showed off my literary wares. He looked at it, nodding his approval and then said, ‘Read whatever you see.’ I was intrigued. Whatever I see? In hindsight, I think it was the thrill of seamlessness to a child so used to limits and restrictions. And so that afternoon, during the drive back to Johannesburg, I stayed awake, making a conscious effort to read whatever I saw. And so it began, billboards, traffic furniture, toothpaste boxes, and a book or two, I read. I’m still reading.

If yesterday I had claimed ignorance of Dharwish, I would have been reprimanded as so often in the past I have when granddad asked my opinion on something I had not theretofore heard of, ‘You don’t read!’ Indeed, I don’t read as much as granddad. He reads four newspapers a day, five on Sundays. When once I ventured to give him credit for my bookish ways, reminding him of his advice to me, he laughed and said, ‘I didn’t mean everything…’

I introduced friends from Jeddah to the delights of Rosebank yesterday and in my haste to get going before the venerable workforce hit the highway I forgot to send granddad the books.

“Where did she go, the little girl who was me? I became who I am, because she was here. But when did she go, that girl who was me and leave me in her place the Woman who is me?”