I woke to the acrid, unpleasant scent of burning hair. I’d been warned. Yesterday, everywhere we went we saw or heard sheep–crammed into the backs of pick-up trucks with humans wedged in as well, or bawling desperately in backyards. Today is the Feast of Sacrifice, the biggest feast of the Muslim year. The kids have two days off school; kids in Moroccan schools have the entire week. If you’re Muslim, you should slaughter a nice fat ram, if at all possible. Outside the kids’ school, beggars scurried in between cars, approaching windows with their hands out.
Note: this is a two-way street
One thing I’m noticing is that the feasts and fasts that make up the Muslim year are celebrated differently between neighbouring Morocco and Mauritania. For example, in Mauritania, restaurants are still open during Ramadan; here, they are not. So I was interested to see how this feast would be different.
In Mauritania the feast was celebrated yesterday. I know that had I been there, I would have walked out the front door and been greeted by the sight of mostly dead sheep, perhaps still bleating softly and moving their legs, their heads resting in a puddle of blood.
Here, in the modern city that is my new home, there was nothing that dramatic. But on every street corner, the kids had made a fire and were singing the hair off the rams’ heads. Horns were lying in untidy heaps on the ground, and there were plastic buckets full of heads waiting their turn. Apparently, all other parts can be cooked in the oven, but indoors it is difficult to singe the hair off the heads so that the head can then be cooked to get at the really tasty bits–the brain, the eyes, the tongue.
It was a showery day, so they had rigged up plastic awnings, and underneath they were grilling away.
I’ve been served goat’s head before, in Mauritania. It was our first meal in a local home, and boy was it a shock when they proudly brought in the platter of couscous with the goat’s head in the center, the tongue artfully draped just so over the jaw. But I don’t know that many Moroccans yet, and today we spent at home. The kids went to friends’ houses; I listened to Christmas music and did laundry. A quiet, if smelly, day.
7 comments
December 10, 2008 at 8:59 am
Kash
Oh boy, the scent of burning hair has been following me all week.
December 10, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Kim
hehehehe Reminds me of our first Christmas back in Kentucky when I was a teenager. Invited to a home where they brought out a pig’s head on a platter. My mom, being the ornery sort, kept turning the platter so the pig would stare right at my sister and I. We’d carefully try to maneuver it around so it was looking elsewhere. She’d move it back. That’s how the whole meal went. Sorta lost our appetite with the main course staring at us like that.
December 11, 2008 at 4:08 am
jean
I don’t know that I would have had an appetite after the sights and smells. Good for you.
December 11, 2008 at 3:27 pm
meredith
I’ve just had to deal with smelly people today, no singing hair though.
December 12, 2008 at 10:41 am
Mary Witzl
Yes, we had this too. My husband and I went out for a stroll a couple of days ago and ran into a couple of the neighbors in the act of butchering a sheep. Wish the kids had been with us; it’s educational for them to see where meat comes from.
December 15, 2008 at 7:30 am
shannon
This is one muslim Holiday I don’t miss. I think it is great that they give the meat to the poor, BUT last year for some reason we decided to drive across town the morning of Idul Adha (as they call it in Indonesia) and I think we all saw more of the insides of goats and cows than we really needed to. I worried we had scarred the kids for life but they seem to have recovered fasted than Mom!
December 19, 2008 at 11:57 am
susan
If any one else turns up their nose at me for eating horse at my neighbors, I’m just going to direct them to your blog. 🙂 Love the homemade ornaments on other post by the way.