Festive menace
By
Youssef Rakha
Eid beckons, the little Eid. Unlike Ramadan and the big eid, characterised, respectively, by fasting and sheep-slaughter, the little eid has little to set it apart except for new clothes, kahk and related cookies.
This makes the atmosphere of celebration more neutral, as it were. Children in particular take remarkable liberties. And one thing they take liberties with is the recreational explosive, bomb (plural for bomba), a miniature variety of its warlike namesake.
Traditionally available in the form of little coil- wrapped paper balls, this mixture of pebbles and gunpowder has recently had a range of reincarnations, from teeny missiles to collapsible buttons. You encounter them during every national holiday, but in the little eid they take on an altogether more menacing guise. Everywhere you go, it seems, the horrendously loud bangs of bomb going off overtake you. It makes you feel vulnerable.
I think back to my childhood, the many occasions on which I participated in dispensing this brand of terror, and I realise it was always sadistic. The best part of it was when you positioned yourself behind the railing of a low-lying balcony, and like a sniper awaited your prey. You were applauded for disrupting the pace of any pedestrian; little old women were particularly prized. But if you scored a direct hit on the head, you were hailed as a champion.
Eid beckons, and the bomb will come. Perhaps, in the deepest recesses of your exhausted psyche, it is just such a sound, BOMB, that intimates a confrontation with the most intractable questions: what a holiday means, how you might truly celebrate and whether festivity can ever be equated with joy. In this minutely engineered aspect of street life, at least, it is more sensibly equated with terror: the terror of a solitary walker, lost in thought, as weary as he is wary of life's insatiable appetite for dissolution, desperately if somewhat hopelessly looking for anything, anything at all that promises to lift the veil of ashes.
The hysterical laughter of the little perpetrators is what lingers in the mind. It is strident and cruel. It frizzles with life-giving energy, which is equally the energy of destruction. Day in and day out, you reclaim small pleasures that seem to slip deceptively away. But what you are doing, in the final analysis, is waiting for a resounding bomba to shake off indolent despair, set life-giving mechanisms in motion and allow you to position yourself behind the railing of a balcony, once again, targetting all the little old women of the world.
Such is the power of terror, which, in the very act of destabilising, hands over an otherwise unavailable possibility for joy. If there is one thing about the eid that bears testimony to the oft-regurgitated claim that it is an occasion for happiness, it must be this: the terrifically subversive powers of the bomba. Which is not to say that joy is always, or ever, entirely innocent of sadism. Perhaps, in the recesses of a psyche that has come to thrive solely on small pleasures, a little sadism, a little terror will ultimately go a long way.
I think back to my childhood, the infinitely varied occasions on which minor triumphs like successfully striking a passerby with your bomba induced a genuine sense of accomplishment, and I realise that I deeply miss my eids. Not the kahk or the happiness, but the carefree spirit in which, dressed in a brand-new getup, your pockets loaded with eid money, you went to the nearest stall, haughty and self-possessed, asked for LE2 worth of bomb and handed over the money as if you were purchasing a private plane, or else your own license to kill.
They say growing up is about freedom, acquiring the kind of social and professional mobility that permits you to make your own claims on the world. And yet, disregarding the fact that it deprives you of the right to be a seasoned balcony sniper, it seems to be about doing solitary street walking, remembering life's capacity for dissolution and being wrapped in your own impenetrable veil of ashes.
Such were the thoughts that came to mind on listening to a certain relation of mine rant and rave about the hazards of the recreational explosive and how it should be abolished, its users punished severely.
Now that I've grown up, I felt, I should be more inclined towards her side of the dilemma. And practically speaking, let it be admitted, I do tend to find myself rather more terrorised by bomb than ecstatic. But equally I know it is for that reason, and for that reason alone, that whereas the eid used to be an occasion for carefree joy, it is no longer.
