So I love Halloween. You don’t have to worry about presents or religious differences or some kind of deep significance to the day. As we learned in anthropology class, this is a ritual of reversal. You purge yourself of the stress of a whole year of working on being a consistent, good person. Every society has this and needs this. Halloween comes along and the children get to be in control for once, demanding “trick or treat” from the adults. Everyone gets to be something completely different from them self. You can wear ridiculous amounts of gaudy make up and the sluttiest clothes you can find, that you would never wear otherwise because that’s obviously not who you are, but hey it might look good.
While the whole year I’m trapped inside this one human existence, its Halloween and you can suddenly free yourself from that a little tiny bit, suddenly there are endless possibilities – seen and unseen. Endless windows to other worlds are opening up before you, like two mirrors facing each other – you can look into one and see reflections smaller and smaller and smaller, and you know that they keep going for an eternity, it is your sight that is the limit. While the whole year I’m supposed to be striving to be good and saintly, this eve before all saints day, I’m supposed to embrace the complete opposite, be demonic and unpredictable. The paradox of human existence is tied up in this holiday: You have this imagination, you can conceive of things you’ve never seen or experienced, you can think of abstract ideas, supernatural and fantastic ideas even, you have empathy and therefore think you can feel what another person is feeling, and yet you have one body, one soul, one mind and one life on earth. It seems a little unfair, but at the same time perfect irony. And this is Halloween.
This holiday is not at all explainable, especially to people who haven’t seen it before (i.e. most Egyptians). It wraps up fall, harvest, rituals of reversal, pagan, Christian, American, fear, the supernatural, empathy, imagination, demonic, angelic, debauchery, excitement, anticipation, childhood, and so many things that can’t be named. And there’s candy, lots and lots of candy.
So Halloween in Egypt has actually been one of my favorite Halloweens of my life, although it only involved a little candy. There’s something almost glowing about your country’s holidays when you’re outside your country. You have all these ideas about what this holiday is like “back home” when you’ve probably actually never experienced it. This has to do with movies, childhood associations, smells, all rolled into this one day. Full moons, cinnamon, pumpkins, windy nights.
So we had a Halloween party, at the insistence of one of my roommates’ (J) coworker’s insistence. This party ended up with me, my three roommates, our family from Maasara, and one of J’s coworkers. So I made spiced cider and chai and bought a massive pumpkin from the market (yes we found a massive pumpkin). Three of us dressed up – as a flight attendant, jazzercise girl, and I was a sort of asian woman. We did well with what we had, although all night my Egyptian sisters were making references to me being dressed like a sheep with little horns because of my hair chopsticks, haha. With our guests there we listened to jazz music, ate a great meal, tried to force them to try the weird drinks we made even though they hate cinnamon, and forced food down their throats for once (talk about a ritual of reversal, we got to be the overbearing, force-feeding hosts for once).
Then we carved the pumpkin! I’m not sure the last time I’ve done that. In the middle of our bedroom we laid down plastic bags , took out our kitchen knife, opened it up, us Americans scooped out the guts, and made a very happy Jafar the Jack O’Lantern while four very confused Egyptian women, and one baby, watched and took pictures. N, J’s co-worker remarks, “no I’ve never seen anything like this before.” It was evidently a very fascinating cultural experience, but no one actually wanted to help with the gut scooping, and that’s the best part. The class divide between the guests was extremely clear, but we all came together, and somehow it worked. We roasted the pumpkin seeds and I realized that I felt the most at home and the most truly festive I have felt about a holiday in a long time. I understand now why ex-pats tend to cling to their culture even more than at home.
So then we had made plans to hang out with my American buddy B from work after this party, so A and I head over to his place down the street. We end up taking a taxi to a French party with a guy from Niger who worked for a French division of a company (still don’t know how to say from Niger in English cause he only knew how to say it in French) and a Canadian girl dressed as a pregnant Egyptian door woman. So evidently they don’t have Halloween in France, but these people knew how to do it. We take the elevator up to the French double doors, behind which salsa music is unmistakable. There were two Bedouins (complete with authentic knives and swords), two girls and a boy draped in silky stuff, we think they were supposed to be a harem of some sort, a Minnie mouse, the son of King Farouk (that was our friend), and then a lot of cool not costumed people (Egyptian fashion designer who was still wearing the gloves from his mother’s full Muslim dress that he was wearing earlier, French guy who followed his girlfriend here, British guy studying Arabic who’s visiting his brother in Qatar soon, the old French man at the party with a kitten in his trench coat).
At the end of the night, looking at my ridiculous “Asian” black liquid eyeliner in the elevator mirror going back up to our apartment I tell A, “my life is just weird. When I get back to America, how am I going to explain this place to myself, let alone other people? What stories am I gonna tell my grandchildren?” (hey do you want to hear about the Halloween I was in Cairo? ) haha. Will I be here for another Halloween some day? Will my grandchildren be living in Cairo for that matter? Will I be sitting in a flat in Cairo and have to teach them about Halloween, as their crazy American emigrant grandmother? Or will I be sitting on a farm in Wisconsin and have to teach them about Halloween in Egypt and how when I was there back in the day, people had never seen a jack o’lantern before? Or will the world even have pumpkins by the time I’m a grandmother? Strange to think about. But this Halloween was one of the best.
And then we come into All Saints’ Day, ready for it. We’ve gotten all that out of our systems and now we want to be like Mother Theresa, caring for the poorest of the poor, glowing with the spirit of God or St. George, slaying the devil with his foot on his throat, or St. Joan of Arc, dressing in armor and leading the armies of France, then bravely roasted to death. As our pastor narrated these stories tonight, I wanted to be among them, not actually have their life, but I want to be myself, following in their footsteps. And I want to be living out the joy and hope and promise that I believe in, grounded in the reality and the personhood that I’ve been given.
So we have a night of possibilities of demonic and supernatural and other worlds opening up before us, and then morning comes and that possibility of truth and goodness and other worlds opening up before us, but now its deeply personal and deeply grounded in our own self, our own relationship with God, our own reality.
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