Lﻉid Lkbir – the “big feast” (not to be confused with Lﻉid Lftr, the feast at the end of Ramadan) – this is the holiday I’ve been dreading since before I even arrived here in Morocco. But then, I really cannot complain when I consider the fortunes of others… For the last month or so, every time I’ve crossed from the front door to the front gate of my host family’s house, their large, black sheep, whose girth had been increasing exponentially, would glare at me and begin bleating at full volume. A few weeks ago, I think it finally began to suspect its fate, although it didn’t seem bright enough to do anything about it. After gaining its freedom from its pen, it just walked up to the kitchen window and peered in. After being barricaded back into its tiny prison with a wheelbarrow, it again escaped, and as I opened the door to head out for the afternoon, there it was, trying to push past me into the house. By the week before the holiday, this became a daily occurrence – as soon as someone opened the door in the morning, there was the sheep, as though it would somehow conquer its fate if it could only get into the house while it was still alive!
As for the people, they look forward to the holiday with relish! Ever since I arrived in Morocco, people had been asking me what I would be doing for Lﻉid. This question, among children and adults alike, is consistently accompanied by huge grins and throat slitting gestures. I receive looks of pity when I explain that I do not celebrate Lﻉid back in America.
Over New Years, it was confirmed that this year, according to the Islamic calendar, Lﻉid would take place on Wednesday, January 11, although vacation and other festivities begin a few days beforehand. Monday, my host family and Moroccan friends began making gateaux (this drives me crazy – it’s the French word for “cakes,” but in Morocco it means homemade cookies). On the day of Lﻉid, no one can kill his (because the women do not do the slaughtering) sheep or goat until the king has slaughtered his. For some reason, my family decided to work around this rule by buying a small goat to kill and eat on Tuesday. A little concerned about vomiting (nothing like a little death to aggravate my usual pre-breakfast nausea), and sad to see that this cute (and screaming) little black and white thing was going to have a very bad day, I nevertheless opted to go watch the deed be done, as it’s a level of familiarity that most of us Americans no longer have with our food.
I will say that, while not particularly pleasant, Tuesday ultimately did not turn out to be the carnage that I had feared. With the help of the local butcher, who grabbed the animal and held it down, my host father quickly and cleanly slit its throat. Admittedly as humane as could be expected, and not taking an excessive amount of time, I still had a hard time watching the goat go through the process of dying. Afterwards the butcher began the rather interesting process of skinning it. This takes talent – my host father told me he’d tried once and made a mess of it, taking off too much meat. Here, the butcher cut through one of the animal’s hind legs and began to blow into it, the effect of which is to separate the skin from the carcass. He then skinned it carefully and cleanly about halfway before tying it up by its hind legs near the front gate, where he finished the job. After skinning it, he gutted it, slitting open its belly and pulling out the insides. At this point, I was only thinking of two things: (1) My high school anatomy class where I dissected a cat with an intestinal disorder that rendered it so foul smelling that no one else would work near me and my lab partner, and (2) that I was going to have to eat intestines. This triggered the most disgust in me, because I had to watch the butcher clean them out via a prolonged
process of squeezing, rinsing, and blowing. Of course I’d rather they be empty before I eat them, but then I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be any more inhumane to give the animals a mild laxative the day before they kill them. It certainly would be cleaner. (It didn’t help that one of my family’s scary cats went to town on some of the leftovers on the ground later on, and I saw it later behind the house – thinking it was coughing up a hairball only to realize it was in fact puking… blech!). Anyway, the butcher finished and was given the skin and the head as reward for his efforts. What was left was a rather clean looking piece of meat (not as gross as some of the stuff I see outside butcher shops in the cities of Rich or Errachidia).Having experienced all this Tuesday, I still decided to repeat it on Wednesday, the actual holiday. This time, instead of killing the sheep in the front yard, they took it out into the road in front of the house. We’ve already had one light snow since then, but I think it is going to be a while before I no longer have to dodge pools of dried blood in front of many of our village’s houses. I found this experience much less educational – the sheep took longer to die, and I finally had to walk away to see if my host sisters could offer some distraction. Indeed, Imane decided it was time that she begin showing me her photographic skills (thankfully, with digital cameras, I don’t have to keep copies of her many “abstract” shots). It caught the attention of one of our neighbors, who of course then wanted me to come in and take pictures of her guests in her salon, and during that time, I missed out on what would have been my second lesson in preparing an animal to eat. I think I am ok with that. Besides, when I returned to the house (they did bring it back inside the gate to clean it), the remains of its intestinal cleaning were far more evident than those of the goat the day before. As of this posting, I am still having to dodge that when I come in the gate or hang out laundry.
During Lﻉid in particular, no part of the animal is wasted, and the animal is eaten in a certain order, according to local and family traditions. I’ve also been told (by biased parties of course) that Berbers eat even more of it than other Moroccans. It takes days to finish everything. Now, I’m no vegetarian, but I (and my digestive system) tend to be satisfied with no more than the bare minimum of meat, even with the most harmless of cuts. That can be a problem in this country, where such an outlook is unheard of! I’ll try most things once, but until now, the oddest thing I’ve eaten here has been sheep balls (ok – one ball), which, by the way, are called “tiglay” – the same as the word for “eggs,” which is why you never ask only to buy two eggs at the local hanut (store) or souk. I’d seen intestines and the penis (on the plate, I mean), but so far, I’d avoided those, along with eyeballs and brains – all considered delicacies. I’ve tried bone marrow at a fancy restaurant back in the US, but have yet to adopt the local habit of sucking it straight out of the bones at the dinner table.
Anyway, the week of Lﻉid, as expected, offered an overwhelming amount of meat. I paced myself – probably to the point of offending people, even though I still ate far more than could possibly be healthy. Every meal – all meat and bread. On skewers, in tajines, you name it. I stuck with the organ meat – not sure if I got the heart in there (I was late for lunch the first day), but definitely the lungs, spleen, liver (wrapped in fat – which I’ve had here before), stomach, and intestines. The latter were a bit chewy for my taste, and even though they were heavily salted and cooked with massive hunks of fat, as was most of the organ meat, these were still not rendered completely unrecognizable. And I have to say that it’s the salt and fat that gives my digestive system the most grief… Two things I couldn’t do – first, the head. The hair is basically burned off, and the head cooked and served on a platter, where the meat is simply picked off by diners. The evening this was served in my house, I was, mercifully, still so full from my lunchtime meat (which tended to come in several rounds at every house where I ate) that I had no problem looking at that unappetizing platter and saying “no thanks.” Two days in a row, at two different houses, my lunchtime tajine landed brains in front of me (it didn’t help that the first day, my host brother ran waving the brain at me before it was cooked and asked me what it was called in English). Now, I do intend to try this at some point during my stay in Morocco, but between feeling generally overwhelmed this week and visions of Hannibal, this time I could barely stand to look at it while I was eating.
Lﻉid has offered its other intrigues as well. I learned that traditional henna in Assoul does not consist of intricate designs, but rather you wad up henna in your hands, wrap them up, and (attempt to) sleep. No doubt that my friends and family would take one look at my hands right now and ask what happened, as the tips of my fingers and my entire palms are varying shades of blackish orange. During all the henna and gateaux-making, I’ve enjoyed some colorful conversations with the women in my host family. I find my host cousin Najat – who is often at our house helping to care for the ailing grandmother – particularly entertaining, as she and my (much younger) host siblings, talk relentlessly about the rich, French-Arab man she plans to marry. This time, however, talk turned to me and my prospects. It seems I am now fated to marry a Berber prince who lives in a cave (sorry guys – you know you can’t compete with that!). No doubt inspire
d by that conversation, on the morning of Lﻉid, my somewhat quiet host mother came running into my room after breakfast carrying a beautiful, deep orange caftan and traditional Berber headdress (like what a Berber bride would wear), saying that I needed to put them on and take a picture to send home! Given that I was still sporting a winter hat and several layers of sweaters and fleece underneath, the only remotely flattering (and not at all like the traditionally solemn Moroccan bride) photo also includes one of my host sisters, who joined us for the fun. Judge for yourself… should I throw away my American wardrobe?Lastly, the holiday week ended on a rather strange note – a murder mystery in my tiny town. Obviously not a common occurrence around here, but the talk of the town on Saturday was the dead man found outside the Mosque. My host father told me about it at lunch (I had wondered why there were so many people still out on the street when I came back from my run after noon). Because all the women in town had gone to the hammam just before Lﻉid, I couldn’t resist going and taking advantage of its being completely empty that afternoon, and by the time I had emerged, the “local” gendarmes had arrived (they’re 100km away – making my regular visits to take care of my working papers a HUGE pain), and people were lining the main street just watching while nothing happened. It seems, however, not to have been much of a mystery after all -- the main suspect was caught within a day...
