Notes on Fasting: 40 Days for Palestine

and Tigray and Sudan and Haiti and Myanmar and Mali and Yemen and 𝄇

hello, internet friends.

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I am writing to you on the floor of my bathroom. I am remembering days in which I would scrawl home from work at seven in the morning, completely spent, coming down off [insert whatever stimulant or depressant I got paid to take with multi-millionaires]. In another essay, I write about how fasting highlights my addictions to drugs (read: self-comforts). Now, I’m here hiding from my cat to write in peace, preparing to go to bed at 9pm. Hello, all. I want to talk to you about fasting.

I decided on October 16th that I would be spending the next forty days fasting from food and water, sunup to sundown. This was after a week of grieving Palestinian death; a week of not really being able to eat anyways; a week of wanting to do more than just stating that I ‘stand in solidarity.’ I am the praying type and I beseech the almighty with every fervor I have to hear us, the oppressed. Fasting was the natural next step for me. I pen this to explain why.

First and foremost, fasting forces you to physically remember (or experience for the first time) what it is like to be hungry and thirsty without relief.

Fasting (sawm) is a pillar in Islam designed to keep you aware of the mercy and complete good of Allah. Fasting sharpens one’s ability to resist temptation. One takes up the discipline understanding that they will say no to food and water for the entirety of the day, no matter how difficult it is¹. Fasting and prayer go hand in hand. You don’t abstain from prayer and then fast and call it good. One of the points of fasting is to focus and sharpen your prayers. I am, unapologetically and unambiguously, the praying type. I pray for my family and my friends. I pray for my constituency (meaning: all those under my care, those belonging to the causes of my heart and hands). I am a young person who believes in my very bones that a new world will be born within my lifetime.

I also find it cathartic to fast in solidarity with people groups targeted in new age “holy wars.” To be Muslim in this world is to be a justifiable, nameless death in the eyes of the West. I am finding a homeplace in learning about the Islamic faith; I am not an expert or an authority. I’m very new here. However, seeing the solidarity among this people group, who often dare to mark themselves outwardly as Muslim by their dress and greeting— it’s no small thing, that bravery. It is an honor to fast and pray.

Secondly, it is a physical reminder to remember the weight of war, even when I am not actively consuming the news.

I no longer live a life where it is commonplace for me to ignore hunger cues, and I am grateful for that. I feel hunger cues on a regular basis, and I am reminded in this period of time that even that is a blessing— that there were stretches of years in my life where I could not feel my body telling me I was hungry because I was so regularly without food, they had given up trying to alert me. I am grateful for the ability to be hungry. Because I am fasting with the purpose of stretching my mind and my attention, every time I am hungry I think about the dead and displaced. I think about the tragedies I do not know. I consider where my focus is and if I like it there. Hunger is a constant reminder to pray. And I do not have to be looking at a news feed or live broadcasts to remember to stretch my attention.

Thirdly, fasting forces me to work diligently and rest well.

No food no water means that if I attempt to skip my pre-dawn meal, or if I attempt to use the work to numb the grief, I will quite literally just fall asleep. You can ask my family. My Baba made fun of me this week because I literally fell asleep mid-conversation as I visited with him. Battery level zero. If I want good work done, I have to rise before the sun and eat, then complete the work of my day as swiftly as I can— because the crash is coming. I can’t have a mid-morning espresso chai latte. There are no snacks I can use to boost my mood. I can’t even drink water as a means of staying awake. I have to go to sleep early. I have to rise early. I have to work diligently. And then (most importantly for me, a workaholic): I have to relinquish the work as my body begins to feel tired. There is nothing I can do, no substance I can ingest to help me ignore how tired I am. Grief is exhausting. It feels like lead in my bones. Fasting (especially with prayers) means there comes a point in time every day where I halt. I have nothing left but to think about why I am so tired and hungry. And then my thoughts move to war. And then I begin to pray. After prayer, I meditate. Then I read.

Do you see?

Fourth and finally, it reminds me what it is that I am fighting for.

Food liberation and food sovereignty compel me to action. Food is love and water is life. When I say that I use y’all’s direct cash assistance to feed my constituency, I am not at all kidding. On any given Saturday (or Tuesday. whenver tbh) you can find me cooking for myself and my [neighbors, friends, comrades, strangers, acquaintances, loved ones, elders 𝄇]. There is no sovereignty when people starve².

Food and water require lands that you and your community are in loving, indigenous relationship with. Food and water require us to be able to steward the lands (both the soil and those grown from it) with the utmost respect and adoration for divine creation. When I dream of freedom, I dream of food. I dream of children smiling big with watermelon in their hands. I dream of fried plantain and okra soup. I dream of finally liking fufu, of frybread, of berries in late july and wild grapes past august. My whole life, I’ve been dreaming of food. I dream of food now, when I mourn what the world could be.

from “Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine” by Nasser Abufarha

Struggle is protracted, as my auntie dequi never ceases to remind me. Fasting reminds me of the virtues of patience and perseverance.

I chose forty days because, in watching the rise and justification of an obvious genocide, I said, “in forty days, Palestine will be gone, free, or the focal point of the next world war.” Maybe I am wrong. But I know I can pray. And I can commit to spending my time and attention (two of my most lucrative resources) watching the world and asking Creator God to bless and keep us.

I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease, such that you do not run from the grief.

(or, simpler said: peace).

IG

1. with the exceptions of the sick, the pregnant, the menstruating, or the traveling

2. Here, this leads us to challenge the propaganda we are beseeched with in the West: how can Palestine be a state formidable enough to warrant carpet-bombings if they do not control their own food? Nor their access to water? How much autonomy can they possibly have if their olive trees are torn up by the IDF?