honestly beautiful. (I guess the weak of mind should stop reading here)

I have never felt such intimacy in sheep anatomy.

It was Tabaski (Eid). I nervously watched the slaughter, for once I use that word completely free of tongue-in-cheek. Alone at home, I listened all morning to the last bleatings of my neighbor’s black and white patched sheep. Sooner or later, its soft staccato cries were mingled with the slow, smooth sharpening of a knife. And low voices in Wolof tongues, intuitively respectful, as if timid in face of the imminent act. As if expressing the bare minimum, necessary to the task at hand. My heart was racing. Cathi came home at that point and we walked around the corner just as a couple youthful strong men were holding down the animal that was at this point no longer struggling (as cliché as that always sounds, he did seem at rest). His neck was positioned above a hole dug in the sand to contain the pool of blood that would come flowing out immediately and heavily. Impeccably dressed as ever, Old Man Papa took the knife to its furry, elongated throat, as I think I might have been holding my own. Against my expectations, it was silent, except for my rather misplaced, if murmured, “godDAMN,” forcing myself to watch because I somehow sensed it was only right to do so. In some unmarked fraction of a minute, I think, he gave up life, at which time the deed that started as a ritual commemoration turned into a mundane step in putting food on the table. What was a living animal quickly turned into flanks, haunches, loins, hinds, sides, and whatever other warm, wet organs it offered mankind.

I spent the holiday with my friend Sidate and his family. It was a day where the shade is cold but the sun is hot. While my friend slept in (in his defense, after an all-night marathon of putting final touches on Tabaski garments, a trip to the mosque, and a double slaying), I sat shivering in the shadow of a mango tree chatting with his brother Cheikh who, machete in one hand and cigarette in the other, was unhurriedly chopping the horns off a disembodied head. By the time we got into his late father’s lay-off from the national police force, he was crouched and skillfully maneuvering a smaller knife, removing the skin and then the choicest parts from the skull. It seemed a little like undressing. (He doesn’t like the job, doesn’t even like killing chickens).

I don’t know why, but what surprised me was the dispersal of the job over time and space. While the actually killing took a matter of minutes, the separation of the body, the cleansing and drying of certain parts, and the cooking of others took the remainder of the day. And spacially, what started as two contained bodies, with time, spread all over the backyard. A hole of blood here, a hole of refuse parts elsewhere, long stringy tubes salted and drying on various clotheslines, Mama cutting up legs on the porch, Combé stirring up who-can-say-what over a fire, and me watching Cheikh flaying heads in the cool, leafy shade against a blood-spattered wall. I spent the entire early afternoon in the midst of dismembered parts of all colors, but looking more or less unsurprisingly like what one would expect to come out of two sheep, and felt ok.