It is the day of the Ascension. Or the Assumption. I am not sure which. Iam not schooled in these things. I don’t know what they mean, except that,like everyone else on this island, I am happy to take the day off from the rigours of the normal week and celebrate them vicariously. (Not that the normal week on Goree Island is all that rigorous to begin with. But anyway.)
They told me that the difference between ascension and assumption is that one celebrates the day Jesus rose from the grave, and the other commemorates the
day his mother rose from the Earth and went to join him in heaven. And so on. It’s connected to Christian and, apparently, specifically Catholic belief.
Frankly, most of the islanders think it’s all bunk. They would, because after all, most of the people on this island are not Christians. But that doesn’t stop people taking a day off on the island.
Goree is a predominantly Muslim island. It’s hardly surprising, since the island is part of a predominantly Muslim country, in a strongly Muslim part of West Africa. But it wasn’t always that way.
The first people to colonise the island were violent Catholic people from Portugal. After them came other violent Catholics from Holland, whose shared religious beliefs didn’t stop them feeling violently opposed to the violent presence of the Portuguese. So they blew the Portuguese Catholics off the island and dug themselves in.
Then came the violently Catholic French, followed by the violently Anglican British, who were in turn followed by a new wave of violent Dutch people who had begun to waver between Catholicism and the new Protestant faith – but of a different order from that professed by the violently Anglican British whom the violently Catholic French had already blown off the island again a few years before.
A new generation of violent French Catholics blew these Dutchmen off the island later on and it went on like that for a couple of centuries, until these Europeans decided to agree on a mutually accepted kind of violence along carefully delineated boundaries drawn up at the Congress of Berlin in 1888, boundaries that stretched, of course, across huge swathes of the African continent, way beyond the confines of this island.
Thereafter, as we know, each agreed to be violent only to the natives within the territories they had agreed to divide among themselves, without interference from the others. (Violence among themselves, and against minorities trapped in the volatile nation-states of the Old Countries from which they had sprung, was not covered by these accords.)
So this is the background, roughly drawn, of the island that I am sitting on on this day of Ascension, or Assumption, or whatever.
The only violence I have not talked about in this whole unfolding history of cycles of violence is that of the Arab and North African Muslims, who did not come in ships across the oceans, like the others, but on camels and horses and on foot, across the hideously beautiful desert.
Surely they, too, brought their portion of violence to this island? Surely Mohammed’s injunction to all true believers to carry a holy war into the world invokes images of flaming swords and turmoil visited on innocents, an intervention that was no less horrific than that brought to these shores by the finest Europe could muster? Why then do I not include the soldiers of Islam in my list of harbingers of violence?
There is a reason for this curious omission. The reason is that, on this holy day that everyone shares, whether they believe in it or not, the Muslims, rather than the Catholics who summoned the day into the common calendar, are the ones who are visibly at peace with the world.
On this island, on this day of Assumption that they have no reason to celebrate, the Muslims are observing a dignified and holy peace. Like every other day of the year, they pass the day, not in drunken revelry, like their Christian cousins on the beach, but in prayer and meditation.
While the Christians parade self-consciously round the island streets, their eyes cast down in guilt and mortification as they sing their dirge-like hymns, the Muslims crouch on mats on the soil in small groups, half-smiling eyes fixed on the middle distance as they share anecdotes and thoughts and pieces of kola nut.
James Baldwin painted the differing impact of the two crusading religions perfectly when he described how the Christians brought the idea of a vengeful God to the infidels, a God who showed little interest in their living reality but rather offered salvation only for their abstract and invisible souls, to be attained only after they had departed this living coil.
The Muslims, on the other hand, brought a religion that was concerned with the tangible well-being and cleanliness of the bodies and minds of people living in real time, in the real world.
Clearly the applications of both religions have differently affected different parts of the world. The strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law in northern Nigeria brings misery and mayhem to thousands of souls, while the Afro-Brazilian adaptation of voodoo to the rituals of Catholicism brings ecstasy and a sense of belonging to thousands of others. Time and space bring different resonances to the word of God.
But here on this island, on this day of Assumption, it is the adherents of Islam who seem most at peace with the universe, while the Christians, who have brought this celebration upon themselves and upon the rest of us, are the ones who seem most ill at ease.
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