By Vivek Anand, LMFT
To read Part I, click here.
On the last day of fasting for Ramadan I am perhaps a little spacey, ready for Eid that evening, and look forward to attending a collective Eid namaaz the next day. A Sikh client runs a few minutes late for our morning session, and tells me that yesterday after a twelve-hour work day it was too much to come home to a big family with kids. “I need to scrub the vigilance alone.”
I suggest, “Sometimes it’s too much to be here, too.”
He snaps, “Too much what?!” He describes feeling irritated with me for asking him a standard therapist question and says he needs me to engage. I respond that I can’t possibly disengage from him and I feel trapped. He says, eventually, that he needs me to be a sturdy bow for him, like a father, as he needs to be one for his children. “Allah is the archer,” he says, referring to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. In a better mood by the end of the session, he says, “From the five rivers (Punjab is panj aab, or five rivers) to Palestine, may we be free, bro!” He is connecting the movement for an independent Sikh homeland to the Palestinian struggle. I don’t self-disclose that I am fasting.
Later that day, my client P comes to session and says they did better with completing assignments this semester. I ask how they are in general, to which they respond that they are stressed about Gaza, and feeling particularly perturbed by Andrew Yang, a fellow Asian, who had tweeted his solidarity for Israel but had said nothing supportive about Palestine. “I don’t even think about him! I don’t know why that got to me.”
P had spoken up on Facebook during the 2014 Gaza War during the peak of the conflict as a teenager. “At least within the last ten years people are getting clearer about the language of settler colonialism and solidarity.” Some of P’s friends went on birthright trips to Israel, and casually spoke of having mingled with IDF soldiers. “I was never part of this group of Muslims and super pro-Israel Jewish Iranians, and I’m not in touch with any of them now. Weird thing is, I look just like these people! I wonder what they think of themselves, and Israel? My current friend circle is ok. We share the same politics.”
A week ago we had spoken of a khutbah, or Friday sermon. They shared that they had fasted the previous day, and prayed a day earlier for Lailatul Qadr, the “Night of Power,” when the Koran was first revealed. The sermon was on Death being the most guaranteed thing, and P spoke of how death “puts everyone in the same boat.”
I thought of how the body, too, is assumed to be a constant, a bedrock, but then isn’t for people fasting or exploring their sexual identity, and told them about Mourning the Body as Bedrock by Avgi Saketopoulou, and they looked it up. They had been reading Octavia Butler and learning about how life was “a process of getting in the right relationship with change.” They said one can also get satisfaction from the day-to-day things and that they didn’t want to overcomplicate where they got their satisfaction. “Death seems distant and it isn’t necessary to be hyper alert about it,” they added.
One white non-Muslim male client, U, I see twice a week, tells me about how he is trying to get back to his Sufi meditation practice, and I ask how he relates to Islam. He says he is glad the scriptural parts came later in a class he is taking, and that he may have been more resistant if the practice weren’t taught first because he opposes theocracy. U speaks of his mother’s ongoing Islamophobia, and his own, in the past. “She has delusions and said Obama was a Muslim and she wanted to see his birth certificate.” U is ashamed of the “dumb kid” he once was. “I am radical now, but I hesitate to share about my past self. Perhaps I’m not being fair to my younger self.” I ask how it is for him to be revisiting his past with me. He responds that he appreciates these conversations. “Most people don’t like such dialogues.” He appears reflective, and says that he should be kind with himself, then cringes while adding: “I was the very person I’ve grown to resent.”
Another white male non-Muslim client, H, whom I see twice a week, over video like all the others, tells me about his paper on protest movements and the risks for those resisting in Palestine compared to protesting in antiwar movements at a distance. He sobs uncontrollably—the first time he has ever done so. “It’s so violent. We are playing with people’s lives!” he says, tearing up.
I am moved, and tears well up in my own eyes. “I’m sorry I’m not there to offer you a tissue,” I say to him. I have never met these four clients in person, and I am taken aback by how close I feel to them all despite physical distance.
He tells me about how the largest protests in the world were taking place against the Iraq War while he was in Paris, and of then coming back to the United States and seeing that nobody here seemed to care. His father revealed himself to be racist and pro-war while his mother obsessed over money around their divorce. H said to her, “Mom, we don’t need to be rich.” He recounts meeting diverse people in Europe; connecting with Muslims in Brussels. He tears up while speaking about Papua New Guinea and Black Lives Matter. “These problems are so large and complex. How do you prevent a genocide? These are unsolvable problems.” I ask whether he feels alone in thinking about this. He responds by describing the problem he had with his white lesbian ex-roommate. “Thinking about violence was too disturbing for her.” Later on he says that he doesn’t really care about his assignments being late, and declares that these issues are the only ones he really cares about.
At the morning collective Eid namaaz at a park in Oakland with my Kashmiri sister, I look around and guess from the bodies and the clothes that I am praying with a large number of African and African American people, with people from Arab countries, South Asians, white and other Americans. I wish her young Sufi teacher İyi bayramlar, a Turkish greeting for Ramadan. He is African American but spends much of his time in Turkey. He smiles at the greeting and wishes me the same. I am invited to a meal at my sister’s home, with her niece and the niece’s husband. We have an intimate and sometimes awkward conversation, negotiating our unconventional and evolving relationship.
The Koran says that it was revealed slowly to Prophet Mohammed PBUH so that he could absorb it. “Go slow, Vivek,” says my African American supervisor, when I tell him about my work with U and others, to remain mindful when their dissociation begins to vanish and reactions emerge.
All these conversations with loved ones and my clinical work with clients help me to slowly think about Islam, difference, oppression, relationality. I am ‘slowing’ down through my ‘fasting’, entering a space of dialogue in which my positionality and subjectivity—being raised Hindu and thus a member of a dominant religious group in India, a person of color in the US, and one associated with Muslims and a minority; also I am seeker, therapist, partner in a gay relationship, student, and teacher—interact with that of others. During a period of ‘deprivation’ I am ‘enriched’ through divine blessings, community, and the vulnerable interactions with my clients.
The holy month of fasting taught me to measure myself as far as possible, to walk more deliberately, to take on less during sessions and to trust others—clients, the divine, the process—even though I could be irritable at times with my non-Muslim white partner while we prepared dinner. “Why are you fasting?,” he sometimes asked me out of concern, as I struggled to be present due to the state of my fasting body. I never knew what to say, not knowing how to express myself in a way he could understand. Further I didn’t know the complete answer. Why was I fasting for Ramadan?
I still don’t know. I trust that the answer will come to me, slowly.
Vivek Anand, LMFT, is in private practice in Berkeley and is a recent graduate of the Manhattan Institute’s One Year Program in Psychoanalysis and the Sociopolitical World. He grew up in India and emigrated to the US in 1994 as a student. He sees adults and couples, has worked with young children, adolescents and families, and has provided group therapy for LGBTQ seniors. He is co-chair of the SFCP East Bay Psychotherapy Forum. Vivek has a previous career as an architect, has been teaching architectural design for more than a decade, and now teaches Clinical Relationship at CIIS in San Francisco. He is also a Hindustani classical and Sufi singer.
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