Fasting for Ramadan: Notes on a Spirtitual Practice. By Kazim Ali
by Paula Hayes | Strayer University
Tupelo Press, 2011. 195 pages, $19.95. ISBN 978-1932195941
Kazim Ali’s poems reveal that fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan is about more than self-denial, more than foregoing food from dawn to dusk. What the poet learns from the art of fasting is that his body is fragile, imperfect, but the fast also bathes Ali’s world in a fresh perspective:
To be in hunger. To look at everything as if you have
For the poet, fasting represents “twenty-nine or thirty days to explore the line between the interior of the body and the surrounding world, to think about what is brought to us about and what we owe” (5). This place of intersection between the physical body and the environment is portrayed mystically with nature allusions; for instance, Ali’s poems are charged with explorations of discovering more intimately how food is related to the cycle of life:
Additionally, because life is so full of hustles and bustles, as well as everyday storms in the midst of our personal gardens, Ali’s poems explain how fasting brings him, personally, to an understanding of the need to calm the mind. There is a confessional tone as he writes,
When fasting flattens out my desires, the manic motions of my mind, the sharp edges, I think: Maybe I could fill a bowl of this and carry it into the night, carry it into the part of my life when I am eating, functioning again. (17)
There is exploration, too, of the interstitial connection between the human body and the natural world, between Ali’s own body and the sky. The galaxy and the poet become one:
Ali’s conclusion is that human existence is not much different from the world in which it participates, be that world a city or the physical galaxy itself. The fast teaches that life is about embracing impermanence, not fighting it with the ego.
