Ramadan, the Holy Month, began a few days ago. In preparation brightly coloured lights had been appearing outside toys stores since last weekend. A number of houses in the neighbourhood also have an array of fairy lights, many in the shape of crescent moons and stars, attached to exterior walls and roofs.
One of the most interesting things about Ramadan, is the way in which it changes time and space for an entire month. The city is transformed during the day, as food vendors shut down (some use the time to conduct renovations), and fewer people walk around – not surprising given that many are neither eating nor drinking during daylight hours. [I should actually say most of the city is transformed. I went to the Ramallah municipality – a ‘Christian municipality’ even though I presume many of the staff are now Muslim – and was promptly served tea at 10 o’clock in the morning. The restaurants in that area are also open during the day, although people eat and drink inside rather than on the patios). Later in the afternoon, there were fewer services running into town, and at sunset (iftar – the breaking of the fast), the streets become almost totally deserted, until people start going to the mosque for the prayer one hour after sunset. On the first day of Ramadan, so many people were going to my local mosque in Umm Alshariyat, that some literally had to pray in the street. After prayers many presumably return home to watch the Ramadan soap operas (Bab el Hara is in its 5th and final season now). Others walk around the neighbourhood. It seems that each night a group of men jog around around my neighbourhood, while singing. I can’t make out what their song is about. Unable to sleep last night, I also heard the drums beating notice – at 3am – to tell people to eat before the next day’s fast begins.
For many the day becomes night and visa versa, ensuring that while the body cannot eat and drink it remains asleep for many hours. However, even for those of us who are not fasting, time changes. The clocks have been put back an hour – reverting to ‘winter time’ in the middle of summer (a whole month earlier than they normally would). While many recognize that this makes fasting a little easier, it has also led to a great deal of confusion. This is something that has just been done in the West Bank. We are now one hour behind Israeli time. Can Palestinians living in East Jerusalem travel to Ramallah and arrive at the same time they left? When they are in East Jerusalem and beholden to the power of the Israeli state, do they live two times simultaneously? The settler-colonists in Psagot that I can see living on top of the nearby mountaintop are living in a different time, even as these exist in an adjacent space.
Johannes Fabian talks about how colonial regimes consign the colonized to a different time, as part of discourses and practices that promote the modernity of the colonizer at the expense of the ‘backwards’ indigenes, who belong to another time. (These ideas then underpin various ideas around ‘development’ among other things). But the multiple chronologies that came into being here on the first day of Ramadan are something different. Apparently it is Salem Fayyad (Palestinian PM) and the PLO that has the power to change time in this way. Thus this is a form of indigenous biopolitics – self-governance – highlighting that the colonized also participate in making their own temporal experiences. And it is also quite mundane. While I am certainly experiencing different ways (temporalities) of existing in the world simultaneously, for most people here the time change makes easier the task of sustaining bodies when particular (religiously inspired) conditions are placed on those bodies.
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