Ordinary Time

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary has four definitions of epiphany, only one of which – “a Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi” – is capitalized.  Since there’s not enough capital to go around these days, we will skip that one.

The word is also used to refer to “an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.”  Well.  No deities here.  Thunder, lightning, the heavens opening up, doves descending – way too much drama for me. 

Here’s the most you can hope for in Ordinary Time:  “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something” – anything will do – “usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.”  The existence of which  would make this entry fulfill definition #4, “a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and insight.” 

And in fact I must take issue with Random House where the word “sudden” is concerned.  There is something sudden about an epiphany.  A moment when things coalesce and you know that that moment is charged with meaning.  But for most of us, unpacking those experiences is the task of a lifetime.  If it were not, there would be no need for stories. 

Maggie spent her junior semester abroad at the University of Ghana in Accra, leaving in February and returning in June.  At least in body. It was a complex experience, and she was not entirely happy there – but she longs to go back.  She both loved and hated being obruni – a word that means both foreigner and white person.  To be perceived as exotic and interesting is a heady, if sometimes inconvenient, experience. Obruni, obruni, buy something from me! Obruni, I love you!  I want to marry you, obruni. 

She wrote a great deal about her time in Ghana in her online journal; and I’ve done the maternal midrash on some of the things she told me in mine.  But the epiphany she had while on the package tour of Elmina Castle, where captured slaves were held before being packed into ships and sent to the New World – the world from which she came - is still working its way into story, and will be for some time.   

She has written some about the experience.  How she stood in the women’s dungeon and could still smell the stink of excrement and tears that had been absorbed by the rock walls. About the claustrophobia, and her overwhelming sense of complicity and guilt. About how she and the other members of her group – mostly white women, as it happened - came back up to the sunlight and the fresh air.  And freedom. 

Or so she thought. 

In the courtyard, the male guide told the story.  “The Governors never brought their wives with them, because they died of malaria. But they would still want women, so they would take the African women.” And the women were brought out into the courtyard, covered in their own filth, and one would be chosen for a public bath.  Then the Governor would rape her, and when he was done, the officers, and then the soldiers, and then the clergy would take their turn.  What was left of her at the end would be sent back down to the dungeon. 

Above the courtyard, standing on the promenade, was another group:  the Legon class of Ghanaian men. Well.  They were young men, 14 or 15, most of them.  Horsing around. They joked in pidgin as the guide told the story.  And they pointed. Maggie understood enough pidgin to know what was being said.  That one is mine.  I’ll take that one.  Hey, obruni.  You need a bath!  And that was when she realized that the story the man told was not about the women, or their pain, or their suffering.  “And they took our women and raped them.”  Our women.  Our women.

Shame and anger.  Is it one epiphany or two to be hit, suddenly, by two conflicting emotions?   And what is the reality or essential meaning of that simple, commonplace, homely symbol, the possessive pronoun?  What does it mean to belong to someone – really?  For reasons that are at once deeply personal, culturally conditioned, and political, my daughter works her own story out in fear and trembling.  And as stories are the only salvation I believe in anymore – as well as the only damnation – I watch her with fear and trembling of my own.  And pride.  And great love.