Waking the moon

I'm 10+ years late to the party, but I'm finally getting around to reading The Red Pencil (aloud with the kids) and I am so hung up on these moon rituals mentioned at the beginning of the book (and, as far as I can surmise, are mentioned later in the book). Granted, we are only on page 115, so we still have a ways to go but, like...what?

So apparently there is a tradition of "waking the moon" in...whatever village our protagonist, Amira, is from...where a "hiding moon" is considered "a curse" so when clouds threaten to cover the moon the people assemble to collectively "wake her" by yelling, banging drums, shaking bells, beating pans. 

And I just...have so many questions about this. 

Is this a special ritual? Like, are there only certain nights that it's important to keep the moon unveiled? Or is it important that she is always free from cloud cover?

Who is keeping tabs on the moon? From what I can tell from the book (and from, you know, life experience), these are all very hardworking people (aren't we all?). So who is assigned moon-watching duty after working the land so hard all day long? Is this task accomplished in shifts? It seems like it would be difficult to stay awake long enough to keep the moon in "view / until sunrise announces / night's farewell" (p. 36), especially if this is a constant thing.

And, again, we're just waking up the entire village to conjure a cacophony every time the moon slips behind a cloud? 

When, then, do the people sleep?

I know the moon wasn't visible when I went to bed last night. The roaring wind, pouring rain, and crashing thunder made enough of a ruckus that I'm not sure any of my hollers would have been heard over the noise of it all. Perhaps that's why cloud cover is bad luck. Who knows?

I don't. 

I cannot find anything about this ritual, other than study guides for The Red Pencil prompting students to explain the ritual. You would think (at least I would think) that such a tradition would be documented somewhere. The Fur are the largest ethnic group in Western Sudan; their traditions aren't exactly undocumented...so where is the evidence of this tradition?

Yenika-Agbaw wrote a piece called Re-Imagining an Alternative Life After the Darfur War (2016), in which she calls into question the reliability of memoirs. Specifically, she asserts that Khorana (2014) expressed the idea "that memoirs can be problematic because while they are 'assumed to be true accounts,' (p. 106) they are based on the memory of what authors recall" (p. 106) and thus are...suspect...I guess. I went to Khorana (2014) and completely disagree with Yenika-Agbaw's reading. Khorana (2014) decries "memoirs...published in the West, with Western readers in mind and with some Western co-authors" and wonders about their reliability (p. 107). She does say that "memoirs are assumed to be true accounts" but that they also "raise several questions" regarding embellishment, exaggeration, etc. (Khorana, 2014, p. 106). But she ends with the idea that "the contested elements [of a memoir] did not mar the essential truth of [the] story" (Randolph, p. 69, as cited by Khorana, 2014, p. 117). So I don't think she wants to throw memoirs out in favour of purely fictional tales. Like, there is certainly truth to them. 

But Yenika-Agbaw seems to assert that The Red Pencil (a fictional narrative written by an American author) somehow is more culturally authentic than...memoirs.

That kind of sent my head reeling a little bit. 

Yenika-Agbaw specifically cites the fact that The Red Pencil "taps into the tribal beliefs of calling the moon in the poems, “Glowing Sayidda” (p. 36) and “Unwelcome” (p. 172)" to add authenticity to the story (p. 118). How could Yenika-Agbaw have simply taken the discussion of this ritual as authentic without verifying its authenticity? 

I want evidence! Where is this ritual documented?

If Andrea Davis Pinkney knows about it (she says in the author's note that it comes from her interviews with Darfurian refugees), then surely there is a record of someone talking about it somewhere (outside of The Red Pencil), but I cannot find a blessed thing. 

I'm just a little...bugged about this...and have to stop researching moon rituals in Sudan...because I have actual papers to write...but I have been thinking about this all semester long (Yenika-Agbaw's piece was why I grabbed The Red Pencil when I saw it and I just...it's a beautiful story...but I cannot simply swallow it as the paragon of authenticity).

*****

Edited to add: Is this a conflation of Ramadan traditions with tribalism? That is the only reason I can think of for a large group of people to (a) watch for the moon and (b) go around banging on drums. 

Maybe it is an undocumented thing that some villages did in Sudan...but I still think...it would be documented somewhere else by this time...I'm just saying...

Works Cited (because...we're doing that today)

Khorana, M. G. (2014). Deconstructing the memoirs of African child soldiers published in the West. Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature, 13(2), 106–120.

Yenika-Agbaw, V. (2016). Re-imagining an alternative life after the Darfur war. In H. Johnson, J. Mathis, & K. G. Short (Eds.), Critical content analysis of children’s and young adult literature (pp. 106–121). Routledge.