How My Family Created New Traditions to Celebrate Eid
Photograph by Alex Kwong Photography of artwork by Haneen Martin, 2017.
Originally posted by SBS Voices, 5 June 2019.
It’s the last week of Ramadan and my mother Whatsapps me an urgent question. “Do you have room on your balcony for a chest freezer?”
We live on opposite ends of the country. For the first time, I can’t make it home to Adelaide to celebrate the Eid because of work commitments. As a compromise beyond my comprehension, my parents and my brother have instead decided to spend five days with me in Darwin.
For most Muslims around the world, Eid-Al-fitr (or Hari Raya Aidul Fitri in Bahasa Melayu) is one of the biggest highlights of the year. Unlike iftar, which is a dinner to break your fast during Ramadan with friends and family, the Eid is an extended celebration of the end of the fasting month and involves a much wider community. In Malaysia, this begins with ‘balik kampung’ — a colloquialism that refers to ‘returning to your village’ and by extension, returning to your elders, over religious holidays.
For most Muslims around the world, Eid is one of the biggest highlights of the year.
The idea is that after a month of fasting and introspection during Ramadan, we turn to older generations to ask for forgiveness for any transgressions during the preceding year. It’s also a homecoming, where people from larger cities return to their families in smaller towns or villages.
For my family, preparations for Eid and balik kampung usually begin a week or so earlier, and involves baking cakes and biscuits from my grandmother’s recipes which I spent my teens perfecting.
When we lived in Malaysia, the end of Ramadan meant two distinct things. The first, a flurry of activities at my grandmother’s house, where men were sent off to run last minute errands while women sat on the kitchen floor and weaved coconut palm leaves into diamond-shaped vessels to make ketupat -- a process so labour intensive it only happens once or twice a year.
The second involved visiting my Nek Chor or our ‘Big Grandmother’ on the first day of Eid. She was the oldest of my grandmother’s siblings, and would always lay out a feast that included all kinds of smoky rendang, glutinous rice cooked in bamboo, fried spicy shredded coconut and beef and more kueh (sweet cakes and biscuits) than our stomachs can fit.
While these elaborate meals may seem like the focus of Eid, it’s the preparations and the sense of community that comes with cooking and cleaning every night which makes it so meaningful to Muslim families.
Now, after years of travelling between Malaysia and Australia for celebrations, we’ve started to create our own traditions. And for the first time, rather than returning to my elders, my loved ones have come to me. Days after our Whatsapp conversation, my mother (campaigner of extra refrigeration) brought food she has cooked and frozen – four vacuum-sealed bags of rendang, six kilos in total – as well as a series of spice mixes, compressed rice and snacks that my father helped pack securely.
Now, after years of travelling between Malaysia and Australia for celebrations, we’ve started to create our own traditions.
Once here, my mum has spent every night cooking extra food like cucur, a fried fritter of vegetables, from a spice mix brought from Malaysia by way of Adelaide, ready to be eaten the moment I walk through the door from work.
If it sounds like a lot of food for four, it’s because we are used to cooking for crowds. Before I moved to Darwin, mum and I would host Ramadan ‘open house’ gatherings where we’d feed up to two hundred people on some years.
No matter where we cook, it’s a quiet yet exhausting dance in the kitchen. The entire preparation process is meditative: we are tired from a full day’s work and fasting, yet we persist for ourselves and for our friends, most of whom are non-Muslim. For me, it has always been more about having loved ones around to embrace my culture than welcoming only those who share our faith.
Last year, a cousin from Kuala Lumpur studying in Tasmania couldn’t get home for Hari Raya, so we resolved to reunite in Adelaide at my parents’ home for the celebrations. Convening from opposite ends of the country brought us closer. From food preparations to sneaking out to get our eyebrows threaded and giggling at my mother’s antics before we were born, it turned into a weekend of sisterhood, storytelling and laughter that I consider synonymous with these celebrations. It’s also an act of defiance in a society in which we had to think creatively in order to have these moments.
Right now, my share house fridge is stocked for the final Eid feast. In the morning, I will dress up in traditional Malay clothing and seek forgiveness from my parents by taking their hands in mine and asking mohon maaf zahir dan batin, meaning “forgive my physical and spiritual wrongdoings”. We will sit silently while we devour the diamond shaped ketupat with rendang and bask in each other’s presence. We will appreciate that we have the ability to adapt no matter where in the world we are, until we do it all again next year.