Kaveh Akbar on Prayer as a Kind of Focused Music

Upon the publication of his debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), Kaveh Akbar reflects on his family's "streamlining" of their prayer habits upon coming to America when he was two years old, and how he learned eventually to find poetry in the music of prayer, and in the Arabic language, which he didn't speak then. "In my very early childhood, I would just watch my family, mimicking their movements as best as I could. Mostly, their prayers were whispered, barely audible, so instead of sounding like them I focused entirely on moving like them—cupping my hands before my face as if they were full of water, then 'splashing' my hands up to my ears, bending at the waist, kneeling, touching my head to my janamaz, my own tiny embroidered prayer mat." More from Literary Hub:  

When I was six or seven, my father decided it was time to teach me to say the prayers on my own. He wrote out the Arabic words using the English alphabet, spelled phonetically, in various colorful inks. He laminated the pages, and every day he and I would spend an hour together sitting on the couch, studying the plastic pages. The line would say “alham dulillahi rabbil alamin, ar rahman ir rahim,” and slowly we would make the sounds together, me leaning up toward my father’s stubbly lips, blissing in the magical music that came from them. We’d practice saying it all together, moving through the postures right there on the old couch, us both laughing at my forgetfulness, growing tired and eventually hungry. It didn’t take long before I had mastered it, could offer 15 minutes of continuous prayer in this gorgeous, mysterious language. I was so proud, and so was my father—it was the exact same language spoken by The Prophet himself.

The poet Kazim Ali writes, “If prayers can make a place holy, then it must mean there’s some divine energy that moves through a human body.” I learned from Kazim that the Arabic word ruh means both “breath” and “spirit,” and this seems absolutely essential to my understanding of prayer—a way of directing, bridling the breath-spirit through a kind of focused music.

Read the full piece right here.