Nigeria Content Online

In the village of South Orange New Jersey where I lived for 6 years the celebration of Halloween was taken fairly seriously.

We had chosen South
Orange because it was a stable well-integrated middle class community a
popular location for upwardly mobile professionals just starting a
family and looking for a well-established environment with good public
schools. So with young children at elementary and kindergarten age
participation in Halloween was de rigueur. Even if you as an adult had
no time for it, the pleasure it provided your children made you swallow
hard and pitch in for their sakes, as I did, commending their
willingness to be part of the community they were living in.

The origins of this
festival are mixed and its history checkered combining as it does poly
religious elements that span Paganism, Christianity and Roman
Catholicism. But as far as the festival itself goes today, the
celebration is entirely secular and superficial. The dressing up in
costumes, doling out of sweets, trick or treating and playful
fascination with ghosts and spirits is completely disembodied from the
historical celebrations of the day of the dead, the preparations for
winter or the passing of spirits that formed the origins of All Hallows
Eve. Elementary school children loved the dressing up in costumes and
the parade at the end of the school day where they showed off and had
fun with their teachers while parents watched.

Many families in
the village spread their enthusiasm for this celebration into
decorating their gardens, which they begin to do well before the
October date on which it occurs. One house in particular went all out
one year and turned their lavish home into an eerie grave yard, replete
with greyed tombstones, ghoulish figures hanging from the trees, owls
watching from the branches and dank cobwebs trailing over the bushes.

South Orange was
also a dormitory town, just 35 minutes on the train from Manhattan’s
Penn Station, and a number of parents who worked on Wall Street had
made homes in the village because it provided the perfect bridge
between urban and country.

On the morning of
Tuesday September 11, 2001 when I got that call to collect my children
from school early there were other little ones whose parents did not
get that message. They never returned from work.

The George
Washington Bridge links New Jersey to Manhattan, New York. On a clear
day in SO walking up by the ridge that leads to the park or running on
South Mountain Avenue you can look across the river to the skyline of
Manhattan. For weeks after the 11th you could see the smoke from ground
zero casting a pall on the horizon and you knew you were looking at a
live mausoleum of some 3,000 bodies. Passing that painstakingly
decorated garden on my morning runs made my heart ache. Here was
playmaking at death while across the horizon was an unspeakable horror,
the real thing, not child’s play.

9/11 turned the
world around. There is almost no country or continent that did not lose
nationals or descendents of nationals in that bombing or in subsequent
acts of horror in Spain and in Britain. The victims at ground zero came
from 70 different nations. The lists of those dead include Nigerian
names, known and unknown and people from all religious faiths and this
is why the backlash against Islam as a religion is so patently
irrational. To those lists we also have to add the numbers of dead who
have been victims of outrage against perceived criticism of Islam.

We all live with
the legacy of that destruction, whether it is in the increased security
that trails all aspects of our lives or in mundane everyday activities
like banking, transferring money, receiving money, seeking education
abroad, attending a public event, entering a public arena or the trauma
of obtaining travel visas.

The backlash
against Islam in America has been a long time coming. That site called
ground zero where the towers came down is a raw wound. Those American
right wingers and rednecks who call Barack Obama a Muslim are sending a
calculated message that is sinister and carries a barely veiled racism
that those who plan the kind of destruction that occurred on 9/11 must
relish. But still, there is a lot to be said for the restraint,
maturity and compassion with which the overwhelming majority of
humanity has reacted to 9/11 and similar events. The condemnation that
greeted Mr. Terry Jones’ senseless plan to burn copies of the Koran to
commemorate 9/11 is an example of this. Unfortunately the minority who
really need to understand the message don’t have the ears to hear,
which makes it incumbent on those who do, to keep pushing the call for
calm.