By Filiz Turhan
To be fast is to move quickly. To be made fast is to be secured. To be fasting is to be made fast by lack of food and drink.
I first fasted at the age of thirteen. Ramadan fell in the month of July. I tried to not eat or drink from 5:26am to 8:28pm. This was perfect for me as I was a pudgy adolescent American Muslim with a hearty appetite and a mother who loved to feed me pancakes for dessert after a steak and potatoes dinner. I wanted to be rail thin to look great in my Calvins and win the guy. When I would get the guy, I planned to be a fast girl. Ready to make out in whatever way he’d have me. So I fasted to be fast, but in fasting, I became slow. In the not eating, I became a sloth, fastened to the bed in a stupor of sanctity, dreaming of water and anything at all to eat. Like a sugared doughnut, for instance. Fasting made time .stop. put me into a floating reverie of hunger and thirst time stands still stands still doesn’t stand still jerks forward like the dial on the scale when fasting fails.
Filiz Turhan’s work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, The North American Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. She has been a professor of English at a Community College for a really long time; like many of her students, she is a first-gen American and was a first-gen college student. She has a PhD in Lit from NYU, and her academic publications explore the topics of Romantic-era Orientalism and Contemporary Global Literature. She can be found at filizturhan.com.
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