Author Archives: Francesca Ressa

Esfand and Sage Burning: Persian Cleansing

Esfand and sage burning practices in Persian culture cleanse houses, bodies, and objects that may be occupied by evil spirits, spirits of the dead, or may be afflicted by the evil eye.

Described verbatim by informant:

“Esfand is basically these dried herbs that, every Persian household has them. And say um a lot of bad things have been happening like your car broke down, you got a bad grade, your boyfriend broke up with you, someone died, you know, so people feel like it’s obviously like it’s evil spirits literally are around your house and around your car and they’re around you so when you burn the esfand you walk around and its smells horrible and you walk around and you just you do it over everyone’s head you do it over even like around your pets head you do it around your car um everything you um walk through the room cuz you’re killing things by burning the esfand cuz it smells so bad and that like gives it’s like a cleansing to get rid of the bad spirits that are causing the bad things. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be evil spirits it can just be like people evil eyeing you and wanting bad things to happen to you. Negative Vibes.

Sage is kind of a similar process it’s just to clean whatever was in the house previously to be gone, it’s a fresh start, cuz you don’t know what happened someone could’ve died in that house, you know? Crazy things. So if you want a fresh start in a new home you can do that.”

Esfand to my knowledge is unique to Persian culture and this cleansing ritual. Ritual burning of herbs is common to many cultures, especially burning with sage. The idea of smoking out spaces and people for purification is something I know to be relevant to a lot of Native American tribes, Mesoamerican cultures, Aboriginal tribes, and countless others around the world. Though smoke is considered polluting and dangerous to many people, burning and beginning anew is a process found in nature, ie wildfires. This has since been observed by humans and emulated in swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture across the globe. Perhaps there is some root to the notion of burning and cleansing there, though that connection seems unlikely in the context of the Middle East, unless the practice of burning herbs was learned or brought in by some other influence (perhaps by trade ie along the Silk Road). This theory is purely speculative, though, as ritual burning could have begun in the Middle East or spontaneously come about for all I know.

I later got an email from my informant saying she wasn’t sure if she explained esfand and it’s relation to the evil eye well enough so she sent me a link to a website that she felt explained it well:

Esfand & The Evil Eye

The Four F’s

The Four F’s: Fat, Female, Forties, and Fertile

“Remember that. It’s the telltale signs: A woman, who’s overweight, in her forties, and hasn’t gone through menopause yet. Basically a recipe for gallbladders stones, if you can check off the Four F’s and there’s any pain in the abdomen then it’s pretty much an instant diagnosis.”

My informant told me this saying in an Operating Room where we both watched her husband perform pro-bono gallbladder surgery on a woman who had no insurance and a classic case of gallbladder stones, thanks to the Four F’s. In addition to being a memorable piece of folk speech for diagnosis, the Four F’s in name alone sounds like a recipe for something bad. Even if you didn’t know that fat, female, forties, and fertile referred to potential gallbladder issues, the list infers trouble.

Ring Alivio: Italian Tag

Ring Alivio (pronounced by informant as both Ring Uh-Leevy-oh and Ring Leevy-oh) is an Italian version of tag where one person is It and everyone else is at base, which is a safe area. Running out of the safe area means you can get caught by the person who’s It, but you leave the safe area to show you can run out and back to base without getting captured. Once captured, you go to jail, which you cannot leave. Once everyone is captured and taken to jail a new person becomes It.

Ring Alivio described verbatim by informant:

“Ring Alivio: a game of tag. One guy was It and uh anytime a person left the base which was a safe area he had to capture that person in the jail and once he captured everybody uh a new person became It so we used to play it all the time on the playground um because we didn’t have any other games we could really play we didn’t have balls. It was really interesting because most of my friends were Irish American but we still called it Ring Alivio. We learned it from some of the older Italian kids.

We played it from kindergarten through the sixth grade, because, again you know it was the only game we could play on the playground because it was just a big concrete parking lot… at Catholic school. (disruptive dog howl) We had a lot of fun. I remember uh [my mother] was very upset with me because in my first year of Catholic School I tore my I tore five pair of pants because the uh um you know I played, I played and sometimes the game got a little rough and playing on concrete all the time if ever you fell and scraped your knees you’d scrape the knees right off your pants so she was kind of upset with me after that first year. And, well, I had a uh I once got slammed into a bus. So.

The parked buses were, are base, and so you hold your hand against the bus um and then you run out and you run back to the bus and one day I ran back to the bus but the guy who was chasing me didn’t stop and he just ran up my back and slammed my head into the bus, the side of the bus, and I busted all my teeth.

Once you leave base you can get caught… you leave base because you’re tough you’re provocative. Who wants to stay in at home? You want to run (cooking wife interjects and he repeats what she says) You want to be free. (dog howls) You wanted to prove to the guy who was It that you were faster, that he couldn’t catch you.”

The first thing that comes to my mind is that “ali,” in Italian, means wings, which allow one to fly and be free, though the informant was not sure as to how Ring Alivio should be spelled. The theme of purposefully leaving a safe place to be wild and free, knowing the threat of getting caught and being thrown into jail, appears to be characteristic of the age group. From 6/7 to 12/13 when this game is played, kids lose their child-like “innocence” as they become aware of their choices and begin making deliberate actions. The person who’s It captures them and puts them in jail, where they are stripped of such freedoms, which perhaps holds a dramatic resemblance to punishments by parents, teachers, or other authority figures. That this game was wildly popular at a Catholic School in the 1960’s is no surprise, with the rigidity of the belief system and inherent strictness surrounding all behavior at such an institution. Running free in the game of Ring Alivio is a benign way of resisting this oppressive feeling, all the while leveling the natural competition between kids during that time when social hierarchy becomes more and more apparent.

“No one knows what’s in the pot except the one who stirs it.”

The metaphor described verbatim by informant:

“That’s about gossip. That’s a Puerto Rican saying about gossip. I learned it from my mother, my Puerto Rican mother. Who would hear people talking about stuff especially about like somebody’s marriage or you know ‘Oh you know she did this’ or you know ‘They’re doing that’ or ‘This happened’ when it’s something going you know you hear that something isn’t right in a marriage or a family, and my mother was always quick to say, really, she would say, ‘You know what, you and I can look in and we can make all sorts of judgments but the truth is, none of us know for sure, because no one knows what’s in the pot except the one who stirs it.’ And she’d say that in Spanish. No one knows what’s in the pot except the one who stirs it. And that’s the truth isn’t it? So my mother was always quick to say that because she really wanted me to understand that I shouldn’t judge. That’s really what she was saying to me: be careful how you judge other people’s actions cuz you really don’t know what’s going on. I thought that was lovely. My mother was always, she was all about that really, she was all about that. Because judgment was really huge in Puerto Rico, you know? Everybody’s watching you, everybody’s watching what you do.”

The fishbowl living that my informant experienced while growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico is a big part of why this proverb holds meaning to her. As my informant infers, the saying relates to people’s assumptions and preconceived judgments—“Nobody knows what’s in the pot except the one who stirs it.” You think you might understand other people’s situations or give yourself the authority to pass judgment but you don’t. Coming from a place where everyone talks about everyone else’s business and gossip is rampant, my informant says her mother did her best to teach her the opposite. The metaphor in cooking terms also aligns well with the culture because it’s women who traditionally cook and, in many cases, gossip.

“A mother is only as happy as her least happy child.”

This saying described verbatim by informant:

“It’s just something you kind of come to realize if you’re a mother who, you know, most mothers do love their children um and you just realize, you know, your happiness once you have children. Before it it’s all about you it’s all about you and your special person or the life you’re living and the selfishness that is the beauty sometimes of just being youthful and you’re on your own path, and then you have a child and you realize that for a while at least the most important thing in your life is not you anymore but someone else. And I think once you’re down that road (pause) it’s hard to turn that around because your life is really, your heart is always with your children, and as much as they need to live their own lives and really be independent and free and feel like grown up and adult and self-sufficient and aspire and do their own thing you’re forever intricately bound to them, and in that way it’s almost impossible to be truly 100% happy if your children are not. There’s a little piece of your heart that hurts if they’re not well, if they’re not content, or or pursuing things that excite them, if there’s something missing and they they let you know, it it’s hard to be completely happy. And most of my friends agree with that. It’s just hard to be, because being whole now, being whole is being whole with your other pieces and those other pieces are your children.

I think it’s a common feeling. And I think for most of us mothers, I think, for better or for worse it’s truth. It’s just one of those truths that are spoken. I find myself saying it I guess sometimes when my children tell me something that probably disturbs me about their lives that I can’t fix, and you know most things in the life of your grown children you cannot. You can support it, if they want your advice you can give it, but they’re going to do what they’re going to do and it’s almost like part of realizing that they are independent and they are truly their own people, and as much as you may love them and they may love you we all have independent choices to make. And sometimes no matter what our intentions (pause) the individual is going to live their own life and when you see them going in a bad direction or you when hear they’re unhappy sometimes it just weighs on your heart. And so you just you know it weights on your mind and so you feel like, you know things are good for me but things aren’t great for one of my children and that just makes your heart a little bit heavy and so that’s only as happy as you can be, and you just have to be okay with that but its difficult. Sometimes its really difficult.”

My informant’s tone was sad and lamenting during this collection. She spoke slowly, tearing up at some points. Motherhood is obviously a role she takes seriously as part of not just her identity but her being. She told me she often finds herself saying this during hard times, and discusses the concept with her friends, who are also mothers. She has three children. The importance of family is deeply-seeded and she truly believes that her own happiness depends on the happiness of her children. In one way the concept seems traditional, because her children play such a large, influential role in her life, but in another sense, her worry and the “weight” she feels for them is an empathy that seems contemporary in character.