Events in one’s life have a way of morphing themselves into threads that ultimately become tough ropes that wrap around your neck and drag you along a path that you may not wish to go, particularly if the threads were borne out of pain.
Enough of pretending to sound like a sage; let me get down to the story of how I learned to memorize at an alarming speed to avoid being flogged at my Arabic school.
Growing up, I used to attend Arabic school, commonly known by its Yoruba description, “Ile-Kewu“.
On Saturdays and Sundays, classes run from morning till afternoon and I really used to enjoy these. On schooldays, Ile-kewu was in the evenings, from 4pm till 7pm. Those were the sessions I dreaded.
For some unknown reason, my sight would start to fail and the Arabic letterings of the Quran that I read with ease during weekends would intertwine and look blurry and I would not be able to differentiate between the alphabet ت (ta) from ث (tha).
Any wrong pronunciation usually attracted the whip of my Alfa, our teacher. He did not understand how on weekends when we have classes in the morning till afternoon, I had no problem reading the Arabic text in my best Arabian impression, while on weekdays during the evening classes, my sight will get so bad I would struggle to string sentences together.
Soon I found out that if I douse my face with water and shut my eyes and only open them right before I start reading the text, I could gain a few seconds of visual bliss before the letters begin to expand and become indecipherable.
This only gave me a few seconds of grace before the whip would descend swiftly on my shoulder or back depending on how long it was. My excuse as it was, that my sight seemed to be failing me in the evening sounded incredulous. Auzubillah minashaitan nirajeem. It was the devil at work and only the crack of the whip would chase him away so he would not succeed in haltering my Arabic studies.
I couldn’t let my back and shoulder be the altar on which the devil would be sacrificed. I had to find a way around it. I soon figured that since we followed a strict timetable, I could read the verse or chapter or page in the afternoon while I could still see clearly and memorize them.
That way, I won’t need to explain myself. I could just read the part off my head and it wouldn’t matter whether I could see the letterings or not. And so I tried it once and it worked!. I stuck to it, gleefully reeling off Islamic verses in my best Arabian impression staring at letters I could still not see, on pages I could still not read, but which played in my mind’s eye. It was bliss.
The effect? My evenings soon lost their spark. Even after I left Ile-kewu and discovered glasses so that I didn’t need to memorize for survival anymore, my brain would go into an auto-memorization state like clockwork.
My afternoons look like I am on nitro while I struggle to read or write in the evenings. I’m still trying to figure out if this is a bad thing.