Book explores growing up

Jeffrey Rakabe's debut novel ponders transformation, trauma and tradition

- Rodney Ghobril

Rites of passage are funny old things.

Whether religious, societal, or based out of another construct in our lives, the human need to mark transitions from one phase of life to the other is nothing short of fascinating to me.

Yes, celebrating the birth of a child is simply a must-do. If a child enters the world into a loving family that is enriched by their arrival, of course we would want to give voice to our joy.

Yes, gathering to mourn the death of a loved one is also a must-do. Death is the big one, the ultimate of the great divides.

A person we once loved and cher-ished is gone forever, irrecoverable and irreplaceable and we need to give voice to the grief rising from the void they leave in our lives.

But, between birth and death, we feel the need to mark various transitional milestones in our lives by various means. Hence the term “rite of passage”. We are making the passage from some point in our lives or version of ourselves to a different one.

And while I am not attacking the belief systems — religious, cultural or otherwise — of anyone at all, when one views everything from a detached, logical point of view, many of these rites of passage do not make a whole lot of sense.

But we imbue them with meaning, because we know we are now crossing a great divide, a tipping point in our lives after which there is no going back to the way it was before.

I was born into, and brought up in, a faith and underwent its requisite rites of passage. I got married and had two children. I got divorced.

All of these are transi-tory phases in one’s life, all of them important, many of them marked by some sort of procedure and/or celebration.