New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Read online

  MODERN MIDDLE EAST LITERATURES IN TRANSLATION SERIES

  NEW WAW

  SAHARAN OASIS

  IBRAHIM AL-KONI

  TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED

  BY WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS

  CENTER FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

  THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2014 by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

  Cover Art: Cover image provided courtesy of the artist, Hawad.

  Copyediting, Cover and Text Design: Kristi Shuey

  Series Editor: Wendy E. Moore

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013950932

  Library ebook ISBN: 978-1-4773-0894-3

  Individual ebook ISBN: 978-1-4773-0895-0

  DOI: 10.7560/754751

  ISBN: 978-0-292-75475-1

  This translation was made from the second Arabic edition of Waw al-Sughra (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1999).

  The first two chapters of this translation appeared in Banipal 40 (Spring 2011).

  The National Endowment for the Arts awarded a literary translation grant for 2012 to support the translation of this novel.

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  Introduction

  NEW WAW

  I. The Winged People

  II. The Prophecy

  III. The Departure

  IV. The Chaplet

  V. The Successor

  VI. The Lover

  VII. The Dyadic Bird of the Spirit World

  VIII. The Western Hammada

  IX. Forgetfulness

  X. The Crow

  XI. The Dagger’s Secret

  XII. The Torrents

  XIII. The Sacrifice

  XIV. New Waw

  About the Author

  CHARACTERS

  Ababa: a member of the Council of Nobles

  Aggulli: a sage and leader

  Ahallum the Hero: the tribe’s warrior

  Amasis the Younger: a noble elder

  Asaruf: a noble elder

  Diviner or Soothsayer: the leader’s confidant

  Ejabbaran: noble elder, sage

  Emmamma: a noble elder, eventually the oldest man in the tribe and its venerable elder

  Enigmatic Stranger: Wantahet or one of his avatars

  Excavator: a stranger who travels with the tribe and digs his “tent” in the belly of the earth

  Imaswan Wandarran: spokesman for the Council of Nobles

  Leader: a poet in love with a female poet but condemned to lead a Tuareg tribe

  Lover of Stones: the tribe’s master builder

  Virgin, Tomb Maiden, Temple Maiden, Priestess: the Leader’s posthumous bride and his medium

  Wantahet: a figure from Tuareg folklore

  INTRODUCTION

  In an interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio, the Appalachian author Ron Rash said: “Landscape is very often destiny” for a writer and referred to “literature of landscape.”1 The landscape of the Sahara Desert has certainly been destiny for Ibrahim al-Koni, and his novel New Waw: Saharan Oasis contrasts the landscapes and cultures of desert nomadism with those of oasis life.

  Al-Koni has written that, from the time of his descent from the high desert plateaus to start his formal schooling at twelve, he has felt a mission to speak for the desert, to help it make “its own statement, which had not yet been enunciated.” Melville had spoken for the sea, Dostoyevsky for the city, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had even spoken for space. “Only the desert has not yet offered its statement.” So, when he began to write in the mid 1960s, what was essential was to express the desert. At the same time, though, he points out that “Every reader of my works quickly perceives that the desert I am talking about is a metaphor for the world, an allegory for the world.”2

  Ibrahim al-Koni, a Tuareg whose mother tongue is Tamasheq, is an international author with many identities. He is an award-winning Arabic-language novelist who has already published more than seventy volumes, a Moscow-educated visionary who sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life, an environmentalist, and a Saharan writer who depicts desert life with great accuracy and emotional depth while layering it with mythical and literary references the way a painter might apply luminous washes to a canvas.

  His elegant, formal Arabic can be complex and suggests a clear and simple but still formal English rendition, with an occasional modern word added to rouse the reader from any mythical slumber. The description in New Waw of the excavator’s love affair with the earth in the original Arabic is a virtuoso piece of lyrical Arabic prose. Chapter XII contains a memorable landscape painted with words. In a chapter devoted to al-Koni’s work, Ziad Elmarsafy has described his language as “highly stylized Arabic.”3

  Ibrahim al-Koni’s political fiction is philosophical, and readers occasionally remark that some of his novels, like New Waw, are intellectually challenging at several levels of meaning. There are a number of words that al-Koni has used systematically in multiple novels till they have become technical terms. These include words like al-khafa’ or Spirit World, al-khala’ or the wasteland, al-‘arraf (feminine: al-‘arrafa) for diviner, and al-tih for the desert’s labyrinth.

  Al-Koni does not simply take his readers on an adventurous trip through the Sahara but embeds them in a culture in which the natural world is rife with signs, symbols, sparks of enlightenment, and prophecies. A senile bird is a sign. When the migratory birds leave the nomads’ encampment, diviners follow the flocks to search for the prophecy encoded in their trajectories. The master mason explains to the diviner in New Waw that “We have a duty to discover the symbol in everything.”

  The Tuareg, or Kel Tamasheq, are a traditionally pastoralist, nomadic Berber people, who have moved freely across the Sahara from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria to Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Today national boundaries and policies hinder their migrations, and there have been armed Tuareg insurrections in Mali and Niger. In April 2012, an independent state of Azawad was proclaimed in three northern districts of Mali—Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu—by Tuareg rebels reinforced by arms from Libya. In January 2013 France led an offensive to retake the north of Mali from the Islamists who had pushed aside their Tuareg allies.

  The Tuareg language is Tamasheq (also known as Tamahaq), which has its own alphabet, Tifinagh, that dates back at least to the third century BCE. Evidence of Arabic-Tamasheq bilingualism among the Tuareg in Mali goes back hundreds of years in the form of inscriptions and graffiti.4 Currently there is at least one other Tuareg novelist writing in Arabic: Umar al-Ansari.5

  The Tuareg have been affiliated with Islam for centuries, but the goddess Tanit is invoked several times in New Waw and traditional Tuareg life has been governed by a tribal code of law, even though its written text is no longer extant. In his novels al-Koni refers to this lost law as al-Namus, perhaps to distinguish it from the Islamic Shari‘ah.

  The oasis novels by al-Koni trace the development, flourishing, and destruction of an oasis community named in honor of the Tuareg people’s lost oasis, the paradise-like Waw (pronounced approximately like the English word “wow”). This “distant oasis lying beyond every other oasis” still occasionally appears to a few visionaries who are not looking for it. Al-Koni, who welcomes multiple allusions, has also referred to it as another Atlantis.6

  New Waw (Waw al-Sughra, 1997, more literally Little Waw or Lesse
r Waw) is the first book in a trilogy that continues with The Puppet (al-Dumya, 1998) and The Scarecrow (al-Fazza‘a, 1998). A putative fourth volume is The Tumor (al-Waram, 2008), although these books have been published and marketed separately in Arabic.

  New Waw describes the birth and growth of this oasis in the Sahara, and major characters like the venerable elder Emmamma, the warrior Ahallum, and the sage Aggulli (also Aghulli) are introduced here. The Puppet chronicles the community’s peak of prosperity and therefore also the beginning of its decline. The eponymous character of The Scarecrow may appear in one or more guises in New Waw and is an enigmatic, apparently benign character in The Puppet. Finally in The Scarecrow this avatar of the Tuareg mythic figure Wantahet supervises the destruction of New Waw, reveling in his self-righteous sadism. When the oasis is under siege from international forces, he masterminds the killing of its inhabitants and then morphs back into the scarecrow.

  From a nomadic point of view, any settlement—even for pressing reasons of leadership succession and even in a model oasis community like New Waw—is subversive and a disruption of the traditional nomadic ethos, according to which endless migration provides a geographical cure.7

  In West Africa, Islamic societies have retained elements of pre-Islamic cultures for extended periods, and Sufism has been an important strand in the Islamic tapestry there. Tuareg spirituality as depicted in al-Koni’s fiction is also multifaceted. The inhabitants of the Spirit World, many of whom are jinn (genies), maintain an uneasy truce with their Tuareg neighbors. (As in other parts of Islamic West Africa, in Tuareg lands the jinn recall earlier folk gods.) Like the author, al-Koni’s heroes typically feel a special bond with their ancient ancestors and the Saharan rock inscriptions they left behind. In novels like Anubis and The Seven Veils of Seth, al-Koni added ancient Egyptian ingredients to his spiritual stew. The deceased leader’s rule over the tribe and New Waw’s two-chapter sequence in which the tribe’s diviner travels in the Western Hammada with the deceased leader parallel the role in many traditional African folk religions of the Living Dead, who are ancestors in the Spirit World. They keep close tabs on their living descendants, advising them in dreams and visions, through a medium, or by visiting in person if necessary. The preoccupation in the middle of the novel with spirit possession and sorcery and antidotes to them are other parallels to traditional African folk religious practices.8

  Tensions between nomadism and settled life in al-Koni’s novels have implications beyond Tuareg (or Mongolian) nomadism; they affect all of us when we face choices like relocation for career advancement. If scientists model human medical conditions on laboratory animals and breed special families of creatures for their research, and if other researchers use one phenomenon as a model for another, al-Koni may be said to create models derived from Saharan life for the study of assorted global issues. If al-Koni has frequently used similar Saharan models, he has deployed them at least in part as metaphors for a wide spectrum of human concerns. All the same, his models are lovingly based on Tuareg folklore, about which he is a leading expert. Although many of his novels seem allegorical, they are better described as reverse allegories: excellent examples of many different things offered for the reader’s creative use. One reader may, for example, choose to consider the almost Satanic leader in The Tumor and The Scarecrow as an allusion to Colonel Qaddafi, and the brave new community of New Waw may stand for Libya. Another equally perceptive reader may be brooding about some other time or place.

  If the message of New Waw were distilled into one phrase it might be that enhanced insight into the human condition is not neatly correlated with technological progress. Fortunately New Waw is a novel and not a distilled message.

  William M. Hutchins

  ______________

  1. Ron Rash, “‘Nothing Gold’ Stays Long In Appalachia,” Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, February 16, 2013.

  2. Ibrahim al-Koni, “Le ‘discours’ du desert: Témoinage,” in La poétique de l’espace dans la littérature arabe moderne, ed. Boutros Hallaq, Robin Ostle, and Stefan Wild (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), 96–101.

  3. Ziad Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 107.

  4. P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2003), cxxvii ff.

  5. Umar al-Ansari, Tabib Tinbuktu [The Physician of Timbuktu] (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2012).

  6. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 98.

  7. See Michael Parker, The Geographical Cure (New York: Penguin Books, 1994) for an American exploration of the curative virtues of travel or migration.

  8. See Benjamin C. Ray, African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000) for information about these.

  I

  THE WINGED PEOPLE

  What? Didn’t you say the sky and birds prove God’s existence?

  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Article IV, Section 244

  1

  For as long as he could remember he had listened for counterpoint in the bird’s song.

  In fact, after many seasons had elapsed and the gullies had experienced numerous floods, he felt certain now that this hidden bird’s polyphonic skill was the secret reason he had been fascinated with it over the years. The bird’s soft, gentle call, which reminded him of wind whistling through reeds, could not be transcribed in any script nor could the tongue mimic it. It began as a faint murmur, and then a mournful cooing immediately came in and rose to a robust melody that sounded like the vibrations of the imzad’s lone,1 mournful string harmonizing with a second, lower string. These two then blended together to create—sadly, mournfully, and lyrically—an epic that told the entire desert’s story. The secretive call created an equally secret message. The song, which could not be recorded by an alphabet or even pictographs and which thwarted any attempt by a tongue to imitate it, began with a soft, mild, mysterious, nebulous murmur that stirred longing and that—as it grew ever louder—breathed life into concealed embers, into sparks that have always been the wayfarer’s law and that have always served as the religion of the wasteland’s inhabitants, who, since their birth, have never stopped searching for what the wasteland has hidden. The bird’s call suddenly became polyphonic as another concealed bird joined in, and then this new voice keened a different ballad. The two melodies created a counterpoint and harmonized to become a single tune, a new carol. Then the song changed course and soared into another realm, transforming the bare land and extending its expanse. The wasteland’s temptation grew ever more intense, and the desert promised a new reunion, an everlasting one that was born the same day the wayfarer was and that burst into existence the same day he did, even though the wayfarer would depart and wander off while the promise remained. The eternal temptation endured as a hint of an impossible reunion and functioned as a huge snare to lure wayfarers to the desert and to life by flaunting a promise—of an oasis and a reunion—that would never be fulfilled. In the newly expanded distance, delight triumphed and the heart overflowed with ecstasy. The body quivered with a dancelike tremor, because a glow had appeared on the horizon, because a torch had cleft the dark recesses of the pale, eternal horizon, appearing for a brief glimpse as a flash of lightning, and this was a sign the wayfarer had craved for a long time and had struggled endlessly to observe. Then the stern, hostile, eternal emptiness supplied a signal like sparks of revelation, and he saw what he had never seen in that expanse and discovered what he had never been able to find; in fact, he discovered what he had not wanted to find.

  So how could his frail body keep from trembling ecstatically? How could a tear of longing not spill from his eye?

  2

  The desert welcomes birds twice a year. In the spring, flocks arrive from the South, spend a few days in the nomadic encampments, and then call to each other to resume their voyage to
the countries of the North. In fall, they come from the North, spend some days in the camps again, and then call to each other to travel to the lands of the South. People say that in the past the flocks preferred oases as migratory way stations but that these dense throngs of birds alarmed the oasis dwellers, who thought the onslaught threatened their crops. So they fought off the birds, set traps for them, shot arrows at them, and beat drums to frighten them away. Then the birds abandoned the oases, and migrating flocks avoided cultivated fields, eventually choosing the desert’s nomadic camps for their stopovers. The desert people consider their arrival a very good omen, and their sages reckon the birds’ landing a heavenly sign. So diviners travel for quite long distances to meet the birds when the flocks arrive and follow them for even greater distances when they depart. It is said that the diviners pursue the flocks of birds to discover the enigmatic insights the Spirit World has encoded in their behavior, songs, and flight.

  The diviners are not the only ones delighted by the birds’ arrival. All the desert people go out to the open country when the first flock appears on the horizon. The sages hurry out before anyone else to greet the migrating community. They head to the wasteland in scattered groups, striding with noble arrogance and preceded by the leader, who walks alone, decked out in his ceremonial regalia. Trailing the nobles are the warriors, also grouped in units. Behind the men come clusters of women, who drag their children after them, wave their babes in the air, and chant cheerful ballads, trilling an epic into their children’s ears: “Here are the birds that gave you to me last year; they’ve come again. Here’s the abil-bil, the egret, which brought you to me, returning to see you. The birds are your mother. The birds are your father. The birds are your brothers. The birds are your family. The birds have come to visit their child whom they entrusted to me. The birds have come to reclaim their trust. When will you be old enough to accompany the birds? When will you sprout wings so the flock will accept you into the tribe and you can migrate with the birds to the Land of the Birds?”