The Scarecrow (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Read online

  MODERN MIDDLE EAST

  LITERATURES IN TRANSLATION SERIES

  THE SCARECROW

  IBRAHIM AL-KONI

  TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED

  BY WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS

  CENTER FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

  THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2015 by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  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: 2015939478

  Library ebook ISBN: 978-1-4773-0708-3

  Individual ebook ISBN: 978-1-4773-0709-0

  DOI: 10.7560/302521

  ISBN: 978-1-4773-0252-1

  Published in Arabic as al-Fazza‘a (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1998).

  The final section, “The Sacrificial Offering,” appeared in July 2011 as “The Sacrifice” on the website In Translation at brooklynrail.org.

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  Introduction: Al-Koni’s Demons

  THE SCARECROW

  The Omen

  The Prophecy

  The Scarecrow

  The Gifts

  The Edicts

  Blindness

  Wantahet

  The Epidemic

  The Raids

  The Beauty

  The Idol

  The Sacrificial Offering

  About the Author

  CHARACTERS

  Abanaban: chief vassal

  Aggulli (or Aghulli): a sage and leader, recently assassinated

  Ah’llum (or Ahallum): the hero, the tribe’s head warrior

  Amasis the Younger: a noble elder

  Asaruf: a noble elder

  Asen’fru: tax administrator

  Chief Merchant: the man with two veils, de facto head of the chamber of commerce

  Emmamma: the tribe’s venerable elder, a nobleman, and the oldest man in the tribe

  Imaswan Wandarran: spokesman for the Council of Nobles

  Itinerant Diviner: handsome, black diviner with special gifts

  Leader: a deceased poet compelled by Tuareg culture and his tribal elders to lead a Tuareg tribe

  Master of the Sign: African sage consulted by the sorcerer

  Scarecrow (sorcerer, leader, strategist, governor, and various other epithets): an inhabitant of the Spirit World who becomes the ruler of the New Waw Oasis; Wantahet or his avatar

  Tayetti: commander of the anti-gold campaign in The Puppet

  Tomb Maiden or Priestess: the deceased leader’s bride and medium

  INTRODUCTION

  AL-KONI’S DEMONS

  Every so often out of the welter of the season’s publications comes a book that is not an imitation of some other book. It has the touch of reality, the voice of a person; it spreads out a landscape of its own in which one moves with easy familiarity. One does not think of it as a book, but as a real world of comfortable unreality.

  Hughes Mearns wrote this in his introduction for a selection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, not for a novel by Ibrahim al-Koni, although it applies equally well to The Scarecrow. It seems uncanny that later, on the same page, he continued:

  One might remark that a famous historic gentleman was an outstanding special pleader, a great soldier whose one defeat has amounted to an amazing victory, a distinguished actor of parts, a governor of a greater domain than that of any single nation of the present world, and guess as one might, no clue would be given to help in identifying the celebrated character. Few would know surely that the reference is to Beelzebub.1

  What is uncanny here is that the main character of The Scarecrow actually is a self-righteous, demonic despot who is as hollow as his physical avatar—a scarecrow in the fields of the oasis.

  The Scarecrow begins right where The Puppet, the preceding novel of the New Waw or Oasis trilogy, left off. The conspirators, who assassinated the last leader of this Saharan oasis community because he opposed the use of gold in business transactions, meet to choose his successor. The choice is complicated by metaphysical considerations. Two realms—al-khafa’, the Spirit World, and al-khala’, the desert wasteland and by extension the material world of everyday life—coexist in the same time and space, but people in the physical world are normally oblivious to the Spirit World, which unbeknownst to them controls them in many ways, most directly by “possessing” leaders the moment they mount the throne.

  In an essay called “Is Life Worth Living?” William James told the story of a frisky terrier that bites a boy and then watches as the owner pays the boy’s father, without having a clue as to its own involvement in this transaction.2 James explained: “In the dog’s life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds.”3 He suggested that if we assume there is a bigger picture, a spiritual framework, we will find that our daily life is worth living, even though we are no more aware of the spiritual world than our feisty terrier is of our financial transactions concerning him. Here is an American version of the possible relationship between al-khafa’, where the jinn (who rank between angels and human beings) live, and al-khala’, where people live. James, in a different essay, explained that the gap between human and canine perspectives cuts both ways:

  Take our dogs and ourselves … how insensible, each of us [is], to all that makes life significant for the other … we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art.4

  A question for readers of Ibrahim al-Koni’s works is whether the gap between human and jinn worlds challenges both us and the jinn who try to understand us. The Scarecrow suggests that the jinn may really lose their bearings when they visit our world.

  In the novels of Ibrahim al-Koni, the dividing line between human beings and the jinn is blurred at times. In fact, wayfarers who meet in al-Koni’s desert typically ask one another whether they are of jinni or human heritage.5 In addition to leaders, other human beings who peep across the divide are diviners (like the tomb maiden in this trilogy), poets (often female in Tuareg culture), and Sufi dervishes. Not all jinn are demons, but all demons are jinn—or so it seems. Most of al-Koni’s demonic characters are male, although the Mute Soprano at the beginning of The Puppet comports herself in a demonic manner;6 most also serve as avatars—to some degree—of the Tuareg trickster Wantahet.

  How coherent, then, are Ibrahim al-Koni’s depictions of demons or the demonic through his many novels? Are all these demonic figures a single demon, several different demons, mere plot devices, or especially endowed characters? If there is one archdemon—say Wantahet of Tuareg mythology—is he more like Satan of the Abrahamic religions, Seth of ancient Egypt, or a West African trickster deity like Eshu? Put another way: since al-Koni identifies himself as a Saharan author, does it help to check out his neighborhood (Egypt to the east and West Africa to the southwest) and his own Sufi and European, etc., formation when interpreting his novels? Does comparison with Egyptian and African trickster gods illuminate al-Koni’s depictions of the demonic?7

  Luc-Willy Deheuvels, for one, has written that al-Koni’s ideal reader will know everything about Arab and Islamic culture, Tuareg culture, and black African culture—not to mention European culture from ancient Greece to the present.8 Ibrahim al-Koni himself has clearly stated that he views ancient Egyptian culture to be part of his Tuareg heritage. Some ancient peop
les settled in the Nile Valley and others returned to the desert.9

  The protagonist of Ibrahim al-Koni’s novel al-Bahth ‘An al-Makan al-Da’i‘ (published in English as The Seven Veils of Seth) is a Satanic trickster named Isan who eventually destroys the oasis that has offered him its hospitality, but only because he wishes a better, destabilizing, nomadic existence for its residents. That novel’s Arabic title is a play on Proust’s famous title A la recherche du temps perdu; in al-Koni’s novel the search is for lost space, for the lost paradise of Waw,10 for which this new oasis, New Waw, has been named. The author encourages the reader to think of Isan as an avatar of Seth, who in the ancient Egyptian religion killed his brother Osiris (the good god of agriculture) in order to seize the throne, but who was also the desert god and therefore a benevolent champion of desert dwellers.

  David S. Noss says that in ancient Iran, “The wild nomads to the north … were the scourge of all good settlers,” and that their religion was a foil against which Zoroaster rebelled in founding Zoroastrianism as a religion for settled peoples and in transforming the nomads’ godly devas into nature demons.11 In The Seven Veils of Seth, Ibrahim al-Koni draws on the tension between these two opposing visions of Seth to provide depth to his portrait of his protagonist. Seth (or Isan), then, is not merely a demon but a god of necessary disorder.

  The twentieth-century Iranian engineer, lay theologian, and reform politician Mehdi Bazargan explained in an essay: “Conflict, one of whose quintessential representatives for human beings is Satan, is the cause of a plethora of blessed events, from the natural cycle of life on earth to the higher cycle of resurrection in the hereafter.” Three paragraphs earlier in the same essay he remarked: “Movement … is a blessing and a source of survival and evolution, while rigidity is a cause of stasis, decline, and death.”12 Hilary Austen, author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life, pointed out—in a similar vein but in a totally different context (how unleashing the artist in a business setting can help a firm “move on”)—that the opposite of chaos is not order but stagnation.13

  WANTAHET

  Al-Koni’s Oasis (or New Waw) trilogy begins with New Waw (Waw al-Sughra),14 continues with The Puppet (al-Dumya), and ends with al-Fazza‘a (The Scarecrow). This eponymous protagonist of the third novel appeared in The Puppet to offer good advice to that novel’s well-intentioned hero. In al-Fazza‘a, though, his destruction of the oasis—which he justifies as an appropriate reward for the community’s contempt for his benefactions—seems malicious and vengeful.15 A voice in the crowd at a food distribution in this novel warns that this may be another version of Wantahet’s infamous banquet, and the chapter called “Wantahet” gives a version of this famous banquet as part of a folktale about a contest between proponents respectively of anger, envy, hatred, and revenge. Paradoxically, the chief vassal of New Waw remarks to its demonic ruler that by repaying good with evil he has demonstrated that he is a human being, not a demon. In al-Koni’s novel Lawn al-La‘na (The Color of the Curse), the demonic protagonist, who even has an evil apprentice, is so evil that the ambiguous interplay of good and evil (or between stagnation and chaos) seems lost. He is said to have sold his soul to the “Master of Dark Tyrannies” and therefore to have returned as a devil.16 This demon in Lawn al-La‘na is also referred to as Wantahet.17

  Are all these demons different forms of Wantahet, who is trying to show us the way back to Waw, the real Tuareg paradise? If God is so good that He can bring good out of evil (as Thomas Aquinas argued in a passage al-Koni has used for an epigraph), should we thank God for demons? Incidentally, the demon—in at least some of al-Koni’s many novels—is a counterweight to the tribe’s leaders, not to God, and the lost Law of the Tuareg people plays the part that might elsewhere be assumed by God. In al-Koni’s novel Anubis, moreover, the ancient goddess Tanit has top billing, not a male god or demon.

  Ibrahim al-Koni obviously draws on many traditions and authors from Tuareg to Russian to Chinese and American, and adds literary and mythological allusions the way an artist applies washes or glazes to give added depth to a painting. Are al-Koni’s references to Seth and other demonic figures merely mythological washes or part of a consistent storyline that forms part of his own or of Tuareg mythology?

  In The Seven Veils of Seth, the chief of the oasis community teases his visitor: “How can you expect our elders not to think ill of you when you arrive on the back of a jenny, as if you were the accursed Wantahet, who has been the butt of jokes for generations?”18 As their exchange continues, the chief reminds the visitor: “The strategist known as Wantahet also claimed he would carry people on the path of deliverance the day he cast them down the mouth of the abyss.”19 There is a more complete version of this accusation later in the novel: “The master of the jenny at the end of time would approach villages to entice tribes to a banquet only to pull the banquet carpet out from under them, allowing them to fall into a bottomless abyss.”20 These references to the Wantahet of Tuareg mythology appear in several of al-Koni’s novels. When the translator asked Ibrahim al-Koni for further details from Tuareg folklore about Wantahet, the author replied that he starts with the folkloric scraps he has and uses them as a starting point. In his “Témoinage,” al-Koni said that he has created his own desert and filled it with his own symbols and archetypes.21

  ANCIENT EGYPT: SETH

  Ancient Egyptian attitudes toward Seth underwent an evolution and are not consistent across the literature and over the centuries. Put another way: the study of Seth in ancient Egyptian religion is the domain of specialists. H. Te Velde, one such expert, in Seth, God of Confusion says, for example, that if “In mythology and for many Egyptians Seth” was “the divine foreigner” or the “god of confusion, for the faithful he was also unrestrictedly god.” He adds, however, that: “after the 20th dynasty” not only were “no new temples … built” for Seth but there is no “evidence that existing temples of Seth were restored.”22

  Isan in The Seven Veils of Seth is called the Jenny Master, because he rides a she-ass, and a vivid account is offered of how he learned to hate camels and love a wild she-ass.23 Similarly, the hero of Lawn al-La‘na is said to have traveled south to Africa’s forestlands on a camel with a caravan but to have returned on a she-ass.24 H. Te Velde in Seth, God of Confusion includes a chapter about the “Seth-animal,” which has been connected with various mammals, real and imaginary, including the wild ass.25 E. A. Wallis Budge in The Gods of the Egyptians says that “The Ass, like many animals, was regarded by Egyptians both as a god and a devil.”26 To be sure, there is also in the Islamic history of the Maghreb a famous Sahib al-Himar: Abu Yazid Mukallad ibn Kayrad al-Nukkari (d. 947 CE), a Berber who led a rebellion against Fatimid rule in what is today Tunisia. He was known as the Ass Master because he rode a donkey.

  Te Velde quotes a text in which Seth announces, “I am Seth who causes confusion and thunders in the horizon of the sky….”27 Seth, then, is the lord of rain, although “in Egypt vegetation and the fertility of the soil is not dependent on rain, but on the inundation of the Nile.”28

  A potion that al-Koni’s Isan slips into the pool causes women in the oasis to miscarry, but he can also cure their fertility problems. Te Velde says of Seth that he is “the god who brings about abortion.”29 Seth’s method of cure underscores his sexual prowess. Te Velde says, “Seth is a god of sexuality which is not canalized into fertility.”30

  In The Seven Veils of Seth, both the character Isan—who doubles as Seth and Wantahet—and the repeated references to the lost Tuareg Law promote nomadism (and tribalism) and discourage settled life in an oasis where tribalism is diluted. If religions tend to promote group solidarity—whether locally or globally—it seems reasonable that a demon like Seth should, in the later eras of ancient Egypt, be portrayed as a deviant foreigner.

  Te Velde explains, “Because Seth repeatedly proved to have been collaborating in maintaining the cosmic order, though in a peculiar way, Seth co
uld be worshipped.”31 Once the worship of Seth fell from favor, however, Seth became “exclusively a demonic murderer and chaotic power….”32 and “a dreadful demon of the black magicians”33 and thus no longer “the ancient Egyptian god of the desert and divine foreigner….”34

  If E. O. Wilson and others are correct in ascribing to religion the role of reinforcing an innate human tendency toward tribalism by encouraging human groups that prefer the group’s members to outsiders,35 then a religion’s demons should also serve this purpose. Even though he is a neo-Darwinian, Wilson embraces Jung’s archetypes and lists two “of the most frequently cited” as “The Trickster” who “disturbs established order” and “A monster” that “threatens humanity … (Satan writhing at the bottom of hell)….”36

  Jung claimed in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” that these archetypes are “primordial types … universal images that have existed since the remotest times.”37 If he is correct, the net must be cast over all of human experience, not simply Africa or Europe. In “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” he pointed out that Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible exhibits

  not a few reminders of the unpredictable behavior of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction … together with the same gradual development into a savior and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster’s compensatory relation to the “saint.”38