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

  One main theme of The Scarecrow is the humanization of the demonic protagonist. Does this transformation also help the meaningless become meaningful? If Jung was even partially correct about archetypes, then many other players can be introduced with questions like: Is Shiva’s role of constructive destruction in the Hindu Trimurti similar to that played by al-Koni’s demon?

  WEST AFRICA

  Robert D. Pelton, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, says that “the trickster pulls the most unyielding matter—disease, ugliness, greed, lust, lying, jealousy—into the orbit of life….”39 He also says, earlier, that “His presence … represents a ceaseless informing of structure with rawness and formlessness and a boundless confidence that such a process is truly constructive.”40 Roger D. Abrahams, in African Folktales, says of the trickster that he “represents primal creativity and pathological destructiveness, childish innocence, and self-absorption.” He “lives in the wilds, but makes regular incursions into the human community …” and “is sexually voracious.”41 Abrahams summarizes:

  the vitality and the protean abilities of Trickster … are continually fascinating and … carry … the characteristic African message that life is celebrated most fully through the dramatizing of oppositions.42

  Viewed from a West African perspective, the scarecrow phenomenon in the final two novels of al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy (The Puppet and The Scarecrow) are masquerades, perhaps comparable to the Yoruba egungun, a returning ancestor. Moreover, the idea that a spirit or god may take possession of a worshiper or borrow random body parts to visit the market has a wealth of West African parallels.

  ESHU

  Eshu stands out among the 401 Yoruba orisha who either represent dimensions of Olorun, the sky god, or serve him, because Eshu acts as their messenger. Few of Africa’s traditional gods are portrayed in African art, but Eshu’s face is usually carved on the Ifa divination tray. God of the road, he may be worshiped at a crossroads. In the chapter called “The Scarecrow,” we learn that cunning strategists in Tuareg culture are cautious at crossroads. Eshu is also a trickster who deliberately starts fights, but these fights normally promote sacrifices to the orisha—he receives a commission—and therefore improve human conduct.

  Noel Q. King, in African Cosmos, first warns Muslims and Christians against confusing Eshu with Satan and then cautions anthropologists against seeing him as the trickster. (King refers to him instead as the Prankster—a subtle distinction.) If Eshu deceives “people into wrong behavior,” that is primarily “so they may gain favor by their expiation and feed the divinities with their offerings.”43 Similarly, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, Robert D. Pelton says that by starting a quarrel between two friends, Eshu demonstrates that their “friendship was held together by custom, not by mutual awareness” or by “a willingness to undergo modification together.”44 Fixing a chair that was poorly repaired or a bone that was improperly set may require breaking it again first. In his excellent article about al-Koni, Sabry Hafez was, then, perhaps overly influenced by Semitic precedents when he identified the Tuareg Wantahet (wantahit) as “Beelzebub, the prince of the evil spirits.”45 This is odd, because on the previous page he said, “the desert’s spiritual balance is maintained by an amalgam of African and ancient Egyptian tenets.”46 His reference then was, admittedly, to the role of ancestors’ spirits, not to demons. A few pages later he identified Wantahet himself, specifically, as “the prince of evil spirits…”47 and then after that said that one of the characters is “the personification of wantahit, Beelzebub.”48 A more African Wantahet is, arguably, a more interesting (and more authentically Tuareg) literary demon. In the chapter called “Wantahet” in The Scarecrow, Wantahet is presented as the advocate of revenge or retribution. Thus, he plays a role parallel to that of Eshu as a trickster who rebalances the scales of justice in the novel by pulling a carpet out from under the feet of malefactors.

  Pelton also says that Eshu’s “presence in the market is indeed a phallic presence, loaded with volatile, unstable energy.” He observes,

  Eshu embodies sexuality as unleashed desire—not lust merely, nor even avarice, envy or greed, but that passion for what lies outside one’s grasp which the Greeks saw in some sense as the sovereign mover of human life.49

  Pelton summarizes: “Eshu does not only present riddles; he is one.”50 Seth, in The Seven Veils of Seth, poses riddles as well and definitely is one.

  Manning Marable in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention at one point calls Malcolm X a North American version of a West African trickster, saying that Malcolm X:

  presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world.51

  These roles are precisely—albeit perhaps coincidentally—the two sides of Isan’s character in The Seven Veils of Seth, of the mythic Wantahet character in Tuareg folklore, and of al-Koni’s demons, as in The Scarecrow.

  One other parallel to African American culture is the occasional use by al-Koni of call-and-response passages like the second section of the second chapter, “The Prophecy,” in The Scarecrow.

  AL-KONI’S MYSTICAL, SUFI, AND EUROPEAN FORMATION

  Seth and Eshu, admittedly, may not have been the only inspirations for the development of the demonic hero in the novels of al-Koni, because other forces—like Sufism and Russian literature—have also been part of his formation.

  Ziad Elmarsafy, in his book Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, has an elegant chapter devoted to demonstrating the central place of Sufism not only in the novels of Ibrahim al-Koni but in explaining his sense of mission as a novelist. He refers, for example, to al-Koni’s motif of “the wanderings of individuals in the desert” as “a mystical ecology.”52 He says that “Al-Koni’s use of Sufi elements is present in his writings from the outset.”53 Moreover, “It is no accident that his repertoire of stock characters includes … the spiritual master and the disciple.”54 Although Wantahet in al-Koni’s novels is accused of inviting people to a banquet on a carpet spread over an abyss, Elmarsafy explains: “Al-Koni makes clear that the abyss (al-hawiya) is a key step in a spiritual journey, during which the traveller’s suffering is at its worst.”55 This Sufi interpretation of the abyss totally transforms the meaning of Wantahet’s banquet. Referring to the division of the Tuareg world into a visible and an invisible sphere, Elmarsafy summarizes a discussion of the subject by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and repeats her point that it is the Sufi, not the tribal leader, who can move between the two spheres.56 Wantahet then becomes a Sufi prototype, and al-hawiya—the abyss or pit beneath the banquet blanket—becomes one of the stages on the Sufi path. Thus Wantahet’s invitation to the abyss becomes an invitation to a form of union with the divine. A member of the Council of Elders says in The Scarecrow: “We must accept the abyss if the fall into it has been willed by the Spirit World.”

  Iblis, who in Islamic belief is the chief devil, has a better reputation with some Sufis than with Shari‘ah-minded, act-right Muslims, precisely because he refused to bow to anyone save God. Thus, arguably, he was the sincerest monotheist. Moreover, the Beloved’s curse bestows enviable recognition on the lover, because it shows God’s interest in that individual. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, for example, Eblis (Iblis) says: “All creatures seek throughout the universe/What will be mine for ever now—Your curse!”57 Finally, Elmarsafy has several pages of analysis of what he terms al-Koni’s own “Sufi Autobiography,” Marathi Ulis.58

  Attar’s ambivalence about Satan, the ultimate monotheist, is only part of the problem, as Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis point out in their introduction when they refer to “the Sufi love of paradox” being deployed as “a way of jolting the reader out of his normal expectations of the world….” Furthermore, they warn that “Objects and individu
als don’t maintain their allegorical significance from one story to another, so the meanings of the symbols in each story have to be worked out anew.”59

  Another element of al-Koni’s formation has been Russian literature, including authors like Dostoyevsky. Al-Koni has written of his “specific and intimate” relationship with Dostoyevsky, whom he has referred to as his master. He highlights the influence on him of Dostoyevsky’s “philosophic dimension and his symbolic system.” In this context, al-Koni says that a novel can be considered “ideas transformed into life” and that no other novelist was able to treat “abstract ideas and incarnate them in life” better than Dostoyevsky.60

  Marc Slonim, in his introduction to an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov, brings attention to human transgression:

  The compulsion toward transgression … was to Dostoyevsky, a basic human compulsion; man does not accept his condition, nor does he accept the world which determined this condition.61

  In The Scarecrow’s chapter called “The Gifts,” the newly anointed demonic ruler tempts the elders, who have proclaimed him leader of Waw, with gifts from his wonder-sack, exactly as if he were Mephistopheles tempting Faust.

  CONCLUSION

  All these extra varnishes or glazes on the painted surface of some of Ibrahim al-Koni’s novels enhance and reinforce the image of al-Koni’s demon as an agent of chaos construed as creative disorder, which is destabilizing but also necessary for growth—economic, physical, or spiritual. In The Scarecrow, once the demon becomes a despot, some of the balance or tension may be lost. The term theosis in Eastern Christianity refers to the doctrine asserting that if God can become man, men can become godlike. In al-Koni’s novels, if man can become demonic, jinnis can become human. There is no abyss or Sufi salvation under a carpet at the end of The Scarecrow, and the senior demon in Lawn al-La‘na may be the least interesting of al-Koni’s demons because he is so monochromatic, so evil.

  Ancient Egyptian and West African sacred stories (myths) can serve as points of reference for interpreting demonic humans and humane demons in the works of Ibrahim al-Koni. Recent history, though, is also relevant. In a series of telephone conversations, Ibrahim al-Koni told the translator frequently that he is not a political person and not a political author. All the same, Colonel Qaddafi was, he has also said, one of The Scarecrow’s multiple inspirations. Since the Arabic novel was completed and published in 1998, the crisis at the end refers not to the Libyan leader’s final year but to an earlier confrontation between Libya and the international community. The scarecrow (or Wantahet) and Qaddafi may have shared some West African characteristics: eccentricity that verges on the criminal, virility or male sexuality separated from fertility, self-centered exploitation of a culture of individual empowerment, encouragement or exploitation of tribalism, the embrace of nomadism or at least of the tent as a personal symbol, and acceptance of the role of Nietzsche’s Űbermensch (or overman), whose antics, however deadly, never truly threaten the survival of the herd—or at least did not threaten it until the invention of weapons of mass destruction.

  In short, a much fuller, more nuanced portrait of Wantahet and his avatars—who are frequent visitors to Ibrahim al-Koni’s novels—is provided by looking outside the traditional characterization of Satan by the three main Abrahamic religions.

  In The Fetishists, al-Koni had Adda, the leader, explain: “Goodness, like truth, is an angel that speeds unimpeded across the countryside, but when a human hand seizes it and places it in a flask, it turns into an evil demon.”62

  1. Hughes Mearns, introduction to Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1927), 8.

  2. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 52.

  3. Ibid., 53.

  4. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Essays on Faith and Morals, selected by Ralph Barton Perry (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1962), 260.

  5. See The Seven Veils of Seth, trans. William M. Hutchins (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2008), 134.

  6. See The Puppet, trans. William M. Hutchins (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 1–9.

  7. Elliott Colla provides a cautionary tale in an article in Banipal; he was thinking of Jahili Arabic poetry in conjunction with a passage by al-Koni, who pointed him to Moby-Dick instead. Elliott Colla, “Translating Ibrahim al-Koni,” Banipal 40 (Spring 2011): 175.

  8. Luc-Willy Deheuvels, “Le lieu de l’utopie dans l’oeuvre d’Ibrahim al-Kawni,” in La Poétique de l’espace dans la littérature arabe moderne, ed. Boutros Hallaq, Robin Ostle, and Stefan Wild (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), 25.

  9. Ibrahim al-Koni, “Le ‘discours’ du desert: Témoinage,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 97–98.

  10. The title of the English translation—The Seven Veils of Seth—is based on the author’s inscription in the copy of the Arabic novel he sent the translator.

  11. David S. Noss, A History of the World’s Religions, 10th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 355.

  12. Mehdi Bazargan, “Religion and Liberty,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82.

  13. Hilary Austen, interview by Peter Day on Global Business, BBC World Service, in an episode entitled “Thinking about Thinking,” updated March 31, 2011.

  14. The novel al-Waram (The Tumor), in which the ruler finds that his official robe has fused with his skin, is related to this trilogy but seems to stand outside the plot sequence of the trilogy per se. The four volumes have been marketed separately in Arabic.

  15. In a private conversation at Georgetown University on April 28, 2011, Ibrahim al-Koni said he had the first international blockade of Libya in mind when he wrote The Scarecrow.

  16. Lawn al-La‘na (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2005), 14.

  17. Ibid., 236.

  18. The Seven Veils of Seth, 75.

  19. Ibid., 76.

  20. Ibid., 143.

  21. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 97.

  22. H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 138–139.

  23. The Seven Veils of Seth, 129 ff.

  24. Lawn al-La‘na, 15.

  25. Te Velde, 13–26.

  26. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904; New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 2:367.

  27. Te Velde, 106.

  28. Ibid., 54.

  29. Ibid., 29.

  30. Ibid., 55.

  31. Ibid., 140.

  32. Ibid., 141.

  33. Ibid., 148.

  34. Ibid., 147.

  35. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 280–281.

  36. Ibid., 244.

  37. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), part 1, 4–5.

  38. Ibid., 256.

  39. Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 252.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 155.

  42. Ibid., 156.

  43. Noel Q. King, African Cosmos: An Introduction to Religion in Africa (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1986), 10–11.

  44. Pelton, 142.

  45. Sabry Hafez, “The Novel of the Desert: Poetics of Space and Dialectics of Freedom,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 67.

  46. Ibid., 66.

  47. Ibid., 76.

  48. Ibid., 80

  49. Ibid., 161.

  50. Ibid., 162.

  51. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 11.

  52. Ziad Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 201
2), 107.

  53. Ibid., 108.

  54. Ibid., 110.

  55. Ibid., 129.

  56. Ibid., 112.

  57. Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 182. See also Faridu’d-Din Attar, The Speech of the Birds, trans. P. W. Avery (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1998), 293 for a less memorable but more complete translation of the same passage.

  58. Elmarsafy, 130–138.

  59. Attar, xvii–xviii.

  60. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 101.

  61. Marc Slonim, introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), ix.

  62. Ibrahim al-Koni, al-Majus, 4th printing (Beirut: al-Multaka Publishing, 2001), 47.

  THE SCARECROW

  We are the hollow men

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

  T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

  Some weave huge figures of wicker,

  and fill their limbs with live humans,

  who are then burned to death when the figures are set afire.

  Julius Caesar, The Gallic War Book VI.16

  With an ill omen you take home a woman

  whom Greece will come to claim with a great army….

  Horace, Odes I: Carpe Diem Song 15

  THE OMEN

  1

  “Taking the matter seriously is actually a grave threat.”

  The hero repeated this phrase twice and pulled from his pocket a scrap of blue cloth that he wound carefully around his right index finger. Then he began to wipe his eyelids very cautiously.