The disease is very slow in progress, and one may play host to breeding bilharzia for years without more than mild discomfort if the infection is slight, but sooner or later all the pelvic organs may become affected and suffer severe pain and malfunction, besides secondary effects such as stones that form round the eggs in the bladder.
That list is but a tiny fraction of the diseases to which the marshmen are subject, and it is small wonder that Thesiger, who for four years had performed seeming miracles among them, was besieged by an importunate multitude in every village that we visited. The number of patients would grow gradually from a nucleus of two or three in the household with which we were staying; word would go round that the medicine chest was open, and they would come in from every quarter of the village to press round him, sometimes in hundreds. To treat them all would have been impossible; no medicine chest that could be transported in a tarada would have lasted more than two or three villages; and many, especially milder cases or those whom Thesiger suspected of malingering in order to be in the swim, were turned away. From the first day these decided that I was a suitable intermediary; of less formidable aspect, perhaps, than Thesiger, and one whose heart could be softened to plead for them. I was soon surrounded with a crowd little less than that which milled round him, and no amount of repetition that I did not understand Arabic made any noticeable impression upon either their numbers or verbosity. Each displayed his suffering with a formal and unvarying ritual of pathos; my view became a kaleidoscope of cataracted eyes, suppurating boil-craters, patches of angry rash on brown skins, wounds, and swollen genitals.
For nearly three hours Thesiger worked indefatigably in the midst of this bedlam; his hypodermic stabbed with piston-like regularity at brown bottoms; oceans of ointment were spread on leagues of lint; he stitched away like a tailor at dog bites and pig-gores, and counted out hundreds of white pills into hundreds of horny brown hands; while all space and light were effectively closed off by waiting patients and relations.
Last of all came the circumcisions. During Thesiger’s first year among these people he had been in much demand to repair the often spectacular damage inflicted by wandering professional circumcisers, who, in return for a fee of five shillings, would perform a protracted and agonising mutilation whose aftermath of sepsis and slow convalescence lasted often for many months. The near-universality of sepsis and complication had at first puzzled Thesiger, for by the very nature of their lives the marshmen have built up some small immunity, and it was not for some time that he discovered the almost incredible cause. The wandering circumcisers, to give full measure for their five-shilling fee, were in the habit of dressing the wound with a magic powder of which they carried considerable quantities; and this powder, it turned out, was composed entirely of dried and powdered foreskins. Thesiger’s despairing attempt to explain the rudimentary principles of anti-sepsis had brought furious scowls from the purveyors of the powder, and pleas from the suffering people that he would perform the operation himself. His first attempts had proved so rapid, painless, and free from after-effect that his competitors had felt inspired to put about a rumour that he rendered his patients sterile. Thesiger was so constantly on the move that they could not be aware of the weakness in this otherwise intelligent gambit, for they did not know how many grown boys and young men had been among his patients. By the following year a large number of them had fathered healthy babies, and the wandering circumcisers found themselves discredited as liars as well as butchers. Thesiger had taken the terror from the operation, and now few would consent to have it performed by anyone else. Would-be patients who had heard of our vicinity would sometimes follow us for many days, and would come in from neighbouring villages to wherever we were known to be staying.
Circumcision, which is normally performed in an arbitrarily chosen year somewhere between the ages of ten and nineteen, is something of an occasion, though the extreme informality of the proceedings is in contrast with that of many other peoples who perform ritual mutilations. The boys assemble, anything from one or two to fifty or more, and lie upon the ground in rows while the operator moves round them as a doctor might move from bed to bed in a hospital ward. The greater part of the whole village forms a solid wall of spectators; women and girls of all ages form an appreciable part of the audience; and often a boy’s mother or sister will sit beside him, encouraging him before the operation and keeping the flies off him after it. Only occasionally a boy professes embarrassment at the presence of the women, and asks to be operated upon in surreptitious privacy; the true marshmen are so often naked in the presence of women that no element of shame attaches to it. Little sympathy, and often much mockery, is shown to a boy who is frightened or who cries out, but very few do, and I have heard one who was asked what Thesiger’s operation felt like reply “it felt as if a flea bit me”. As the operation is completed the boy’s mother gives vent to the weird cry of rejoicing that is described in technical literature as “ululating” (an onomatopœic word, for the sound is simply “ululululululululu” repeated in a high and rapid wail until breath gives out), and sometimes the father fires a shot or two from a rifle. Often each boy of a group that is circumcised together gives a small feast for the others, and it is said that some sort of bond or blood brothership grows amongst them.
After the circumcision the boys remain recumbent for an hour, as a safeguard against bleeding, and then they walk home. From then on, during the few days until they are healed, they wear two or three onions on a string round their necks, for the people are convinced that the wound will become septic if the boy should smell cooking, or baking, or any form of perfume. The boy who is in the vicinity of such smells will plug his nostrils with the small ends of the onions until the danger is past. Curiously, they believe the peril to emanate from these pleasant scents, never from stenches; furthermore native custom had previously required the operation to be performed in the height of summer, as the operators had held that cool weather would cause the wound to become inflamed.
The gale blew unabated all afternoon, and by now it was clear that we must spend a second night at Ramla. As a rule Thesiger was at pains not to spend two nights under the same roof, for in the eyes of most marsh Arabs the demands of hospitality include the killing of chickens, and become a serious drain upon the householder’s resources.
I should have liked to wander over the small stretches of dry ground surrounding the village, but because of the dogs it was impossible; this too was a repetitive pattern throughout the long journey. Practically every house in the marshes is guarded by at least one, and sometimes as many as four or five large and almost invariably savage dogs. They are savage both because they are trained to be so and because, being an unclean animal, they are afforded little of the casual affection that household watchdogs may receive outside the Muslim world. Their attitude to all human beings other than those of the household they guard is dour, morose, and explosive. They bark so incessantly both by day and by night that many of them have strained their vocal cords; some produce no more than a husky whisper, others the cracked and disconcertingly alternating bellow and squeak of the human adolescent. As a result of constant and venomous bickering among themselves the older dogs are so tattered and frayed as to give the impression of being damaged beyond all reasonable hope of repair; their ears, if they still possess them, serrated like the fronds of a fern, their tails lopped to haphazard half-lengths, even the black buttons of their noses sometimes twisted to preposterous angles with their faces, or hanging by a thread of gristle; their flanks and shoulders criss-crossed with the scars of teeth. The basic type, before this distortion has been superimposed, is something between an Alsatian and a Husky, with a dense, usually light-coloured, coat, and a tail that curls more or less tightly upward. The commonest pattern is sand-coloured or rufous, and suggests descent from the wild red dogs of India, but they may be blotched or brindled, and occasionally white. Whatever their origin they must by now have reached the maximum development of which th
e species is capable; there are no small dogs and no unaggressive dogs, quite simply because if there were they would be killed by the large and aggressive.
The religious—or in this case customary, for the marshmen cannot be said to possess more than the mores of their nominal religion—uncleanness of dogs does not prevent them being on terms of some familiarity with the household they serve, and more especially its younger members. The adults discourage a display of affection, but despite these sanctions I have seen children sleeping with puppies cuddled in their arms, and occasionally older children will play with a dog as do Europeans. Even in their unsentimental society the protection between dog and man is to a large extent mutual, and the killing of a dog can start a blood-feud as does the killing of a human being.
The dogs effectively restrict a stranger’s movements in a village or about its immediate precincts, and because of them it is impossible even to relieve oneself without a guard standing by; indeed it is surprising that the marshmen manage somehow to steal from each other as much as they do.
At nightfall the wind was still gusty and tumultuous, but its force must have slackened a little, for an exhausted fishing party made its way into the village after three days marooned without food on a small island. They had been poisoning fish, the only mass method of fishing that the marshmen allow themselves. For some forgotten reason fishing with nets is taboo, and the people who make their living in this way, the Berbera, are looked down upon as of low caste, so that the marsh tribesmen themselves are confined either to the grotesquely inefficient methods of spearing or of strewing the water with poisoned bait; digitalis concealed in shrimps. The poisoned fish float to the surface, and their poaching by passing boats gives rise to frequent squabbles.
Night came down upon the marshes in utter desolation; there was no sunset nor hint of colour, the light just faded out of that roaring grey sky until the silhouettes of the tossing palm plumes became dim and indistinct and merged into the darkness of a starless sky. The house began to fill with guests as before, and when we had eaten and become once more part of a huddled throng who faced inward to the rearing flames of the reed fire, our host turned to a young man near him and asked him to sing. “Ma’agdar, Ma’agdar, I can’t, I can’t,” he replied with the preliminary and quite meaningless modesty that I found to be customary, but after a few moments of protestation in diminuendo he composed himself and began. It was a quartet; he sang the melody, while three companions held an even chord like the drones of a bagpipe; like bagpipe music, too, it was at first difficult for an uneducated ear to discover any defined melody. The voice was tenor, and as with many other primitive peoples it was produced nasally and with a constant tremolo, whose range seemed at times greater than that of the melody itself. At first I found it too curious and unfamiliar to be acceptable, but as song succeeded song I became engulfed by it and permeated with it and its poignancy began to move me; even the absorption and strain with which the strangely unvocal notes were produced enhanced rather than detracted from the total effect. Most of the marshmen are quite unable to sing and know it, but the knowledge in no way deters them from trying; day-long, for example, Hassan as he paddled our canoe would from his position a yard astern of me pour forth his profuse and noticeably unpremeditated strains, a cracked and excruciating nasal shout whose impact on the ear drum was not unlike that of a crackling telephone. The approved method of voice production makes enormous demands upon the singer, and when he has failed to master it the result is no less than disastrous. In almost every village, however, there are a few whose voices, perhaps because of their purity in childhood, have had continuous enough practice to become accomplished; their singing can be both beautiful and evocative, and they are in great demand for the entertaining of guests or for any other occasion of feasting.
When the singing was over our host called to a young negro slave with a humorous and sympathique face and asked him to dance. “Ma’agdar, Ma’agdar,” he protested, as the singer had, but soon he was on his feet, and the squatting crowd shuffled a foot or two back from the fire, leaving him a space perhaps five feet by five.
I realised in the first few seconds that though the marshmen’s singing required a co-operative effort from the listener a little akin to that demanded of a hypnotic subject, the impact of the dancing was full and complete and to me irresistible. The rhythm was staccato yet somehow fluid, each movement whether of limb or torso somehow resembling a pause and a pounce. The dance was a narrative, as are many of them, and song and mime was a part of it, all held within the framework of a tight unvarying iambic rhythm. Ti-tumti-túm, ti-tumti-túm; the audience took up the rhythm, each stamping out the tune with the heel of an extended right foot, each with his arms outstretched before him and his hands locked with extended fingers to produce a finger-click as loud, literally, as a man may make by clapping his palms together. Even the small children can do this; a shrimp of six years can with his soft baby fingers make a crack like the report of a small pistol.
I could not follow the words that the slave sang as he danced, but the mime made the theme plain, a labourer cheated of his hire. His voice was light and plaintive and whimsically protesting; its pathos seemed the aggregate of generations of unquestioning slave tradition. As the dance neared its end he squatted on his heels and in exaggerated time with the rhythm he bounced round the little open space, searching for the labourer’s hire of which he had been cheated, lifting the corners of the reed matting, peering into the coffee pots and among the embers of the fire, chanting pitifully, “I want my pay, I want my pay.”
The next dance was, like most that I saw during the journey, erotic. These dances have been described in the journals of learned societies as “erotic but not obscene”; the distinction is a nice one, but the words would require close definition before the point could be maintained. Most of the movements in these dances are specifically and frankly sexual; sometimes the dance is composed almost exclusively of such movements, and becomes a stylised pantomime of the sexual act, ending with a formula to represent climax; sometimes the sexual movements are used arbitrarily among others, as though a dancer were using his whole repertoire and adding these for piquancy. Each dancer is in any case his own choreographer; he learns gradually when he is very small how to perform and perfect simple steps and body movements, and these he develops, elaborates, and intermingles into dances that are thus essentially his own though using the dance-language of his culture.
It seems likely that many hundreds of generations of dancing in the tiny confined space about the hearth of reed huts, with the necessity for the maximum movement in the minimum space, have been responsible for the great development of body-movement as opposed to footwork for which there would be inadequate room. Thus, any dancer worthy of the claim, often if he is still quite a small child, is able to call into play groups of muscles of whose very existence in himself the average European is unaware; and an important part of every dancer’s vocabulary, as it were, is a violent and prolonged shivering of one or both shoulders. Precise and almost acrobatic use of the pelvic muscles lends a sexual flavour to nearly all dancing, the movements ranging from direct crissation to sinuous rolling motions or plain high-speed bottom waggling; this last nearly always draws enthusiastic laughter from the audience.
The slave’s second dance that night at Ramla was on a theme that is very familiar to the marshmen, an exploitation of the risqué possibilities inherent in the Muslim attitude of prayer with the forehead pressed to the ground and the rump high in the air. He was a superb artist, and there was certainly nothing slipshod or haphazard in the execution of the performance, but whether it would have been labelled erotic rather than obscene in England seems a very academic point; it was a beautifully danced dirty joke.
Besides the talented and enthusiastic amateurs, of whom there are a number in every village, there are also professional dancers, or rather entertainers, for they are expected also to sing, to drum, and to perform “variety turns”. They travel
among the villages, and they are, of course, all male, for no woman ever makes an officially public appearance. The boys wear their hair long, and the rhythmic swinging of its heavy dark mass is a feature of their dancing; a thing that I never saw, for the only professional dancing boy we met with other than in the streets of Basra had had his hair shorn two days before, in preparation for school. In view of the erotic nature of the dancing itself it is perhaps not surprising that these boys are also semi-professional prostitutes, but they marry young, and often bring up their own children in the same tradition.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 5