The Sahara

by Eamonn Gearon

  A large part of the Sahara’s poetic appeal for the non-native writer has been its image of pristine isolation. Depicting it as undisturbed and removed from the pollution of civilization, poets have often imagined that they would find peace there, contemplation supposedly being easier in a wild emptiness than in a city. Lord Byron writes about this desire for solitude in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, exclaiming,

  Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,

  With only one fair spirit for my minster.

  That I might forget the human race,

  And hating no one, love her only.

  While the majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets inspired by the Sahara did not travel there, this did little to dampen their enthusiasm for drawing on typical wilderness tropes, as they understood these in the abstract. These mainly consisted of silence, danger and the almost complete absence of human interference. Given the appeal of deserts as solitary places, it is not surprising that the Romantic poets found the Sahara a particularly evocative subject. It is worth noting that the “big six”, those poets who have for nearly two hundred years been at the core of the Romantic Movement - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats - all allude to the Sahara in their work. Defending his choice of foreign subject matter, Coleridge once said, “A sound promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself”

  One advantage of the unseen Sahara was that it provided these poets with an imaginative landscape radically different from more domestic settings such as London or the Lake District. Choosing to write about the desert they were also freer to experiment with different poetic forms, working in the alternative metaphorical space provided by the imagined. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” remains as popular now as when it was published in 1818; its opening lines are some of the most easily recognized in English verse:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  ‘Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert.

  “Ozymandias” was written in friendly competition with Shelley’s fellow poet Horace Smith, both men having to produce a verse with the same title. Smith’s version opens with the lines:

  In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

  Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

  The only shadow that the Desert knows.

  Shelley’s version became so popular that Smith renamed his own poem, hoping it might flourish if not in the shadow of Shelley. Unfortunately for Smith, his choice lost something of the power of its original single word title. “On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below” does not exactly trip lightly off the tongue.

  A similar composition competition took place in 1818. Taking part in it, Keats wrote to his brothers, “The Wednesday before last [February 4] Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile.” Apart from the common theme, the self-imposed challenge also stipulated that the verses had to be composed in fifteen minutes or less. The results were as impressive as one would expect from such poetic heavyweights. Leigh Hunt produced “A Thought of the Nile”, and Shelley and Keats both entitled their poems “To the Nile”. Keats included the following evocative reference to the desert beyond the Nile:

  We call thee fruitful, and that very while

  A desert fills our seeing’s inward span:

  Nurse of swart nations since the world began,

  Art thou so fruitful?

  …

  ‘Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste

  Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew

  Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste

  The pleasant sunrise.

  It was not just English poets who sought to evoke the Sahara. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published West-ostlicher Diwan, or West-East Divan, in 1819 and an updated version in 1827. Diwan is a twelve-book collection of lyrical poetry and Goethe’s last major poetic cycle. A lifelong admirer of Middle Eastern cultures, Goethe saw in the East the pre-classical roots of western civilization, including the origins of language and poetry, and his magnum opus as both an exchange of cultural ideas between Occident and Orient and a philosophical or spiritual journey. In Hegira, and the 195 poems that follow it, Goethe’s intention was to

  Travel with the caravans,

  Trade in musk through burning sands;

  All the coffee trails I’ll wander,

  Deserts here to cities yonder.

  Described by the French poet Theophile Gautier as a “cool oasis where art rests”, Diwan had an enormous impact in Europe and America, inspiring a new decades-long aesthetic of Orientalism.

  Frontispiece to Goethe’s West-East Diwan

  Nineteenth-century American poets also included the Sahara in their topographical repertoire. In 1842 Longfellow published his collection Poems on Slavery, which he described as “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast.” The collection included “The Slave’s Dream”, the tale of a man taken by slavers from near the River Niger. While sleeping, the slave dreams of his homeland:

  And the Blast of the Desert cried aloud,

  With a voice so wild and free.

  While the slave dreams about his desert home, he is released from bondage by death.

  He did not feel the driver’s whip,

  Nor the burning heat of day;

  For Death had illumined the Land of Sleep.

  Longfellow’s 1850 collection The Seaside and the Fireside contains his most famous desert-inspired verse, “Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass”, which includes the lines:

  How many weary centuries has it been

  About those deserts blown!

  How many strange vicissitudes has seen,

  How many histories known!...

  Before my dreamy eye

  Stretches the desert with its shifting sand,

  Its unimpeded sky.

  From 1874 Longfellow published an enormous 31-volume anthology called Poems of Places, with each volume focusing on poetry from or about a different locale. Volume 24 concentrates on Africa, and includes nine poems devoted to the Sahara, including “Song of Slaves in the Desert” by his fellow Fireside Poet, John Greenleaf-Whittier, and three poems by the German Ferdinand Freiligrath. Another friend of Longfellow, Freiligrath’s Saharan verses – “Mirage”, “The Lion’s Ride” and the Edgar Allen Poe-esque “The Spectre Caravan” - were inspired, the writer was proud to acknowledge, by Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales. The last of the three imagines those who have died in the desert coming back from the dead one night, not unreasonably terrifying the traveller-poet and his entourage:

  ‘When, behold! - a sudden sandquake, - and atween the earth and moon

  Rose a mighty host of shadows, as from out some dim lagoon;

  Then our coursers gasped with terror, and a thrill shook every man,

  And the cry was ‘‘Allah Akbar! ‘Tis the Spectre Caravan!”

  Like Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson was comfortable drawing on Egyptian mythology, the quizzing Sphinx being a favourite theme as it was for artists of the period. For Emerson, writing in 1841,

  The Sphinx is drowsy,

  Her wings are furled:

  Her ear is heavy,

  She broods on the world.

  Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx” portrays the creature as “so somnolent, so statuesque!.../Come forth my lovely languorous Sphinx! And put your head upon my knee!” With Ammon as the Sphinx’s lover, who “strode across the desert sand,” Wilde also imagines the creature of mystery for all who have gazed upon it across the centuries:

  And many a wandering caravan of stately negroes silken-shawled, Crossing the des
ert, halts appalled before the neck that none can span. And many a bearded Bedouin draws back his yellow-striped burnous To gaze upon the Titan thews of him that was your paladin

  One final nineteenth-century poem worth mentioning 1s “The Simoon” by the Englishman Martin Farquhar Tupper. A lyrical poem typical of its time, it refers to the hot, sand-laden winds that regularly sweep the Sahara and Arabia. Evoking their destructive and potentially fatal force, the poem speaks of their victims: “The desert is their grave, the sand their shroud.” With these words we are able to make a connection between the nineteenth-century versifiers who imagined the Sahara and those twentieth-century poets who lived and died there.

  “The Brutish Desert”: War Poets

  Diametrically opposed to the Romantic Movement, the majority of poets who wrote about the Sahara in the twentieth century experienced the desert directly, often in war and as far from the Romantic worldview as possible. As we have seen, large swathes of the Sahara saw a great deal of the Second World War, and the desert experienced by soldiers was no pure, idealized setting, but an environment sullied by war machines and the burnt and blasted bodies of fallen combatants.

  One of the predominant images of the First World War is the mud and dirt of the trenches. In the Saharan poetry from the Second World War the mud may be missing but the dirt is no less real; nor were the desert’s open spaces any less lethal than the trenches. As Keith Douglas records in “Landscape with Figures”,

  On sand and scrub the dead men wriggle

  in their dowdy clothes. They are mimes

  who express silence and futile aims

  enacting this prone and motionless struggle

  at a queer angle to the scenery.

  The most famous of this group, a poetic school of circumstances, Douglas was by temperament a man of action, as he makes clear in his unfinished memoir, Alamein to Zem Zem. A soldier who loved soldiering, despite or perhaps because of fighting first- hand, Douglas wrote in his memoir, “To say I thought of the battle of Alamein as an ordeal sounds pompous: but I did think of it as an important test, which I was interested in passing.”

  Speaking of the war’s drama, Douglas remarks, “it is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and be killed, and yet at intervals moved by a feeling of comradeship with the men who kill them and whom they kill, because they are enduring and experiencing the same things.” The back and forth of the desert war also gave both sides plenty of opportunity to come into contact with, now dead, enemies. Seeing these inevitably forced men to wonder what was the point of the fighting and the dying.

  In contrast to Douglas, Sidney Keyes hated the army and the war. By nature a pacifist, Keyes once wrote in a letter home, “I was never bored until I joined the Army; now I am crazy with the utter futility, destructiveness and emptiness of my life, to which I see no end.” Sadly for Keyes, the end came swiftly, when he was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. Dying aged 21, he had been at the front for just two weeks. While his frontline Saharan service was limited, Keyes arrived full of ideas about the desert, which he soon translated after his arrival into a number of moving poems that betray keen awareness of their geography. Echoing Byron, Keyes writes in “The Wilderness”,

  The red rock wilderness

  Shall be my dwelling-place...

  The rock says “Endure”.

  The wind says “Pursue”.

  The sun says “I will suck your bones

  And afterwards bury you.”

  Others were inspired to write by the disconnect that existed between their experience of the fighting and how this would be remembered by those who were not there. One of these was John Jarmain, who wrote in “El Alamein’’:

  It will become a staid historic name,

  That crazy sea of sand!

  Like Troy or Agincourt its single fame

  Will be the garland for our brow, our claim,...

  But this is not the place we recall,

  The crowded desert crossed with foaming tracks,

  The one blotched building, lacking half a wall,

  The grey-faced men, sand powdered over all...

  In similar vein, “Eighth Army” by T W Ramsey speaks of

  ... bones there where we left our own

  Bleached by the drifting detritus of stone...

  We never liked them, and we hated sand

  So loving warm, so thirsty for our blood;

  But still they might have sent us into mud

  A fathom deep-this was at least dry land.

  Like Douglas and Keyes, Jarmain and Ramsey were killed during the war, thus sealing or limiting their reputations. Hamish Henderson, one poet who survived the conflict, highlights the contrast between the dead and the survivors. In Elegies for the Dead of Cyrenaica, he reflects that the “conflict seemed rather to be between ‘the dead, the innocent’ - that eternally wronged proletariat of levelling death in which all the fallen are comrades - and ourselves, the living.” Henderson also sees the desert as an enemy, a theme to which he gives prominence in the foreword to Elegies, observing that he had heard a German officer making the same point. The officer mused, “In reality we are allies, and the desert is our common enemy.” Henderson adopts the sentiment in “End of a Campaign”, where he writes of the dead:

  There were our own, there were the others...

  I will bear witness for I knew the others.

  In the seventh elegy, “Seven Good Germans”, Henderson mourns his avowed enemies, coming across some unburied German corpses:

  Seven poor bastards

  dead in African deadland

  (tawny tousled hair under the issue blanket)

  wie einst Lili

  dead in African deadland einst Lili Marlene.

  The Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay resisted his call-up for military service on the grounds of his Scottish nationalism. After his eventual capture and a spell in prison, he was sent to North Africa. According to many critics, the desert war was the making of Hay as a Scots makar. Certainly, in English renderings of “The Young Man Speaking from the Grave”, “Bizerte” and “Meftah Babkum es-Sabar?” (the title borrowed from an Arabic poem meaning “the key to your door is patience”), one is aware of the importance of the desert in Hay’s work. Writing largely in Gaelic with occasional phrases in colloquial Italian, French, German, Arabic and Greek, his work never garnered the same reputation as his English-language counterparts, although his verse is just as powerful as any of Douglas’ work.

  Hay’s Scottish nationalism also invades his poetry and he appears more sympathetic to the North African locals than to many of the English soldiers with whom he served - or is simply more anti-English than pro-indigenous Saharan. As he wrote to his brother in 1942, “I cannot imagine a more cosmopolitan place than the seaboard of North Africa... though curiously enough the average English soldier in his ignorance seems to find nothing but crowds of’dirty bastards’, who are much inferior to him in every respect, wherever his masters order him to go.”

  A Brilliant Palette

  “I will salute with a profound regret that menacing and desolate horizon which has so rightly been called-Land of Thirst.”

  Eugene Fromentin

  If nineteenth-century poets did not journey to North Africa, painters of the period did. The fact that such a trip could be costly and involved an element of danger was offset by the visual delights the travellers expected to find. The motivations that brought them to the Sahara were many and diverse. Like the poets, more romantically inclined painters could forget in North Africa the banality of European industrial modernity, finding the Sahara pristine by comparison. From the French invasions of Egypt in 1798 and Algeria in 1830,
the region’s Ottoman territories were coming under varying degrees of European control, which made the decision easier for those bearing easels.

  Because of uneven foreign occupation or control not all of the Sahara attracted painters. In those Saharan lands with a Mediterranean border, Libya received the fewest artist-travellers, not being colonized until the twentieth century. Morocco attracted more painters than Libya, although few travelled south of the Atlas Mountains. The number of visitors to Morocco was as nothing, however, compared with those who journeyed to Algeria and Egypt in the second half of the century. As for the southern Saharan nations, apart from those painters who followed the British Army to the Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania were left virtually undisturbed by foreign artist-travellers.

  Before the political map of the Sahara was altered in favour of the Europeans, anyone wishing to travel there found that diplomatic protection was usually necessary. Invasion and occupation changed this, and opened up the Sahara to European and other artists. For many the impetus to travel to North Africa came about as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.