Tears of longing stream from their eyes; these are the tears of desert mothers who know with a mother’s intuition that when an infant is born in a homeland called the desert, no mother will enjoy motherhood long, because the infant whom a bird brings into the desert will inevitably imitate the avian community and leave the nest sooner rather than later. Once he departs, his travels will never end. The mother knows that the desert’s legal system is what the Law has established and that it treats the babe in her arms as a bird.2 Once he ventures off alone, she will never be able to reclaim him. From that moment on, the desert will hold him, and the poor fellow won’t return. He will never look back at the tent, at the nest, and his mother will have lost him for good. That’s why the mother holds her nursing infant high and throws him into the air the day the birds land. She weeps and croons heartrending songs in honor of this maze, because she knows, with a mother’s intuition, that once a son heads off into the desert he is not heading off to life—as all mothers hope—but to a maze; he is heading into a labyrinth, one from which he will never return.
The tribe’s celebration starts the night the birds land.
Swarms of girls go out to the open countryside shortly before sunset and form a joyful drum circle, trilling shrilly while women poets sing verses that slay the wasteland’s stillness and awaken the rebel demon of ecstasy in the hearts of the Spirit World’s inhabitants. Then embarrassed female jinn hide in the farthest caverns while male jinn explode with musical frenzy, delight, and anxiety as they approach the group, camouflaged in human garb, and invade the circle to challenge the tribe’s warriors’ prowess as dancers. The moon rises, lighting in breasts a new zeal, the rhythm grows more intense, poems wax hotter, and the poets’ throats become hoarse, although this huskiness makes their voices even more attractive and agreeable. Then the entire encampment is reeling, and the tribe is afflicted by a mysterious frenzy that has perplexed diviners and that not even specialists in the Law have been able to explain.
The singing ends at dawn, but the inexplicable frenzy lasts for days, endures for a long period, and continues for a time that will never be forgotten.
3
When the birds approach the desert and alight as guests in the encampment, they do not immediately perch on the roofs of the tents and do not land in the beds of the wadis to poke their beaks into furrows in search of worms. Nor do they alight in the spaces between campsites to rummage through trash to scavenge grain, crumbs, or leftovers like the local birds, which don’t aspire to homelands of the Unknown and haven’t experienced a migratory paradise. Instead, the migratory birds approach the campsites in massive, densely clustered tribes that fly in parallel formations, each trailing a wise leader, who flutters at the front, repeating a pleasant and distinctive refrain that the entire tribe repeats after him as its watchword.
Not far off flap the wings of another tribe that differs in color but heads to the same destination, flying to the same unknown homeland. A leader precedes them, soaring through the empty air, repeating a different tune that distinguishes his tribe from the next. Each melody is a beautiful song when heard alone, and the leaders of these avian tribes must teach their flock this watchword, which the birds must repeat to show that they haven’t strayed from the tribe’s flight path and still follow the tribe’s Law, because any bird that does not belong to a tribe becomes isolated, turns into an outcast and, according to the customary law of the wasteland—the birds’ customary law—becomes a solitary, lost creature. Fear of becoming lost, dread of the labyrinth, motivates each bird in the tribe to cling to the tribe’s sign, its watchword, its melody. So each bird repeats its tribe’s song after the leader. In exactly the same way, a son of the desert repeats his name the first time he goes out to the grazing lands, because his mother has taught him that he will be lost forever if he forgets his name.
This is why the tunes are repeated, why birdcalls overlap, and why there are numerous songs. Then the sweetness of the singing is lost, and the pleasure of the melodies dissipates. Similarly, when girls gather in a circle and each sings her own song at the same time, the musical experience is spoiled and the beautiful melodies become a repulsive hubbub.
Before deciding to land, groups circle over the camps for a long time and then spread through the gullies and pastures. Desert dwellers have noticed that their zeal increases, their hymns grow louder, and their dancing through space becomes more graceful and beautiful during the hours prior to their descent to the earth. The singing of some tribes deteriorates into a fierce squawking, however, and the dancing of some other winged communities becomes a feverish frenzy. Is it because a descent from the sky’s kingdom to the earth’s gullies is so terrible? Or, is the true secret actually the journey, which wayfarers say provides inveterate travelers with a pleasure that so surpasses in sweetness and allure even the ecstasy of musical enjoyment that travelers want it to continue in perpetuity?
A first bird lands on a tent or in a tree in a gully.
The boys yell with glee, the girls’ tongues compete in releasing trills, and the voices of the women poets rise in mournful refrains.
Diviners approach with a fox’s wariness and walk round the bird, intoning spells, giving voice to a truth they normally confess only to themselves: “You’re no bird, bird. Winged people, you are us. Your Law is migratory. Our Law is nomadic. You beat your wings in the sky; we pad over the earth on two feet. You migrate to the nations of the unknown North; we migrate in search of Waw.3 You eventually return from the nations of the Unknown, because you haven’t found the Unknown Nation among the nations of the unknown North; we eventually return from our quest for Waw, because we discover that there isn’t any Waw in the desert homeland. All the same, you don’t stop migrating and we don’t stop searching. You know that heroism isn’t determined by a successful arrival, and we realize that the search itself is heroic. So, community of birds, do you know why we celebrate your arrival? Because all of us realize that you are us and we are you, even though we don’t admit this to anyone else.”
4
But can a being accustomed to exploring space, a being whose homeland has become the sky, endure life in the lowlands? Can creatures born and bred between the heavens and the earth enjoy the earth’s lowly realm?
The birds’ stay in the encampments does not last long.
After just a few days, the cry bursts forth.
The leader of each tribe adopts the role of herald, flies over the gullies, and soars over the dwellings, crying the secret watchword, stridently repeating the departure song. The members of the tribe snatch up the watchword, and their voices gleefully chant this refrain. The hour is set, and the muster begins. So melodies proliferate, songs multiply, and voices drown each other out till the chant’s beauty is lost and the enjoyment fades, because feverish travel punctures rapture and the hour of departure swallows the pleasure of the song. When the first wing flutters, forsaking the desert’s soil and rising into the expanse of the morning, this bird’s wings, which are bathed and marked with colors, look resplendent. Behind him assembled wings of the same color take flight. The flock swoops into the glowing light but does not shoot off toward the unknown homeland until it has circled over the gullies and soared over the dwellings to say goodbye. During this sorrowful flyby, in the course of this painful farewell, throngs from the caravan trail after the flock. Then sages sob, girls choke back tears, and children weep out loud while diviners pursue the flock to detect the prophecy inherent in its trajectory.
Other migrating flocks rise in quick succession and follow each other into the void, which is harsh, stern, uncaring, and eternal. Their songs fade off in the distance, and the din of their melodies dies away, but the diviners continue to pursue them even after they disappear into the harrowing void, where they become part of it, an expression of the purity of the void, a part of it that fades and dissipates into nothingness.
Once the birds have departed, the camps revert to their former stillness and their lethal tranquilit
y.
The diviners return the next day, bringing the prophecy back to the camp. They enter the leader’s tent and closet themselves with the leader for an entire night. When they emerge, they face the people, order the attack drums struck, summon the herald to tour the camps to advise the clans to migrate because a drought is coming, or send for the maidens, who will trill joyfully at news of the floods that the diviners have detected in the birds’ conduct.
That day the diviners had also spent the entire previous night alone with the leader. When they met with the people that morning, however, they did not order the drums struck, they did not summon the herald to inform the tribes of a drought, nor did they send for the maidens to trill joyously at the coming deluge they had detected in the flight of the birds.
On that day, when the sages silently left the leader’s tent, people could see depression and despair in their eyes and despondency and disappointment in their faces.
______________
1. A bowed, single-stringed Tuareg instrument traditionally played by women.
2. In the works of Ibrahim al-Koni, the Law is the lost but influential customary law of the Tuareg people—al-Namus.
3. In Tuareg culture, Waw (pronounced “wow”), although the name of some actual locations, refers to a paradise-like lost oasis, which is rediscovered only by a blessed few, especially wayfarers who are not seeking it.
II
THE PROPHECY
But then a man didn’t need to have to keep his mind steadily on the ground after sixty-three years. In fact, the ground itself never let a man forget it was there waiting, pulling gently and without no hurry at him between every step, saying, Come on, lay down; I ain’t going to hurt you. Jest lay down.
William Faulkner, The Mansion, Chapter 18
1
Why do the tribes move about? Why do they traverse an area and head to a more distant one? Do they do this to leave a land threatened by drought and famines in search of a land that promises ample grazing? Do they set forth because they fear the ancient prophecy that warns that remaining in one place for forty days invites servitude to the land? Do they migrate because the Law has said that death on camelback is the destiny reserved exclusively for noble nations? Or do their sages inspire the masses to migrate in search of water and grass even though they actually travel in response to another unknown call they do not disclose even to themselves?
Tribesmen understand that the turbans of the wise conceal many secrets. They know that the leader would not have become a leader, the diviner a diviner, and the sage a member of the council of noble elders if this leader, diviner, or sage had not withheld some secret, because anyone who is so tyrannized by his tongue that he fails to keep a secret isn’t granted wisdom or authority over other creatures. For this reason, tribes respond to the diviner’s prophecy, yield to the advice of the sage, and obey the leader’s order. Then they set forth in groups behind any caravan the leader allows to depart and halt when the leader orders them to.
But the tribesmen also know that misfortune awaits tribes if the age frowns on them and discord enters the council of the wise or if disorder finds its way into the leader’s tent.
2
When the tribes of the sky disappear into the sky’s labyrinth, they leave behind them stillness, despair, and sad, miserable birds that are too ill, wounded, or old and infirm to continue the migration and follow their tribe.
On this most recent journey, the departing celestial tribe left behind an aged crane. Nobody noticed him the first day, perhaps because the terrestrial tribe was consumed by the anguish that the birds’ disappearance had caused or perhaps because the sorrow that the people of the sky had left behind with the tribe was vaster than the wasteland itself, swallowing the wasteland and concealing all the creatures that moved through it. According to the revealed law of diviners, sorrow blurs vision and actually blinds the eye. It is said that the sorrow the emigrant leaves behind in the hearts of those he quits exceeds the sorrow that the deceased bequeath to their kinsfolk. Sages offer many justifications for this. They say: “Travel and death are both eternal separations, but we can erect awe-inspiring monuments for our dead, stone tombs that we visit during festivals and that we sleep on by night to gain prophecies, which warn us against an enemy, an epidemic, or a drought. Moreover, when the jinn become unruly and upset us, we go to these tombs, dig up their stones, and remove the bones of our dead to use for talismans we carry on our travels and employ to ward off the people of the Spirit World. Family members who leave to take a distant trip, however, vanish. We cannot find their burial places or locate any trace of them.”
There is, however, another cause for the painful sorrow with which desert tribes normally say farewell to travelers. This is an obscure reason that tribes sense but do not understand. Sages know it but persistently conceal it from themselves. A confused, murky token whispers in their breasts with a murmur like wind rustling. It says that only the wayfarer is promised entry to Waw, that only the traveler can locate the errant continent, and that only a traveler dandles in his heart the hope of reaching the lost oasis. All the same, the traveler is ignoble, conceals his hope by compartmentalizing it, and tries to convince himself that there is no hope, because he knows that if he does not conceal this hope from his ego, it will conquer him and he will tell someone about his hope. Once the tongue utters the secret, the secret is ruined and the treasure—the gold dust—will turn to ashes. But the people seeing off the traveler are also ignoble, because they guess the truth and detect the traveler’s intent in his eye before they learn it from a slip of his tongue. Then temptation incinerates them, their breasts flare with longing, and envy torments them. So they weep. They weep not from sorrow about this separation but about the idea that a misguided, errant creature just like them—a wretch like any of them, someone who, like them, has never known whence he came or where he is heading—will find the track they haven’t and will be guided by the Unknown to the oasis that the desert’s inhabitants have been promised since they first came to the desert. Then he will never again know the suffering of this excruciating quest and longing’s pain will vanish from his heart, because the forgetfulness that Waw affords him is a panacea for the world’s ills. Then the equilibrium of things is reestablished, and the traveler, whom the wasteland has threatened with its labyrinth, becomes a newborn while the community that said farewell to him and that considered itself safe on account of its sedentary life becomes a desperate, wretched, lost people. When they weep, they do not weep for the newly lost traveler, even if he was their closest relative, but for themselves because they realize they are lost. Then the emigrant becomes an enemy even if he had once been their dearest friend or even their brother or father.
The birds fly off during the migratory season, and everyone returns to his personal concerns while combating an indecipherable longing, his longing for the Unknown from which he came one day borne on the wings of a bird, because the bird that brought him to the desert when he was an infant wrapped in the swaddling clothes of forgetfulness won’t be able to carry him back to the Unknown, to his homeland, now that he has outgrown them.
3
In the morning the children found the venerable bird squatting on the ridgeline of a tent. The kids discovered him after the grown-ups had departed to attend to adult affairs. Then the boys surrounded the dwelling and debated how best to reach him. One fetched a long pole and beat on the corner of the tent to frighten their guest, but the haughty bird remained huddled there, holding his long neck back, shielding his head with his wings, and then extending his red beak into the air. He opened his eyelids entreatingly, revealing an anxious eye. A tall, scrawny lad picked up a stone, which he lobbed toward the bird. It rolled over the haircloth fabric and down the tent’s other side. Then some boys started yelling, waving their fists in the scrawny youth’s face.
“This is a sin. It’s like hitting your mother or father. Would you throw a rock at your mother? If the adults see you, you’ll be punish
ed.”
A boy, whose head sported a Mohawk that resembled a hoopoe’s crest, jumped from the pack and warned, “Keep away! He’s my guest. Don’t you see that he chose our home, not any other? I knew he would come ’cause I’ve seen him in a dream three times. He brought me good news! The grown-ups say birds bring good news.”
The tall, lanky boy with the pole mocked him. “Good news? Don’t you see he’s old? Old birds bring bad luck, not good news.”
“How do you know he’s old, sourpuss?”
“Just look at him. Can’t you see he’s old?”
“Perhaps he’s tired. Don’t forget he’s come from a distant land.”
“If he weren’t old, he wouldn’t have stayed behind when his flock left.”
“Perhaps he’s ill or wounded. I don’t see anything that shows he’s old. Guys, do you?”
The children yelled, but the thin boy’s voice rang out once more. “The bird’s old, and old birds bring bad luck. Drive the ill-omened, old bird away if you don’t want misfortune to strike your house.”
The boy with the Mohawk lost his temper and shouted, “You talk this way ’cause you’re jealous. You’re a bad, hateful boy and talk that way ’cause you’re jealous.”
But the thin boy started to circle the tent, hopping on one foot, and chanted the cruel song that has been passed down from one generation to the next. The boys’ ancestors supposedly sang it over the heads of the elderly, who were thrown into pits, where they were left to their fate.
Wiggegh temmedrit atgeed ad tedwelad.
New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 2