New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  The bird fell silent, and stillness settled over the valley—the ancient stillness, the mysterious stillness, the hostile stillness, the lethal stillness, which declares in its mute tongue that the homeland that knows no spatial borders and that isn’t delimited by time is the only homeland for living beings, the homeland appropriate for living beings and for life, because it is a homeland that lies outside life. Why would a creature who one day visits that homeland and then finds himself put back in the cage bounded by feebleness, disability, and old age not weep? Why would the creature who has visited the homeland, to whom the Spirit World has been disclosed, not weep when he finds himself confronted by the eternal, stern, naked wasteland flooded by the mirage’s streaming tails?

  2

  Forty years ago they tracked him down in the distant grazing lands.

  They came to him after he had been gone for some months.

  He was afflicted by angst—a curse said to be especially common among poets—and went to the borders of the Western Hammada to find solitude as desert dwellers do when they suddenly discover that they have been afflicted by an incurable disease. But they did not grant him any respite. The elders did not cut him any slack. They came looking for him just days after the leader passed away. They told him that he was the deceased leader’s only sororal nephew and that he was therefore duty-bound to assume the tribe’s leadership. He argued with them. That day he debated with them. He was still young; so he argued with them. He told them he was a poet. He told them he was not merely a poet but an afflicted poet. When Emmamma asked what he meant by “afflicted,” he said naively that he was afflicted by a disease called sorrow. Then all the noble elders began to laugh. They shed their grave demeanor and all laughed together. He heard the elders laugh out loud for the first time. He was stunned that these sages would violate their eternal Law and guffaw in response to a statement that he thought wasn’t very amusing. He thought that they were perhaps laughing for some other, secret reason—not in response to his reply.

  They immediately plunged their fists into the dirt to ward off the evil that their laughter might have aroused. They asked forgiveness from the god of the desert, vowing to slaughter a sheep when they returned to their encampment as a sacrifice to expiate the sin of laughter. Then … then they adjusted their veils over their faces, carefully concealing their noses, and brought themselves back into conformity with the Law.

  Emmamma asked, “Do you want us to violate a tradition that no one in our community has ever violated?”

  “The leader has sons brighter than I am and wiser than most men. Why shouldn’t they inherit the post of leader from their father?”

  Asaruf shouted, “Do you want us to pass the drum to sons of a departed leader who leaves a sister’s son in the tribe? Do you want us to violate our forefathers’ decree—which we have inherited—carved on the tablets of the lost Law?”

  “But I’m a poet, and poets have never made suitable leaders.”

  Ejabbaran spoke up for the first time. Throughout this discussion he had been raking the dirt with his finger, tracing letters of their ancient alphabet. He didn’t reveal their meaning, however, because this wise old man erased these symbols before they spelled out a word. He was bent over his symbols when he observed, “Becoming leader won’t prevent you from reciting poetry, Master.”

  Yes, the sage Ejabbaran was the first person to utter this sacred term of address. He was the first person to place the blue band on the youth’s turban and to drop the executive drum, the war drum, before the dead leader’s nephew by using this word, which doesn’t take up much space in the language’s lexicon but which is the final word among desert tribes.

  Silence reigned, but the sage continued to trace letters of the alphabet in the dirt, erasing what he had written before the words were complete enough to be read.

  He heard Emmamma suggest, “Yes, our sage has spoken correctly: you can recite poetry in secret.”

  “I should recite poetry in secret?”

  “Yes, you can recite your poems in secret the way the tribe’s elders do, just like all the leaders.”

  “Like all the leaders?”

  “Yes. Do you think you’re the only desert leader who enjoys reciting poetry? Know that all leaders in the desert are poets.”

  “I have never heard a leader recite a poem.”

  “You haven’t heard a leader recite poetry, because they recite in secret, as I told you. They recite their poems in secret, attributing them to female poets or foreigners.”

  “But does poetry remain poetry if a man recites it in secret? Does poetry remain poetry if the reciter attributes it to someone else?”

  Ejabbaran spoke again, “This is what we found our fathers doing, Master.”

  He hunched over the dirt, lost in his letters, drawing and then erasing what he had drawn. He would write a symbol and erase it. He seemed to be immersed in his world rather than present with them. This is what made him feel that the expression “Master” was decisive when Ejabbaran uttered it; it seemed that the Unknown had uttered it.

  3

  Not many years passed before they came to him again.

  Water had cascaded down the valleys, and many meteor showers had lit up the sky. The tribes’ poets had recited splendid new poems, and the maidens had sung heartrending ballads. Elders had dozed off, and the tribes had lost wise leaders. Then the elders came to their leaders’ sisters’ sons to place the blue cloth band on their heads, to hail them with the title “Master,” which previously had been said to him in the wilderness when he was named the tribe’s leader. Then they came to him again, just as they had come to him in the deserts of the Western Hammada. Emmamma led them as he had on that day, but wise Ejabbaran was unable to come, because this ancient sage had ceased tracing his symbols in the desert’s dirt and lay in an awe-inspiring tomb beside his ancient ancestors.

  The sage was absent this time, but Asaruf came with Emmamma. The leader observed how one messenger’s head would be higher than the other’s only to be outstripped by his partner’s by a turban’s height. Then the first man’s head would gain the ascendency once more, rising above his companion’s by the same distance. He remembered that this noble situation—when companions the same height alternately appear taller than each other on account of their gait, as if they were competing to climb heavenwards—is known in poetics as “Amisarrasan.”7

  They came in the evening. They didn’t track him down in the wasteland of the Western Hammada as they had once done. They came to him in the dwelling they had selected for him long ago. They came to him, and he realized at once why they had come. He perceived that secret today with the mind of a leader, the mind of time, which was gushing past with the torrents in the valleys, vanishing like the early afternoon mirages, and carrying away his whole life. He perceived today the secret he had not perceived that day when he employed a poet’s intuition, that noble insight, which is tender and delightful and which they had come that day to seize from him. They had stifled it in his breast forever. They had stifled the poetry in his heart on that ill-omened day. Then he himself had smothered. He had kept trying to breathe, gasping for air, hoping to bring back his lost bird. He had been wheezing all this time, breathing laboriously with a distressing sound—like someone wailing and trying not to weep—because when a man suffocates, he finds no way to draw in air; all he can do is weep. The eternal desire to breathe, to reclaim his lost bird, caused him to forget the ceremonies preordained for him and to ignore the law of leadership. He committed another error, one the elders thought inappropriate for a leader. So they contacted each other, consulted with each other, reached a decision, and came to him. He knew what they would say on this occasion. Time had truly taken his life but in exchange had granted him a small talisman, which the Law called by many names: experience, intellect, and wisdom. By means of this talisman he was able to decipher the prophecy. Yes—they would say, “This is inappropriate.” They would say that the leader’s life was the tribe
’s life and that it was inappropriate for the leader to be married to a poet now that he had reached a mature age. They would say that the leader’s destiny was to sacrifice himself in order to improve the tribe’s fate, to sacrifice happiness just as he had previously sacrificed his solitude and poetry one day. They would say that a man who enters the tent of leadership must forget about love, just as he had previously forgotten solitude and poetry. In the leader’s tent there was no room for any fantasy, and love is a fantasy. Love is a great fantasy; love is the greatest fantasy.

  He would argue with them; he wouldn’t remain silent. He would debate heroically with them, with all the heroism of a lone man, a defenseless man ambushed by enemies armed with the most vicious spears. He would tell them that they had stifled in him the noblest of breaths one day. They had slain his first beloved in his heart and today, decades later, had come to slay heaven’s gift in his heart, to take from him his last consolation, the last amulet that heaven had provided him before snatching everything from this wayfarer. In the past they had taken everything from him. How would it harm them if today they allowed him to keep his little doll, if they let him retain a wife who recited poetry after they had forbidden him to recite it? What harm would it do them to leave near him an unassuming creature who sang lyrics to him during melancholy moments to make up for the songs they had stolen from him one day? But could he convince them using such language? Would the logic of a child from whom they had taken a doll suffice to convince intellectuals? Could someone who had filled his heart with the Law’s sternest dictates understand a poet whose tongue had been removed? Would wisdom’s heroes, the arrogant advocates of severe scriptures, understand the language of a wounded lover?

  Yes, he lost the argument that day, too. That day he failed as well to convince the eternal clique, the stern clique that no longer recognized poetry after trading it in for the provisos of the Law, the clique that lost the secrets of passion when it embraced a religion called “Concern for the Tribe’s Destiny.” So they were disappointed to find him speaking a language they thought he had forgotten long ago, one they deemed inappropriate for His Honor the Leader. So they defeated him. They vanquished him. When they left, all he could do was sob with grief, suffocating from the calamity, because calamity had become his default consolation during the decades he had spent alone.

  4

  After this defeat, he wrote his beloved a note saying that leadership was a curse he had not chosen, that destiny alone, so it would seem, was what had decided his fate by making him the late leader’s sister’s only son and that he had not been able to rebel against the will of the elders back then, long ago, because that would have meant not only a rebellion against the elders but a desperate contravention of destiny’s volition. This passionate woman, however, didn’t recognize logic’s language, didn’t understand the secret of destinies, and considered the Law to be a handful of dead words, of deadly words. If his beloved had been just any woman, it would not have been so hard, but she was both a woman and a poet; she wasn’t just a poet, but a poet in love. What earthly argument could sway a female poet in love? Before she departed and deserted the tribe forever, she sent him a note too, an angry note, a note in which she said that she had decided to do what he ought to have done. She said that self-imposed exile in the far-off wastelands had in the past been a male prerogative but apparently now the situation had changed, just as everything had changed, because men now were forcing women to choose exile, forcing women to be heroic (because the ultimate expression of heroism is self-imposed exile) while they, men, secluded themselves in their homes. Then he received news of her. They told him she had emigrated; she had migrated to an unknown land. After that no one ever saw her again.

  He went out to the open countryside to bury his defeat there. He went to the wasteland to contend with the ancient lump in his throat, to sob over this calamity instead of reciting beautiful poems and chanting sorrowful songs, because the bird of poetry had flown away, becoming lost, and the voice of song had choked and died.

  5

  And here they were—coming to him again.

  They came as they had come long ago in expanses of the Western Hammada. They came as they had once come to take poetry from him, as they had come on another occasion to take his beloved from him, taking the poet from him, leaving him alone and abandoned with no companions save solitude, calamity, and a life that time had decimated, leaving it a fantasy like any other.

  Here they were coming again today to confiscate something else, but what was there left to take? Were they a group charged to take, a group that would never lack something to take? Yes. Yes, these elders would never lack for something to take from the leader’s dwelling. They arrived one day to take the bird, to take the secret he had hidden in the retem thicket, in the sanctuary’s groves, in the valley he had placed off limits to the hoi polloi when he told the herders, vassals, and slaves: “Anyone entering Retem Valley from today on will have his head chopped off with a sword.” So everyone had avoided it and had kept their herds out of it. He had stationed mounted warriors on its heights as guards. He had done that as a precaution to erase the evidence, to hide his little secret. Had the jurists discovered this little secret too?

  Were they too stingy to allow him this play-pretty? Had they come to deprive him of the bird, the song, and the secret—camouflaging their action with the need to uproot themselves in obedience to the law of nomadism?

  When they approached, he went out to meet them in the open. He hurried to greet them out of respect for Emmamma, the same Emmamma, the venerable Emmamma, the immortal figure who had accompanied the elders on that first day in the Western Hammada and who had accompanied the group during the second assault. All the former elders had passed on. Time had carried off Asaruf during the third assault, but Emmamma led the way this time too. He was leaning on an elegant acacia walking stick and shaking. He shook and the stick shook too.

  Once they finished their attack on him, he requested just a few days before the forthcoming departure. Emmamma took him aside to say, “Don’t think I came because I feared people would say the venerable elder had missed an opportunity to influence the leader concerning some worldly matter, because you know that a person who has turned his back on life will not be much harmed by what is said. I came instead because it isn’t a bad omen for the leader to contravene a time-honored law and refuse to migrate; truly the bad omen would be for the venerable elder to fail to join a deputation of elders visiting the leader’s home.” Then he laughed sorrowfully as he waved his staff before him. He joked, “I have come to you today on three legs. I fear I’ll be forced next time to borrow a fourth leg from the acacia tree in order to reach your dwelling.”

  6

  That day, during the few hours that followed the bird’s departure, in the brief period after the bird took flight from the groves, rose into the air, and disappeared into space’s labyrinth like a speck of dust vanishing into the ocean of the void, at that time when he felt empty and desolate and experienced a distress that surpassed the calamity of the years, that was greater than the pain of his whole life, he dashed out of the sanctuary. He traversed the valley’s groves, scaled the rugged, rocky scree with the vigor of a young man, and climbed the elevation leading to the encampment. He took long strides, forgetting that the Law had also stipulated how the leader should walk, forgetting that the forefathers had not neglected to shackle the leader’s feet, to teach him to imitate the way cranes walk. He forgot the Law and the forefathers, because he forgot he was a leader. He did not merely forget he was a leader then, he forgot that he was carrying another bird in his right hand. He was carrying the aged bird that old age had prevented from traveling, from joining his close-knit flock. He forgot he had lost that day not only the bird in the groves, the bird that sang, the bird that brought the secret and glad tidings; he had also lost the aged, haughty, indifferent bird that had in recent days been another boon companion for him. Even when he encountered the vassals and ord
ered them to assemble the nobles for a meeting, he didn’t notice their astonishment, he didn’t notice that they were looking furtively at his right hand, scrutinizing the dead bird. Even when he approached the sages and met with the elders in the tent, with the immortal Emmamma front and center, he did not relinquish the dead bird. He was still grasping its two long legs and dandling the scrawny body, which death had left even scrawnier and less significant, leaving it the size of a small handful of straw.

  When he spoke to them that day, he said, “He left. He departed. He has flown away. You can rejoice: he has departed.”

  The elders exchanged suspicious glances and looks of amazement and then of disapproval. They did not notice the pallor that had spread over the leader’s cheeks because they were following the movement of his long, thin fingers over the bird’s body, over its feathers.