Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  Mamun M never agreed to interviews, remained barricaded in the large flaking plaster-walled mansion he purchased in his second year as a songwriter, whose servants roamed the halls busy with unassigned tasks, and which once filled in the nighttime with the youthful rebels of that generation but now remained silent as Mamun M, who was altogether silent except in song, where his observations of the lives of ordinary people remained accurate enough that the public wondered whether, like certain sultans in the Arabian Nights, he would visit the orchards, graveyards, factories, herders’ plains, mines, and oil refineries of his lyrics, disguised as a plebe. Regard: a crowd gathers around a niqabi woman, they tear her veil at the black cloth because, secretly, Mamun M is hidden underneath. Denuded horrified, the woman cries and throws dust onto her forehead. The crowd is ashamed and several of the perpetrators are severely beaten. Such scenes were not uncommon at that time.

  What else did the sultan survey that Hedayat’s owl eyes summon, that his automatic tongue can hoot and chitter about: nothing at all. Mamun Ben Jaloun didn’t for a moment see the hard-callused hands of the oil worker or natural-gas plant labourer making all the stuff the unnameable country was known to the world for. Rather, my father wandered set to film set, laying a track here another song there, his feet always following some distant melody, and, as others around him noticed, always trying to dig out some actual story swimming under the skin: why the endless movie studio, he always wondered. Mamun Ben Jaloun, restless, young, inquisitive, always inquiring, why do they burn every movie set after they’re done filming. But no one told him. No one seemed to know.

  Then, without warning, he gave it all up. Just shy of his thirtieth birthday, Mamun M received a call from a documentarian Badsha Abd that in these hottest months, or jilaal, an artificial drought was brewing in the burning pastoral reaches of the unnameable country. Recall, for it is said at that time Mamun M received countless offers to serve as assistant director, producer, even to act, though we have noted he has no camera face; whatever provoked him, then, to accept such a lowly, nominal role aside from the fact that one grows tired of the senseless roaming across paved granite walkways, smooth to the naked soles of the feet, drinking cup after cup of aniseed liquor and eating raisins, as we know, by the fisted kilograms. As well, if you must know: the curiosity of leaving the constant threat of fiction was there, of fleeing the prison of the studio (which was contrasted only with the prison of his large home with its repeating rooms of ottomans and plush cushions, and lonely eyes of some woman who had called for him and would not leave until he saw her, and who would no doubt assent to the silent call of just one finger come hither) to pursue an actual story once again. Perhaps more than anything, a fulfilling existence requires struggle, and this is what my father wished for at that age.

  So: not yet thirty, Mamun M expended his last breath as the sole singer and composer of the score for the spaghetti western The Fall Guy, a most disappointing production, before departing with a crew of documentarians as its boom-mike operator to distant burning plains. Two weeks later, Soni Aadam’s outer bell rang and the postman called urgently from beyond the gate. He thrust into the producer’s hand a package in the shape of a book supposedly from his friend Mamun M and scooted away on the back of a 150 cc Honda.

  Soni Aadam wasted no time tearing the wrapping; he had never received a written communiqué from Mamun M, nor any gift in the mail, and he knew the message was urgent. A bookmark fell to the ground. Before he could bend all the way to the floor, the five-hundredgram bomb exploded, leaving nothing but teeth shards limb fragments.

  Two other producers and one director were killed by similar means within twenty-four hours. Five Ilyushin fighter jets firebombed La Maga Studios; the Governor’s defence was that in an era of imperialist domination, one had to fight the enemy within with perhaps greater furor, and there was no bigger enemy than an endless studio involved in the ceaseless production of anti-socialist propaganda.

  The rest of his life, my father would attest to his innocence; he would shed genuine tears over Soni Aadam’s death and for the demise of the golden era of La Maga Studios (which would be rebuilt but in another image). By the time the news discovered him, however, he would be deep into another existence, secluded and examining other deaths with documentary filmmaker Badsha Abd. We can observe, however, that for the second time, my father predicted demise on the horizon and absconded from an ostensible high ground for the ditch. Never again would he be able to tolerate the taste of raisins or sing another note. Ashes to ashes, powdered sound to desert sands: Qismis, his mother, the Screens all to dust and a deeper forgetting, to the sands of the unnameable country. Many years later, crowds would gather at playback bars around the unnameable country and along to the backing tracks of the old La Maga Studio hits, and they would try to warble and coo like Mamun M in the movies. So ritualized did these events become that aggravated five-o’clockers would binge on malt liquor and start fisticuffs at the first cracked note; one was allowed no mistakes or personal renditions that strayed too far from the original.

  La Maga Studios, meanwhile, survived the American bombs but would not survive the Governor’s wrath. The entire world a movie set burned. Airplane missiles combined with self-administered gasoline blazes used commonly in the city to clear space for the next film segment. Firehoses malfunctioned and people leapt into an artificial canal that they were building to facilitate joy, and for a moment while riding a camel outside city lines, my father turned his head over his shoulder and caught sight of a region of mist.

  THIRSTY GHOSTS

  For all the records of flash and song, recall my father escapes the film studio’s fires of disrepute and its actual fires by fleeing into the burning hinterland plains of the unnameable country. He has heard reports of artificial drought, of the Governor’s poison deposits sunk into town wells, Anwar’s explosions burst granite walls descending tumult, his disrupted irrigation systems wilted whole communities destitute flesh and mouths yawning up into sky, and he wants to see the landscape himself.

  Famine and drought invite related torments: Mamun Ben Jaloun the boom-mike man, Badsha Abd the director of production, Gibreel the cameraman, and Abdel-Aziz the cinematographer, find footage in wreckage, in the labour of millions of insect heartbeats beating wings mandibles chewed away all leaves of mangroves and acacia, every corn kernel and all the grains of sorghum. Children have been scouring for substitute dinner portions, reports indicate, catching unnameable acaudate rodents that peer cautiously out of parched earth, ceaseless animals multiplying ad infinitum, eating all the leftover crops, and capable of surviving, they say, even on bare soil.

  All the doors of all the houses are unlocked, all the rooms sawdust walls unkempt beds scattered cutlery broken television sets. Does anyone live here, my father asks, picks up a burning stone in the front yard of a house and holds it in his right palm, unable to think of whatisit in the heat. He swallows thick and throws the stone very far.

  They walk until nightfall, they set up camp. They shoot some reels of thirty-five millimetres. All the Governor’s Jeeps and all the Governor’s men have dealt irreparable: whole destroyed villages without a breathing plant or man in some areas. They wander in the dust that lifts up onto clothes in hair under fingernails, the dust they eat in their meals despite all efforts, dust in their water mud in stomachs intestines in their piss, their brains feel dusty from thought to thought.

  They find a watch with a leather strap in the sands, and Mamun Ben Jaloun puts it on. Then the days begin to change shape as the watch tells desert time. They notice the sites of the dynamited wells appear in different locations than on maps, places where the air tastes of hurried figs, dried apples. Haunted memories saturate the landscape Governor’s Jeeps blades of dust in the eyes and loose shadow flickering behind lanky man, child screaming grown-up hand he was holding becomes translucent, a pulmonary sky pumping to far blinking lights they’re coming, pack you all into the car now and escape into near road venal m
otion onto highway to Benediction or La Maga.

  They wander in the dust until the heat renders Abdel-Aziz, their cinematographer, delirious and unable to continue, laughing crying glossolating fluent incomprehensible, incapable of walking eating. They are forced to tie him to the back of a donkey. The mountains beside in front behind them reach into the unblemished sky as their path finds new sands without reprieve, and Abdel-Aziz has taken violently ill.

  Then a sand scuttling sound, a wheel and movement: an animal or man emerges suddenly out of nearby rocks. The strange meaning becomes apparent: a fat dwarf situated nimbly along the inner lip of a metal hoop has come rolling down the path, and smashes against a rock. The film crew is too astonished in the stifling heat with concerns of sickness and death/ what will they do without a cinematographer/ to say anything and watches the creature lean its hoop against their tarpaulin sicktent, bend low to whisper thick clotted sounds through the open door into the cinematographer’s ear.

  Mamun Ben Jaloun has taken to a nearby rock constellation but before he can return with a sizeable stick to shoo away the strange intruder, the metal hoop is already rolling path into grey-azure horizon. What did he say, my father shakes the cinematographer ashen forehead parched lips limbs barely moving under bedsheet.

  But the blood parasites infecting Abdel-Aziz have already taken their toll, it seems. The aid of saline solution and nutrient broth, litres of water coaxing hours of conversation, produces a sleepless lull. Just as my father and the film crew are measuring cigarettes until the next town, having given the cinematographer up to ghosts, laughter emerges from inside the sicktent.

  My father gets there first, feeds water to dying lips bids speak, friend. Whispers, inaudible syllables: father bends closer, tell me of the dwarf, of your illness, speak words, any words, words about death even, against death. The cinematographer’s first skittering sentences fight wind at the tent rasping throat tosses prophecy, his lucid mind peaks through emaciated flesh, he beckons come closer:

  A city, he says, high above the Karkaars with houses built onto the sides of mountain passes, bridges of spiderthread, a city of thirsty ghosts, the Governor’s men slit spidersacs to collect rain no water dynamited wells.

  The dwarf told you, my father asks.

  A loud yellow braying donkey sound, a guffaw from the cracked lips of Abdel-Aziz. The cinematographer died laughing not too long, several days later, a gruesome demise, if you will recall from stories commonly told, paroxysms and frothing at the sides of the mouth. His corpse mixed with sand easy, however, and then they were relieved. The event was a turning point in my father’s career as a documentarian, for he suddenly found himself promoted to replace Abdel-Aziz, though he had no experience with such a job.

  You’ll do fine, Badsha Abd pats him on the back and gives him a quick lesson on the laconic art of cinema: a lonely crow plus deserted bough equals desolation, moving hand to moving head and sudden sound makes slap, you can cause blue metal tang and a guitar all cubes and fretboard pickups heavy distortion twingtwang strings, and know a slaughter goat can give a man’s eyeball as thin stream atmosphere slices moonlight.

  And all this how, my father asked.

  Cinema and showbiz, Badsha Abd replied with a shrug.

  Then it got nightfall. And then a sound. Hark unto the cry: Shidane Shidane, the ghost of Shidane. Hear his howl a moan a half-slaughtered animal. But that would not be the Americans’ doing or the Governor’s. Not exactly. And yet. A question, nevertheless: can a ghost haunt you before bodyandsoul has gone, before a life has even arrowed conception gestation. A pre-emptive haunting perhaps, a warning, if we are superstitious. But our party moves on, leaving the sound for the coyotes to claim as theirs. The theme of the locusts is not accompanied by rivers of blood, or diadem of burning bush.

  If God walks alongside this crowd then he is like a djinn’s shadow: lux, pure light, invisible. How long did they wander thusly. How many dynamited ruined wells did they find and film in silence. And what of a train’s skeleton half-buried in the dust, beyond the realm of railway tracks for miles in any direction: look there a string of excoriated boxcars. Recall from newspaper reminders that somewhere else they are still excavating the skeleton of the largest prehistoric whale ever documented. Time enough to ask: who are the Abd, since you may be wondering about Badsha and before him. And why are they, since we’re all about them suddenly and a great deal.

  Historically, much of the land directly south of the Gulf of Eden has belonged to the Abd, and they have enjoyed strong historical ties to the governing elite despite the governments’ overtime changing heads and diadem doctrines, throughout which the Abd remained strong nevertheless. Picture for yourself the long history of KUBARK funding when it needed Uncle: CIA moolah, in short, to well-water the lawns and to high-rise strong walls of better-defended estates of necessary individuals. Badsha of the bunch, the chief Abd of our story, was born to a Queen Bulbul without a crown, much beloved for her humming of popular radio tunes, which she hummed in the courtyard of her home while watering flowers, but which people supposedly heard for miles around because it was said she had the gift of humming directly into ears.

  Things began to go wrong when the KUBARK sounded up a big tree-rustle about pan-Arab nationalism and the wider global threat of International Communism, to which the Abd lifted eyebrows, who hell and did we ever, and it was around or exactly this time Badsha Abd cried into the world for the first time. Suddenly, the Abd, unfunded unchained by the CIA, had to fend for themselves, which they managed by buying their way into the film industry.

  Badsha grew up in the cracked splendour of the Abd family’s wealth, the ceilings and walls of which served as the backdrop of his first documentary productions. Quieter than his relatives and few friends, he amused himself by trailing miles of black glossy out of his pockets, though impossible, that would have ruined the tapes, so this way instead: with his thumbs always triggered on the Super 8 pointed in the wrong direction: reels of tape documenting the attempts of polio children to stagger after years of illness, or of a man lying along a harbour while speaking to the fleas on his shoulder.

  Badsha Abd spent his adolescence disappeared into underground places of heat, noise, foul air, and confusion, so it’s no surprise we find him followed by the sound of Shidane Shidane, the ghost of Shidane, or threading village after village of blackened parched corpses unburied, shrunken, untouched even by scavenger dogs. The walls of wells collapsed imploded inward, the water buried under stones thirty metres below the earth. Sometimes the stone-baked bodies of women and men frozen in their efforts to scrape with their hands to lift the stones.

  In the towns, the documentarians manage to broach water from the reluctant, and to replace their donkeys with less exhausted, sturdier asses of burden. The towns give way to the plains, another village, but this one has a few survivors, a wheezing woman in the grave dimensions of a small hut, behind a courtyard effusing the sweet stench of corpses, newly rotting, side by side. They shoot thirty-five millimetres as she expires. No one offers water, though the thought crosses Mamun Ben Jaloun’s mind.

  Husks of rifle shells and the odd Jeep drives in from far sands with the oblivion question: you. Do you know, the insignia-heavy man asks, this region is a war zone, but we are a film crew, we have permits, as the air stews Badsha Abd’s skin under beige polyester shirt for minutes seconds decades as the crew swims or stands, sits, probably, with hands behind their skulls as directed, on the thirsty ground, under the slicing sky. Murray’s men, the crew whispers, just as transistors flare voices make dust electric wiring, they’re talking from far.

  Who is Murray, no one asks, because legends speak long before him.

  Walk, says a man to the reedy man to a man with a nervous jitter until a gun pushes up Badsha of the group and he walks, with others behind him, into a large truck with a weather-beaten tarpaulin cover.

  The film crew occupies the truck’s perimeter benches gasoline odour old cola can food smells, one
occupying soldier per two or three or four crew members. Darkness finds my father and his friends save a dangling light above for the bumpy ride. The ground gives way to reaches of sky or sleep as motorsounds surround them. When my father awakes, the back door is a mouth opening brighter light than even in the unnameable desert of their recent crossing. Then single-file through a two-dimensional hallway through which they have to pass sideways to a high vaulted room guided by fear of the gun barrel at the back of every two or three or four men.

  Seat yourselves, commands a voice. Time passes. The air grows foul and full of the smell of bodies in close proximity, as thoughts contracting translucent jellyfish axons in phosphorescent water and whole tribe of grey-bodied young thirsty ghosts of dynamited wells rasping requesting.

  A young girl enters with a vase of water floating flower petals, without glasses, and Gibreel, the first recipient, is unsure of what just make with your hands, she instructs, before pouring stream after stream from the vessel to the bowl of his hands cool water, strength, all the marine animals return to thoughts, stifling world of strange bodies become thirsty fellow travellers in a cavernous echo chamber where no new characters enter for so long their gun-toting keepers begin playing cards, laughing, smoking, exchanging sordid details seated around a table near the large doors about their mothers, daughters, sons, girlfriends. Sand begins to fill the room from a hole in the ceiling high above.

  Gibreel raises the question first, but must wait until the guards’ exchange of insults, throwing hands onto the table, trading cards, comes to a reasonable pause, at which point they are evasive: this time of year in this part of the country makes dustbowls its common feature, they claim. The sand keeps falling, rises to the height of their ankles and the guards secure their guns on the table under towels clean away from the dust, lift their chairs, whose legs descend to the floor, and lift the table of their game by similar extensions, before continuing to converse and curse several metres higher up than the documentary crew.