Gold Dust

Translator’s Afterword

Gold Dust takes place in a world of contrasts — desolate rock plateaus, lush oases, and far-flung pastures abounding in mythical flora and fauna, all surrounded by endless wastes traversed solely by camel herders, dervishes, and the occasional caravan. The focus of this novel is not the desert itself, but rather the lives of desert dwellers as they struggle against forces beyond their control. In an echo of Ibn Khaldun’s great treatise on human society, al-Muqaddima, time in Gold Dust moves in cycles rather than lines. Indeed, the desert is not timeless but seasonal — with wet seasons of abundance and flourish, followed by years of drought and hardship. Human time, too, moves in this way in the novel: characters grow and wither, win and lose; caravans come and go, bringing with them holy men and refugees, riches, and misery. And always, in the background, there are the winds of empire that buffet the desert world, with barbaric French and Italian incursions from the north and reverberations from the rise and fall of African kingdoms to the south.

What may not be so obvious to English readers is that al-Koni’s world of nomads is not necessarily a familiar one to most Arab readers. The Arabic novel has always been dominated by stories of the city, although peasant communities of the settled agricultural lands of the Arab world have had their place in the canon as well. Aside from the work of novelists such as Abdelrahman Munif and Miral al-Tahawy, the nomadic segment of Arab society — once so economically and politically significant that it inspired Ibn Khaldun’s classic — has been largely absent from the Arab novelistic imagination.

Though noteworthy, this fact is not altogether surprising — for the historical rise of the novel as an art form is directly linked with the marginalization of nomadic pastoralism as a key component of Arab civilization. The very industrial era that enabled the one made the other obsolete. With labor performed by ever-increasing masses of men interacting with ever more powerful machines, human reliance on laboring beasts dwindled. In many parts of the world, nomadic pastoralists — such as the Tuareg of the Sahara or the Bedouin of Arabia — were the ones who used to supply sedentary societies with the animal-power that made things run. The plowing of fields, the milling of grain, the shipping of goods across vast continents — these were all ventures undertaken by men and animals laboring together. With the rise of the factory — and with it, the tractor, the train, and the car — men abandoned the society of animals for engines of their own making, and the age-old need for pastoralists came to an end. Ever since, we have only continued to cut our ties with the world of herdsmen. In the process we have cut ourselves off from what they knew, and their recognition that animals are more than just objects to be looked at, shorn, and eaten. Gold Dust appears in this light as a protest against the modern abandonment and objectification of animals, and an affirmation of the relationship between man and beast as one of interdependence, mutual recognition, and soul.

Since al-Koni’s work is so rooted in a particular world, translation is often not so much an act of finding equivalences as of tearing something from its sense. It is not just that his Arabic reads more like poetry than prose, with rhythms and resonances that have no correspondences outside the language. It is also that some of the references have little meaning beyond their original context. To this end, in the original Arabic, the author has himself inserted a number of footnotes to explain Tamasheq (Tuareg) words and customs, pre-Islamic pagan cosmology, and classical Sufism. Rather than burden the text with footnotes, some of his notes reappear here below (in summarized or expanded form) along with a short list of English-language sources recommended for readers interested in understanding better the ground from which this translation was uprooted.

The concept of nobility — as it relates to men and animals alike — is central for understanding certain aspects of this novel. Yet its nuances are not easily translated into societies that organize themselves around egalitarian values. Critical to the concept is, of course, the idea that some virtues are inherited by birth. Of equal importance, however, is the understanding that nobility is a character trait whose weight rests on a system of social recognition. Though one may be born noble, nobility itself is confirmed by certain features of one’s behavior — self-control and generosity being paramount. A failure of noble creatures — man or beast — to behave nobly not only points to a deviation from their natural selves but also their social role — and thus poses a threat to the social order itself.

These dynamics infuse al-Koni’s representation of Tuareg society, which is stratified, but also held together, by an intricate, hierarchical arrangement of classes — nobles, vassals, smiths, and African slaves.¹ Arguably, Ukhayyad’s ambivalence about his own noble status marks the beginning of his exit from this class system — that is, from Tuareg society itself. Similarly, the noble character of the piebald is significant — as is the fact that his heedless behavior undoes the outward marks of his breeding. The term Mahri refers to a stock of thoroughbred camels said to date back to a fabled Omani race of noble steeds. While ‘thoroughbred’ and ‘noble’ capture some of the characteristics of the original Arabic words, the novel assumes that readers will readily recognize a difference of character between purebred and regular mounts — a distinction admittedly lost on many of us for whom all camels are equally extraordinary.²

The tagolmost—a uniquely Tuareg headdress consisting of an indigo blue turban and veil — is also ubiquitous in the novel and has its own function in the expression of nobility. As anthropologists have noted, this veil is worn by Tuareg men (not women) and has its roots neither in religious custom nor in mere practicality as a form of protection against harsh desert elements. Rather, its meaning is richly social — and is expressively manipulated to conceal (or reveal) emotion and intimacy in relationships.³

As he does in his other novels, al-Koni alludes to Libyan prehistory and antiquity in provocative ways — most explicitly here in Chapter 29, when Ukhayyad encounters the petroglyphs depicting the hunt. Indeed, the Tadrart Acacus petroglyphs in Libya stand at the center of al-Koni’s fictional world. Some of this rock art dates as far back as 12,000 BCE and depicts lush scenes of the flora and fauna — including giraffes, hippopotami, and elephants — of the region before its desertification in ancient times.⁴

Al-Koni is also sharply attuned to the pagan prehistory (or co-history) of the nominally Muslim Sahara. The orthodox, the heathen, the superstitious, and the heretical all coexist in this world. In Gold Dust, it is the appearance of Tanit, as well as the various references to magic, spell-casting, and dream interpretation, that signal this most explicitly. Tanit (also known as Tanith and Tanis) was the Phoenician lunar goddess (and patron of Carthage) also revered by the indigenous Berber peoples of North Africa. A consort of Baal, she was goddess of war, motherhood, and fertility — and associated both with the Ugaritic goddess Anat and the Phoenician goddess Astarte. Among her symbols was the isosceles triangle, which recent scholarship has associated with particular designs of modern Tuareg art.⁵ The appearance of the moufflon, or Barbary sheep, also has resonances within pagan pre-history, for the wild animal had a totemic, noble significance in pre-Islamic Berber North Africa.

The long-extinct silphium (of the genus ferula) was an herb known since the time of the Greek colonization of Libya and used in Roman cooking. Thought to be a form of giant fennel, the herb was prized for its savory taste, and also as an abortofacient. In any case, so valuable was the herb that it figured on coins in Roman Libya. Silphium achieved a near mythical status in antiquity when, either due to overharvesting or climate change, it disappeared from the narrow strip of Cyrenaica where it grew.

Finally, a word about two of the Sufi references in Gold Dust. At more than one point in the novel, Ukhayyad finds himself hanging between life and death. In the original, al-Koni often uses the Arabic word barzakh to describe this liminal space. While commonly translated as ‘obstacle,’ or ‘separation,’ this Qur’anic word has rich resonances — referring to the interval separating this world from the hereafter, or heaven from hell. For Sufis, its meaning is broader, referring to a point between light and darkness, spirit and matter, the animate and the inanimate. This space is not purgatory in the Christian sense, but the realm that the spirit passes through as it transcends bodily form.⁶

The novel’s references to the lote tree are also replete with Islamic and specifically Sufi undertones. In the Qur’an there is mention of “the lote tree of the farthest reaches” (sidrat almuntaha). According to tradition, this tree marked the farthest point to which the Prophet Muhammad traveled during his ascension to heaven — it stands at the very boundary of existence, beyond which no one can pass. With enormous leaves and fruit, the lote tree stands at the edge of heaven itself, and under it flow the four rivers of paradise. For Sufis, the metaphor of the lote tree marks the point at which the mystical seeker moves beyond human guidance and into the realm of experience itself.

I would like to thank the author and Nadia Mahdi for their help in preparing the translation.