New Waw, Saharan Oasis

I THE WINGED PEOPLE

1

For as long as he could remember he had listened for counterpoint in the bird’s song.

In fact, after many seasons had elapsed and the gullies had experienced numerous floods, he felt certain now that this hidden bird’s polyphonic skill was the secret reason he had been fascinated with it over the years. The bird’s soft, gentle call, which reminded him of wind whistling through reeds, could not be transcribed in any script nor could the tongue mimic it. It began as a faint murmur, and then a mournful cooing immediately came in and rose to a robust melody that sounded like the vibrations of the imzad’s lone,¹ mournful string harmonizing with a second, lower string. These two then blended together to create — sadly, mournfully, and lyrically — an epic that told the entire desert’s story. The secretive call created an equally secret message. The song, which could not be recorded by an alphabet or even pictographs and which thwarted any attempt by a tongue to imitate it, began with a soft, mild, mysterious, nebulous murmur that stirred longing and that — as it grew ever louder — breathed life into concealed embers, into sparks that have always been the wayfarer’s law and that have always served as the religion of the wasteland’s inhabitants, who, since their birth, have never stopped searching for what the wasteland has hidden. The bird’s call suddenly became polyphonic as another concealed bird joined in, and then this new voice keened a different ballad. The two melodies created a counterpoint and harmonized to become a single tune, a new carol. Then the song changed course and soared into another realm, transforming the bare land and extending its expanse. The wasteland’s temptation grew ever more intense, and the desert promised a new reunion, an everlasting one that was born the same day the wayfarer was and that burst into existence the same day he did, even though the wayfarer would depart and wander off while the promise remained. The eternal temptation endured as a hint of an impossible reunion and functioned as a huge snare to lure wayfarers to the desert and to life by flaunting a promise — of an oasis and a reunion — that would never be fulfilled. In the newly expanded distance, delight triumphed and the heart overflowed with ecstasy. The body quivered with a dancelike tremor, because a glow had appeared on the horizon, because a torch had cleft the dark recesses of the pale, eternal horizon, appearing for a brief glimpse as a flash of lightning, and this was a sign the wayfarer had craved for a long time and had struggled endlessly to observe. Then the stern, hostile, eternal emptiness supplied a signal like sparks of revelation, and he saw what he had never seen in that expanse and discovered what he had never been able to find; in fact, he discovered what he had not wanted to find.

So how could his frail body keep from trembling ecstatically? How could a tear of longing not spill from his eye?

2

The desert welcomes birds twice a year. In the spring, flocks arrive from the South, spend a few days in the nomadic encampments, and then call to each other to resume their voyage to the countries of the North. In fall, they come from the North, spend some days in the camps again, and then call to each other to travel to the lands of the South. People say that in the past the flocks preferred oases as migratory way stations but that these dense throngs of birds alarmed the oasis dwellers, who thought the onslaught threatened their crops. So they fought off the birds, set traps for them, shot arrows at them, and beat drums to frighten them away. Then the birds abandoned the oases, and migrating flocks avoided cultivated fields, eventually choosing the desert’s nomadic camps for their stopovers. The desert people consider their arrival a very good omen, and their sages reckon the birds’ landing a heavenly sign. So diviners travel for quite long distances to meet the birds when the flocks arrive and follow them for even greater distances when they depart. It is said that the diviners pursue the flocks of birds to discover the enigmatic insights the Spirit World has encoded in their behavior, songs, and flight.

The diviners are not the only ones delighted by the birds’ arrival. All the desert people go out to the open country when the first flock appears on the horizon. The sages hurry out before anyone else to greet the migrating community. They head to the wasteland in scattered groups, striding with noble arrogance and preceded by the leader, who walks alone, decked out in his ceremonial regalia. Trailing the nobles are the warriors, also grouped in units. Behind the men come clusters of women, who drag their children after them, wave their babes in the air, and chant cheerful ballads, trilling an epic into their children’s ears: “Here are the birds that gave you to me last year; they’ve come again. Here’s the abil-bil, the egret, which brought you to me, returning to see you. The birds are your mother. The birds are your father. The birds are your brothers. The birds are your family. The birds have come to visit their child whom they entrusted to me. The birds have come to reclaim their trust. When will you be old enough to accompany the birds? When will you sprout wings so the flock will accept you into the tribe and you can migrate with the birds to the Land of the Birds?”

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 tranquility.

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.

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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.