Desert Divers

by Sven Lindqvist

  To objections that it had done no such thing, he simply declined to answer. Instead he announced a ‘peace march’ to ‘liberate’ West Sahara.

  At this threat, the Spaniards suddenly broke off all contact with the Saharans. A curfew was proclaimed. The Spanish Foreign Legion erected barbed wire all around Saharan neighbourhoods. Saharan soldiers were dismissed from the army. Petrol stations stopped selling petrol to Saharans. In a week, twelve thousand Spanish civilians were flown out of the country. Even corpses were evacuated. A thousand dead were dug up out of the local cemeteries and flown to the Canary Isles. The animals in the zoo went with them.

  The Spaniards persistently denied ‘rumours’ that they were going to hand over power to the King of Morocco. But in secret they had already done so.

  By the time Moroccan troops marched in, the majority of Smara’s Saharan population had fled across the border into Algeria, 150 miles east. Smara, the main centre of the Saharan liberation movement, became the main base for King Hassan’s war of conquest in the Sahara.

  34

  ‘Problems? In that case, it’s the goats,’ says the governor.

  We are invited to dinner at the governor’s palace. A roast sheep with its ribs exposed like a shipwreck is carried in as we sit there on the sofa, all men, all Moroccans, except me and a Saharan poet. Chicken with orange peel and olives comes next, then sweet rice with almonds, raisins and cinnamon completing the meal.

  ‘The nomads make their way from the drought in to the water and electricity of the towns,’ says the governor. ‘They settle, motorized herdsmen tending their herds from Landrovers and keeping their families wherever there is a school for their children and healthcare for their old.

  ‘It is worst for the women. They know nothing except about goats. The woman belongs with goats. Goats are closer to her than her husband, yes, even closer than her children. Her way of bringing up children is out of date, her cooking primitive, and only goats give her a raison d’être. So she can’t live without goats. She takes them with her into town. The whole town is full of goats and that creates hygiene problems. It’s simply impossible in modern apartments. I have no hesitation in saying that goats are the greatest social problem we have to contend with at the moment.’

  ‘And the solution?’

  ‘I have issued a goat order and appointed one person responsible for goats in each neighbourhood. He sees to it that the neighbourhood is kept free of goats. Each neighbourhood has also been allocated an area outside town, where the goats are allowed. It keeps the women busy – it’s a long walk there to do the milking.’

  35

  The Saharan poet Yara Mahjoub is a handsome man of about fifty with brilliant white teeth and a skipper’s wreath of short white hair. He can’t write, not even his name. He carries the whole of his repertoire within him.

  ‘Is it ten poems? Or a hundred?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, many many more! I’d be able to recite them to you all night and all the next day and still have many unspoken.’

  ‘What are they about?’

  ‘Give me a subject and I shall sing the praises of it.’

  I suggest ‘the judgement of the international court’ and he is immediately prepared.

  ‘Sahara reunited with the mother country

  the profound connection

  between Saharans and the throne –

  the evidence now in the hands of the Hague

  where it’s been confirmed by the court

  so everyone must be convinced.’

  He turns to the assembled company and recites the poem with great bravura, an artist used to performing. Every gesture is part of a stage language, every line in the verse demanding applause.

  ‘When did you compose your first poem?’

  ‘It was during the vaccination year, which is also called the “year of the summer rain”. I was eighteen and in love for the first time. This is what it sounded like:

  ‘Oh how beautiful it is,

  the bridge leading to the hill!

  Oh how lovely is the hill’s blue

  in her eyes!’

  ‘That was in the days of the Spaniards. Did you compose poems in their honour?’

  ‘I had my camel and my goats. I didn’t need the Spaniards. Father was a goldsmith. So am I. That is my profession. Poetry is my vocation. If I don’t make poems, I fall ill. All real poetry demands inspiration and the love of the King is the greatest source of inspiration. I made this poem during His visit to the USA:

  ‘After your journey to the States

  and your visit to the Pentagon

  your insignificant neighbours scream,

  they who are a thorn in your side,

  they who rise against Your Majesty,

  they scream as if mad with envy.

  But they lack food,

  yea, they lack soap!’

  36

  One night on his way to Smara, Michel Vieuchange hears far-distant men singing Saharan songs together in the darkness.

  As he listens to the resolute gravity in their voices, he thinks there is something peculiar about his own enterprise. What is he really doing there? Is he going to do violence to a secret which ought to remain untouched?

  Justified qualms. But he waves them away and struggles on, drunk with fatigue, exhausted, but upright. Elation pours through him despite his torments. He feels chosen, happy, purified by his own flame.

  Sometimes his mouth is so dry he has great difficulty pronouncing the single word ‘Ahmed’. He prepares himself for several minutes before attempting it. Only one single word and it seems almost insurmountable.

  One of his Saharan companions falls ill and refuses to go on. The little caravan returns to Tiglit. Again Vieuchange is imprisoned in a room with no window, a cloud of flies his only company.

  His head is full of one single desire, firm and irrevocable: to complete his journey. He will carry out what he has made up his mind to do. Everything that has been working its way within him since birth is heading towards that goal.

  His determination is unyielding. But during the long days of waiting, it changes character.

  The thought of Smara no longer gives him any joy. He can no longer find the enthusiasm that has previously borne him along. It has dried out, shrivelled up.

  Vieuchange in Tiglit, after his first attempt on Smara.

  37

  Decisions are nearly always carried out under different conditions from those under which they are made.

  Decisions are made at headquarters. They are carried out in the trenches.

  Decisions are made in Paris. They are carried out in the Sahara.

  The emotions generated in him by the name ‘Smara’ have disappeared. Remaining is the decision. The will. The intention. When all the humidity has gone, in the end there is nothing left but defiance.

  When desire burns out, it is replaced with lies. Vieuchange begins to pretend.

  He writes ‘we’ about himself. He pretends he is not alone but travelling with his brother.

  He pretends they are on an important assignment through unknown country where no one else has ever seen what they see. In reality, he knows who has been there before him and he has no assignment other than to carry out his own intention.

  He pretends they are on their way to a living town. In reality, he knows perfectly well Smara is in ruins and that it was his own countrymen who destroyed it.

  These false premises make his enterprise utterly artificial. But this artificiality is documented with extreme authenticity.

  Step by step, stone by stone, he describes what it means to do something in the Sahara because he ‘had wanted it, in Paris’.

  38

  On November 1, he finally arrives in Smara. He has spent most of the journey hidden in a pannier, curled up in a foetal position, tormented by unbearable cramps, not even seeing the ground.

  He now breaks free and staggers off into town.

  The ground is strewn with dark stones. Not a human be
ing in sight. Everything is in ruins.

  He buries a bottle with a message in it to show that he and his brother have ‘discovered’ Smara – a final game of pretence before he crawls back into the pannier and begins the return journey.

  Vieuchange in front of Smara.

  ‘I got there,’ he writes in his journal. ‘But like a pearl-diver, I must immediately return.’

  He spent three hours in Smara. The return journey took a month. He died in Agadir on November 30, 1930.

  Actual cause of death: dysentery.

  Real cause of death: romanticism.

  To Laghouat

  39

  ‘The more light the desert receives, the darker it seems to become,’ writes Eugène Fromentin.

  Desert romanticism exists in that kind of paradox. Otherwise one must ask what a romantic is doing in the desert at all. The desert has no leafy groves, fragrant meadows, deep-soughing forests, or anything else which usually evokes in the romantic the right emotions. Desert romanticism already appears incomprehensible at a distance. Up close, it becomes absurd. What is romantic about an endless gravel pit?

  Eugène Fromentin can tell you what. He wrote the classic desert book A Summer in the Sahara (1857). He is the first of a long line of writers and artists to experience the desert with an aesthetic eye.

  Fromentin loves the desert because it has no appeal, because it is never lovely. He loves the expansiveness of its lines, the emptiness of its space, the barrenness of its ground. At last a sea which does not swell, but consists of a firm, immovable body. At last a silence which is never broken in a desolate country where no one comes and no one goes.

  Eugène Fromentin, Arab Horseman. (Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Rochelle)

  Eugène Fromentin, Interior of Arab tailor’s workshop. (Private collection, descendants of Eugène Fromentin)

  Strangely, that same silence seems so threatening in the town, lying there dark and mute under the sun.

  The people appear to have lost their power of speech. They surround him with an immeasurable gravity, as mute and scorched as the landscape they inhabit.

  Why this silence? Is it the sun? The heat makes the air vibrate with a faint but entirely audible note. The ground itself seems to gasp. Day and night change places. The midday sun annihilates and kills, the midnight darkness revives and gives life.

  Fromentin sets off on nightly wanderings in town. But the inhabitants are just as hostile in the dark hours. They do not greet him. They pretend not to see him.

  So that is what the Arab is – a man unwilling to show you his house, unwilling to say his name or say what he is doing or tell you where he is going. ‘All curiosity is unwelcome to him.’

  It must be the sun which has made the Arab like that. Fromentin feels himself being influenced. The sun persecutes him right into the night. ‘I dream light,’ he complains.

  He stands all day out in the desert, painting, bathing in the sun. In the evening he is feverish from all the light his body has absorbed. Even when he closes his eyes he sees sparks, flames and circles of light in the darkness. ‘I have no night, so to speak.’

  People of the desert have lived under that sun since they were children. The terrible desert sun has marked them with its lack of emotion ‘which has fallen from the sky onto objects and from objects has transferred to their faces’.

  Hence the silence.

  40

  I’ve come from Algiers. I have rented a small Renault 4, buckled at all four corners and with the driver’s seat sagging so much that it hits the floor. They did not want to let any other car go out into the desert. ‘A single sandstorm takes off the paintwork in a few hours,’ they said. So I put a couple of books and a rolled-up towel behind me and steered the little wreck out into the traffic of Algiers.

  Algiers is a climbing town, all the streets on their way upwards or downwards, the traffic heavy and eternally at a standstill, until it suddenly hurtles forward with the roar of a tiger. I have seldom come across such a constant need to demonstrate the potency of your automobile and your driver’s daring as I have here.

  In a R4, there is nothing to do but calmly allow yourself to be passed on both sides, often so closely that your crumpled shirt gets a pressing into the bargain. So I cope with the latest passer’s stinking exhaust fumes, perhaps muttering something about the fact that he is driving on camel shit to honour his mother.

  Arabic oaths are often descriptions of the sexual behaviour with camels of the mother of the person concerned. Anyone who manages to combine the anal insult with the sexual gains extra points.

  The road slices up the mountainside in sharp turns like a fretsaw. The R4 has no strength to fall back on – the trick is to accelerate between gears, as in the old days of double-declutching, and keep the engine running. Then the tough little car manages the Atlas mountains, and when I finally reach level ground, we get up to 60 mph, even 70 in successful moments.

  It rumbles and it sways, but I can’t help liking the R4 for the wind whistling through the coachwork and the sewing-machine buzz of the engine as it patiently carries me towards Laghouat.

  Algeria is in the middle class of the world’s countries. That is clear from the road, which is not dominated by shepherds and flocks of sheep but by heavy transporters – steel girders, pipes, cement. Roadworks occupy more machines than people – though the unemployed, currently 17%, would fight to be allowed to shovel macadam.

  In the villages I try to buy some food for lunch, but there is only bread. There is always bread, subsidized by billions, very cheap to buy and sold in great quantities. Fresh morning bread has already been thrown away at midday to be replaced by even fresher afternoon bread. Even far out in the countryside, these bread habits have been adopted from the French and are considered sacred – Algeria literally throws away her oil income in the form of dry bread. A country which on liberation in 1962 was a great exporter of food now produces only 35% of what its people eat or throw away.

  ‘C’est la crise, c’est normale,’ they say in the shops as an explanation for there being no tea, no coffee, no sugar, no eggs – well, more or less nothing but detergents and powdered milk.

  But there are schools. Everywhere I see children on their way to or from school. The first shift begins at dawn, the last is on its way home as the sun sets. Caring for the children and giving them an education despite 3.2% annual growth in population is the heroic feat of the schoolteachers – minor intellectuals who for twenty-five years have accepted these triple shifts, these remote posts in the countryside and these low salaries, to cope with the great task of teaching the people to read. But who feel themselves more and more deceived and abandoned as the years go by and others enrich themselves.

  What did their sacrifices give them? When will things get better? In twenty years, when the oil runs out?

  I stay with a teacher’s family in Laghouat. My friend Ali, whom I got to know in the rue Valetin gym in Algiers. His brother Ahmed is leader of the big band ‘Desert Brothers’. Like most young Algerians, they are enraged by the corrupt misrule.

  ‘Before independence, we had five parties in the country. Now we’re not considered mature enough to have more than one. What people lack is not maturity, but power!’

  All evening we sit round the big couscous dish until the meal is concluded with milk and dates. Then we all sleep together in the best room.

  The moisture from our breathing glistens on the cold walls. Outside, the stars sparkle as brightly as only desert and darkness can make them. The silence is boundless, and the occasional distant barking of a dog makes it audible.

  41

  Early in the morning, I go up onto the roof. It is a beautiful day. White clouds have accumulated on the horizon like a further layer of sediment on dark mountains.

  This is where Fromentin stood 130 years ago. The landscape we see is the same. The same sun, the same desert.

  But not the same people. His Arabs were closed, menacing, hostile. Those I have met are ope
n, lively, hospitable people.

  Under the same sun.

  Fromentin was wrong to think the merciless sun had marked the people of the desert for ever. Perhaps he actually knew that himself. In the 1980s, A Summer in the Sahara was published in new academic editions which also account for variations in the text. In them you find other explanations for the silence in Laghouat.

  42

  In the spring of 1830, Paris was already seething with the rebellion which was to find its outlet in the July revolution. De Polignac’s militantly reactionary government was about to fall. As a final way of diverting dissatisfaction, it was decided to attack Algiers, on the pretext of an alleged insult to the French Consul.

  In their proclamations to the people, the French said they had come to liberate the Arabs from Turkish oppression and make them ‘lords in their own mansions’. But the supposed liberators committed the most hideous atrocities and retained power wherever they could seize it.

  France under the July monarchy decided to keep just Algiers and its immediate surroundings; but the military was not to be deterred. Villages were burnt down in their hundreds, and thousands of refugees died of starvation. By the time the February revolution introduced the second empire, Algerian resistance had been broken all along the coast.

  The mountains and the deserts remained. No political decision could stop the conquest that continued with military logic. On December 3, 1852, it was Laghouat’s turn. The French seized the town after a two-day siege. Forty-five years later, the commanding officer described in his memoirs what happened next:

  The town had to endure all the horrors of war, experience all the atrocities that can be committed by soldiers when they are left for a moment to themselves, still feverish from the dreadful fighting, raging over the dangers they have undergone and the losses they have suffered, excited by their hard-won victory. Terrible scenes were enacted.