The Seven Veils of Seth Ibrahim Al-Koni
A Modern Arabic Novel from Libya
Translated by William M. Hutchins
Published by
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Copyright © Ibrahim al-Koni, 2003
Translation copyright © William M. Hutchins, 2008
Published in Arabic as al-Bahth ‘An al-Makan al-Da’i‘ (In Search of the Lost Place) in Beirut by al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2003.
Chapters One and Two of Section One, Part One, of this novel appeared in a somewhat different form in Banipal no. 25, Spring 2006, pp. 3–10.
Section One of Part Two appeared in a somewhat different form online at wordswithoutborders.org, July 2006.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
First Edition
ISBN-13: 978-1-85964-202-3
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Samantha Barden
Jacket design by David Rose
Illustration by Janette Louden
Printed in Lebanon
Introduction
In the ancient Egyptian religion, Seth is the evil god who out of jealousy slays his brother Osiris, the good god of agriculture, to seize the throne. Isis, the goddess wife of Osiris, then searches everywhere to recover the pieces of her husband’s body and secretly raises their son Horus, who eventually challenges his uncle. Seth is, however, also the god of the desert and therefore a benevolent champion of desert dwellers like the traditionally nomadic Kel Tamasheq, better known as the Tuareg. The world-renowned, Libyan, Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni, who writes in Arabic, has drawn on the tension between these two opposing visions of Seth to create a novel that also provides a vivid account of daily life in a Tuareg oasis.
Isan, the protagonist of The Seven Veils of Seth, is either Seth himself or a latter-day avatar. A desert-wandering seer and proponent of desert life, he settles for an extended stay in a fertile oasis, where he adopts a tomb’s vault as his domicile. If Jack Frost, the personification of the arrival of winter, were to visit a tropical rain forest, the results might be similarly disastrous. Isan first upsets the good citizens of the oasis by substituting a she-ass for the usual camel as his mode of transport and by rejecting their offers of hospitality. He is surprised bathing naked, without even his typical Tuareg man’s veil, in the spring-fed pond that serves the oasis, by six young beauties, each the spouse or sweetheart of a local notable. These six belles both captivate and infuriate him, and he swears revenge. Not surprisingly, since this is a novel by Ibrahim al-Koni, infanticide, uxoricide, serial adultery, betrayal, metamorphosis, murder by a proxy animal, ordinary murder, and a life-threatening chase through the desert all figure in the plot, although the novel is also an existential reflection on the purpose of human life.
If Isan, alias Seth, is a demonic antihero, his two main antagonists are the chief of the oasis (and, so, arguably Osiris) and a younger man who plays the fool, the village idiot. He resembles Horus and Jesus. The idiot is not Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Satanic Isan is not Dostoevsky’s killer Rogozhin, and the novel’s climactic murder does not duplicate that of The Idiot, but there are enough similarities between the two novels to add a level of meaning. Another Russian novel that may serve as a reference point for The Seven Veils of Seth is Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin, in which the plot is also driven by the arrival of a Satanic outsider, in this case Sanin, in a relatively harmonious, provincial community. Nicholas Luker says, “Sanin rests on its hero’s unexpected arrival and departure. . . . We may even conclude that the name Sanin suggests Satanin . . . and thus Satan himself.”2 Luker also remarks on “Sanin’s uninhibited sexual behavior. . . .” It becomes clear in The Seven Veils of Seth that the desert god of sterility also takes a personal interest in fertility.
Ibrahim al-Koni typically layers allusions in his works as if he were an artist adding a suggestion of depth to a painting by applying extra washes. Tuareg folklore, Egyptian mythology, Russian literature, and medieval European thought elbow each other for room on the page. One might expect a novel called The Seven Veils of Seth to be a heavy-handed allegory. Instead, the reader is left wondering. The truth is elusive, a mirage pulsing at the horizon.
Nomadic pastoralism has been part of the self-definition of the Kel Tamsheq or Tuareg people for at least two thousand years but has been threatened for the last fifty years by diverse forces including severe and extended droughts, the rise of national governments that wish to define national borders and to impose public education on all children, the over-grazing of goats, the abolition of slavery, television, and globalization. The call of the nomadic life – of a life of endless existential quest – is a central issue of The Seven Veils of Seth and of the companion novel Anubis, although al-Koni makes it clear that many nomads live in cities today and work for multinational corporations, which transfer them from state to state or country to country. Personal growth through destabilization is the goal that the benevolent side of Seth encourages, not simply a return to the good old days of Saharan camel caravans, which were an innovation in their time. A second major issue in The Seven Veils of Seth is the curious interplay that one finds in daily life between good and evil. If someone who hates you saves your life, should you be grateful? Is it fair to use data collected when someone did you a favor to lobby against him later in an unrelated case? If God is so good as to bring good even out of evil, should we thank God for Satanic demons like Seth?
Although al-Koni’s novels Anubis, The Seven Veils of Seth, and Lawn al-La‘na (The Color of the Curse), which were published in Arabic in this sequence, do not constitute a trilogy, each is an inquiry into the overlap in human existence between good and evil. In The Seven Veils of Seth, the hero is described as a mirror that shows a malevolent face to a bad person and a benevolent one to a good fellow. In Lawn al-La‘na, the protagonist is such a troubled and thoroughly evil character that the interesting ambiguity of the complex interactions of good and evil in the two previous novels is lost. Read as a series, though, the three novels make it clear that al-Koni is exploring aspects of human nature and not launching into some reprise of Pharaonic culture.
The author asked the translator to use an alternative title (The Seven Veils of Seth) in place of an English translation of the original Arabic title al-Bahth ‘An al-Makan al-Da’i‘, (translated on the Arabic text’s cover in English as In Search of the Lost Place). The author has explained to the translator that the Arabic title was a reference to A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. The quest for the lost paradise of the oasis Waw is a frequent theme of works by al-Koni, including this novel. An alternative title for this novel in English then would be “Paradise Lost.” Here the Satanic Seth attempts to help us oasis-dwellers find our way back to Eden. Or, does he?
William M. Hutchins
About the Author
Ibrahim al-Koni, winner of the 2005 Mohamed Zafzaf Award for the Arabic Novel and the 2008 Shaikh Zayed Book Prize, was born in Libya in 1948. A Tuareg who writes in Arabic, he spent his childhood in the desert and learned to read and write Arabic wh
en he was twelve. After working for the Libyan newspapers Fazzan and al-Thawra, he studied comparative literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, where he also worked as a journalist. In Warsaw he edited a Polishlanguage periodical as-Sadaqa, which published translations of short stories from Arabic, including some of his own. Since 1993 he has lived in Switzerland. Of his sixty works, his novels The Bleeding of the Stone, Anubis, and Gold Dust have been published in English translation. At least six of his titles have appeared in French, and at least ten are available in German translation. Representative works by al-Koni are available in approximately thirty-five languages, including Japanese.
Juan Goytisolo in Le Nouvel Observateur (September 9, 1998) referred to Ibrahim al-Koni as a great artist whose works deserve to be known by European readers and remarked on the inexorable way that his characters move from bad to worse, since the final disaster comes as a surprise that seems in retrospect inevitable. Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz in a review in Le Monde (11 October 2002) greeted the release in French translation of L’Oasis cachée with praise for the universal significance of a work truly presaging the emergence of Arabic literature from its “Oriental rut.”
Ibrahim al-Koni’s works have already become the subject of papers at scholarly conferences and of M.A. theses in various parts of the world. Awarded a Libyan state prize for literature and art in 1996, he has received prizes in Switzerland in 1995, 2001, and 2005 for his books as well as the literary prize of the Canton of Bern. He was awarded a prize from the Franco-Arab Friendship Committee in 2002 for L’Oasis cachée.
The Tuareg are pastoral nomads who speak Tamasheq, a Berber language written in an ancient alphabet and script called Tifinagh. They are distributed through desert and Sahel regions of parts of Libya, Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. An estimate from 1996 put their numbers at one million and a half. Their affiliation with Islam has been enriched by a vibrant mythology and folklore, which Ibrahim al-Koni links with that of ancient Egypt. The Tamasheq language is also related to ancient Egyptian. The goddess Tanit, revered in ancient Carthage, was once worshiped by the Tuareg along with the male sun god Ragh. Traditional Tuareg society has been marked by caste divisions between nobles, vassals, blacksmiths, and slaves. Tuareg men are famous for wearing veils. Women do not normally wear veils but have head-cloths.
Ibrahim al-Koni has made a name for himself in contemporary Arabic literature, even though he is an outsider, a Tuareg who began life as a nomad. His works are remarkable for telling tales that blend folklore, ancient myths, and vivid descriptions of daily desert and oasis life with existential questions that directly challenge the reader.
Acknowledgments
The translator acknowledges appreciatively the author’s patience and continued trust as well as a literary translation grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for this novel for the period 2005–2006.
The publisher would like to thank Moneera Al-Ghadeer, Marilyn Booth, Yasir Suleiman and Muhsin al-Musawi for their generous and invaluable advice and assistance in putting together this series, which would not have been possible without their support.
Main Characters
Isan , also known as Seth, the jenny master, Wantahet, and the strategist: a desert wanderer
Ewar, chief or headman of the descent group living at the oasis
Edahi, oasis fool or idiot
Elelli, oasis sage
Yazzal, oasis diviner
Amghar, chief merchant of the oasis
Emmar, oasis warrior
The Six Belles or Water Nymphs:
Taddikat, spouse of Yazzal
Tafarat, spouse of Amghar
Tahala, spouse of Elelli
Tamanokalt, spouse of Ewar
Tamuli, spouse of Emmar
Temarit, sweetheart of Edahi
These two series of generations accordingly, the one of Cain, the other of Seth, represent the two cities in their distinctive ranks, the [latter] one the heavenly city, which sojourns on earth, the other the earthly, which gapes after earthly joys, and grovels in them as if they were the only joys.
Augustine, City of God, 15:15
*
Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.
Augustine, Enchiridion, XI
*
This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q. 2, Art. 3, Reply Objection 1
*
I declare that I know not which is preferable – a disadvantage which proves to be a benefit, or an advantage which proves to be a hindrance.
Michelangelo, [“To Pope Clement VII in Rome,” January 1524] The Letters of Michelangelo1
PART I Section 1: The Visitor
1 The Strategist
The shadowy figures of travelers, who might bring either rain or harm to the community, always seemed portentous. So they consulted the diviner about the newcomer’s intentions, even before concern spread through the oasis, but the diviner – in a way typical of this miserable fraternity who are unable to satisfy people’s curiosity, even though people cannot dispense with them – merely sparked more curiosity with his murky sayings, which resembled riddles and puzzles.
The inhabitants of the oasis would not have been skeptical about the stranger’s doings, had he not aroused their suspicions with his conduct, for normally they hastened to welcome visitors and to shower them with displays of generosity, commencing with the slaughter of livestock, continuing with evening festivities, and concluding by shackling them with marriage to their daughters. They had attempted to employ the same ruses with this suspect wayfarer. Eventually they dispatched the fool, in the hope of obtaining a reading on the situation, since they had adopted the ancient tradition of utilizing a fool as their trusted messenger. They were convinced that strangers are by nature mysterious, secretive individuals, who conceal more than they reveal. Otherwise, they would never have set out across the deserts and would never have chosen to join the ranks of foreigners. Whenever their fools failed, they sent a sage. If he failed as well, they dispatched to the cunning fellow the scion of all the cunning of the oasis and perhaps of the entire desert: the diviner.
The stranger outwitted the entire string of investigators this time, however, thus increasing the apprehensions of the people and the anxieties of the elders. When the nobles consulted the diviner, he volunteered a cryptic statement of the sort that diviners favor: “Each day I grow ever more certain that not for no reason at all does a man travel great distances to seek what a mirage conceals.” Then Elelli added a clearer summary of the encounter: “There’s more here than meets the eye; so, beware!” The fool Edahi said what no one else did, although his remark disgusted both the elders and the common folk: “I’ll tell you the truth. The best thing you can do is to kill him tonight.”
2 The Women
He found the spring at the southwestern edge of the oasis. Shocked by the sight of the abundant water, which was ringed round with rude, earthen dikes, he slipped out of his clothes, pulled off his veil, and – without even meaning to – threw himself into the tempting pool. With his hands and feet he created a turbulence that disturbed the stillness of the water and the silence of the grove, which was surrounded by lofty palm trees interspersed with unfamiliar shrubs. From the fields wafted some unseen fruit’s mysterious scent, which tickled his nostrils, although he could not identify it.
The water on his skin felt delightful: cool, soft, and as smooth as a beautiful woman’s body. He ducked his head, and the flood covered him completely. The heavenly spring rocked him; he enjoyed submersion in the water and succumbed to the intoxication. When he thrust his head up suddenly from the depths to gasp for air, he heard a confidential whispering. He listened carefully for a moment, but silence returned, blanketing the whole area. After inhaling greedily, he found himself repeating involuntarily: “H
ow delightful! Why haven’t the idiotic wise men of the desert ever told us that water’s embrace is more delightful than women’s?”
He was starting to submerge once more when the whispering started again. He discerned a feminine timbre to it. He listened for a time, but the voices fell silent and stillness prevailed, interrupted only by the cooing of a dove and the chirring of grasshoppers. He disappeared again, surrendering to the mysterious deeps, as vague insights were awakened in his consciousness. From the body of water he received a forgotten message. He strove to crack the talisman protecting it, but this was difficult. He struggled and did not give up. He almost succeeded, for consciousness’ smoldering coal flared up so that darkness was dispersed and existence was convulsed by a prophecy, but a commotion spoiled everything. He shot to the surface to find a row of beauties above him. He was unsure whether they were human beauties or beautiful jinn. They traded jests with a boldness unknown among the women of the desert and winked at one another with a coquettishness in which virginal bashfulness was not totally overshadowed by traces of the seduction of wanton hussies or even of the temptation of the women singers of whose audacity visitors from distant lands had provided him legendary accounts. They were haughty and uncannily similar in physique and height, and perhaps even in rank. They had beautiful faces, fair complexions, and large black eyes – like gazelles’ – that sparkled with promise, seduction, and passion. They wore wraps that concealed their towering bodies but revealed the contours of their full, curvaceous rumps. So he decided to jest: “Do I see female jinn or beautiful women?”
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