33
AWALEH
WHAT CAN ONE SAY about the multitude of djinns that surround us throughout our lives, of the band of frowning demons with heavily wrinkled brows who keep watch on our slightest feelings and impulses, and the trolls throwing us into the depths of disgrace at the first mistake? What can one say about those invisible beings who have one foot in the realm of the visible? What can we make of those nymphs who set monstrous traps for us, capitalizing on our little weaknesses, our occasional blindness; they lure us with fantasies like bathing the body of our lovers in the reflections of the moon, probing everywhere and seeking what can be said in what is impossible to say. How can we avoid awakening the spirits who hibernate in the bottom of our own darkness? Man is a wheezing, crotchety mollusk, dragging himself along on the thread of his fate. He dreams his life on a large scale but that can't be. He is there, terribly anxious; daily effort has chipped away at him, and he has settled into a convenient silence. The worst is yet to come. If happiness existed in this world here below, it would take the shape of a fountain of milk, the Ancients thought. God would be maternal, would breast-feed the little birds, the little refugees, the malnourished, the orphans, everything life drops and abandons by the roadside. As I think of Him, I immediately open myself to Him, to pray serenely. To chant, with my eyes closed in ecstasy, the ninety-nine names of the very holy Prophet. That is how I regain peace of mind and body.
What will tomorrow bring? No one can dare to say. No sign on the open palm, no prophetic calligraphy on the hand of Fatima. We always think at first that all we undertake will last our whole life long, and then we have to face up to the obvious: that's absolutely not the way it is. So we lose ourselves in conjectures. Will babies get their mothers' milk again, suckled at the breast, and not that revolting powder, white as aloe juice, given out by the UNDP,1 the WFO,2 the UNHCR,3 or some other charitable agency—the milk we call “refugee milk” since this milk arrived in Year One of Independence? It came at the same time as our relatives driven from Ethiopia or Somalia by the war between the Somalis and the Ethiopians, two age-old enemies in the Horn of Africa, according to commentators foreign to the region. Let us wager that this will always be the ordinary course of things. There are two kinds of children: the children of Nido, nourished with powdered milk normally and legally imported, the most numerous—not always sons and daughters of refugees, since three-fifths of the country's children survive on that miraculous powder and thus depend on a pittance from humanitarian aid—and the other children. There are two kinds of fathers: those who give themselves over to the rite of the purple stem they are forever chewing, that khat which is exported all the way to Vancouver these days, and the others, who would like to have this luxury but do not have the means. Those who keep hanging onto khat like the swarm on the bough are plugged into the ten thousand watts of the rumbling snores of Radio Mabraze.* And so? Well, nothing. Hak, nada, zilch, niente. Mamas sit rolling the beads of their rosary, sing songs of longing for the milk warm from the udders of the camel, chat of legends from an earlier time and country in honor of the trucks that bring bags of flour, powdered milk, sugar, durum wheat, brown soap, and cans of oil. The trucks and their drivers are adorned with the attributes formerly given to nomadic heroes wild with warlike furor, to Bedouins, wielders of the cutlass. Some of them show teary faces every time a convoy leaves, wondering when a compassionate God will make them return. The sooner the better, groan the standing ones with their stunted faces, the rubbish-dealers of hope. Tomorrow inshallah mubarakh, by the grace of the very holy sheikh Abdelkader Djilani, add the seated ones. A ballet of glances rises to heaven. The ones lying down say nothing. Decidedly, those trucks are the saviors of the world. They drive away in a line, leaving behind them clouds of kerosene mingled with dust. Plastic bags spin like tops all along the cracked trail. The sky that dries everything out, dirty and gray like the collar of a shirt that has been worn on a very hot day, keeps coming through between the swirls of dust. The thirty-two teeth of famine grind in silence. Tree shoots that will never come up are dreaming of leaves, of vigorous roots, proliferating rhizomes, young downy shoots, tangled brambles, blackish little roots and fragile seeds, impetuous and triumphant. What will tomorrow bring? Luck, we're waiting for luck, we're waiting for luck we're telling you, for a godsend, providence, baraka, luck, see? Some eat up their little bit of hope in the shade of an acacia tree. Children pick up grain after grain, at the exact spot where the trucks were parked, a little fistful of corn or rice. They have one foot in life, the other in nothingness. And yet, it's the finest day of the season in the village of As-Eyla, transformed into a “camp for displaced persons” as the national press decorously puts it. The rest of the time they remain lying on their mat, so weak and asthenic, curled in the fetal position, their big dry eyes staring at the horizon line. What could they possibly be staring at? Their bloodless pupils wander from bald hill to bald hill. Only desert mirages take off from those runways, as nomadic pride is a thing of the past. (“Never will I submit to a life where the belly guides the eyes,” they used to swear in times gone by. May God seal their eyes and let them sleep the sleep of the just!) Fat flies swallowing tiny insects and ants stampeding as if struck by lightning have a crush on them. The toothy jaws of the dragon of death grind up the sickly brotherhood. One or two cats, their skeleton showing beneath their graying coat, their stringy fur longer than the mustache of Mephistopheles, stand guard with lonely hearts. They, too, do not like to meow, don't like the noises of others, humans or animals. It is in silence, under the stingy shade of an acacia or a ficus, that they find peace in the world. Hours add onto hours to give birth to days exactly the same as the other days. Thus, smoothly and quietly, unfolds the odyssey of a life 360 degrees open to the pre-desert. The lightness of a smile should not push into the background all the bitterness of the difficult job of living, with its duties and torments, its feeling of thickness and complexity, its flint rubbed until it sparks. The vanity of things has evaporated all by itself like the languages we call dead. To predict is heresy; tomorrow is entirely veiled by the will of the Majestic One. We must try to live our lives as seriously as children play their games, while knowing that cops and robbers are only roles and postures to be played with the greatest seriousness. You've got to smile, too. Even in your death throes you must hold back your drool; that is what a saying still in use today tells us.
1. United Nations Development Programme.—Author's note
2. World Food Organization.—Author's note
3. United Nations High Commission for Refugees.—Author's note