Misjudged Good Folks

I HADN’T SEEN DURMA for a long time, and I missed her. After I promised my aunt not to see her or talk to her anymore, Durma sold her tinplate shack in the Slave Yards and moved to town to live in an Arab-style house with a group of darabukka players. The day she left to start her new life beyond the high wall that separated us from half of humanity, I hadn’t gotten to tell her good-bye, and I regretted it like mad.

Durma had learned to sing from an elderly slave woman from Fezzan who, seeing that she’d happened upon a rare talent who could perform marskawi, started depending on Durma to perform at weddings and other social occasions.¹ Of course, singing was a comfortable job compared to the forced labor slaves had to do. In fact, no matter how good or bad they happened to be at it, everybody in the Yards resorted to singing to help themselves get through their grueling lives. At night after people’s work was done and they headed back to the Yards, somebody would start to sing. Then somebody else would join in, and somebody else, and somebody else. Before you knew it, the gathering had expanded to include a growing number of performers, clappers and dancers, and the whole neighborhood would be bursting with raucous circles of song and dance. Tunes were something to be celebrated, and song was a healing balm. People who’d had too much to drink would often reel and totter around, losing themselves in the ecstasy of the marskawi. Song and drink were medicine for the afflicted soul, a remedy for the suffering born of exile, degradation, and the frightening unknown.

When Yagouta, the daughter of Ubaydallah and Makhzouma, married a slave boy from the Yards, Durma’s gift to them was to come and perform at their wedding celebration. When she came, she received a huge welcome. After all, even though she’d left for the big city, she hadn’t forgotten the folks back home, and she never stopped helping the needy among them with what she earned from her gigs, which went on till the wee hours of the morning, and sometimes for days.

It was only to be expected, of course, that some men would end up inviting her to bed. After all, a passionate black singer like her would let a man discover his wild side, and liberate him from the alien “other” self that controlled him when he was part of a herd.

Musically induced rapture is inseparable from the quest for love. Female singers were thirsty and their thirst was quenched. They gave to drink, and were given to drink. The world wasn’t fair, and it didn’t give the Negro woman a house, a breadwinner, and children, since no man would marry a singer even if he was black like her. The singing profession turned a woman into a whore who was available on demand. So even though Benghazi households vied for the chance to have her perform at their social functions, their respect for her didn’t go beyond the hand that beat the darabukka, the throat that crooned the songs, and the body that writhed as skillfully in bed as it did on the stage.

By the time Yagouta’s wedding was over, more than one man had proposed to let his daughter work with Durma.

Fortunately for life here, there were people who took a different view of things and people generally classified as “bad.” I personally loved Durma inside and out. I loved everything about her, and all that she was. So when I missed her, I made no distinction between one part of her and another. I didn’t pick and choose which parts of her I wanted and which ones I didn’t. One of the signs of love is that you love what you love without asking yourself why it is that you love it.

1. Marskawi is a kind of traditional music that traces its origins to the city of Murzuk in southern Libya. Marskawi combines Bedouin Arabic poetic lyricism and elements of the Amazigh (Berber) heritage. Most of the artists best known for the performance of marskawi are from Benghazi and Bayda, Libya, such as Warda al-Libiya, Shadi Al Jabal, and Ramadan Wanis.