Ibrahim al-Koni’s ‘The Desert Also Keened’
Ibrahim al-Koni’s “The Desert Also Keened” is winner of the 2023 ArabLit Story Prize in Dima El Mouallem’s translation.
By Ibrahim al-Koni
Translated by Dima El Mouallem
A man of piety adored God for four-hundred years without cease. He was distracted for a time by the warbling of a bird in a tree within the orchard surrounding his house. His recompense was that God forsook his love.
Farid al-Din al-Attar, Mantiq al-tayr
As soon as the hateful thing alighted on a wild shrub withered by the sun, she rose to her feet and stood sentry at the entrance to the tent. When she saw the poor child stare at its fabulous, shining plumage, she jumped up in a frenzy, like a woman stung. She threw herself at the boy and held him tight with both arms. Tears streamed down her face, and she wailed, “No, no, no! Don’t look at it like that. It’s a trick, it’s not real; it steals children away from their mothers!”
But the child was able to slip away, lissome as a snake. He went to the wonderful, iridescent, golden-winged bird. Never in his life had he seen a bird like it. The boy stepped toward it, mesmerized.
The golden bird remained indifferent; it did not move. It waited and waited until he was standing right in front of it. The boy put out his hand. His fingers could almost touch its feathers that sparkled in the twilight. The bird dodged away, hopping twice out of the little hand’s reach.
Enchanted, the child stepped forward. He almost had it, but the bird evaded him again and hopped further back. The boy watched with bated breath. The wondrous bird, meanwhile, readied itself for the long chase.
The mother wailed, “Oh no! There they go. I told you to leave that damn thing alone. It tempts children and takes them out into the desert. You come back here right now!” But the boy did not come back. He took off behind the herald of temptation.
The golden-hued harbinger took off, bobbing and weaving and pirouetting, and the boy took off after it, his breath coming in gasps. His desire to catch the bird and possess it was overwhelming. His mother saved him that day. She ran after them, grabbed hold of him, and dragged him back by force.
Nighttime came, and darkness reigned. When the boy’s father returned, she blurted out the story. The man proclaimed, gruff and decisive, “If the bird comes back, tie the boy up. Take a rope and lash him to that tent pole over there.”
One day, when the child’s father was out in the desert and his mother was visiting a friend in the neighboring settlement, the bird seized its chance. It stepped up to its spellbound victim and, and as the sun set, led him away. It led him out through the southern plains; they made a striking pair trekking across valley and hill. The golden bird would wait haughtily for the child to approach, then elude him by hopping back once, twice, or even three times. The bird would stand, waiting, looking this way and that. Sometimes, it cast a cryptic glance at the child, its small eyes bright and cunning. It spread its wings seductively, and just when its pursuer was sure of grasping his object of desire, the bird evaded him by taking a sudden, swift step forward.
The chase went on.
Onward came the darkness. Eventually, the dark descended on the eternal desert, and the bird vanished into the night. The boy found himself awash with sweat, urine, and exhaustion; he collapsed under a wild tree and fell asleep. In the night, the howling of wolves woke him. He heard the murmurings of the jinn in the wilderness: he recited Sūrat al-Tawḥīd as his mother had taught him, and he gazed at the stars that were scattered across the otherwise lightless firmament. The stars kept him company in their inscrutable idiom; they spoke to him of things beyond his ken. At last, sleep overtook him once more.
The next morning, he wandered through the trackless waste for a long time before they found him in a ravine, collapsed under a wretched broom tree—his feet bloody and his lips cracked—having run himself to exhaustion.
At night, after the boy’s mother had dried away her tears, after her husband had forced her to restrain herself, she said, “See what that awful bird did to you? It’s the devil. Don’t you understand?” She shook the boy roughly and repeated maniacally, “It’s a mean, old devil that steals children from their mothers.” The boy’s father cut her off with an abrupt gesture, and she went back to sobbing. They were sitting around the fire before retiring for the night; the boy fell asleep sitting up.
She had conceived the boy after they had despaired of such a thing. They had gone to every known sorcerer, magician, and faqih in the desert oases but to no avail. No incantation worked and no charm proved efficacious. The rarest of herbs were brought in from far-off places. They even brought her potions all the way from the heart of the continent, made out of snake venom and beasts’ brains.
Soon, she would be too old to bear children; as luck would have it, that was when they found the fire-worshipper: that terrifying soothsayer who was famous for being in league with a host of pagan jinn in Adrar Oasis.
He would not have deigned to see them had they not come from the distant plains of the Red Plateau. He had stopped talking to outsiders. In the wake of the incessant attacks mounted against him by the dervishes allied with the believers among jinn, he had gone into hiding. Claiming to be armed with incantations and charms inspired by the Quran, the dervishes seized that last stronghold of desert wisdom, declaring the era of paganism over and its arts the work of the devil. In the face of their persecution, the fire-worshipper stopped issuing his penetrating auguries into the dark and the great unknown. People began to avoid him for fear of bringing the fury of the newcomers on their own heads. Isolated and besieged, the head of the pagan soothsayers took refuge in a cave on Adrar Mountain and spent the rest of his life in hiding, along with his contumacious legion of jinn. This uncanny confederacy vied to decipher talismans, sometimes hurling insults at one another for variety. People often heard the great soothsayer sniggering in his cave at the jokes his familiars told him to keep him company.
The fire-worshipper received the couple at the mouth of his desolate cave that stood at the top of the mountain. He spoke to them in Hausa. Only when he realized that they could not understand him did he condescend to speak in Tamahaq instead. He spoke not a word in Arabic, and the pair knew he that he refused to speak the language of the Quran to spite the Isawiyya dervishes who brought low his glory in the oasis. Although he had been sequestered in the darkness of his cave, his skin had a burnt tone to it. Dressed in black from head to toe, he looked like one of the blasphemous jinn himself.
The oasis dwellers were terrified of his followers, believing that the jinn had become aggressive ever since they split up into two factions after the dervishes came. One faction, they claimed, was guided and followed the dervishes, while the other stuck to its paganism, remaining ever faithful to the terrifying, fire-worshipping soothsayer. Perhaps it was precisely these stories that made the woman shake simply upon seeing him: this relic of paganism brought back to life from the realm of caverns and the dark.
He slaughtered a white chicken beneath her bare feet, besmirching her body with blood. He groped her shapely buttocks and pawed at her plump breasts as he mumbled the conjurations of the idols of old. His callused fingers, dyed red with chicken blood, dug into her body.
The husband witnessed this ritual in a daze. Before starting his pagan recitation in the language of the jinn and in Hausa, the soothsayer had cautioned him against uttering any Quranic verses or prophetic sayings: “My familiars dislike it. I forbid you to recite from the Quran or mention prophets and messengers here.” He then sprinkled an incense-like powder into the fire. Noxious smoke filled the air. The woman felt dizzy, and her husband felt nauseated. The sunburnt fire-worshipper went back to groping her body and sullying it with blood. At last, he said, “The first stage is complete. Tomorrow, you’ll come with me, and I’ll show you the burial ground where you’ll have to sleep for three nights in a row.” He muttered some inaudible conjurations and said, “It’s the oldest burial ground in the desert, the oldest burial place in the world. It’s the shrine of all shrines. It was the navel of the world before people had even heard of those tambourine-banging dervishes and their qibla!”
The burial place was a cairn of black stones that clung to the foot of the mountain below the dreary cave. The first night passed peacefully, as did the second. It was on the third night that she dreamt her disgraceful dream. Afterward, she was too ashamed to tell her husband. She dreamt she was being given in marriage to the King of the Jinn. Breaking the custom of the land, he came to her in the morning; he subjected her to such agony that still sends orgasmic shivers down her spine when she remembers it. The terrifying king copulated with her like no man had copulated with woman. The two of them crawled over the stones of the vast valley together. No matter what she did, she could not shake off his fiery, frenzied body.
She kept her dirty secret from her husband without knowing that he had a secret of his own. He had heard them that third night: her moaning and writhing in pleasure and pain. Neither of them was able to look the other in the eye for months.
The soothsayer had handed them a pagan amulet for the protection of the long-awaited son and heir, and refused to accept a fee for his trouble. Hardly had a few weeks passed when the man noticed his wife having cravings and eating white clay.
As soon as the child was born, his mother hastened to tie the amulet around his neck. She covered it with leather to protect it and decorated its exterior with mosaics of enchanting colors. When the precious talisman had disappeared about a year ago during one of their travels across the desert, the woman became upset, but her fool of a husband assured her that he would get a new amulet from a faqih in the nearby pasturage. He did not know that faqihs’ amulets were no match for the pagan sorcerer’s talismans. Only when the ominous golden bird came into her life did the poor woman remember the lost amulet. She was filled with misery and dread.
According to old women in the deserts of Timbuktu, the golden bird is sent by the devil to lure away little ones and steal them from their mothers. Its appearance is tied to bouts of drought and lean years. They say that it rarely appears, but that when it does, it leaves many victims in its wake. The secret lies in the bird’s golden feathers. Wherever that demonic gold glimmers, misfortune will reign, blood will be shed, and Satan the accursed will scurry across the land.
Today, the bird came back again. It caught the poor mother unawares when she went to borrow a waterskin from the neighboring settlement. In the days when it first appeared, she had taken her precautions. She carried out her husband’s command; she tied the boy to a tent pole with ropes of coarse palm fibers. She neither went out to the grazing grounds nor on visits to the neighboring women before making sure the rope was tied fast around the child’s bloodied ankle. While she was away, he would cry and try to escape. The rough rope dug a coarse collar around his tender flesh. At night, she would cry to herself out of pity, but in the morning, terrified, she would tie him back up again.
Yet time is the blight of memory, and its sweet whisperings can entice one into perdition and forgetfulness. Weeks passed, and she became complacent and let her guard down. When she went to borrow water, she left him untied inside the tent.
The ominous bird came right on her heels to lead the child away. He followed it across plains and valleys, climbing uphill and sliding down. When the chase began, it was evening. At noon the next day, the child collapsed, panting, and fell face down on the ground. The cruel sun blazed overhead, unsheathing the rays that burned the boy’s flesh. His tender feet were bleeding, his lips were cracked, and his throat was parched.
Only then did the bird disappear. Perched on a wild shrub with withered branches, it watched the boy’s body convulse and twitch. It spread its magnificent wings and began to preen them with its wondrous beak.
The boy regained consciousness before dusk. He resumed the chase, crawling on all fours over the biting stones, heedless of his bloodied limbs, even as the stones tore away pieces of his flesh and left them behind as bloody tatters on the rocks.
They found the putrid body the next day, under a lone and desolate lote tree.
The woman keened for him for days and nights on end, announcing his death to the desert, to the vastness of space, to the wild trees, and to the crane, that most sacred of birds. She stopped wailing only when her husband took her back to the terrifying fire-worshipper’s cave in hopes of conceiving another child. Once there, she learned that the awful soothsayer had died. The Isawiya dervishes boasted that Adrar was now forever cleansed of the infamy of idolatry. Undeterred, she went to the foot of the mountain where stood the oldest burial place in the world, and she wailed out of the depths of her agony, “Why give him to me only to take him away? Why?”
Her wretched question was answered by the dervishes as they swayed to and fro in their religious ecstasy. There they were, at the foot of the mountain, striking their tambourines and crying out Sufi utterances of divine love. They answered her: “He takes only from those He loves; He gives only to the fallen.”
Ibrahim Al-Koni is a Libyan writer and one of the most prolific Arabic novelists. Born in 1948 in the Fezzan Region, by 2007 al-Koni had published more than eighty books. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have received numerous awards. For instance, in 2015, Al-Koni was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for his whole oeuvre and won the National Translation Award in the US for William Hutchins’ translation of The New Waw.
Dima El-Mouallem is a translator and a scholar of Islamic Studies. She earned her M.A. in Islamic Studies from the American University of Beirut, with a focus on the wonderful, the strange, and the miraculous.