On ‘Desert Imaginations’ and the Meaning of Saharanism
On ‘Desert Imaginations’ and the Meaning of Saharanism
By Timothy Alouani-Roby
“Owing to the powerful literature underlying it, Saharanism has placed deserts, writ large, outside normative ethics, creating the possibility for criminalized behaviors to be not only imaginable but desirable in deserts.” – Brahim El Guabli
In Desert Imaginations, Brahim El Guabli draws on literature, colonial history and other fields to articulate a new conceptual framework — Saharanism — that, much like Orientalism more generally, facilitates the exploitation of desert spaces.
This is not a book about the history of the Sahara nor of deserts in general, as Black, Amazigh, and Indigenous scholar Brahim El Guabli clearly states at the beginning of the book. “It is rather a history of ideas about deserts,” he writes. More specifically, El Guabli undertakes the ambitious task of naming and tracing the genealogy of an ideological framework that underpins exploitative attitudes towards desert spaces in vastly different cultural and geographical settings.
Saharanism is the name he gives to this framework. Notably, the concept is not specific to any one place, though the book primarily deals with cultural production in a North African-Tamazgha and Arabian context. Rather like Orientalism, the aim is to articulate a general category of thought as a means of arming us to recognize and resist it more effectively. El Guabli writes: “By conceptualizing Saharanism and delineating its intellectual genealogies and manifestations, it becomes possible to perceive how it has morphed over time into a powerful system of ideas that justify extraction, experimentation, racialization, and sexual exploitation in desert environments.”
By no means an exhaustive account, Desert Imaginations sets out chapters on Spiritual, Extractive, Experimental, and Sexual Saharanisms. El Guabli provides compelling and, frankly, enraging examples of predatory, ignorant attitudes in all these categories. Spiritually speaking, there’s the venerated Charles de Foucauld, for example, whose hermitic retreat into the Sahara, usually depicted as pure religious devotion, is shown to be utterly inseparable from the violence of French colonialism. The testing of nuclear bombs in the Sahara and Australia are examples of what El Guabli terms the experimental approach, and then there’s the sexual behavior of literary figures such as André Gide, whose pedophilia has been quietly backgrounded in favor of heroic existentialist narratives of self-discovery.
It is, however, to writers such as Ibrahim al-Koni and Abdulrahman Munif that El Guabli looks for hope. Through works such as Nazīf al-ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Libyan Tuareg novelist al-Koni has “grappled with the literary disregard for deserts” and “successfully put the Sahara at the center of a critical literary and nonliterary oeuvre,” writes El Guabli.
Saudi novelist and essayist Munif’s Mudun al-milḥ (Cities of Salt) is a milestone, five-part work that traces the struggles ensuing from the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula. El Guabli writes that his work “has placed the desert at the center of the twentieth-century political, social, cultural, and capitalistic upheavals of the Middle East.”
Drawing on al-Koni’s concept of waḥdat al-kā’ināt (unity of creatures), El Guabli gives the name desert ecocare to a way of thinking and being that can recognize arid spaces’ specificity and richness. For him, al-Koni’s writing achieves this as it expresses “the indispensable complementarity of all lives in his desert home.” It casts the ecology, mythology, and specificity of this desert as central to his fiction, an approach that marks a stark contrast with writers guilty of Saharanism, such as Gide or Paul Bowles, who merely use the desert as a backdrop for impunity. Notably, El Guabli is also clear that Arab writers or others from within the region can themselves fall into the pitfalls of Saharanism, citing examples including Egyptian scholar Samih Murkus and Algerian historian al-Ṭayyib Būderbala’s treatment of Gide’s sexual Saharanism.
Literature in general is central to Desert Imaginations — crucially, as both a force upholding Saharanism and, in some instances, resisting it. “Against the literature of Saharanism,” says El Guabli,” there is also a literature that tries to humanize the desert, or to get into the significance of the desert as first and foremost home — a home for both people and non-human subjects. It shows us that in what might look from the outside like a place that is dead, barren, where nothing happens, there is actually life, there is existence, and there are people who call it home.”
The work of al-Koni, Munif, and other writers — such as Malian Tuareg author Omar Al Ansari (who writes in Arabic) and Algerian Hocine Hacene (who writes in French) — represent the positive pole. In contrast to the image of the desert as dead space, their work foregrounds the life of these places in all their rich uniqueness. El Guabli provides readings of al-Koni’s Nazīf al-ḥajar and Munif’s Mudun al-milḥ to illustrate their opposition to the logic of Saharanism. On the latter, for example, we read that “Munif eternalizes the experiences of those who have been omitted from the history of this dizzying hypermodernity, which made the desert into a complete sacrifice zone.”
One of the charges laid against Saharanism is its flattening of all desert spaces into a homogeneous category of empty wasteland, its inability to recognize specificity of place. With this in mind, I asked El Guabli how his own concept — applicable, as he says, to all desert spaces — avoids falling into the same pitfall.
“Every scholar, activist, or person interested in this issue should undertake the enterprise to find out how Saharanism is very specific in its application to their environment — that’s something that can be done locally,” he says. “I’m countering the reductive notion of Saharanism by exposing how it works across different deserts, but I’m not closing the door for specific projects that can take the concept forward.”
Desert Imaginations, then, sets out a broad framework with general applicability within which local specificities can be fruitfully analyzed. Again, much like Orientalism as a general concept. So, I asked El Guabli, what’s the benefit of adding this new concept of Saharanism? Doesn’t the notion of Orientalism, or indeed colonialism more generally, already give us the intellectual tools to understand and resist?
“Without going to its details, complexity and efficiency as a concept, [Edward] Said says that Orientalism has invented ‘the Orient.’ I see Saharanism doing something different — that is, rehabilitating a place that actually exists.
“The non-existent Orient of the Orientalist is confronted with the real, material, harsh condition of a desert… If you ask anybody to point to a desert on a map, they can; if you ask them to point to the Orient of the Orientalists, they can’t; it doesn’t exist as a physical reality. So, that’s already an important difference.
“Then the desert is a place that we build or have been led to build a lot of assumptions about, mainly related to exploitability, death, harshness, and other things that follow from the image that we are led to making our heads about deserts. Then that translates into actions — and this is where colonialism comes in. It’s about control, and control can be through scholarship, force, and economic exploitation, but also through imaginaries that people are fed constantly about people and place.
“I don’t see Saharanism as replacing Orientalism or colonialism, but rather as an intervention to complicate the specific histories of deserts in a broad array of fields and the imaginaries that become normalized. We literally internalized [these imaginaries] through different media from literature to film, songs, and plays.”
Desert Imaginations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of specificity, a point that stands out especially amidst the dynamics at play where Amazigh cultures, Arabic literature, and Saharanism intersect. El Guabli warns that “if we subsume North Africa — Tamazgha — under the Orient, we do violence to the millions of Amazigh people who call that their home, and we fall into the trap of colonialism.”
He continues: “For me, thinking through Saharanism, Orientalism, and colonialism in the context of Arabic and multilingual literary space, it’s really important to redefine the terms. We should no longer speak in generalities of Arabic or Francophone literature. We should be very specific, because when you when you take somebody like Mohamed Choukri and say ‘Arabic or Arab writer, Mohamed Choukri’, it’s just simply wrong. He was from the Rif, he spoke Tamazight, he wrote in Arabic.
“Today, for example, writing about North Africa or the Maghreb without mentioning Tamazgha is just wrong… Your duty as a writer is to reflect what people are using and what they are trying to normalize, and the power of writing is there.
“So, I think all of this invites us to think differently about the spaces occupied by Arabic literature and how it coalesces with Amazigh thought — to foreground the Amazigh and African aspects of literature written in Arabic or French.”
Desert Imaginations does much more than simply repackage Orientalism, instead opening rich new terrain for understanding the ideological underpinnings of violence in deserts around the world. El Guabli indeed asserts that Saharanism as a conceptual framework applies to all desert spaces, but it’s in the emphasis on specificities of place, culture, and history that the analysis comes fully to life.
Analyses of Saharanism in different contexts such as the Australian desert or England’s historic land enclosures might provide fascinating new insights and linkages, but the literature and colonial history of Tamazgha and the wider MENA region are especially apposite for El Guabli’s forays in this book. A serious engagement with the concept of Saharanism will surely yield better knowledge of Tamazgha cultures and the literatures relating to their lands, in terms of violence both historic and contemporary, and ways forward for the future.
Timothy Alouani-Roby is a writer and editor living on Gadigal Country in Australia. Originally from Northern England, Timothy speaks conversational Darija and divides his time between Sydney and Marrakech. He previously worked in professional sport, and now writes on architecture, literature, philosophy, and politics.
Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences. by Brahim El Guabli, is available from University of California Press.