Al-walad shamm sunaahu, The boy smelt his own armpit odor.
-Sudanese proverb about reaching puberty
He raised his whip [sawT] so that his armpit shone [baraqa, a verb meaning To Gleam from the Flash of a Lightning Bolt]
-Example of a pure Arabic bedouin phrase, cited by Lane from the Kufan grammarian Al-Farraa’ (died 822)
Sawt al-sawT, Voice of the Whip, A documentary film
-Homophones swapping emphatic (S, T) and non-emphatic (s, t) Arabic consonants
So it all comes down to that, not how it sounds but rather how it smells. No cracking whips, but rather stinking armpits. The drovers and we had all come of age after those forty days, yes we could and did sniff ourselves if we couldn’t help it. Even the teenager Ibrahim, the youngest drover in Bilal’s dabouka, who because of his age had to do all the cooking, whom I called long distance when I was visiting his father’s house in Um Badr in 2010 and he was working in a Saudi camel stable, even Ibrahim back then could smell himself.
I hope he later had a chance to see the film. He was in a shot, calling out, Ta’aala Ya ‘Aam Bilal, Come O Uncle Bilal, when it was time for them to gather at the aseeda bowl. I left a DVD with his father, and I knew there were laptop computers in Um Badr by then. He must have seen it by now and noticed how young he looked thirty two years ago.