A khawaja's ass-load

Idhaa inkasar al-jamal hammal hamal himaar. If thy camel breaks down, put on an ass-load.

-Burckhardt’s Arabic Proverbs

I rode a white camel for the first 20 days, then I left the dabouka for a day and a night to enter Dongola to get my passport exit stamp. When I met up again with the herd I was told my white camel had broken down and died, and from then onwards I would ride a chestnut gelding, the cameloid eqivalent of an ox, a strong, slow, and lumbering beast. So what therefore does Burckhardt’s proverb say about me? My khasi certainly did not haul his ass for the next twenty days to Egypt, but he sure did mine, a khawaja-load.

O my camel! (translation. Woe is Me!)

gamal /n pl gimaal/ camel ma shuftish il gamal wala l-gammaal [proverb] (I have seen neither the camel nor the cameleer) I have no idea who was responsible. ma gaash fi-l-gamal (He did not come by camel) He hasn’t asked for too much. il-gamal bima hamal (The camel with what it carried) The whole caboodle. is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal (The way permits the passage of the camel) No one is forcing you to stay. ya gamal-i (O my camel!) expression of mourning by a woman lamenting her dead husband.

gamali /adj invar/ 1. of or pertaining to camels 2. requiring long cooking. shay gamali [jocular] tea very late in coming.

-A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic

I regret never asking the drovers for idioms and proverbs in their Kabbashi dialect that mentioned camels. These Egyptian proverbs originate from the language of settled peasants who rarely see camels in their daily life. Donkeys and sheep maybe yes. Camels probably never. But I still wonder how many camel proverbs there might be in the drovers’ language.

They have no aphorism like “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” because there are no rich men in Dar al-Kababish, and the original verse probably contains a misprint of the Greek word kamelos (camel) for kamilos (anchor chain), of which there are none in North Kordofan because there is no water on which to sail a boat.

But KhairAllah definitely might say something like, is-sikka tfawwit ig-gamal, The way permits the passage of the camel, because we were riding camels on the Darb al-Arba’een, The Way of the Forty, otherwise known as a sikka sahraawi, A Saharan Way, and no, we were not Arab Seamen aboard Ships of the Desert, just woeful cameleers, or as Egyptians would say, gammaaleen.

If The Nile Doesn’t eat me, Something else will

Lepidus- What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? Antony- It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it; and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. Pompey- What colour is it of? Antony- Of its own colour too. Pompey- ‘Tis a strange serpent. Antony- ‘Tis so. And the tears of it are wet.

-Antony and Cleopatra, 2.7

After 21 days we finally reached the Nile. Everyone drank and washed. David and I went swimming, to the drovers’ great consternation. The Nile will eat you, they said. Al Neel biyakulkum. We laughed and swam deeper and farther into the current. I wondered how it would feel to leave the camels there and then and just keep swimming to Egypt. No more waterless nights to pass around the campfire, no more empty goatskins at our midday stop. But then I thought, what about all the tamaaseeh? and swam back to shore. Better to be picked at by vultures than swallowed by crocodiles. I had heard there were still many living in the Nubian Reach of the Nile. So it wouldn’t be the Neel that ate me, it would be the Neel’s strange serpent, a timsaah.

A Kabbashi’s Camel Chorale

The nomad’s camels are strong and frolic in these fat weeks of the spring pasture.  Now it is they lay up flesh, and grease in their humps, for the languor of the desert summer and the long year. Driven home full-bellied at sunset, they come hugely bouncing in before their herdsmen: the householders, going forth from the booths, lure to them as they run lurching by, with loud Wolloo-wolloo-wolloo, and to stay them Wòh-ho, wòh-ho, wòh-ho! They chide any that strikes a tent-cord with Hutch!

He sang in their braying-wise [which one of their ancient poets, Antara, compared to the hum of flies!] as we passed over the the desert at a trot, and quavering his voice (î-î-î-î) to the wooden jolting of the saddle.

-Travels in Arabia Deserta, Charles Doughty

At a fast pace the air was filled with the drovers' cries of Hut, Onk, Heh and Biraah (Easy does it)- the four notes of the Kabbashi chorale.

-Smithsonian Magazine, March 1987

There were many strange noises made by the men when driving and riding camels, noises made to calm them and others made to excite them, like lullabies and drum beats. There was a lot of onomatopoeia on the trail, as if they should speak to them in camel talk when their own Arabic failed. Slower, Faster, Easy, Ouch. The drovers would say Ouch! when they could see it hurt the camels more than it hurt themselves, trotting across stony ground or the girth rubbing a saddle sore. If I closed my eyes and just listened I could imagine myself overhearing a conversation between babies, or extraterrestrials. Wolloo-wolloo. î-î-î-î. Hutch. Onk. Biraah. Hey, take it easy up there, I’m walking to Cairo as fast as I can.

Water of the fountain of Paradise (tasneem), stored in the hump (sanaam)

How can you say, “I am not defiled, I have not gone after the Baals?” Look at your way in the valley; know what you have done- a restive young she-camel running hither and yon, rushing into the wilderness, in her heat sniffing the wind! Who can restrain her lust?

-Jeremiah 2:23

The hump should not be very big. A very large hump is a sign that the male is a poor breeder and that a female is sterile.

-A Field Manual of Camel Diseases

It was true, our camels were very lustful. Like Jeremiah’s haashi with interlaced tracks, they were always veering this way and that with sexual intent. Putting their nose into another’s backward-aimed urine stream and then sniffing the breeze- as Egyptians do in shamm al-naseem, a pre-Islamic holiday celebrating the spring fling the day after Coptic Easter- really turned them on.

So it is odd that an overly big hump is a veterinary symptom of sterility and impotence. After weeks of only aseeda we lustily ate roasted camel hump, the sanaam, after we butchered one who fell lame in our herd, but we didn’t drink maa al-tasneem, the Water of the Fountain of Paradise promised in the Quran to those who are saved. I doubt if it is the water stored in the fat of the sanaam, a word from the same s-n-m triliteral root as tasneem, and the sanaam we ate did not really taste heavenly, just chewy. Our water came from goatskins and I preferred the liver.

a sport and a pastime

Innamaa al-hayaat al-dunya la’ibun wa lahwun

-Surah 47, Verse 36

Amusement and Diversion. Idle Sport and Play. Play and Passing Delight. Sport and Frivolity. Childish Games. These are what translators of the Quran have called al-hayaat al-dunya, the life of this world. Hans Wehr has the two Arabic nouns that tell us what is the life of this world coming from the verbs la’iba and luhiy, with their various meanings given as “to slaver, slobber, drool (baby)” and “to turn one’s attention from, to try to forget”.

James Salter’s novel, which opens with that verse from Surah 47, is considered one of the most explicit literary treatments of sex ever written by a non-pornographer or not Henry Miller. Could he have guessed fifty five years ago that sex might best today be called a sport and a pastime. Did Muhammad know fifteen hundred years ago that the two words in a verse he transcribed direct from the Angel Gabriel’s mouth Salter would use for his title. Drooling and Forgetting. Al-maktoub maktoub, What is written has been written. Innamaa, indeed.

Cairo's unwashable taste

Can you rinse away this city that lasts/like blood on the bitten tongue?

-Chandni Chowk, Delhi, Agha Shahid Ali

Maybe everyone has a city in their lives like Cairo is in mine. The city where I first drew blood and saw blood, where you can never wash away the taste on your tongue. Cairo is still on my tongue, I have two small scars to prove it where the cuts were made, the holes where the tubes were inserted letting me breathe again.

But I still like Cairo, admire it even, and I hope for the best despite all the stupid things Cairenes have done to themselves since their Arab Spring. The lines from Julius Caesar come to mind, as I remember them- in fact I misremembered them and just now had to look them up again- when Marullus scolds his fellow Romans for being so easily swayed by Caesar’s oratory following his defeat of Pompey- “you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things”, he says- just as I wanted to scold Cairenes for going gaga over Sisi after he toppled Mursi. Do they really not regret cutting their own democracy’s infant throat?

The people I knew there forty years ago are either dead or their whereabouts are unknown. Ahmad my building’s bawaab, Mahdi Bashir the camel trader’s son, my first Arabic teacher Ahmad Taher who no longer answers email, and the makwagi who worked in the stall next door. But still I would not mind going back again and wandering around Talat Harb Square. Groppi is gone but Cafe Riche is open. Maybe you can still buy books at Madbouly. I hear it’s easier to cross the street without getting killed by wild traffic, and that a dollar still goes a long way in kebab restaurants.

What blood sticks to a Cairo-bitten tongue does not have to be bitter. Wash it down with ahwa saada, and swallow again.

Postcards from the Periphery

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/my home a neat four by six inches.//I’ve always loved neatness. Now I hold/the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.//This is home, and this the closest/I've ever been to home…

-Postcard from Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali

I’ve always been sent and have sent postcards to distant places from other distant places. Sometimes a bit bigger than four by six inches, but not by much. I’ve liked buying postcards as much as stamps for postcards wherever I’ve gone. I try to convince the postmaster that postcard stamps should cost less than letter stamps, usually to no avail. It’s the same effort, he says, to deliver an envelope as it is a card, the same hand to hand, hand over hand, hand after hand effort required for both.

That’s why I like sending a postcard, the fact that when it is mailed in a place like Sudan, say, or Nepal or Argentina, many people’s hands, starting with mine, touch it (and get a chance to read it and look at the picture) before it arrives finally in the recipient’s hand So many different people in that chain of events, I bet they would be surprised if they were ever to be in the same room and were told, You all helped deliver the same postcard.

Finding the right words for a postcard is an art, for me mostly a jokey form of art. From Cuzco, Peru I once mailed a card to Mel Gerling, a farmer friend in Missouri who drove combines and tractors and used electric augurs to lift grain into bins and bailing machines to pack straw. The postcard showed a family of Inca farmers wearing ponchos and chullos and standing barefoot in their field with a ox-drawn plow. I had written on the back, Greetings from Peru, this is how all the farmers work here. It was a joke, but when I got home and saw Mel, he pulled out the card and asked me if it was really true. I had to admit, No, that photo was taken a hundred years ago.

I used to write cards to a man in Upper Egypt from whatever other country I was in. Once I sent one from Havana and when I saw him later he pulled out a high stack of the cards he’d received from me over the years and we went through them one by one, him asking me about each country’s stamp. I remember he really treasured the Cuba stamp.

Maybe it all started with postcards I’d been sent when small by my great Aunt Ahwee, who got her name when my toddler sister could not pronounce her name, Marie, properly and could only say Ahwee. Aunt Ahwee would send me in St.Louis postcards from Disneyland that always signed off Love and Kisses, Ahwee. That’s how I really feel like ending every postcard I still write. Ahwee…

Money, Count it Twice

Word passes in whispers [among the Egyptian traders] that we’ve arrived from Nahud…Muhammad truly needs help in this camel trading business. Making a profit from a simple sale is a new concept for him, a man used only to working hard for honest pay. The EXIM game confounds him, where two Sudanese pounds equal one Egyptian pound, where prices can double in a single sentence [are you speaking Sudanese or Egyptian Arabic?], where two thousand miles of trail in forty days multiplies what a camel is worth, where, as here in Binban, neither a man’s word nor handshake is held true. Money…count it twice.

-Day 42, Trail Diary, Kordofan to Cairo, February 1984, on the day we arrived in Egypt’s Nile Valley camel-trading town of Binban, 30 kms north of Aswan on the western bank

Muhammad was the most naive, honest, kindly drover in our group. Adam was the designated camp cook but Muhammad did most of the aseeda making, despite already having done most of the other camp chores. Once Adam asked for a rag to clean a pot and Muhammad tore him off a piece of his own riding tunic. He was too poor, too miskeen (unlike in classical Arabic where the word means miserly, in Sudanese colloquial it is miserable) to have any turban cloth left at all. We joked that he was too miskeen even to be buried properly, turbans being a man’s ever-present shroud.

So when Muhammad tried to sell his camel to the shrewd Egyptian traders, KhairAllah stepped in to help him negotiate. There was some shouting, dowsha, but that is normal in Egypt, and in the end Muhammad seemed satisfied with the price. KhairAllah himself was not well versed in trading- he was the khabeer, trail boss, expert of the route not the market- but he proved again and again that he could do most things and many things well

I was not happy that day in Binban. The trail camaraderie had ended too abruptly. Egyptians can do that to you, in a minute break a magic desert spell that has lasted for forty two days. Just look at the last scene in Voice of the Whip, when the narrator says, “But this is the end of their journey, Egyptian workers load the train”, and the film goes to slow motion as fat peasants with sticks beat the camels and the drovers look on impassively from the side.

Robert Gardner had a point when he objected to our funding pitch. No, he said, it does not sound like an ethnography about men. What I hear is a tragedy about camels, they walk across the Sudanese desert only to be sold and slaughtered by Egyptian butchers. In Egypt, money…count it twice.

a naaqa's appointed Time and ours

They said, Thou art only one of those bewitched. Thou art no more than a mortal like us: then bring us a sign, if thou tellest the truth. He said, Here is a she-camel [naaqa]. She has a right of watering and ye have a right of watering, both on a day appointed.

-Sura 26 The Poets, Verse 153-155

‘Idd Ahmad. Two wells and two mud-made troughs after our long morning’s march on the wadi’s edge and a dry breakfast. Last night a scrap broke over low water, it touching on other complaints they have with me and David, about our constant queries- especially the names of landmarks they don’t know, only KhairAllah does- and that we write their answers in our books [to the illiterate a kind of bewitching].

But scarce water at bottom is the matter even though we’re never more than two days from a well. Yes we each have a priority for it- Muhammad his ablutions, Adam his washing of pots, Masood his sweet tea, in fact David and I want no sugar at all. Last night Masood said, Water finished, sugar finished, Khilis al mayya, khilis al sukr. I said, Ma’aleesh, mabahibbish sukr, So what, I don’t like sugar. This got his goat. Even the camels fight about water. Over my shoulder they growl at the trough. The wells are always poor…

-Day 14, Trail Diary on the Darb al-Arba’een from Kordofan to Cairo, February 1984

Thus the Prophet Salih was interrogated by the Thamudites, a tribe that later disappeared, perhaps swept away by flowing lava. And so too our ibl, camels in their collective plural, which in our dabouka included a naaqa, a she-camel or two, watered on their appointed day, before the drovers allowed themselves their appointed glass of tea. But everyone was grouchy because those wells were poor, their water muddy and sandy, some said even bitter. Sugar helped, but David and I preferred our tea unsweetened. They must be witches to dislike sugar, they said of us.

Camels in the sky

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: …’tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.

-from Act III, Scene ii

Nearing Day 40 you begin to see camels everywhere because you have been chasing after them for so long and each one is too precious to lose. On the flat, over a dune, behind an acacia, in your dream. Sometimes in the clouds.

There were not many clouds in February. That was dry season and the sky was blue, much bluer than the azraq, blue, color that the drovers called some of their darker-hued camels. So what you saw overhead was as empty and monochrome as all that sand you saw before you. Blue and yellow. Only when we butchered a camel once, already couched and then cutting along the spine and spreading its skin on each side to lay down like two halves of a picnic cloth did we see red. So then we had a tricolor- blue, yellow, red. Guess whose flag I saw flapping in the wind, up where the clouds should be.

Sh-sh-sh. Kh-kh-kh.

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first time or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails…Then there is the sky…

-Paul Bowles, Baptism of Solitude, from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue

At hobbling time after dark and in a hurry, there was always a lot of chattering to others and muttering to oneself, sometimes sing song and sometimes guttural, making either perfect sense or none at all. The camels never listened and the other drovers often neither. It was not easy to bed down an entire dabouka without making noise to calm them. Sh-Sh-Sh. Kh-Kh-Kh. Pluf-pluf-pluf, blowing out with loose lips. Just that, and clinking together of the hobbles’ wooden plugs with their palm rope loops draped on one arm and with the other you tied up 150 forelegs one by one, bending each back at the knee. Only then was the night’s stillness absolute and you looked up.

Two hours between sips

True saleb leaves a taste in your mouth that you want again in less than two hours.

-Muhsin Kadem, Salep wholesaler in Balkapan Han, Istanbul

I have spent many hours in coffee houses waiting for day’s end, starting in the morning reading that day’s newspaper and ending with the evening edition. I tried to ration my cups, not that it ever mattered to waiters- they never cared how long you sat and read or watched the street- but I always thought it unseemly to drink so much as to be seen as a nervous type.

Sometimes I’d arrived too early to announce myself at someone’s door, so I had to wait, sometimes I had the whole day before the next day’s flight out and had to wait even longer, and sometimes I had finished whatever had brought me to that place, to put down on paper information for later, so I could put away my pen. That was the best feeling of all- to need make note of nothing more.

I felt that way in Istanbul writing about salep. I’d interviewed Turkey’s leading orchid wholesaler and in tea houses waiters and a couple who I’d seen drinking it. I’d spoken with a professor of orchid biology, and I’d gone to Ali Usta to taste dondurma, the taffy-like Turkish ice cream made with salep powder from Kahramanmaras.

So I spent my last day in Kadikoy seated outside the Fazil Bey coffee house with Murad Celik, a waiter about to retire after forty years on the job. He didn’t speak much English and I wasn’t in too talkative a mood- it was raining, cold and miserable under the awning- and all I wrote in my notebook was that according to him, hot salep was good for suppressing a cough. But Murad must have smoked an entire pack of cigarettes that afternoon, so I didn’t believe him. What did he know about causing or curing a cough.

Incidental to a camel

The pursuit of an animal, whether for the purpose of hunting it or with more innocent intent, depends for its attractiveness less on the animal itself, or even on the ultimate success of the quest, than on the surroundings into which the pursuit takes you, and the sights, sounds, and experiences incidental to it.

-The Red Sea Ibex, T.R.H. Owen, in Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 20, No.1, 1937

I guess you can say that driving a dabouka through the Sahara Desert from Sudan to Egypt counts as being in “the pursuit of an animal”. And our intent was certainly innocent, not lethal. That was left to the Cairo butchers they were sold to. It was also true that my primary attraction to the camel was because of their desert surroundings, the subtle sights of dawn coming quickly after a short sleep and dusk dragging its feet after a long ride, the soft sounds of 150 camels crunching sand under foot while driven and chewing their cuds while couched, and the way everybody- Kababish, Kawala, and khawaja alike- laughed together when somebody fell off his mount or tilted a water skin to take a drink and found it dry.

Camels Judged on their own terms

Judged on its own terms, Voice of the Whip is an excellent film….One problem is that the filmmakers’ implicit organizing device (a comparison of Sudanese drovers with American cowpunchers) is never revealed. Without this clue, the viewer finds it difficult to discover the film’s purpose…We need to know why the drovers are drinking such repulsive, dark brown water, what the dusty brown objects are that they eat, and why one drover rubs his hands in the dirt. Above all, the narrator must stress that we are not watching ordinary life…There is no sustained focus on human problems or relationships, and so we tend to pay more attention to the camels…

-Film Review, William C. Young, in American Anthropologist, 93, 1991

When I presented Voice of the Whip at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, from the stage I mentioned that I’d been enthralled since young by the yarns of the Chisholm Trail, and especially by Montgomery Clift’s hot-headed cattle drover in Red River. But that wasn’t my implicit organizing principle on the Darb al-Araba’in. William Young got it wrong.

Instead it was Clint Eastwood’s bad hombre in A Fistful of Dollars, when he is filmed walking unburdened across a desert flatland as night falls, having been left behind on foot by his mates, and there he lies down, sleeps without cover, gets to his feet at dawn with barely a yawn, and then continues his trek after a short tug on his poncho. No breakfast, no toothbrush, no mouth rinse, his pillow wherever he lays his head.

So yes, on the trail there was repulsive water to drink, dusty objects to eat, and dirt to wash our hands. That’s what the drovers and I called ordinary life, the camera uninterested in anything more about us. It was all about the camels, and we knew that before setting out for Egypt from the wells of Al-Nahud. It’s what we’d signed up for.

In those days We were all Ashab al-Jamal

The battle, referred to in written sources by the pre-Islamic phrase yawm al-jamal, The Day of the Camel, immortalized Aisha’s presence in the closed litter atop her camel. The Battle of the Camel would forever remain synonymous with Aisha’s participation in the first internecine Islamic conflict. Even her troops would be referred to as ashab al-jamal, the companions of the camel.

-Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past, Denise A. Spellberg.

Egypt’s Battle of the Camel; The Day the Tide Turned…In a scene reminiscent of the Middle Ages, men on horses and camels entered Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 2 February 2011…to disperse the week long sit-in calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The events that followed came to be known as the Battle of the Camel. The battle left 11 dead and over 600 injured…the sight of camels galloping through the square had spooked the protesters. The duo [of pro-Mubarak activists] allegedly hired thugs [baltagiyya] with camels from the Nazlet al-Saman district [near the Pyramids, where the tourist stables are located]…

-Ahram Online, Yasmine Fathi, February 2, 2012

Thugs on camels. Baltagiyya al-jamal. Those two words used together should not be possible, but maybe yes only in Egypt. In Dar al Kababish and its desert surroundings, we were all Ashab, Companions, of the camel, Abbala, People of the Camel, from the word where the collective noun Ibl, camels, is put into the occupational form of the word, People who work with —. Baltagiyya [from Wehr, meaning gangster, pimp, sponger, parasite, hanger-on] ride in cars and carry sticks. All the Abbala I knew rode on camels and carried whips.

When I first read about Cairo’s Battle of the Camel in Tahrir Square, I joked with my Sudanese friends that maybe Mubarak had hired KhairAllah and the other drovers. But when I saw the photographs I knew quickly they were not Abbala. Look how this rider does not cross his legs in front of the saddle horn, but instead he lets them dangle astride as if searching for their stirrups. Stirrups on camel saddles are for tourists.

A true son of the Abbala, a true son of the Ashab al-Jamal would know to cross his legs over the camel’s neck. That way you can press down with your legs to leverage your body upward and so resit yourself in the sirj whenever you wish and so avoid saddle sores. Look at that baltagi in the photo. His rear end must be hurting. KhairAllah would be laughing. Even I laughed. The two of us were Ashab al-jamal, companions and friends. He, the one wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans, dressed like a thug, was clearly not.

Thugs on Camels in Cairo