Toponyms to Nowhere

Hamrat al-Shaikh (Redness of the Religious Leader), Hamrat al-Wuz (Redness of the Goose), Bir Abu Za’ima (Well of the Father of the Female Leader), Jebel Kirim (Generous Mountain), Um Badr (Mother of the Full Moon), Um Khair al-Din (Mother of the Goodness of Religion), Um Dubban (Mother of Flies), Dubeibat (Little Fly), Abyad (White), El-Obeid (The Little White One), Humeir Kabir (Big Little Donkey), Um Dam (Mother of Blood), Dam Gamad (Congealed Blood), Abu Shanab (Father of the Mustache), Suq al-Gamal (Camel Market), Mahbub (The Loved One)

-Villages and Towns North, East, and West of Al-Nahud (The Female Breasts), our Point of Departure on Darb al-Arba’een (The Way of the Forty), headed to Wadi al-Milk (The Water Course of Fortune), as shown on Michelin Map 745

We passed many villages whose names I never learned. Some you could not even tell were villages, they were so small and empty. But always we knew we were going away from, not towards the places people lived. Fewer trees, more sand. If I’d carried this map at the time, it would not have helped me know anything that the drovers couldn’t tell me. The map’s dotted lines marking recognized tracks gave out after three days. The drovers only knew, Good water here, Good people there, Good grazing ahead. Keep moving. Yallah binaa, God be with us.

He runs straight through it, watching his toes

…;he is preoccupied,//looking for something, something, something./Poor bird, he is obsessed!/The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray/mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

-from Sandpiper, Elizabeth Bishop

We never ran, always walked or even slower, and camels have only two toes so it got boring after a single day, watching them. Only 39 to go. But maybe we were all preoccupied on that trip, being that there was little to occupy ourselves with in the first place. A big desert does that to your head, empties it of the here and now.

So instead we looked down, maybe eight or nine feet down, trying to pick out from the blur of passing ground the Sahara’s bits and pieces. There were broken ostrich shells (or were they bleached ostraca?), hunks of petrified wood from when the paleomonsoon made forests grow here, more rarely three-stone clusters as the jury-rigged fire-dogs of old campsites, and what was most common, the sand. From perched on a camel’s back, all seeming a most monotonous color. But from closer, say when you’ve spread out a sleeping bag after a long day and you roll over to one side to sweep away loose acacia thorns that might poke you in the night, you see them, your face inches away. Each tiny and distinct. Black, white, tan, and gray. But few rose or amethyst as I remember.

When in doubt he painted them naked

During a stay in Bursa I was taken by the architecture of the baths, and they certainly offered the occasion to study nudes. As the temperature was extremely high, I did not hesitate to make myself completely naked; seated on my campstool, my colorbox on my knees, my palette in my hand, I was a little grotesque, but you have to know how to adapt yourself as necessary.

-Jean-Leon Gerome, writing of his visit in 1875

The Great Bath at Bursa (1885) is a composition that was put together with a combination of memories and sketches made ten years earlier and then finished with nudes sketched in Paris.

-Jean-Leon Gerome: His Life, His Work, Gerald Ackerman

It is related of him [Gerome] that when he was engaged in the modeling of a [female] figure he had difficulty in satisfying himself in regard to the disposition of the draperies. In despair he invited a number of savants to meet him at dinner. To them he told his trouble and asked if science could come to the rescue of art.

-The Greatest Painters of France, Munsey’s Magazine, 1901

I pulled into Bursa by bus and pulled out by ferry. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I’d heard about its landmark buildings, and it was on my way back to Istanbul so I stopped over. At dinner the waiter recommended Bursa’s specialty Iskender kebap, but I thought it didn’t need so much melted sheep butter poured over the shawarma already smothered in tomato sauce. Gerome painted a baker’s dozen of nudes in the hammam there. I don’t think his painting needed so many of them either given they were all the same French model.

The Great Bath at Bursa

Ceci n'est pas une bible

I find it baffling and reprehensible.

-John Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

President Donald J. Trump made a statement...He surprised those following him [including the Secretary of Defense and General Mark Milley, wearing battle fatigues] by holding up a Bible in front of the church. Thank you President Trump. God and His Word are the only hope for our nation.

-Franklin Graham

The sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal…I stand ready. The Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] stands ready. The head of the National Guard stands ready.

-Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense

One wag has said that a Muslim must be left-handed in order to offer the Quran in one hand or the sword in the other, the unclean. The only option I was ever given on the trail was either to eat my ‘aseeda for dinner or to go to bed hungry. Your right hand was your dipping hand whether you were left-handed or not. And KhairAllah’s whip hand. And my writing hand.

“It’s a Bible”

Ribh not riba

Triliteral root R-B-H. Nouns. Ribh, Profit, gain, increase [gained in traffic], excess or surplus [obtained above the capital expended]. Rabah, Camels that are brought from one place to another for sale, meat fat. Rubah, A young weaned camel. Raabih, One who profits, a man’s proper name [name of one of our drovers in 1988]

Triliteral root R-B-W. Noun. Riba, Usury, unlawful or excessive profit or interest

-Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon

And of their taking usury [riba] when they were forbidden it…we have prepared for those of them who disbelieve a painful doom.

-Quran, Chapter 4

I owed a lot to KhairAllah. After eighty days on two trips with him, laying on his shoulders all our extra troubles, making him work overtime to keep an eye on us and figure out what I was saying to him in my gibberish that only he, not any of the others, could fully understand- I really owed him many more than one. So I told him that he would share in the profit of the film. I told him, You are Batal al-Shaasha, Hero of the Screen, and everyone knows you in London and New York and Riyadh. This may in fact have been true because the film ran on television in those cities, and worldwide.

But I did not know the Arabic word for legal profit, only the word for illegal gain under Islamic law. I was afraid that he would take it badly if I used the word Riba, which I knew, and not the word Ribh, which I did not. But I should have known that word for the many times on the trail that I called out to Raabih…Ya Raabih, Inta ‘Atshan, Aw lissa?, O Raabih, Are you thirsty, Or still not yet? And the many times we talked about Rubah, weanling camels. And the fact that we were driving a herd of Rabah from Kordofan to Cairo for Abu Jaib’s profit. But I didn’t yet know those words.

So I explained my dilemma to Mahdi and asked him what word to use. Just give KhairAllah the money and he will take it, he laughed. It doesn’t matter what you call it. He will understand.

But there are trees

In physical appearance, Kordofan is very monotonous. It is a rolling steppe country marked by no abrupt or grand accidents. In the unending succession of undulating plains, a hill fifty feet high is a landmark for a day’s journey…On these steppes, one landscape is much like another…For the last months of the rainy season when everything is green, this landscape is pretty…All the remainder of the year, the parched land under a burning sky is dreary to the extreme. Only a waste of sand can be more forlorn.

-General Report on the Province of Kordofan, H.G. Prout, 1877

On a camel you can see common thorn trees from far away and less common baobabs, so uncommon that they startle you with strangeness every time you come upon them, from even farther. Everything that grows above waist high becomes a landmark when one travels across a dead flat sand sheet.

Camels gather on all sides of a thorn tree to browse and pass under a baobab close to the hollow trunk, letting the rider look overhead to see the hole up maybe twenty feet through which rain water can be scooped for storage in the wet season and pulled out in buckets in the dry when the land is parched. It makes you wonder if Prout missed Kordofan’s greatest landmarks altogether and so never learned that one of the many Arabic words for baobab- which gives us its English word- is Abu Hibab, Father of Seeds, not to confuse with Abu Habib, Father of the Beloved.

Want a laugh? Have a drink.

In the course of considerable journeying through Kordofan, I have not seen a single approach to gaiety in any of the villages. Even the little children seem to be constantly weighed down with the gravity of life in this land. There is sufficient evidence that merissa is drunk in considerable quantities, but even drinking seems to be a serious matter, to be begun with solemnity and finished with grave decorum…

-General Report on Kordofan, H.G. Prout, 1877

Yes, those who get drunk on merissa may be solemn and decorous, but if you get so drunk you fall off a camel, Khaali baalik min Zouzou! You’ll never hear the end of the laughing and the teasing. Bilal once fell off and we hooted and hollered for a week. Not quite Cat Ballou- the camel wasn’t drunk too and Bilal had a longer fall. He somehow remounted and we continued on our way. Only 39 more days to Egypt.

Beeple now freer

I was reading the U.S. State Department’s unclassified travel advisory, an amazing document. “Travel in all parts of Sudan particularly outside of Khartoum is potentially hazardous…[American] travelers to Sudan have been subjected to delays and detention…unpredictable local driving habits…roadblocks…In addition to the ongoing civil war, heavy rains…extensive flooding…water-related diseases…control over police and soldiers may be limited.” My favorite phrase was, “In addition to the ongoing civil war.” I glanced beside me. “You were saying?” His main objection was simple: “Because beeple no free!”

-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

In Sudan, after a year long protest when the army opened fire in the streets, the people are now free- or at least they are freer than before. Omar al-Bashir is in jail, women can wear pants without being harrassed by Islamic vice squads, and many things a lot more important are now permitted only because of what the people have achieved. Yes there are still delays, yes when it rains in Khartoum it still floods, and yes truck drivers are still crazy as ever, but yes also the police and soldiers are finally under control. In fact they have mostly gone away.

Yet last week’s Supreme Court decision, saying that the civilian government must pay up to $4.3 billion punitive damages for al-Bashir’s ties to Osama bin Laden’s bombing plots, has now thrown a curveball. I think of civilians like KhairAllah and his eldest son Soliman. What will civilian rule mean to them with such debt to pay for a military ruler’s crimes? If democracy in Sudan is born with the original sin of having been birthed from a dictatorship, then he may as well have stayed in the desert and kept his son there, and not sent him to university in Khartoum. Soliman wants to vote, not to ride camels, and not to pay for al-Bashir’s crimes as decreed in a US courtroom..

Tea at the grand

At last our train rolls into [Khartoum]…It is well after sunset when we reach the Grand Hotel and find comfortable rooms and baths awaiting us. As we enter we are met with some roaring lions in a neighboring garden…The Blue Nile rolls at our feet, broad and blue and delicious…How profound the peace and repose of the city tonite! I feel inspired to mount yonder white camel and so wander off into the city, anywhere, everywhere…cross the river, and all alone save for the camel and the moon, enter the very house of the Khalifa and be greeted by, “Have a whiskey and soda, old man”.

-Islam Lands: Nubia and the Sudan, Michael Myers Shoemaker, 1910

Less notorious than Shepheard’s [in Cairo] is the Grand Hotel, Khartoum…a result of General Kitchener’s unique replanning of the city following the crucial Battle of Omdurman…In the new city of Khartoum which he laid out in the pattern of a Union Jack in a symbolic statement of British dominance…

-Anthony King, Imperialism and the Grand Hotel

Nothing says British dominance more than putting a whiskey bar in the home of the Mahdi’s Khalifa, Successor to the Rightly Guided One. After independence, the Khalifa’s house became the museum of the Mahdiyya, with such souvenirs of the world’s first successful uprising against British imperialism as the depiction of General Gordon’s beheading. But all that was in the “native town” of Omdurman. It was the year 1988 and a century had already passed.

Back in Khartoum, Steve and I were up at dawn, jetlagged and eager to get to Kordofan. We wandered out Nile-side hoping to have our breakfast at the Grand Hotel. I had taken tea there a few years earlier and thought he’d like its old world charm. But we found it a wreck with broken windows, doors off their hinges, cats running wild, and a toothless guard heating his kettle over a kerosene stove in the middle of the lobby. Tafaddal, he said. So we joined him. ‘Atlan, Out of order, he didn’t need to say. Ingileezi or Sudaani? I asked. Both, he answered. Here, have some date wine, O My Brothers. And we were served just like in the old days.

Bullish on buul

If Trump likes hydroxychloroquine, he’ll love camel urine.

-Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

Ibrahim the Cook will pour it for him. Masood will tell him how good it tastes. Rabih will say he is crazy. Bilal will think he does it because he is a khawaja. Abdullah will ask, Why does he drink buul, urine? KhairAllah will say, Because he is a buwala, a man who urinates a lot. Or as the proverb puts it, Huwa abwalu min kalb, He is more frequent in making water than a dog. But it is more simple than that. Donald Trump is a bawwaal, a big fat pissing camel.

Markab...saddle it, sail it

Ukhayyad liked to brag about the thoroughbred camel to the other young men of the tribe…he would raise his voice, singing one of those bewitching songs, like charms against loneliness that riders take refuge in whenever they cross waterless deserts…

That was not the first time. The camel had entangled Ukhayyad in far worse humiliations many times before.

-Gold Dust, Ibrahim al-Koni

Al-Koni didn’t learn Arabic until he was twelve. He is Tuareg and spoke Tamashek when he was growing up in the Libyan desert, in the Fezzan region. Now he writes in Arabic, novels and epics as he calls them, always with the desert as his theme, “a shadow of the place without water” he calls it. But when you drive south from al-Koni’s birthplace in Ghadamis towards the Fezzan oasis, you see plenty of water sluicing north through huge steel pipes and sucking the aquifer dry. The Great Man-made River Project they call it, making even an oasis the size of Fezzan into a desert. Too much water, flash floods, can kill you. As can too little. So to survive you may need both meanings of the word markab, boat and beast [on which one rides].

Taking nawal to the movies

They cut out her tongue first. Later came the rest. For the Imam ruled according to the laws of God’s Sharia. Stone adulterous women to death. Cut off the hands of those who commit a theft. Slash off the tongues of those who spread rumors about irradiated milk.

-The Fall of the Imam, Nawal El Saadawi

She tell me how forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence…

-Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

William Lee, an Exterminator- Interzone Incorporated? A Hallucinated Giant Talking Beetle- An organization based in the Interzone…a notorious port on the North African coast. A haven for the mongrel scum of the Earth…an engorged parasite on the underbelly of the West. William Lee- Ah, I can’t see it.

-Naked Lunch, screenplay by David Cronenberg

I first met Nawal El Saadawi in 1984 at the womens center she directed, on the same block of Sharia Darih Sa’ad I had lived on five years earlier. I wanted to interview her about Cairene pharmacists who doubled as untrained OB/GYNs advising patients across their countertops. Yes, the womens health care system in Egypt was screwy. Nawal was a medical doctor and enraged about it.

I must have given her my telephone number in New York because even though I hadn’t seen her since 1988 when I was back in Cairo making Voice of the Whip, she called me at home in 1991 to invite me for coffee. She said her son wanted to study filmmaking in the States and thought I knew something. I invited her to see Naked Lunch which I thought would have some interesting Orientalist imagery for her to chew on later.

I don’t know what she may have expected, I told her it was based on the Beat classic and Burroughs had lived in Tangier near Paul Bowles. Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky had just been made and maybe she thought it would be something like that, something great she could tell her friends back in Cairo about before word had spread.

We left half way through. I think she must have hated the misogyny more than the violence and drug use, let alone its complete incoherence which in a novel you can escape by putting it down for a minute or a day but not in a movie theater. We didn’t talk about why we’d just walked out. I apologized for wasting her time. We parted on the sidewalk and I never heard from her again. But then I thought of Burroughs killing his wife in life and in the film. A suspended two year sentence in Mexico, typically an unprosecuted honor crime in Egypt…she would not have been surprised by either.

A shaa’ir’s shi’aar

Triliteral root Sh-Ayn(‘)-R. Verb. 1st Form, Sha’ara, He knew; He said or spoke or gave utterance to poetry. 3rd Form, Shaa’ara, He vied with him in poetry; He slept with him or her in one innermost garment. 4th Form, Ash’ara, She (a camel) cast forth her fetus with hair on it. 6th Form, Tashaa’ara, He pretended to be a poet. Noun. Sha’r, Hair. Shi’r, Knowledge, poetry, falsehood (because of so many lies in poetry). Sha’ir, A sheep or goat having an itching on the knee which therefore scratches it. Shi’ra, Hair of the pubes. Al-Sha’raa, The star Sirius. Shu’roon, Poetaster, flies that collect on the sore on the back of a camel which disperse when roused. Shi’aar, A call or cry by which to know one another in war or a crowd. Shaa’ir, A poet. Ash’ar, A testicle, scrotum, furred garment, a kind of fly that alights on camels and asses and dogs. Mutashaa’ir, One who pretends to be a poet but is not.

-Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon

There were no shu’roon on the Darb al-Arba’een. Either they were true poets like Bilal and Idris, who recited verses corrupted from the Classical at the campfire or on camelback, or they were true poets like KhairAllah, who with a slight flick of his whip could make the herd turn off the pace and halt as one wherever he intended. Each man was shaa’ir of his own diwan.

We often cried out to the others when driving the camels fast and late in the dark, from our places at the front of the herd to the back or from the left flank to the right. Not a war whoop, not a crowd call, not exactly a shi’aar, but rather a joke or a tease or a taunt. O Uncle KhairAllah! O Father Bilal! Where will you make our beds tonight? We are tired and want to sleep. The ibl are thirsty and want to drink. The sha’ir want to scratch their shi’ra.

Sahara means...

Triliteral root S-H-r. Verb, 1st Form, SaHara, He made milk. 3rd Form, SaaHara, He showed openly what was on his mind. 4th Form, aSHara, He went forth into the desert. Noun, SaHraa’, A desert, a waste, a tract of land like the bare back of an animal [on which you ride], destitute of herbage, without trees and without hills and without mountains. SuHayraa’, A certain sort of milk. SuHaar, The sweat of horses. SaHeer, The certain uttering of the voice of the ass of the vehement kind, more vehement than the neighing of horses.

-Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon

Funduk SaHaari

-An old hotel in downtown Khartoum

Hs and Ss are Arabic letters in non-emphatic and emphatic doubled pairs, transliterated in English as h and H, s and S. Sahara and all its cognates- the desert, the horse sweat, the certain milk, the donkey bray- are pronounced emphatically, a velarized S and an aspirated H. Lane defined the desert as being as bare as a riding animal’s back. My camel’s back had ticks and sores, tufts of long hair and dried sweat. Unsaddled but not as destitute as the SaHraa’.

I stayed at the SaHaari Hotel several times. The lobby had a few people always waiting around, because of its comfortable chairs I guess, but I never saw other guests upstairs. The elevator had broken and no breakfast was served. I liked it because it was central and less expensive. The third time I tried to stay, I found it closed and moved across the street to the Acropole. I asked the Acropole’s owner what happened to the SaHaari.

It’s been closed for more than ten years, he said. I said, But I stayed there last year. Yes, he said, I heard that some crooks had broken in and rented out the rooms behind the government’s back. Were the sheets dirty? Yes, I remembered, But not with horse sweat or a certain sort of milk. And sometimes at night I had heard the vehement voice of an ass. In the SaHraa’, not the SaHaari.

Better damm khafeef than lisaan taweel

The inhabitants of Cairo are a people of a merrie, jocund, and cheerefull disposition, such as will promise much and performe little…And if any of them chance to fall out in the streetes, they presently goe to buffets, and then a great number of people come flocking about them to see the conflict, and will not depart thence until they have reconciled them.

-Description of Africa, Leo Africanus, 1550, translated into English in 1600 as A Geographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke…

A cheer, a buffeting, and a reconciliation...that just about sums up life on the streets of Cairo when I was there forty years ago. On my daily walk to AUC, not more than five blocks along Qasr al-’Aini, I was as likely to see khinaa’, conflict, as I was to see tasalah, peace-making. More likely a darab, a drubbing, than a bousa, a buss. More often meet with lisaan taweel, a long [sharp] tongue, than damm khafeef, light [easy going] blood. Sometimes a falling out from a coffeehouse, sometimes from a donkeycart. Sometimes a farraash (literally, a brusher, a man who brushes himself against women, a frotteur), sometimes a nashshaal (pickpocket). But usually just a loudmouth or a know-it-all, a wiseguy or a rude boy. Cairo has them all, a city containing multitudes, most of whom, following the Arabicke Spring, are far less mabsout, merrie, now than they were then, when Leo and Lou lived there.

Singing to Saide camels

Moreover the saide camels are of a gentle disposition and are imbued as it were with a kind of humaine reason; for when they have a day’s journey to travel that is more than their want, their masters cannot drive them on, being so tired, with whips, but are faine to sing certain songs to them; wherewith being exceedingly delighted, they performe their journey with such swiftness, that their saide masters are scarce able to follow them.

-Description of Africa, Leo Africanus, 1550

Like a fish sleek and tasty, Your eye like a Seiko watch.

-a Dubayt, a camel-driving couplet, composed and sung by Idris, a drover in Bilal’s dabouka, 1988

Did they sing to themselves or sing to their camels? Why the rush? Certainly the camels didn’t care to hurry, they were going to their own slaughter. Yes, the drovers wanted to hurry, the lights of Cairo awaited, but as Yusuf said, I want to be rid of this miserable job. The sooner he’d arrived, the sooner he’d have to start it all over again. Nothing to sing about there. So maybe best for both man and animal to take it easy in the desert…not much grass, not much water, but where time stands still. Like an unwound Seiko watch.