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language: Tamajaght (English tr. by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and Christopher Wise, from French translations by Hawad and Hélène Claudot-Hawad)
country: Niger
year: 2014
form: poetry
dates read: 7.4.25
Oh mule,
bent under the load
of ancestral pain,
suffocated by the conqueror’s vanity.
Go! Set in motion
the spiraled march.
Oh difficult far-off,
high-altitude,
capped clavicle horizon
of utopia
set free.
Hawad’s long poem, or suite of linked poems, In the Net, translated from Tamajaght to French by Hawad and Hélène Claudot-Hawad and then from French to English by Claudot-Hawad and Christopher Wise, is a bitter, fiery elegy for the short-lived Tuareg-led state of Azawad, declared in what is now northern Mali in 2012 and dissolved in June 2013.
the poems link together aspects of both colonial and post- or neocolonial Tuareg history, from French nuclear tests to the Malian state’s opening of the Taoudeni basin to oil and gas multinationals to the both colonial and postcolonial erasure of Tuareg history and culture — notably in a pointed rejection of the cultural weight placed on Timbuktu’s Arabic manuscripts, which Hawad sharply contrasts with the blithe unconcern for the destruction of tifinagh — which is to say, the writing system used for the Amazigh/“Berber” languages — inscriptions and other manifestations of Tuareg history and culture.
the poems are a sobering reminder of the ways the end of formal colonialism did not, in fact, mark a radical transformation of many former European colonies but simply a repainting. Hawad sees little difference between the policies of the French state and the policies of the Malian state, backed as it was until 2022 by the French government and military. the UN, too, is a tool of colonialism:
[…] UNESCO is one of the props
of the cultural customs officials
who work for the United Nations.
And one of the edicts of the United Nations
for people without a state
is the whip.
The whip that lacerates you,
erasing every mark
of your people and your land.
all of these bodies are united, from this perspective, in their commitment to the destruction of the Tuareg,
[…] turn[ing] all living things into ash
anything alive
daring to breath[e] in the Sahara.
(the printed text has “breath” — as is unfortunately to be expected from university presses, the book is riddled with small typos like this — “forgot” for “forget”, “breath” for “breathe”, and similar.)
the heart of this, as Hawad is relentless in pointing out, is resources: Azawad claimed the Malian portion of the Taoudeni basin, believed to hold large reserves of oil, and Hawad identifies this as the crux of the issue: Tuareg liberation — indeed, a broader Saharan liberation, where “[a]nyone we meet on the path / can come along, as our comrade” — is an obstacle to both the Malian state’s “development” plans and the corporations that intend to exploit these resources.
it’s a powerful, striking, thought-provoking collection. I’m a bit stuck, though, on this passage from the beginning of poem 7:
Azawad,
to be defeated is an art
mastered in solitude
in the dark of night.
Defeat is a status apart,
a gaze that ignites thinking,
a vigorous mental faculty
endowed with its own manner of thought
aiming at an ideal with strict demands.
It’s an elevated station
situated much higher
than the level of the conquerors.
if defeat or subaltern status is the guarantor of moral superiority, what if the MNLA had won? what if Azawad had achieved its independence and received international recognition? would the project of Tuareg liberation then lose its moral high ground? perhaps it’s unfair to dwell on hypotheticals like this, but I think if we want to take revolution seriously we have to be prepared for — and, in fact, actively desire — the possibility that the revolution will win, that it will not simply be a romantic lost cause that can be safely memorialized. I don’t think this is necessarily reflective of the totality of Hawad’s politics, but it’s a lingering question, and one with relevance for other revolutions and revolutionary movements and what Wendy Brown, after Walter Benjamin, has called “left melancholy” — “Benjamin’s unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present”. certainly the poems remain committed to the project of Tuareg liberation (self-effacingly so: “Azawad, poetry can’t blunt / the razor-thin rocket / of the remote-controlled guillotine / for those left hanging / on executioner’s wall.”), but…I wonder.
moods: dark, hopeful, polemic