Empire and Magic in a Tuareg Novel: Ibrāhīm al-Kawnī’s al-Khusūf (The Lunar Eclipse)

Summary

Ibrāhīm al-Kawnī was born in 1948 in a remote region of the Libyan desert near the border with Algeria and Niger. According to his own testimony he grew up speaking Tamashek, the Tuareg language, and only learnt Arabic after the age of twelve when he went to school in one of the oasis towns of Southern Libya. He states that from an early age onwards he had developed the ambition of writing what he calls ‘the epic of the desert’, a task which, in his view, had yet to be accomplished. After a long period of gestation, much of it spent in Poland and Russia where he came to know the work of his literary mentor Dostoevsky, al-Kawnī burst on to the literary stage in the late 1980s with a succession of remarkable books, some twenty by now, which brought him fame and international recognition.

The chief protagonist in all his works is the Sahara desert, which he describes in one of his early short stories as ‘God's regent on this earth who carries out His edicts and commands in harsh totality’. In his recent interview, he went yet further, stating that ‘God, man and beast are joined into one body called Sahara’ (al-Kawnī, Discours, p. 98). This fusion of the transcendental and the real in al-Kawnī's vision of the desert resides at the core of his extensive oeuvre and is, perhaps, the principle reason why it may be placed within the remit of magical realism as has been observed by a number of critics. Hafez credits him with having provided Arabic literature ‘with a dimension of magic realism similar to that in Latin American fiction’, while Eissa considers that in al-Kawnī's work magical realism has the effect of fusing man and his desert environment into a single entity by erasing ‘the conventional distinction between character and space’.

The objective of this paper is to examine more closely the interface between the magical and the real in Ibrāhim al-Kawnī's first novel, a substantial work in four volumes written between 1986 and 1988 which carries the title al-Khusūf (‘The Lunar Eclipse’). It narrates the story of Shaykh Ghūmā, a Tuareg tribal chief and warrior who faces the progressive loss of all that he holds dear: his offspring, his friends, his beloved, his favourite animals and plants and, perhaps most painfully of all, his desert abode.