In continuation of the photograph of Hawad that gives its strength to this issue’s cover, Maïa Tellit Hawad shares with us her perspective on her father’s work, in particular its relationship to language. Hawad creates graphic work like the ones that accompany this text, but he is also creating new concepts in Tamajaght language, which allows for poetry, painting, calligraphy, and political manifestos to exist together in an artistic continuum.
Thrown via a brisk gesture, the letters reel and collide, morphing into lively silhouettes: ⵣ (Eza), ⵜ (Eta), ⴶ (Ega), etc. On canvas, they personify the signs of the Tifinah alphabet and the Amazigh cosmovision. In trance, their limbs have multiplied, stretched, intensified. Mutating beyond the word, straddling other signs or sometimes other texts, they pass through graphic turbulence, leading their gathering to the point of hiccups, bold splatters of color.
These inky, painted creatures are drawn with a reed/qalam (aghanib in Tuareg), or sometimes with a brush for larger formats. They form the pictorial side of what Hawad, the Amajagh (Tuareg) painter and poet, calls “Zardazghanab,” or “furigraphy”: a literary and graphic practice that uses words, letters, signs, and lines as ammunition to confront disaster and dispossession.
“When I was born, the chaos had already begun.” With this succinct phrase, Hawad, originally from the Aïr region and linked by family ties to the Ajjer (now Niger, Algeria, and Libya), evokes the steamroller that crushed his world. Born in the 1950s in the heart of Central Sahara, Hawad grew up in a society still reeling from colonial conquest and the defeat at the turn of the 20th century. The annihilating power of colonial domination’s technology (firearms, war machines, and new modes of transportation) scarred minds. Thirty years of anti-colonial resistance fought with asymmetrical weapons brought the country to its knees. Thousands of civilians were thrown into mourning and driven into exile. The social and political organization of the Tuareg, confederal in structure, is divided and de-structured, closely monitored and isolated from its neighboring partners.
Such dismemberment bears the seeds of an ongoing destruction of an entire ecosystem (human, plant, animal, and mineral), marking the way in which “modernity” negotiates, consumes, and digests the desert.
From 1960 onwards, Tuareg territory was carved up into five new states. Colonial rule created a torn country, a desert hacked up according to the advances and interests of foreign armies. Libya, Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso emerged from this ripped cloth. In the wake of the colonial posture, new political administrations concentrated all power to the cities and turned the Sahara into a useless, “wild,” and suspicious margin of the national territory.
Within this closed framework, sedentarization policies are initiated for the sake of “development,” while Saharan mobility (now deemed “trans-border”) is made illegal. The expropriation and devastation of Tuareg lands is conducted for the benefit of French nuclear (1960-1966) and chemical tests that were carried out in colonial and post-colonial Algeria, as well as for international mining extraction. The pollution of the land and the destruction of plant and water resources, preserved for centuries by the nomadic management of the territory, go hand in hand with the silencing of all Saharan inhabitants’ claims to their rights. “We saw the emergence of a force of extermination in which the universe was not only wounded, but could be destroyed… As a nomadic Tuareg boy, I was haunted by this chaos,” recounts Hawad, who as a child grew up listening to the stories, poetry and debates of his elders on resistance and defeat. In this new order, what is to be done with one’s culture? How to live with the cataclysm? In what terms should one express the present and sketch out future horizons?
Hawad, a polyglot, trained in classical Arabic and fluent in several regional languages, decided to write in his own tongue: Tamajaght. He writes in vocalized tifinagh, used by the ishumar movement (teshumara), of which he was one of the initiators.
Ishumar, a Tuareg word inspired by the French word chômeur (unemployed), refers to young Tuareg people who perilously straddle the new borders and return to mobility in search of work in Tuareg regions that became Algeria, Libya, and other neighboring countries.
Forced into economic exile and excluded from urban centers where the decisions that govern them are forged, the teshumara is marked by precarity. From this political and social suffering ishumar poetry and music have sprung. Audio cassettes, and later MP3s, circulated across the country. Electric guitars lent their resonance to songs that lamented the encampments left behind and underscored the imperatives of struggle.
These young people, both boys and girls, draw on their own culture for the elements of their contemporary expression. They recycle the codified genres of Tuareg poetry and create new repertoires to cope with the present. By extending the scope of inherited cultural tools, they push them into new functions of resistance, without renouncing their identity.
In addition to the motif of nostalgia, Hawad integrates another theme into his work: that of inversion and subversion—a process of metamorphing entrenched horizons. Amidst a context overshadowed by chaos, it was this very chaos that needed to be summoned, enacted, channeled into trance, and recalibrated through a reenactment of its aesthetics. Hawad asserts, “I must deconstruct the structure that has engulfed me. The graphic gesture must correspond to the violence I endure and that to which I respond. With my pen, I unsheathe claws; I rend the void; I lacerate the chaos in return.” His poetry transgresses the precincts of linguistic convention, disregards grammatical order, and ruptures the ligaments binding words. His paintings, in turn, set signs into motion, projecting them into the maelstrom, distorting and transforming them. These signs, now turned into visages and agents of cataclysm, etched hitherto unwritten narratives within the desolation.
Hawad’s imagination depicts forthcoming upheavals—nature rebelling against those who exploit it: the crimson Saharan wind invading Europe, desert dwellers migrating to the Arctic, the radioactivity of Polynesia rebounding to its source. In this landscape, it is for the poet, the insignificant, the vanquished, the “remnants of nothingness”—those for whom imagination remains their sole possession—who bear within them propositions and potential solutions, or at the very least, perspectives on the predicament. Through his work, Hawad makes tangible, and extends invitations to these minuscule entities, rendered almost imperceptible by the new world’s chessboard: ants, insects, animals, grains of sand, shadows, breaths, letters from marginalized languages, indigenous peoples, nomads… Hawad’s labor is imbued with the idea that another grammar, different terms, might emerge from those that have been crushed, marginalized, or relegated to obscurity. Those who teeter on the brink of annihilation, refuse to capitulate and continue to challenge adversity, be it giants or empires.
For as long as I can remember, I have seen my father filling entire notebooks, canvases, leaflets, tiles, leather skins, bits of wood, bones, pebbles, and more with our signs. The works though, are not confined to the object.
Galloping, exuberant in gesture and production, they remind me of the use of tifinagh in Tuareg country; a swarm of letters traced on sand, rocks, or the signified earth. Our deserts are populated by these markers indicating nomadic paths and attachments to the land.
As it is with Tuareg therapeutic practices, which uses repetition, litanies, borborygmus to escape immobility and shock, furigraphy constitutes a means to put a lost, wounded desert back into motion, by inventing and resignifying another desert in the infinite space and time of imagination. “Poetry is my mount,” says Hawad. “It allows me to leave, to bounce back, to get out of a situation of encirclement, suffocation, aging or deterioration of what surrounds me, to propel myself towards something else. I’m looking for the kind of walking that doesn’t stop and that continues in spite of my confiscated territory; this is what I’ve called ‘surnomadism,’ as if to join the wind, which only exists in movement.” ■