Seeing Man
On the mantlepiece a stuffed quail looms
that once relied on an infinity of forest
– Joseph Brodsky
Siwa, the Great Sand Sea. In 1885 the adventurer Luigi Robecchi
Bricchetti called it Oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The tour guides parked
my camel near theirs, near silver humped Ferraris which fuse like
burial mercury in the heat. I would never have guessed still life
survived inside that slippery Mountain of the Dead, caves which
predate tourism as well as pilgrimage. In antiquity did the wind
lounge by the windows of that human formicary, eyes with nothing
to gaze on, no bodies to blow waywardly, no skulls waiting to be
snapped by the feeble flash of greyscale Orientalists? In life I had seen
enough to drink an omen wherever it springs. Later, the violet clouds
opened above a silver lake; and the martyred sunset burst outwards,
out of its sky-skin, like flesh from an overly ripe date. Yesterday you
told me about the news of a suicide bomber in a market in Sinai.
Paradoxically, what’s the difference when someone kills via drone
button versus the hero who kills with their own body, his quest
leaving no citations. Mbembe says: To kill, [the suicide bomber] has
to come as close as possible to the body of the enemy. To detonate the bomb
necessitates resolving the question of distance. In the end little reflects
the glint of war and all it distantly ruins. I spied a gang of golden
daffodils plotting by the polluted pools of the Oracle. Were they
once German soldiers seeking shade, skinny dipping their epic
bodies in those waters? I met our weekend cabal at our luxury
hotel. Metropolitan citizens to include one heiress of a Chinese
African-media mogul; one descendent of Robin Maugham (‘…all
the habits of today come from what happened in the past…’); two
Ivy-league digital nomads, newly graduated, upper-middle class
children of immigrants; three sun-burnt but tenured academics
cloddishly trading abstracts on dead ethnologists; some off-duty
foreign aid workers on R&R; and a gay military officer whose
uniform bears a rainbow flag stitched below a flag of his authoritarian
nation. He spends his time fantasising about a haven slash base
here, where ‘…such agreements continued, but in great secrecy, and
without the actual writing, until the end of World War II…’ Then
at a second camp, kept far enough from ours, a conference of
reconciliation groups, advocates for transitional justice, reparations,
truth commissioners for survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing –
they too have earned a little time off, some cool leisure after their
veiny tribunals. I stared at us; I stared at our corpse-lives. And I
began to picture the pain of others, how the ground we rested on,
loved on, paid for, was so pristinely haunted and occupied by those
eidolons adrift from time. The Long Range Desert Group, hungry
to fight the Empire of Japan, or the Afrika Korps, or the 136th
Armoured Division Giovani Fascisti – all these actors centre-stage
in a theatre of sand, in someone else’s souvenirs. At dinner we knelt
beneath an asylum of fake palm trees like understudies vying for
history’s shade. A metal net trapped the light above the foliage, lost
empires glinted on the canopy, red dust hummed on winding sheets.
Welcome! our noble five star-rated host, evening Oracle, proclaims.
Young men then carry out, so we are told, an authentic dish of ram’s
head buried in hearts of palm. Is it still tradition to tip here? Stay
forever! Eat until you explode, a standard host joke. Like a globe whirls
after it is spun he then goes around our tent one by one to prove he
can small talk in as many languages as there are time zones; later,
he will twist his tongue, rip us off, earn commission for every mass-
produced specialty copper coffee pot we adore to drink out of and,
as if bewitched, cannot resist purchasing. He declares that I must be
Japanese. I choose not to correct him. To push him for a further
discount I will tell any minor lie: Just a memento for a friend I love.
No, not a girl. Two friends. Twin beds. To you, the only other British
national, he recites a standard line from Wikipedia: The first European
to visit Siwa since Roman times was the English traveller William George
Browne, who came in 1792, to see our ancient temple, who was murdered
in 1813 on his attempt to travel to Tehran. Was I paranoid to read our
lucent omen in that future he professed like a chance invocation, a
divination to be ashamed of every night, every year, until when, until
this water runs dry. Unlike ordinary goods did I believe words accrue
power to solidify their custom futures the more they are declared?
I recalled a sentence from Henry James I copied down on the plane:
You have the imagination of disaster and see life indeed as ferocious
and sinister. That night, postcolonial revenge via violent gastroenteritis.
Luckily my new phone model functions as a potent searchlight; but
if one grain of sand gets into its charging port, you warned, it’s all
over for this trip, our images, our queer memories. So I went back to
bed and, as if carrying on the heaving duties from our host, I invited
strangers and their stranger dreams inside. I dreamt of a songbird
massacre I must have once read about, one slaughter gantlet in the air
where branch knots warbled like restless calluses, and every meshed
acacia trapped a tail or quaver chest, now welded onto the hot lime
anointed bark of earlier. All the fowls on fire in this Old World.
Supposedly, Alexander the Great brought his conquest here by following
birds across the sand. Did feathers drift like ash on the wind then?
Electronic mating trills, wire-rooted, looped out of stereos disguised as
wood, blurting odes to lure another flock. Crossing birds came to rest
just to die in this oasis. Silent skies emptied as our manic poaching
fingers rubbed their bijou hearts like cocked bayonets. Every word
was as light as eating a wing. Human. Divine. Carrion. My academic
conscience kept saying I would rather suffer evil the natural way, but I
did it anyway. After the act was done the scent of plum trees, boiled
to make a gummy snare, wafted all across the night like a bag of wind.
I made one cairn whistle with the spat out bones of crushed thrushes,
skulls blown in by the kiss of metal, impotent throats from quails,
orioles, chaffinches – but I could not erase the feeling that these were
also human bones. In my dream I refused to stare into the eyes of the
Amazigh child who watched us eat our parts only to offer a bitter
epilogue: Better birds fallen and not bombs in the end. Yet I awoke
feeling like I was not so far from that quiet cenotaph I built but only
a few seconds or centuries ago to worship at. What were the lines
etched on its stele which I brought back on my tongue, the old verse
I re-translated under our netted tents, wondering which life was
real, whose dream I dreamt: I arise and unbuild it again. As dawn
arrives at the oasis we have nothing left to sacrifice or get wet but
empty pages in our passports; the raw light turned our bodies into
transparent glass, weeping, impenetrable. I asked our Oracle if I could
buy a skin’s second gambit, a holograph to grow, to make mine, if I
tried and really desired two. Every day traded the same. Sand seemed
to alter so little. In this life I know my organs float on bodies of water
consistently, regardless of their owner; I have travelled enough times
to know that no act can stay dry, pure, without implication, forever.
I know you must have dreamt queerly last night too because in the
morning you said nothing, only sketching anarchic tidewaters where
a bullet of ice mutates into a silver eel before stabilising on a wedding
ring. Ahistorical interference in the natural ebb, in what is deemed as
commonplace. There were many blue bodies on the oasis foam that
day, many variations of organising glass. In the end the great pool was
so shallow we sat in it like imperial debris plucked from underwater
archives, salt-rusted statues reanimated just to play pretend at ancient
customs. On wide ceremonious deckchairs as white as lotuses we
complained about the price of iced drinks, vector-borne diseases,
faraway wars now no longer so faraway, and the drought which might
not end by natural means. Last night, rumours that a mythological
beast invaded or escaped the gardens of this bio-reserve. Were we
fast asleep, too busy in our domestication to capture changing river
tracks, to document those rituals all around us, those symbols of
rising seas, punctuated chronicles, a sun swelling in a song to solicit
the new tourist season. On the last day before we flew home I slipped
our Oracle an extra note in search of a terminal forecast. His answer
was as clear as a pack of tepid bottled water. I was to ask you next time
we were alone and true: Do you really think we can live on like this?