Hawad – The Tuaregs

Hawad, Tuaregs, The “Spiraling March”,
Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2012.

Are the armed Tuareg uprisings that have sprung up since the 1960s in Azawad (Mali), the Aïr, the Azawagh (Niger) or the Ajjer (Algeria) really surprising, incidental, unforeseeable? Certainly not. They are part of the long resistance of the Tuaregs to colonial empires.

“O world disaster, what desolation
my nation that rises up in the turmoil
that rides the bullet toward Medina
abandoning us in the land of submission
where I curl up in fear
of the column sent by the commandant
who musters all his infantry…

–poem by Bila, around 1900

The Tuaregs are divided today among Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Libya and Algeria. After their defeat against the guns of the colonial troops in the 19th century—Ottoman, French and Italian—who decimated the old military and political elite of the Tuaregs as well as a large part of the population, ruining the land and placing it under a harsh military control—which the Tuaregs call tiwta, the “disaster”—forms of resistance emerged involving profound transformations of society on the military, political, ideological and social levels.
This new type of resistance took shape around 1900. It laid the groundwork for the general insurrection of the Tuaregs in 1916 headed by Kawsen who had called it the “Spiraling March” because it used strategies of evasion adapted to unequal forces. The heroic war sung in the Tuareg epic poetry was replaced by guerilla warfare, the ambush, the fighters’ mobility, but also exile and the search for modern technical and military knowledge. The final defeat of the rebels and the hanging of Kawsen in 1919 was followed by a pitiless repression that, far from wiping out the “spiraling march”, made its spirit stronger in the Tuareg imagination.
The 1950s and 1960s saw the creation of the states of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). The Tuaregs refused to be “the fifth wheel on the artificial framework of new States,” but their challenges were crushed. So, another phase of fringe resistance was built up: the teshumara. This name, formed from the French word “chômeur” [unemployed], reflected the situation of exclusion and marginalization of the Tuareg who could no longer live there and had to go into exile once again, to construct other ways of being, to find new partners, to acquire the knowledge that would allow them to recycle their weakness, defeat and the strangled horizons into tools for a future day “to mend the deserts” and “reconstruct the land.”
Resistance, first of all, consisted in being satisfied with not adopting the logic of the conquerors, despite adversity and defeat, and not being impressed by their armada. In short, to keep swarming under the steamroller. This period was marked by an intense artistic creativity that renewed the traditional poetry and music of the Tuareg world, accentuating and imposing life on the margin as a reference value.
It is in this context that in 1980 many young men answered the call of Muammar Gaddafi who was lacking cannon fodder. Bearing the burden of independence and old revolts bathed in blood, they got back on the road to exile. They left, like their parents before them, in search of ways to confront a world that gave them no role to play. Their motto: “Trade your blood for knowledge,” meaning military skill. They joined the Libyan barracks not for money nor for the illusion of supporting the cause; they knew that Gadaffi was steeped in pan-Arab and anti-Berber nationalism and would never help the Tuaregs liberate their lands. But they needed to get tough in the name of their land that they were hoping to free one day, as well as expressing their poetry of the 1980s.
The itinerary of these men, recently returned from Libya, is like their ancestors who at the beginning of the century fought for the order of Senussi against the colonial armies in the north of present day Chad, in Sudan, in eastern Libya and in Fezzan, finally to return home sixteen years later armed with rifles and cannons destined to “spit out of their land” the French occupiers.
Although different currents of rebellion choose either to take up arms or to remain in clandestine silence, aware of their weakness, all of them feed on this long experience of resistance and suffering: that of not being able to be what they want to be on the land of their ancestors.
For a long time the Tuaregs have followed their path and it is a solitary path. Their difficult march is, of course, hobbled by the contortions of realpolitik, by the manipulation of some leaders of the rebellion for the profit of various interest groups, against the background of global competition for access to the mining resources that arouse the greed of powers that are already obese but never sated. The “spiraling march” gets bogged down in radioactivity, uranium dust, toxic fumes, groundwater and air polluted by the extraction of minerals. And yet, it moves on.

The Black Flag

The Black Flag, Le Drapeau Noir, No. 1, August 12 1883.

To live free working or die fighting.

It’s not just as another challenge to bourgeois society that we gave the title Drapeau Noir [Black Flag] to this newspaper—bound to continue the struggle of the Lutte—and that we print here the immortal motto of our brothers the Canuts [in Lyon]. We also wanted to keep this glorious workers’ insurrection alive; to remind those who have already forgotten and to inform those who might still be ignorant. We wanted to warn the bourgeoisie that the only flag under which we will stand together now is the same one that poverty and desperation raised up in the streets of Croix-Rousse on November 21 1831 and that until the coming victory, we will have no other.
Our enemies couldn’t care less and our readers and supporters might give us a hard time, so they have to know—and we don’t have the right to keep them ignorant—why we are flying this flag, why we are adopting this emblem, why we are accepting what has, until now, been considered only a historical curiosity but absolutely inoffensive from a revolutionary standpoint.
We are not afraid to admit it, it will cost us—dearly—to abandon the scarlet banner of those defeated in May, to renounce the red flag of the brave men and woman of ’71, [in the Paris Commune], because we still shed tears for them and they still inspire us. We hold dear the stirring reminders of good times on those glorious anniversaries and the hate and vengeance that rises up on the dark dates. We haven’t forgotten those living in exile and prison, we whisper praise to them and dream of the coming triumph.
But there is something more convincing than all these ideas, stronger than principles, more powerful than theories.
What happens everyday clearly shows us that the red flag, so glorious in defeat, can in victory hide the ambitious dreams of the lowliest schemers in its blazing folds, as we see it has already cloaked a government and served as the banner of constitutional authority. That’s how we knew that for us, mutinous everyday, rebellious every hour, it could provide nothing but confusion and illusion.
Of course, if we still wanted to fight out in the open, in the organized battles that until now the revolutionaries have always had the naïve pretension to engage in with their enemies, the red flag could become ours. It is, in fact, all pretty and scarlet, a fitting banner for such fights and battles. A good representation, like feudal coats of arms talking, of getting rid of the privileged castes in the huge mass of people, the complete disappearance of social inequality, the unification of all classes into one class of workers.
But this is not enough anymore. We’re done with the misguided ways of the past regarding the purely practical domain of revolutionary action, just as in the speculative realm, perhaps, of emblems and symbols.
What we want now—and we say it without fear of reprisal in any way—is a partisan war, the combat of the “lost children” in the streets, as relentless as they are dissipated, fighting in the shadows, but hitting the mark, the only logical war, the civil war—the only worthwhile war—the social war.
Therefore, it is to those who are suffering, to those who are holding their breaths under the ever-increasing burden of poverty whom we call. Let those who have had enough of exploitation and slavery, those who want to put an end to the political and economic domination that is crushing us, those who want to break forever the iron chians that bind and keep us separate forever, come to us.
We distance ourselves from all sentimentalism and all compromise. We are staring a duel to the death with bourgeois society. They cannot win. And by taking the Black Flag, by unfurling to the winds the dark folds of desperation, it is more than a warning, it is better than a call, it is the death of the old world that we are displaying, it is the inevitable promise of its coming end and it is, at the same time, for all the poor and wretched, for those wallowing in misery, for all those dying of hunger, the definite announcement of an era of happiness, justice, liberty and peace: it is ANARCHY.

Also available at The Anarchist Library

The Doll’s Head

The Doll’s Head by Adrien Remacle

I saw it rolling between the gaunt, hooked fingers of an old hand that was rummaging through some old nails in an old box of tools. It looked like the head of a gloomy old man: eyes a little alarmed, an Arab nose, long in the face, drooping lines. It was carved of flint, barely polished. Or so it seemed to me at first.
The man standing over the box of nails, looking for a hook in the scanty light of the narrow window on this rainy day, got irritated at feeling this ball of stone continually roll around under his fingers wherever he was searching. He grabbed it and was about to throw it out the window.
I stepped in and stopped him, without knowing why. I had been staring at the little head for a moment and when it was about to be thrown out, it seemed to me that in the shadow of the old hand the face had fallen into a frown.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Dunno.”
I took the doll’s head and examined it more closely. It was better sculpted than I’d thought at first. The features were cleaner, sharper, the suffering expression was more than alarmed—it was frightened. The neck was sectioned off perfectly flat, absolutely smooth, like the stone had been carefully sanded.
I left with it. But it bothered me. It vaguely intruded on my thoughts. I rolled it between my hands, back and forth, back and forth. I didn’t want to just put it in my pocket because it worried me to think that this doll’s head would rub against my keys, the edge of my pocketknife, the ring on my wallet or my pack of cigarettes. But I was tired of having my hands full so I made a place for it all alone in one of my coat pockets. And I went about my business.
But I kept thinking about the head. I had to keep taking it out of my pocket and look at it. Yes, it was certainly better chiseled than I first thought! But it seemed to me that the features were less tense, maybe calmer, the expression less sad… An annoying conjecture! I was going to get rid of it, really, drop it on the ground for good… I didn’t dare. I looked at it again. No, it wasn’t as calm as I’d thought a minute before. And the eyes were so big now… There was terror, I think, yes, terrified suspense in the face. How did I not see this before?
I put the doll’s head back in my pocket and went on, dreaming of what this old face could have been in the past. Environments, landscapes passed through my brain. First it was under the earth – piles, blocks, beds of flint. Dark and disordered caves, human limbs squatting, kneeling before some manual labor that I didn’t see. Then all of a sudden, an old Arab, tall, bearded, grizzled, wearing a dazzling burnous; palm trees, an African sky, sand. The confused notion of a story, a complete story, distended, twisted in my mind, drifting, drifting, becoming clearer at times… Words appeared, phrases formed and repeated. It seemed to me that the old Arab had his head cut off. He told me what he felt, these words: “My body is long, long, long, long! My burnous will never be able to cover it from head to toe!”
Still I walked down the street, quickly. The sight of a junk shop aroused me, attracted me. Among the scraps lay a bag of Saharan fabric, a bag stitched with thread that pierced the frayed, dirty tissue and bit into the lines of still lively color. The pressing need to reunite these two objects, the patched up satchel and my doll’s head, froze me. I bought it. Feverishly I took the head of the old Arab from my pocket and… it seemed to be smiling! The features were very balanced now, perked up in hilarity. Certainly, just a minute ago, the right eye was a little lower than the left… but there it was, climbed back into place…
I hurriedly stuck the stone into the bag and feverishly twisted it closed. It, at least, was locked up safe and sound.
And I walked. I went without seeing anything, except in my head. The story picked up again, continued. I distinctly noticed in my thought a black man, a hideous black man who lifted a large scimitar over my Arab who was tied to a tree, exhausted, with his face turned to the sky and… his eyes alarmed like the first time, my first sight…
At that moment, awake again. A stream swollen by the rains crossed my path. I raised my eyes, remembering where I was, and saw, through an open window, the inside of a factory. A fat black woman was leaning out the window, her round, glistening face blossomed into a lascivious smile. Workers bustled about in the shop and then one of them broke away and approached the window, a black man, my black man! The doll’s head was seen at that instant within me… Ah! It really was him! There he was, making big, white eyes, sticking his red, foot-long tongue out at me, planting a huge slap on the ass of the woman. She was not upset and did not turn around; her black meat jiggled a little under her shawl is all. She laughed more lewdly while watching me. Then she lifted one of her elbows and darted a long, sharp finger at my satchel! She pointed at the head of the old Arab – I saw it! And putting her finger to her neck she moved it like a blade cutting her throat and made a little air-like noise, “ffftt”…
I was forced to take the head out and look at it again. Oh! This time it was horror! It was waiting for the blow, its mouth was contorted and its wide eyes saw the flash of steel!
I ran away with the doll’s head.
Since that time it has obsessed me, possessed me. It’s attached to me for the rest of my life. Maybe longer. I won’t ever dare banish it. I dreamed that if my house burned down, maybe I’d be free of it. Now that is the thought of a lunatic! It cannot burn or melt. I would find it again in the ruins. It would come back to me. Even a cataclysm can’t help. It is over. I will never escape. It will never end. A shape, especially the shape of a face, is not destroyed. It is never harmless to let a new face into your life… Others took hold of me in a similar way that I could not refuse… But if on the day of the box of nails I had not…? No, I couldn’t help myself… We are not free.

(1892)

André Caroff

The Resurrection of Madame Atomos by André Caroff (adapted by Michael Shreve)

After the disappearance of Atomia, Madame Atomos had recovered her health. Then she stopped thinking about her body. Until the day she happened to look into a mirror.
It was something that did not happen often, but this time the terrible woman experienced the biggest surprise of her life. For, she was growing younger!

Contents:
The Resurrection of Madame Atomos
The Seduction of Madame Atomos
On an Ill Wind… (short story by François Darnaudet)

In this seventh volume, Madame Atomos is miraculously rejuvenated into a woman twenty years younger than her former self! She uses her newly-regained beauty to seduce Akamatsu and plot a deadly revenge against Smith Beffort and his wife Mie, the former Miss Atomos, for whom she plans a hideous death…

The Resurrection of Madame Atomos available at Black Coat Press

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik, Iceland

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik, Iceland

Metrolysis

Metrolysis by Jacques Barbéri (translated by Michael Shreve), Liquid Imagination, Issue 16, 2013.

Interview with Arjen Anthony Lucassen

At Bifrost here: An interview with Arjen Lucassen by Richard Comballot and Michael Shreve.
S’il est un musicien de la génération actuelle qui revendique constamment la SF, c’est bien le multi-instrumentiste néerlandais Arjen Anthony Lucassen. Né en 1960, séduit très tôt par l’imagerie SF, le rock façon Beatles, Pink Floyd ou Led Zeppelin, il devient tout aussi rapidement musicien professionnel, jouant dans divers groupes de metal.
En 1995, il se « met à son compte » en créant de toutes pièces le concept Ayreon, invitant au long de ses six albums une centaine de musiciens et chanteurs venus d’autres formations (Hawkwind, Marillion, Focus, Iron Maiden…), portant haut les couleurs d’un hard progressif puissant et lyrique. Son dernier album (Lost in the New Real, 2012), solo pour une fois, puise comme toujours aux sources de la SF, avec en guest le comédien Rutger Hauer, le réplicant de Blade Runner.
Il nous a paru évident de lui poser quelques questions…
At Bifrost here.

The Erotectomy

By what series of unforeseen circumstances, by the pull of what subtle strings did I, alone perhaps among my sensible fellow men, first come to meet and then penetrate the mystery of the psychotherapeutic institution of Doctor X—a character whom reality borrowed from some tale of Hoffmann or Poe—well, it doesn’t really matter to the public. The fact remains that one morning of late I was at the door of this secret clinic, hidden in plain sight in the suburbs of Paris.
The room I entered was exactly like the amphitheater of a hospital. An intense brightness seeped through the glass walls and illuminated the tiered benches and the instruments gleaming in large bowls filled with carbolic water and right in the middle of the semi-circle an empty bed—more sparkling than pure silver, more out of place than a clown.
The auditorium looked full already—strange auditorium! Some of the faces were frozen in shock with inexpressible suffering. Others were twisted by maniacal spasms. Some of the most tragic stared out of unevenly dilated pupils—and their masks were motionless.
My soul battled between astonishment and anxiety. The chief assistant of Doctor X was passing by my row. I leaned over to him, “All these beings who were fidgeting around, are they curious spectators or are they patients?”
“They’re both,” he answered. “The Doctor’s method is to include the residents in his research. It amuses them at first: primary condition for a healthy mental therapy. And then, seeing others cured, they end up hoping to be cured themselves. All these onlookers really are crazy, if you’d like, but they’re consciously crazy, sometimes even willingly—crazy in love! Ah! The one we’re going to operate on has a great story…”
The assistant did not have time to finish his sentence because a thin young man with snow-white hair—the Doctor—had entered during his final words and was already speaking aloud.
“I don’t have to tell you, gentlemen, why we are gathered together within these walls. For the first time, before your very eyes, I will attempt a surgical treatment of Love…”
But at the word Love, shouts broke out. In a flood of brutal words the wild desires of some were unleashed; while others, enraptured, their hands clasped together, seemed to glorify a Madonna in the azure.
Silence was a long time coming.
“Gentlemen,” resumed the mythical, professorial Doctor—and his voice quivered with a metallic accent—“nothing is impossible for Science. It needs only time and the self-sacrifice of its servants. One day it will break all of our chains. One day it will make us masters of the world and we will be, as that old oriental book said, like unto gods knowing the secrets of things. Though this day will not shine for a while, at least we will have contributed a little to bring its dawning closer when we have conquered the fatality of the Unconscious in its most formidable form, which all of us have suffered.
“You know, gentlemen, how far the study of cerebral localization has progressed in this century. Since Broca we have revealed the properties of the third gyrus of the left frontal brain, and in stimulating or paralyzing this encephalic region by the appropriate means the practitioner can, at his will, like a water faucet, make words flow forth or dry up.
“In my own particular life, I have ventured to find out whether this completely new and fantastically fertile doctrine might not be applied to the study of the pathology of Love, particularly in treating that malignant form that I name here for posterity ‘Erotitis’.
“There’s no need for long experimentation to discover that a passion that penetrates and saturates every man, that suffers or rejoices in his physical and moral sensibility, automates in his central nervous system, objectifies itself in his imagination, fuses with his memory, overexcites or depresses his intelligence, strengthens or decimates his regal faculty, the will—that such a passion, I say, from which, perhaps, not one of our cells escapes, can acknowledge only one diffuse localization.
“So, the first difficulty to overcome was this: to track down Love, chase it out of the territory that it usurps everywhere and corner it into a pre-determined and accessible fold in the cerebral substance.
“Unsolvable problem? No, gentlemen! The problem is solved. It is not the time now to go into detail about what combined action of the most potent modifiers of the nervous system, especially by what methodical use of hypnotic or suggestive psychotherapy it was possible, in the patient I present to you today, to isolate Love and concentrate the Erotitis into a specific point in the brain, lying just under the occipital-parietal suture. I will simply say that humanity as much as scientific curiosity made surgical intervention a duty in this particular case. This patient, gentlemen, has already attempted suicide twice; and there’s every indication that he will do it again and again until he finally succeeds. Thus, the patient is really truly desperate and because of this, even leaving aside all other considerations, our attempt is clearly justified.”
During the Doctor’s speech a man, whose face was wrapped in a large compress giving off a sharp odor, was laid on the aluminum bed by the aides. The surgeon tied a white cloth around his neck and put his drill up to the patient’s shorn head. While the drill bit screeched a red stream suddenly spurted out.
The man fidgeted, incoherent words escaped his lips: “Chin!… Waterfalls!… Beloved!…”
“Give me the extractor,” the Doctor said. “See it, gentlemen, just a few centimeters of the bony substance is removed… Pass the haemostatic tweezers!… I make an incision in the brain… Again the tweezers! And the retractors!…”
“Madeleine!” cried the patient. “I don’t want to!”
“The young man protests, but we’re going all the way to cure him!… The other sponges, gentlemen, the other sponges! This pulp bulging here under my finger is where we have, for posterity, localized Love. We are going to cut most of it off. For love, like for cancer, a recurrence is always to be feared. Notice that under the gray substance, I have reached and I am sacrificing an equal portion of white substance. The Erotitis is equally sensory and motoric. We shall leave it no refuge, not a fiber left to tyrannize the brain!”
The patient’s head was hanging, spiked with tweezers that were clicking around the lips of the wound. The Doctor gave a final slice and straightaway his bare arm, red up to the elbow, lifted up and brandished a bit of brain flesh at the end of his instrument.
Then there arose from the benches of the amphitheater a torrent of shouts, curses and weeping, like from slaves terrified of a deliverance for which they had given up all hope.
And the raucous chorus of mental patients around the Doctor, who was weeping, victorious and haggard, sang a hymn of revenge—a hymn that still terrifies my memory!—while spitting on the hideous debris, they cursed it, trampled it and in doing so destroyed all the suffering and all the joy of Humanity!

The Erotectomy by Louis N Baragnon (La Revue Blanche, November 1894)

The Player

The Player by Jacques Barbéri (translated by Michael Shreve), Polluto: Wage Slave Orgy, December 2012.