To recycle horizons

Tuareg Poetry for the 21^st Century. Furigraphic meetings.

Portique Nomade, Agadez, 23-25 November 2006
CD & booklet 32 pages
Introduction, notes and translation by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and Hawad. Furigraphic pen drawings and paintings by Hawad.
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Forty-four Tuareg poets and performers, from the Aïr, the Tagama, Téshilé and the Azawagh, gathered together for the first “Furigraphic” Encounters of the Nomad Gateway, offer a glimpse of the richness of Tuareg poetry.

“To recycle horizons” … This desire, this necessity, this wish, led to the first Furigraphic Encounters, which were held in November 2006, in Agadez on the premises of the Nomad Gateway. For three nights and three days, poetical voices, the rhythm of words, the modulation of chanting, and cries of emotion made the clay arches ring. In a calligraphic echo of the sounds weaving around the room, the walls were decorated with the furigraphic works of Hawad, the painter and poet. The aim of these encounters, according to Hawad, their initiator, was to “create a space where many voices could meet with one another and where each would gain stimulation from the others so as to weave the fabric of the present.” In truth, the present is a source of palpable anxiety felt in modern Tuareg speeches, poetry and chants, evoking the narrowing of horizons, the country torn apart, the world scattered, young people sacrificed, forced into exile and into hiding. With the discovery on Saharan nomad land of new deposits of uranium, oil and other minerals essential to the global economy, the Tuareg are caught between the interests of international mining companies and regimes which govern them and act as if the desert were unpopulated. To be a Tuareg in this context is a dangerous thing. How can one be a nomad today? How can horizons be opened up? How can one break free of suffocating constraints? How can one make sense of the world again? (Amara publications, translated from French by Wendy Ouali)