#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Mauritania

The Desert and the Drum is the first novel to be translated into English from the largely Islamic northwest African nation of Mauritania. Although this translation is from French, so slightly puzzling as to why this took so long.

Rayhana is a young Bedouin woman whose life is turned upside-down when foreigners arrive to mine for metals nearby her camp. She falls for the charming Yahya, leading to her having to flee the camp and stealing their precious rezzam or tribal drum.

She flees to the nearby town in search of former slave girl Mbarka. Here she is confronted by many new things and a new way of life, illustrating the contradictions in contemporary Mauritania, and the struggles of being a young woman here. Rayhana is full of anger at her tribe and at the injustices perpetrated against her. The ending of the book felt abrupt and somewhat unsatisfactory. I appreciated some of the insights into this country but I felt some of it was probably over my head. ( )

The first work of fiction to be translated into English from Mauritania. I wasn’t expecting much but I was far too unkind. An excellent book in all respects; well-written, fascinating plot (a girl who leaves her Bedouin tribe and her life in the Sahara). I guess it teaches me that I need to take more chances. Works of fiction from places without a Western tradition of the novel have often disappointed me—my first world bias—but this opened my eyes in many ways. Very highly recommended. ( )

16/2021. I read The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, set in Mauritania, which is about a young, high caste, Bedouin woman, Rayhana, who becomes disillusioned with her nomadic tribe, and their traditions, and leaves alone for the unknown in a nearby city to search for her only urban social contact, her mother's escaped slave (note: slavery is illegal in Mauritania but some high caste Arabs and Bedouin still hold lower caste and generally darker-skinned people as slaves), and her child born outside marriage, stealing her tribe's sacred drum as vengeance on her way out. Anyone who knows how hostile societies can be to an inexperienced woman without a back-up network will understand that the protagonist's life isn't likely to improve under these circumstances.

Before reading, I had qualms about a middle aged man from a traditionally gender-segregated society writing in the first person from the point of view of a teenage girl but the author is either keenly imaginatively empathetic or has spent a significant amount of time actually listening to young women or both, perhaps due to his experience as a journalist. I found the protagonist and her reactions realistic, complete with her youthful tendency to self-dramatise and her limited perspective on life because of her sheltered upbringing. The text doesn't shy away from depicting Mauritania's caste system, including illegal slavery, or mentioning other systemic problems such as corruption, although this brutal honesty is balanced by the humane decency of a few individual characters. However, anyone expecting an unlikely happy ending will be disappointed.

I won't spoiler the ending, because this is one of those rare stories that I think truly deserves to be read along with the protagonist as a journey into the unknown, but I will mention that the whole book works as both a contemporary style novel and a nuanced political allegory, and anyone who thinks the point of the story is that the high caste protagonist should have stayed at home without straying needs to ask themselves how any of the high caste women anywhere in this scenario would survive if their slaves escaped to live their own lives, for themselves, and their high caste dependents had to actually work for their own keep.

The prose is simple but effective, and Rachel McGill's translation seems sympathetic to Mbarek Ould Beyrouk's original.

I also love the cover art by ReeM Al-Rawi (and you can find more on her website).

Quotes

"I didn't sleep that night. I worried about what the next day might have in store, in this city I'd been told was merciless, where life could slap you down and no one would even bother to look. I was afraid of what might befall me in such an enormous camp of stone and cement, where nothing was quiet yet nothing ever spoke to me. I trembled to think that my lost love could be hidden somewhere in this chaos of soulless dwellings and lives, that the sneers of heartless city people might have wiped away his smile." ( )