Brion Gysin - The Process

My room had mud walls and a mud floor, a split-palm ceiling which dribbled sand onto a gray sheet thrown over a bare iron bedstead: the only other furniture was a battered tin pail of water. Barred windows looked into an open-air kitchen court where food of a sort was being prepared by three ragged old women with tattooed faces who sat on the ground, screaming back and forth at each other over their pots at the top of their lungs, for hours on end. Meals were served by the scarecrow “boys,” who shuffled back and forth between kitchen and dining room, stuffing into their mouths whatever rejected food guests had left on their plates.

There were flies: the “boys” were covered with flies like a living garment. Flies swarmed around them like a veil, supping on the juices of their big, empty eyes, which they rimmed like animated mascara. Flies landed to drink at the trough of their loose lips or got pushed into their mouths along with the food. Naked puff-bellied children begged for scraps outside the dining-room window or just lay there listlessly in the dust, like sick iguanas covered with flies, cramming red earth into their mouths. Flies swarmed so thick on the dining-room tables that I took them for a furry tablecloth until a “boy” made a lazy swipe at them with a filthy rag. Then, they rose for a second into the air only to settle back again in precisely the same order. Flies in the Sahara ride in squadrons on everyone’s back. They show a decided preference for khaki and their remarkable discipline is most clearly observed on a khaki field. They ride around on everyone, nose in the wind in glittering chevrons, flight patterns which lift into the air to shift and reform as their field moves.

I might have been welcome at the hotel, for the Syrian, too, was at war with the captains but, when night fell like ink dropping into water and he called me to drink anisette with him and some other palefaces at the bar, I had to refuse him and so lost a possible ally. I slipped out of the hotel to where my young guide, the Broken Boy, was waiting for me in the threadbare shadow of a tamarisk tree.

Somewhere out there in the dark, someone is singing in a husky quavering voice like the wind:

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara and never turn back!

Eternity flows all about us as we pull at my pipe, utterly silent under the stars. Our feet make no sound as we pass through the shallows of starlight beneath the ghostly tamarisk trees and over the last sandbar on the edge of the village. Where are we going? “To the Sahara,” he whispers in my ear with one arm about my neck. I can hear the pulse jump in his wrist. Suddenly and inexplicably, there is a rough mud wall under our out-stretched palms as we feel our way to the door of this compound out on the outskirts of town. Somewhere within, somebody plucks at the strings of an instrument. The player runs up a shivering chromatic scale and, as our lips break apart, a quick fire of aromatic thorns bursts up snapping, on the other side of the door. Through the cracks between the boards we can see into an African compound glowing red in the firelight. When my little friend softly raps out a rattling code on the door with his knuckles, I hear with a smile the same chuckling word the masterpiece matches say to the box. Animals are stirring in there. Someone is shuffling across to the door. My companion is gone. “ Eshkoon? ” Who are you? they ask, from inside the door, and I hardly know what to reply. Who am I, indeed?

Someone I think I must know and who surely knows me has opened the door and stands there with the firelight behind her, inviting me in. This black witch-shape against an orange background of fire is familiar to me since the dreams of my childhood, and the sensation becomes more and more overwhelming as she flaps up and down, bowing me into the compound, dancing in front of the flames. I step into an adobe courtyard of sculptured mud the color of a burning rose, glowing like African flesh. Dear little donkeys and a baby camel turn to blink at me from under a palm-thatched manger. Mothers and grandmothers sit smiling around the fire. Everyone who ever has loved me is there: I am in Africa, home.

I bow and we softly stroke palms, murmuring greetings and blessings from the distant hills and plains. A door is flung open to my right, making me blink in the sudden diamond-white glare so many times brighter than firelight which streams out from that room. Holiness shines out from a chamber as bare as a Saharan shrine. Singer is there; sitting cross-legged on a golden straw mat with his big, full-bellied gimbri , a lute he cradles like a murmuring child in his lap. A tiny carbide kinki lamp whistles and flares, illuminating the room less than his smile. Where he sits the ground is a throne.

Singer’s giant shadow leaps up the red walls behind him, overwhelming the light in the room as he stretches out his arms, bending over the lamp on the floor, to welcome me, drawing me in. The wings of his cloak extinguish the lamp for a second; just the time to whisper in my ear as he embraces me: “ Dar tariki tariqat : In darkness, the Path.” I set my sandals neatly on the smooth floor of white sand at the foot of an iron army cot with its sheet drawn tight for inspection — the only furniture in the room. Hanging high on the wall over an empty monumental fireplace sculpted in red mud is a rifle; no other objects in sight. My place is beside Singer; on the woven straw mat to his right, facing the door. I throw back my burnous to pull out my parchment bladder, hard-packed and as big as two fists. With some little ceremony, I slowly unwind the thong at its neck to show him the emerald grass of Ketama — my “passport.” His eyes and smile widen: “ Ul-lah! ” he breathes in a voice almost as deep as Ghoul’s own.

From the depths of the unlit fireplace, he drew out a span of bamboo as thick as a cane and half as long, onto which he fitted a clay bowl as big as a briar pipe for tobacco, packing it full of my keef. We smoked the first pipe together in absolute silence. Hearing the Brothers arrive in the courtyard, Singer clapped for them to come stumbling in, slipping off their sandals in the sand, murmuring greetings and blessings as they shuffled up one by one to snatch kisses from my lucky hand before settling down in a ring. The big pipe was stoked and lit by Singer, who passed it around the full circle, instead of letting each man finish his much smaller pipe as we do in our chapter at home. I was only mildly surprised. Some of those present had come three and four weeks by camel across the Sahara to be with us that night. In such scattered communities as these, small divergencies creep in.

The pipe passed and passed again. I knew they had never smoked any keef like this before. Without thinking, some of the Brothers began to recite. With a smile, because I am not really one of them, I drew slightly out of the circle to let Singer lead them into more intricate patterns of words but he arrested them all with a great clap of his hands before anyone could start to profess. Abruptly, they stopped and rose to their feet as two latecomers slipped into place. Singer, their master, stepped into the center of the circle as the Brothers joined hands. I remained in my corner, seated in their leaping shadows. They stamped and swung hands in order to catch up the rhythm and, then, they began jumping and shouting in unison:

AL- lah … AL- lah … AL- lah …

Exhale on the first syllable, inhale on the second. It becomes:

HA- ha … HA- ha … HA- ha …

And then:

A- a … A- a … A- a …

And, at last, the cyclical, rattling word of our zikr , a pair of unvoiced aspirates, our Key and our Link: what the matches say to the box.