The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…