Abstract
A Black and Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco, Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Arabic studies and comparative literature at Williams College. His first book is entitled Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023). He’s currently completing a second book entitled Desert Imaginations: Saharanism and Its Discontents (University of California Press, forthcoming). His journal articles have appeared in LA Review of Books, PMLA, Interventions, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, History in Africa, META, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He is coeditor of the two volumes of Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (1966–1988) (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Refiguring Loss: Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Cultural Production (Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming).
What is your definition of “desert”?
There are many ways to define the desert. You can think of it as a space that receives less rainwater than the average needed to sustain green space or forms of life that we associate with water generally. You can also define the desert as a mostly barren topographical space where rich forms of life and existence exist, and where people create and procreate in conditions many would not consider ideal.
However, there is space behind these definitions to go beyond what we consider normal, desirable, comfortable, or acceptable. The desert occupies about 33 percent of the Earth’s surface, meaning deserts are ubiquitous and present everywhere. They are part of the air we breathe and the existence we lead in the world. As such, they must be more than just challenging spaces that are not ideal for life. They obviously exist for ecological reasons that we have not yet fully explored and deserve more theoretical articulation than we have been able to talk about. A truly desert-thinking methodology would allow us to see the desert as an essential component of our world’s ecosystem.
Deserts are homes. They host life. They contain their own internal logic that sustains forms of existence that, instead of being articulated in more critical terms, have been posited as problems. Colonialist thinkers and developers still consider deserts as places to be greened, un-deserted, and stripped of their ‘desertness’ to accommodate the only way of life they see as normal or ordinary. As a result of this logic, the desert cannot be what it is by itself, but rather we humans think it should be. Hence we impose our power to shape what the desert should be instead of what it currently is. In centering humans as the primary agents who define deserts, we risk sustaining the ongoing, misguided idea that deserts are a problem.
If deserts were a problem, why do people live in them? Deserts are populated because they are not monolithic. Reductive approaches, popular culture, film, and literature have created the perception that the desert is all ergs (sand dunes). However, the truth is that the smooth, wavy, and dreamy ergs are only a small fraction of the desert, made of regs (stony lands), mountains, and bushy areas. Deserts contain rivers, valleys, and oueds (a gully or stream bed), with plants and seeds of a future life that emerge and bloom as soon as rain falls. As you undoubtedly know, there are several conflicts in the world over desertic areas. These places are not devoid of significance for the people who see them as spaces of millenary civilizations and ways of life that have shaped who they are. The desert is home to humans, plants, animals, and spirits. The desert dweller is aware that s/he shares this vast space with other beings—both visible and invisible—who complicate their relationship and behavior with the environment and the territory .
So, for me, the desert is both what it is and what it is being forced to be. I like to approach the desert as what it is. It is a complicated, multilayered space that is certainly hard to inhabit but that conceals and sustains life in ways that require us to go beyond our accepted definitions of what constitutes life and existence to fully capture its depth .
What does the desert mean for you, and can you share the trajectory of your work about the desert?
The desert, for me, means home. It means a place where people and other beings live, create, and procreate to sustain forms of life and existence that have so far escaped predominant conceptions of what is valuable or important.
One important example is when you tell people about oil spills. Everyone will be upset if you say an oil spill happened in the Atlantic or Mediterranean. As people know much about sea life, this emotion seems natural. They know about whales, dolphins, fish, algae, coral reefs, and all sorts of aquatic beings that combine a fascination with the unknownness of what lies under the sea—a future life to be discovered or that does not cease to surprise us. However, the response would be entirely different if the same oil spill happened in a desert. People think deserts are empty, and the death that could be brought to a desertic space by an oil spill is minimal or nonexistent. You can see that the fundamental issue here is the definition of life and what is worthy of being defined as living. Sea life is alive because we confer a notion of life upon it, whereas desert life is easily dismissed through parallel and invented concepts of emptiness. When scouting the Algerian desert for a location to detonate the French nuclear bombs, General Ailleret quipped that he saw some scorpions and lizards in the “desert within the desert” and nothing more. Allegedly, since there were no people or other creatures worthy of his notion of life, the desert invited its demise or annihilation through nuclear experiments. The reality, however, was different. The desert was very much alive, and people and animals populated it.
My work starts with the fundamental premise that what we have known about deserts is immersed in colonialist perspectives that pay no attention to forms of existence beyond the visible or what is accepted as the norm. My work attempts to demonstrate that the desert, the way we approach it and think about it, is the result of a long history of sociocultural and political construction that I have called “Saharanism.” Once we are aware that the desert that we see in movies, read about in books, and see deployed in fiction is constructed, our job is deconstructing it by grappling with the various imaginaries that undergird its construction. How does one deconstruct the desert? The deconstruction starts by interrogating the ideas and the canonical knowledge that has been established about deserts and trying to poke holes in them. For example, I do not know how many times we have to read the desert through Deleuze and Guattari instead of drawing on Abdul-Rahman Munif or Ibrahim al-Koni, to name just a few. What we read and how we read it significantly affect how we approach the desert.
So, for me, Saharanism offers a space through which I can put both colonial and Indigenous approaches to the desert in conversation to highlight that a space so enormous and so brutal is also capacious for life, intimacy, love, and a different type of human-animal relationship. My goal is to humanize the desert beyond the instrumentalist and extractive imaginaries that have so far reduced it to a dead or developable space only. The desert, for me, is a place, and places are intertwined with our existence. We have affective, emotional, and mnemonic relationships with places, which form and shape a large part of who we are or even become.
Why do you think it is important to look at the desert? Why now? What’s urgent? What prompted your work on Moroccan Other-Archives?
Although my book Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence is about state violence, it contains an important chapter about a desert jail called Tazmamart. Established in 1973 to house officers and soldiers who participated in the coups d’état against King Hassan II in 1971 and 1972, Tazmamart embodied the inhumane uses of deserts in our modern times. Thanks to the work of anthropologist Aomar Boum, we now know that the French used the Algerian and Moroccan deserts as internment camps. Since ideas and practices circulate, it is not surprising that Moroccan officers would get inspired by the colonial past to put the desert to the same use to punish their co-citizens in the postcolonial era. After all, the desert is scorching hot during the day and extremely cold at night. Choosing a place with extreme weather conditions ensures that the prisoners cannot survive if they flee. They were doomed either way. So Moroccan Other-Archives engages partly with this desert jail and its broader literary significance.
However, I did argue somewhere else that other-archives as a concept can help us study deserts and what they conceal. I have defined other-archives as “texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited memories” and, I add here, as toxic matter, residues of colonial legacies, construction projects, and remnants of ideas that either found or did not find their way to implementation.Footnote1
In this context, what does a desert other-archive look like? What stories can it tell us? How might we be able to recover it and deploy it to understand better how deserts are treated today? Defining and engaging with this desert other-archive will open a whole host of scholarly and environmentalist vistas that will certainly enrich our knowledge about all the “messed-up” stuff that happened or still happens in deserts and allow us to write a different history of these places. I would define this desert other-archive as the totality of recoverable knowledge that uncovers both the concealed and the yet-to-be-known stories of what happened in deserts. As you know, archives are about what happened, not what is yet to happen. A lot happened in deserts. The alphabets, bones, unfinished projects, radiation, tracks, paved roads, brothels, satellite military bases, demolished homes, and plants that carry in their genes the stories of the people and products that once upon a time planted or watered them. This other-archive is accessible but has not been articulated or theorized in clear terms.
Now let me go back to the first question of this section. This work is important, it’s timely, and it’s necessary. For the longest time, we have not been able to perceive the dangers of the colonial construction of deserts as empty, dangerous, dead, and extractable. The powerful nature of these imaginaries has overshadowed the deserts’ intrinsic environmental organization, their importance as ecosystems, and their nature as homes for people and nonpeople. Now that indigeneity discourse has gained more traction globally, it is crucial to rethink deserts through the Indigenous lens to better perceive how Indigenous people conceptualize their space, treat it deferentially and understand the stories they tell about it. Every desert has a cosmogenic and environmentalist story that colonialism and the predominance of Saharanism’s cliches have doomed to amnesia. When we rehabilitate deserts in our critical academic discourse, we rehabilitate a mode of existence, an Indigenous way of thinking, and a whole field of cultural production with crucial environmentalist sensibilities that the dominant Euro-American-centric approaches have disregarded or overridden. I want to see Desert Studies as an integral part of an environmental approach that rehabilitates, listens better, and thinks of the desert environment as an extension of ordinary existence in the world. Deserts are not abnormal; in fact, they are normal. Maybe changing people’s ideas about their abnormality will let our societies finally see their normalcy.
Also, can you elaborate more on the term Saharanism you recently discussed in your contribution to the edited volume Deserts Are Not Empty and your recent article “Saharanism in the Sonoran”?
Saharanism is a very powerful and all-encompassing imagination that sustains the image of deserts as dead, empty, dangerous, and extractable. The result of centuries of encounters between deserts and different peoples, Saharanism has been the product of politicians, ambassadors, engineers, explorers, travelers, litterateurs, colonial officers, and dreaming romantics. This “universalizing imaginary” has created the conditions for the deserts to be approached through a utilitarian perspective, which considers them anomalies that can only be accepted if they offer something that can be exploited or used, like oil or gold. Anyone who reads the conversations among French intellectuals in the 1950s would see that the Sahara—the largest desert in the world—was not necessary per se but rather it was considered useful for what it could have contributed to France’s economic and geopolitical grandeur. However, Saharanism forgets that Indigenous people are in deserts and that the latter are not necessarily seen as a burden. I developed Saharanism as a concept to name this long tradition of writing about practices that unfold in deserts: phenomena that remained unnamed and the imaginaries or ideas undergirding them that have not yet been theorized. Saharanism offers the necessary language to pin them down and theorize their genealogies and development across time.
Saharanism is racist and genocidal. From the first Greek encounter with the Ethiopians, whom they racialized as “burned faces,” to the French nuclear tests in the Sahara to the United States’ importation of camels from Egypt to use them to fight the Native Americans and the Mormons in the nineteenth century, Saharanism has taken many manifestations. Aside from the 1961 nuclear experiments in the Sahara, the French attack on Laghouat in Algeria in 1852 was probably the first genocide that occurred in that desert. Over 6000 people were exterminated, and the ones who found refuge in the caves were fumigated to death. Eugène Fromentin, the French painter, happened to be in the city right after the genocide, but he could not name the genocide despite talking about entering a “half-dead city.”Footnote2
By developing Saharanism as a framework, my goal is to open the desert to a fresh critical approach that theorizes what has been happening in deserts. For instance, we always hear: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” One of the questions I ask myself is, “What is it that happens in Vegas that needs to stay in Vegas?” The answer is obvious, but beyond that we must think about what happens in deserts that needs to stay in deserts. We have to think about drone testing, border control, deaths caused by tightened security, and other things we will only find out later.
Saharanism has the power to weaponize deserts into what they are not: this is exactly why it is essential to look at how several fields, from church literature to bandes dessinées, are intertwined in its construction.
What about education/pedagogy? How can we learn from (and with) the desert to rethink the architectural discipline, its purpose, and investigation tools? How do you research deserts?
Pedagogy is crucial for changing how deserts are perceived and bringing attention to their people’s environmental sensibility. For the past four years, I have been teaching a course entitled Saharan Imaginations, which aims, among other things, to help students to think about the desert as an environmental space and push against the dangers of Saharanism, both in discourse and in practice. The course has become popular over the years, and I received more applications than I could accept for a seminar-style class. I believe that the value of any education lies in its long-term impact on students, and I am always happy when I hear from former students who find themselves thinking about something relevant to our desert discussions. It has happened several times, and I am glad to see my students take these teachings to new horizons. So pedagogy is crucial to taking ideas outside books and research articles into the world, and students are creative, eager, and committed to the kind of environmental questions they discover through their study of deserts. Most often, students are surprised to find out how many questions they did not expect are studied through the desert lens, but surprises give place to incredibly generative discussions.
There is a long history of intersections between deserts and architecture. Architects, both civilian and military, played a significant role in the history of what I call Saharanism. The desert appeared like a canvas upon which architects could impress their plans and give shape to their ideas. I think French discussions of the possibility of building a “mer intérieure” in the nineteenth century was one of the moments in which we see the intersection between Saharanism and architecture. The project to bring the Mediterranean to the Algerian Sahara failed, of course, but the degree of architectural detail and discussions are there to prove this intersection.
Architecture and engineering are also present everywhere in deserts because once someone thinks of an idea, architects and engineers are the ones who work to make it happen. I can think of many examples, but the most important ones are the Trans-African railway, which the French planned to use to connect France to West Africa. We can also mention the Russian construction of several dams on the rivers that feed the Aral Sea, which is now dried up. Furthermore, the US-Mexico border wall is a work in which architecture, engineering, and security intersect. Beyond these big projects, there are also smaller projects where architecture is very present in the desert in the form of demolished homes, workers’ villages, mining sites, and unpaved roads. Architecture’s history is co-constitutive with the history of deserts, and it has yet to be written. Mohammed bin Salman’s construction of Neom City in Saudi Arabia and most of the buildings in the Gulf states have involved engineers from London and New York.
How can the design discipline engage the context of the desert in noncolonial terms? What do you think is a necessary mode of reparations to the people displaced by the colonization of the desert, in material and cultural terms?
A noncolonial approach to the desert should center the desert people, their cultural production, and their way of life. This perspective should not and cannot mean that other forms of knowledge have no place in the desert. To the contrary, by centering the desert and its people, we can tease out new knowledge that respects the traditions, ideas, rationalizations, and practices that have been produced and transferred across generations for millennia by people who call deserts home, while also testing these traditions against the questions that plague modern societies and the challenges of environmental humanities. Colonialism has overpopulated the desert not with people but with ideas that have acquired several afterlives. Because of its force and strong ability to disseminate ideas, the colonial system has created realities that transcend deserts’ both spatial and temporal realities. Just read colonial narratives about Australia or Africa, and you will see what I mean. However, rehabilitating and decolonizing the desert is key to centering knowledge production by Indigenous peoples. It’s a crucial way to liberate the desert and give it back to its people.
I think each desert is different. Some deserts might require restoring stolen lands, like in the United States and Mexico. In other places, like oil-rich countries, better redistribution of resources. Elsewhere, like the Algerian desert, it is more a question of historical truth about nuclear experiments. Each place is different, and the approach should depend on the scale of dispossession and harm done to people.
How can we learn from the desert biome to reimagine the relationship between humans and nonhumans?
One of the best sources that reimagine the desert-human-animal relationship is Ibrahim al-Koni’s short novel Nazīf al-ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone). This short novel shows how all three elements are co-constitutive of each other. The main character Asouf forsakes eating meat to save the Waddan (the mouflon) with whom his father before him had a pact never to eat meat again. Against the forces of hunting and environmental destruction represented by two Libyan hunters and their American customer (John Parker), Asouf and his family represent the desert environmental consciousness that introduces a different level of interaction between humans and nonhumans in the desert. Humans do not necessarily have to exterminate every other being to survive but rather have to find a balance between self-sustenance and nature’s self-regeneration. We see a different rapport with nature between John Parker’s excess and Asouf’s self-restraint—and even self-sacrifice to save the animal from Abel, the hunter. One of the critical elements that al-Koni represents in this novel is nature’s ability to take revenge on those who infringe upon its codes. This is symbolized by the deluge that kills the hunters after their assassination of Asouf when he refuses to show them the Waddan. Nature has the ability to self-cleanse, and the desert is the scene al-Koni uses to reveal a new possibility for environmental consciousness.
Is there a specific author/text/source you recommend to your students and colleagues in an imaginary bibliography about deserts?
Several works are essential for people studying or interested in learning from the desert. Munif’s novel Cities of Salt is a marvelous masterpiece particularly relevant to architects.
Al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone, mentioned above, is infinitely rich. Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger’s travelogue, is a terrific and monumental work that records life in an entirely different Gulf than the one we know today. Finally, Carl Lumholtz’s New Trails in Mexico is an impressive work about the American Southwest in the early twentieth century. Readers are advised to use discretion when dealing with the racist, Saharanism-infused ideas and language in the last two works.
Notes
1 Brahim El Guabli, “Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence,” in Jadaliyya, April 11, 2023.
2 Brahim El Guabli, “Saharanism: Genealogies and Manifestations of a Desert-Focused Imaginary,” Williams College, March 16, 2023. Accessed online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVwCNW9lMN4.