The emotion the desert stirs in us floods our being with a drug from which it is hard to recover.
The vertigo of our silences plunges us into our deepest abysses. Faced with the light of these silences, another silence arises, an inner silence that brings peace with oneself.
The grandeur of these solitary and eternal spaces enchants us and fills us with that emotion which stays engraved within us forever.
Yes, it is into my desert that I invite you !
My desert is SAHARA. My initiation into the desert began, it is true, with the poetry of the people of the desert, and particularly those of the Hoggar, who told the stories of Dassine and of the great chief Moussa Ag Amestane. He liked to say : « The reed flute never sings so well as in the solitude of the open space where silence alone listens to it. Man, you must learn to fall silent like the silence, to hear the song of space. Who can swear that light and shadow do not speak ? Only those who do not understand the language of day and night. »
Farida Sellal — Nomad Once upon a time there was a desert.
A desert unlike any other…
It lay between the Ajjer and the Ahaggar, suspended in mid-air, defying time and space…
Once upon a time, a space that settles within us, in the hollow of our life and our existence.
It is true that on those Saharan nights one enters a kingdom, that of the silences: our silence before the silence of others … Before the silence of this desert.
Our self melts and merges into a symbiosis, and then the desert speaks to us. We are left without a voice. In the depths of the desert, the one we find buried deep within ourselves, every element quivers from the macro to the minuscule …Everything vibrates within us. Some have called it a land of dream. The colour, the tones of the light….The space. Even time plays with shapes, and at each moment the landscape adapts to it. It is a surprising thing.
In this desert, we walk barefoot on the sand or on the stone engraved for eternity. Truth before the evidence of the world.
Is it then in this desert that we discover « the desert » we carry within us?
Is this the shadow and the light speaking to each other ?
The conscious before the subconscious?
Did Moussa Ag Amestane not tell us to fall silent, the better to hear the song of space?
Between the real and the unreal, the desert is the void, there is nothing. Nothing but the immense expanse piercing the sky. The sky no longer above us, but beside us, before us and behind us.
Seized between two worlds, beyond human understanding, words make themselves heard in a setting of eternal dialogue. I lost myself, then found myself again… Into the hollow of the silence of my story, I invite you.
The Sahara The answer of the silence of this desert mirrors the emotion felt before the immensities that unveil themselves to us like a deep breath of freedom.
Does the breath of freedom then come from the nomad peoples?
After all, is anything more nomadic than freedom?
Is anything freer than the nomad?
The men of this land speak little.
Their language, the « tangalt », favours metaphor and symbol.
Do they not say « Assouf » to name a certain emotion before the desert?
The « Assouf » means solitude, but also the nostalgic longing for something we miss. The «Assouf» is that state of melancholy blending joy and sorrow, the memory of a past happiness yet so present in solitude.
What presence can be found in solitude?
When one utters the word « desert », the image that comes to mind is, depending on the person, a field of dunes, or a plateau of stone with nothing hovering in the air. The word desert can also give the sensation of thirst, of scorching heat, of an overwhelming sun.
The word desert can likewise give rise to the sensation of fear. And yet… And yet how far this word is from what it claims to be.
My story begins to the south-west of Tamanrasset, which the Touareg call by the name of Ténéré. They describe it as “Akal-n-Esuf”, the land of the void and of solitude. I had just been appointed to the wilaya directorate of the PTT of Tamanrasset and I was in charge of carrying out the special southern programme, which consisted of linking 32 isolated localities to the rest of the country. It was in January 1979, during the mission to Timiaouine, that a sandstorm rose in the Timissao… Although the guide and Seddik the driver had advised me not to leave the car, I set off into the turmoil with only my chèche on my head and the burnous I was wearing.
Years later, in 2002, I set off again in search of the nomads who had found me and of the imzad player who had brought me back to life. I did not find the old lady who saved my life, but her sister Tahiguel Ag Mansouri remembered me well.
Taguelmet 
She saved me She took her sister’s imzad and played for me the air that gave me back to life.
“Human time stood still” in her hands.
A cloud of incense envelops my senses. At the sound of the imzad, my senses recover the meaning of the course of my life.
Seddik, 2002 The Timissao:
It is in this place that my story begins
and it is here that I found my way again. A message beyond time lifted me into a world between dream and reality.
The Timissao
In the Timissao, between sky and earth, I wandered at random across the sand dunes through long corridors bordered by rocks. A veritable labyrinth. A light wind caressed my face. It was a breath of infinite gentleness after the sandstorm that had cast me, gasping, onto this uncertain path. The pitiless light of the desert was a torture for the eye. Where then did I draw the strength to feel, like a flood of tenderness around me, in this rocky universe whose majesty defied time ? Whence came this heightened sensibility that made me perceive the slightest movement of the air around me as a melody ?
The wind could not belie my certainty of finding my way again. Sooner or later. And so I kept walking, entrusting my fate, when night came, to the wild stars that tore across the sky. And despite the protests of my aching limbs, I do not remember having moaned or wept.
Winding my chèche around my head, I had taken refuge in a cleft of the rock face from which I looked out over a field of dunes strewn with stones. The setting of the sun had been of a beauty to make one forget all the sensations of this world below, the demands of the body and even its physical existence.
Time stood still.
An instant, a brief instant.
I was alone.
A world without path, without space, without air.
Without hands, without eyes…
The soul laid bare, in the utmost nakedness of oneself.
It was a world that taunted me to the point of tearing out my guts.
A world without words.
The wind had withdrawn, leaving me alone before another space of silence.
The desert had just given me the strength to wrench myself free of that time.
I remember the consecration of that day which lifts the dawn effaced by the light of the sun. My gaze questioning the sky ricocheted off the faces of the cliff that had offered me shelter. It was there that I discovered the evidence of the world. My soul had begun to listen in this land of silence and of stones made of life. Stones of words and words of stone…
Hidden far from the eyes of the living prayer of every night come from all the stars of another time, a fresco. In the morning, a message sprang from the rock walls.
On that luxuriant morning, in the heart of the calm of my solitude and my distress, burning my memory, body to body I could not believe my eyes : silhouettes of men on horses galloping as they broke free of the rock face, flew towards me at the speed of light.
Above my head animals, men, a whole scene of life…
On the threshold of my ignorance, an armada in motion awakens me.
Their four forelegs and their four hind legs at full stretch, the horses are caught in their surge. The head and the body of the animal are doubled, and the rider on his mount, one hand gripping the bridle and the other raised in the air, orchestrated the movement. They all came towards me as if to urge me to rise and to set out again.
Beyond space and time, I had just leapt a gap without knowing it.
I had just crossed space and travelled back through the course of the ages to the era of the ancient Men of the desert. With difficulty, my hand reached out towards this living throng of figures from that other time who wrapped me in an infinite tenderness. The desert was teaching me thus that I was no longer alone.
Text drawn from Emeraude – Farida Sellal – Casbah Editions 2019.