26 26 ▶ Cultural: Music
Blues of the Sahara Urszula Świątek
I
t’s always a wonder when a local music scene finds international fame. One moment you’re thinking: we’ve reached the end of art, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, nihil sub sole novum, and such. Then, suddenly, you gain access to a whole new world of sound. Sure, anything new usually comes from a synthesis of what we already know, but that does not rule out the originality of the resulting blend. So what is Tuareg or Tamasheq guitar music and why is it among today’s greatest? ‣ Let’s start with the name itself. The Kel Tamasheq, are “speakers of Tamasheq” – Tamasheq being the languages and dialects spoken by Berber people in large parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso. Another name for the Tamasheq people is Tuareg. The difference between the two names is that Kel Tamasheq is a self-designation of the people, while Tuareg is a place-derived name or an Arabic exonym – a common, external name for a geographical place. In the Western world, the two terms are used interchangeably. ‣ Once nomadic pastoralists, now seminomadic, the Tuareg call the desert their home. What we know as the Sahara, the Tuareg know as ténéré, “desert” or the plural tinariwen, “deserts”. The Kel Tamasheq are an ethnic minority in each of the countries they inhabit and have faced persecution which led to their exile and rebellion. Rising urbanization and desertification forced them to abandon their traditional ways and threw them into a reality of rapid social change.
‣ Amidst the struggle and division, it was
music that became the unifying voice, spreading across the desert through bootleg cassette tapes. The story of Tuareg guitar music – a new genre also called assouf, teshumara, or desert blues – begins in the late 70s in Tamanrasset, Algeria. There, a group of men from north-eastern Mali, amongst them Ibrahim ag Alhabib, Inteyeden and his brother Diarra, formed what was soon to be called Tinariwen, from Arabic Kel Tinariwen – “people of the deserts”. These young men who left their homes in protest of both the modern state borders and the caste hierarchies of their elders were the ishumar, the “unemployed”. They wandered around the desert and desert towns hoping to find the lost feeling of home. They fought in the Tuareg rebellion of 1990-1991. These were the blues of that place and generation, their assouf – a word crucial for the Kel Tamasheq – a feeling of loneliness and isolation, a longing and existential search for home. ‣ Assouf is the musicians’ preferred term for their music style. Their songs probe the modern Tuareg condition: life in the desert, the loss of home, existential fears, political disunities, and systemic injustices. Their lyrics are often political, calling for revolutionary change. The poetic nature of their lyrics reaches back to old Tuareg poems of ritual, bravery, satire, beauty, and war. Lyrics about solitude or existential angst are found side by side with political songs like “Kel Tinariwen” from Tinariwen’s latest album Amadjar:
