This paper argues that the sonic and visual qualities of Abderrahmane Sissako’s films 'Timbuktu' (2014) and 'Heremakono' (2002) articulate a form of aesthetic cartography that challenges dominant frameworks by which the ancient city of Timbuktu and the vast space of the Sahara have long been represented. Recent historiographic scholarship has shown the myriad ways in which this desert has for centuries been framed by travelers, scholars, and law-makers as if it is empty, invisible, menacing, and silent—the city of Timbuktu has itself become the proper name of city so remote and unreal that it now sounds to many like a fiction. By taking Sissako’s celebrated (and controversial) films as a focal point, my intervention extends the insights of new scholarship on Saharan connectivity into literary and aesthetic studies. Originally titled 'Timbuktu, le chagrin des oiseaux' (the sorrow of the birds), Sissako’s 'Timbuktu' depicts that city’s occupation by Ansar al-Din in 2012, whereas 'Heremakono' (2002) is an earlier and less widely-known meditation on the itineraries of different inhabitants of small coastal town at the westernmost edge of the Sahara. Both films are themselves acts of place-making that reveal the plurilingual and heterogenous vitality of desert spaces. In particular, Timbuktu sounds out a recessed translingual sonic, poetic, and musical archive that weaves together French, Bambara, Songhay, Tamashek, Arabic, and English, as well performances by Saharan artists including a score by Tunisian composer Amine Bouhafa and original compositions and performances by Toulou Kiki, a Tuareg singer from Niger who also stars in the film, and by the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara. Sissako’s sounding-out of a threatened sonic archive invites us to cultivate different modes of listening and looking—and requires that we transform existing disciplinary boundaries by studying the Sahara as an interconnected center of aesthetic and cultural production rather than a silent or threatening margin.