To reach into even the recent past is to imagine a context in which reading and writing were rare. The verbal arts were—and in many contexts still are—dominated by epics, poems, stories, speeches and other spoken genres. As texts are only a shore to literature’s ocean, literary history is incomplete without considering orature. This is particularly true among Arabophone Saharans in Mauritania, Morocco and the Western Sahara, where poetry has retained its prestige in both educational settings and the larger literary culture (Bensaid & Ladjal 2019; McNee 2001; Pettigrew 2007). Yet, the ephemeral nature of vernacular literature presents a dilemma: how can we recover a desert archive if its past use was unwritten, and its current use is not tied to a certain time? Additionally, does archiving the vernacular inevitably strip it of its vitality and remove it from the human memory it is meant to dwell in? Building on Rotimi Omoyele Fasan’s (2011) observance of "a third space, an interstice between the purely oral and written,” I propose dissolving the idea of texts as discretely self-contained literary forms and instead reading certain written genres as part of orature’s archive. Anticolonial resistance leader al-Shaikh Māʼ al-ʻAynayn (1838-1910), for example, wrote sharūḥ (elucidations) of his own poems peppered with the phrase “dear reader or listener,” indicating that the text would be read aloud. He also described the circumstances and reception of his poems in his writing. These traces of the vernacular within the written corroborate other scholars’ observation that manuscripts and early lithographic printings were often a means to preserve what would be recited and received aurally, rather than expressions of a written style per se (El Moudden 1990; HT Norris 1986). For example, letters containing Sufi miracle tales and poems would circulate among North African zawiyas (Sufi lodges) for memorization and recitation rather than for silent, solitary reading (Gutelius 2002). Since these same zawiya leaders would also exchange lengthy scholarly texts, it was the genre rather than the physical medium which coded a work as orature. Using 19th and 20th-century texts from the northwest Sahara, this paper will demonstrate how written literature can be used to recover aspects of an ephemeral desert archive and write it back into literary history.

In this paper I will present my attempts to draw a primary source-based history of two French women exploring the Sahara. The graphic novel I am writing centers on French colonial explorers Odette du Puigaudeau and Marion Senones’ travels to Mauritania and Morocco from the 1930s to the 1970s. Odette and Marion grew up in Brittany, met in Paris, fell in love, and travelled to Mauritania by themselves in 1933. They returned to France during WWII, collaborated with the Germans, only to became members of the resistance. They travelled twice more to Mauritania after WWII, then got into a fight with the president of independent Mauritania, and moved to Rabat, where they lived till their death and are now buried. Odette and Marion figure very little in the scholarship on French exploration of the Sahara, though it is not for lack of archival sources. Indeed, their archives, housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, include dozens of boxes of letters, administrative documents, pictures, travel diaries, published works, and drawings. Both women produced dozens of articles and nearly a dozen books. Though Odette and Marion used the French government’s influence when beneficial, and were at times funded by French cultural institutions, they did not hesitate to criticize French colonialism in the Sahara which they saw as mere profiteering. With this project I hope to contribute to the literature on gender and colonialism, which as of now has mostly portrayed colonial women as mothers. Puigaudeau and Senones were anything but mothers, in fact through their sexuality—a sexuality that was clear to many of those they met in Mauritania—they evaded traditional female roles. Puigaudeau, in particular, used her French colonial power in the Sahara to dress and act as a man. In the Sahara she could deploy a form masculine dominance over colonial subjects and over her own female intimate partner, that she never would have been able to access in Paris. This paper will present my attempts at depicting, in graphic art form, the lives of Odette and Marion and of those they encountered in Mauritania.

European investment in border enforcement in North African and Sahelian states has redirected migration routes into more dangerous terrains where migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and violence by armed smugglers and militias and to exposure and dehydration in punishing and ‘empty’ landscapes. This contribution centers the story of Amadou, a 22 year old Guinean man who left Conkary to pursue l’aventure in Europe. During his journey through the Sahara, he was robbed by 'Tuareg rebels' and held for ransom by ‘bandits,’ escaping into the desert to walk for seven days before reaching aid in the Algerian town of Reggane. Amadou’s ‘adventure’ in the Sahara reveals the desert as a productive space bound up in contemporary geopolitics and longer histories of exchange and exploitation in the EurAfrica region. Drawing on the geographic concept of ‘deep space’ and Michelle Wright’s notion of ‘epiphenomenal time,’ this paper explores how desert spaces archive the routes and roots of human mobility from south to north, even as they enfold, conceal, and obfuscate its attendant violence. West and Central African migrants traverse Saharan landscapes dotted with 'ruins' of earlier passages, both forced and voluntary, that condition the possibilities of survival and flourishing on the journey and in spaces of arrival.

This paper uses two Maghribi Arabic novels, Tunisian Bachir Khreyif’s Barg el-Lil (1961) and Moroccan Rachid El Hachimi’s Dhākirat al-Narjis (2018), to explore issues of racial terminology, the Saharan roots and routes and the imaginaries they evoke. The novels are mined for both the kind of archival notions they put forth and their own archival potential within the field of Arabic literature and Maghribi culture. For decades, a ‘culture of silence’ (Marouan 2016) has covered the history of trans-Saharan slavery and Maghribi involvement in the enslavement of sub-Saharans, despite notable contributions by historians (Ennaji 1994, Toledano 2007, Oualdi 2011, El Hamel 2013, Montana 2013) and anthropologists (Capranzano 1973, Ferchiou 1996, Kapchan 2007, Jankowsky 2010). In the aftermath of the so-called Arab Springs, discussions about ‘anti-black racism’ have emerged in Maghribi civil society, academia, culture and literature. Zarā’ib al-‘abīd (2016), which explores Libyan culture through the slave-master family relationship, was shortlisted for the Arabic Book Prize, and the memory of slavery is a central theme in the International Booker Prize winner Sayyīdat el-Qamar (2010). Other Maghribi novels in Arabic and French are also exploring racism and the memory of slavery, as is the case with Morocco in Dhākirat al-Narjis. As for Barg el-Lil, it is the first modern Arabic historical novel in which the protagonist is a Central African slave –although quite excluded from the Arabic literary canon archive. I read it against the backdrop of Negritude and African diasporic political culture in post-WWII, and as entangled in notions of ‘committed literature’ (adab multazim) that was so hotly debated in Arabic literary circles and the periodicals across the Third World in the 1950s-60s. Both novels insert the sub-Saharan element within a culturally-plural landscape including Andalusi, Italian and Mediterranean in sixteenth-century Tunis in Barg el-Lil and Amazigh, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean in postcolonial Morocco in Dhākirat al-Narjis. They evoke particular locations which shaped the protagonists’ identities and genealogies – the forced journey to Tunis from Central Africa where Barg was violently kidnapped and uprooted, and the Moroccan protagonist’s enslaved great grandmother’s route from Sijilmassa to Fez, and then to Essaouira. Likewise, both novels bring in elements of indigenous sub-Saharan cosmovisions – including matrilineality in historical (archival) transmission, and ways of unlocking memory based on sensorial knowledge, which ultimately challenge conventional understandings of the archive as a neat space, and archivability as a practice of preservation necessarily governed by a set of skills and epistemology.

Along the historical route of the trans-Saharan slave trade passing through Ghadames, the pre-desertic area at the border between Tunisia and Libya, the governorate of Mednine, is a privileged place to delve into the analysis of racial issues. Under Tunisia’s Ottoman rule (1574-1881), in fact, Black slaves were shipped from Kanem Bornu Empire and resold to today’s Turkey. Many, however, were retained across the journey and remained as domestic servants in the South of Tunisia, where demand for agricultural labour (especially for the cultivation of dates) made them extremely valuable. Today’s social structure can be read as a living evidence of the legacy of slavery, as it is cut by racial lines echoing profound social, economic, and professional inequalities. Nonetheless, tackling the history of slavery in the region proves to be a very difficult task, as the issue seems to be blanketed by a “culture of silence.” Since slavery in Tunisia was abolished in 1846, before the colonial encounter (1881), French officials photographed and left in the archives only post-abolitionist trajectories, often misunderstanding them. Archival documents are thus incomplete and reflect a hegemonic and colonial perspective, often colluded with former slave owners. Since the post-abolition period played an important role in shaping the development of racial categories, archival documents have to be taken into consideration in the analysis of the racial legacy of slavery in the South of Tunisia. Yet, they have to be counter-read and integrated, allowing the subaltern voices to emerge. Pulling together various strands, such as colonial archives, today’s analysis of the social hierarchies, and oral memories, this paper wishes to delve into the trajectories that slaves and freed slaves have experienced in this peripheral and often neglected area of Tunisia.