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Flutes of deathDriss Chraibi
What makes the novel so remarkable is that it combines this comic perspective with the age-old, bitter contest between centralised power (originally colonial and, in Morocco, including successive waves of occupation — by the Romans, the Arabs and the French — now by the postcolonial state and its would-be French, Arabic-speaking lackeys) and the Berber people, presented as almost immersed in the earth and rocks of the Atlas Mountains into which they have been driven. In Berber territory, it is an uneven contest. The resistant pride, the close-knit communalism and the subtle cunning, fuelled by an age-old anger amongst the Berbers, ensure the defeat of the interlopers. Here, modernity stands no chance. Too often has this community been raided by tax-gatherers and other bureaucrats from the city. The civic leader of the Berber community draws his strength from the earth itself and prays by prostrating himself “to pierce the earth, to gulp down in himself the elemental and prodigious force of the earth ... The sap was there” (26). The most powerful woman in the community, a magna mater figure, welcomes the two “visitors” with a laugh “as sharp and piercing as an orchestra of fifes and tambourines” (29). Since all her words (despite the excruciating poverty of the mountain dwellers) contain a laughter which makes them “sparkle between the mountain and the sky” (29), there is from the start an ominous quality in the apparently warm welcome extended to the strangers. The Berbers know far more than the “clever” cosmopolites imagine they do. The visiting functionaries are scathingly included in the following categorisation: The French had gone, but their slaves stayed behind — porters, domestics, intermediaries jammed for good between the new masters of the Third World and the people (91). It is in puzzlement at the idea that urbanites can be bested by supposedly unsophisticated peasants that the question is asked: “What kind of sand was thrown into the gearbox of the beautifully-designed administrative machinery which heretofore had been so well oiled by the law?” (101). For not only do the mountain people keep the investigators at bay, but they shield the “terrorist” among them — who had earlier humiliated the army of the predatory state by his daring guerilla raids and acts of righteous political vengeance. The story moves to its eerie, dramatic and tragic end on the sound of the Berbers’ music — the flutes of death of the title. Although Inspector Ali attempts to reassure himself that these are “only some mountain people from the Middle Ages, singing their happiness to live in the hereafter” (133), his initial instinctive shudder is more appropriate, when he recognises in the sound of the flutes “a chorus of hill wolves” (133). Whether this is ultimately a victory is left ambivalent, however. For when the next bout of investigation (with similarly punitive intent) reaches the village, and they “stalked around the village, cave by cave”, they find only “A void. Not a soul” (146). |
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Driss Chraibi is a Moroccan Berber; the Berbers being the most ancient inhabitants of this northwestern part of the African continent. His marvellous novel called Flutes of Death (in English: it was originally written in French, published in English in 1985 by Three Continents Press) is set in a tiny village in the Atlas Mountains. At one level, it is an hilarious spoof of the detective novel, showing two inept police officers from the plains, the unnamed “chief” and the “inspector”, Ali, who (in French cinematic farce style) bumble their way among the rugged peasants of the mountain community in pursuit of a dangerous terrorist.