(Pascal Maitre, National Geographic)
Last year journalist Paul Salopek was arrested in Darfur. He was held for five weeks. By then Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) was in Khartoum negotiating Salopek’s release. The resulting story—about the land beneath the Sahara called the Sahel—is in this month’s National Geographic. Abstract, episodic, uber-novelistic—Salopek’s written one of the weirdest magazine stories in history—a beautiful tragedy that loops nation to nation, shifting like trauma fractured memory, while still managing to explain the geographic issues at the root of the Darfur conflict.
There were three of us.
Idriss Anu drove the Toyota truck that would be stolen by militants. Daoud Hari was the translator, and for this he would eventually pay with severe beatings. We were en route to the village of Furawiya when the pro-government guerrillas rose silently from the grass.
“Stay in the car,” Daoud said.
But it was already too late. Even as the gunmen sauntered up, their hair matted in dreadlocks and their chests slung with small blackened things that looked like dried ears but which were Koranic amulets, we still hadn’t grasped that we had crossed a threshold where it no longer mattered what passport you carried, that you were young and loved, that your skin was supposedly not of a torturable color, or that you were a noncombatant. Words had lost all currency as words, and by the time the grinning teenager with the Kalashnikov reached for my door handle, we were condemned to live and die according to choices made by others. We had become truly Sahelian.
Dauod Hari, mentioned above, has just published a Darfurious memoir called The Translator (Random House) about his work as a “fixer.” The prose is nimbler than A Long Way Gone and Hari offers a vision far more devastating than Ishmael Beah. Although Hari does offer some fun scenes with Nicholas Kristoff “acting like he always sleeps on a mat outside in the middle of warzone.”
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March 31st, 2008 at 11:39 pm
That NG article is incredulous… the scene with the whippings is too fucking ill…