From the Backstage of Tinariwen Band: Border Crossing and Transnational
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Nadia BELALIMAT – Aborne conference – September 2009. Draft ‐ PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE – Work in progress. FROM THE BACKSTAGE OF TINARIWEN BAND: BORDER CROSSING AND TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL ASPECTS IN CONTEMPORARY TUAREG MUSIC HISTORY The history of Tuareg guitar music, its style, its poetry, and its recent evolutions both represent and express the historical fracture and the socio‐economical upheavals born out of the advent of post‐colonial States. Current relationships between geography, music, and politics in the Tuareg region of Central Sahara illustrate the multiple migratory processes of the Tuaregs. Independence deeply affected the economical and political geographies of Tuareg groups in Northern Mali and Northern Niger, those furthest from the new centralized political powers. In their vast territories split between five States (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya), the Tuaregs became outlying minorities coming under different policies from their respective authorities: in Algeria and Libya, they are integrated via assimilation policies of national citizenry, while in Mali and Niger they are kept out of post‐decolonisation transition policies and different national logics according to the region concerned. To this stato‐territorial analysis, was added a complex diasporic process of which the ishumar music is a testimony with regard to its migrations and evolutions to an intra‐saharan scale. It takes on an original trans‐national cultural value when viewed in its current cross‐border set out. 1 Nadia BELALIMAT – Aborne conference – September 2009. Draft ‐ PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE – Work in progress. Line of Argument / issues What are the issues and theoretical questions raised by relationships between national borders, music and the formation of transnationalism among Tuaregs today? We put forward the hypothesis that, after independence, contemporary (postcolonial) Tuareg society has become one of the largest transnational societies in sahel‐saharian Africa. The process in particularly is obvious in the historical developments or the ishumar music, whom Tinariwen Band has been a symbol, and its complex territorial dynamics. We will try to show how his musical culture is defined by its territorial, sociological and performativ fitting in the transnational, intra‐saharian, networks of the Tuaregs of Mali and Niger from the Algerian and Libyan South. The transversal aim of this paper is also to make a distinction between building of the Tuareg transnationalism and disporic process of some groups, to set apart the various strata currently covered by the word transnational for the Tuaregs today. Our line of argument is based on the following focus: - Through their historicisation, we shall try to describe the migratory processes that lead to this transnational culture. Within the diversity of theses migratory phenomena, we shall note and discuss the particular diasporic dimension of the Malian Kel Adar. - Through an anthropological analysis of their music (as a performancial process of poetic production). - Through specific mobility practices of the ishumar, we shall illustrate some aspects of their transnational culture. Here, we shall mainly draw on an analysis of how the music circulates. - Historicisation of the historical process of the emergence of this music. - Outlining (mapping) these networks and mobility. - These networks currently form a relatively all round meshing connecting all various locations in their territory. Postcolonial migratory phenomena of the Tuaregs cannot easily be encompassed in one typology. Their description and analysis show a superimposition of multiple processes: - Political, economical and climatic migrations - various cross‐border practices (bi‐ter), - « illegal » cross‐border mobility, - non migratory transsaharian or cross‐border circulation - motivated mobility within their social or family networks encompassing several national territories. 2 Nadia BELALIMAT – Aborne conference – September 2009. Draft ‐ PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE – Work in progress. - Diasporic process concerning Kel Adar group. Tinariwen songs in the Tuareg nationalist movement and in the emerging process of a Tuareg transnational society The history of the Tinariwen band speaks volumes concerning current Tuareg mobility’s and their relationaships to post‐colonial territoriality. Their history is rooted in the border area between Mali and Algeria, between Tessalit and Timyawin. Both villages are small distant1 across the Algerian border town of Timyawin downstream of the Tessalit wadi, from Tessalit south‐eastward in Mali. All Tessalit inhabitants have long been in contact with those of Timyawin: this is the area of the Irregenaten tribe and their traditional area of nomadisation. Inteyeden from Timyawin and Ibrahim from Tessalit were brought up together in Timyawin, have known each other since childhood; they were to be guitarists leaders of Tinariwen. During the bloody 1963 suppression in Mali, the northern Kel Adar crossed into Algeria. As a child, Ibrahim ag El Habib, who was to be the guitarist leader of Tinariwen, scratched its first chords on the “guitare‐bidon” (can guitar) in Timyawin where he took refuge with his sister and his uncle after his father was assassinated and his family properties destroyed by the army in 1964. Their musical adventures will definitely seal their friendship and embark them on an extraordinary cultural adventure of the Tinariwen band. They belong to the first ishumar generation, born at the time of the independences and their songs make its social chronicles for two decades. Between the 60s and 70s, more than 50 % of Kel Adar groups flew to the Ahaggar in Algeria bringing with them many orphans. Family dispersal and social marginalisation are some of the consequences of this diasporic movement. This historical fracture was the start of cultural and identity reconstructions for the post independence Adar Tuaregs in particular and for many Malians and nigeriens Tuaregs in particular. It forced on them a new kind of mobility so far unknown within the very ancient tradition of mobility. This was the time of the exodus, on foot, towards Southern Algeria for these nomads fleeing the army after losing their livestock in the droughts of 1968‐1974. In small groups, they walked to Tamanrasset with only a five‐litre water can to brave 700 km to the Hoggar Wilaya. This is the “can 1 80 km environ. 3 Nadia BELALIMAT – Aborne conference – September 2009. Draft ‐ PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE – Work in progress. road” as the first Ishumar call it then2. Successive waves of young men left home and started a new adventurous way of life, faced with hostile authorities and state borders depriving them of any citizenship. Consequently, they crossed these borders illegally or, as they say in French, “en fraude” [afrod]. When included in their vocabulary, “afrod” has been referring to various smuggling cross‐ borders activities. They started smuggling on foot, as a kind of subsistence economy during the droughts of the 80s, in dangerous conditions (Ag Ahar, 1990). At the time, the word ashamur referred to various exclusion forms of citizenry and education, shared by all Tuaregs, in Mali as well as in Niger, as mentioned in these verses: “[On the road to exile] We have no [nationality] papers, no education [litt. books] other than our amulets3. This particular diasporic movement reached the southern Tuareg general migrations mixing economic and political factors in the context of a difficult and long lasting post‐colonial transition of the Tuareg groups living at the periphery of the new states following the colonial era. From the 1970s on up to the 80s, a series of political and economic factors, including droughts, brought about new migration waves originating from the Azawaŕ valley and Tamesna (Niger and Mali), Aïr (Niger) and Adar (Mali).4 The Tuareg political movement and 90s Tuareg rebellion emerged from this postcolonial process by the end of the 70s (Boilley 1999; Lecocq, 2002) based on the teshumara social mouvement of mixed malian and nigerien tuareg youth. The Kel Adar brought with them their poetical and musical traditions and turned them in a creative process in an urban context, between the modern instrumental tone of the guitar and the vocal melodic repertoire of the rural female drum. It constituted the point of their musical innovation and appeared as a musical revolution and a support of teshumara identification. Tinariwen Band born in the late 70’s, emerge in this particular musical and social background made up of mixed urban tinde, “can‐guitar” and women refugee’s poetry: Oh mother! Since I left for Libya persevering, I finally arrived! But I cannot settle in no way 2 Sing., ashamur or shumera, plur. ishumar. From the French [chômeur] (unemployed person) a word used during the South Algerian exile as early as the end of the 60s Cf. Claudot‐Hawad, 3 “Wer legh elkad faw iktaben /Kunta weddegh i ishraden”. 4 Most Tuareg groups were affected at one time or another by political exile, by seasonal labour migration or by droughts. The pastoral economy was distressed by two extreme droughts (1968‐1974 and 1984‐1986). Most nomad families took refuge in urban centres, where shanty areas popped up and became de facto ghettos for destitute refugees around Arlit, Niamey, Gao, Agadez, Tamanrasset, and on the border posts between Algeria, Mali and Niger. Young men, for their part, mostly from Kel Adar(Mali), Kel Aïr or Kel Azawaŕ (Niger), migrated into an informal exodus circumscribed to convergent cities (Tamanrasset,