ED - There are books you’d like to read. And there are those you know you have to read because the author processes ideas through experience, history, and soul. “Blue Dunes” is both. And we talked it over for a good hour.
Karine Leno Ancellin went to Mauritania, decades back, with her then-new husband, the love of her life, father of her four sons. She immersed herself in his culture. She registered her ‘deficit’ as a slim woman in a culture that appreciated zoftig females and accepted with good humor being looked on as ‘a mop’ … as the rectangular veil atop a fashionably slim Western body appeared to the locals.
She kept extensive notebooks, as was her habit. And now, nearly three decades later, Ancellin’s dug back through those ten volumes of notes, mellowed by lessons learned in the meantime. The result is a book that will hit the shelves in August!
What Ancellin assimilates is the effect of post-colonialist machinations on indigenous folk and how that is lived at the individual level. Yes, when French imperialists left over to independence movements, new states were written down on the map! Yes, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso were nation states in their own right! Yes, it was glorious!
And no, glorious as it was, it didn’t recognize the ancestral rights of the Tuaregs.
Tuaregs were a nomadic people, self-sufficient with their knowledge of their land, their flocks, their water wells with date palms rounding out the menu. The five new states divided their territory but failed to give Tuaregs transit rights … the ‘papers’ … recognition as humans, actually. Well, there was the mineral extraction, wealth the new states hoped to develop with the ex-colonial powers. And those nomads were in the way. They’d had their livelihood taken away so they rebelled against it.
Ancellin drops into this tension and looks at it through the lens of her fictional heroine, Nancy Hoffberg, a journalist, sent to report on the change that was in progress and drawn to ask insoluble questions. And the injustice. Hoffberg is possibly pollyannaish for a political journalist but one willing to live among and travel with a Tuareg guerrilla to learn and understand their plight.
Naturally, much of this reaches back into Ancellin’s own experience, immersing in ancestral nomad culture. It’s tempered by lessons learned in the intervening years. The read has its locus in the desert but resonates the same post-colonial experiences that have left Native Americans struggling for agency over their ancestral lands, the inheritance of African peoples herded about on their own lands, the Asian folks who rose against the French and found themselves fighting the US military behemoth.
The Tuaregs were peaceful until their sustenance was blocked, the water reserves off limits, and then came the drought and their animals died. No schools. No hospitals. Nothing left to lose. So they struck back. The Tuaregs have a word for what they need: Azawad. Think of it as a portable country. An identity, a nationality that can travel with them, across artificially drawn borders.
But leaving the political implications aside, what Ancellin also attempts is to enfold her narrative in the old Tuareg culture itself. It is ‘restrained,’ as one editor pointed out. “When you live in tents, there are no physical barriers. Sound travels,” Ancellin explains. “You are discrete in your relationships. And when you live in the desert, there are likewise no walls. Word travels person to person. What you do is known, soon, and it follows you. Behavior is restrained by that knowing.”
Ancellin experienced all that. But, despite taking in so much, she says she never felt 100% local as an adopted Mauritanian. However, on arrival in Greece, she did feel it fit. Ancellin says, “Greece felt like I actually belonged with identifiable roots. Mauritanian social mores had never really permeated my blood cells.”
I suggest it’s like learning a foreign language. The first one is difficult. The second one comes easier. Maybe feeling at home in Greece is a result of trying to find a balance between natural and modern life? She ponders that one.
Leaving journalism for a more secure profession, Ancellin has lived and taught in Greece for some 10 years now. Her students, as always, inspire her work. Her sons, who share her dual nationality, are in France. Her ex-husband is a valued friend she consults for his wisdom. Her writing time is whenever inspiration rises, often late at night.
This interview is also being written late at night. It seems that Ancellin’s trajectory, like so many of us have experienced, began with books, grew into a desire to find an elsewhere and know more about the world, and bloomed as she immersed into different cultures. We look back at our own and make comparisons. And in that, we learn even more. Blue Dunes may well jog a lot of those things we’ve learned along the way.
Looking forward to it! And to the signing party that is very likely to be announced next month!
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Karine Ancellin’s already working on her next book, a fantasized biography of a musician in 1970’s London.