Out in the Haud, we felt we had heard the Prophet’s camel bell. We had come to know something of these desert people, their pain and their faith, their anger, their ability to endure. The most prophetic note of that bell, however, was one we scarcely heard at all, although the sound was there, if we had had ears for it. In less than ten years, the two Somalilands that had been under British and Italian administration had joined and gained their independence as the Somali Republic. What will happen there now, no one knows, but whatever course they take will not be an easy one in a land that has so few resources except human ones.
The best we can wish them, and the most difficult, is expressed in their own words of farewell.
Nabad gelyo – May you enter peace.
THE END
GLOSSARY OF SOMALI WORDS
As yet there is no official orthography for the Somali language. I have therefore used an anglicized version of Somali words, which will give the reader some idea of pronunciation. I have also, in this glossary, included in brackets the spellings recommended in 1961 by the Linguistic Committee of the Somali Ministry of Education, under the chairmanship of Musa Haji Ismail Galaal.
abor: mound-building termite (aboor)
amiin: Amen (amiin)
aul: Soemmering’s gazelle (cawl)
balleh: natural pond or manmade excavation for holding rainwater (balli)
belwo: short lyric poem (balwo)
balanballis: butterfly or moth (ballanbaallis)
biyu:water (biyo)
beris: rice (bariis)
dadabgal: night spent together by an engaged couple (dadabgal)
dero: Speke’s gazelle (deero)
dibad: dowry (dhibaad)
Dhair: the autumn rains (Dayr)
dab: fire (dab)
faal: a way of telling the future (faal)
Guban: the coastal plain; lit. “burnt” (Guban)
Gu: the spring rains (Gu)
gabei: long narrative poem (gabay)
gerenuk: Waller’s gazelle (garanuug)
gabbati: token payment made to bride’s parents (gabbaati)
galol: type of acacia tree (galool)
ghelow: a night bird (galow)
gedhamar: an aromatic herb (geedchamar)
gorayo: ostrich (gorayo)
harimaad: cheetah (harimacad)
helleyoy: refrain used with songs (helleyoy)
In sha’ Allah: if God wills it (In shaa’ Alla)
is ka warran: give news of yourself (is ka warran)
Jilal: the winter drought (Jiilaal)
jes: one family travelling alone (jees)
jinna: species of ant (jinac)
kharif: the summer monsoon. An Arabic word
khat: a leaf with narcotic properties (qaad)
Kitab: the Book, i.e. the Qoran (Kitaab)
libahh: lion (libaach)
lunghi: a length of cloth used as a man’s robe. An East Indian word
magala: town (magalo)
miskiin: destitute (miskiin)
marooro: a plant (marooro)
mas: snake (mas)
meher: percentage of man’s estate made over to his wife (meher)
ma nabad ba?: is it peace? – Somali greeting (ma nabad baa)
madow: black (madow)
Nasa Hablod: two hills near Hargeisa; lit. “The girl’s breasts” (Nasso Hablood)
nabad gelyo: may you enter peace – Somali farewell (nabad gelyo)
nabad diino: the peace of faith – response to “nabad gelyo” (nabad diino)
nin: man (nin)
odei: old man, elder (oday)
Qadi: Muslim judge (qaaddi) qaraami: a love poem; lit. “passionate” (qaraami)
rer: Somali tribal unit; section of a tribe (reer)
rob: rain (roob)
shabel: leopard (shabeel)
saymo: a dangerous situation (saymo)
shir: a meeting (shir)
shimbir: bird (shimbir)
shaitan: devil (shaydaan)
tusbahh: Muslim prayer beads (tusbach)
torri: a knife or dagger (toorri)
tug: a river-bed (tog)
wadda: road (waddo)
Wallahi: by God (Wallaahi)
wadaad: a man of religion, a holy man (wadaad)
wahharawallis: a type of flower (wacharawaalis)
warya: hey! (waariya or waarya)
wein: big (weyn)
warabe: hyena (waraabe)
wa fulley: he is a coward (waa fulle)
yarad: bride-price (yarad)
yerki: a small boy (yarkii)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to Dr. B.W. Andrzejewski, of the London School of Oriental and African Studies, for the information and advice he has given me about the spelling of Somali words.
I should also like to thank Messrs. Martin Secker & Warburg, Ltd., for their permission to use four lines from “The Gates of Damascus,” by James Elroy Flecker, as the motto.
M.L.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sir Richard Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, J.M. Dent, London, 1856.
R.D. Drake-Brockman, British Somaliland, Hurst & Blackett, 1912.
J.A. Hunt, A General Survey of the Somaliland Protectorate, 1944–50, H.M. Stationers.
Douglas Jardine, The Mad Mullah of Somaliland, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1923.
J.W.C. Kirk, A Grammar of the Somali Language, Cambridge, 1905.
M. Laurence, A Tree For Poverty, Somali poetry and prose, Eagle Press, Nairobi, 1954.
R.G. Mares, “Animal Husbandry in Somaliland,” British Veterinary Journal, Vol. 110, Nos. 10 and 11.
O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: A Study of the Psychology of Colonisation, Methuen, 1956.
AFTERWORD
BY CLARA THOMAS
… For the first time I was myself a stranger in a strange land, and was sometimes given hostile words and was also given, once, food and shelter in a time of actual need, by tribesmen who had little enough for themselves – Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
When Margaret Laurence reminisced with me about her African years, it was almost always about the books that had issued from them and her admiration for African people and their ancient tribal cultures. There were snatches of life memories – sometimes the early years of her children Jocelyn and David would surface, or the stint of baby-sitting she willingly did for a British officer in Ghana, not because she was fond of him, but because he had a complete set of the writings of Sir Richard Burton which she read avidly, or, most surprisingly, the fact that, while in Ghana, she typed for Barbara Ward the manuscript of her landmark work on African nations, Faith and Freedom. Often we talked of the African writers she admired so much, particularly the Nigerians, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, to whom, with others, she had paid tribute in Long Drums and Cannons. Achebe she met only three times, the last time in 1984 when she was already deliberating on the memoirs she would write and when he was struggling to finish his novel, Anthills of the Savannah. I was present at all of their meetings and watched, deeply moved, as an empathetic, brotherly-sisterly bonding sprang up from their first moments together.
Two years in Somaliland and five in Ghana had been a powerful catalyst to Margaret’s talent, issuing in A Tree for Poverty, her translation of Somali folk-tales and poems, the novel, This Side Jordan, the stories collected in The Tomorrow-Tamer, and culminating in The Prophet’s Camel Bell, the book in which she closed the door on her African years, her apprentice years, and prepared the way for Manawaka. Many times she said that, once in Canada again, she knew beyond doubt that literature’s themes were universal and that now she had to write of her own place and her own people. Ten years away from Somaliland she wrote The Prophet’s Camel Bell, reflecting on her diaries and reconstructing her younger self from their notations and her memories. The book was “the most difficult thing I ever wrote,” she said. Fiction she always considered her true métier
. The first draft of The Stone Angel was already complete. Hagar in her wilderness had been growing in Margaret’s mind and imagination for years, ever since her desert encounter with the Somali woman and her dying child. Then Hagar found her voice and began to tell her story. “It all came out complete. I did scarcely any revision.”
She had found her themes in Africa, though – exile, the journey towards wholeness, personhood, knowing “the heart of a stranger,” the unique dignity of every individual, the drive to freedom, faith, and the recognition of grace. It was during one of our frequent telephone conversations, she at “the Shack” on the Otonabee River near Peterborough, I in Toronto, that she lighted upon “Heart of a Stranger” as the title of her essay collection. We were both sorting through our heads for possibilities and that one, the absolutely right one, surfaced – to our enduring delight. Margaret honed her techniques in the African works, too. Undoubtedly her ear for tones of speech and shades of meaning was naturally acute, but it was certainly sharpened by her hours of listening to the Somalis tell their stories at their campfires and then working with the translations of her interpreter. She was fond of saying that she wrote This Side Jordan in episodes, then spread them all out on the dining-room table and thought, “Now what’ll I do?” What she did was to achieve a compelling novel, playing many levels of variation on the themes of love and loss, exile, despair, and the finding of faith as she juxtaposed her African characters moving pell-mell into a new day and beset by its manifold terrors, and the anxious, exiled British, former masters and now, speedily, deposed and homeless, strangers to both Africa and England. At the same time she bore witness to her love of Ghana, the deep understanding she had developed for its past and its people, and the hope she shared with them for its future. The same themes permeate the nine Tomorrow-Tamer stories, written between 1954 and 1962 and first published separately, though begun while she was still in Ghana.
The Prophet’s Camel Bell is Margaret’s corresponding tribute to the Somalis and her Somaliland years, 1950–1952. Written in 1962 at a time of great stress, when she knew once and for all time that to be a committed writer was her fate, both joy and doom, and when she and her husband Jack were forcing themselves to realize that their marriage was shattering, the book is also a tribute to their early, happy days of adventuring together. She had been allowed to accompany Jack on his dam-building assignment in Somaliland only because he had described her to the reluctant officials as “an accomplished woodswoman.” “Canadian peoples different,” as the Somalis often said.
Librarians may well catalogue The Prophet’s Camel Bell as travel literature; true, it is the story of a journey into a desert land whose nomadic people’s lives had been unchanging since biblical times and whose Mohammedan faith was to them “as necessary as life, as inevitable as death.” They looked up at the crescent moon in the sky and “knew that the Word had been made visible.” But it is also a journey into awareness and understanding of the Somalis across a cultural chasm that might well, and excusably, have seemed unbridgeable. Most of all, though, it is the record of the maturing, the coming-of-age of Margaret Laurence herself. As she marvelled at the acceptance and endurance of the Somalis, she learned those qualities for herself.
Margaret had always been impatiently busy – she learned calm and quiet from Somaliland and its people. She watched them helplessly dying of thirst and she learned humility from the recognition that she and her medical kit could do little or nothing for them. Looking back on her diaries she recognized as “bosh” her early, facile statements about the easiness of becoming “popular” with the Somalis. Their story-telling inspired the story-teller in her, and she added immeasurably to the care, patience, and discipline that every professional writer must have as she listened and wondered at the retelling and repolishing of age-old stories around the campfires.
As she looked back on her younger self and wrote, she acknowledged and assimilated her own life’s experiences. She had already known much love and much loss – the early deaths of her parents and Grandfather Simpson, whom she had fought and resented, but who “proclaimed himself in her veins.” She had deeply loved her stepmother, always “mother” to her, her brother Robert, her husband Jack, and the enduring friends of her girlhood. She had known deep and continuing joy in her children and her work.
The persona who developed through the pages of The Prophet’s Camel Bell is the same Margaret Laurence who became the most beloved woman in Canada. The qualities are all there. When you turn the last page you are not alone. Margaret is with you, saying “yes” to life, laughing, loving, kind, understanding and, always, with enduring faith and hope.
BY MARGARET LAURENCE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963)
Dance on the Earth (1989)
ESSAYS
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists
1952–1966 (1968)
Heart of a Stranger (1976)
FICTION
This Side Jordan (1960)
The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)
The Stone Angel (1964)
A Jest of God (1966)
The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Bird in the House (1970)
The Diviners (1974)
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jason’s Quest (1970)
Six Darn Cows (1979)
The Olden Days Coat (1979)
The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)
LETTERS
Margaret Laurence – Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters
[ed. John Lennox] (1993)
Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman
[ed. John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky] (1997)
TRANSLATIONS
A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)
Faces of Somaliland C.J. Martin
Hargeisa town C.J. Martin
Hargeisa wells C.J. Martin
A Sergeant – Somaliland Scouts C.J. Martin
A Somali nomad C.J. Martin
Basket weaving C.J. Martin
Making sandals C.J. Martin
The Haud C.J. Martin
The Haud before and after the rains C.J. Martin
Mohamed Margaret Laurence
Hersi, Jack, Abdi Margaret Laurence
Arabetto Margaret Laurence
Isman Shirreh C.J. Martin
Jack, author and Gino Margaret Laurence
The bungalow at Sheikh Margaret Laurence
Working on a Balleh C.J. Martin
A Burden camel carrying portable hut C.J. Martin
A Nomadic encampment C.J. Martin
A Qadi C.J. Martin
Herders with camels C.J. Martin
Copyright © 1963 by Margaret Laurence
Afterword copyright © 1988 by Clara Thomas
This book was first published in 1963 by McClelland & Stewart.
First New Canadian Library edition 1988.
This New Canadian Library edition 2010.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987
The prophet’s camel bell / Margaret Laurence; with an afterword by Clara Thomas.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-4628-5
1. Somalia—Description and travel. 2. Somalis. 3. Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987. I. Title. II. Series: New Canadian library
DT406.L38 20I0 967.73′03 C2009-905026-9
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Developme
nt Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
Photographs by C.J. Martin and by the author
Map by William Bromage
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.