The Free People

by Khalifa Abo Khraisse (Italy)

Making a local connection Libya

Although I am Libyan, I had never visited the South of Libya before 2013. I went there for filming a documentary with two friends of mine, Italian and British filmmakers. We landed In Sabha airport, and the moment I stepped out, the intensities of the colours changed, as if you were at post-editing stage of a film, and during the colour correcting you increased the hot colours, smacking the scenes with a touch of reddish-yellow. By the car, we went to Tragin, a small city about 120km from Sabha. When I say southern Libya, you probably think desert, which is correct. And when I say desert, your first impression would be silence and isolation, but you are wrong, the people are so nice and sociable that it’s almost impossible to feel alone. Yet, they were living in the absence of any support by the government; they do everything on their own, struggling with sewerage systems, and providing clean drinking water and electricity. Many of them could not afford proper walls and ceiling; they were closer to shacks than houses. I thought a lot about why this was happening in an oil-rich country? At the town of Murzuk southwest of the region, we stopped by the ancient mosque of Murzuk. There was a man sitting near it. He was the Muezzin of the mosque—the person who recites the call to prayer for each time of prayer—waiting for the prayer time. At the prayer time, only four old people besides him and the Imam who had come to pray. That old mosque and the few people who still came to pray there every day somehow reminded me of the red-headed dervish from the film Bab’Aziz. I thought of a specific scene, where he was standing near a mosque that has almost sunk in the sand, and he keeps trying to empty sand with a bucket. At some point, people become part of the place's identity. somehow, we are all the red dervish, believing that the moment we stop removing the sand with a bucket, the mosque will disappear. All we are doing is delaying the inevitable. I read a lot about the Tuareg—the nomadic tribes—, so when we found out that there were a few lived nearby, we went there. They lived in a small community of a few houses on the outskirts of that town, we learned that most of the Tuareg were living that way. With a unique mix of pride and humility, they treated us as if it were their sole purpose in life to make people feel comfortable. We sat in an open yard among elders and youngsters, and like that, we were one family. A young man called Talib becomes our interpreter, I translated from Arabic to my friends, and Talib translated to Tifinagh (the Tuareg's language) because many spoke poor Arabic. Talib was a driver, he could not study in the university. he said that he can’t travel anywhere other than across the desert. “Because I do not have any paper to prove that I am a Libyan citizen!” He told me. no birth certificate, no ID, he was not registered in any record, same as the majority of Tuareg, they don’t exist to the Libyan government. Their great grandfathers were born and have lived their whole lives in the desert; it is their homeland, long before the borders that divided it took place. They invited me to stay the night to attend a wedding. The party took place in a tent in the middle of nowhere, very colourful, very alive and beautiful inside. I was charmed by and caught up in the music, and the way they moved and danced. They call themselves Tamasheq, which means “the free people.” The men are veiled and their faces covered, while the women aren’t. My books had told me that there are three historical stories to explain the origin of this tradition, but I didn’t ask our hosts which one was the right one. I loved that, for once, there is a community where men’s faces are covered instead of women's.