Part I
A desert is a sublime territory of striking contrast: the scorching heat of the day will vanish, and a freezing wind will dominate the night. It was my first night out in the deep Afar Desert. Despite the biting wind, I attended the night of captivating music. The elocution of the night resonated to the core of being as a sentimental melody. The subtlety became as harmonious as the symphony. I cherish the night. It isn’t as intense as the day; rather, it’s gentle, subtle, and mysterious.
The night was windy. The wind blows delicately in the Danakil Desert sphere. The wind itself seems burdened with longing. It carries a slight wet breath that infuses the whole surrounding, like a woman who kissed her relatives out of her longing until their cheeks got wet. The touch of the wind on my face felt like the touch of a child. How do I know if that childlike hand caressing me wasn’t the one that resonated with the eternal vibration of the entire phenomenon?
Deserts are about space; but not a frozen kind. You will face the endless horizon and the prodigious sky with a sharp contrast of some sort of weightless simplicity. Deserts are vast and majestic as a gigantic mountain or a great ocean that stirs awe and reverence. They are gateways to eternity with an extended range that nullifies confusion, anxiety, fear, restrainment and so forth. Surreal sunburst after sunburst everywhere. One might go to the desert to do nothing: just to embrace the vastness, to be shaped by the hardship, to cleanse his soul from the modern digital bewilderments and penetrate the impenetrable.
In the rural area of the Afar Desert Triangle, most tribal communities are pastoralists. They have no permanent settlement. During the winter and spring seasons, shepherds of the Afar tribe led their cattle to the remote grazing bush lands and grasslands alone for up to six months, packing a few necessary belongings on a camel. They navigate the extended territory looking for water and grass for their cattle. Only the women with their kids, the elderly, and a few milk goats remain with the family. Very rarely the whole family may go out with the herd for the full adventure. Even if the family is left behind, they will relocate their simple, movable huts every one or two weeks. They roam as if the whole extended desert wilderness is their yard.
I was thinking the whole night about how shepherds may perceive and combat the challenging environment. In mythical belief, it is believed that he who lives in the desert in solitude becomes a neighbor of God. The shepherd must have been contiguous to the territory of God for years so that he might borrow embers from his neighbor, the divine.
He will spend more than four months in sincere silence every year. In his solitude periods, the shepherd may see far away few humans walking down the dunes just to fade away in the dim evening light behind the horizon. He will watch them vanish behind the dim yellowish illumination tenderly as if they were his ancestors. He will greet them in spirit from afar. He will attend to the whole human psyche in their respiration. The evening air wafts the aroma of existence from their strands.
He would stand in the middle of the desert where everything halted. He would stare at the finite expanse, where beings and nothing passed before him like a dream in a dream. He may attend their mumbling in a language he can’t comprehend. He will consider their strange language as dialects of Angles.
There in the midst of the arid desert his soul yearns not for the light but the afterglow, not for the meaning of men’s murmurs but for the resonance. It doesn’t matter whether he sees a stray bird or a miniature cloud instead of a human being. It could be sufficient to solidify his conviction in all nature. It will give him the testament to existence.
He will go through the spontaneity of silent prayer, in the sphere of sincere silence. When he returns to his family, he will be in chastity, in honesty and he will eradicate all bogus, counterfeit expertise and be born again in spirit. He may accumulate plenty of lone adventure stories to narrate. Upon returning he will no longer be a shepherd but a sage. It was only for a story he might yearn for alone in the desert circle.
The Afar tribe uttered, reverberated around, and echoed orally multitudes of stories from generation to generation, in murmurs and in whispers. Their stories were in an ever-changing rhythm and in almost everyone’s possession. There is a wonderful folktale from the Afar Desert tribe that can serve as a vital example.
Long ago there was a husband and a wife among the Afar tribe. Though they pleaded to the gods for many years, they were unable to have a child. One day a wise man advises them to vow for the devil to bless them with a child.
A year after they vowed to the devil, they got their first child. But they have no idea where they could catch the devil and deliver their offering. Once again the same wise man advises them to go to the place where elders held arbitration to settle matters of foes. If either of the opponents ceases the arbitration and leaves abruptly, they are told to approach him and deliver the offering. But every time they advanced to the revel and disclosed the story, immediately the revel returned to the arbitration and accepted the words of the mediators.
Tribe arbitrators told such stories over and over again to warn the opponents to come to terms. The message is clear: no one is above or out of the tradition and the words of the elders. If someone dares so; he might be labeled as a traitor and of course as a devil. No one will cooperate with him in any matter. Even he might be forced to cremate his deceased child alone. Among the tribe communities and mythological societies’ no one can afford to be considered as a devil, for each one is dependent on everybody else.
Tribe men were careful not to violate the norms, the innocent common senses, the words of elders, and so forth. They detest injustice more than being condemned. The tribe men were prudent not to transgress the mysterious stream-like impulse of nature in their day-to-day deeds. They were compassionate not only for their fellow folks but also for everything in nature, for the creatures, the cattle, the trees, the leaves, and everything. They treat the animals reared in their compound as their own children. When they got weaker from old age, they drove and sold them to a distant market not to witness their slaughter.
They interacted with nature reverently. Even today, peasants cherish the bull as a dear companion. They convey their happiness, sorrow, longing, sadness, and hope with a song, a poem, a chant, and a lullaby to the bull. In the evening, they took off his yoke from his shoulder tenderly as a firstling.
There were no rules among the traditional societies; only stories. Laws, norms, and creeds were all stories. In the ancient judicial tradition of Ethiopia, having a great skill of storytelling will enable one to win the dispute. The arbitrators decide on the terms of the expertise of storytelling, not the basis of fact. There would be poetic arguments between or among defendants. The winners enjoy far-reaching fame beyond their territory for how they counter their opponent in poetic argument.
When crafted sincerely, every story manifests a survival anthem and a precious memory of a given society and humanity at large. We are all continuations of some sort of story. Stories and mythologies could be as meaningful or meaningless as life itself. But the act of living must be a daring will to weave ornate stories with our blood and sweat. Stories were among the first and most precious things human beings presented as sacrifices for the gods. There is a wonderful Jewish story that demonstrates such sacred storytelling deeds.
When the Jews were being mistreated, a great Rabbi went into the great desert, lit a holy fire, and delivered a special prayer, pleading with God to protect his people. And God sent him a miracle.
Later, his disciple went to the same part of the desert and say: “Almighty God, I do not know how to light the holy fire, but I do know the special prayer; Please accept my prayers!” The miracle always arrives.
Decades later, and during some dire times, another Rabbi went to the desert, saying: “I don’t know how to light the holy fire, nor do I know the special prayer, but I still remember the place. Help us, Lord!” And the Lord helped.
Sometime later, another younger Rabbi spoke to God:
“I don’t know how to light the holy fire, nor the prayer, and I can’t even find a place in the desert. All I can do is telling this story, and I hope you will protect our community.” And the Lord helped.
Indeed, as poet Muriel Rukeyser said, ‘The universe isn’t made up of matter, but of stories.’ The world will delve into meaningless, rampageous chaos when it loses its authentic, sincere, and innocent story and the act of storytelling. At some juncture in history, man has lost the very subset of being human. Thousands of years have passed since the thread that binds us to our ancestors, to our innocence, to the touch of the spirit, and to the divine was broken. We settle in serial blocks of buildings while our dreams are about crossing that arid desert or about the fear of snakes, the yearning for swimming in the pale blue lake, for the waterfall, the buffalos, and about the wish for hunting and chasing.
Spiritually we are in exile. Modern man has lost the very soul of his manner of being humane. Each desert tribe has its own version of story; unique ways of perceiving the idea of the gods, how things happen to become the way they are.
Authors Address: He can be reached at Email: lullabiesofeternity@gmal.com Website: https://www.yacobberhanou.com/
BY YACOB BERHANOU
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 19 JUNE 2025