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    Under the Tripoli Sky
    Under the Tripoli Sky
    Under the Tripoli Sky
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Under the Tripoli Sky

    By Kamal Ben Hamada and Adriana Hunter

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    A fascinating portrait of a pre-Gaddafi society on the verge of change.

    Tripoli in the 1960s. A sweltering, segregated society. Hadachinou is a lonely boy. His mother shares secrets with her best friend Jamila while his father prays at the mosque. Sneaking through the sun-drenched streets of Tripoli, he listens to the whispered stories of the women. He turns into an invisible witness to their repressed desires while becoming aware of his own.

    Why Peirene chose to publish this book: 'This is a fascinating portrait of a closed society. On the surface this quiet vignette of a story could be read as gently nostalgic, but underneath the author reveals the seething tensions of a traditional city coming to terms with our modern world. The book gives us privileged access to a place where men and women live apart and have never learned to respect each other.'
    Meike Ziervogel
    'The reader feels he is peeking through a half-drawn curtain on a secret feminine world in a patriarchal society . . . Excellent.'
    David Mills,Sunday Times
    'Beautifully simple and restrained prose.'
    Lucy Popescu,Huffington Post
    'It ought to be commended for its lack of sentimentality about this much-mythologized chapter of modern Libya.'
    Hasham Matar,Times Literary Supplement
    'A short but shimmering read.'
    Malcolm Forbes,National
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeirene Press
    Release dateSep 24, 2014
    ISBN9781908670175
    Under the Tripoli Sky

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    Reviews for Under the Tripoli Sky

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    • 3/5
      1960s LibyaBy sally tarbox on 19 March 2018Format: Kindle EditionA fairly lyrical, poetic novella set in 1960s Libya. The feel of the place washes over the reader, the heat, the sea, the mythology... With his father often away, young Hadachinou is surrounded by women. His mother, who seems to resent him; aunts; servants; friends. Some are oppressed by their men while others have struggled to achieve freedom. On the cusp of adolescence, the boy imbibes the atmosphere around him.Quite well-written but ultimately forgettable.

    Book preview

    Under the Tripoli Sky - Kamal Ben Hamada

    The day before.

    Everyone already knew about it, except for me.

    When I saw Aunt Fatima at the door I instinctively understood that a plan was being hatched.

    That night she came to my bed to tell me her usual goodnight story:

    Seven girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and eats one of the girls.

    Six girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and eats one of the girls.

    Five girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and eats one of the girls.

    Four girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and eats one of the girls.

    Three girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and…

    I always ended up falling into her arms, soothed and bewitched.

    *

    Aunt Fatima was the only person who told me the story of the twirling ghoul that keeps coming back to the house where the seven girls live. She was a widow and spent most of her time with her only child, Houda, whose every whim she tolerated. ‘Big fat Houda!’ the local children taunted. I too would tease the girl as I ran away from her through the long, narrow alleyways of the Medina while she tried to keep up with me under the scorching midday sun. I would hear her behind me, breathing heavily, dragging her feet, and sometimes she groaned and sometimes she wailed. Then I would stop and wait for her and want to make up by stealing a kiss. But she always ducked aside in horror, afraid she’d fall pregnant!

    Aunt Fatima and Houda would visit for all sorts of family ceremonies. And every year they arrived with the first new moon, heralding the beginning of the fateful period of fasting.

    ‘Tomorrow there will be a celebration, your celebration!’ Aunt Fatima promised me as she chewed noisily on her acacia gum softened with wax. ‘Seven girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls and eats one of the girls. Six girls inside a flute. The ghoul twirls and twirls…’

    ‘But, Aunt Fatima… are there really only seven of them?’

    ‘Hadachinou!’

    ‘But…’

    ‘Go to sleep, little one, go to sleep!’

    *

    Daybreak.

    The last vestiges of sleep were still weighing heavily on my eyelids when the naked light of dawn slowly appeared, spreading across the carpet. I stretched and closed my eyes again to preserve the image for a moment, but the first rays of sunlight danced over my face as if to thwart me and snatch me from my voluptuous indolence.

    Deep inside the house, no one.

    I walked through the rooms filled with silence and a thousand motes of dust rising in sunbeams, spiralling steadily in apparent chaos towards a secret, absent centre. I went over to a mirror and prodded my body, running my fingers over my forehead and the outline of my face.

    Out of defiance I opened the shutters to look at the sun, eye to eye. Through the cool blue of daybreak and the multicoloured phosphenes skittering around me, I took a deep breath of crisp morning air and stretched again, an alley cat beneath a freshly lit sky.

    Light spilt over the house and the walls and the corridor and the kitchen… which is where I went in the hope of finding something to bury the sense of exile that was beginning to overwhelm me. I gobbled a piece of fruitcake, then hurtled down the stairs like a punctured balloon. The magic of waking had given way to a feeling of powerlessness.

    Nothing.

    I sat on the doorstep and checked everything was real out in the street. I saw distant figures appearing in a hazy morning torpor – my mother’s friends, who gazed at me tenderly and smiled.

    ‘Time, there’s nothing but time!’ exclaimed a passer-by.

    Before my eyes – now robbed of their fickle dreams – the tarmac and the ever-present sunlight.

    On our terrace, Ibrahim the local butcher stood facing a bleating orphan lamb. My father always trusted him to select the victim when he came on his annual round for Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.

    But it wasn’t Eid today!

    Each year, the same gestures performed with perfect skill. The same fascination on children’s faces… all the way to grilling the head and the feet.

    The sheep’s squalling, on and on, right up to the last moment, right up until its head is under the knife, when it sees the gleaming blade… It stops, accepts, gives up and watches its own decapitation with already glassy eyes. Blood spilling.

    The sheep left to empty itself of its blood. Taboo food. Sacrilege.

    Witches, jinns, the godless and the mad drink animal blood to revive their strength. But my mother gave it back to the earth with a shudder of fear and disgust.

    I witnessed the ceremony with a mixture of amazement, curiosity and quasi-morbid delight. The sheep’s silence, its eyes changing colour, its furious bleating as it faced the deafening void, the children standing round in a circle holding their breath, and the springing fountain of blood.

    Ibrahim’s sharp knife cutting smoothly through the skin as he whistled a well-known pop song.

    Rivulets of slow-flowing blood, smaller streams coagulating.

    The carcass left to the women: removing the offal, the intestines, cutting up the meat, salting it and hanging it out in the sun on the terrace.

    The slow, impatient morning quivering.

    Images of what was happening, what happened each year in this millennial ancestral ritual, spooled through my mind like an age-old dream brooded over again and again.

    Noon.

    Head lowered, I walked in and out through the front door, waiting for something to happen.

    Hunks of the lamb hanging over the sink. Bones piled up like a still life.

    My mother already at her pots and pans, preparing celebratory dishes, baking assida: wheat flour, olive oil, date syrup.

    I went over to her with half-closed eyes.

    ‘We’re going to get you dressed and shave your head,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Today’s the big day.’

    *

    Dressed in only a simple length of white cotton cloth dotted with patches of saffron and wound round and round me to cover my body, I myself wander round aimlessly.

    The deserted street; my yellow ball bouncing, bouncing, and the sun sitting in the sky, static and jealous.

    I stand still and my gaze follows those two orbs abandoned in space.

    The horizon squints, disinterested.

    Tired, I let go.

    In front of the mirror I stared at my new hairdo: the ‘barber’ had used his well-sharpened knife to shave my scalp from my left ear to my right with the help of a round metal plate, leaving one small lock of hair at the front.

    My big head looked like a yellowing melon with a tuft of maize fibre. A sad scarecrow or – in the words of one of the women who had started appearing, all beaming smiles and brightly coloured

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