There are evenings in the bivouac at Chegaga Berber camp when Ali takes up the djembe and sings with his colleagues around the campfire for us.
It’s not remixed music or songs from the many groups that have emerged using the bass guitar to modernise this musical style so typical of the desert.
Ali’s repertoire takes us by surprise, with intonations far removed from what we’re used to.
This music was played by nomadic Berber families in the desert. Some families owned a djembe, which was part of the essential equipment of nomadic life and accompanied them wherever they went.
The djembe was made from the materials available in the desert: wood stretched over a dromedary skin. If dromedary skin was not available, cow skin was preferred to goat skin because it was of better quality for the sound.
This instrument was part of everyday life.
Often the woman, but also the man, would compose a text similar to a poem or ode to recount events: rain, drought, a good harvest… or to evoke the life of the group: departures, returns, encounters, the welcome of a stranger, but above all the states of mind, joy, sorrow, happiness, nostalgia, love, anxiety… These texts were accompanied by that easy-to-carry percussion instrument, the djembe. Since writing did not exist, the Bedouin people had an oral tradition, so their songs were memorised and passed on from group to group, from family to family and from generation to generation.
These songs embody daily life in the desert; they are the breath of Life.
In it, people expressed the harshness of their living conditions, and poured out their suffering and discouragement in order to find the energy to carry on with their lives and regain faith in the future. Ali explained one evening by the fire that this song is inspiration, interiorisation, then expiration, expression, liberation of the voice and the feeling.
We can imagine a back and forth between the self and the universe, between the living being and its environment, a back and forth that is so strong when life is so fragile and so dependent on its environment.
Ali has inherited this repertoire from his ancestors, and is committed to passing on this tradition, which is being lost with the disappearance of nomadism. He shares it with us in the warmth of a wood fire under a starry sky
