Exile in the Desert with Sarmi Moussa

Photo by Patrick Gruban

In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

—Thomas Merton

It was past midnight, and the bench I sat on in the small mud-brick airport in Ouargla was hard. It kept me from sleeping. I was in transit in this remote oasis town, waiting until just before sunrise to board the flight to Djanet in the southeastern Algerian Sahara. It was here that I saw Tuareg men for the first time.

Two large draped forms filled the bench across from me—men dressed in their traditional indigo caftans with white turbans called cheches wrapped around their heads and draped across their faces so only dark eyes were visible. Tuareg men are sometimes referred to as “blue men” because the indigo dye can stain their skin. The pictures I had seen of Tuareg people didn’t do justice to these two imposing figures, and I watched them doze off. The Berber-speaking Tuaregs of North Africa were known for their camel-caravan journeys across the Sahara. Now they take planes when they need to, and drought has forced them to sell off their herds and crowd into tented camps and oasis towns.

As the long shadows of morning stretched across the stark landscape, we landed on a sandy airstrip on the outskirts of Djanet, the small town that served as the gateway to the Tassili n’Ajjer. Near the Libyan border to the east, the Tassili n’Ajjer, which means “plateau of rivers” in the local Berber language, was named when water, trees, and grass were part of an ecosystem far different from the arid, rocky landscape it has become.

The Tassili is home to more than fifteen thousand Neolithic paintings and engravings depicting the vanished savannah, where herds of cattle and other large animals foraged for grass and crocodiles swam in streams and swamps. This open-air museum was well known to the Tuareg people but was “discovered” by French archaeologists only in 1933. It has since brought a slow stream of adventurers and scientists to see the record of people who lived in this high desert nine or ten thousand years ago. I’d decided that before I left Algeria, I too needed to see this remarkable landscape and its treasures. It was the 1974 winter break from my job teaching English at the University of Oran, the major higher education institution in western Algeria.

I was living in Algeria because I couldn’t bear to be an American anymore. By the early 1970s, after years of street protests against the Vietnam War, after being tear-gased and arrested and demoralized, I needed to go away. The Watergate scandal had just erupted. President Nixon had ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor, North Vietnam’s only port. Media images of the burning flesh of screaming Vietnamese children stalked me.

In 1972, after I turned twenty-five, I found a way out. I didn’t flee to Canada like so many war resisters. After all, my life wasn’t threatened by the draft or the war, only my sense of identity. I fled to North Africa, an unlikely place. Algeria chose me, not the other way around. The country was recruiting English teachers for its three universities. I had a newly minted MA in teaching English as a foreign language, pursued as a passport out of the US, not a career choice.

Algeria had waged an iconic struggle for independence from 132 years of French colonization. The revolution was held up as the world’s blueprint by other countries fighting for self-determination, from South Africa to Palestine. One million Algerians had died in the war. The French, in their final coup de grâce, burned the library at the University of Algiers before abandoning their colony. The country began building its own institutions, educating a new generation of skilled leaders and workers.

I happily accepted a job offer. Algeria had severed diplomatic ties with the US after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. I was glad to be...