Images of loneliness in Tuareg narratives of travel,dispersion,and return

Abstract

This article examines how social, economic, and political upheavals in the Sahara have stimulated re-thinking about loneliness in relation to trauma from mobility, dispersion, and return home in communities of Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, and semi-nomadic Tuareg in northern Niger and Mali. How do Tuareg, sometimes called Kel Tamajaq after their language, draw on and re-formulate longstanding and new ways of coping with loneliness in regional droughts and wars, which have driven many to alternately disperse from their communities and return to homes that are no longer the same? What is the connection between changing modes of travel, concepts of loneliness, and ways of coping with this experience? In these communities, loneliness is a recurrent theme in personal life histories—in particular, in narratives of both geographic travel and spiritual travel in medico-ritual healing—and is alluded to in poetry, song, and everyday conversation. This article explores the meanings of loneliness and ways of coping with it in this society through analysis of this emotion in symbol, subjective perception, and social experience. The focus is upon representations of loneliness in narratives by travelers who have confronted this emotion, and upon relevant Tamajaq terms often used to express loneliness: namely, essuf (the wild, solitude, and nostalgia); tamazai (approximately, a depression); and tarama (unrequited love), illustrating with cases and examples. More broadly, the article is guided by and builds on insights in psychological anthropology into emotion and affect as well as suffering and subjectivity.

Keywords

loneliness migration ritual Tuareg

Introduction

Emotions are personal and subjective, but also culturally, socially, and politically constructed (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Biehl, 2007; Good & Hinton, 2009). Sentiments approximating loneliness may be human universals, but their contexts, expressions, and meanings vary, as these reactions to travel among predominantly-Tamajaq speakers in rural and urban communities of northern Niger and Mali illustrate:

A woman in a rural Tuareg village did not directly complain of loneliness while her relatives traveled, but hinted of this in arranging for a small child to stay overnight, she indicated, “in order to chase away Kel Essuf spirits of the wild [or solitude, essuf] who enter spaces once filled with people that are now empty.”

A women in Agadez, Niger accompanied her husband when he migrated to another town to sell Tuareg jewelry there. Later, the couple returned to Agadez because, relatives explained, “she felt in the wild/solitude [essuf] and depression [tamazai] there far from her parents.”

An adolescent girl whose parents arranged her engagement to a close cousin suffered from depression [tamazai] and hidden love [tarama] for another, unrelated man; she embodied loneliness for the latter in trance possession, as her soul wandered in the wild [or solitude, essuf].

Although distinct, these incidents are characterized by indirect expression of feelings approximating loneliness and various types of travel or mobility. Social, economic, and political upheavals have prompted many persons to re-think about loneliness on dispersion and return home in communities of semi-nomadic, Muslim, and traditionally stratified Tamajaq-speaking communities in northern Niger and Mali.¹ There, one encounters numerous (though often indirect) verbal and non-verbal expressions of emotions suggesting loneliness. In this once nomadic and still highly mobile society, despite being accustomed to travel, individuals sometimes feel “in solitude” (essuf), or closely-related sentiments bringing on solitude and sometimes, also, possession by its spirits, such as depression (tamazai) and hidden love (tarama).

Tuareg practice declining but persisting herding, camel caravans, and recent truck trading expeditions, labor migration, refugee flight, and political exile. People sometimes refer to lonely feelings during and upon return from their own travels—whether geographic or ritual/spiritual—and upon their abandonment when a loved one travels. In this, they draw on and re-formulate longstanding and new ways of coping with loneliness in regional droughts and wars, which have driven many to alternately disperse and return home.

This article explores the connections between these modes of travel and local concepts of loneliness. Mobility—while “normal,” is not always freely chosen. Travel and loneliness themes recur in personal life histories, particularly those of labor migrants and refugees, as well as in rituals treating non-organic illnesses and hidden emotions associated with travel to the spirit world, when one’s head is “in the wild or solitude,” denoting both an interior solitude and an outside desert wilderness (essuf), leading to possession and/or madness. The complex concept of essuf (in some dialects, tenere) has been shown to have multiple meanings (Hawad, 1979; Rasmussen, 2008), but there remains the need to analyze its connections to other emotions and to traditional and changing travels—literal/geographic and psychological/spiritual—since body and mind/soul are locally continuous and interrelated, rather than opposed. Spirit-related mobility is also relevant, since this is implicated in the experience and expression of loneliness. Imagery from spiritual travel is often used to convey loneliness in physical/geographic travel.

The challenge here is that feelings related to loneliness are not always directly conveyed, but often alluded to euphemistically or metaphorically. There is also the need to examine loneliness as not solely a condition, but also an emergent process, and to contextualize this as a social fact, as well as a personal subjectivity. Travel offers rich insights into these issues.

I explore the causes, meanings, and consequences of loneliness as well as ways of coping, and assess the extent to which loneliness is sometimes agentive and empowering. The method is to analyze references to this sentiment based on data from this social/cultural anthropologist’s ethnographic fieldwork on ritual, healing, gender, intergenerational relationships, and performance over nearly 35 years in Niger and Mali in rural and urban Tuareg communities conducting longitudinal qualitative field research on topics of spirit possession, medico-ritual healing specialists, the life course and aging, gender, smiths/artisans, youth cultures, and verbal art performances using methods of participant observation, guided conversations, structured interviews, collection of life history narratives, case studies, and transcription and analyses of verbal art.²

Indirect, rather than overt expression of emotions is widely valued in Tuareg society, especially by those of aristocratic (imajeghen) social backgrounds (Casajus, 2004; Casajus and Dragani, 2016). Key mores of reserve/respect (takarakit), dignity (imojagh), and decency (eschek) restrain expression and encourage speech by allusion (tangalt) (Rasmussen, 1997). Also relevant here are altered states of consciousness and local concepts of insanity, which sometimes overlap with loneliness. The question here is why do some forms of loneliness lead to creativity and agency, and others lead to social disaffiliation? How and why do some lonely experiences produce re-integration back into the community, and others do not?

This ethnographic case has wider cross-cultural value for psychology and psychiatry, in that local ways of coping with loneliness suggest alternative means of identifying, interpreting, and treating loneliness as experienced and expressed differently across and within cultural settings, hopefully encouraging greater empathy in this globalized world. This article also implies that there are ways to experience the world and emotions that are not so heavily dominated by western medicalized discourse and scientism generally. Among Tuareg, loneliness is not exactly equivalent to the western meanings conveyed in the English term. Loneliness as experienced and expressed in local cultural contexts is also not captured in DSM (Good & Hinton, 2009), or in the concept of “cultural idioms of distress” (Nichter, 1981). Rather, this Tuareg case illustrates the psychological dynamics that occur through the interaction of individuals’ constructions of their personal selves with larger cultural formations (Crapanzano, 1981; Obeyesekere, 1991).

This analysis also promotes a deeper understanding of Tuareg society in terms of both regional variations and widely shared experiences. Despite the importance of mobility there, living in community is highly valued (Rasmussen, 2001). Many sufferers of loneliness I knew lamented the dispersion of close relatives and friends and pointed out the need to return to the community. In northern Niger and Mali, there have been very dramatic social, political, and environmental upheavals: droughts, floods, and locust invasions in climate change; militant Islamist reformists, some affiliated with AQIM (Al Qaida in the Maghreb) and ISIS; youth unemployment; tensions and armed conflicts with central state governments and armies; uneven regional development; and limited national budgets.

The goal here is to elicit local concepts and their cultural logic by considering loneliness-approximating examples, cases, and narratives with imagery evoking this sentiment. Inspired by works in the anthropology of religion, psychological anthropology, and medical anthropology—for example, by Biehl (2007), Coleman (2009), Good and Hinton (2009), and Obeyesekere (1991)—I situate meanings contextually, thereby illustrating both interconnectedness and dissonance between personal and collective experience. I am also guided by insights from psychological anthropology on emotion and affect (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Clough, 2007; Crapanzano, 1994; Lutz and White, 1992 [1986]), and emotion, suffering, and subjectivity (Kleinman et al., 2011 [1997]; Mattingly, 2012). It is important to analyze both the experience and the expression of loneliness. I conclude by discussing the broader implications of this ethnographic material for understanding the relationship between the individual and the collectivity (Durkheim and Mauss 1963 [1903]).

The Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq)

Historical and ethnographic background

There is both unity and diversity among Tamajaq speakers (Bernus, 1981; Claudot-Hawad, 1993). Most live in the central Sahara and on its Sahelian fringes, in Niger, Mali, Libya, Algeria, and Burkina Faso. Until recently, most practiced stock-breeding and camel caravanning across the Sahara. Many groups interweave Qur’anic with non-Qur’anic and pre-Islamic influences in local cosmology, ritual, and mythology, and integrate Arabic, Qur’anic, and state patrilineal influences with matrilineal legal systems practiced prior to conversion to Islam and subjection to French colonialism. Most women enjoy legal rights and economic independence. Both sexes inherit and manage property, travel independently, represent themselves in court cases, and socialize in public (Nicolaisen & Nicolaisen, 1997; Kohl, 2009). Women, ideally the moral epicenter of society, tend to remain near the home—in more nomadic communities, the tent—though women are not forcibly secluded, but are owners of tents and conservers of culture (Rasmussen, 2006). Men, by contrast, should leave the home and range more widely (Claudot-Hawad, 2002).

Although some aristocratic elite and tributary (imajeghen and imghad) groups in this ranked society until colonialism raided settled peoples to the South for taxes in return for military protection, there was generally balanced and reciprocal trading between nomads and farmers (Baier and Lovejoy, 1977). In the past, some but not all elites monopolized resources and owned slaves (Rossi, 2016), but relationships with subordinates were usually flexible and negotiable. Many slaves were absorbed into Tuareg society in fictive kinship (Bouman, 2003; Nicolaisen and Nicolaisen, 1997).³

French invasions into the Sahara in the mid-19th century profoundly changed local social, political, and economic structures (Boilley, 1999; Claudot-Hawad, 1993). French administrations curtailed the caravan trade, established artificial borders, modified the powers of local leaders, disrupted the balance of power and protection in client-patron relationships and reciprocal raiding, and created needs for additional consumer goods and cash (Fischer and Kohl, 2010, p. 3).

Following the independence of African states in the 1960s, nation-state borders were ossified. Tuareg were split between different states with different school systems, competitive economies, and sometimes conflicting political ideologies. Centers of power were in distant capital cities. Other cultural/linguistic groups dominated more fertile, populous, and prosperous regions. Initially, Tamajaq speakers were underrepresented in national armies, civil service, and higher education, and in towns they were pressured to communicate in other languages. Cattle-raising and farming peoples moved into northern and borderland areas of herding, over-grazing delicate pastures. Aid programs disrupted the balance between water and pasture. Diminished herds from droughts of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries increased already-present political pressure to sedentarize. The restructuring and privatization mandated by IMF and the World Bank led to political upheavals, alienation of unemployed youths, alternative informal economic activities, and a series of Tuareg rebellions.⁴

Not all Tuareg feel marginalization to the same degree, however. Some traditional leaders still hold office, but with modified powers. Some important social patronage relationships based on affective ties and mediation persist (Rasmussen, 2013). There are also intermarriages, trading partnerships, and social integration between Tuareg and other cultural and linguistic groups (Deubel et al., 2014). There are emerging new socioeconomic classes.

Patterns of mobility and travels, geographic and spiritual

Neither French nor English glosses convey nuanced local concepts of mobility. The Tamajaq language abounds with mobility-related terms. In general, travel must have a purpose. Individual travel must ideally have some relation to collective wellbeing. Some individuals’ motivations for travel (for example, coerced refugee flight and political exile) are not always directly connected to ideal goals of travel but, like much voluntary travel, have a practical economic basis (for example, caravanning, overland truck garden trading, labor migration). Some travels have a social basis, for example visiting distant kin. Others have religious goals (for example, pilgrimages to shrines and conventions of healers and Islamic scholar/marabouts).

Both geographic and spiritual travels can also have ritual-symbolic and psycho-social significance as rites of passage, particularly for young men. Spiritual travels include possession, mediumship/divination, ritual travels of initiates (Rasmussen, 1997, 2006), and dreaming (Casajus and Dragani, 2016; Rasmussen, 2015). When spirits of the wild (Kel Essuf) attack or invade, the soul (iman) “wanders” too far from the human moral and social community into the (literal and figurative) essuf desert/wild. Possessed persons often indicated that they also suffered from tamazai, denoting approximately a depression, and tarama, a hidden and/or unrequited love. In some regions, predominantly women undergo musical ritual exorcisms of these spirits involving trance, defined as travels of the heart and soul into the wild or solitude (Rasmussen, 1995). Men, also, may intrude into spirits’ domain, but most such men usually seek Qur’anic treatments involving mediumship and counseling by Islamic scholars (ineslemen, popularly called marabouts). In non-Quranic mediumship, the healer’s soul also travels, albeit with greater control over spirits in special contracts requiring offerings (Nicolaisen, 1961; Rasmussen, 2001, 2006). Travel should also have a definite space, structure, and control, and regular steps: preparation, equipment, modes of transport, information, and protective amulets.

Notwithstanding these very nuanced concepts of travel, a core, prototypical sense of travel (awezelu or echiqel in different dialects) involves leaving one’s known social, cultural, geographic, familiar space, to go toward a space perceived as exterior, strange, and/or distant, and a rupture with everyday activities. Illustrative here is a concept, anoughou, denoting a lack of balance in health from travel-induced disruption of one’s usual habits. Friends and interlocutors in the field explained my own brief illness upon return to the village of my long-term hosts as caused by not following my usual routines during my overnight stay elsewhere.

Cosmology, gender, and travel

Cosmology and gender are relevant to travel. In nomadic cosmology, there are oppositional and complementary relationships between the interior and exterior, and fluid negotiated relationships through mediators between identity and alterity (Claudot-Hawad, 2002, p. 10). Semi-nomadic pastoral livestock breeding and herding, still practiced by some rural residents albeit with smaller herds, reproduce the universe’s dynamism, and the female-owned tent symbolizes cosmic cyclical, recurrent movements.

By contrast, other (non-nomadic) spatial movements imply a distancing from a shelter, the maternal tent, which often also stands beside male-owned houses inside family compounds in settled and urban areas, and continues to have psychological power and symbolic value. Distancing from this shelter is necessary for individual maturation—for example, trading expeditions and labor migration are rites of passage for men. A traveler must be autonomous and resist dangers of the exterior that threaten involuntary metamorphosizing. Many assert that one’s character changes on travel, whether during physical/geographic refugeeing or migrating, or during spiritual possession or dreaming, and in such cases one needs to be re-integrated back into the moral and social community.

Caravanning, other itinerant trading, and labor migration were until recently men’s business. In the past, boys (and earlier, slaves) worked on caravans under the supervision of elderly male relatives. Now most labor migration and other itinerant trading take place without supervision by elderly males. When individuals travel in pairs, they are usually of the same age cohort. This change brings independence, but also dangers and temptations, such as lapses in religious devotion: one young man, returned from expeditions selling jewelry, remarked to me with a chuckle that he occasionally drank beer in Lagos, Nigeria, but did not dare do so in his rural home village, “because of all these marabouts around here.”

Rites of passage are necessary to protect a man from risk of not being able to enter into marriage and his wife’s tent, and so remain in the wild, which renders him feminized. For a man should travel only temporarily, whether on labor migration to amass cash for bridewealth to marry, or on spiritual travel during ezzeker trance while inside the mosque, which, like some Sufi practices in North Africa, features the danger of a male human falling victim to intermittent possession and enslavement by a female djinniya spirit (Crapanzano, 1981). Men should ultimately return and seek access to the female-owned tent through marriage; only then may their rite of passage become true transformation (Turner, 1967) rather than indefinite limbo.

Not solely men, but also women, may wander beyond the abyss spiritually if there is extended social liminality, rather than the ideal, as formulated by Victor Turner’s classic theories of rites of passage (Turner, 1967), of temporary liminality, which should bring about transition to eventual re-integration into the community. A woman’s situation is conceived of as that of a protected egg; the danger is that the shell may be pierced (Claudot-Hawad, 2002). Inside her tent, the married woman can be legitimately “invaded” by her husband, but his access to this tent (and the “egg” inside it) is contingent on his completion of bridewealth payments and pleasing of his wife and parents-in-law. When her “shell” is pierced by transgressions or failure to live up to ideal mores of these rites of passage—for example, when a husband leaves or does not fulfil his obligations—a suffering woman may wander beyond the moral and social community, which can lead to either temporary (treatable) possession or to long-term, sometimes incurable insanity. Loneliness felt by either sex, then, relates to disrupted rites of passage and rites of return; when Turner’s ideally temporary liminal separation “drags on.”

The ideally complementary roles of the sexes are expressed in counteractive humoral/thermal theories of body. Successful travel for men involves remunerative work, the fruits brought back to women relatives. Travel also neutralizes men’s dangerous “hot” masculinity. For woman, by contrast, the counterbalancing force tempering her “cold” femininity is linked to her social position and ritual status at home (Claudot-Hawad, 2002, p. 112). Breakdowns approximating “mental” and other non-organic illnesses and/or violating taboos such as having an illegitimate child (called a “child of the wild”) threaten to disrupt women’s humoral and moral balance (Rasmussen, 2006). Women should ideally be cool, though not too cold; the latter threatens during childbirth. Consequently, rituals surrounding childbirth are needed to protect from jealous spirits (Ag Erless, 2010; Rasmussen, 2006).

Young men, though ideally “hot,” are in danger of becoming too hot. When angry, exasperated, or sexually desirous, their blood travels up into the head and threatens logic (Claudot-Hawad, 2002, p. 139). In this predicament, men are sometimes advised to spend time in the desert wild to restore a balanced equilibrium and patience, but must not permanently reside there. Men also need to balance over-coolness, a condition of becoming too sweet and mild, i.e., in local view, feminized, caused when a man remains too long in or around his mother’s or wife’s home. Thus, spatial mobility, in addition to its literal meanings, has more abstract meanings as thresholds and crossroads of transformation, or alternatively, disruptions and sometimes ruptures.

Border-crossing

Most economic migrants are (culturally defined as) “youths,” i.e., physically mature, but not yet economically independent or married (Rasmussen, 1997), who belong to an age cohort widely called ichumar (a term earlier applied to the first Tuareg rebels in political exile). Many men now must go on labor migration to accumulate bridewealth for marriage, formerly in animals, now in cash.

In border-crossing, travelers pass from one political, social, and economic space into another. Kohl (2009) describes the crossing of nation-state borders without documents in the afrod system, a business unofficially transporting migrants between Mali, Niger, Algeria, and Libya. If all goes well, they also pass from one social status to another and from one interior psychological space to another. In cases of success, this can indeed represent a transition which, according to Kohl, generally follows Turner’s (1967) ideal model of rites of passage.

This process can, I contend, also occur in spiritual crossings, from one social, moral, and ritual/symbolic status to another. Moreover, as noted, I also contend that, in any form of travel with less successful experiences, this ideal passage is not smooth; rather, one can become “stuck” in liminality, rather than making a complete transition. This causes one to suffer from loneliness in isolation, or at least alienation from both home and distant communities. Some persons do not complete this transition with ideal remuneration, health, or psycho-social-thermal balance intact, thereby jeopardizing their marriageable adult status upon return. Some migrants also face great physical harm and stress during incarceration in jails overcrowded with strangers, or loss and hardship when “dumped” by some Algerian authorities into the Sahara Desert, a solitude without support or supplies (Hinnant, 2018). Some unscrupulous Libyan employers reportedly do not pay them after their work and drive a few victims insane. Most of all, men returning home without money dread losing their dignity (imojagh) in women’s mocking songs.

Some migrants have traumatic encounters with police while wandering, exposed, exhausted, and disoriented, or become lost (physically and psychically), and suffer at least temporary insanity from the loneliness of psycho-social liminality. Consider for example the following narrative, given to me by Idrissa (pseudonym), son of a mason, from a chiefly and marabout clan in rural northern Niger, who related his labor migration trip across borders and its effect on his brother and fellow traveler:

When we crossed the Niger border, we reached the village of Katyene in Algeria … afterward, we reached Djanet, where we spent several days working … We then moved to another village and passed around albarkat [Arabic; system of sharing money]. We worked in gardens for several months. The first month, we received 20,000 CFA [West African French francs, about US$50]. The second month it was 30,000 CFA. The third month, 40,000 CFA.

We returned to Djanet [en route home], where my brother got a “mental” [non-organic, spirit-related] illness or “craziness” [tourna yibzak] … it was difficult to travel [with him that way]. Algeria had too much surveillance. We were lucky to [be able to leave].

We took the Frode [smuggler’s vehicle transporting migrants] all night … In the morning we were at the Algeria/Niger border, and by the second day we reached Talak [small village near the frontier]. We left in another Frode and then we took a big green truck to the bus station in Arlit [large uranium-mining town in northern Niger], where we spent the night.

In the morning, my [ill] brother disappeared! I left to look for him there, I looked and looked, and encountered some police who had chased him while he was wandering around town. I told them, “That [person you saw] was the same person I am looking for,” and they said, “Are you going with your brother, from there in a small car to the URC [station for truck transportation between rural oases and towns]?” “Yes.” Once we arrived at the Arlit URC, we encountered someone from Affasas [small village in Niger’s Air region], also a relative, who helped us to travel [as far as] Agadez [town in Niger].

We spent seven days in Agadez. A relative there brought us to the hospital, but we found no medicine for him. So we took another [URC] truck for our home village. Family cared for him. He [the sick person] spent 40 days attached to an ebizgin tree [one Tuareg treatment for non-organic illness, a tree that is an abode of spirits, and also yields herbal medicines]. In addition to this treatment, our father also went south, where Qur’anic verses were recited [to reinforce the cure].

This non-organic illness, approximating a “breakdown” in English, though not directly mentioning the specific sentiment of the brother, strongly suggests his loneliness. For it was explained by Idrissa and corroborated by other acquaintances as resulting from separation from companions (in a kind of essuf, solitude or desert wild) and harassment by strange police in a town following physical hardship and political tensions in a different country. In effect, this was a travel space beyond the tent/shelter/civilization, where police morphed into spirits of the wild (also solitude) and threatened to “swallow” Idrissa’s brother, thereby blocking his transition into a new tent/shelter/civilization. He was later treated at home by both contact with the spirit-abode tree medicines and recitation of Qur’anic verses.

Not all experiences, then, are conventionally transitional. What are the effects on the psyche and wider sociality? Illuminating here are the dynamics between a person’s psychic inner life and social relationships, or as Obeyesekere (1991) terms it, the work of culture, during and following geographic and spiritual mobility. One can feel and express loneliness in different ways. In the following, I examine more closely the connections between the experience and expression of loneliness, psycho-social distress, and additional forms of mobility.

Solitude, depression, “secret” love, and local concepts of loneliness

The prevalent cultural emphasis on composure and dignity (imojagh) ideally requires hiding too open expression of emotions—positive as well as negative. One should not reveal too much about future plans, including anticipated travel or good fortune, for fears of evil eye, negative gossip, and/or coveting, togerchet (Nicolaisen, 1961), thereby conveying the dangers of complacency, too-open boasting, lack of generosity, or ostentatious display of wealth. Suffering should be born with a detached, neutral demeanor (Casajus and Dragani, 2016), though this ideal, as anywhere, is not always followed.

Different scholars (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990; Lutz and White, 1992 [1986]) have pointed out that emotions are socially constructed and tend to reproduce social conditions and cultural givens. According to Crapanzano (1994), Leavitt (1996), and Ochs and Scheiffelin (1989), hidden emotions need not be expressed solely through spoken words, but can also be detected in intonations and exclamations, as well as non-verbal conduct: in conveying social familiarity, for example, by touch or look, and other embodied language. Women gave me a neck massage (arabaz) on my visit, to express our friendship and hospitality. Others sprayed perfume (elwerdi) on visitors, or burned incense (tafarchit) and offered tea to them.

Even among close persons, lonely sentiments should be expressed indirectly: through euphemism, symbol or metaphor, whispering, or embodiment, or in private. Spouses should not publicly communicate with or about each other from reserve/avoidance/respect (takarakit) (Ag Erless, 2010). Early in my research, I was made embarrassingly aware of this when friends with whom I had a relaxed joking relationship, testing me, inquired if I felt lonely for my spouse (at a distance at that time); clueless, I responded, “Of course,” and they laughed, amused at discovering this, which, I learned, was not supposed to be admitted openly.

Some contexts and registers/genres allow manipulation of this restriction. Formulaic techniques during oral performances, for example, allow conveying of emotion that may or may not be the “true” emotions of the performer. For example, a composer/poet or reciter of poetry may address an audience in an impassioned register without hiding emotion (Casajus, 2004; Casajus and Dragani, 2016). In this context, sentiments are openly revealed as a part of this performance style to portray others’ (the composers’) sentiments rather than their own, though the dividing “line” between voices can be hazy.

Formalized performances may differ significantly from informal everyday conversations and from “prosaic” accounts of migration and other travels. But depending on context, I contend, even performances may sometimes reflect the performer’s own emotions, as illustrated in poetic songs of some ichumar/guitar musicians who experienced very real loneliness in their fighting and political exile. Consider, for example, the following indirect allusions to genuine feelings of loneliness in an oral song that I was permitted to transcribe and translate with assistance from a local intellectual. This song, widely recorded and circulated on non-commercial audio-cassette tapes, was composed by Intayaden, an early ichumar guitarist, composer, singer, and political exile at the time of his compositions, who died in Libya around 1995.

Song Title: Imidaywan win alkaline nak azaghagh (Oh, Friends of my Country of Azaghagh)

Friends of my country [region, land], I saw a dispersion [algharba, political exile]

I am in a country where there is no maternal love

I am wounded in my own soul

I struggle against my thoughts

I do not understand the life that surrounds me

I burn my heart with my cigarette, which worsens my true illness

My friends of my country, I have seen exile/dispersion

I am ill, which prevents me from laughing

I am in a country where I do not have maternal love, I am unhappy in my soul

I have lived where there is no maternal love

I see the world upside down [topsy-turvy]

I burn my heart with the cigarette, which worsens my illness

Many face loneliness in the estrangement and distancing from community ties that exile brings; in men’s cases, often loneliness for mothers, sisters, sweethearts, and wives. Although there exist many performances of this song by other performers, the “original” loneliness emotions were very real for Intayaden. His allusion to “no maternal love” expresses the idea that a woman completes the man; a man feels incomplete without a woman, whether wife or mother. “I burn my heart with the cigarette” evokes both the composer’s loneliness—akin to an image of tessa, the liver (seat of strong emotions such as love, fear, and/or anger) “burning” in many possession songs (Rasmussen, 2004); in this case, love and nostalgia at the distance from maternal love—and also his anguish at the influx of harmful consumer goods. Some tobacco companies have marketed cigarettes in poorer countries to circumvent mandated health warnings. The broader point is that there is a range of expression of sentiments and styles in conversations, poetry/song, spirit possession, and geographic labor migration, exile, and refugee narratives. Thus, in situating the lonely “voice,” one must consider the context, not solely the genre.

“Mental” or non-organic illnesses, altered states of consciousness, and loneliness

Relevant here are altered states of consciousness and local concepts of non-organic (approximating) “mental” illness. The connections between insanity, creativity, and personal emotions such as loneliness and solitude are close, but complex. In Tamajaq, numerous terms for insanity and other altered states of consciousness (possession, visions, dreams) (Casajus and Dragani, 2016; Rasmussen 2001, 2015) reflect regional dialects, but crucially reveal some shared Tuareg cultural concerns. Of course, translations of such terms into English are never exactly equivalent in meaning, but their use in social contexts and local exegesis of them by interlocutors nonetheless yielded some approximate meanings in English.

Important is the key distinction between enebzeg (fem. tanebzeb), denoting an insane person, and ettebek (fem. tettebek), denoting a temporary but sometimes recurrent possession “craziness.” Some forms of insanity are widely considered the result of separations, loss, inherited traits, or attacks by spirits provoked by intruding into their spaces. Loneliness can trigger female spirit possession. Consider the case I collected, for example, of a young woman I will call “Fatima,” who through embodiment in trance possession during exorcism of spirits of the wild/solitude, non-verbally expressed loneliness for her husband, who was delayed in returning from caravan trading expeditions.

During amzor (a mother’s seclusion to protect from jealous spirits) following childbirth, Fatima developed complications described by relatives as “her head is in essuf,” also as tamazai, “illness of the heart and soul,” and in addition, according to herbalists, tuksi, or “hot illness” (the gendered humoral imbalance, not necessarily a post-partum biomedical fever, for the latter was cured by penicillin, and Fatima still did not thrive). She sat listlessly and silently, did not eat, sleep well, or bathe, even just before the baby’s nameday, when a mother should be rested and freshly hair-styled, and wear new, clean clothing. When I inquired how she was feeling, Fatima only whispered, barely audibly, “Essuf, essuf [the wild, the wild]!”

Fatima’s relatives arranged a musical spirit possession exorcism ritual, with her sisters, cousins, and friends and neighbors present. The female chorus’s therapeutic songs were deemed very beautiful and well-performed. Many verses referred metaphorically to tree branches swaying in the wind, symbols of resilience and strength and shelters of spirits. Poetic song titles referred to sentiments such as “My Liver” and “Bitter Dates,” and to being an orphan (seeking applause and support). Fatima responded to the songs by performing, in trance, a seated head dance to audience applause. The next morning, although feeling better, her relatives, friends, and healers stated, “She is not yet cured [will require a few more rituals]; her head remains in the wild.”

Fatima’s husband’s frequent and prolonged travels were not atypical, and delays were unavoidable. But these travels are never easy. Fatima had lost animals in drought, and her brothers resided in distant villages. Also, she was tormented by rumors of some men’s polygynous marriages with “secret wives” in distant second homes. But the ritual provided some comfort and relief from her suffering.⁵ Also, with the assistance of intermediaries, her husband returned home, though not in time for the baby’s nameday. A male relative stood in for him.

Other cases of essuf involve conditions considered incurable insanity because causes cannot be reversed. For example, one man was driven “mad” when, upon his return from caravan travel, he found his fiancée engaged to another man. Suffering from a combination of tarama (unrequited love) and essuf (solitude/wild), he resided near his family, but wandered about half-dressed and vacant-eyed, and was defined as “enebzeg” or insane by others. Mutual acquaintances asserted, however, that his essuf also inspired creativity: he was a gifted poet but would only compose poems in the wild/desert/solitude.

As Casajus and Dragani (2016) point out, not all poets, musicians, or singers are considered insane, not all tragedies lead to poetic creativity, and most poets hold high prestige. Nonetheless, the foregoing example, while not typical, suggests that a few persons considered mentally ill, or at least suffering from essuf solitude—a state of loneliness that may lead to insanity and/or to possession—can become inspired to create poetry and song. The founder of Tinariwen, a Malian Tuareg international touring band and early ichumar rebel fighter and exile, though not considered insane, became struck by essuf when he returned to his nomadic camp and found his relatives massacred, which led him to create many of his poetic songs. Although this group’s promoters use this story in global publicity, he himself endured very real suffering from atrocities and loneliness during political violence. In other words, some desolate and/or traumatic experiences do inspire creativity/artistry, but one should not assume that all creative artists are insane or “mad,” or that all loneliness leads to creativity or to permanent insanity. Emotion is part of aesthetic style in some performances, but more reflective of real feelings in others.

Loneliness can lead to more long-term madness in cases of extreme uprooting from community ties, along with economic dispossession and social disaffiliation, which for both sexes is devastating. Consider the case of a returned refugee woman in Kidal, Mali:

Lala [pseudonym], a woman in her fifties, had fled and returned home several times from Tuareg rebellions and their violent repressions by national armies and later invasions of the region by militant Islamist reformists. She suffered greatly from these events’ dangers and also from having to cope with what was left of her family and property. Lala and her younger brother had been separated during one armed conflict hitting Kidal, but in peaceful intervals during peace accords, they shared a compound there with his children and their aunt.

Later, violence re-surged, and Lala’s Kidal home was looted by unknown fighters. Her aunt moved away in a family dispute over whether to keep or sell their remaining livestock. One should be able to count on matrilineal relatives for emotional support, and matrilineal “living milk” property for economic security, but poverty had pressured Lala’s relative to kill their animals and sell their hides.

This turmoil catapulted Lala and her home into a state of essuf, manifested, according to mutual acquaintances, in her haggard, stressed, disheveled, and unwashed appearance, in her often deserted and dirty compound, and in her frequent wandering about without a precise destination—conditions that, according to prevalent cultural mores valuing grooming and upkeep of tent, conveyed to other local residents a lack of control over self, one sign of invasion by spirits of essuf. The root problem, however, was not so much Lala’s violating ideal mores, but rather her suffering from structural conditions that made them difficult to follow. Following one visit, after departing from Lala’s home, the adolescent who accompanied me commented “It is really essuf around here now!” and surmised “I think she has spent too much time out here alone, in essuf.” No longer a shelter or epicenter of community, this was a lonely, wild, and empty place once filled with people, but now empty. Exorcism rituals were not available to her because they had been forbidden in Kidal by some civic authorities and Islamist reformists. On my subsequent visits, I brought food and other presents that I hoped would help, but found Lala wandering near the edge of her neighborhood, toward the desert.

The foregoing contrasting case studies of loneliness expressed in spirit travel, often caused by others’ abandonment, physical/emotional distance, and/or alienation, suggest limits and hierarchical rankings of different expressions of emotions. There is some acceptance of temporary interior travel toward the wild and individualistic non-conformity to mores, provided they can be controlled. With Idrissa’s brother/fellow migrant, recall, his loneliness, coupled with disorientation and police harassment, were recognized as a “mental” illness, but not stigmatized, and treated supportively. Fatima, although recurrently “struck” by spirits, was not labeled “mad,” but instead considered intermittently in essuf, and this empowered her in marshalling community support. By contrast, as Lala’s case revealed, some forms of essuf take over loneliness in solitude more long term, as when this sentiment is so tied to utter deprivation in, and destruction of one’s social world, and causes that person’s divergence, in local viewpoint, from cultural mores of respect/reserve, dignity, modesty, and decency. In other words, the cultural attribution of “madness” in Lala’s case was the “downstream” consequence of social and political violence.

There is also widespread labeling of someone as unambiguously “mad” who shows a perceived lack of control over the self socially in immodesty, as in public full or semi-undress. Amina (pseudonym), a woman who underwent frequent spirit possession exorcism rituals was, in contrast to some other possession adepts, widely considered to suffer from not solely temporary “possession craziness” (tettebek) but also from permanent insanity (tanebzeg). Amina’s husband had abandoned her and also taken her children with him to Bilma, a distant town. In her loneliness, she gave birth to several illegitimate children. She also ran naked through the desert outside her village.

Amina’s naked flight embodied her actual predicament and emotions: of distance (literal geographic and psycho-social) from her children and loneliness. Corporeal honor (ezzebun) and modesty (takarakit) are ideals for both sexes. Another woman, unknown locally, often wandered between villages and camps half-dressed in only a cloth wrapped from shoulders to knees.

Incoherent or excessive verbosity is also considered a sign of insanity. A young man separated from his family while he fought during the 1990–1996 Tuareg rebellion, who following peace accords hung out indefinitely at a transit station, kept seizing the hands of passers-by, asking repeatedly to see a French journalist long ago returned to France. Notably, this revealing location, a symbol of crossroads and mobility, here conveyed indefinite lingering, rather than transition.

Lala, Amina, the returned caravanner/poet disappointed in love, the wandering strange woman, and the ex-rebel fighter, were all, like Idrissa’s brother and Fatima, lonely, not solely isolated. However, in contrast to Idrissa’s brother and Fatima, they were widely considered permanently insane. Many mad persons are simply allowed to wander, or, if violent, are confined to home. Following her mother’s death, Amina descended into an even more severe mental decline. She was eventually tied up inside the tent of her uncle in a village distant from her former home. Not everyone who feels lonely goes insane. As shown, much depends upon perceived self-control and community support. Also, there are biomedical psychotropic drugs at hospitals in capital cities, but only a few rural persons have received them, and only after trying longstanding medico-ritual and herbal treatments.

Conclusion

Travel-related separations from loved ones, disappointment at not fulfilling gendered expectations, and dispossession from property all may result in varying degrees of loneliness, if not always descent into permanent insanity. For some, loneliness can become socially and ritually agentive in marshalling support against solitude, but for others this sentiment can lead to non-social personhood and abandonment. Geographic travels highlight these tensions, as do spiritual travels, which become an idiom for expressing associated feelings of loneliness. Hopefully, the forms of loneliness evoked here, grounded in Tuareg idioms and experiences, pave the way toward new avenues of research in cross-cultural psychiatry and psychological anthropology.

The Tuareg data show important but complex connections between travels, loneliness, non-organic illness, and creativity, which defy neat binary divisions between individual versus collectivity and body versus mind. Hopefully these insights contribute to efforts to interpret personal sentiments cross-culturally (Crapanzano, 1981, 1994; Kirmayer & Blake, 2009; Obeyesekere, 1991), to bring together subjectivities and political economy (Mattingly, 2012), and to illuminate why some conditions within and across diverse cultural settings are locally stigmatized and others are not (Calabrese, 2013).

More broadly, this article has implications for psychological anthropology, transcultural psychiatry, and other studies of emotions in self-society relationships across cultures. The foregoing analysis of Tuareg concepts and cases of loneliness has hopefully conveyed local cultural meanings and social uses of psychological states that, while often involving individual suffering, illustrate alternatives to some stigmatizing English/American and western biomedical meanings of non-organic “mental” illness. This article also hopefully brings analyses of solidarity and solitude together in analyzing loneliness in relation to socially constructed mobility. Solitude and sociality can become detached, but not always as binary oppositions (Coleman, 2009). Among the Tuareg, “the wild” and other types of solitude can offer sociality if their loneliness is brought under control. There must be some inner control over self in the cultural emphasis on dignity and reserve, but also comfort from others; if not, there can result social disaffiliation, or even complete antinomy between solitude and solidarity. This insight raises the possibility that culturally varied modes of experiencing mobility over space (social and symbolic) can influence the experience and expression of loneliness. The goal has been to offer a theoretically engaged perspective that draws on interdisciplinary traditions of anthropology and psychiatry to achieve a balance between concepts of particular cultures and more universal human concerns. These findings hopefully have broader implications beyond Tuareg communities for recognizing loneliness in all its diverse experiences, expressions, and treatments—whether officially declared a public health problem or not. Analyzing the work of culture makes accessible emotions that otherwise might be hidden or difficult to translate into “mainstream” psychiatric concepts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

In longitudinal anthropological field research projects conducted between approximately 1983 and 2017 on spirit possession, healing specialists, gender, aging and the life course, smiths/artisans, verbal art performance, and youth cultures in rural and urban Tuareg communities of Niger and Mali, this author gratefully acknowledges support from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, Indiana University, and the University of Houston. All data here derive from informed consent and permission from research participants/interlocutors/assistants. I am also grateful for the kind assistance from IRSH in Niger and CNRST in Mali and for affiliations with universities in these countries.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Susan J. Rasmussen, PhD, is a professor of anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, USA. Dr. Rasmussen researches medico-ritual healing and healing specialists in Tuareg (Kel Tamajaq) communities in Niger and Mali, West Africa. She recently conducted field research on youth cultures in Agadez, Niger, and is currently also conducting additional field research among African immigrants and expatriates in France. Her published works, numerous articles, and six authored books focus on healing, gender, the life course and aging, cultural memory, connections between symbolism and power, and verbal art performance. Her sixth book, Persons of Courage and Renown: Tuareg Actors, Acting, Plays, and Cultural Memory in Northern Mali (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Press, 2019), focuses on acting and cultural memory in northern Mali.

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