The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert.
Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition.
But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Bedouin nomad grapples with visions of the dead and the advent of French colonialism after WWI in Slahi's vivid and fablelike debut novel (following the memoir Guantánamo Diary). The present-day narrator recounts a story that allegedly came from a descendant of the legendary storyteller Sheherazade, about Mauritanian camel herder Ahmed Ould Abdallahi, who sets out in the Sahara to find his prized camel, Zarga. Along the way, Ahmed encounters many dangers, including desert vipers and cannibals, along with instances of Bedouin hospitality, contextualized by the narrator's explanations of tribal relationships with the new French authorities. As the camel is crucial to his livelihood, Ahmed risks everything, driven by his Muslim faith and apparitions of such people as a long-dead Bedouin seer, whose powers of prediction are enhanced by French telescopes. While he's gone, his family receives a false report of his death, and by the end, the narrator reveals why Ahmed's story has endured through the generations. Flashes of wry humor (a character's futile attempts to sharpen a knife are likened to "trying to convince a Yemeni to change his opinion by force") offer a welcome counterbalance to Ahmed's daily prayers and religious songs. This modern-day folktale of human endurance is worth a look.
