No subject

January 12, 2008 at 12:54 AM EST 

ESSEKANE, MALI - When Terence Leonard Uyarak looks up at the star-cluttered
night sky over the Sahara, the four people running - ulaktut in the language
of the Inuit - are there. 

Tuktgurjuk, the caribou toward which they head, is there. So is nunurjuk,
the polar bear from which they flee. 

But they aren't where they're supposed to be. It's as if they have all
stumbled, and slipped half way down the sky. Nunurjuk, the north star and
all of the other stars by which Mr. Uyarak tells his way in the snow of the
Canadian Arctic are laid out above the desert night. But they are skewed,
down near the equator. He cannot tell his way by them, not here in this
desert. 

Mr. Uyarak could hardly be farther from home - six flights, thousands of
kilometres, in a place the polar opposite from the pole on which he lives.
His jutting cheekbones are sunburned; there is sand in his nose and his hair
and his clothes - he's ankle-deep in it all the time. Yet for all of that,
Mr. Uyarak said, this place is not so different from his hometown, Igloolik.


"The people are very calm, that's one thing. And the nuna, the land - the
sand is shaped in the ways that snow shapes when there is a strong wind." 

The land and the way they live in it are threatened too, by climate change,
by the lure of consumer culture. 

And it is a desire to draw international attention to those threats that has
led a group of Inuit performers to a quirky arts festival near Timbuktu in
Mali. 

Talking to the nomads who invited him here, Mr. Uyarak is learning about
camels, and they are not that different, in many ways, from the dog teams
his father used to keep. He rode one yesterday, and concluded it was a lot
like being in a kayak: You can't stiffen up, but have to roll with the
waves. 

People here wear layers and layers of clothes, to keep cool instead of hot;
they live in tents, just like the few people back home who still live out on
the land. Even his language, Inuktitut, sounds a bit like the Tamashak
spoken by his Tuareg hosts. Their language and traditions are both oral;
like the Inuit, their written language is an innovation of recent
generations. Both groups navigate by the stars. 

Then there are other, darker similarities: Many young Tuareg want out of
here, the same way many of Mr. Uyarak's friends want out of Igloolik. They
want to live in the city and watch DVDs and listen to 50 Cent. Few have
interests like his - Mr. Uyarak has sought out people in his community to
teach him the old ways, including that trick of nighttime navigation. He
despairs of young people who can't even speak Inuktitut. "My girlfriend
wants to watch The O.C. all the time and I always tell her, there are so
many things that are more important than some stupid TV show from America." 

Mr. Uyarak, an acrobat and actor, and seven other members of a troupe called
Artcirq were invited here by one of the world's other great desert peoples,
the Tuareg nomads whose camel trains have carried salt and gold across the
Sahara since the 1300s, since Timbuktu was a thriving centre of learning and
trade rather than the dusty, half-deserted museum it is today. 

Two years ago, a slight, courtly Tuareg man named Manny Ansar saw Artcirq
perform in Mexico and decided, right then, that he had to find away to bring
them to his festival. Mr. Ansar (who has a day job doing communications for
the electric company) runs what must be the world's quirkiest, most
inaccessible and magical arts festival - a gathering of more than 40
disparate acts, thousands of Tuareg, vast herds of camels and a few hundred
hardy, wide-eyed tourists, at an oasis 70 kilometres northwest of Timbuktu. 

As a griot, a story teller, explained at the start of the festival on
Thursday, the Tuareg are " les enfants de grande tente," who live a
solitary, nomadic life much of the time, but gather, once or twice a year,
"to share the news, resolve disputes and plan the way forward." 

Such gatherings, held at oases such as Essekane, were traditionally
accompanied by music and dance, camel-racing and storytelling. For the past
eight years, the Festival au Desert has revived that tradition for three
days in January. Hundreds of square, white cotton tents are pitched between
the dunes; enterprising Malians set up to sell everything from bananas to
whisky to heated buckets of water; and lights and speakers are rigged on a
wide, concrete stage on the last dune before the Sahara begins in earnest. 

It took a lot of finagling and fundraising (a plane ticket from Igloolik to
Montreal alone is $3,000, never mind all the way to Timbuktu) to get Artcirq
here, accompanied by two throat singers from Iqaluit. The troupe was founded
in 1998 after Igloolik was rocked by the suicides of two young people. 

Guillaume Ittukssarjuaq Saladin, who had grown up in Igloolik but moved away
to tour the world as an acrobat with circus troupes, started teaching young
people, with the support of Igloolik's great cultural force, the filmmaker
Zacharias Kunuk, whose Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner was screened here last
night to a crowd of mesmerized Malians.

Full story: http://tinyurl.com/2rkwnr

Also, Stephanie Nolen's blog:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/totimbuktu