the tattoo moment that I apparently didn't tell you—for madison

This is supposed to start with a "and there I was, and—" sort of thing. There I was standing in this bookstore, of all places...

But the fact is, I've always gotten off on bookstores. And libraries.  (But only really really good ones.)  And I do so love the smell of musty books... and ink.

So I guess what happened may have been inevitable, and doesn't start with "and there I was—" at all. Because I was always there. Always.

So.  If I say "when I was a kid my dad took me to Holmes Bookstore in San Francisco, and gave me a dollar—" —well, many stories would begin this way. And so, I have a history with bookstores. And, as I said, with libraries too.  And, I'm afraid to say, I've had more than one peak and downright orgasmic moment in one or the other.

So. To start with "there I was—" becomes kind of silly, since I was, so much of the time, there.  It was, I suppose bound to happen.

My official favorite bookstore in the world is Le Tiers Mythes, which is kind of behind the Sorbonne on the tiny Rue Cujas off the Boul Mich in Paris.  I've been going to this bookstore every trip to Paris for decades.

And each trip, the bookshop keeper would take a look at me, reach up somewhere on the tottering shelves, and hand me something and say—"this is for you."

And my life would shift into a new pattern from that point until the next.

So.  I was standing there.  As always, in exactly the same spot I tend to go to.  And in front of me was a reprint of a Revue Africaine from around 1885 and I was just holding it in my hands, not even open, when one of those moments emerged—

"What if—" I thought.

That's how the good moments start, isn't it?

I remember exactly what that moment felt like. One of those moments when everything just clicks into place, even if no one else on the planet gives a shit.

"What if North African tattoo patterns were really a lost ancient writing system of the Amazigh people?"

Yah, it's one of those kind of bookshops. Highly specialized for those interested in the legacy of French colonialism throughout the world, but particularly in the Middle East and especially North Africa.  And feminisms of the so-called Third World. Revolutionary figures from same.  Thus the name: 'Le Tiers Mythes' — but this was an esoteric moment even for there.

The bookseller went down the ladder into the dark bowels of storage, and came out with a stack of century old journals and reprints of same. And clunked them down in front of me.

I started collecting as many Revue Africaine reprints from that period as I could.  There were a series of articles by a Capitaine Rinn on the origins of Tifinagh, the writing system of the Berber  (Amazigh) language, Tamazight.  Rinn took an approach completely different from any study of a writing system I'd ever seen before.

And I did what any impressionable anthropologist of a certain age would do: I wrote a little grant proposal to study the possibility of studying the problem.

The idea was (as far fetched as it might sound) to drive down into the Sahara to the oldest Library in North Africa to look for documents that might link the images in tattoo patterns to the ancient tifinagh script.

First stop was Casa, to meet with a local professor who I'd heard was interested in the tifinagh problem.  This was Day One of our expedition to the the Sahara. Luckily, I'd brought my Michelin map of Morocco with me to the professor's house.

"I thought so too," he said. "So I went down there. And your vehicle, by the way, you would never have made it that deep into the desert. Jamais."

My grant didn't cover an expedition-worthy vehicle. I did, however, have a clunker. I hadn't really thought 'methodology' through, I was so caught up in this ridiculous proposition.

"There's nothing there," he said.

Everything in the ancient Library had been stolen or 'redistributed' long ago. It had long ago been emptied of its treasures.

"But anyway, for what you are after, that's not the right place," he said, as if this were an Indiana Jones movie and I was digging in the wrong place.

He took my map and drew a big circle on it surrounding an entirely different territory.

"That's where you will find what you are looking for," he said. We finished our tea, I thanked him, and left.

It feels like fraud.

You know—when you write a proposal for one kind of research only to discover that your premise (and therefore your entire methodology) is entirely just plain wrong. Day One of this project, and I had to rethink the entire enterprise.

Drove back to where we were staying. The house of a friend of a friend of a friend. Where, too, were other friends of friends crashed out on cushions on the floor.

When I came back looking so despondent, my host gave me that look and asked what could possibly have gone wrong before I'd even started my expedition.

I pointed to the map. One finger trying to account for the entire region of the Middle Atlas Mountains to where I was now being redirected.

"My grandmother lives right there," one of the friends of friends of host said. "And she's got tattoos like you're looking for. And we're going there tomorrow to celebrate Eïd. And you are welcome to come and join us."

His grandmother lived right there—exactly where my random pointed finger had indicated the vastness of the entire mountain range. And so, right then and there the new direction of my inquiry took (re)direction.

Years later, and many grandmother's tattoos later—I found myself in the valley before a fortress village way south and deep in the High Atlas Mountains. The valley and steep mountain sides on either side of the river looked uncannily familiar.

And I glanced at my tattooed hands.

The tattoo on my left hand suddenly appeared to be a map. Not a treasure map, but a map of this very valley. And with the help of Capitaine Rinn's articles from the 1880s and beyond, I was able to decipher it.

On my hand was a stylized river surrounded by two mountains just like what was right in front of me.  With Amazigh tents on each side—little triangles inside the larger triangles.  And on my hand was (using Rinn to decipher it) at the peak of each triangle was the symbol for a matriarch gathering her sons about her.

A call to arms.

And that's what we found.  The height of a movement for Amazigh language revival.  You could tell by the spray painted graffiti on the mountain walls. A call to arms (without the arms) before it's too late. A call, it turned out, to preserve tifinagh and the Amazigh language, Tamazight before it disappeared entirely in the next generation.

And was there a connection between Amazigh tattoo patterns and tifinagh, the ancient writing systems?  Undoubtedly. But the women of the High Atlas did not know of it.

"It's forbidden," they said.

No more tattoos. No more tifinagh.

All that was left were the patterns.

And the women diligently put the patterns into their rugs. And into their pottery. And the men put the patterns into their architecture.

"It's just decoration," the women insisted.

"Folklore," the men said with a smile.

"We speak Arabic now," they said in not-quite Arabic.

"You can take pictures," they said. "We love tourists."

"But you cannot ask questions."

"Or write anything down."

"Writing will get us arrested."

And they put their fingers to their mouths, to shush me.

And I took pictures.

tabouna — Tunisian style (and that's the problem)

In the countryside of Tunisia women make خبز الطبونة (khubz tabouna) on a daily basis. Which I may well have spelled wrong, because my Lang Arabic Lexicon seems to have omitted it — and besides, it's in idiomatic fellahi dialect. Generally not written at all.

And that was the problem, of course.

So. For about five hours a day, country women are mixing and kneading, letting rise and slapping down, and forming nice flat, round loaves of durum wheat bread about the size of the American dinner plate. They make about 15 loaves a day — a major enterprise, as far as I'm concerned.

The tabouna is outside, usually just past the women's courtyard. It's about four feet tall and at its base, around three feet wide, narrowing toward the top. The oven is made of baked earth, what we would call adobe here. It's blackened rim and interior attest to the multitude of loaves these ovens have had slapped onto their sides for baking. Yeah, the bread does not lie flat in the oven. Instead, it is sprinkled with cold water and bakes vertically — turned periodically — on the sides of the interior. The tabouna has first been filled with stones and kindling, and when the fire simmers down, it is the heat of the stones that bake the bread. Fifteen loaves take a long time. Every day.

And that's one of my favorite things in the countryside — the taste of freshly baked khubz tabouna.

So. I was thinking about this with great nostalgia and longing, on a flight from Paris to Casablanca, and upon arrival. I was with a belly dancer friend, and some friends of hers (male) were picking us up at the airport.

We get in the car. Both of us sitting in the back seat, of course. The guys are in the front. And I say in Arabic, just to make conversation, and because it really was true,

"I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat some khubz tabouna."

The car screeches, narrowly missing a camionette on the road. There are no lanes, or at least any lanes that anyone pays attention to. I hate driving around Casa. I just don't get it. But Moroccans navigate really well through it all, so what just happened?

The driver pulls over, and the two guys turn around and they're glaring at me.

"What did you say?" the driver asks in French.

So I repeat myself in Arabic.

They look at each other. They look back at me. They really heard right.

"You can't say that here," his front seat passenger says. I didn't remember their names yet.

"Eh?" I say in French.

"C'est interdit!" the driver says — it's forbidden.

I'm very very confused. My belly dancer friend is not really paying attention to any of this. She doesn't speak French, and she doesn't speak Arabic. But well wow, can she dance. She's come with me to find the source of one of her favorite dances, and to see how North African women interpret it. Right here, right where the dance was born. She also wants to see if she should study anthropology. This trip is a big deal for her, and I'm blowing it.

We're barely past the airport, and already something's gone terribly wrong. Ominous for the whole trip we're embarking on. A land rover heading south into the Sahara, looking for a library that may (or may not) have texts still written in tifinagh, the primordial writing system of the Amazigh, or Berber people. So I can see if there's a correspondence between the old writing system and Tamazight women's tattoo patterns. That's the goal this time round.

Morocco. We're in Morocco — not Tunisia.

I catch my bearings, and explain.

"In Tunisia, the women in the countryside make this wonderful bread. The oven is called a ta—"

"Stop!" they both say in unison.

"That word," says the driver, "means something different here."

"Means something different everywhere — except Tunisia," chuckles his buddy. The tension has passed. I'm a moron, clearly, and hadn't intended to be so crude.

I think again of what that oven looks like. Earthen, with a blackened rim. So organic (in the old sense of the word). You look inside and you're looking straight into — oh, I get it.

Just as they, haltingly, explain it.

Cunt.

I had just said that I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat hot cunt.

So much for my Arabic proficiency.

As may now be obvious, Moroccan dialect differs significantly from the Tunisian. And both of them are distant from the mainstream Arabic further east. But worse than that, my Tunisian dialect is fellahi — peasant style. It's like an anthropology Ph.D. candidate from abroad coming to the U.S. to study Appalachian land disputes, and learning English for the first time at the hands of hillbillies of West Virginia, as depicted say, in the movie Deliverance. And that's the English you speak.

Well, that's my Arabic. That's why people would cringe when I'd open my mouth at the Archives Nationales, and tell me to switch to French. That's why the head of the Women's Union in Baghdad hugged me crying her eyes out at the 'authenticity' of my my backwoods language skills. That's why the women of Dubai had a good chuckle at my expense.

Okay, so I've probably made the worst linguistic gaffe possible in the Arabic language. Does that mean shut up and never speak again? No. I figure, after that one, I can say anything I want. Letting people correct you is in part what anthropological fieldwork is all about.

I just wish I was better at languages. Switching dialects is such a pain. And so much of my research has been in the mountains of Morocco in the past ten years. But my language skills just don't want to switch over.

They think I'm North African, but have been living in France way too long (they have no idea just how bad my French is, I guess). Or, they're just being polite.

"Are you from Egypt?" someone asks. "Where are you from?" another inquires. Finally, finally someone recognizes the Tunisianisms I just can't let go of and nails it down.

"Aahhh," they respond, at the identified exotic dialect. Tunisia does not come first to anyone's consciousness, even in North Africa.

There's that French expression:

petit pays, petit esprit

The French always used it in reference to Belgium, but I could see it in the look in their eyes. Small country, small spirit. Everyone underestimates Tunisia. Even now.

We're still in the car on the road to Casa. The ice has clearly been broken. What are you studying they ask, and I explain.

"We're Berber," the driver says.

"My grandmother has those tattoo patterns," the passenger says. His name is Aziz, I learn, finally. "She has those symbols on her hands and face," he says — having always taken them for granted before.

"We're going up to the mountains," his cousin the driver says.

"It's Eid. Come with us," says Aziz.

And so, we abandon the library at the edge of the Sahara (whose manuscripts it turns out, have long since disappeared) — and after picking up the tzaddik at the airport the next day, we all head up the winding dirt roads of the Middle Atlas mountains.

The women are baking bread when we arrive. It smells swooningly good.

I keep my mouth shut.

At least, about the bread.

Every moment goes swimmingly. A perfect fieldtrip, and perfectly unanticipated, given the rocky start. With lasting friendships made and kept, even now.

"So. What do you think?" I say to the bellydancer.

"You made it all look so easy," she says. "I could never do that."

Which is exactly how I feel about her dancing.

missing her as I do — new orleans revisited

Maybe I don't have any right to miss her as I do. Maybe the missing is reserved for what people conventionally call 'family.' For kin related by blood or marriage. And I am neither. She is 'family' in that other sense. The sense of what we call family.

My home was her home. Her home wasn't home to her.

She escaped as often as she could. She'd be in Moscow. In Tuva. In Brussels, when she had to be. She was here. She was there. She just wasn't home at home. Although, to be sure, I'm glad I got to be with her in Stockholm and see what her life was like there. People loved her there as well. And she had — and has — family. And love. Lots and lots of love.

So why am I thinking about her now? After all, it's not her Yahrtzeit until May. Until Memorial Day. She died on Memorial Day (on a US calendar, anyway), which makes the mourning process feel large, really large — as if the country itself takes up the mourning cry... I never thought much about Memorial Day until I got that phone call that she was gone.

The American Anthropological Association Meetings will be held in New Orleans this year. Our panel will focus on Trance. We've got two papers on North Africa — Hager's on the Zar cults in Egypt, and mine on accusations of faking it in Tunisia. We've got Jeff on Christianized Laotian refugees. Tina on contradance trance. And Jennifer on Sulawesi trance now for television audiences. It's gonna be a wonderful panel. With one exception.

She won't be there. The queen of trance and structural categories. Researcher extraordinaire. Indefatigable writer, editor. Not a thrilling teacher, if truth be told. But most of all, beloved.

The thing about conferences is that it forms some strange sort of bonds. Where you only see the people you love at the height of their form, and in a spectacular setting not your own. Altered time, altered space. And presenting the apex of your research at that moment. A high, of sorts, which is more than an academic high. It's a high of ideas, and the confluence of ideas. Of resonance to discover your own research dovetails with another's. Comparing notes. Deciding to present together the next year, to further the research to the next stage. To see what happens. To build momentum. To go from high to high: the meeting of more than minds.

Last time, in New Orleans, we were together. The theme of the meetings was '100 Years of Anthropology.' It was 2002. I presented on Mouloud Mammeri, Algerian anthropologist, and founder of the modern Amazigh Movement in North Africa. Did anybody care besides me? Does anyone ever really care? I'm not sure.

But she cared.

And we played. This was pre-Katrina New Orleans. Pre-Deepwater Horizon oil spill. New Orleans both playful and serious. We spent a lot of time in churches, as I recall. We were cleansed. We were healed. We were cleansed and healed. She was in her element, that's for sure. I, for sure, was not. I don't do church.

But then we visited John T. Martin. Four of us, I think, together. The Anthropology of Consciousness meets the Druidic Voodoo Priest. And the rapport was magnetic.

He stared into our eyes as he spoke. It wasn't about the transmission of charisma. It was about thirst. He was thirsty for this meeting of the minds. His readings were spontaneous and on target. But so were hers. Ours. The snakes were all upstairs, I remember, except for Jolie, the albino. It wasn't how I had remembered it from my last trip to New Orleans — right after the Voodoo Queen had died. When the snakes (who refused to be photographed, but appeared only as shining light) were still downstairs.

Now John kept them upstairs. Eugene, especially. Although Jolie still came downstairs. A barometer for who may and may not enter a more sacred and less public space. I keep a remembrance of them — pieces of the skins they've shed — inside a special wooden jar, set upon a special place. I don't call it an altar to Dhamballa. I don't have to.

I wanted him to speak at our next conference. He wanted travel funds for all the snakes as well. It wasn't like he was going to leave them for anyone else to attend. It wasn't like they'd leave him on his own.

There was a rapport, a resonance, an electricity among us all. Those trite words "I-can't-explain-it" are apt, but also inappropriate. It's my job, is it not, to be able to explain it?

No, it was my job to investigate further. I promised to call, when he asked me to call. I looked him straight in the eye and made the promise.

And every day from then till now, I have thought of calling. Every single day. I've thought of him.

But I don't make phone calls.

He probably knew it. I hope he knew it. I'm a flake. Just terrible at keeping contact. Bad, bad, bad. What else can I say?

But now. We're going back to New Orleans. I wonder what he's suffered. I wonder whether he's alive. I wonder what happened in all those intervening years in which each and every day I thought about calling.

Because I miss her as I do, I will go back and find him, if I can. I won't do it for him, or for me. I will do it for her. On her behalf. Because she is the one who follows through.

I know I have a message for him. I'm not sure what that will be. Just to say she's gone? Just to say I'm sorry? Just to cry out how much I miss her? Not sure.

All I'm sure of, is I won't call.

I want to look him in the eye, face to face and mind to mind, and have him tell me why I'm there.

And what I can do to make amends.