The Parable of the Goatherd, a bestiary
The Parable of the Goatherd is poetical and material research into Amazigh animalistic tropism and zoopoetics, a return to the side of the animal, through the goatherd as mediator, space-crafter, the living-with-other-species space. We meet a proto-Goatherd, an archetype within the Amazigh imaginary, the goatherd as poet and storyteller, a flute player, a tuner of winds, of communication with the non-human.
It seems like the Development imaginary doesn’t have an Outdoor and the modern state, at least in North Africa, is a (geochronological) machine of confiscation(s) ; of the night by electricity, of the orality by literacy, of the gift by market, of the collective memory by museums, of the hospitality by war and tourism, of the relations by exploitation and mining, of life by energy and power.
Front of this pictured authority are there other forces of insurgency? Or some type of resurrection of Wildflowers? Maybe a nostalgia to the barbarous (political barbarity), to the bestial can be point of burrow?
What Does a Berber bestiary look like? Can it be a dramaturgical study of the natural history of development? Or an articulation of Indigenous geography of voices and relationships to land, the intricacies between living beings with the world of plants, atmosphere, soil, water, stones and spirits?
The problem is that Modernity didn’t keep beasts outside. Instead, it tamed them, put them in gardens, archives, records, ethnographic collection, natural reserves, fictions, houses, films, farms, plates, computers..etc. But possibly, in that process, modernity unleashes new bestialities. Flesh can be consumed and sound can be muted but life, this animal spirit, can mutate and find new bodies to inject. This feedback is behind the aggressive development that is ultimately a failing system to humanise, civilise, colonise and contain its beast, in a sort of dialectics. The metaphor of the world as a cage persists. As if this modern space is immune and actually can cure itself, a fatal autoimmunity, like a pharmakon, like a sovereign who is in a civil war.
What if a minimum of optimism is necessary to propose that a negative zone is possible, at least as a fictional setting, probably Hyperstitional, hoping that some furtive earworms to be invoked, exhumated or remembered.
Oral archives, Oraliture can help us to remember how to side with animals, for a poetical program of participation in the World. The animals we are thinking about are anti-metaphysical, they are not the other for an Amazigh humanism and are anti-metaphors, living metaphors.
**Agdal: a géographie d’écart, a matrix for hearing the subjectivity and language of another species, wind whisperer, Humanimal, Animal telepaths, shifters…
