A poet and painter from the Aïr region in the central Sahara, Hawad is Amajagh, known as “Tuareg” to outsiders. He has chosen to write in his own language, Tamajaght, using the vocalized Tuareg alphabet, Tifinagh. The drama and resistance of the Tuareg people—and of any people facing the threat of erasure—permeate his work. To resist chaos and meaninglessness, to fight against the alienation of the imagination—the ultimate dispossession of the self—Hawad created “furigraphy” (zardazghanab). Spurring on “the galloping horse of images and imagination as it bolts,” he sketches escape routes beyond the narratives imposed by domination and violence. His pictorial and literary furigraphy is a means of breaking free from enclosures, inventing a “surnomadism” beyond confiscated time and space, and shaping a self that is multiple, elusive, and omnipresent.

As a child, Hawad was raised in a nomadic world that instilled in him not only spatial mobility but also social, cultural, and linguistic fluidity. In addition to his mother tongue, he speaks several regional languages, including Hausa and Arabic. His imagination was shaped by the stories of his ancestors’ anti-colonial resistance in the early 20th century, by the extermination of the warriors of his confederation (out of nine hundred Ikazkazen households, only sixty remained at the end of the war), and by the looming threat of his people’s and culture’s disappearance.

Escaping certainties, never surrendering—even at the edge of the abyss—carving a path beyond preordained routes: this is the force that drives the eclectic characters in Hawad’s poetry of thirst and wandering. These figures traverse a desert that is both physical and human. Crossing boundaries, whether material or immaterial, is a recurring theme in his work. So too is the motif of thirst, a philosophical quest that spurs cosmic travelers (Caravane de la soif, 1985; Chants de la soif et de l’égarement, 1987; L’Anneau-Sentier, 1992). In search of water, the thirsty wanderer leaves familiar paths, steps into the desert, loses their bearings, strays, raves—until, finally, they are ready to invent their own way forward.

At the root of this thirst, in Hawad’s universe, flames burn and embers smolder—fueled by the fragmentation of the nomadic world, the oppression of its breath, and the suffocation of its dreams. The tragic events of contemporary Tuareg history seep into his fiction. Testament nomade (1987) recounts the violent expulsion of Tuaregs from Algeria, as those registered in other states were cast out. Froissevent (1991) was inspired by the 1984 crisis, when nomads, trapped by drought, were forced into exile—entangled in a foreign elsewhere that imposed its limits and its logic. La danse funèbre du soleil(1992) eerily foreshadowed the massacres of Tuareg civilians in the 1990s in Niger and Mali, and the emergence of armed rebellion. Yasida (1991) grapples with the struggle of marginalized, impoverished, and excluded peoples to resist the looming threat of annihilation. Sahara, visions atomiques (2013), Dans la nasse (2014), and Irradiés (2015) delve into the underground forces of conflict and international intervention, accelerating the agony of the desert and the destruction of the Tuaregs and their land:

“Ruins, a landscape of iron and fire / explosions blasting holes / sewers, swamps, quagmires / where the remnants of the world crawl / piled on barbed wire and mines.”

Oppression elicits different responses, embodied by characters who express contrasting worldviews, whether in the mineral desert or the urban sprawl of modern cities. Whatever the debate, choices unfold in heated verbal jousts where clashing truths ultimately dissolve into cosmic forces. The futility of human actions and certainties—“a tiny grain in the waves of the dunes”—is ever-present in Hawad’s work, where only the blind and the outcast seem to possess true insight, transcending conflicts to act as mediators between worlds.

Hawad is the author of around twenty books, including Furigraphie – Poésies 1985-2015 (Gallimard/Poésie, 2017), Vent Rouge (Institut du Tout-Monde, 2020), and Fiel de cuivre (La Rumeur Libre, 2024). His works have been translated into multiple languages, including French, Dutch, Norwegian, Sami, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, English, and Occitan. He was awarded the Argana Prize in 2017 (International Poetry Prize, Rabat, Morocco). His ink drawings and paintings have been exhibited in cities across Europe, North and South America, and Africa.

(Presentation adapted from the writings of Hélène Claudot-Hawad)