The brother, the djinn, and the passing of time

Dominique Casajus

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 The brother, the djinn, and the passing of time
Dominique Casajus

Paper published in: Research  in  African  Literatures,  Vol.  15,  No  2,  Special  Issue  on  
African  Oral  Narrative  (Summer  1984),  pp.  218-­‐237  

A series of tales collected between 1976 and 1980 in northern Niger, in the course
of anthropological fieldwork on Tuareg social relations, convinced me of the importance of
the brother-sister relationship in Tuareg oral literature, an importance reflecting the
privileged position the relationship occupies in the social network. In order to illustrate this
proposition, I have selected two stories because they not only raise key sociological issues,
but also constitute interesting Tuareg versions of tales widely distributed in the Sahel-
Maghreb region and in other parts of the world.
This study1 will essentially focus on “Teshewa”, collected in February 1980 from
Ghaisha Ult Khamed, of the Iberdiyanan tribe, the imghad of the Kel Ferwan2 Tuareg who
are nomads west of Agadez. I will examine a second, “Young girl kidnapped by a djinn”,
collected from numerous individuals in the same region, only in terms of the questions
raised by the first.

Teshawa 3
A young girl named Teshewa has a father, mother, younger brother, older brother,
and sister-in-law, the wife of her older brother. She habitually washes her hair in her older
brother’s copper basin. One day before leaving on his voyage, he washes his basin and says:
“I will marry whoever washes her hair in my basin during my absence, even if she is my
mother.” Following her brother’s departure, Teshewa continues washing her hair in the
basin even though her mother warns her against it. One of her hairs winds itself around the
basin’s handle. Following his return, the brother finds the hair, knows that someone has
used his basin, and learns that it is Teshewa. The marriage contract is immediately drawn

                                                                                                               
1 Previous versions of this article were presented orally in G. Calame-Griaule’s seminar on oral
literature and at a meeting of the Oral Literature Section of the E.R.A. 246. In developing my
analysis, I particularly benefited from detailed commentaries made by G. Calame-Griaule,
Ch. Seydou, and B. Biebuyck, to whom I am indebted. This article is an edited and translated
version of “Le Frere, le djinn et le temps qui passe,” Cahiers de Littérature Orale, 12 (1983). This
translation is by Brunhilde Biebuyck.
2 Kel Ferwan is the name of a confederation of tribes composed of one noble and several
commoner (imghad) tribes. I have written a brief portrait of Ghaisha Ult Khamed in “Un Salon
litteraire chez les Touaregs,” Cabiers de Littérature Orale, 11 (1982), 177-178.
3 I published the complete tuareg text of this tale and its French translation in my book Peau d’Âne
et autres contes Touaregs, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1985 (note added to the online version).
up and the wedding takes place that night. In the morning twilight before sunrise Teshewa
leaves the bridal tent and goes away.4
She walks for a long time, finds a tewela (Sclerocarya birrea), climbs onto it and
transforms herself into a bird. Her kin lose hope of ever finding her, but one day, seeing
her younger brother herding sheep in the distance, she calls out. They spend the day
together. She delouses him and asks him to return the following day with scissors, a knife,
and a comb so that she can dress his hair. He does as he is told. She tells him to keep the
flap end of his boubou on his head5 so that no one will see that his hair has been dressed.
When he returns to the encampment, his kin who are surprised at his garb,
forcefully uncover his head, and try in vain to know who had dressed his hair. The
following day they follow him and thus discover the tree where Teshewa is perched. His
kin had brought a golden basin filled with water; everyone offers her water in turn, saying:
“Teshewa, Teshewa, here is some water, drink.” She answers them one after the other,
saying: “My father-father-in-law, I don’t want any water, drink it yourself;” “my mother-
mother-in-law, I don’t want any water, drink it yourself.” She also addresses in turn “my
older brother-husband,” “my younger brother-brother-in-law," "my sister-in-law-cowife."6
In short, she refuses to come down from the tree. Her kin chop down the tree and grab
her (she is still a bird). They put her inside a tunic pocket, and she begins to grow bigger; in
succession she is put inside bigger and bigger leather bags, and finally she is placed inside
the stomach of a she-ass (although the tale does not state it specifically, the activities in
which she engages lead us to believe she then is transformed into a young girl). Every day
she goes to the well, waits for the people to leave, leaves her she-ass, waters her sheep,
reenters her she-ass, and returns to the encampment in this way.
The amenokal’s7 son suspects something in this she-ass. He climbs a tree in order
to spy on her. Teshewa arrives, leaves the she-ass, and takes off her clothes in order to

                                                                                                               
4In a Kel Ferwan marriage the nuptial tent, which will subsequently be the couple’s abode, is
erected near the encampment of the girl’s parents. The couple settles there the night of the
marriage ceremonies. Before sunrise, they leave to return to the encampments of their own parents
and return to their own tent following sunset. A paranymph accompanies them each time (a boy
for the husband, a girl for the wife). The tent remains in the same place for seven days; it is empty
during the day and occupied at night. After seven days, the couple moves and settles the tent in the
encampment of the husband’s family.
5The Tuaregs sometimes wear very large boubous and can fold the flap end back onto their head;
young people who do not wear the litham voluntarily wear their boubou in this way.
6 In the tale this passage is a sort of fixed-form recitative. The passage in which Teshewa refuses the
water offered by her kin also is sung in fixed form. Numerous Tuareg tales contain this type of
refrain, sung or recited. In some ways they are the tale’s emblem and a good storyteller should not
omit them. It is reasonable to postulate that an important aspect of the tale is to be found in these
passages. In fact, we will see that these two fixed form passages correspond to one another and
represent the essentials of the tale.
7 The term amenokal designates the chief of a noble tribe who does not recognize the supremacy of
any other noble tribe. There are tribes that exist in the orbit of a much more powerful tribe without
becoming vassals; their chief cannot be an amenokal. In Agadez the term also designates the sultan;
the Agadez sultan does not have any equivalents anywhere else in the Tuareg world and his role is
bathe. The boy steals her clothes and returns to his tree. Returning from her bath, the
young girl says, “Who took my undergarment? He should return it to me, and he will see a
way of wearing an undergarment that is more beautiful than his mother’s.” He gives it to
her. She thus enumerates in succession all her clothing and jewelry, saying each time: “He
who will return my pagne [loincloth], my tunic, my bracelet, … will see a way of wearing it
that is more beautiful than his mother’s, sister’s, cousin’s.” He returns all her clothing to
her, comes down from the tree, places her behind him on his camel, and takes her back
with him. On the way, she pretends that she left her bracelet behind, backtracks, and
reenters her sheass. Turning his head, the young man only sees a she-ass. He tells his kin
that he wants to marry this she-ass. Everyone tries in vain to convince him to the contrary.
The wedding is celebrated and the she-ass is led into the bridal tent. When night falls,
Teshewa comes out of her she-ass.
In the morning twilight the amenokal’s envoys come to learn the news, and then
the amenokal himself arrives. The young girl they see before them is so beautiful that they
faint in shock. She reanimates them by sprinkling them with sweat from her forehead. The
amenokal falls in love with his daughter-in-law and decides to kill his son.
Seven days after the wedding8 he asks his son to accompany him on a voyage.
Arriving at a well, he finds a pretext to have his son enter it and then abandons him. The
latter scratches his head and discovers the dates his wife had placed in his hair when she
braided it. He eats the dates and throws away the pits. One of them germinates and
becomes a palm tree that he climbs, leaving the well in this way. Upon returning home, he
finds his wife (the story implies that she has remained faithful to him). He subsequently
succeeds in killing his father by making him fall into a well whose opening he had hidden
with a cover and at the bottom of which he had lit a fire.

Preliminary Remarks
At first sight, this tale can be divided into three parts, a division that is only useful
from an analytical perspective. Since my intention is to identify its unity, I will be obliged to
go beyond these subdivisions. The first part involves an incestuous marriage. A young girl
married to her brother seeks refuge at the top of a tree from which she is forcefully
dislodged by her kin. In the second part a young man who has hidden himself in a tree
returns the articles of clothing he had stolen from the young girl one by one and then
marries her. In the third part father and son fight for possession of the young woman.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
principally religious. By mentioning the amenokal, the narrator does not refer to a precise institution
but simply wants to designate a powerful man-he is the king of the “fairytale.”
8 The tale states: “When a period of seven days had elapsed for the son.” This is the period of
seven days following the wedding during which the newlyweds do not spend the day in the tent (see
note 3). If the marriage had taken place near Teshewa’s encampment, which does not appear to be
the case, it is at this moment that the amenokal’s son would return to his father’s encampment with
Teshewa. Whatever the case, it is the end of a period marked by numerous prohibitions after which
the young couple begins to settle into its new social status.
 It is interesting to note at this juncture that the last two parts of “Teshewa” are
almost exact replicas of a tale collected by G. Calame-Griaule near In Gall,9 situated very
near Kel Ferwan. In her analysis, Calame-Griaule says the tale belongs to the family of tales
involving “animal wives” (AT 400) and, more particularly, to the group in which this theme
is associated with another theme, “the husband persecuted because of his beautiful wife”
(AT 465). Needless to say, we can make the same remarks about our tale. On the other
hand, the first two parts of “Teshewa” are very similar to another well-known European
story involving an animal wife, “The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars,” (AT 510B).10
“Teshewa”, in which the incestuous father of AT 510B has become a brother, seems to be
a synthesis of these two kindred tales that usually appear separately in international folktale
tradition.

The Tree Theme

At this point it is useful to refer to V. Görög-Karady’s article on the tree theme in
African tales11 because it includes a series of tales, collected in the Sahel-Maghreb region,
that are clearly related to the first part of “Teshewa”.
In one of these, collected among the Songhay, a young girl tells her family that she
only wants to marry her brother. She is chased out of the village and seeks refuge in a
baobab tree where her sister finds her. Her family gathers at the foot of the tree and asks
her to come down. She only consents on the condition that her brother accept her hand in
marriage. He pretends to accept her offer and she comes down, but he does not keep his
promise and the young girl dies after three days.
We find the same motifs here as in the first part of “Teshewa”: incestuous marriage
(realized in one case and only desired by one of the two possible partners in the other); the
sister seeking refuge in a tree; the discovery by a member of her family (brother or sister);
the family gathering at the foot of the tree and pleading for her to come down (Teshewa’s
parents offer her something to drink in the hopes of grabbing the bird she had become).
In the same article by Görög-Karady we read the following tale collected among
the Hausa (my paraphrase): The daughter of a chief only loves her brother. She behaves
toward him as she would toward a potential husband; that is to say, she does not call him
by his name. The brother decides to remedy this state of affairs. He goes to the river where
his sister bathes with her friends, picks up their clothes, climbs a tree, and declares that he
will only return the garments if they call him by name. All except his sister do as they are
                                                                                                               
9Cf., G. Calame-Griaule, “Peau d’anesse,” Cabiers d’Études Africaines, 73-76, 1-4 (1981), 501-515.
The closeness of this tale to ours perhaps explains a curious detail in the latter. When the amenokal’s
son puts her on the back of his camel, Teshewa pretends to have lost her bracelet and returns in
order to introduce herself anew into her she-ass skin. In the “Peau d’anesse” story, the young girl
originally is a she-ass; she only becomes the wife following a series of adventures and regressions to
her previous state (p. 502). Teshewa’s return to her she-ass state seems to be a trace of this incident,
but it has lost its function.
10 Ibid., pp. 507-508.
V. Görög-Karady, “L’arbre justicier,” in Le Thème de l’arbre dans les contes africains, ed. G. Calame-
11

Griaule (Paris: SELAF, 1970), pp. 23-62.

told. The water begins to rise dangerously and she, in turn, is forced to call her brother by
name. From then on she can no longer consider him as a potential husband.
Here again we find the tree and the incest theme present in the first part of
“Teshewa”. This tale, however, also recalls the second part in which Teshewa bathes
herself and the amenokal’s son steals her clothing and he hides himself in a tree. In order
to regain possession of her clothing Teshewa says that she wears her undergarment more
beautifully than his mother’s mother, the pagne more beautifully than his mother, and so
forth. This statement implies that she does not wear her garments as his mother’s mother,
mother, and so on do. In other words, she announces: “Look at me and be convinced that
I am neither your mother nor your mother’s mother,” in short, “I am not your kin.”
As we can see in the following table, the Hausa story and the second part of our
tale are inversely symmetrical.
HAUSA TESHEWA
Brother-sister; brother in a tree, sister is Man-woman, man in a tree, woman is
batheing. batheing.
Brother obliges sister to behave as his sister Woman convinces man she is not his kin
and not as his potential spouse. and is therefore marriageable.
Brother returns clothing to her. Man returns clothing to her.
Conclusion: They were not married. Conclusion: They were married.

The development of this sequence, in turn, clarifies the first part in which Teshewa
is in a tree and her kin offer water to her, hoping that she will come down. She answers
“father-father-inlaw, mother-mother-in-law, brother-husband, I don’t want water.” In
other words, she implies: “I am both your in-law and your kin.” The clothing motif is not
present in this episode, whereas it is in the tale involving coming down from a tree. In fact,
the first motif is secondary and when it is present, its function is to accentuate a symmetry
whose axis is the “coming down from the tree” motif. In this respect, the following
parallels can be drawn between the first two parts of “Teshewa” and the Hausa and
Songhay tales:
First part: Teshewa refuses to come down from the tree because she is both
the kin and affine of those who await her below.
Second part: The amenokal’s son comes down from the tree when it is clear
that the young girl standing below is not his kin but a possible affine.
Songhai tale: The sister comes down from the tree when her brother agrees
to marry her; she dies in the end.
Hausa tale: The brother comes down from the tree when his sister behaves
as his sister.
 The Confusion between Affinity and Consanguinity
As the preceding table demonstrates, the tree in this series of tales or episodes is
always brought into play in the following sequence: A asks B to come down from a tree; B
comes down or does not come down. He only comes down when the kinship relationship
with A is defined without ambiguity; he does not come down when he cannot choose
between two possible attitudes. Coming down or not coming down from the tree means
being able or not being able to choose between affinity and consanguinity (in the Songhay
tale the girl comes down but this leads to her death because she has made a wrong choice).
Climbing the tree could be seen as expressing passage to an interrogative mode. The
question that is raised is “Are you an affine or a consanguine relative?”
Ultimately the tale underscores the idea that the very structuring of the social tissue
is founded on the distinction between affinity and consanguinity. Incest, presented here as
a case in point, would in effect abolish this distinction. In doing so, it would serially abolish
all distinctions that are the very basis of social life: If Oedipus marries Jocasta who will the
child of their union be? Oedipus’s brother or son?12 This point is also subtly evident in
another detail in the tale: Since she has used her brother’s copper basin illicitly (thereby
overqualifying the brother-sister relationship), Teshewa cannot have recourse to the golden
basin offered by her kin; even the licit use of this kinship relationship (to drink from the
same basin) is no longer possible for her.
By means of reasoning ad absurdum, the tale identifies the logical consequences of
premises that contradict customary social life. This logic appears most clearly in the
sequence involving the tree, but it had already surfaced in previous episodes, which
announce and prepare them, forming a sort of crescendo movement. Following her first
wedding night, Teshewa flees at morning twilight. In reality, it is at this time that newly
weds part from one another and leave their bridal tent to regain the encampment of their
own kin. In this case, the encampment of Teshewa’s parents is also that of her husband’s
and she cannot part from him as she should. She can only flee. This flight and its
accompanying metamorphosis into a bird thus seem to be direct consequences of the
incestuous marriage. Later, she delouses her younger brother and dresses his hair, a token
of affection frequently reserved for (and even expected for) a brother-in-law. Although
brothers and sisters are supposed to have great affection for one another (see below), and
perhaps because of this, a sister cannot dress her brother’s hair or delouse him. A wife can
treat her husband in this way, but any public demonstration of affection between husband
and wife is not permitted. Through these episodes (the tree episode being the climax), the
tale thus announces that it addresses itself not so much to the question of incest in and of
itself (about which it is very discreet) but to its consequences: the confusion between in-
laws and kin.
The first two parts of “Teshewa” clarify each other, forming panels of a diptych; at
first sight, the third part seems to be added on, but I will demonstrate that this is not the
case and that it, in fact, is a response to the first two parts.

                                                                                                               
12Sophocles lays the emphasis on this in his play Oedipus the King (see Vernant, J.-P. 2001 c [1970].
« Ambiguïté et renversement. Sur la structure énigmatique d’“Œdipe-Roi” », in Vernant, J.-P. & P.
Vidal-Naquet (ed.), Œdipe et ses mythes, Paris, Éditions Complexe, 2001 : 54-78. [note added to the
online version]
 The Father and Son
In the third part the well plays a role similar to that of the tree in the first two parts.
The amenokal first abandons his son at the bottom of a well, then the latter reciprocates.
For the narrator and auditors, the father’s attitude is condemnable, whereas the son’s
vengeance (despite its cruelty) represents a return to a certain degree of social norm: If sons
marry after their father, they should also die after them.
At the beginning of the tale, the tree appeared two times. In one case, the heroine
could not (or did not want to) come down from it; in the other, the hero could come
down. The well appears twice in the third part, and each time a man throws a relative into
it. In the first case, the victim succeeds in climbing out; in the second case, he cannot. The
son’s temporary stay at the bottom of the well corresponds to a socially unacceptable
situation; the father’s definitive stay corresponds to a return to the social norm. Similarly, in
the first two parts, it is initially socially impossible for Teshewa to come down from her
tree whereas for the amenokal’s son, it means that a socially acceptable marriage is possible.
We can compare occurrences of the tree and the well in the following way:
Situation Tree Well
Socially unacceptable Climbing down is impossible Climbing out is possible
situation
Socially acceptable situation Climbing down is possible Climbing out is impossible
(return to social norm)

One detail accentuates the symmetry highlighted between tree and well: It is once
again a tree that makes it possible for the amenokal’s son to climb out of the well; climbing
a tree and leaving a well are thus equivalent. This third occurrence of a tree does not have
the same meaning as the first two; unlike the first two, it does not represent a form of
interrogation. In some ways this motif is neutral; only its form is important. It does not
make sense in and of itself, but it highlights the symmetry existing between the other
episodes.
This formal symmetry corresponds to the analogy existing between the sociological
content of the tree and the well episodes. The first part of the tale involves a confusion
between two terms –affine and consanguine– that should remain distinct; the second part
involves an inversion of two terms –senior and junior (the father refuses to accept his
status as a man older than his son). We could venture to say that the opposition between
affinity and consanguinity is spatial (a consanguine relative is nearer than an affine and
consequently marrying someone in this category implies marrying close by rather than far
away) and that the opposition between senior and junior is temporal. In fact, reference to
temporality is not absent from the beginning of the tale; this reference will become clearer
when I compare “Teshewa” with “The girl kidnapped by a djinn”, in which reference to
temporality becomes more explicit.
The opposition made between tree and well is echoed in a minor way in the two
passages in which Teshewa braids a man’s hair. The first man is her brother whom she
treats as her brother-in-law (in a long episode preceding the first tree scene), a deed directly
related to the fact that she cannot come down from the tree. She subsequently dresses her
husband’s hair with all the requisite discretion (since it is mentioned only after the fact). As
we saw, among the Tuareg, demonstration of affection between spouses cannot be made
publicly whereas a woman has the right to demonstrate a certain public tenderness for her
brother-in-law.
The last part and the ensemble formed by the first two thus are symmetrically
related. The tale cannot, however, be reduced to the juxtaposition of two symmetrical
sections. Teshewa first transforms herself into a bird and then into a she-ass. The bird’s
species is not specified; the narrator uses the generic term egejid. This bird is perched on a
tewela, a tree that does not exist on Kel Ferwan soil but that is familiar because its wood is
used for certain kitchen utensils sold in the marketplace in Agadez. Teshewa thus
metamorphoses herself into an unidentified bird living in a faraway country. This
metamorphosis, therefore, puts her in a state of extreme indeterminacy, which is
superimposed onto her social indeterminacy: she is both and at the same time an
unidentified bird and a girl whose status (kin or affine) cannot be identified. A series of
successive transformations lead her to a state of she-ass, a domestic animal (which, for her,
corresponds to a lesser degree of indeterminacy), then to a woman. The sequence of these
transformations is graduated: Teshewa is first enclosed within skin containers (bags) that
become bigger and bigger, then finally in the she-ass’s belly, which, after all, is also a type
of skin container. It seems that she definitely leaves her she-ass state following her second
wedding night, which corresponds to her metamorphosis into a bird following her first
wedding night. Successive metamorphoses weaken the effect of the first one (which, right
after her stay in an animal belly, seems to be a kind of rebirth) and can cancel the effects of
the abnormal one and transform the young girl back to her full human state.13 These series
of transformations can be represented as follows:
Incestuous marriage ⇒ ⇒ undefined bird ⇒ ⇒ bird in a bag ⇒ ⇒ young girl in a bag
⇓
Woman ⇐ ⇐ (normal marriage) ⇐ ⇐ young girl inside a domestic animal

We noted that the beginning and end of the tale oppose the themes of the tree and
the well. We can also point out that at the beginning the young girl’s behavior is asocial
whereas at the end it is social and even positive since she is responsible for saving her
husband from the well. This is an additional symmetrical element between the beginning
and the end, but the narrative cannot go from one attitude to the other without passing
through a series of intermediary states, for the distance is too great between her asocial
behavior (incest) and her positive social behavior (rescuing). This gradation thus functions
like an obligatory bridge between the two symmetrical sections; it is the axis around which
the tale unfolds its symmetrical games and which creates its unity.

                                                                                                               
13For this remark, as well as its subsequent development, I am indebted to Calame-Griaule, “Peau
d’Ânesse.”
 The Young Girl Kidnapped by a Djinn
I collected only one complete version of “Teshewa”. The other versions with which
I am familiar do not contain the incestuous episode, and other innocuous adventures lead
to her transformation into a bird.14 It is surely dangerous to base commentaries on only
one version; I have judged it feasible only insofar as variants of certain episodes of
Teshewa exist in neighbouring societies (without which my argument would have been
difficult to make) and because this tale seems to be the mirror image of another that exists
in numerous variants in Tuareg country. Through a kind of reasoning ad absurdum
Teshewa tests the hypothesis of abnormal endogamy; the tale I will now analyze tests the
hypothesis of abnormal exogamy.
A young girl is kidnapped by a djinn (the Tamacheq aljin, derived from the Arabic;
the term kel-esuf, “those of the bush,” is also used). Whereas certain traits unite the Tuareg
jnoun (pl. for djinn) and the Arabic jnoun as they are described in the Koran and the classics,
there is one trait that profoundly distinguishes one from the other. The Tuaregs affirm that
the jnoun are the dead and add that those who become jnoun eternally haunt the tent in
which they receive their final funeral rites.
It is important here to bear in mind that when she marries, a woman receives her
mother’s tent. More precisely, her mother gives her the principal elements of her tent and
keeps the others for herself. The two women, therefore, each live in a tent resulting from a
split of the one tent. The Tuareg insist on the proximity, almost the identity, of these two
tents. A woman and her daughter thus live and die in two tents that are not completely
distinguished one from the other, whereas a man is born and marries in two separate tents
that are viewed as quite distinct from one another. In principle, he dies in the second one,
which he will haunt following his death. I will return to this point at the end of the study.

The Tuareg Versions of the Tale

Following are summaries of the principal versions, also collected between 1976 and
1980 from Kel Ferwan Tuaregs in the region around Agadez.
Version 1: There are several brothers and a very beautiful sister. One day when they
all are at the well, a djinn hidden at the bottom grabs their scoop and only lets it go in
exchange for the promise of their sister. He takes the young girl and before setting off, he
asks her, “Which do you prefer? That I eat you or that I become your father?” She chooses
that he become her father. On the way, he regularly asks her: “Look, look, what do you
see?” The young girl responds: “I see a beautiful encampment surrounded by camels (or
else by horses or goats or other animals, the animals change with each new answer).” The
djinn invariably answers: “In our place it is still more beautiful.” They finally arrive at the
djinn’s very ugly abode. One of her brothers goes off in search of his sister together with
one of his slaves; en route both men come upon encampments where the brother exclaims,
“Me, my camel, my saddle, my slave, what on earth is more beautiful than all this?” “All
                                                                                                               
14 In one of these versions the young girls, jealous of the beauty of one of their companions, throw
her into a well. As she falls, she is transformed into a bird that perches on a neighbouring tree. The
tale is then identical to the preceding one. It is interesting to note that the motif of the jealous girls
can be found in the next tale that we will analyze.
that is quite beautiful,” he is told, “but ten years before you came a young girl who
surpassed you in beauty passed through here” (then nine, eight . . . the number of years
diminish as the hero advances). Each time he leaves an encampment the brother sings:
“Oh, Oh Khayatan [the name of his sister], where are you, you whose lips are so dark [a
sign of beauty among the Tuareg].” The narrator specifies that he cannot forget his sister’s
beauty. When the brothers arrive at the sister’s tent, she hides them under her bed.
Following the return of the djinn, the brother amuses himself by pricking him with a
blacksmith’s awl. Thinking he is bit by an ant, the djinn cannot fall asleep. Later in the same
night, the young girl asks him where his soul is. He answers: “Go to a gazelle [in this
version the gazelle is near a river], remove one of its horns by beating it with a stick; inside
this horn is a bag … [and so on up to ten bags]. In the tenth there is a box, in which there
is a box, in which there is a box … [up to ten boxes]. In the tenth box you will find a hair.
That is my soul.” She follows his advice, finds the hair and breaks it. The djinn dies and she
returns home.
Version 2: A group of young girls who are jealous of their friend’s beauty abandon
her alone in the bush while they are picking wild berries. She is accosted by a djinn who tells
her: “Which do you prefer? That I eat you or that I marry you?” She prefers getting
married. There follows a long voyage similar to the one in version 1. Her oldest
“intelligent” brother visits his sister without the djinn’s knowledge and then returns home.
Her youngest “stupid” brother, in turn, comes to visit and, on the way home he is
surprised by the djinn who kills him. Then the young girls kills the djinn in the same way as
in the preceding version.
Version 3: Young girls leave to pick wild berries. Out of naughtiness one of them
separates herself from the group; a djinn accosts her. She succeeds in escaping from him
and regains her mother’s tent, but he catches up with her. Hearing a noise outside, her
mother thinks that a sheep is caught in the mats of her tent and orders her daughter to go
out and chase it. She does so unwillingly, and the djinn grabs her. The rest of the tale is
analogous to version 1. The motif of the brother’s laments is attenuated and that of the
blacksmith’s awl disappears.
In these three tales the djinn behaves like a husband toward the young girl he
kidnaps: She cooks for him and they share the same tent and bed. In versions 2 and 3 he is
explicitly called her husband (elis net, “her man”). In version 1, however, he proposes to
become her father, but this does not change in any way his future behavior, which is
analogous to that of the other two jnoun. I will return to this significant characteristic (the
djinn being “father” and “husband” simultaneously) at the end of this study.

The Tale in the Berber World

Tales in which a young girl is kidnapped by a monstrous being are not specifically
Tuareg. Equivalents can be found elsewhere in the Berber world and even in the
international folktale tradition.15 The Tuareg versions, however, are particular in one aspect
                                                                                                               
15These tales recall those of the “capricious girl,” in which a young woman refuses all suitors that
her family proposes to her; she accepts only one suitor who reveals himself to be an animal or
monster. In the Tuareg versions, which are different on this point, the young girl never consents to
her kidnapping.
that I will examine first. I will merely compare them to their variants in the closest
neighbouring groups, for in fact what distinguishes these tales from their closest variants
should suffice in establishing their specificity.16
One version was collected by René Basset in Wargla (Southern Algeria); it reads as
follows:17
A man and his wife had seven sons and one daughter. The daughter leaves with her
friends to cut underbrush. She playfully separates herself from her friends and is accosted
by an ogre; he lets her leave on the condition that she return. She has no intention of
keeping her promise, but he follows her tracks to her home. Her mother orders her to give
fire to the stranger who is standing near the door. She does so unwillingly and the ogre
grabs her and leaves. Her seven brothers each in turn attempt to deliver her from the ogre
but he kills them all. The youngest brother, born after the kidnapping, succeeds in killing
the ogre, saving his sister, and resuscitating his seven brothers.
This version thus also involves the kidnapping of a young girl by a semi-human: the
word which I translate as ogre is ghul, a term derived from Arabic that led to the French
word goule, and to the English ghoul.18 In the Arab classics the ghoul is akin to the djinn from
whom he often is not distinguished. To my knowledge this is the closest Berber example of
the Tuareg versions. Father J. Riviere related another tale (collected from the Kabyle,
northern Algeria) in which a short passage recalls an episode shared by the three Tuareg
tales:19
A man’s spouse is kidnapped by an ogre. The man goes off to find her, encounters
the ogre and asks him where his destiny lies. “My destiny,” answers the ogre, “is in an egg;
the egg is in a pigeon; the pigeon is in a she-camel, the she-camel is in the sea.” The man
digs a hole on the seashore, a she-camel emerges from the waters, falls into the hole. He
disembowels it, removes a pigeon, removes an egg from the pigeon; he crushes the egg and
the ogre dies.
This is a short passage in a much larger story involving an entirely different subject,
but it recalls the successive encasings in the three versions (hair in the box, box in the bag,
bag in the horn), particularly in version 1, in which the gazelle whose horn contains the
djinn’s soul is found either near the sea or a river (sea and river are expressed by the same
term in Tamacheq, egerew).
                                                                                                               
16Recognizing the particularity of a tale is not without importance. A tale is not a myth and there is
a certain degree of arbitrariness in the manner in which it organizes its elements (cf. C. Levi-Strauss,
Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1973), vol. 2, p. 154). Possibly for this reason a culture can easily
borrow tales without bothering to transform them. It is thus important to ask what exactly a given
culture does with a tale; that is to say, identify the treatment it can give it and define what is specific
to it. This concern, which is superfluous if one undertakes a purely semiological analysis of a tale,
cannot be neglected if society is the backdrop of one’s study. Teshewa’s particularity resides in the
fact that it is a synthesis of two distinct tales.
17Rene Basset, “Les Huit frères, leur sœur, et l’ogre (Ouargla),” in Nouveaux contes berbères (Paris:
Leroux, 1897, pp. 96-102.
18 In French the word goule frequently designates a female demon but ghul does not.
19 Joseph Riviere, Recueil de contes populaires de la Kabylie et du Djurdjura (Paris: Leroux, 1882), p. 191.
 The similarities between the tale from Wargla and certain Tuareg versions (even in
minute details) indicate that we are, in fact, dealing with the same story. As in versions 2
and 3, the young girl encounters a djinn (the ogre) while she is picking wild cereals or
berries. As in version 3 she playfully separates herself from the group and it is because her
mother asks her to leave the house, which she does unwillingly, that the djinn can
subsequently seize her.
In the tale from Wargla, each of the seven brothers in turn goes in search of his
sister and fails. An eighth child, who is born much later and is small but sly, succeeds in
killing the ogre. A distant reminder of this motif can be found in version 2: One of the
brothers (intelligent) visits his sister and returns without problems; the second (stupid) is
killed by the djinn on his way home. This motif is also found in “Tom Thumb,” which
exists in Tuareg oral literature.
At this point we can speak of a Tuareg form and a Maghrebian form of the same
tale. From one to the other, however, there is an important alteration. In the Maghreb
versions the brothers actually fight the ogre and one of them kills him. In the brief passage
cited from the Kabyle story, it is the husband of the kidnapped woman who confronts the
ogre, but in any case, the woman is always rescued by someone. In all the Tuareg versions
none of the brothers confronts the djinn, and the sister frees herself on her own. Version 1,
it is true, contains a trace of combat between a djinn and one of the brothers: Hidden under
his sister’s bed, the brother amuses himself by pricking the djinn with a blacksmith’s awl,
but this action is a caricature of combat, a puerile game replacing a true confrontation. The
very fact that he uses the tool of a blacksmith (a scorned individual) makes this game all the
more ignominious. Similarly, in version 2 the stupid brother is killed when he returns home
(when his back is turned) and not when he is confronted by the ogre. It is this absence of
confrontation between the brothers and the djinn that gives the Tuareg tale its
distinctiveness and that will enable me to compare it with “Teshewa”. As we shall see, it
actually only partly involves the story of a kidnapping.

Brother-Sister Relationship
In version 1 (as well as in version 3 and in others not cited here) the djinn and the
young girl cross innumerable countries; before each encampment they come across, he
asks: “Look, what do you see?” Each time, she responds: “I see a very beautiful
encampment and so on” to which the djinn responds: “In my place, it is even more
beautiful.” This passage constitutes a kind of song whose couplets the tale-teller repeats. In
version 1 (as well as in version 3, to a certain extent) the brother in search of his sister asks
the inhabitants of the encampments if they have ever seen anything more beautiful than his
retinue. These questions and the answers constitute a sort of recitative that can be seen as a
response to the djinn’s song, inasmuch as the encampments the brother comes upon are
presumably the same as those the djinn and the young woman had seen. The recitative can
be seen as a response to the song for another reason: In the song comparison is made
between the beauty of the encampment seen from far away and the beauty of the
emcampment who is the goal of the voyage; in the recitative, the inhabitants of the
encampments encountered compare the voyager’s beauty to that of the young woman who
is the goal of the voyage. Furthermore in version 1, and to a lesser extent in version 3, the
brother moans all along his route about the beauty of his lost sister. This passage is sung
and it alternates with questions to the inhabitants posed in the recitative mode. In Tuareg
tales these sung or recited passages are very important (see note 6) and an essential aspect
of the tale is condensed within them. The tale in question parallels two voyages: one
involving a woman and a djinn and one involving a brother who travels with his sister in his
thoughts. The brother’s tenderness toward his sister is emphatically expressed here; in a
previous study I analyzed this tenderness as reflecting incestuous sentiments,20 but further
discussions with informants did not corroborate my interpretation; they viewed the
brother’s laments as only a kind of literary device.21 In Tuareg tales a brother frequently
displays a slightly demonstrative tenderness toward his sister, but this tenderness is pure
and it is a trait that is always much appreciated by the audience. Similar episodes appear in
tales in which the brother could be even less accused of incestuous sentiments for he
brilliantly marries his sister off and he protects her against the schemes of jealous cowives.
On the contrary, the incestuous brother in Teshewa is rather brutal. Furthermore, whereas
they are rivals in the Maghrebian tales, the brother and djinn hardly encounter one another
in the Tuareg examples; this absence of rivalry between the brother and the sister’s
“husband” is another reason why we must not quickly jump to the conclusion that the
brother’s sentiments are incestuous. The “Young girl kidnapped by a djinn” merely presents
with much literary affectation a brother-sister couple parallel with a woman-djinn couple.
Without entering into details, I will simply say that it parallels a normal brother-sister
relationship with an abnormal relationship between a woman and a male being. The real
argument of the tales lies in this aspect more than in the kidnapping.

Excessive Exogamy and Endogamy

This tale, or family of tales, seems to be the mirror image of “Teshewa”. Normal
and even positive in the latter, the husband-wife relationship is monstrous in the djinn tales.
Incestuous in “Teshewa”, the brother-sister relationship is normal and even positive in the
others. The opposition of these two types of tales is also apparent in certain narrative
details, which I have not commented on thus far. In the three versions of the second, a
young girl kills the djinn by taking one of his hairs; in the first a brother marries his sister
because he finds one of her hairs. In version 2 of the second type, on the other hand, a
young girl is accosted by a djinn because of the jealousy of her friends; in Teshewa it is the
father’s jealousy that compromises his son’s marriage for a period of time. Taking these
details into consideration, and arranging the two “tale-types” in chronological order but
inverting the temporal axis in both, we obtain the following table:

                                                                                                               
20 Cf. my thesis, La tente dans la solitude, University Paris 7, 1979.
21 Even if it is not incestuous, and precisely because it is not, the tenderness between brother and
sister is remarkable. In folktales, it reflects the particular closeness between a Tuareg man and his
sister, indications of which are to be found, among other places, in the kinship terminology. I am
now studying aspects of this closeness.
 Fist Tale Second Tale
A man takes his sister’s hair and this initiates A woman takes a male being’s hair and this
an abnormal endogamous relationship ends an abnormal exogamous relationship
Positive wife-husband relationship Positive brother-sister relationship
Jealousy between men compromises this Jealousy between young girls breaks this
relationship for a while relationship and fuels the other one

Each column in the table not only is symmetrical but is also the inverse of the other
one. In one as in the other, the roles played by women and men are inverted. The husband-
wife relationship becomes a brother-sister relationship. The manner in which time elapses
is also inverted. We should furthermore note that in “Teshewa” a young girl is
transformed, whereas in the second tale the djinn is a being who has the power (among
others) to transform himself. The fact that the hair motif plays an important role in the
ensemble constituted by the two types of tales is highlighted by its double occurrence in
“Teshewa”, which echoes (inside the same tale) the symmetry of the hair motif between
the two types.
These two are strictly opposed to each other; one exposes excessive endogamous
and the other exogamous situations. This opposition can be broadened if two facts I have
withheld from this analysis are taken into account: Although the djinn in version 1 behaves
like the girl’s husband, he is her “father”; on the other hand, I have mentioned that the
Tuareg jnoun also are the dead, which distinguishes them from the ghul or ogres in the
Maghreb tales. We shall see that these two facts are tied to one another.
If the djinn is either the husband or father of the young girl (since versions of the
tale move indifferently from one status to the other), there must be a point of view that
equates these two statuses. Indeed, an equivalence can be found if we recall that the Tuareg
tent is transmitted from mother to daughter and that following his death a man (who
becomes a djinn) haunts the tent in which he died and in which he took his wife. The social
position of the tent can be outlined as follows:
A = A’
B = B’
C = C’
A, her daughter B, and her daughter’s daughter C are the proprietors of three tents
that derive from the split of one tent (that of A). They each represent the successive stages
in the destiny of A’s tent. In relationship to the latter, A’, B’, and C’, respective husbands of
A, B, and C all occupy, or have occupied, the same status: they entered the tent (or its
avatars) as husband, coming from another, quite different tent (see above). Let us imagine
now that A’ is dead and C represents the young girl in the djinn tale. C’ is her husband, B’
her father, and A’ a djinn who haunts A’s tent (from which C’s derives). In doing so, we see
that in the tale the three statuses are confounded: In real time they succeed one another – a
man begins as husband in a tent, he later becomes the father of a girl born in this tent (she
will later marry in a tent deriving from this one), and ultimately he will die and haunt the
tent as a djinn. What lends the tale its marvellous or monstrous aspect is that a certain
degree of power over temporality (the basis of society) disappears. The three successive
moments in the destiny of a tent are confounded.
Similarly, marrying one’s sister also means refusing the lapsing of time, for social
life consists mainly in two basic types of movements: women leave the encampment in
which they were born with their tent to settle in their in-law’s encampment; a brother
leaves his sister’s tent to enter as husband in another one. This endless movement is spatial
but it is also conceived as measuring the lapsing of time.22
In the first part of this study, I examined incest from a spatial point of view, noting
all the while that the theme was similar to another, more temporal order; this implied a
temporal reading of incest that the texts did not specify. Only comparison of “Teshewa”
and the djinn stories could lead me to this type of reading. The similarity in the subject
matter of the two resides at this level. They both involve a game not only with kinship
relations but also with temporality. When time stops, “Teshewa” marries her brother; when
the order in the succession of social events that constitute time is no longer respected, a
djinn becomes a young girl’s husband or father.
As members of a given society we can sometimes forget that each society creates
the time within which it lives. By playing upon time in the same way as they do with
kinship relations, these tales force us to remember that a social component exists in one as
in the other. By varying these social parameters, the tales demonstrate their importance to
social life. Rather than reflecting reality, these tales are controlled distortions of that reality.

                                                                                                               
22Cf. my article, “La Tente et le campement chez les Touaregs Kel Ferwan,” Revue de l’Occident
musulman et de la Méditerrannée, 32 (1981), 53-70.