Wilfred Thesiger – The Marsh Arabs
Cover of The Marsh Arabs, first edition, 1964, E.P. Dutton & Co.
Wilfred Thesiger was truly one who found himself in the wrong century, if not the wrong millennium. Hounded by the march of progress, the man spent the majority of his life seeking extreme solitudes, in the company of few and with little desire to accomplish more than exist closely to the land as it had been done for aeons before.
He lived for years in the Arabian South, crossing the Empty Quarter with the Rashid, a tribe of Bedouin, and subsequently made his way to the Marshes of Southern Iraq where he lived intermittently for years. In the post-war period of the early nineteen-fifties, when car consumerism changed the landscape of the western world, Thesiger sought other things:
I had left [the Marshes] in the last week of July 1952 and it was now an early afternoon in February. Seven months later; it seemed longer. In that time I had crossed high passes through the snows of the Hindu Kush to the cold blue lake of Korombar where the Chitral river rises; I had looked out over Wakand from the Borogil Pass, and seen in the distance a glint that was the Oxus; I had slept on the glaciers at the foot of Tirich Mir, and in the dark, verminous houses among mulberry orchards, where the last of the Black Kafirs lived on the borders of Nuristan. Now, back once more in Falih’s mudhif on the edge of the Marshes, I felt that I had come home” (p. 141, same edition as noted in the caption).
It was not a lonely life, but isolated and intimate with the land, in part to hunt, in part to explore, in greatest part to be present and to exist in complete conjunction with the environment.
There is something in him that drove him to push himself to the limits of human endurance as a means to be closest to freedom, or what some might consider the sublime, the knife’s edge between terror and ecstasy, horror and the ethereal.
What makes Thesiger such a compelling figure is as well his capacity to write, simply, beautifully, and deeply about his experiences–possibly best found in Arabian Sands–and capture them in photography. What well may some think of him, his literary and visual arts are something to behold, unique and immortal.
