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This print benefits Millennium Promise. The non-profit receives 25% of rentals and $175 per sale. "Saba welcomes me. She is a student of geography at the Uni...[more]versity of Sebha and is family to the bride. I follow her into a room full of voices. I'm blinded by intense lights, reflections, colors. Tiny mirrors and silver strings multiply ochre face powder, carmine lips, and rusty henna. Women wear scents. They are lacing coins into their large braids. Ibn Battuta, the Arab Marco Polo, wrote in the fourteenth century, 'They are the most beautiful women in the world.' The Tuareg celebrate weddings during Sebiba, their holiday for the earth's fertility. They dance to an intense and passionate rhythm with a concordant sway of hips, an unmistakable imitation of sexual intercourse. They go red, only on that occasion veiling their faces. Shrill shouts set the dance on fire. Their intimacy, forbidden to men and foreigners, gets expressed through quick looks, lines of poetry, and laughs. The pressing drum says that Islam is something different for Tuareg. It is animated with African joy and nomadic lightness. It is full of rules of ancient behavior codes that the Koran neither prescribes nor approves. For instance, the culture encourages strength in the face of hardship. It is taboo to cry for one's self or complain of thirst. Here everyone moves with lightness and everything ones owns has to fit on top of the saddle, or at least in an off-road vehicle, the camel of our times." Monika Bulaj Saba 2001 Ghat, Libya Image 19.25" x 29" Paper 24" x 30" Frame 30" x 40"[less]