The Prophet's Camel Bell (36 page)

The Prophet's Camel Bell
is Margaret's corresponding tribute to the Somalis and her Somaliland years, 1950–1952. Written in 1962 at a time of great stress, when she knew once and for all time that to be a committed writer was her fate, both joy and doom, and when she and her husband Jack were forcing themselves to realize that their marriage was shattering, the book is also a tribute to their early, happy days of
adventuring together. She had been allowed to accompany Jack on his dam-building assignment in Somaliland only because he had described her to the reluctant officials as “an accomplished woodswoman.” “Canadian peoples different,” as the Somalis often said.

Librarians may well catalogue
The Prophet's Camel Bell
as travel literature; true, it is the story of a journey into a desert land whose nomadic people's lives had been unchanging since biblical times and whose Mohammedan faith was to them “as necessary as life, as inevitable as death.” They looked up at the crescent moon in the sky and “knew that the Word had been made visible.” But it is also a journey into awareness and understanding of the Somalis across a cultural chasm that might well, and excusably, have seemed unbridgeable. Most of all, though, it is the record of the maturing, the coming-of-age of Margaret Laurence herself. As she marvelled at the acceptance and endurance of the Somalis, she learned those qualities for herself.

Margaret had always been impatiently busy – she learned calm and quiet from Somaliland and its people. She watched them helplessly dying of thirst and she learned humility from the recognition that she and her medical kit could do little or nothing for them. Looking back on her diaries she recognized as “bosh” her early, facile statements about the easiness of becoming “popular” with the Somalis. Their story-telling inspired the story-teller in her, and she added immeasurably to the care, patience, and discipline that every professional writer must have as she listened and wondered at the retelling and repolishing of age-old stories around the campfires.

As she looked back on her younger self and wrote, she acknowledged and assimilated her own life's experiences. She
had already known much love and much loss – the early deaths of her parents and Grandfather Simpson, whom she had fought and resented, but who “proclaimed himself in her veins.” She had deeply loved her stepmother, always “mother” to her, her brother Robert, her husband Jack, and the enduring friends of her girlhood. She had known deep and continuing joy in her children and her work.

The
persona
who developed through the pages of
The Prophet's Camel Bell
is the same Margaret Laurence who became the most beloved woman in Canada. The qualities are all there. When you turn the last page you are not alone. Margaret is with you, saying “yes” to life, laughing, loving, kind, understanding and, always, with enduring faith and hope.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963)
Dance on the Earth (1989)

ESSAYS
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists
1952–1966 (1968)
Heart of a Stranger (1976)

FICTION
This Side Jordan (1960)
The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)
The Stone Angel (1964)
A Jest of God (1966)
The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Bird in the House (1970)
The Diviners (1974)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jason's Quest (1970)
Six Darn Cows (1979)
The Olden Days Coat (1979)
The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)

LETTERS
Margaret Laurence – Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters
[ed. John Lennox] (1993)
Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman
[ed. John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky] (1997)

TRANSLATIONS
A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)