Who Is Allowed to Touch It: Systems and Hands in M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water
- Written as
- An imagined student aged 17, senior at a public high school in Dayton, Ohio
- Format
- AP English Literature and Composition, senior-year research paper (MLA 9)
- Task
- Write a research-supported literary argument of at least 2,000 words on a novel from the independent-reading list. Your thesis should rest on close reading of the text and engage with at least two secondary sources.
- Length
- 2,753 words, not counting headings and references
My grandfather was a machinist in Dayton for most of his working life, and the first rule he taught me in his basement was that you do not own a tool until you know how to take it apart and put it back. I thought of that rule often while reading M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water, a novel that opens with the “dry clack” of a loom and closes with two pairs of hands on a well rope. In between, Hydara sets two kinds of making against each other. On one side is what the foreign engineer Adam Sterling calls a system: a solar and water plant for the Sahelian village of Madina, built so that “Nobody in Madina will ever need to touch it” (Hydara 8). On the other side are hands: a smith’s forge, a box of sisal, charcoal and grass, a weaver’s wet jute sacks, a loom, a rope. It would be easy to read the book as a contest in which the old ways beat the new machine, but the second half of the novel is full of machines that the villagers build and keep, including a water harvester, a mill and electric vehicles assembled in their own workshops. What Hydara distrusts is narrower and more interesting: a machine that the people who depend on it are not allowed to open. The novel defines ownership as the right to mend, and it measures Adam Sterling’s education by what happens to his hands, from the “clean, uncalloused hands” (7) of the first chapter to the scarred palms that hold a lamp for a stranger near the end.
Hydara makes Adam’s philosophy clear before he ever reaches Madina. In the hot conference room in the capital, Bakoro, Adam sees “a list of uncontrolled variables,” and the narrator tells us plainly, “He meant to seal all of it out of his project” (6). The plant he presents is “a lattice of silver frames” (6), and when Minister Khresay asks whether the village will help build it, Adam explains that “the warranty holds only if certified hands do the work” (8). The only hands his system will accept are licensed ones from somewhere else. The Minister’s griot, Balla, has already given his verdict with his eyes on “Adam’s clean, uncalloused hands”: “A system with no roots . . . is a house built for the wind” (7). Now Khresay adds an old saying from his Sarahule ancestors, that “a man who does not help build the granary will never fight to defend it” (8). Both men are making a prediction about ownership. People defend what they had a hand in making, and Adam has designed a plant that no one in Madina will have touched.
The first real test comes on the second day of construction, when a “certified” support bracket snaps. Malik, the village blacksmith, carries the pieces to his forge and welds them with a sliver of his own iron, and holds out a bracket that is “blackened, a little misshapen, solid” (15). Nobody takes it. Adam looks at it and sees only “An uncontrolled variable in a balanced design” (15). He logs a week’s delay and waits for the certified replacement. Malik then says the sentence that I think the whole novel grows out of: “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours. . . . Remember that when it breaks” (16). Matthew B. Crawford makes almost the same argument in Shop Class as Soulcraft. He describes how more and more modern products are designed to hide their insides, so that the people who use them can no longer fix them and come to depend on specialists and replacement parts. For Crawford, being able to repair something is part of what it means to be responsible for it, and losing that ability changes how people relate to the objects around them. Malik’s line puts that idea in eleven words. What I appreciate is that Hydara does not make Adam a fool for refusing the bracket. Later the engineer Aisha writes in her notebook that refusing the smith’s bracket “had been sound engineering, and that leaving it in the dust without learning the smith’s name had not” (44). Adam’s mistake was human more than technical. His design had no place in it for the smith.
Aisha’s pre-filter makes the conflict sharper because, this time, the hand-made solution is plainly better. The plant’s air intakes are choking on a wet, salty dust that Adam’s lab never tested, and Aisha offers what the village already uses for its grain stores: “Coarse sisal fibre for the big particles,” then acacia charcoal, then fine woven grass. “It’s cheap. Anyone can replace it” (25). Those last four words are the exact opposite of a warranty. Adam calls it “A box of charcoal and leaves” (25), and when his apprentice Talib tries to order the materials through the government purchasing portal, he finds that the approved vendors “did not sell anything that grew” (27). Adam’s frustration explains his whole outlook: “None of it is certified. I can’t put any of it in the model” (29). Even Talib, who is on Adam’s side at this point, thinks the box sits on the intake “like a patch on a good shirt” (29), an image that comes from cloth and mending, the world of his father’s loom. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America helps me see what is going on in these scenes. Berry argues that modern specialization separates knowledge from responsibility. Experts apply standards that were set far away, and the practical knowledge of people who actually live in a place gets treated as backward or unscientific. The portal is that kind of system in miniature. It cannot even name sisal.
The trial on Intake-06 settles the question, at least for the reader. The intake with Aisha’s box runs cooler, and “Its pressure line on the screen had been as flat as a ruler” (31). Adam tells Talib that “The data was . . . inconclusive” (31) and has the box thrown in the scrap store. Then Hydara closes the chapter with my favorite sentence in Part One: “In the scrap store behind them, in the dark, the charcoal in Aisha’s box drew the damp out of the air” (31). The hand-made thing keeps doing its job even after it has been thrown away, quietly, with no one watching. Aisha later rescues it “because the charcoal was still good” (43), and the box disappears from the story for more than a hundred and fifty pages. When its three layers come back, they are inside a new machine.
Before that, though, Part One shows what happens to a system that refuses hands. Adam teaches Talib, “You don’t fix things by feel or by hand,” and adds that “manual intervention only introduces human error” (30). Talib sums up the lesson in the phrase that becomes the slogan of Adam’s whole approach: “Nothing gets in. Nothing stops” (31). Adam agrees that “Inside the fence everything is tested, rated and covered” (31). The irony arrives fast. When Minister Dunia brings the amendment that will let her ministry take over the plant, Adam remembers “Talib on the observation deck” (40) and his slogan, and then signs the amendment, although the narrator admits that “he did not read it to the end” (40). The plant was sealed against dust, and a pen walked straight in. Later, when a bearing is burning out and the replacement parts turn out to be fakes, Adam finally puts his hands inside the machine, but only in a panic and against the manual: “The manual didn’t account for sabotage!” (46). He and Talib swap a motor out of the backup intake “with rags wrapped round their hands” (46). Hands enter the system for the first time without knowledge or permission, at the worst possible moment. Two weeks later the plant burns, and the last image of Adam in that chapter is “His hands were burned” (54). Hydara seems to be saying that a system built to keep hands out only delays them until they can do the most damage.
The loom is the counterweight to all of this, and it is worth remembering that a loom is also a machine. In the opening chapter, Talib’s hands are “calloused from the hoe and useless on the loom” (4), and his father, Ibrahim, tells him, “A weaver’s craft is in his hands” and that their thread “asks only for your hands” (3, 4). Talib breaks a warp thread and runs away to his notebook of diagrams. The thread hangs there, untouched, for most of Part One, like Aisha’s box in the scrap store. At the end of the ninth chapter Talib finally ties it, remembering his father’s words, “Then you must re-tie it. That is the work,” and “The old rhythm came back into his arms” (76). The repair is tiny, and that is the point. A loom can be mended by the person who sits at it. Adam leaves Madina with nothing in his hands except a piece of glass from the burned plant. He holds it on the bus “the rest of the way” (69), and years later, at night, “Its edges would bite into his palm” (77). The only thing his hands kept from the Glass House is something that cuts them.
Part Two, set ten years later in the floodplain village of Nafawol, tests whether Adam has learned anything, and Hydara shows the answer through his body first. Dr Arramata, the engineer from Nafawol whose idea the project is, notices that “The skin of both his palms was tight and shiny with old burns” (83). When she suggests that he has seen a village lose ownership of a project, he says only, “I’ve done it” (83). This time, when the demonstration harvester overheats in front of the whole village, a weaver named Bakary steps forward and tells him what the women do when the dye pots get too hot: cover them with wet jute. “The cloth drinks the heat. The air takes it away” (97). Adam accepts at once, and that night he sits by the machine pouring water over the sacks himself. The village’s suspicion still runs along the line between hand and machine. The Water-Keeper, Kadiatou, thinks of her well, “The rope knows me,” and of the new device, “This thing only hums” (96). The written agreement turns Malik’s idea into law. The seventh clause says that Nafawol “might build from them, mend from them and copy them, and nothing in the paper let Proxima stop it” (101). The right to mend, which Adam denied the smith in Madina, is now written into the contract. Even the key to the system is small enough to hold; an elder turns it over and says, “It’s lighter than a groundnut” (101).
Hydara is careful, though, not to replace one simple idea with its opposite. When the village builds its own road, Kadiatou blesses it with the words “Let it be a road of hands” (112), and the builder Edrisa sets the road’s crown using the rope from the old well, “pulled it tight and sighted along it with one eye shut” (112). The skeptical elder Mamadou asks, “Is this the machinery?” and Edrisa answers, “Some of it” (112). Those three words may be the novel’s best answer to its own question. The village also hires a roller and buys fuel. The novel’s real line falls between machines that the village can understand and keep and machines that keep the village out, which is a different line from the one between machines and hands.
The clearest proof is the K-Purifier, which the student Bintu designs at the village academy. Adam finds it on a workbench in the final year of his contract: “a porous clay vessel holding layers of sisal, charcoal and grass” (212). These are the same three layers as Aisha’s box, rebuilt as a machine with a small solar pump. Bintu explains that “Every part can be bought nearby or made here” (212), and the design is published free for any village to copy. She is honest about its limits, too: it cleans the water, but “Not the salt” (212). Adam does not say anything about Aisha’s box, and the narrative never tells us what he feels, but earlier that day he had told Kadiatou about “a weaver’s son at Madina” and admitted, “I taught him to trust mine over his own hands” (211). The circle closes in the last chapter, when Talib himself visits Nafawol and, as Hassan later reports, asks Bintu how the purifier’s filter is layered. When she shows him, “He laughed. He said they used to make those for the grain stores where he came from, and once, a long time ago, for a machine” (231). By then Talib has become the person Adam once told him not to be. In Madina he repairs pumps for the district, and when a borehole’s leathers wear out he carries two kinds of seals, the government’s and the ones Malik cuts from a hide. “Talib fitted Malik’s” (218). Asked whether they will last, he says, “Malik says till the rains,” and asked about after the rains, “Then he cuts more” (218). Ownership in this novel looks like that: a part you can make again.
The scene I keep coming back to is Adam’s last drive out of Nafawol. His vehicle dies on a causeway at night, and a young mechanic from a road crew opens the panel and finds the problem in under a minute: “The connector. . . . The road shakes them loose” (215). The scene echoes Part One. On the night the Glass House first lit up, Adam had diagnosed a dead string of panels from a screen and sent a man to a junction box “where a connector had been seated by hand and not quite home” (22). Now the roles are reversed. The woman tells Adam to hold her lamp, and “He held it where she told him to and did not let it move” (215), which repeats almost word for word what Talib’s sister Hawa did with a torch during the blackout delivery in Bakoro, when “she did not let it move” (32). Adam has become the helper whose hands hold the light. Then, “She did not ask his name” (215). In Madina, Adam never learned the smith’s name. On the causeway, a stranger with skilled hands does not need to learn his. Hydara does not tell us how Adam feels, only that “For a long way he watched the mirror more than the road” (215).
The novel ends at the well. In the first chapter of Part Two, Kadiatou drew the bitter water alone, “the fibres biting into her calloused palms” (85), and noticed that “The weight was wrong” (85). In the final scene she is too old to draw it alone, and her great-granddaughter Halima puts her hands on the rope below hers, “the fibres biting both their palms,” and this time the weight “was right” (232). The coda that follows is four short sentences about the lost empire of Wagadu, and it ends: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (233). Read against the rest of the book, the line explains the Glass House. Madina’s plant had one pair of hands on it. Adam held Proxima’s power of attorney and “could sign for the Proxima Fund alone” (40), so when Dunia needed one signature, she only had to win over one person. Nafawol’s system has many hands on it, and they were all allowed to learn it.
I do not want to make Hydara sound like someone who thinks hands can fix everything. The harvester in Nafawol settles at a little under seventy percent of its design yield and stays there, no matter how many tricks Alie tries, Bakary’s wet jute among them, and the purifier cannot remove salt. The novel admits that some problems need equipment, deep boreholes and outside money. Crawford makes a similar point in his book; he is not against technology, only against arrangements that make people passive in front of it. What Songs of Dust and Water argues, I think, is that the test of a machine is who is allowed to put their hands on it. My grandfather would have understood Malik on the first page. He kept his tools oiled and his micrometer in a wooden box, and he never let me use either until I could take them apart.
Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Sierra Club Books, 1977.
Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin Press, 2009.
Hydara, M.J. Songs of Dust and Water. 2026.
