Hawad

thumb|Image of Mahmoudan Hawad Hawad, sometimes Mahmoudan Hawad, (born 1950) is a Tuareg poet and author born in the Aïr region of Niger and who currently lives and publishes from Aix-en-Provence, France. Hawad deploys a method he calls furigraphy (a play on the word calligraphy) to create space in his poetry and to illuminate certain themes. Common themes of his work include thirst, movement, wandering, anarchy, and political themes related to Tuareg politics in the region. He is married to Hélène Claudot-Hawad, a Tuareg scholar and translator of Hawad's poetry into French. He has published a number of poems, epics, and other literary works primarily in French, but translations have increased in recent years with an Arabic translation of Testament nomade by prominent Syrian poet Adunis.

==Life and work== Hawad was born in 1950 in the Aïr region in what is today Niger. Although born in what is now Niger, Hawad refuses to identify with this state. He was born into a family of the Ikazkazan Tuareg, who are part of the larger Kel Ayr Tuareg group. He recounts many crossings over the Sahara and the Sahel on camelback while he was growing up with his brothers and father. In his early adult life, he was part of a growing number of Tuareg who moved away from Tuareg lands to work as a day laborer with stretches of unemployment which first introduced him to Tuareg politics. He married Hélène Claudot-Hawad and relocated, in "chosen exile", to France before the Tuareg revolutions in the early 1990s.