I just watched a documentary about Paul Bowles and am re-reading The Sheltering Sky, so North Africa has been on my mind lately. What an interesting perspective on a new culture - through music and especially, a percussive instrument. Tambourines are so often relegated to the dilettante musician here in the US - one mistakenly expects anyone to be able to play it - perhaps only its red-headed stepsister the triangle gets less respect.

Of course anyone who's tried to play it, especially in a meter not standard to western sensibilities, realizes the gravity of this mistaken presumption. I'm not sure, since this is non-fiction, whether you intended to use this instrument and our western misunderstandings of it as a metaphor for our greater misunderstandings of other cultures, but it's a beautiful parallel that worked for me.