Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa A Carnivalesque Mirage Lynda Chouiten LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books Excerpts of Short Stories from Eberhardt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chouiten, Lynda, 1977– Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa : a carnivalesque mirage / Lynda Chouiten. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8592-6 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7391-8593-3 (ebook) ) 1. Eberhardt, Isabelle, 1877–1904–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eberhardt, Isabelle, 1877–1904–Travel–Africa, North. 3. Women–Africa, North–Biography. I. Title. PQ2237.E13Z56 2015 848'.809–dc23 2014034424 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction xv 1 Possessing the Land, Dividing the People 1 2 Islam: The Not-So-Straight Way to Power* 53 3 Desiring Power: The Transvestite Westerner and the Eroticized Native 95 4 Journeys: Travel, Writing, and the Changing Self 141 Conclusion: Eberhardt’s Life as a Novel-like Epic 187 Appendix: A Chronology of Eberhardt’s Life 195 Glossary 199 Bibliography 203 Index 211 About the Author 217 v Preface This study argues that Isabelle Eberhardt was a carnivalesque figure only in appearance. Despite her nonconformist lifestyle, made up of cross-dressing and mixing with the natives, it shows that this writer held order and authority in high esteem and that her vision was enmeshed in the outlook which pre- vailed in her time. Not only did she view authority as exclusively male and white, but she also valorized distance between these and what she saw as inferior categories. In other words, her approach to both gender and race was dichotomic, drawing a line between male and female, between whites and non-whites. While subscribing to the nineteenth-century cultural and racial codes, however, Eberhardt was compelled to break them in her quest for empower- ment. Reading the intriguing aspects of her lifestyle in the light of the Nietzs- chean concept of will-to-power, this study argues that her hybrid political and sartorial practices were all relied on as empowering strategies in her attempt to reconcile her numerous markers of weakness with a no less marked quest for recognition and power. While transvestism allowed her to appropriate masculinity as a power signifier, her life among Maghrebians substituted to her marginality in Europe a respectable status made possible by her supposedly superior racial identity. In analyzing Eberhardt’s evolution in North Africa, this study engages with a number of prominent literary theories, including Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque and Gilles Deleuze’s studies of nomadism, pointing to the limits of these concepts as strategies of resistance. Eberhardt’s case shows that neither carnivalesque practices nor nomadism are immune from the temptation of power. Where these concepts unsettle power mechanisms, Ebe- rhardt found in mobility as well as in-between categories a means of achiev- ing an empowerment originally denied to her on account of her gender cate- vii viii Preface gory and unorthodox family history. But despite her resorting to transgres- sion as a necessary strategy in her quest for power, she took care to demon- strate her loyalty to the prevailing racial and moral codes: while marrying an Arab man, she wrote disapprovingly of racial and cultural hybridity; and while leading a dissolute life, she celebrated temperance and asceticism. Because one of the strategies deployed by Eberhardt in her attempt to accommodate these two impulses—transgression and conservatism—was re- writing her subversive gestures so as to conform with the transgressed codes, this book considers both Eberhardt’s writings and biographical evidence. This is one aspect of the originality of this study. Indeed, although more than a century has passed since the Swiss-born writer’s death, few authors have undertaken a close examination of her texts. While critics as well as biogra- phers quote extensively from her diary and, to a lesser extent, from her letters, they tend to disregard her fiction; when they do not, their reading remains more or less literal, ignoring the metaphorical/symbolic dimension of Eberhardtian diction and imagery. One reason which is often invoked to justify such neglect is the difficulty of identifying, among the texts posthumously assigned to Eberhardt, those which have actually been written by her. But this argument, which may have had some validity a few decades ago, is no longer plausible today. While it is true (and well-known) that considerable modifications were made to some of Eberhardt’s writings by Victor Barrucand, these changes are limited to the writer’s later texts, which Barrucand published as A l’Ombre chaude de l’Islam (1906) and Notes de route (1908); Eberhardt’s texts that were not edited by Barrucand underwent few, if any, modifications. More importantly, archival research, undertaken essentially by Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean- René Huleu, has made it possible to isolate “authentic” Eberhardtian texts from those which have been reworked by her posthumous editor. Delacour and Huleu have published annotated editions of all of Eberhardt’s writings, indicating those passages written by Barrucand. As part of the present study, I have undertaken archival research myself; its results match those made public by Huleu and Delacour. I have accordingly used translations that are closest to the original texts as they appear in their (Delacour’s and Huleu’s) editions—particularly, Melissa Marcus’s translation of their Œuvres Complè tes I— and I have tried to translate as faithfully as possible texts for which no published translations are available. I have also avoided parts of texts written by Barrucand, except on one or two occasions, when they significantly rein- force other passages known to have been written by Eberhardt. When this is the case, I clearly signal Barrucand’s contribution to the text. While Chicago Manual of Style has been used throughout this book, I have considered clarity and practicality above all, particularly when citing Eberhardt’s short stories. Because more than twenty stories, most of which have been first published in the same year, have been quoted from, I thought Preface ix the letters normally placed after the date of publication and supposed to indicate the order in which the stories appeared would be confusing. I have therefore preferred to provide abbreviated titles instead. Acknowledgments This study on Isabelle Eberhardt is a reworking of what was initially a PhD thesis defended at the National University of Ireland, Galway. This thesis would have never been completed without the tremendous support and pa- tient guidance of Philip Dine, my director of studies; I cannot thank him enough. As the examiners of the thesis, Jane Conroy and Charles Forsdick made valuable comments and suggestions which I have done my best to take into consideration while working towards this book. Charles Forsdick must be thanked again for the support and advice he provided while this book was under elaboration and for recommending Lex- ington Books as a publisher. Philip Dine and Jane Conroy must be thanked again, together with Daniel Carey, for believing in my academic abilities and granting me a doctoral scholarship which allowed me to devote my time entirely to research. Thanks also to the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions for financing the scholarship. I am grateful to Lillis Ó Laoire, Daniel Carey, and Sylvie Lannegrand for their useful suggestions and encouragement. I will not forget Lillis Ó Laoire’s warm support when this research was still at its embryonic stage. My thanks also go to the staff of La Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, les Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and the James Hardiman Library, at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Thanks for your professionalism and solicitude. xi List of Abbreviations AN L’Age du néant ASM Aïn Sefra’s Market AVW A Vision of Women BI Beni Israel Derouicha Nuits de ramadhan: la derouicha DJ The Daily Journals Douar Douar of the Makhzen ER Evening Reflections EZ Entrance to the Zawïya FLIS Forced Labor in the South FP Friday Prayer Horizons Onward to the Blue Horizons ILDS In the Land of Desert Sands IML In the Margin of a Letter Instruction Instruction professionnelle des femmes indigènes KE Kenadsa Evenings LC Lovers’ Corner LK Lella Kheddoudja LM Legionnaires and Mokhazni Lost Lost in the Dunes xiii xiv List of Abbreviations MD Muslim Death MI The Marabout’s Indignation OZ Oum Zahar PA Pleurs d’amandiers RE Ramadan Evenings RW Reflections of War SF Sudanese Festival Silhouettes Silhouettes d’Afrique SJ Sous le joug Springtime Springtime in the Desert Sunday Sunday in the Village Tea Saint’s Afternoon Tea VM Vision du Moghreb WSW Women’s Small World Introduction Isabelle Eberhardt has always been a marginal figure. In her lifetime, she aspired to become a renowned literary name but succeeded only to scandalize Westerners and Orientals alike with an unconventional lifestyle made up of cross-dressing, promiscuity, and constant hanging around with North African natives; and while this unconventionality started to be seen in a much more favorable light a few decades after her death, when the old values of order and hierarchy started to be seen as no more than despicable instruments of power, she remained, as a writer, as marginal as ever. From Claude-Maurice Robert’s L’Amazone des sables (1934) to Edmonde Charles-Roux’s two vol- umes, Désir d’Orient (1988) and Nomade j’étais (1995), most of, not to say all, the full-length books devoted to her are biographies. 1 Although the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have been marked by a renewed interest in this atypical figure, with scholars like Laura Rice (1990), Ali Behdad (1994), and Dunlaith Bird (2012) analyzing the political and ideological import of her evolution in North Africa, none of these authors have devoted to her more than an article or a book chapter. This monograph is an attempt to remedy the poverty of the literature on Eberhardt and, more importantly, her writings. It is commonly held that this writer placed all her talent in her life, leaving behind rather poorly crafted texts (Robert 1934, 13; Barstad 2002, 265); in other words, that her life is more worth studying than her work. To this view, I oppose two major argu- ments. The first consists in the not-easily-answered question of what a “good” writer is. On what basis should Eberhardt be dismissed as a “poor” writer? Of course, obvious technical faults can be detected in her novels, which fail to provide convincing, well-woven plots; 2 but are two never- completed novels enough to assess a writer’s artistic skills? After all, the most successful writers can experience one or two artistic failures. Another xv xvi Introduction question that might be raised, regardless of the degree of Eberhardt’s talent, is whether—and why—a supposedly untalented writer should be excluded from the realm of criticism. The question is all the more pertinent when the critic’s concern is, as is mine in this book, the writer’s political and moral positioning rather than his/her artistic achievements. One argument against studying Eberhardt’s texts which seems to bear some validity is the oft-repeated idea that her writing is too journalistic and denotative—a sort of “transparent form of speech” which promises nothing more than what it plainly states (Barthes [1953] 2012, 77). To this statement, however, I oppose the idea that there is no “transparent” writing; that all writing is necessarily connotative. At any rate, this is certainly the case with Eberhardt’s texts. One of my objectives in this study is precisely to demon- strate that Eberhardt’s aesthetics, far from neutrally rendering her experience in North Africa, reveal much not only about her vision of this space but also about her moral and political outlook. The syntagmatic structure of her sen- tences, her diction, and, above all, the imagery she deploys, betray a coherent and consistent system of thought. This system is, surprisingly for one sup- posed to be a rebel-figure and hailed for her opposition to both colonialism and patriarchy, anything but iconoclastic; all that is traditionally seen as sacrosanct in the Europe of her time is also valorized in her writings. This study highlights Eberhardt’s subscription to the gender and racial codes of her time, showing how her texts reproduce the premise of the white male’s supremacy and the female imperative of submissiveness and moral irre- proachability. Eberhardt is not a traditionalist only because she buttresses patriarchy and its gendered moral code. She is so because—and this is the first of the two central arguments of this book—she viewed life as a set of strictly distinct and hierarchized categories, the (superior) male and (inferior) female being but one illustration among others of this non-equalitarian vision. Her ap- proach to race is another important illustration. Unlike critics who salute what they see as her panegyric rendering of North Africans, I show that her ambivalent attitude towards the Oriental natives oscillates between a roman- tic aestheticization of their nobility and a denigration of their supposedly backward intellect and civilization. But while who occupies the top of this racial binary may change, what seems to me significant is that the hierarch- ized vision is maintained, as is what she saw as the imperative of racial distance. Indeed, Eberhardt’s texts reveal that she abhorred the idea of racial and cultural mixing and systematically associated it with hideousness. It is this Eberhardtian systematic reflex of separating and hierarchizing which justifies the phrase “a Carnivalesque Mirage” in the subtitle of this book. As defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is the subversive thrust to liberate mankind from order, authority, and the artificial conven- tions which erect barriers between men and subjects some of them to the Introduction xvii domination of others. Celebrating free, joyful interaction between people, the carnivalesque also blurs the traditional categories that are so essential to order, allowing the most unexpected misalliances. The carnivalesque sphere brings together the male and the female, the high and the low, the noble and the ignoble, dismantling all the commonly accepted oppositions; it is the realm of king-beggars, wise fools, and virtuous hetaerae (see Bakhtin [1929] 1984a and [1965] 1984b). Eberhardt incarnated this combination of contrar- ies, particularly of the high and the low, in more than a way. In Europe, despite her aristocratic pedigree, she occupied the margin of the cultural map on account of her mother’s transgression of the moral code and her own illegitimate birth; 3 later, in North Africa, she was simultaneously the impov- erished Arab vagabond who often had to beg for “his” own food and the young scholar whose superior knowledge owed “him” the admiration of fellow Muslims. While thus incarnating the carnivalesque category of the king-beggar, her eccentric behavior, which blended fervent devotion to Is- lam, the faith she chose for herself, and sacrilegious departure from its teach- ings, also made her a virtuous hetaera of sorts. Indeed, although Eberhardt scrupulously observed religious duties like prayers and Ramadan -fasting, she also notoriously indulged in heavy drinking and sex. Despite evidence to the contrary, however, my contention is that manifes- tations of the carnivalesque in Eberhardt are an illusion—a mirage, to use an image better suited to the desert, where she spent most of her adult life. As a philosophy which turns the world upside down (Bakhtin 1984b, 370), the carnivalesque locates itself outside the power apparatus, which it unsettles and subverts. This is not the case with Eberhardt. What I show throughout this study—and this is my second central argument—is that this writer’s carnivalesque gestures aimed not at thwarting the power system, with its hierarchized categories and its logic of domination, but at securing her the upper hand within this system. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha famously presents hybridity as an empowering tool for the racially oppressed. While racially privileged, Eberhardt resembles the racial subal- tern described by Bhabha both in that she, too, faced the risk of subjection on account of her gender category and her social marginality and because, like them, she found in in-betweenness a strategy that promised to rescue her from powerlessness. In this strategy, the Oriental space played a pivotal role. As the different chapters detail, Eberhardt’s life among the Maghrebians betrays more than a carnivalesque wish to bridge racial distance; as a West- erner in the midst of the natives, she secured a condition of empowerment bestowed on her by her supposed racial superiority. In the same way, her transvestism did not aim at questioning gender categories; rather, it is her subscription to the patriarchal postulate of the superiority of maleness while realizing the contradiction between this belief and her quest for power which urged her to borrow a male identity. xviii Introduction In her ambivalent stance, which simultaneously challenges and supports the power apparatus, Eberhardt is reminiscent of another, arguably better- known female traveler: Mary Kingsley. In Travel Gender, and Imperialism , Alison Blunt explains how Kingsley’s appropriation of male roles like that of the solitary traveler failed to subvert the Victorian patriarchal law because her maleness was performed away from the terrain of applicability of the Western cultural code. While acting as a male adventurer in Africa, Kingsley scrupulously “played the role of the dutiful daughter and the loyal sister” (1994, 46) at home. What is more, she refused to relinquish her female gender identity even in the midst of the jungle, famously celebrating “the blessings of a good thick skirt.” Although the transvestite Eberhardt can seem to be more subversive than the skirt-wearer Kingsley, this study argues that, despite her cross-dressing, and indeed because of it, Eberhardt, too, played the role of the dutiful daughter. The parental teaching which, for Kingsley, meant wearing modest feminine dress, involved adopting male clothes, in the case of Eberhardt. As I explain in chapter 3, Eberhardt’s tutor, Alexander Trophimowsky, looked askance at sartorial marks of femininity and thought that gender equality started with equality in education and exter- nal appearance. Like Kingsley, moreover, Eberhardt saw the African space as a “heteroto- pia” (Foucault) 4 where practices that are frowned upon at home become possible. It is, for example, significant that Eberhardt’s propensity for sex should be unleashed essentially in the Maghreb. Apart from the fact that this perpetuates the age-old Western vision of the Orient “not only as a space of debauchery but as a space of availability” (Gregory 1999, 143), I develop the argument that Eberhardt’s almost exclusive preference for Arab partners be- trays a wish to elude the subjection which, as a woman, would have been hers in a relationship with a Western husband/lover. Her simultaneous opting for self-masculinization (through cross-dressing) and for an Oriental partner endows her with a double superiority: that of gender and that of race; that of the “male” Westerner over the necessarily feminized, because Oriental, North African. Eberhardt’s sexual encounters in North Africa are thus an excellent illus- tration of Edward Said’s argument that the Westerners construct the Orient as a site of both power and desire. While making this statement, I am aware that Said’s conclusions are drawn from an examination of an almost exclusively male corpus and that these conclusions have been refuted as not applicable to female Orientalists. 5 The studies carried by Lisa Lowe, Reina Lewis, and Billie Melman have demonstrated that women’s representation of the Orient do not have the homogeneity assigned by Said to that of men travelers; rather, it is marked by what Lowe terms “heterotopia” and Melman “polyph- ony.” 6 Women, these scholars argue, not only do not propose the same image of the Orient—factors like nationality, class, and cultural background can Introduction xix determine their discourse—but can also be self-contradictory. Thus, Melman shows us that the representation of things Oriental by the eighteenth-century traveler Lady Montagu and nineteenth-century women like Amelia Hornby bears the mark of their respective epochs, making the former see in the veil a sartorial trick that enables freedom of deed and movement and the latter read it as a mere sign of female modesty ([1992] 1995, 85–88 and 99–100). For her part, Lowe explains that Lady Montagu’s vision of the Oriental woman bears its own internal contradictions. As the wife of a socially respected ambassador, she looks down on Turkey as no more than an exotic Other; yet as an “Other Within”—a woman who, as such, is oppressed within her own culture—she simultaneously voices compassion for, and identification with, the very Oriental women for whom she feels contempt (1991, 31–32). This ability to identify with, and show sympathy for, the Oriental Other has been signaled in most studies of female Orientalism. In Melman’s words, “writing on ‘other’ women [...] substitutes a sense of solidarity of gender for racial and sexual superiority” (1995, 8); in Reina Lewis’s, women “produced a gaze on the Orient and the Orientalized ‘other’ that registered differences less pejoratively and less absolutely than was implied by Said’s original formulation” (1996, 4). Thus, despite the acknowledged heterogeneous char- acter of women’s discourse on the Orient, there seems to be a consensus on its more or less benign character. Roughly, what is usually argued is that the Orient, which, for men, acts as a site of power is, for women, a site where they negotiate their status. Such a view defines women travelers in general as resisters to colonialist and patriarchal oppression who, in view of their loca- tion outside of the sphere of power, are nevertheless compelled to opt for compromise with those who are within this sphere. One illustration of this vision is Dunlaith Bird’s Travelling in Different Skins , which, while ac- knowledging that the transgressions of Isabelle Eberhardt, among other women travelers she studies, 7 were sometimes accompanied by rigid conven- tionality (2012, 27), sees this hybrid position as the unavoidable result of these women’s “negotia[tion of] the trouble associated with their sex and their ‘unnatural’ desire for mobility” in a male Orientalist and colonialist tradition (4). While I agree that negotiation is an inherent feature of women’s Oriental- ism, I go beyond the view that this negotiation is only an unavoidable neces- sity without which women travelers would be excluded from the masculine realms of travel and travel writing. In the case of Eberhardt, hybrid identity and political in-betweenness are often avowedly willed strategies aiming at a multi-faceted will-to-power. This quest for individual empowerment is, de- spite the life of wandering and destitution which was hers, quite manifest in Eberhardt’s texts. One of the striking features of her writing, for instance, is the quasi-absence of sympathy for, and identification with, fellow women, whether they be European or Oriental. I detail, in chapter 3, how the Swiss-