After reading Prof. Fawzia’s article about R.F. Kuang’s novel Babel, I started reading The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon’s key decolonial text. I haven’t made it through the entire book yet, but one key idea from Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface is that men are made when they “[thrust] out the settler through force of arms” and decolonize themselves (Fanon 18). The decolonized, realized man forms himself by throwing back at the colonizer who “no longer clearly remembers that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun” his own violence (Fanon 14). “The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity,” and his violence is a direct response to colonial violence imposed on him (Fanon 19).
Colonization, then, makes non-humans out of both the aggressor and the colonized. I found myself curious about how Fanon’s theory fit into Bell’s experience and action, especially because her work was mostly nonviolent—at least, not overtly so, and especially not from Wallach’s perspective, who provided most of our biographical information on Bell. It may be because England was more insidious in its influence in Iraq in comparison to its unfettered brutality in India, for example; or it might be a function of Bell’s gender, since she was permitted less access to decisions that involved combat than contemporaries like Lawrence or Wilson.
Mostly, though, I was interested in the first part of what Fanon wrote (as it was recounted by Sartre); that colonialism unmakes both the colonizer and the colonized. This theory provides a possible explanation for Bell and even Eberhardt’s ability to “unsex” themselves in the East and take on more male social roles, as with Bell’s negotiations among sheikhs and independent travel, and Eberhardt’s independence and sexual exploits. Fanon’s “unmaking” of colonizing men could be reframed as a movement so far to the masculine end of an imagined masculine-feminine spectrum, such that men become more like pure instruments of violence. Could it be possible that women colonizers are “unmade” differently from the male, in that they are pushed into traditional masculinity instead of total brutality? I was reminded in this train of thought of someone’s comment from class about how colonizers conquered land in an eerily similar way to how men “conquer” female bodies, as well as the references in Wallach’s biography to Bell’s desire to “penetrate” Arabia.
Bell’s colonialist activities in Iraq could then be conceptualized as a more feminine, but still violent, mode of conquering, something based more in exploitative social, cultural, and economic relations than in direct violence. This might contextualize the quote from A Woman in Arabia, too: “If the American and British invaders of 2003, after ousting Saddam Hussein, had read and taken to heart what Gertrude had to say on establishing peace in Iraq, there might have been far fewer of the bombings and burnings that have continued to this day” (A Woman of Arabia 17). The author would likely advocate for a more neocolonialist, soft-power approach to relations with the East—in the context of Bell, a more ‘feminine’ form of power, enabled by a combination of Orientalism, racism, and the sense of freedom colonialists derived from cultural and spatial distance from the colonial motherland. This strain would be perpetuated not by men “unmade” into pure weaponry, but by women made into effective agents of imperial power.
What a fascinating read, Claire! And here, ofcourse, we must think of the concept of “imperial feminism”—which may be what Bell (and Eberhardt’s) self-involved individualist understanding of feminism–their desire to have the rights they feel are their due, thanks to there own sense of expetionalism/superiority to other members of their sex–later evolved into the mantle of (neo) liberal varieites of feminist thought that is in fact, a handmaiden to imperialism.