My Passage: “The woman in the baths possessed the inimitable quality of a ghost: blurred against the sun, swallowed by the horde of us congregating. A veil clung to her neck. Her bareness still seemed wanting. Outside the realm of novelty, there was not much explanation for what drew her to us but if one were to exist, it would be not how she looked as much as her looking. I understood her gaze was not a gaze as much as it was a way to see nothing. She was not French, at least not entirely. The woman in front of us was instead a stranger, at once cowed by her shadow and utterly at ease, leaning away from her guide to pronounce, with feeling, her answer to our nonverbal query — she was a Brit, a friend. This was as interesting to me as it was uninteresting. What had interested me most in this exchange was the unsaid: which end she sought fixed to the Damascan mean. Or maybe the unsaid remained something else entirely. After she took her formal photograph, she leapt the threshold. Her body swayed back but returned no looking. I did not know if she had ever been a girl. I did not yet know if she knew it was possible to love something so dearly and wrongly, that your body bent helplessly toward your beloved’s opposite end, with no will toward one’s own loving.”
Original Passage: “They had all come up so close to me and I thought them a villainous-looking crowd. Someone murmured to the old man: “French?” “English,’ said I hastily: “we are your people’s friends.” This had an extraordinarily soothing effect on the atmosphere. I asked if they would mind moving away from me for the picture, which they did in silence. When I had taken it I thanked the man who seemed master of the bath and turned to my old man to have the door unfastened: this also was done in complete silence, but just as I was stepping out two or three of them asked me to turn back and look over the baths. This you may imagine I did not do. I was very glad to have that door open, though I suppose it was all really quite all right. I wish now I had taken the picture with more care, for I don’t imagine any European has been in that particular place before.” (Letters from Syria, 76)
Analysis:
What I consider most essential in my transformation of Stark’s writing is the reorientation of perspective: centering the “villainous-looking crowd” rather than Stark herself. In doing so, the scene becomes a counter-expression of the original encounter, told through the eyes of a native who possesses equal power to observe and judge Stark, just as she admires and pities the Levant. This narrative choice preserves the single-person perspective of Stark’s writing while reconfiguring it to welcome the polyphonic voice of the colonial subjects she sought to describe. The counter-grammar of my palimpsest renders autonomous and singular the people who, in Stark’s words, exist only as a monolithic crowd.
Even more significantly, the unnamed colonial subject finds the ability to occupy Stark’s positionality — even to sympathize with her as he dissects her “dear and wrong love.” This reciprocity exposes what Stark’s narrative omits: the colonial asymmetry at the heart of travel writing, in which the Western traveler seeks to know “the people” but cannot imagine being equally known by them. The observer fever dreams the Orient while refusing to see it as a mirror reflecting the hypocrisy of her gaze. Yet the palimpsest is careful not to condemn her; the narrator pays attention to Stark’s hybrid identity — French or not, knowing or unknowing—and emphasizes the fluidity of selfhood in the colonist-colonized relation, along with the vulnerability inherent in human connection. Both are elements Stark’s original text leaves unaddressed (by design, of course) and thus my intervention fleshes out a response to these omissions.
Brilliant, Ayanna! I love the flipping of the Gaze—done with subtlety of the kind that takes me back to Homi Bhabha’s theories of (post) colonial mimicry. Also, to Malek Alloula’s psychosexual reading of the colonial photographers’ postcards from French Algeria.