*while writing this, I did take some creative liberties so this Freya is based on real Freya
If I had to choose a travel companion from our readings, I would pick Freya Stark herself. I do not think she would be pleasant company, but the discomfort would be instructive. I imagine u somewhere in contemporary Baghdad, a city she knew intimately in the 1930s, now transformed beyond her recognition.
We would share a talent for observation but diverge completely in what we do with it. Whereas Stark collected details about women’s jewelry and Bedouin customs, I would be watching her watch them. I would note her gaze even as she would be in casual conversation. She would probably find me frustratingly direct with the way I would keep asking her about her work with Stewart Perowne and Adrian Bishop. I would also ask her about those cocktail parties at South Gate while Iraq burned with nationalist fervor.
The tension would be palpable in the markets she once wandered through in disguise. She would want to show me the hidden corners she discovered, the nocturnal Ramadan celebrations she witnessed. There, I would keep pointing out the British Embassy, the old intelligence offices, and the sites of colonial violence. When she would try to romanticize the Bedouin “raw and traditional,” I would remind her of the cruel things she justified.
What we would have in common is curiosity. We both have a restless need to understand how societies work. Where her curiosity served empire, mine would serve its unraveling. She would probably recognize in me the same stubborn independence. But she would hate how I would use that independence to question everything she stood for.
The trip would end badly, I think. Maybe at one of those archaeological sites she loved to claim as “discoveries.” Those many ruins she bragged about visiting alone. I would ask her what gave her the right to “discover” places people had been living in for millennia. She would call me ungrateful, claiming that she had preserved so much knowledge. When we would part ways, we would each be convinced the other had missed the point entirely.
In the end, though, I would learn something valuable from traveling with her: how empire’s most effective agents are not the obvious villains, but the complicated and talented people who genuinely love what they are helping to control.
I loved this post Amber! I love how you describe a possible trip undertaken in the company of Dame Freya Stark today to the same places she describes in her travelogues–and your position/intervention as unraveler of hers. Turn it into a short story or essay about the postcolonial gaze of a young Muslim female traveler/observer in our world!