Author: Claire Beeli

My biggest takeaway from this class, I believe, is a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of historical figures and historiography, particularly in the imperial/colonial context. I can’t say I’ve ever before spent so much time deconstructing the kinds of narratives I’ve taken for granted since childhood—the intrepid, mystical traveler, like Eberhardt, or the fierce woman kingmaker, like Bell, or the prodigal soldier in a strange land, like Lawrence. When we began, with Eberhardt, I was ready to dig in and take apart her approach to Algeria—and while I did find some elements of her behavior and worldview to criticize, I also realized that I needed to be more generous with her, since her story, especially in its transgressions of class, race, sexuality, and gender, also carries terrific revolutionary potential. I was stunned, too, by how beautiful I found her writing, even when it glossed over the Northern African political climate of her time or hid her sometimes-condescending view of Arabs.

In some ways, I was more inclined to appreciate Bell, since she at least was a straightforward imperialist. In the same way I was surprised by how much I appreciated Eberhardt, however, I was surprised by how little I appreciated Bell. Her accomplishments, impressive as they were, meant little to me, and I found her personality and writing uncompelling. Still, it was enlightening to learn just how much of the historical processes I tend to assume just happen, like the ascensions and descents of certain figures, or the emergence of certain groups, could actually be engineered by someone like Bell. It’s put me on the lookout for manufactured events now and in my studies of history, and it’s made me more careful in how I talk about how past events came to be.

While I admired Stark’s writing style more than Bell’s, I found her, in a lot of ways, a weaker version of her. Especially in her case, I was struck by how nonlinear political/historical trends can be; her logic of anti-Zionism in her letters and US tour was not unlike current arguments against Zionism in lots of ways, even though Zionism persists today. I appreciated that Stark wasn’t aristocratic or classed in the same way Bell and even to some extent Lawrence and Eberhardt were; it made her feel more real, and in a way more approachable. She was also the only spy who wrote about the other spies (Lawrence and Bell), which I found fascinating—I liked seeing what she thought of their history, since she was so much closer to it in time than I could be. 

As for Lawrence, he really made me think critically about how historical narratives are formed, and how historical characters are just that—characters, and not necessarily accurate reflections of real people. Mousa’s work was especially interesting in this regard. I knew that history as I knew it could be inaccurate, but somehow, I saw the historiographical process as something that just happened, not as something influenced by the character of the very historical figures it follows, as with Lawrence’s work in forming his history to his desires. Prof. AK’s interventions, too—allowing us to remember why we can be so attracted to the myth/story of Lawrence, and making sure we understand why/why that is fine but also worthy of investigation—helped me form a skeptical view of history that didn’t totally disregard the attractions of conventional historical narratives.

I was struck, especially in our more recent classes, about how much of Lawrence’s life has been dedicated to ordering and “making right” various events, actions, memories, etc., and failing to do so. He tried to reorder his sexuality to align with the British male heterosexual ideal and failed; there’s evidence that he pursued relationships with boys like Dahoum, along with those first lines from Seven Pillars. He tried to do right by the Arabs into whose political life he had inserted himself unsolicited but refused to abandon British imperial interests, and so failed, since he could not do right by every standard, all of the time. He tried to order and control thoroughly his own body by testing its limits, and failed, and his testing devolved into the erotic, masochistic flagellations he inflicted on himself. 

If I had to guess, I would locate the origin of this impulse in his childhood and the strictness of his upbringing, interrupted by bursts of chaos or violence, like when he discovered his parents’ scandal and when his mother beat him. Perhaps he inherited the impulse to make things right from his mother, who some of the scholars we’ve read postulate brought her children up so strictly and religiously to compensate for the nonconformity of her marriage.

To me, Lawrence’s impulse toward ordering also makes Mousa’s clarifications about the holes in his accounts of his time in the Middle East more interesting. What purpose did it serve for him to invent, at least in some respect, these incidences of violence and nonconformity, such as the events of Deraa, or to take credit for more work in the Revolt than he actually deserved? He could have, as some scholars wrote, been inventing these episodes as a means of self-punishment and self-revelation—i.e., he knew there was something nonconformist about him, or he recognized internally some homosexual impulse, and so felt the need to invent Deraa so that he could order himself in the world. He felt the need to punish his own nonconformity by exaggerating/falsifying it and projecting it to the world, so that people would understand where he lay in the order of the world.

He might have taken more credit than he deserved for the Arab and British efforts in the Middle East because of his guilt over his failure to safeguard the rights he had promised the Arabs. By making it appear as though he had done more than he had, Lawrence could right his place in history; his misdeeds could be outweighed by revolutionary action.

If I had more time/space, I would have tried to understand Lawrence’s upbringing through a psychoanalytic framework, which I believe would help in understanding some of his choices, especially those that seem contradictory. Altogether, I believe that Lawrence, despite appearances, was unsure of who he was, what he wanted to be, or even what he was doing as he did it. He was passionate, but frequently irresponsible, not dissimilarly from Isabelle Eberhardt. His impulse to order the world to his vision is more Bell-like, and the fluidness of his identity was in some ways like Freya Stark’s. I’m glad we saved Lawrence for last—I’ve liked being able to compare him to our previous spies.

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.

I found myself regarding Isabelle Eberheardt in a very critical light, one that reminded me of how Joan Didion regards the young hippies of Haight-Ashbury in the 1970s. To me, the most refreshing text on Eberheardt was the introduction to Passionate Nomad, which highlights Eberheardt’s carelessness and essential uselessness in Algeria, to herself, and to those around her. This take on Eberheardt was similar to Didion’s disdainful, unimpressed portrait of hippies in the titular essay of her collection Slouching Towards Bethelehem. 

The Passionate Nomad introduction paints Eberheardt as beyond her time in that she was more akin to a 1960s hippie orientalist than a real colonialist. It refers to her as a symbol of the moral decay of Western Europe going into the twentieth century, especially of moral decay in European colonies, just as Didion paints the hippies as symbolic of wider moral decay within the American empire in the 60s and 70s before the rigid, fascistic Reaganism of the 80s. Her exploits in Algeria remind me of the Beatles in India, the hippies doing ayahuasca, or people going to “find themselves” backpacking in Southeast Asia—orientalists who like the aesthetics of transgression and the freedom they can claim as “vagabonds” and “outcasts” without any of the responsibilities of real revolutionary action. 

They were young teenagers who ran away from the constrictions of the nuclear family to find Haight-Ashbury a gateway to sex, drugs, and intertia, just as a young Eberheardt fled the constrictions of Geneva society to find Algeria a gateway to similar forces of decay. Neither group showed real interest in political action, despite a fascination with and empathy for local causes (for Eberheardt, Algerians, and for the hippies, often indigenous Americans, or Vietnam). They simply sought their own pleasure, often through exploitative means, and kept going until they ran out of funds. 

To me, these similarities point to broader parallels between the European political mood of Eberheardt’s era and the American political mood of the 1960s-early 70s. What might such parallels tell us about patterns of imperial growth and responding backlash? What about the nature of an imperial culture might, at its moment of internal decay, lead young people to attempt to abandon their privilege—yet fail to fully reject the culture that made and privileged them?