Category: Self and Other

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The Expatriate Mindset – Eberhardt and the Contemporary Era

The world “expatriate” is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

expatriate (verb):
1. banish, exile
2. to withdraw (oneself) from residence in or allegiance to one’s native country
3. to leave one’s native country to live elsewhere
also: to renounce allegiance to one’s native country

expatriate (adjective): living in a foreign land

expatriate (noun): a person who lives in a foreign country

The idea of expatriates (“expats”) in the contemporary era is one of digital nomads, international businessmen, and passport bros. To be an expatriate is more serious than vacation – to be an expatriate is to choose to be away from home, for a very prolonged, even permanent amount of time, and to refute your home nation for various personal reasons in favor of the foreign.

When studying Isabelle Eberhardt’s life, I considered what I shared with the travelers, writers, archaeologists, and adventurers of the 19th to early 20th century who felt this sense of the expatriate mindset, the Germanic sense of “Fernweh” – a severe desire to wander, travel, and be distanced from their homeland. I found it sad in Eberhardt’s life that she was raised in a difficult, abnormal home, could not reconcile herself with Geneva or Europe in general, and attempted to seek peace in Morocco and Algeria, to the great detriment of her physical health and ultimately her life. In the introduction to Writings from the Sand, Vol. 1, the editors Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu write that she left Geneva “in hopes of never returning” (Eberhardt, 2012).

My parents are both mentally unwell and I also had a difficult, abnormal upbringing. It caused me to associate my geographic constraints with intense negativity. As a child, I fantasized about moving abroad. Later, in the military, I requested an overseas duty station and was out of the United States for four years.

The internet is currently rife with a shared sentiment among many Americans (and those of other nationalities, too), who desire to voluntarily leave their homeland for somewhere else on the grounds of political instability, lack of belonging, safety, better opportunities, and myriad other reasons. My friends echo these desires, with some having successfully relocated abroad, and others unable to do so.

A line that has always stuck with me is from the film, The English Patient: “We are the real countries. Not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. I know you’ll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That’s what I’ve wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends, on an earth without maps.” (Minghella, 1996). Despite collective urges to travel, whether temporarily or permanently, to pursue the foreign, to imagine that it is perhaps better than what is at home (even if this is a falsehood or merely a half-truth – no place is perfect, and exoticizing another nation does not make it a solution to one’s domestic problems) – in the end, nation-states and logistics rule over us. They rule over the expatriate and therefore shape the expatriate mindset itself. Eberhardt contended with such difficulties in her travels, including with finances, physical hardship, and the need to straddle the fine line between appeasing the French occupying force and building friendship with the Arab peoples she so strongly identified with.

The English Patient imagines a hypothetical “earth without maps” with true freedom. However, nation-states cannot exist without borders. What would a border-less world, a dream for a self-described vagabond like Eberhardt look like? How would it function, and would such a mode of existence even be remotely feasible, or does it go against human nature? Would a border-less world serve to answer the anxieties of this generation’s expatriates?

References

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Expatriate. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 21, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expatriate

Minghella, A. (1996). The English Patient: A Screenplay. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA34785462

Eberhardt, I. (2012). Writings from the Sand, Volume 1: Collected Works of Isabelle Eberhardt. U of Nebraska Press.

 

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Birds and Freedom – Isabelle Eberhardt

Nostalgia for Freedom I - Every Day OriginalNostalgia for Freedom I by Angelika Rasmus

Nostalgia, wanderlust, sadness, longing… obsession, encapsulation, fracture

“Nostalgia for a place for which I have no name” – Isabelle Eberhardt

This painting by Angelika Rasmus encapsulates the beauty and curse of Isabelle Eberhardt’s flight to Algeria through the unit’s readings on her and her adventures.

Writings from the Sand, Vol 1. An emerging theme was Eberhardt’s fragmentary and impressionistic prose, constantly shifting and exposing her fragmented state of mind. In the painting, the sparrows invoke a fleeting, ungraspable state, circling her consciousness as she juggles her “loyalty” to Algeria, to her Sufi brotherhood, to the French and Layuatey. No single narrative, very known to be a woman despite male-presenting.

Daily Journals, a recurring theme of where, when, what is my (Isabelle’s) inner peace. The tension and turbulence of her circumstances and the situation she puts herself in through her physical dilemma festering from her relations with others, her addiction to keif, her sense of identity and allegiance.  The calm face in the painting suggests her journalistic state, controlled, obedient, however detached from the fractionally expressed thoughts. The woman’s face mirrors the way her journals juxtaposes her self-expression and reflection of constant upheaval in her life through her family life to the conditions she lived in Algeria.

Passionate Nomad (Introduction) “She was a vagabond, a wanderer, not only because of frenzied boredom and innate restlessness, but because she had no real roots anywhere, and therefore belonged nowhere.” Like a bird, with no place to truly call home, constantly in flight, migrating to a place that may seem like a temporary home, but even then not exactly. Eberhardt is a paradox amongst a multitude of things: European-born yet Arabized at least in her “learning” of Islam and the Sufi brotherhood, a woman inhabiting male roles, and a romantic wanderer yet wickedly realist of her own experiences in colonial Algeria. In the painting, there is a sense of lulling calmness, chaos above, individuality of the lady yet multiplicity of the sparrows, and a sense of clarity vs obscurity. There is no stable interpretation of Eberhardt, as can be seen through her readings, her work, her writings.

Eberhardt can not be understood as a simple vagabond or a nomad, she is an anomaly, she is a flock of fractured selves pieced and held together by one strip of sanity in which for her would be the predestined fate that Islam decrees.  Her desires to locate a sense of feminism and being a westerner going into “exotic” lands and do “adventurous” things parallels a life of the sparrow (bird). The obscured eye within the painting suggests a partial blindness, and often noted by many, her using what she could understand to fuel her decisions to the best of her abilities as she grew up with a multifaceted sense of education. The way Eberhardt lives is in constant search for something, whether that be feminism, freedom, escape, a search for meaning, perhaps even a place to call her roots. 

I can’t help but also interpret the multitude of birds in conjunction to the symbolism of birds signifying not only freedom, but depending on the bird, sometimes death, allusion to danger, destruction. Sparrows, in particular, can portray a persistent and obsessive quality. To which Eberhardt was most if not all at certain points of her life in Algeria, especially in the way she was obsessed with Algerian culture and was trusted into the Qadiriyya, and thus not only using Islam as her one string of sanity, but also compelling her mother to also convert (obsession becoming contagious). Her obsession with the male-perspective of Islam allowed her justification to a lot of her decisions, despite her fracturing mental and physical health. Liberation but imprisonment within her own self.

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Hello world!

Hello Students of Spies of Empire!

Lets have some fun interrogating the machinery of Empire as it reveals itself through the shenanigans of some of its more famous–or infamous!—writer-spies-archeologists-travelers: spies one and all!

We will think about what “spying” means” and whose interests it serves–and ask when it can be a force for good or evil, control or being controlled.

More to follow….for now, welcome to the course!