Nostalgia 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.
