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Touching on A Woman in Arabia: “The Person”, “The Lover”, & “The Courtier”

As we have spent a lot of time talking about Bell’s perception and how influential her actions have been towards both the Arabs and the British, we were unable to truly dive in deeper at specific chapters within A Woman in Arabia, so to provide some insight into why looking at “The ‘Person”, “The Lover”, and “The Courtier” is important to give us a holistic and deeper understanding of Bell and her beliefs/what she did in her life. As a recap: A Woman in Arabia was a recollection of Bell’s historical letters, military dispatches, diary entries, and travel writings to offer an intimate look at this woman who shaped nations.

The “Person”

Bell’s “antifeminism” wasn’t simple opposition to women’s rights, it was classed, contextual, and pragmatic. She came from an elite industrial family who believed in John Stuart Mill’s idea of women as rational “Persons”, but within a paternalist system. She shared her family’s view that suffrage required education and civic competence, and that women’s property laws had to change first. For her, it was a matter of readiness, not essence. Bell plays a double-coded role: too male for women, too female for men. She’s simultaneously insider and outsider, using her gender strategically in diplomacy. She’s performing masculinity to access power, while retaining femininity to humanize herself within male hierarchies. Her addressing the British wives of friends from Baghdad degradationally as in saying “A little woman” reaffirms how fractured she can also be as a woman in a predominantly male situated circumstances. Yet she also founded schools, hospitals, and women’s clubs in Baghdad and admired those who defied patriarchal restrictions. Always between categories Bell saw herself as a “Person” in the fullest Millian sense: self-directed, rational, and morally sovereign. Her feminism was paradoxical, personal rather than political, elitist yet emancipatory, compassionate but paternalistic.

The Lover

When Bell took up her post as “Major Miss Bell”, her work at the Intelligence Bureau was kept secret, much was omitted but letters was consistent. However there were a period of three days and three days in November 1915 where no letters came by aka love affair. Bell’s voice across diaries and letters is vivid, commanding, and self-scrutinizing: she organizes camps, nurses aides like Fattuh, curates social worlds, and narrates herself with both ironic wit and romantic candor. When soldier-diplomat Charles “Dick” Doughty-Wylie departs for Albania and secrecy tightens (destroyed letters, evasions to family), she chooses renunciation through motion, “the road and the dawn”, turning heartbreak into purpose as she heads back to the desert, converting private longing into a travel/work manifesto: if politics and society deny fulfillment, she will sublimate desire into maps, monuments, and manuscript pages addressed to him in everything but name.

This brings up the discussion where despite Bell’s likening towards the Arabs and taking their input and often defending them at times, wanting to unite them, as much a game or a way for her to move others around as a pawn for her own unfulfilled desires? Her espionage? Bell’s affection towards married men slowly turns her into an unreliable narrator, despite the plentitude of accounts of others writing on behalf of her and even through her own documented letters and words.

The Courtier

In her later Baghdad years, Gertrude Bell’s story becomes a meditation on power, gender, and the gaze of empire. Once central to Britain’s rule, her authority shrank with Iraq’s new constitution, and she redirected her energy toward archaeology (where she truly embraced becoming an archaeologist) writing the Law of Excavations, founding the Iraq Museum, and thus transforming personal loss of influence into cultural legacy. Her letters reveal both the intimacy and imbalance of her relationship with King Faisal: political dialogue shaded by affection, a romanticized vision of Arab nationhood melting into frustration at his “veering” character. Bell’s prose stages herself as both participant and observer, painting scenes of white robes, whirring fans, and emotional candor, asserting narrative control even as official control slipped away. Through her management of Faisal’s court, choosing Ghazi’s European suits, hiring an English governess, and instructing the queen’s household, she enacted a Western gaze that sought to civilize while sincerely admiring. Her “court-making” blended maternal guidance with imperial authority, a feminine performance of governance within male-dominated politics. As Stykes had once insulted her by calling her “A man woman”. Illness and financial worry “humanized” her final years, but she remained indomitable, writing, organizing, and advising until her health gave way. Within her letters, the commanding tone, vivid self-dramatization, and moral certitude construct a woman who, denied political freedom, found her version of “escape” and meaning in shaping memory of her devotion to the foundation of Iraq.

 

Furthermore, Bell’s letters and diaries (her life overall) reveal loneliness, yearning, and a fierce need to belong somewhere, neither accepted fully by the British establishment nor by the Arab world she loved. Faisal and others trusted her sincerity, even though her loyalty lay with Britain. She wrote about tribes and leaders with both fascination and condescension. Her letters often express admiration for Arab culture, yet they also reveal a belief that Arabs needed British guidance to “civilize” and govern themselves.

Zooming out–> is Bell truly the most “truthful” in her accounts of her life and life generally in Persia as well as with her travels and the founding of Iraq? Bell’s strategic elitism and anxiety about democracy leading to theocracy and also her imperial paternalism in balancing sects AND also being called “Enti Iraqiyah, enti badawiyah—you’re a Mesopotamian, a Beduin.” by King Faisal which was defining for her: a reassignment of identity, accepted as both insider and foreigner. However, not always is a reassignment of identity a positive concept, especially as a spy, whose job essentially is to balance both the “false” and the “truth” or their true beliefs/morals/values with the overall end game and goal of a alrger overarching empire. Bell also “archived” her present days through her photography and her documenting. Her gaze suspending the imperial colonialism, still seen true to this day in the Middle East through her choices, her actions, and her words.

At the very end, did Gertrude Bell die a hero of empire (a queen) or a victim of its contradictions?

Notes and post curated by: Nabiha

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The Life of Gertrude Bell: a playlist with only good songs

Gertrude Bell is a complicated individual, as all these spies are turning out to be. I think what I found so fascinating about Bell is that despite her love for Iraq (however much was genuine, and not exoticized or orientalized), she was consistently loyal; loyal to her family and to Great Britain itself. This made reading her life as a narrative much simpler than Isabelle Eberhardt. I scoured my playlist to find (my best attempt at) the perfect mix of tragedy, beauty, the pull of discovery and power, and the split loyalties/love that define the life and spywork of Gertrude Bell. 

  1. Rebel Prince – Rufus Wainwright 

This song feels like Bell’s love for the British Empire. It is her master, her sordid and salacious lover. While it seems like a far-off, looming entity, the Empire is something dear to Bell. However, she must leave England precisely because of her love. She projects her loyalty into her spywork, leaving the room she knows so well, but always looking back at her far away master. “It was appropriate that the Bells’ family fortune was earned through… Britain’s great strength, after all […] they worked not only to enhance their own communities but to maintain Britain’s place in the sun. They took pride in the British Empire and its role as custodian of the universe” (Wallach; “Of Great and Honored Stock”). 

2. Blacklisted – Neko Case 

I interpret this song as Bell’s growing entanglement and work for the British Empire. Her job of perception is based in deception. She must deceive the Iraqi people she loves to further the aims of the country she answers to, the country she believes has the power to make the trees bend in welcome. Why does the fast train of imperialism rage on, where does it end? Where do the passengers, the colonized, wait, in the meantime? “Authority would remain in the hands of dignified Sir Percy and a group of British advisors. London was convinced that it would control Iraq until that undetermined and presumably distant day when the untutored Iraqis had learned to govern themselves” (Brian; Desert and Sown introduction).

3. Pearl Diver – Mistki 

Bell’s love for Iraq and loyalty to England is paradoxical. She follows the tide to the beautiful that she wanted so badly, with the monster of imperialism over her shoulders. She occupies a middle space, a space of no feeling, and must continue diving deeper, becoming more entangled in life in Iraq and loyalty to Britain. Ironically, her loss of power towards the end of her life also mirrors the death of the song’s treasure hunter. “The work has been so interesting that as far as I am concerned I couldn’t have experienced better or even as good, a destiny” (Bell; Letters II 658-659). “She employs her growing competence of Arabic to describe a backward country in the flux of change” (Brian; Desert and Sown introduction). 

4. Shooting the Moon – OK Go

I see Bell as this song’s Big Hero. With her eventual loss of power, what is there to show? A country divided and kings made by a name no one seems to remember. Her time in Iraq was not exactly true, but it can’t be discounted because she did truly love the people she met (in her own, perhaps infantilizing, belittling way). She can only deliver love to (or perhaps exert power over) Iraq by caring for her museum. Despite all her lies and deception, she would still wish them well in some (British-controlled) way. “Seven years I’ve been at this job of setting up an Arab State. If we fail it’s little consolation to me personally that other generations may succeed, as I believe they must…” (Bell; Letters II 664).

5. Ghir Enta – Souad Massi 

I imagine this as Bell’s love letter to Iraq before she dies. Today, Iraq is with her and the British, but tomorrow, who knows? Iraq has become her home, it’s a place she cannot live with as is, but cannot live away from. It’s tragic and beautiful! Iraq is her true love, perhaps because it’s the place she was able to leave her mark. Souad Massi’s Algerian, but the song is in Arabic, so I think Bell would appreciate the song for its exotic Arab aesthetic. “They never elect any other European. That’s the sort of thing that makes it difficult to leave” (Bell; Letters II 667). “I love seeing [Iraqi visitors] and they are most useful for purposes of information” (Bell; Letters I 407). 

6. Hey Hey Hey – Eilen Jewell

Gertrude Bell did sleep off her regret in a very literal way. Whether her death was a true suicide or not, she was undoubtedly sad and lonely. I see this song as Bell’s tired goodbye to her beloved Iraq, the place she couldn’t quite keep a grasp on. “There are long moments when I feel very lonely… I am aware that I myself have much less control over my emotions than I used to have” (Bell; Letters II 658, 662). “Gertrude Bell took an overdose of sleeping pills. All of Baghdad attended her funeral, along with an honor guard of sheiks from her beloved desert” (Brian; Desert and Sown introduction). 

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My Adventure with Isabelle

While it is no secret that I often ridicule, slander, and even mock Ms. Eberhardt, there is no one else I would rather vacation with than her. Unlike her status as a spy, Isabelle Eberhardt’s ability to have a good time should not be up for debate. Through the readings, it became clear that Isabelle possessed a quality that far too many people lack nowadays: a sense of adventure. One moment she’ll be worshiping in a mosque and in the next she’ll be indulging at a brothel. It takes a special kind of existence to live a life as full as hers within the constraints of twenty-eight years. I admire the spontaneity that characterized her way of life. Admittedly, I have not gone full vagabond and thrown away all my responsibilities and alliances; however, I too live a life littered with exploits and antics. When referring to her time in Northern Africa, Rana Kabbani claimed, “It provided a way of attaining experiences more varied than those she could have expected in suburban Geneva. ” Growing up in suburban Kentucky, I can relate to the alluring call of the distant and unknown.

The destination for our vacation could not be any where else except for Algeria. While I was very tempted to choose Nigeria, the familiarity the Isabelle has with the people and culture of Northern Africa cemented the choice (I am assuming  that this vacation is during her era and that I can speak Arabic). I think our vacation would go almost perfectly. I can see us riding horses through the desert, discussing her unique practice of Islam, etc. Additionally, I think our personalities would mesh really well with each other. The only type of people I struggle to vibe with are those who are extremely type A. Fortunately, Eberhardt is the exact opposite. She was the definition of “go with the flow.” It has even been said that “She did not make decisions.; she was impelled to take action.” My only worries are that her narcotic and sexual desires would impede our fun. Nothing sounds worse than having to derail our entire vacation so that Isabelle could beg for kief or pine over a man (or God forbid she does both).

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Kin and Stranger in Persia

“Ride through [the bazaar] on a summer morning, when its vaulted coolness will offer you a grateful shelter from the sun, and before its activity has been hushed by the heat of mid-day.” Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures bursts open with images like this: shafts of light cutting through domes, merchants sitting cross-legged among their wares, mule bells ringing through the crowded arches. I felt transported, and yet, I also felt the distance in her gaze. Reading Bell reminded me of my own road trip from Tangier to Mauritania – where I looked Moroccan, until my Arabic yielded me not a local. I was kin and stranger, welcomed and held apart. Bell writes Persia with that same tension: sympathetic, but detached.

That detachment is double-edged. It sharpens her sketches – the bazaar alive in dust and color, the hidden gardens that bloom like secret paradises, the mourners of Hussein caught between devotion and performance. But it also limits them. Persia, in her hands, becomes spectacle and history, a land she can describe but never fully inhabit. Her authority rests not on intimacy, but on the power to interpret – to render the unfamiliar legible for those at home.

Still, Bell’s Persia endures because it mirrors the paradox of travel itself. To move through another place is to be both transported and estranged, drawn close yet never fully at home. Reading her, I am reminded that distance is not failure but condition – that what lingers is not only the image of Persia she saw, but the uneasy truth that to observe is always to stand slightly apart.

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Reflections on Isabella Eberhardt

I must say, I love a good adventure, Isabella Eberhardt’s adventure however, while wild and exciting, left a confused and hyper romanticized legacy that left a bad taste in my mouth. In looking back at the readings and discussion notes for writing this post, I noticed two major themes along which our study of Isabella Eberhardt fell.  The first theme was intentions and loyalties. Discussion of this theme revolved mostly around Eberhardt’s relationships with different people she came across, particularly, her relationship with the people of Algeria and her relationship with general Lyautey. While there is no definitive evidence which speaks to Eberhardt’s absolute allegiance to anyone but herself and the road, I believe that insight may be gained into her allegiances by analyzing two things. The first is Eberhardt’s own writings about topics surrounding the French and North African populations in both [INSERT TEXT} and [INSERT TEXT]. In [INSERT TEXT] she says “INSERT QUOTE”. Now, while this may have simply been an implication of Eberhardt’s personal admiration for Lyautey rather than her admiration for France’s colonial project, other evidence, such as her saying “INSERT QUOTE” on page [insert pg number] of [INSERT TEXT], suggests that she did, at least somewhat, buy into the French vision of North Africa, even if unintentionally.

The second thing that must be analyzed when attempting to decipher Eberhardt’s loyalties is her biographer’s outlooks on her journey. Now here, opinions do diverge, with some biographers, such as [THAT ONE COUPLE], who in my opinion were more so admirers than experts, claiming that Eberhardt’s allegiances were shifty, and that she was simply trying to survive wherever she went. [AUTHORS’ NAMES] appear to relay that Eberhardt was truly just a writer, a good one, and that if she was looped into French colonial projects, it was unintentional and cause by people taking advantage of her writings. For instance, on [insert pg] of their introduction, they say that Eberhardt “insert quote,” suggesting that Eberhardt was simply an innocent young adventurer trying to live out what she thought to be her purpose. These authors go on to build an what is, in my opinion, an overromanticized or maybe a glorified version of Isabella Eberhardt that focuses more on her allure as an adventurer than about the political motivations and implications of her adventure.

On the other end of the spectrum and just as essential to analyze when studying Eberhardt is [AUTHOR NAME]. [AUTHOR NAME] hints that Eberhardt was indeed mal-intentioned, saying things such as “quote” (cite) and “quote” (cite). These analyses, unlike those that came before, seem to build a more pragmatic version of Eberhardt that adopted the French cause intentionally, regardless of the reason. Since neither side presents definitive evidence, it is difficult to attach labels to Eberhardt, I find it difficult to believe however that someone with that many question marks around them and who has drawn so much attention across time is completely innocent of political involvement. Eberhardt was young, but she was mature and frankly, selfish, her decisions may not have been made in favor of any ideology, but in the pursuit of self-preservation, which for her may have meant walking on the edge between colonist and colonized. 

The second, and in my opinion, equally important theme was Eberhardt’s nonconforming gender practices. Understanding how Eberhardt acted as a man and as a woman, what each gender meant to her and how and where each gender got her is crucial to understanding her person and positionality. One particularly odd thing that stands out about Eberhardt taking on a male persona in Algeria is that she is simply accepted! Even I did not expect that, I was pleasantly surprised but also wondered whether she was accepted because she was a traveller…would a local woman attempting to do the same thing be equally embraced? Both Eberhardt’s own texts and the films which we watched convey her complex understanding of herself as both man and woman. In many texts, including for instance [INSERT TEXT] she refers to herself using male pronouns. Additionally, not only is she addressed by others as Mahmoud, but she also has, as we discussed in class, a male gaze through which she looks upon other women! For example in [INSERT TEXT] she says “quote” (cite), indicating that she views Algerian women in what one might call a typical orientalist light (although to be fair it isn’t quite clear whether she feels this way about European women as well). The conception of herself as a male only in the public space and as female in private and sexual settings is fascinating and is actually a theme in feminist literature. By being male, she is able to access the inner circles of religious orders and society. She is able to freely engage in her hoodlum behaviour with little protest or outright shaming. I wonder however whether she loses a piece of herself in this way…

In the films, Eberhardt is also seen as both man and woman. In the documentary style reflection on her life, people, mostly men, reflect on her as a woman, but also seem to understand and respect the role she held as a man, reflecting the importance of both personas in her legacy. In the recreation of her adventures, she is seen as Mahmoud outside her home and Isabella inside (although the general still refers to her as Mahmoud). Her role as Mahmoud in the film reflects how she was able to form relationships her female existence would have otherwise prevented, specifically her odd relationship with general Lyautey and of course her relationship with many Sufi men.

Tying all of this together is Isabella’s existence as a writer. Through writing, or maybe for writing, she makes sense of herself and the world around her. Her relationships and her positionality, her goals and her past, and much more. We discussed the possibility of her writing being a production of information that categorizes her as a spy…I think that while this may be true, it was not her intention. I believe, because of the passion and colorful language with which she wrote about her travels, that Eberhardt genuinely had a love for the unknown. Whether she got taken advantage of or eventually served the French after losing purpose is a different story. Essentially, I don’t know whether she was a spy or not, and I don’t know that I particularly care…to me she was a woman who defied norms, which in some ways is “cool” but in other ways is genuinely stupid. She was the original Transcendentalist and I am not a huge fan of transcendentalism. She chose to live a difficult but eventful life, a selfish choice, but one that I suppose satisfied her craving for discovery.

 

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The Mirror Trick

The Mirror Trick

In Marie-Odele Delacour and Jean-René Hulue’s “Introduction: The Game of ‘I’”, they draw special attention to the rhetorical and thematic use of perspective in Eberhardt’s writing. In “The Mirror,” a short prelude to the rest of her short story collection, the first-person narrator is Mahmoud Saadi. He is a male wanderer who becomes the vessel for Isabel’s writing, though in the text he is not named, and without further inspection his role is mostly passive. The more active subject is Mohammed, who is described to be of “perfect masculine beauty.”. Mahmoud observes Mohammed looking at himself in a little penny mirror and speculates at his interiority — at the end Mohammed closes the mirror and smiles, and the reader is left unsure as to whether Mohammed was using the mirror to spy upon the spying on Mahmoud.

While reading this passage, I remembered a quote that’s been pinging itself around in my head recently. Margaret Atwood says: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” While this refers more to heterosexual objectification, it nevertheless provides an interesting perspective on Eberhart’s superfluous and intersectional identity as a woman who often disparages women, a woman who travels as a man, and a white person who claims a middle-Eastern identity and inheritance. 

In their reading of “The Mirror,” Delacour and Hulue claim Eberhardt as an incredibly active participant; through their description, it’s easy to mistake her as a character in the narration itself. With this supportive interpretation, the question that the Atwood reference then invokes is whether or not there is such a thing as an internal, uncorrupted female gaze. The fact that Eberhardt is the female puppeteer behind these two male figures is a significant reverse-power play considering the context of her time, but that logic is marred when taking into account the privilege of her whiteness in shaping ethnic stories. The infinite “spying” aspect of the mirror trick also relates to Atwood’s quote as it is unclear if Mohammed is reflecting internally within himself, if it is only Mahmoud is spying on Mohammed, if it is Mohammed is spying on Mahmoud spying on Mohammed, or, to get really rhetorical, if Mohammed is piercing the veil of Mahmoud to lay his eyes on Eberhardt; Atwood’s quote is less about separate male and female gazes, but and more that they are inevitably melded within a woman. Is Eberhardt, this double agent of politics and identity, just living an amped up version of this psychosis?

 

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In Response to “Is there an idea or image or line from our readings that has stuck with you for more than the week or unit when it was discussed? What are you continuing to think about it? Why do you think it has had this effect?”

In the records of Isabelle Eberhardt’s life I find neither the vagabond nor the nomad she so fondly self-references. Instead, I find a woman at odds with her colonist’s background, yet who finds herself wedded to it again and again — no matter the landscape. This turn of events may have always caught Eberhardt by surprise, but its cause is really quite simple. A “nomad” must not only shed all attachment to the material forces around them (oppositional and otherwise), and, consequently, shed all loyalties. The spy, however, is a figure of multiple loyalties: their attachments not disavowed, but instead participated in with even more vigor than the common person. As such, a spy cannot be a vagabond, nor a vagabond a spy — no matter how much Ian Fleming’s romantic storytelling attempts to conflate the two. 

Still, why does the role Isabelle occupies (spy) seem to correspond so frequently to the role she wishes to occupy (nomad)? The answer lies on page 213 of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. 

“On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apoc-

alypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical

conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where

identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—

double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.”

It is important to understand that border enforcement, in the context of the nation-state, are largely a modern innovation. It draws on the colonial demand for dominion over the Earth, segmenting it into individual pieces that individuals or communities claim to “possess.” For many colonial subjects, the imposition of border regimes stoked more terror than direct violence from colonizers, as the false imposition of ill-defined borders led not only to violence from those meant to enforce them but also from the oft-disparate cultures and societies now forced to occupy the same “nation.” It is only in this world, where the horror of borders and their fragility is stark naked, that we can understand the blurring between Isabelle’s lived and desired roles. 

Spies and nomads share one commonality: the ability to permeate borders. Nomads because they have unattached themselves from nation-states and all that they entail, and spies because they are attached to multiple of these colonial projects intending to redesign the world. Eberhardt, over and over again, confuses her ability to occupy the contradictory worlds of colonial Algeria as proof of her “nomadic” lack of attachment to the way of things. However, Isabelle’s ability and desire to occupy these worlds is a direct result of her many attachments — her eroticized fascination with Arab Islamic culture sublimated in her operative work for the French Empire. Unable to let go of either attachment, she finds a way to manipulate them in her favor: allowing her access to a “foreign frontier” all while refusing to renounce her colonial background.

The nomadic life she details living, then, is revealed to us: a tower of dust.



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Desert Ballad: A Playlist for Yasmina

I often do readings while listening to sad playlists full of tragic love songs. While reading Yasmina, I found myself sympathizing with her even more because the music added an extra melancholic element. Her story moves like music, beginning with quiet innocence, swelling with passion, and ending in heartbreak and collapse. These five songs, for me, capture Yasmina’s journey.

  1. “Young and Beautiful” – Lana Del Rey

This song reflects the way Yasmina begins: innocent, dreamy, and living her life as a shepherdess among the ruins. She doesn’t fully understand what’s coming, and when Jacques enters her world, she’s swept along almost without a choice. The line “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” mirrors Yasmina’s fate. Jacques is captivated by her youth and beauty, but those qualities fade in his memory once he returns to France, leaving her devotion behind.

2. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division

Yasmina and Jacque’s love is doomed before it even begins. She even tells him it’s impossible for a Muslim girl and a French officer to be together. But instead of stopping, they give in, which makes their passion both beautiful and devastating. The song has the same feeling: you know the ending will be tragic, but you can’t look away. For me, the refrain “love will tear us apart” is exactly what happens when Jacques is reassigned. Reality itself rips their love apart.

3. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – Green Day

When Jacques leaves for his new post, Yasmina is left in total loneliness. The image that stays with me is her lying facedown in the gorge, immobilized by grief. She doesn’t rage or resist. She just repeats mektoub. That resignation matches the emptiness in Green Day’s song, where the singer walks a lonely road with no one by his side. Yasmina’s “boulevard” is the dusty plain of Timgad, but the isolation and drained hope are the same.

4. “Somebody That I Used to Know” – Gotye ft. Kimbra

This song reflects the cruelty of Jacque’s return. Yasmina still sees him as her Mabrouk, the man she loved and waited for, and she calls to him with joy. But Jacques, now married to a Parisian woman, treats her as nothing but a shameful past. Her outburst: “Why did you use all of your ruses… to seduce me, carry me away, and take my virginity? Why did you lie and promise to return?” This fits perfectly with the song’s bitterness about being turned into a stranger by someone who once defined your whole world. For Yasmina, love was life itself. For Jacques, it became disposable.

5. “Back to Black” – Amy Winehouse

The end of Yasmina’s story is the hardest to read, and Back to Black is the only song that fits. Yasmina spirals into illness, poverty, and prostitution, but even then she still clings to the memory of Jacques. Winehouse’s line “we only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times” captures the endless mourning Yasmina embodies. The story’s final words, “Yasmina the Bedouin was no more,” echo the song’s raw finality. Both tell of women consumed by love that society never let them keep.

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Isabelle Eberhardt: Radically un-Transgressive

As a Kabyle-American, I found all of Eberhardt’s journeys quite fascinating. In a lot of the ways I’ve experienced and understood Algeria, she is transgressive if understood as a woman. While I use the pronouns “she” and “her” for Eberhardt, this is done only for linguistic clarity. I think her gender was far more complicated than just being a woman traveler in drag. Is it fair to even consider her a woman when her gender/religious/cultural expressions were entirely male? If Eberhardt is understood as a man, then really, all she did was not very transgressive. I think I’m inclined to read her this way because the very few times she refers to herself in her daily journals, masculine pronouns are used. So, she is then a masculine European figure, trying to (quasi-)disguise herself as an Arab. Once again, this is very surface level transgressive, and instead further reinforces what Mohamed Boudhan calls “France’s Arabizing function.” 

Let me explain! “These Berber assemblies are tumultuous. Passions have free rein; violent, they often end in blood. However, the Berbers always remain protective of their collective rights. They defend themselves against autocracy by suppressing those who dare aspire to it. In Kenadsa the Arab theocratic spirit has triumphed over the republican confederative Berber spirit” (Eberhardt 307; Oranese South II). Essentially, Eberhardt establishes an ethnic hierarchy of her experiences in Algeria. The (often French-associated) Arabs act as enlightened Muslims, much better and more civilized than their primitive, Indigenous counterparts. While her fascination with Arab identity may be read as transgressive from a western lens, when Eberhardt is understood as someone in the lived reality of North Africa, she instead implicates herself with a fellow ruling, dominating class. She, as a native European, is understood as a qualified speaker on civilization, and she knows the Arabs have it where the Berbers don’t. It completely reinforces the French colonial tactic of dividing and conquering. Arabs and Berbers are SO different, and if you can’t be European, it’s much better to be a civilized Arab! 

Despite the interesting and somewhat controversial history of Amazigh marabouts, Eberhardt associates this caste of people with Arabo-Islamic civilization. “The marabouts’ influence on Kenadsa has been so profound that Berbers and Kharantine have forgotten their languages, no longer using anything but Arabic. Their behavior has softened and become civilized” (Eberhardt 308; Oranese South II). Eberhardt then believes in a cultural/linguistic homogeneity, a precursor to the aftereffects of French colonialism on North Africa. While Eberhardt claims to be a neutral passerby on her journey to self-discovery in the exotic east, she claims to have “never played any kind of political role” (Bowles 87; Eberhardt’s letter to the editors of La petite Gironde). Yet, just a few sentences later, she admits, “whenever possible, I make a point of trying to explain to my native friends exact and reasonable ideas, explaining to them that French domination is far preferable to having the Turks here again, or for that matter, any other foreigners. It is completely unjust to accuse me of anti-French activities” (Bowles 87; Eberhardt’s letter to the editors of La petite Gironde).

Overall, Eberhardt is an incredibly interesting character, but perhaps for the exact opposite reasons western media lauds her as a transgressive, anti-racial, proto-feminist. To me, she is the perfect example of Europe’s ability to separate, class, and racialize their colonial subjects, as well as setting the stage for the postcolonial Arabization of North Africa. Eberhardt’s views were perhaps more progressive than the average European of the era, however, it wasn’t anything particularly revolutionary, despite how impressive her story was. Like Kabani says, “[Eberhardt] became a mouthpiece for patriarchy, voicing traditional male views on sex, culture, religion and politics” (Kabani ix). It’s like the kids say: fork was found in kitchen! 

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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.