The interview:
What do you think was Isabelle Eberhardt’s attraction to the desert?
From
what she has written, her first attraction was the space, the beauty of
the place, her attraction to Islam, and especially the Sufi Islamic
cult.
How deep was Eberhardt’s practice of Islam? Was she really into it?
Yeah,
I think she was very much. I think she was into the practice of, again,
the Sufi cult. In the beginning [of her time in Algeria], she was not
an Islamic scholar so she was very attracted to it as a religion.
Eberhardt was very attracted to the chanting of the services. You can
join a Sufi group and there will be the chanting, the incense, and the
singing without much teaching.
I know that she was certainly into a
lot of hashish, as well, as part of her religious practice. But I think
that there was something about the beauty of the desert, the simplicity
of the life, the coherence of the community that she found there [that
attracted her to Islam]. I don’t think she appreciated the poverty that
she found, but that is going away from your question . . .
Do
you think that because Eberhardt was not a scholar, that she was not
trained as a professor, she was able to immerse herself into the Arabic
culture to a degree that was more personal?
I
think it was very personal, of course. While she was not a scholar, she
was really trying to be a writer. She was trying to report, because she
worked as a journalist as well, certain things that she found in the
society; yet [some of these things] often went against the grain of
what was the colonial principles and the colonial impression at the
time. Remember that this was the big period of colonial expansion in
North Africa.
Now Eberhardt also had a very interesting
background. Her father was fascinated with Tolstoy, and tried to create
a community (he was sort of a nutty guy too) that was base on his
writings. So she [Eberhardt] was raised in a natural freedom that was
very coarse for a woman; she could ride a horse and often dress in
men’s clothing. And when she moved to Marseille, in France, she
became kind of like a little star.
When she was seventeen or
eighteen she first visited Algeria, and her writings say that when she
saw Algiers for the first time from the boat, the city looked like a
collection of doves on a hillside. So you can see that she was very
taken by the picturesque beauty of the place.
But I want to go
back to something else here, that Eberhardt was also influenced by, as
I am sure everybody else was at this time, by what they were seeing.
Because this was the beginning of the use of photography, which started
to tell people what they were seeing, and about what was out there in
the colonial empire. On one hand there was this very romantic vision of
the exotic, as only the exotic was being presented. On the other hand,
there was a presentation of the civilizing influence. Now the
French had this sense that the indigenous people in their colonies
could become little Frenchmen.
Eberhardt was [also] influenced
by the writing of the people who have come and gone in these colonial
communities, and there was a lot of talk of the exotic. [In this
setting] she had created quite a personage, a persona, for herself, and
I think this was very important.
Did Eberhardt rebel against the French idea that the indigenous people in the colonies could become “little Frenchmen”?
I
think that she didn’t see the civilizing mission, the bringing of
French civilization to the colonies, as very important. Instead she
immersed herself in the culture as something very pure, very beautiful.
So although she did not rebel, as such, I think her rebellion was
looking at the way the people really were, and living with them.
There
were very few women who took on the life of moving with the caravans
and living the very simple life, and Eberhardt’s knowledge of the local
people became very valuable when the French saw that there ws
opposition to their colonial rule. [So although] Eberhardt was not
going to be the Joan of Arch of the Arabs, she certainly did look at
them from the inside view.
Do you think that part of Isabelle Eberhardt’s lifestyle was trying to live out the anarchist dreams of her father?
I
think she was influenced by her father’s idealism, but I do not think
that she had a philosophical view of anarchy. Eberhardt would spend
hours in the souqs and markets just drawing and moving with the people.
What topics did she usually write about?
Sketches, little romantic stories, love stories and despair.
Did Eberhardt’s writings have an impact on Western Civilization?
Yes, she certainly captured the imagination of western writers, and she was well published.
I
have found that much of what she wrote was, in fact, romanticized by
her publishers and the French public. But that was what they wanted at
the time: a vision of the exotic, a vision of a woman riding alone on
horseback through the desert.
Her diaries are certainly
interesting from an ethnographic point of view, as well. You get a
sense of the poverty of the villages in North Africa, of the mortality,
the daily diet. I am sure this was not fascinating to the people of
France at the time, who were only looking for the exotic.
What is your personal attraction to Isabelle Eberhardt?
First
of all, she was a woman, and there were not many women doing what she
was doing at the time. She kind of became a symbol of women’s rights
and women’s empowerment as well, for better or worse.
I was
doing economic anthropology in Algeria at the time (70's and early
80's) that I discovered records of Eberhardt in local governmental
archives. I found studying her life to be a refreshing escape from
going through all of the statistics that were representative of a man’s
world: Men writing about how many kettles of wheat, barely, and dates
they produced.
I found her personality very attractive. In a very sad way too.
Interview with Kathleen Modrowski on Isabelle Eberhardt
September 5, 2007
Brooklyn, New York
Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
Vila Nova de Milfontes, Portugal
November 19, 2007
Selected quotes from the interview not included in the original article:
"You
can go about looking at Islam in a couple of different ways. One is
from the standpoint of the scholar, who delves into the scriptures, and
Eberhardt could read and write Arabic, her [Eberhardt's] attraction to
Islam was more of a creative impulse."
"She even liked the desert on grey days, which is really depressing."
"She [Eberhardt] was torn because she wanted some kind of recognition, some kind of success."
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