Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Monthly supplement Light on the underground A quoi rêvent les loups (What Wolves Dream Of), Yasmina Khadra, Paris: Julliard 1999. pp274 Into the abyss Yasmina Khadra All in the detail Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, Pascale Ghazaleh,1750-1850, Cairo Papers in Social Science Volume 22, Number 3, Fall 1999. pp157 A serious spinster Passionate Nomad, Jane Fletcher Geneisse, London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. pp402 Written by camera Ayam Al-Dimoqratiya: Al-Nisa' Al-Misriyat wa Homoum Al-Watan (Days of Democracy: Egyptian Women and National Elections), Ateyyat El-Abnoudy, Cairo: Kassem Press, 1999. pp197 Bizarre, perhaps The Bazaar, Markets and Merchants of the Islamic World, Text by Walter M. Weiss and photographs by Kurt-Michael Westermann, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. pp256 All about Egypt Egypt: Nile, Desert, and People, Wolfgang and Rosel Jahn, Trans. by Manuela Kunkel and Ian Portman. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press 1999. pp191 + 300 colour illustrations Through the mask of Yasmine Layali Okhra (Other Nights), Mohamed El-Bisatie, Beirut: Al-Aadab Publishing House, 2000. pp180 Photohgraphs of Egypt and the Holy land, Francis Frith, Zeitouna Publishing, 1999 --see caption-- To the editor At a glance A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani * Hikmet Al-Missriyeen (The Wisdom of Egyptians), introduced and edited by Mohamed El-Sayed Said, Cairo: The Cairo Centre for Human Rights, 1999. pp273 * Ashr Sanawat maa Farouq (Ten Years with Farouq), Karim Thabit, Cairo: Al-Shorouq, 2000. pp472 (Adel Hammouda and Me), Ahmed Fouad Negm, Cairo: Zeinab Publishing House, 2000. pp108 * Mirayat Al-Dhat Al-Okhra (Mirror of the Other Self), Sabri Hafiz, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, Aswat Adabiya Series, 1999. pp365 * Moqarabat Al-Abad (Nearing Eternity), Gamal El-Ghitani, Cairo: Nahdit Misr Publications, 2000. pp96 * Al-Kotob: Wighat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), monthly magazine, issue no. 13, February 2000 Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publication * Al-Fonoun Al-Sha'biya (The Folk Arts), a specialised periodical, issue no.58-9, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation * Al-Osour Al-Jadida (New Eras), monthly magazine, issue no. 5, February 2000, Cairo: Sinai Publishing House * Nizwa, quarterly magazine, issue no.11, Oman: The Oman Institution for Journalism, Publication and Mass Communication * Al-Hilal, monthly magazine, issue no. 2, February 2000, Cairo: Al-Hilal Publishing House Books is a monthly supplement of Al-Ahram Weekly appearing every second Thursday of the month. We welcome contributions and letters on subjects raised in this supplement. Material may be edited for length and clarity; and should be addressed to Mona Anis, Books Editor, Al-Ahram Weekly, Galaa St., Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt; Faz: +202 578 6089; E-mail: m.anis@ahram.org.eg For advertising call +202-5780233; Fax +202 394 1866 To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.    Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross "Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996

Passionate Nomad, Jane Fletcher Geneisse, London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. pp402

A serious spinster

Reviewed by Azadeh Moaveni

A plain, energetic and lofty woman, Freya Stark could not be more suited to her cozy place in the annals of the British empire. Trekking about the Middle East in floppy, outlandish hats first as a freelance anthropologist and later as a colonial servant, Stark cultivated an image that would later prove irresistible to the hungry memory of a declining world power. Besides being colourfully eccentric and impressively self-educated, Stark was a prolific commentator who personified the civilizing zeal of colonial Britain with a subtle dexterity. This spinster's travels were marked by a seriousness of style, if not of purpose, and though she has become best known as a lively character in the last act of Britain's colonial tragedy, this reduces her simply to the peculiar and the admirable -- the Emily Dickinson of female travelers -- and therefore misses the significance of her unorthodox career.

While Stark would have preferred to put her knowledge of the Middle East to more conventional use, as her contemporary Gertrude Bell did as Oriental Secretary, the upper echelons of colonial administration remained closed to her. Ever resourceful and yearning to put her experience at the service of something larger than her readership, Stark eventually fashioned herself into an informal emissary of empire. Her familiar wit and way with people lent themselves to advocating British policies through persuasion rather than through formal diplomacy, and her travels in the region supplied the requisite expertise. Acting alternately as author and colonial public-relations manager, both within the boundaries of empire and across the Atlantic, Stark's semi-official brand of specialisation was nothing if not the predecessor of the modern regional expert. While biographers have preferred to characterize Stark as a boundary-pushing woman traveler, her relentless transformation into an 'expert' and the later public and official privileging of her insights suggest much about how the ambitions of amateur historians and the ideological self-promotion of a world power can so productively coincide.

Jane Fletcher Geneisse does not probe too deeply into the political dimensions of Stark's career, nor for that matter its inevitable politicisation, through the lens of post-colonialism, but she nevertheless traces its evolution in great detail. In fact it is the details that contribute most to her portrait of a woman, who, despite having achieved little in the way of greatness, nevertheless deserves to be remembered. Stark's well-documented peregrinations coincided with a fascinating moment in modern history, and she counted many among the great and the good as her closest friends.

Freya Stark was born British but spent much of her early life, which was marked by the inattention of her distracted mother, in Italy. The Starks were neither an aristocratic nor a stable family, something which informed both Freya's wanderlust and her lifelong attraction to the powerful. In her letters she describes her impulse to travel more elegantly than does Geneisse: "there was a creative impulse, which is as strong as love and as deep as life, and if it finds no road available in art it will turn to life for its shaping". She wrote this in hindsight, though at other times her honesty about her intentions also highlighted her recklessness: "And as to what I was doing -- I saw no cause to trouble about a thing so nebulous beforehand...some more 'ascetic' reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace...start out ready-labeled as an entomologist...or whatever ology ... [is] suitable and propitious."

With a smattering of Arabic picked up in Britain, Stark landed in Damascus in 1928, and the Middle East, for better or for worse, would not see the last of her for decades. At first she was exclusively interested in travelling as far as possible into exotic areas that few westerners had visited, though before long she devised cartographical and archeological aspirations around her plans. In Iraq Stark developed two of her interests, namely, amateur historical scholarship and the sound of her own voice. The former was to be a lifelong source of income and a social credential; for as much as she would have resented the insinuation, Stark was most successful when channeling her curiosity into "travel philosophy" for her British readership.

Stark's politics were unpredictable, at times balanced by her personal experience in societies that most in her milieu had summed up either from up close or at a distance, but in neither case with much thought or attention. Her liberal background and critical eye sometimes won her loud detractors, in particular for her stand against Zionist plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At other times, she fell decidedly into line with the dominant ideologies of her time. "I hope," she wrote, "that the British idea of civilization will win through in the end; the more I see of other nations the more I feel we are the only ones actuated by any remotely decent motive."

Geneisse, unfortunately, is much less adept when handling Stark's politics than she is when discussing her personal life. Her treatment of post-colonialism is decidedly unnuanced: "[Freya protested] that she was 'as much an imperialist as anybody' -- in those days it not being politically incorrect to do so." Writing, as she seems to be, for a popular audience, Geneisse has the same relationship to the contemporary reader as Stark had to hers in the early part of the century; both expect the reader, who is assumed to be uncritical and interested more in entertainment than in the accurate portrayal of the facts, to accept their broad generalizations about Middle Eastern cultures and societies. For Stark at least the intellectual climate of her time and of the century before it can be credited for this tendency.

But Stark's political aspirations must be treated with at least a measure of the attention she paid to them herself; she continually and deliberately sought to play a role in history, and her imperialist sentiments were interwoven with her more progressive ones. If Stark found Yemen to be "grim, fanatical, and backward", Geneisse fails to historicise her reaction with a description of the tribal politics of the Gulf. Stark essentialised wantonly, and in some instances it seems Geneisse has sanitized her for marginally more critical modern sensibilities, choosing to quote Stark writing "Persia is no good for one's morals", instead of the absurd comments to be found in other places, such as "the Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective".

Conventional Orientalist tropes feature prominently in Geneisse's own writing as well, and rarely does one notice that the biography was written some sixty years after the period it describes. In instances Geneisse simply selects anecdotes, using them without adulteration to enliven her narrative, for instance where she recounts with pleasure a colonial official putting an Iraqi delegate in his place -- in perfect Arabic, of course -- with his commanding and superior knowledge of Iraqi history. At other times, she merely indulges in lazy generalization -- Islam is a belief system where "there is no separation between religion and politics and no concept of a secular state".

Stark's views became more sophisticated with time, though her writing could never be described as a model of balance. By 1953 the ravages of war and nationalist movements in Egypt, Iraq, and Iran had made an unquestioning allegiance to colonialism difficult, and in the third volume of her autobiography, The Coast of Incense, Stark wrote that it was a "fallacy that civilized nations should rule, [as their] methods of power are barbaric, and civilization becomes corrupted as it seeks for power..."

Stark, however, reproduced elements of colonial discourse and also internalized much of the patriarchy inherent in the gendered relationship between sovereign and colony. For an ultimately garrulous and warm character, Stark's dislike of women is intriguing, and pages could have been devoted to it. Despite her eccentricity, it suggests a more fundamental conservatism in line with her deeply imperialist sensibilities. Her treks and unconventional appearance suggest a women who had internalized the values and behaviour of her male counterparts, such as TE Lawrence, hardly making her the emancipated flouter of convention she was known for and that Geneisse paints her as. Her unseemly rivalry with her predecessor Gertrude Bell supports this. Stark was "not very fascinated" by Bell's life, and followed the older woman's adventures apparently for the sole purpose of comparing who had traveled more lightly and who could stomach the worst water.

Towards the end of her career, Stark traveled to the United States to advocate Britain's policies in Palestine in the face of the growing Zionist movement. Though no modern equivalent exists of such an informal ancillary to government, there is now instead an extensive network of people, who, like Stark, put their regional knowledge and expertise at the service of power. Publishing books, giving lectures, and appearing on television, there is much in them of the self-styled "regional specialist" as originally conceived by Freya Stark. Denied by gender and circumstance any real potential for power, she nevertheless shaped her life with its securing as an ultimate goal, scarcely aware that she was the original member of a far less distinguished trend, which she would likely have wanted little to do with.

 

 

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