Return to Inscriptions Volume 6 | Return to Inscriptions
Misadventures in the Desert: The Sheltering Sky as Colonialist Nightmare
Deborah Root
The people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture–nothing, nothing. Her husband reached over and patted her hand. “You’re right. You’re right,” he said smiling. “Everything’s getting gray, and it’ll be grayer. But some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think. You’ll see, in the Sahara here….”
Several times they came upon groups of dark men mounted on mehara. These held the reins proudly, their kohl-farded eyes were fierce above the draped indigo veils that hid their faces. For the first time she felt a faint thrill of excitement. “It is rather wonderful,” she thought, “to be riding past such people in the Atomic Age.”
–Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1949
Within the colonialist construct that has come to be called Orientalism, the Orient exists as the terrain where a particular kind of experience is available to the Western subject, an experience at once mysterious, dangerous and compelling. [1] In Paul Bowles’s 1949 colonial tale The Sheltering Sky [2] the Orientalist topos is refigured through the landscape of the Sahara desert, and through the experience of the post-war Western intellectual who seeks to escape Western culture yet is unable to survive the encounter with the alien landscape. The Sahara desert has long existed as a place of forgetting in Orientalist literature. The vastness of the landscape has exercised a pull on the sick at heart, and it appears as a site where no questions are asked, where time is in suspension, where it is possible to join the French foreign legion “to forget.” Here, the colonial adventure itself becomes the cure for heartbreak and loss, and the alien landscape the source of that cure. But what is at stake in the relation between the desire to experience difference and the possibilities for forgetting that the colonist believes can occur in the Sahara desert of French colonial Algeria?
The Sheltering Sky would seem to fit neatly into Deleuze and Guattari’s description of becoming invisible and the dangers involved in moving too quickly across space: the characters seek to become nomad, and embark on a line of flight that skitters across the expanse of the desert into the twin black holes of death and madness. The story articulates the familiar theme of post-World War II alienation. Kit and Port, a pair of wealthy aesthetes from New York, with their friend Tunner decide to visit the Sahara desert, setting out from Oran on the Algerian coast.
As the characters venture south into the desert, several things happen: Kit sleeps with Tunner and, sensing this, Port decides that the couple must abandon their friend and set out alone. This proves to be a bad move: Port quickly falls ill and dies, and Tunner’s arrival on the scene provokes Kit to run away and join a camel caravan traveling further south. Kit becomes the lover of the handsome Taureg Belqassim, who disguises her as a Taureg boy and takes her home to live in a room on his roof. Belqassim’s wives react antagonistically to their discovery of Kit’s gender (although the film audience never knows for sure, as Arabic speech is not translated), so Kit runs away, eventually to be brought back by colonial functionaries to Oran, where Tunner awaits. After these experiences Kit has become quite mad and silent.
For Kit and Port, the forgetting they seek is of World War II and the encroaching sameness and monotony of Western culture, which they envisage as a sickness. But they are the ones who become ill, and in the story their ailment appears to be caused by the disjunction between the way they imagine their adventure and the reality of the indifference of the external world. A closer reading of the story, however, suggests that the disaster of their journey is less a question of the way reality imposes itself on the characters’ imaginary adventure than it is the extent to which their imaginary is itself structured within a colonial exemplar. Kit and Port dream of being free of culture, floating signifiers “in charge” of their experience in the desert: this is where their desire locates itself. But this desire is impossible to realize because their detachment from their social and cultural matrix only reinforces the alienated, Cartesian subjectivity that is at the root of their malaise. It is the colonial situation that makes this fantasy appear possible to alienated colonials or post-colonials such as Kit and Port.
Travel and Delirium
Bowles clearly maintains a link between travel and madness, as (at some level) have other Western novelists who write of the unfortunate experiences Europeans encounter in non-European countries. Indeed, this has become a trope of Western literature and film: white people always seem to be dying undignified deaths or going crazy in hot countries. In a similar vein, it is not surprising that, for the white protagonists of The Sheltering Sky, the further into the desert they go, the worse things become for them (this, of course, reminds us of Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now: away from the town, from “civilization,” all order drops away, and there is death, violence and madness). Port is killed by an “alien” disease (typhoid, a disease associated with contamination), and Kit’s madness is closely linked to her sexual encounters with “native” males; as Kit’s personality unravels, her lovers become more black and, hence for Bowles, both more “alien” and more indicative of her disintegration.
This needs closer examination: why do things so often turn out badly for such people in novels and films? And why did things turn out so badly for Kit and Port? In The Sheltering Sky this would seem to have to do with the characters’ desire to seek a certain kind of movement across colonized space, a movement whereby they are able to operate as “free,” sovereign subjects and where it has been decided in advance that they will be able to achieve a certain kind of experience. The notion that it is possible to achieve a particular type of authentic, intense experience from contact with “different,” colonized people assumes a radical difference between the colonizers and the people they encounter, and it is precisely this presumed difference that provides the interest and stimulation for the characters.
Here we would want to distinguish between the view that cultural and linguistic differences exist and may be recognized and respected as such, and the colonial notion of the absolute incommensurability of the colonized or Orientalized “other” and the European. The intensity of experience sought by Kit and Port both assumes and is produced by this notion of radical difference, which itself must be produced and maintained through a range of colonialist constructs.[3] As the characters seek to escape the greyness and alienation of Western culture, they attempt to maintain the interest produced by the appearance of difference, of exotic peoples and landscapes. We recall Fanon’s discussion of the colony as a Manichean world, in which the colonist maintains a notion of absolute difference with respect to the “native.” But whereas in the colony proper the “native” is often despised and seen as a unit of labor or as an inconvenience, in The Sheltering Sky this Manicheanism is maintained but differentially valorized. The characters attempt to retain their authority with respect to the “native,” but here the appearance of difference excites them and reminds them that they are the masters. Rather than attempting to render difference “safe” and comprehensible, in this instance the Western intellectual affirms the ambivalence of cultural dislocation, and the belief that difference constitutes a dangerous edge that they are successfully able to negotiate.
In the beginning of the story Port walks the streets of Oran and thinks:
How friendly are they? Their faces are masks. They all look a thousand years old. What little energy they have is only the blind, mass desire to live, since no one of them eats enough to give him his own personal force…. They have no religion left. Are they Moslems or Christians? They don’t know. (14) [4]
The apparent opacity of the “native” is something that Port expects to encounter and indeed affirms; he has decided in advance that at some level the people and cultures he encounters will be incomprehensible, and indeed this is part of the experience he is looking for. This incomprehensibility both substitutes for and marks his escape from the grey sameness of Western culture. For Port, the people of Oran are barely animal, not even conscious of their own religious beliefs, and he is there, able to walk amongst them and consume the spectacle of difference and of the apparent repetition of the “alien” face. At this point in the story Port believes he can control the experience provoked by his inspection of the Arabs of Oran, as he feels himself to be standing above an undifferentiated mass that exists to stimulate his interest.[5]
The notion that cultural difference provides authentic experience functions again and again as a kind of pharmakon[6] for the Western colonialist subject, in that this experience is presented as something that can (appear to) cure the Western disease of alienation and ennui, but which can also kill and render insane. We recall here the double function of the pharmakon, the ambivalent nature of the medicine that cures and kills, and carries the disease outside the gates of the city. For the colonist the ambivalence seems to be produced in the way this experience generates extreme anxiety about authority, that is, about her ability to remain in control of the experience and her position relative to the “different” people she encounters. The notion of giving up authority voluntarily is both elided and rendered intolerable to the Western subject, and in colonial tales such as The Sheltering Sky, when the structure of colonial authority that sustains the characters is seriously shaken or disappears, they become disoriented and ill. Hence the equivalence of “going native” and madness; in such stories the encounter with difference produces a kind of poison, and in this sense it is possible to say that Kit and Port suffered from difference poisoning.
For Bowles, any crossing of boundaries (cultural, class, gender) necessarily results in disaster, not because of the way questions of power and authority overdetermine the nature of the encounters, but because he maintains a notion of radical difference, and this difference itself is dangerous. The reasons for this danger are never addressed explicitly in the story, but would seem to have to do with the way difference puts the (colonialist) identities of the characters into question and further marks their profound alienation from each other and from culture itself. This alienation is not situational for Bowles, but becomes an ontological state from which there is no escape. Although Kit and Port pursue and affirm difference as the antidote to the grey wasteland of post-war Europe, in the story any “outside” to Western culture becomes even more threatening and degraded.
Aristocratic Dreams
The characters articulate the modernist dream of authenticity through the experience of difference, and of difference as pure experience and as spectacle. Kit and Port, as do many in such stories, also seek to exceed the limits of bourgeois culture. In the earliest part of both the book and the film, Port carefully distinguishes between themselves and the bourgeois tourist:
… they had crossed the Atlantic for the first time since 1939, with a great deal of luggage and the intention of keeping as far as possible from the places which had been touched by the war. For, as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. (6)
Desire, then, is structured in the text as the ability to stand above culture and freely choose amongst “elements” (including the World War II), all of which appear available to them. We may ask precisely which elements of Western culture the characters are able or likely to reject, and which they will continue to affirm. Kit and Port certainly do not reject their money, luggage, privilege and authority; rather, they attempt to attain the experience they seek through manifesting more privilege and authority, that is, through attempting to live out their desires in an aristocratic manner. Why do Europeans so often affirm the notion of going to the desert (or another “exotic” locale) for an authentic experience? Part of the attraction lies in the way experience itself is commodified and made to seem available to the colonist. Within this construct, the notion of experience itself appears as an a priori, or perhaps more accurately as a kind of template within which various experiences will be made to adapt and to assimilate. The experiences sought by many hoping to escape Western culture are neatly wrapped up and presented as items to be consumed by properly sophisticated palates; the desire for the “exotic” remains superficial and dilettantish, with everything spelled out in advance, and no room for nuances, or rather blindness to nuances. Again this refers to an aristocratic moment, where experience is something to be sampled like fine wine.
The relation of exoticism to colonial authority is intricate and multi-layered, although it tends to rest on morphological signs, for instance, jewelry, tattoos, animals such as the dromedary or gazelle. The colonist’s relation to exoticism also refers to a European aristocratic ethos in so far as the bourgeois subject only seems able to conceive of her own “difference” as that which is not bourgeois, which is to say, any “outside” to Western culture tends to be thought of through, and limited by, a European aristocratic exemplar. The desire for escape from the constraints on personal freedom imposed by Western bourgeois culture is so frequently construed through a particularly colonial framework because “different” peoples and landscapes are able to function as a backdrop to a Western, aristocratic adventure story (and hence the gesture of escape remains totally inside Western culture, a variation or repetition of a Western model).
Certainly, part of becoming cosmopolitan for an American such as Bowles or the characters in the novel is learning to take on European sophistications and to appropriate European fantasies and obsessions. The desert nomad is an enduring feature of the Western canon of exotica, and a great deal of European literature exists on the romance of the camel nomad (most notably Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which articulates the trope of the corruption of town versus purity and nobility of the desert). The French presence in Algeria gave rise and referred to a long- standing Orientalist literature, which further refers to the aristocratic Crusader tradition of the chansons de geste and various other heroic tales of knights going off to fight the infidel.
Sexual Ambivalences
The exotic is often marked through sexuality, or rather is made to represent a certain kind of sexual encounter, to the extent that stories of Europeans going to foreign countries and having sex with attractive “natives” have become a constant and persistent clich* of film and literature.[7] Difference is immediately made to collapse into sexuality but to exceed it as well, in so far as such encounters become a convenient signpost that one has indeed experienced “difference” (and lived to tell the tale). Colonial stories generally trace the (supposed) ability of the colonized woman to provide a properly “exotic” experience for the European man, yet become somewhat more ambivalent and complicated when it is a white woman who experiences sexual adventure in the colony. While the “native” woman tends to be presented as unthreatening (although treacherous), the “native” man is characterized as extremely dangerous to white women, and in The Sheltering Sky Kit’s sexual encounters are explicitly linked to rape, death and madness.
Port’s encounter with the Saharan woman Marhnia in the early part of the story quickly reproduces the figure of the Ouled Nail dancer/prostitute in French literature and pornography, the Moorish woman unveiled and available to the colonist in Algerie Francaise.[8] This first engagement with a Saharan nomad is sexual, made available to Port through a relatively uncomplicated cash transaction. Betrayal is nevertheless built into the encounter; with Marhnia, he pays, she submits, but in this apparent submission lurks dissimulation: she attempts to steal his wallet. Port’s ambivalence about Marhnia is manifested in his suspicion and his desire, and the question of trust is raised during an intimate moment of the encounter:
They lay on the couch together. She was very beautiful, very docile, very understanding, and still he did not trust her. (33)
Marhnia’s “treachery” is ineffectual, and Port remains in control of the situation, easily foiling her attempt to steal his wallet and leaving the scene of the encounter unscathed. The liaison between Kit and Belqassim is much more violent and ambivalent, and Kit loses all control over the events taking place, literally held down by Belqassim. Her experience of their first sexual contact:
There was an animal-like quality in the firmness with which he held her, affectionate, sensual, wholly irrational–gentle but of a determination that only death could gainsay. (285)
Describing colonized people as animals who lack the ability to reason is a long-standing tradition in colonial texts, but the ambivalence of this characterization is evoked in the passage above: Kit immediately falls in love with Belqassim. The association between sex with Belqassim and death comes up again, after he has taken her to his house in the Sahara and confined her, first on the roof, then in his bedroom:
Now that he owned her completely, there was a new savageness, a kind of angry abandon in his manner. The bed was a wild sea, she lay at the mercy of its violence and chaos as the heavy waves toppled upon her from above. Why, at the height of the storm, did two drowning hands press themselves tighter and tighter about her throat? Tighter, until even the huge grey music of the sea was covered by a greater, darker noise–the roar of nothingness the spirit hears as it approaches the abyss and leans over. (304)
Irrationality, savagery, violence, chaos and death: the “native” man brings these to the white woman, yet for Bowles it is also Kit’s sexuality that is her enemy, something that is at some level as “alien” and destructive to her as the “native,” that makes it possible for her to seek oblivion in deathlike experiences with deadly, “alien” men. The colonized male, then, is presented as doubly treacherous: he demands submission from the white woman and at the same time calls forth the madness and savagery that exist within her.
Bertolucci’s film differs from the book precisely around the issue of sexual contact between colonists and “natives,” and this shift is symptomatic of a certain ambivalence and unease with such encounters in colonial tales. In the book, Marhnia’s passivity with respect to Port is emphasized; after the wallet incident, he shoves her, and she cries out, alerting the men in nearby tents. In Bertolucci’s film, Marhnia’s gesture is deliberate, and she follows Port to the door of the tent and ululates loudly to call the men to assist her. (Bertolucci obviously finds the Arab ululation threatening, as he uses this woman’s cry throughout the film to mark moments of danger for the protagonists.)[9] Regarding Kit and Belqassim, in Bowles’s version of the story he focuses on, and reiterates, the extremely equivocal nature of the contact between the white woman and the man of color in colonial situations. Belqassim and his friend in effect rape Kit soon after she joins the caravan; despite the violence of the encounter, Belqassim is tender and amorous, but always dangerous. Bertolucci emphasizes the affectionate, seductive qualities of Belqassim, and it is not clear if he and Kit have sex during the journey in the desert. Bertolucci’s Belqassim treats Kit as a lady, ordering a palanquin to be constructed to protect her from the sun. Thus, in Bertolucci’s film, the “native” woman becomes more dangerous and threatening and the “native” man less so, and more an object of pleasure for the female colonist. Ambivalence about such encounters in colonial texts remains forty years after the novel was written, but the anxiety seems to have shifted to the woman of color (here we recall films like Full Metal Jacket, where it is the “native” woman who is the enemy).
Escape and Authority
The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement…. The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit those places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them grow … nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. (Deleuze and Guattari 318-382)
Nomadic peoples occupy a particular place in Western colonial fantasies of exoticism and cultural difference. The nomad has come to function as a metaphor for radical exteriority, for the possibility of pure flows of movement and escape. In a certain type of colonial literature, this is linked to the Westerner’s desire to become nomad, to wander across the desert and somehow locate authentic experience in precisely that movement, and in the encounter with “different” peoples and cultures. But if Deleuze and Guattari are right in saying that nomads inhabit space rather than move through it, then the colonialist dream of escaping Western culture through nomadic wanderings and incursions into nomadic territory raises questions about the relation between movement, appropriation and colonial authority.
The desire to escape the repressiveness and negative intensity of Western culture is not, if we are to be honest, wholly unreasonable or unattractive. But this desire for escape so often is consistent with a colonialist ethos, and consequently so often returns as a reiteration of Western authority. [10] The problem lies in how lines of escape, or a notion of an “outside,” come to be constructed so conventionally, and why the sense of an “outside” to Western culture is so often articulated within an aristocratic, colonialist ethos (i.e., travel at will with many changes of clothing, which implies money, leisure and porters). In one sense the characters in The Sheltering Sky are successful in their quest for nomadic adventure in that they do manage to travel great distances and, in Kit’s case, literally migrate across the Sahara with nomadic people. But the real question becomes one of where the space of resistance to the effects of Western culture will occur, and the way in which a colonized “outside” is constructed as the place where one may find difference and intense experience.
A key task in a critique of colonial tales such as The Sheltering Sky would be to interrogate how the characters come to (or always/already) think of escape or an “outside” in the most literal way, which means that their escape or their sense of what escape could mean will always remain within a gesture of appropriation, in so far as they locate their own difference or refusal of bourgeois culture in both the ancién regime and in the (apparent) absolute difference of Arab and Tuareg people. The conventionality of the gesture means that the colonist will “escape” by physically going someplace else, outside of European or American cities, and by utilizing the trappings of difference as an intriguing backdrop to her concerns. The ability to experience different customs (and especially different bodies) means that the colonist is able to select the traits of difference that interest her, decide what difference is, and to capture and accumulate some of that difference as a way of breaking through the alienation she feels in Paris or New York. The colonist remains in control. In The Sheltering Sky, we see that even as her personality disintegrates, Kit is able to exercise direct, assertive authority with respect to the “Native.” As she flees the small Saharan town where Port died, she comes across a caravan heading into the desert and begins to issue orders:
Even as she saw these two men, she knew that she would accompany them, and the certainty gave her an unexpected sense of power…. Because each of her gestures was authoritative, an outward expression of utter conviction, betraying no slightest sign of hesitation, it did not occur to the masters of the caravan to interfere as she passed the valise to one of the men on foot and motioned him to tie it atop the sacks on the nearest pack animal. (281)
There need be no actual engagement with “difference” or with “different” people save in their capacity as servants, prostitutes, or as opaque backdrop to this experience. It is possible to say that, although in The Sheltering Sky difference and authenticity is represented by North African Arabs and by Saharan nomadic peoples, it could just as easily be represented by something else for all it matters to the story, which seems so much not to engage with Arab and Saharan people at all. For Europeans such as the characters in the story, all “cultural difference” becomes the same kind of thing, and is able to provide the same order of “experience”: there are Western subjects, and there are all “those others” who provide color and intensity for the amusement of the former (we note that, by the end of the story, Kit discovers that all men are able to please her).
Bowles spoke of The Sheltering Sky in a recent interview:
The book is about the desert, not about people. The desert does away with people. It swats them like we swat flies. It’s hard to get through the desert and come out on the other side alive.[11]
This remark seems somewhat disingenuous, given the fact that “people” have been living in the desert for a long time, and have been able to coexist in a variety of ways with the terrain. It seems clear that for Bowles, “people” here mean Europeans. The story traces the personal disintegration of Port and Kit, and the disastrous consequences of their encounters with North African peoples and, although the vastness and (presumed) indifference of the Sahara desert comes up again and again in the text, the story functions such a way that the “native” is made to represent or collapse into the desert landscape, and to stand for an indifferent and treacherous natural world. Bowles’s view of the Sahara landscape as hostile and destructive to human life is indicative of a peculiarly Western notion of land and space as an abstract category.
The Sheltering Sky would seem to have a didactic function whether Bowles intends it or not: certainly it presents the view that the land is somehow alienated from the people who live on it. Because the relations of the protagonists with “natives” are structured around incidents of betrayal and suspicion, the story suggests that it is impossible and indeed undesirable to relinquish colonial authority, and further that is impossible for the Westerner to respect or comprehend cultural differences. Indeed, Bowles links contact with “natives” to insanity; of course Kit is going to go crazy, the result of an “alien” landscape, masquerading as a boy and sleeping with “different” men, or perhaps it was her madness that impelled her to do these things in the first place.
Authority and Madness
In colonial tales such as The Sheltering Sky, the authors seem to recognize at some level that power makes us weak and stupid, precisely because the colonist has learned to rely on the external structures of colonial authority, and on the benefits the colonial system provides to the colonizers. The colonist has limited experience in dealing with difference and ambivalence in a way that challenges her privilege,[12] and hence finds it extremely difficult to survive without the colonial authority that defines and orders her relations with colonized peoples. The colonist becomes severely disoriented without that structure (unless she is able to recognize her own relation to colonialism and can begin to relinquish her authority and privilege), because she is taught to think if she gives up authority she will and must be subject to someone else’s power. This is, as we know, a central feature of Western, hierarchical culture: we learn that somebody has to be in charge, while at the same time we learn to elide the ways in which actual, political power (such as colonialism) structures relations among people. It is authority or rather the attempt to hang on to it that makes the colonist sick, but in books such as The Sheltering Sky any attempt to confront or relinquish this authority either never comes up, is doomed, or results in disaster.
Near the end of the story, after Kit runs away from Belqassim, she meets Amar, a black man who attempts to help her when she is confronted by an angry crowd. At this stage of the adventure, the repetition of the “alien” face produces only exhaustion. As they walk through the streets of the African town:
Outside the sun seemed more dazzling than before. The mud walls and the shining black faces went past. There was no end to the world’s intense monotony. (318)
This exhaustion indicates a shift in Kit’s experience of difference: she is no longer quite standing above the people she encounters and enjoying the spectacle of difference, as Port sought to do when he walked the streets of Oran. Yet Kit is still alienated from the people she walks amongst, and difference still remains a kind of repetition, marked through the morphological quality of skin color. Difference has become a kind of sameness, akin to the grey monotony of Western culture that initially provoked her visit to the Algerian desert. Kit remains a colonist, but one who through her actions has lost status. The narrative reveals an important point here: the colonist must affirm and maintain her position and privilege, or lose status and be subject to colonial authority as a “native” or worse, a traitor. Because Kit is dressed as an Arab woman, she is initially treated as such and barred from entering a cafe that does not allow “native women” inside; she is called a “saloperie” (filth). When the cafe owner discovers she is European, confusion ensues for a moment, but Kit is quickly referred to as a “sale putain” (dirty whore) and a “creature.” And, of course, despite Kit’s ambivalent position, the “native” remains treacherous in the story: after making love to her and promising to “save” her, Amar steals her money and traveling case.
Bowles is right in underlining the risks of sexual tourism in the colony, but for the wrong reasons. If the quest for difference as articulated by Kit and Port necessarily results in betrayal, it is not because this is the nature of the “native” or of the landscape: betrayal is built into the quest itself, and is in fact an auto-betrayal that has to do with the way desire is dreamed by the colonialist subject. This is what creates the catastrophe of the black holes in the desert, and because the characters can only conceive of movement as something that occurs “outside,” as speed. One could say that Kit gave up authority (or it was taken from her by circumstances), in a manner of speaking, but in such a way that is identical to madness. Is this the only way relinquishing colonial authority can be thought in a colonial tale? All we learn from the story is that women of color are treacherous but ultimately harmless while men of color are extremely destructive and to be avoided.
Part of the problem lies in thinking of “our” culture and “their” culture, and of each as cohesive, discrete entities. I am unwilling to attempt to speak of “their” culture, but I can say that to think of ourselves as escaping or rejecting Western culture is to, at some level, affirm “our” culture’s view of itself as monolithic and universal and to risk reproducing the rhetoric of mastery that characterizes colonial discourse. There are many margins and roads inside, margins at the heart of this culture, in capital cities and in the wild places, many ways of escaping its purview without slipping into what we like to think of as absolute difference. And to escape from the inside can be much more subversive than riding a camel across the desert.
At the basis of the problem is the notion of radical difference, a colonial notion which remains pervasive, and an alienated relation to the land. I would question the extent to which abstract difference exists at all, as opposed to the many local differences of culture, territory and tradition.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Lang Baker for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Back to main text
2. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1989 film version of the story reflects a revival of interest in Bowles’ work. The film was not a commercial success. It was miscast, and one quickly tired of John Malkovich’s studied ennui and Debra Winger’s vapidity; the characters appear merely petulant rather than riddled with Western angst (although perhaps the two come to the same thing in the end). Also, at some level we cannot help but read this film through Lawrence of Arabia and similar movies, so that for all its ponderousness Bertolucci’s version seems almost a parody of the desert adventure story. Back to main text
3. For an historical discussion of this issue, see Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). Daniel comments on the European view of the Orient in the colonial period: This imperial attitude meant thinking of a people as different and inferior: agreeable or disagreeable, but always different (154). Back to main text
4. See also Meyda Yegenoglu’s “Veiled Fantasies,” which addresses the representation of the veil in Orientalist writings.Back to main text
5. We are reminded of Edward Said’s discussion of Gustave Flaubert’s trip to Egypt. See Said, Orientalism 184-190.Back to main text
6. For a discussion of the notion of the pharmakon, see Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy.”Back to main text
7. We can see the way this type of exoticism continues to function in capitalism, for instance, in airline and other tourist advertisements.Back to main text
8. We note that, for the film version of the story, Bertolucci selected an actress with enormous breasts to play Marhnia. We are reminded of Malek Alloula’s analysis of the European’s obsession with the “Moorish bosom” in French colonial postcards from Algeria. See Alloula.Back to main text
9. This use of ululation may be a filmmaker’s quotation of Women of Algiers. Back to main text
10. A current example of this is the appropriation of Native spirituality by non-Natives; the latter seek to escape the limitations of Western thinking, but do so in such a way that reproduces colonialism. Back to main text
11. Quoted in an article about Bertolucci’s film in the fashion magazine Mirabella (October 1989).Back to main text
12. We are reminded here of bell hooks’ discussion of marginality and resistance, and her observation that in white supremist societies black people must comprehend both margin and center, whereas whites often comprehend only the center. See hooks.Back to main text
Works Cited
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York: New Directions Books, 1949.
Daniel, Norman. Islam, Europe, and Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1990.
Name and author of article? Quoted in an article about Bertolucci’s film in the fashion magazine Mirabella (October 1989).
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978.