I first discovered Isabelle Eberhardt when I bought a book of hers, The Oblivion Seekers, published by City Lights and translated by Paul Bowles. I bought the book because of the quote on the back cover "One of the strangest documents that a woman has given to the world." (Cecily Mackworth)
Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877. She was an explorer and writer who lived and travelled in Northern Africa. She was well educated despite being registered as illegitimate (her father was the family tutor Alexandre Trophimowsky) and spoke Arabic and several languages fluently. Her illegitimacy later kept her from being able to make claims on her inheritance after her mother took ill and died in Algeria where mother and daughter had travelled so that they both might convert to Islam. Shortly afterward Isabelle's father would die of cancer in Geneva and his greedy wife in Odessa was all but too eager to contest the will. Isabelle simply left for Tunis where she outraged the French pied noir living there by smoking kif (tobacco mixed with marijuana) on the cafe floors and taking home any man she pleased.
Isabelle eventually left Tunis to wander in the desert, but when her financial circumstances got worse, she crossed the sea to Marseille. There she found her brother who was legitimate but still living in a state of poverty that rivalled her own. Unable to arrange anything in Geneva, Isabelle travelled to Paris where she hoped to be a journalist. She was determined to be a writer.
Though she did not consider it a stroke of luck in her desperate times to encounter the rich widow, the Marquise de Morés paid for Isabelle's return to North Africa to investigate the mysterious murder of her husband four years before. Though later in life Isabelle would acknowledge the part luck had played in her life. "No one ever lived more from day to day than I, or was more dependent on chance..."
When the Marquise found out that Isabelle had little interest in actually investigating her husband's murder, she cut off all funds. Isabelle was unphased by her sudden and instantaneous catapult back into poverty. Instead she took a lover, an Algerian soldier named Sliman, who would be the great love of her life, and set out to join the secret religious cult of the Qadriya, one of the most powerful of all the tribes.
Disguised as man she took the name Si Mahmoud Essadi, but the Sufi brotherhood knew she was a woman underneath her men's clothes and decided that if she wanted to dress and act like a man it was her own business. From then on every member of the cult was sworn to feed her, shelter her, and give their life to protect her as they would any other member of the Qadriya.
But not everyone shared the Qadriya's views. The French thought Isabelle was a clever spy and rival cults did not approve of the Qadriya accepting a man they knew to be really a woman. One day as Isabelle sat in a courtyard an unknown man drew a sword intending to slice Isabelle in two. Luck again intervened in Isabelle's favour as the tip of the sword got caught on a wire clothesline first and instead of hitting her head, the blade hit her in the shoulder, nearly severing her left arm entirely.
After six weeks in the hospital she travelled to meet Sliman who tried to apply to propose to her. Their application was rejected. After she was banned by the French from entering North Africa entirely, Isabelle rejoined her brother in Marseille and again lived in extreme poverty as her injuries kept her from being able to work for long hours of lift anything heavy. She started work on a novel based on her experiences in Marseille working as a stevedor amongst the Muslims and numerous letters to Sliman urging him to transfer to Marseille. One day he arrived and they married both at the Marseille city hall and then again at a mosque.
But there would be no happy ending for Isabelle as scandal and ill health would follow her for the rest of her life. The mayor of Tenes was forced to resign for befriending her; Sliman would be transferred to a remote village, and eventually Isabelle would die in a flash flood surrounded by muddy pages of the manuscript she had been preparing after Sliman demanded the authorities continue looking for her.
In her book The Oblivion Seeks is a chapter entitled "Pencilled Notes". These are the first words of Isabelle's I read and they are thoughts that stay with me.
"A subject to which few intellectuals ever give thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander...To be alone, to be poor in needs, to be ignored, to be an outsider who is at home everywhere, and to walk, great and by oneself, toward the conquest of the world. The healthy wayfarer sitting beside the road scanning the horizon open before him, is he not the absolute master of the earth, the waters, and even the sky? What housedweller can vie with him in power and wealth? His estate has no limits, his empire no law. No work bends him toward the ground, for the bounty and beauty of the earth are already his."
For myself, who grew up a nomad living everywhere but nowhere, those words resonate for me. Once I was jealous of people who knew the same places most or all of their lives and never felt the same hunger to wander that consumed me, especially when I was a teenager. I followed The Grateful Dead, drove from one side of the US to the other, and even when I was at university I kept a car so when the pressure building up inside of me needed release I could throw a box of CDs on the passenger seat and drive as far as a tank of gas would take me in any direction as long as it took me away.
My last great wandering took me to Brazil. In Brazil I found my darling doggie, five weeks old and malnourished, but even that didn't stop me from taking her first in a jeep through the rainforest as far as I could go. Then by boat up the Amazon into Venezuela. Eventually me and La Chienne would cross Venezuela, Colombia, and through the cloud forests of Ecuador before flying back to my then home, Boston.
Even still my wanderlust has not diminished. It is love that pulls my feet towards home and keeps me there. Love for my darling doggie who is not the pup she used to be and so I cannot bear the thought of not being with her. Telling people that I rented a little place in the forest to have quiet in order to write sounds a lot less crazy than explaining that when my dog was ill and I was made to believe she had cancer that I took the place so that my dog could retire to the country on the weekends.
When I get the urge to wander I take the metro around Paris and look upon it as an unfamiliar country or I go further beyond Paris, beyond London. I am not unhappy either because whether I am gone an hour or a week I am greeted by the same happy dog and the slap of her strong tail against my legs and if my journey did not sate me entirely there is now a forest to explore and her to sniff out the best paths for us to take together.
Isabelle spent most of her wandering time on the back of her horse, traipsing around the Sahara and while I think she had a truly fascinating life, albeit a sad one in many aspects, I think she would approve that I spend some of my time wandering the forest looking at the backside of a dog.
The works of Isabelle Eberhardt:
In French:
Dans l'Ombre Chaude de l'Islam (In the Hot Shade of Islam)
Nouvelles Algériennes (Algerian Short Stories)
Les journaliers (The Day-Labourers)
Available in English:
Vagabond
Departures
The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
The Oblivion Seekers
In the Hot Shade of Islam
Prison of Dunes
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