Submitted by kin in Anarchism

Isabelle Eberhardt, disguised as a young Arab man, advances across the southern Algerian desert toward Touggourt, with an entourage of hundreds of men and women dressed in full, elaborate desert costumes. The smell of gunpowder in the air and the raucous noise of pipes and drums accompanies them as they slowly travel on horse back and camel to meet El Hachemi, the Sheikh of a nomadic Sufi sect that Isabelle had secretly joined, and his entourage. As they approach the Sheikh, they find him wearing, in contrast to the colorful crowd, the austere, undecorated green silk robes, green turban and white veil appropriate to a descendent of the prophet El Djilani. The crowd hails him with cries of “Ya O Djilani!” as he attempts to control his white steed. The surrounding sterile dunes seem to come alive with people. Several entourages of horses, aloof camels, and regal desert nomads meet up in a haze of smoke as colorful banners are unfurled with shouts and horses stamps with impatience. Once everyone is assembled they all move to a vast plain covered with tombs, where the riders and horses (Isabelle among them full of fearlessness and anticipation), quickening to the sense of opening space ahead, finally let rip in a headlong gallop, racing, Isabelle wrote later, “as if to the ends of the Earth.”

The fantasia lasted two days and Isabelle remains the only European woman To have ever have experienced such an event. She was 23 years old.

Isabelle was born to an exiled Russian aristocrat mother and an Armenian anarchist-disguised-as-priest father in Switzerland in 1877. Her father raised her as an anarchist in a villa compound outside of Geneva; by the time she was sixteen he had taught her to speak Russian, French, German, and Italian, and to read the Koran in Arabic. At nineteen years old she moved to Geneva where she worked as a secretary for an exiled group of Russian terrorists. At night she began disguising herself as a young sailor boy and was free to explore the darkest corners of Victorian Geneva, crawling from one seedy tavern to the next.

At twenty years old, longing to escape suffocating Europe and to seek the mythical African landscapes she had always dreamed of, she traveled in disguise to northern Algeria, posed as a young male Arab scholar. There, feeling the freedom of her first true independence, Isabelle took lovers of all sorts, in blatant defiance of the stifling European mores of the time. After a brief period of pleasure and perfecting the local Arabic dialect, she joined her fellow students in a brief uprising against the French colonial police in the Mediterranean city of Bône. Armed with a dagger and a pistol she wounded and killed at least one officer in the street battles that consumed the city. To escape possible arrest, Isabelle went into hiding, eventually surfacing in Paris months later as a journalist of “Turkish” descent. Longing for the desert, which she hadn’t reached on her first trip, she soon returned in secret, again disguised as an Arab male. Journeying south to the open plains, she joined a nomadic desert tribe, became a mystic, and got married (to a young Arab warrior). She managed to survive an assassination attempted with a holy sword wielded by an enemy of her Sufi sect—a rival group reportedly funded by the French government in Algeria. Her hired killer was put on trial and Isabelle became well known throughout Algeria. She used her new fame to get another journalism assignment, this time for a French-Algerian newspaper. Her fame also brought her greater danger, seeing as she was under investigation by the governments of France, Switzerland, and Russia for various nefarious activities. Therefore, she decided to follow the French army invading the remote frontier of Morocco. But Isabelle soon began neglecting her assignment when she came into contact with a Sufi mystic in a hidden mountain fortress near the border. She disappeared for several months—lost in which worlds, we cannot say. She surfaced in an oasis town, sick and exhausted: Isabelle’s body had been ravaged by her intense life. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 27, Isabelle died in a flash flood.

Isabelle’s participation in the desert fantasia and her life story as a whole remind us all that escaping our colonialist (and now tourist) mindsets whilst wandering our Earth is absolutely possible, and can lead us into worlds we had only hoped to imagine. If we were to even dare a fraction of the passionate and relentless seekings of Isabelle we would find our little worlds exploding outward before us. Her “drift” (which led her to the desert) also evokes the adage that, indeed, once you leave the safety of your air conditioned tour bus (or your Let’s Go! Travel Guide for that matter!) there is no going home again . . . as you may have already guessed.

“Life is here.”

– Isabelle in her diaries one month before her sudden death.

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Wrife1998 wrote

Desert costume is a type of clothing worn by people who live in deserts. Desert clothes are designed to protect the wearer from the harsh environment of the desert. Desert clothes are often made out of leather and wool. These clothes are generally loose fitting and cover the entire body. Desert costume is not just for men, women can wear them too.

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custody_showdown wrote

Sounds similar to the story about Lawrence of Arabia. Instead of a dude its a chick this time.

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