by David Winner
“Forget skyscrapers, ice water, drinks, stockmakers, New York, half chewed cigars, and statues of liberty. Think of camel bells, cyclamen and the last lions,” wrote Bill Barker, the commander of the northern province of mandate Palestine to his lover, my great Aunt Dorle in 1934, trying to encourage her to move from New York to the Middle East. Dorle was entrenched in the New York music world by that point, working with the New York Philharmonic, but she had grown up a poor little rich girl from New York inspired by the tales of Scheherazade. The Middle East was an enchanted place and Islam its enchanted religion.
But when I think of her travels in the Arab world in the twenties and thirties, it is nineteenth century composer and part time Orientalist Gioachino Rossini who comes to mind: his operas about traveling from the east to the west and visa-versa: Un Italiano in Algeria, Un Turco in Italia. What would he have called Dorle, Una Fanciulla (young girl) Hebraica in Arabia?
Certainly, Dorle’s vision of The Orient had not progressed far beyond Rossini’s. Georges Asfar, another lover in her prolific thirties (a Syrian Christian) encouraged her to think of him as her Muslim master. Like Barker, he littered his letters with Arabic, the magical language of magical places.
I’ve carried something of that flame myself the few times I’ve traveled in the Arab world, but worse than my muted Orientalism, I’ve sometimes fallen prey to an even more dangerous trope, represented by Claire Danes as Carrie from Homeland, her blond hair disguised by a hijab, walking purposefully through devious Muslim spaces.
However sophisticated and well-traveled I see myself, I’ve fallen into sinkholes of fear and prejudice while traveling in what Dorle would have called the Orient. Read more »