in his travel accounts from Algeria.
Yes: the reality of the colonies functioned like a dream.
No one had asked the French officers to conquer Laghouat or Zaatcha. Far less had anyone asked the soldiers to massacre the population. No one forced them to do it. It was enough that no one stopped them. They were simply given an opportunity which they were unable to resist.
They took it – in the same way as Saint-Ex, Vieuchange, Loti, Eberhardt and Gide took the opportunity to step into their far more innocent dreams.
For them, the colonies were an arena in which they were able to
live out
everything not socially accepted in their own countries.
It is doubtful whether the colonies ever produced either the power or the income their supporters hoped for and advocated them in expectation of. But in the spiritual life of Europe, the colonies had an important function – as a safety vent, as an escape, a place to misbehave.
Like the dream, the colonies offered a refuge away from the demands of their own society, an outlet for the cruelty and self-importance not tolerated in Europe. Not yet tolerated.
In the colonies, while one represented the highpoint of civilization, it was possible to escape much of civilization’s unpleasantness: the banality of the bourgeoisie, the
tristesse
of marriage, the inhibiting control of impulse – and become party to mass murder, child abuse, sexual orgies and otherexpressions of urges which at home largely found their outlets in dreams.
Maupassant alludes to it. Gide’s
The Immoralist
is an indication of it. But apart from Conrad, of course, which of the writers of the epoch expressed it in art? Who is prepared even today to dive into this dark well and clean it out?
The Well-divers
88
Timimoun is the only oasis in the Sahara where I could imagine myself living.
I like the narrow winding alleys constantly changing direction to avoid the pursuing rays of the sun. The houses form bridges across the narrow shafts of streets, the streets becoming tunnels, the courtyards as deep as wells down which the sun cannot penetrate. The windows are narrow apertures, so deep the sun cannot shoot in through them. Over the centuries, innovations have built on the basic principle of desert architecture: defence against the sun.
I love the shimmering blue dragonflies hovering above the green flowering water of irrigation pools, a promising murmuring, rippling, gurgling everywhere. The water runs through a complicated system of gullies criss-crossing each other, branching out or merging. Black men plant cabbages in the soft silt.
I love the salt-white plains round Timimoun and the hourglass fine sand. I love the mountains with their long red roots of sand. I love the new-moon dunes, shaped like sickles with sharp, wind-polished edges.
The car’s shadow with its high wobbling wheels seems cut out of a comic strip as I return to Timimoun at sunset through a sea of dunes.
I would like to come back here always. I would like to spend the winters at the El Gourara hotel with my word processor and a small disc library of the classics of modern egoism from Hobbes to Huysmans. And soon all the other works ‘on line’ from all the national libraries and databases of Europe. Plus a discarded, bound and thumbed old desert novel by Pierre Loti.
That is my desert romanticism.
I would live here undisturbed by human complications, without love but also without pain.
Live off bread and dates, watching the wheatear and the desert crow, listening to the palm doves as they grumble, tut-tutting in the date grove. Sitting in the sunrise looking out over the salt marshes and enjoying the monotony and silence of the desert.
89
I have a bell. A copper sheep-bell. All round me in the great expanses of landscape I can hear the loud clanging of many different sheep-bells, some far off in the distance, others quite near.
Only my bell doesn’t clang.
I feel inside it with my fingers and find a soft rag wound round the
Yes: the reality of the colonies functioned like a dream.
No one had asked the French officers to conquer Laghouat or Zaatcha. Far less had anyone asked the soldiers to massacre the population. No one forced them to do it. It was enough that no one stopped them. They were simply given an opportunity which they were unable to resist.
They took it – in the same way as Saint-Ex, Vieuchange, Loti, Eberhardt and Gide took the opportunity to step into their far more innocent dreams.
For them, the colonies were an arena in which they were able to
live out
everything not socially accepted in their own countries.
It is doubtful whether the colonies ever produced either the power or the income their supporters hoped for and advocated them in expectation of. But in the spiritual life of Europe, the colonies had an important function – as a safety vent, as an escape, a place to misbehave.
Like the dream, the colonies offered a refuge away from the demands of their own society, an outlet for the cruelty and self-importance not tolerated in Europe. Not yet tolerated.
In the colonies, while one represented the highpoint of civilization, it was possible to escape much of civilization’s unpleasantness: the banality of the bourgeoisie, the
tristesse
of marriage, the inhibiting control of impulse – and become party to mass murder, child abuse, sexual orgies and otherexpressions of urges which at home largely found their outlets in dreams.
Maupassant alludes to it. Gide’s
The Immoralist
is an indication of it. But apart from Conrad, of course, which of the writers of the epoch expressed it in art? Who is prepared even today to dive into this dark well and clean it out?
The Well-divers
88
Timimoun is the only oasis in the Sahara where I could imagine myself living.
I like the narrow winding alleys constantly changing direction to avoid the pursuing rays of the sun. The houses form bridges across the narrow shafts of streets, the streets becoming tunnels, the courtyards as deep as wells down which the sun cannot penetrate. The windows are narrow apertures, so deep the sun cannot shoot in through them. Over the centuries, innovations have built on the basic principle of desert architecture: defence against the sun.
I love the shimmering blue dragonflies hovering above the green flowering water of irrigation pools, a promising murmuring, rippling, gurgling everywhere. The water runs through a complicated system of gullies criss-crossing each other, branching out or merging. Black men plant cabbages in the soft silt.
I love the salt-white plains round Timimoun and the hourglass fine sand. I love the mountains with their long red roots of sand. I love the new-moon dunes, shaped like sickles with sharp, wind-polished edges.
The car’s shadow with its high wobbling wheels seems cut out of a comic strip as I return to Timimoun at sunset through a sea of dunes.
I would like to come back here always. I would like to spend the winters at the El Gourara hotel with my word processor and a small disc library of the classics of modern egoism from Hobbes to Huysmans. And soon all the other works ‘on line’ from all the national libraries and databases of Europe. Plus a discarded, bound and thumbed old desert novel by Pierre Loti.
That is my desert romanticism.
I would live here undisturbed by human complications, without love but also without pain.
Live off bread and dates, watching the wheatear and the desert crow, listening to the palm doves as they grumble, tut-tutting in the date grove. Sitting in the sunrise looking out over the salt marshes and enjoying the monotony and silence of the desert.
89
I have a bell. A copper sheep-bell. All round me in the great expanses of landscape I can hear the loud clanging of many different sheep-bells, some far off in the distance, others quite near.
Only my bell doesn’t clang.
I feel inside it with my fingers and find a soft rag wound round the
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