[spectre] Centenary of the death of Isabelle Eberhardt

[Aliette Guibert]

0n October 21st, 2004 Centenary of Isabelle Eberhardt's death at Aïn Sefra,
Algeria,

Girl and girl by adoption (by the father) of Russian anarchists emigrated
into Switzerland who educated themselves their children in the learning of
the former and modern letters and the sciences, in the contact of a
transgressive radicalism: polyglot, she became soon a journalist in Paris;
fascinated by Africa, she made a first journey in Morocco, where to frequent
places forbidden the women she began to make common sound to dress as a man.
Androgyne and beyond the morality, she was in love with her brother whom she
followed in Marseille when he enlisted in the navy and where she met
Slimène, Algerian post-office employee of the French army whom she married
and followed in Algeria to Aïn Sefra, the garrison town of Marechal Lyautey,
where they settled down. Exceptional rider, her measured the deserts of
Morocco in Tunisia as an explorer and she made relation written and drawn in
the Press of France and of Alger; she was converted to the Sufism, was
active for the cause of Arabic and Islam beside of which she went in mission
several times on order of Marechal Lyautey.

On October 21st, 1904, she was taken with her house by torrentielles and
sudden waters of the oued in floods. It is English Lesley Blanch, missing
person recently of years, the first woman of Roman Gary, who Who after the
second world war dedicating to her husband a book, called back to the epic
of Isabelle Eberhardt among the famous, voluntary or accidental
adventuresses, who lived courtship unconformist life or contradictory
passions with the education which they had received, often in the other
countries where those where they had been born: " Les rives sauvages de
l'amour ", original edition in French, at Plon, Paris. (Title in English:
The wilder Shores of Coils, at Paperback).

The book of Lesley Blanch met the road of the Beat generation in the United
States, then, in the 60s ; following a Paul Bowles suggestion wishing to
translate any Eberhardt's works in English, Ferlinghetti as publisher edited
this ethological work with photo portraits of her (The Oblivion Seekers by
Isabelle Eberhardt, Paul Bowles, at City Lights books) ; one pic as a French
marine and in the other one dressed as a man in a traditionnal morrocan
costume, this way she struck the imagination at a time when the signs of
enigmatic seduction began to appear publicly; it is through the page torn
away from this book in City Lights bookstore, San Francisco, that she came
back in France and meant provoking Europe under day fascinating for the
feminist leftists and the déconstructivistes punks, and with the film-makers
close to the underground in search of radical and intense critical subjects,
while the book of Lesley Blanch was still forgotten.

For this time, Edmonde Charles-Roux, friend of Lesley Blanch (brilliant and
eccentric journalist, of a famous beauty, about whom one say that she was
the first reader of Gary and that she taught him a lot, and living in Nice
after their divorce), prepared the exhaustive biography in several volumes
which appeared at Grasset... We call it " coincidences " or " the sight of
time ". Indeed, embodying memorably several material, sexual or emotional
aspects except limits, in the 70s and 80s of the sexual liberation and the
explosion of the ethnical cultures, Isabelle Eberhart was one of the
charismatic icons of the emancipation; although heterosexual - bisexual we
could say - she was an also representative character of the passion and the
malpractice for the homosexuals, then in full development of them own
critical references and culture in view of the public.

It is to note that the film of Australian Ian Pringle with Mathilda Mey's
performance as Isabelle, it was preceded in 1984 of a full-length film of
art inspired by the Algerian period of Isabelle Eberhart, adapted freely and
realized by Christine Laurent: " Eden miseria ", in 1984, produced by Paolo
Bronco. This film seems little quoted - wrongly.

A new film, a documentary biography according to the labourers and the pads,
by a diTurkish director, would be in preparation on the occasion of
centenary.

To see her :

http://images.google.fr/images?q=Isabelle%20Eberhardt&hl=fr&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi