Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Chapter 3: Body of Work: Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization

Chapter 3 Body of Work Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization George R. Trumbull IV “If you knew the secrets of the desert, you would think like me; but you are ignorant of them, and ignorance is the mother of evil.”1 This supremely confident boast, attributed apocryphally to the celebrated Algerian intellectual , poet, and resistance leader, the Emir ( Abd al-Qâdir, illuminates the centrality of environmental representations to the engendering of projects in the Algerian Sahara. Knowledge of the secrets of the desert, and the definition of such secrets, remained a contested field throughout the history of French intervention in Algeria. As French colonial apologists confronted the challenges of empire in the twentieth century, they increasingly mobilized an array of representations aimed at remaking the land and people of the desert, a body of images both congruent with and dissimilar to earlier representations of the land of thirst and fear. Colonial understandings of the Sahara as a potential site of economic activity depended on the genesis of new kinds of representation of the environment . Rather than functioning as an unmediated flow of speculative capital from metropole to colony, the economic history of French colonialism,  | George R. Trumbull IV at least in the Sahara, necessitated first a variety of representational investments , from the penny press to the avant-garde tableaux. French interest in the Sahara, for much of the history of colonial Algeria, operated as much at the level of the spectral as the speculative. Any potentially profitable use of the Sahara centered on reconfiguring the Sahara as environmentally suitable for mastery, no mean task. Discussions of profit and investment in the Algerian Sahara arose more frequently as representations, depictions, and hypotheses than as lines in a ledger or tallies of profit and loss. Indeed, such tallies prove nearly impossible to reconcile in any systematic way for the Sahara: the French investment in the desert remained more in paper and in canvas than in cash and in specie.Water functions as a metonym,illustrating the genesis of knowledge and ignorance of, and bodily experiences situated in, the desert. The French colonial authors discussed here—government officials, military officers, travelers, scientists, economists, popularizers of empire, and others—defined Saharan communities in particular, however, through their environmental aspects, drawing on both tropes of desert description rooted in the nineteenth century and twentieth-century fascinations with the potential for technological control over the land. Situated in space through reference to specific landscapes, social practices, ecologies, and natural phenomena, these communities emerge, not solely as social groupings defined as urban or rural, nomadic or sedentary, but also as environmentally defined foci for colonial study and action. This chapter argues that geographic and economic representations of desert environments, and in particular water, operated as mutually reinforcing categories of mediated knowledge that ultimately served to open up the Sahara as a reimagined, utilitarian space for new, technological forms of empire. Historians have demonstrated the degree to which Algerian communities often remained opaque to French colonial administrators.2 Indeed, colonial officers more often figured as rather easily manipulated figures of limited power than as representatives of an all-encompassing, all-knowing colonial state whose power intruded on every aspect of Algerian life; in Algeria at least, France neither knew all, nor encompassed all, nor permeated all.3 Hence, the very relationship between empire and community in colonial Algeria was a tenuous one; Algerians often had good incentive to attempt to insulate their communities, whether socially, religiously, or geographically , from colonial officials. If colonial administrators ignored ( Abd al-Qâdir’s secrets of the desert, it was perhaps not by accident, but rather due to the will and actions of people like ( Abd al-Qâdir himself. Analyzing the discontinuities of the history of people in their environments has given rise to multiple methods of historical inquiry. In a 1995 Body of Work: Water and Reimagining the Sahara |  essay, Alfred Crosby memorably dismissed American environmental historians as “more interested in dirt than in perceptions . . . of dirt. . . . They have no doubts about the reality of what they deal with, nor about their ability to come to grips with it. . . . They do not suffer from epistemological malaise.” If true, that lack of epistemological malaise seems something of an intellectual luxury, if not a blessing.4 In contrast, the historian of Germany David Blackbourn posed the question, “What of real geographies?,” a question more...