Writings from the Sand Volume 1: Collected Works of Isabelle Eberhardt (review)

Initially published in 1988 by Grasset, Œuvres complètes Tome I by Isabelle Eberhardt, meticulously edited and presented by Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu, brought to life a brilliant and prolific writer, traveler and observer of life in colonial Algeria at the turn of the century. Now thanks to Melissa Marcus' elegant translation, this volume is finally available to an Anglophone readership.

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877, the illegitimate daughter of a Russian noblewoman and a former Russian Orthodox priest living in exile in Geneva. She traveled to Algeria at the age of 20, where she converted to Islam, married a native Algerian (a spahi—a native soldier serving in the French army) and traveled throughout the desert dressed in male Arab garb. She died in 1904, at the age of 27, in a flash flood in Aïn Sefra, a remote village in the Algerian Sahara. During her short and tumultuous life, Eberhardt wrote numerous short stories, travel notes, reportages and newspaper articles, personal diaries, and two unfinished novels, Rakhil, a story of a Jewish prostitute, and Trimardeur, about a Russian anarchist.

Eberhardt's approach to the Maghreb is unusual. She breaks with the Orientalist exoticizing tradition which characterizes most writings by Europeans about the region, and offers instead a unique view of Algeria from within, thanks to her impeccable knowledge of Arabic, her passion for Islam and her profound sympathy for the people she encountered. Her keen observer's eye and her openness to new experiences led her to write about the Maghreb with unprecedented sensitivity and candor. In her writing Eberhardt demonstrates a rare compassion for the indigenous population, and she openly criticizes the excesses of the French colonial regime.

The fate of Eberhardt's writings has been as turbulent as her own life was. A small selection of her stories and reportages were published during her lifetime, mostly in the Algiers press. Much of her unpublished manuscripts, including her diaries, were damaged by the same muddy flood that took her life. Eberhardt's first posthumous editors took many liberties with her texts: they corrected and excised them, and even added to them. The first person to publish Eberhardt's work posthumously was Victor Barrucand, the editor of the liberal-leaning L'Akhbar, the French-language newspaper in Algiers in which Eberhardt had published many of her stories and reportages. A mentor, collaborator and a close friend, Barrucand considered himself a legitimate executor of Eberhardt's œuvre. While Barrucand should be credited with rescuing Eberhardt's work from potential oblivion, the liberties he took with her texts go far beyond overzealous editing. Barrucand published a selection of her stories and travel narratives in two volumes entitled Dans l'ombre chaude de l'Islam and Notes de routes (1906), in which he not only rearranged the order of her writings, but also added his own hand, correcting, censoring and adding his own commentary to Eberhardt's texts. He even co-signed the volume. While there were other editions of a selection of Eberhardt's various texts throughout the twentieth century, Delacour' s and Huleu's volume is the first to bring her entire œuvre together in a coherent way.

In order to restore Eberhardt's work in its authenticity and integrity, Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu, as they explain in their Introduction, scouted bookshelves of second-hand bookstores in search of first-edition volumes, consulted archives, newspapers and journals to which Eberhardt contributed, studied the correspondence and literally followed in Eberhardt's footsteps "in order to try to outwit the traps of Isabelle's legend" (xxiii). Their edition is based on manuscripts—some still splattered with mud-now kept in the Archives d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, as well as texts published during Eberhardt's lifetime. As Edmonde Charles-Roux...