Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

CHAPTER FIVE Gypsies in the Dance Cafés of the Islamic Mediterranean

Dance Cafés of the Islamic Mediterranean [133] for Gypsy café dance. The existence and subsistence of these cafés depended on a complex cultural and commercial infrastructure tied to three migrations: the Romantics’ search for the Other in their quest to escape the French capital; Napoleon’s invasion and distribution of thousands of personnel who remained behind even after the Emperor departed, abandoning his army in 1799; and the Gypsies’ migrations to Egypt from other parts of the Middle East. Based upon these populations’ entrances into Egypt, a commercial, public form of café performance spectacle emerged in the nineteenth century, opening and funding a desire for and economy of Middle Eastern dance.4 The vast socioeconomic and cultural changes engendered by the French Revolution (1789–1799) transformed the literary field of Orientalism and subsequently Europeans’ sensibility of the physical geography of the Orient—from barbaric and wild to sensuous, poetic, and mysterious—an urban coast bordered by vast desert topography housing the ancient ruins of the Pharonic dynasties.5 The link between these disparate landscapes is the Gypsy who crosses empires and geographic expanses from India on her way to Spain. Egypt, in the Gypsy mind, is a stop along the road extending in front of and behind her as she moves through time and space. No point along this endless journey is more significant than any other as, for the Gypsy, migration—dancing—carries the greatest freedom. The Gypsy forms an essential part of this mutation of literary perspective and Orientalist physiognomy; she emerges out of the desert, walking barefoot into the city to dance for the European, whether stranded soldier or literary tourist. The Ghawazi—Carmen’s soul-sisters—are dark, savage, luscious beauties, considered just a step above the African slave.6 Inside the darkened, male-populated cafés, they danced in a staged fulfillment of their viewers’ expectations of being pleasured sexually, if only visually. Let us explore this phantasm in more detail: women with half-nude torsos covered in ringing bells, beads, and necklaces, undulating their pelvises, executing rapid footwork sequences, multiple revolutions and polyrhythms of the torso, head, wrists, and arms, to the point of frenzied abandon—a release that the male spectator, perhaps a British or French officer or an Arab merchant, expects when he enters the darkened, cave-like room of low tables, dimly lit corners, and dense air. As the dances extend over many minutes, the Ghawazi enters a kind of trance, a threshold space, the infinite, quiet expanse of the desert transported into the confines of the crowded, smoky café. Beads of intimate sweat drip down her face, neck, and torso and onto the floor. The nomadic Gypsy, whose family caravan remains far away from the site of this performative discourse, transforms Algerian Woman Posing for the Camera, photographer and date unknown. Roger-Viollet Archives, Paris, France Dance Cafés of the Islamic Mediterranean [135] herself momentarily into an urban site for ethnographic discourse, tourism, and history. Urban spectacle intersects the geography, cartography, and ancient culture from which the Gypsy emerges onto the café stage. A spectatorship conceived by Orientalists in Paris, London, New York, or Berlin, the Ghawazi became complicit in newly emerging ideas about women, the Middle East, and dance as the mechanism by which both the Gypsy pilgrimage and history are declassed, overwritten like a palimpsest by projected desire.7 While her “journey of silence” continues by virtue of their gaze, the Ghawazi still holds power: she generates, controls, and manipulates the very text they read. Her dancing body becomes the new topographical road map “read”by Orientalists upon entry into the city. A popular spot for Orientalist tourism, the café marks the point of intersection between two migrations: that of the Gypsies out of the desert and the Europeans into the phantasmagoric location of desire, escape, and difference. The nomadic desert designates a space of traversal, the passage to an oasis. At the site of the dance café, a provisional settlement for the Gypsy dancer, wandering has ended for the time being. For the European spectator, it is a destination of a very different mode of travel—that of tourism—with its safety net of the return trip home. For the Gypsy, there is no home—no place to which return is possible. In this nexus, the European too performs, acting out the rites of travel, expectation , and the tourism of desire. Travel...