February 1, 2023 • 53 mins
In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Jolie Holland about Isabelle Eberhardt, aka Si Mahmoud Saadi, the Muslim crossdressing adventurer raised by anarchists.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
podcast that doesn't have a tagline because the tagline is
in the title. I'm your host. Margaret Keljoy with me
today is an absolutely fantastic musician, the one and only
Julie Holland. Julie, how are you? I am utterly thrilled
to be here with you. Yeah, I'm glad you're here.
(00:21):
Our producer Sophie, who is better known for her work
as a dog mom to one of the two best
dogs in the world. So are I three best dogs
in the world? Anderson Huh, yep, that's Sophie. No notes. Yeah, Julian,
What's I wrote in the script? Do you have any pets?
But before we started, we we made this clear, but
do you want to introduce the listeners to your pet?
(00:44):
The dog? The dog in my life is His name
is Jocko. He's not named after Jocko Pastorius. He's named
after the werewolf cartoon character that Michael Hurley has drawn
for a number of decades. He's that Jocko. I do
not know either Jocko. So it was like it was like,
(01:05):
Margaret's not gonna go any of that. But that's great.
He's a nice dog though I'm very, very very handsome boy.
He's very beautiful. I love him and our audio engineers Ian.
Our theme music was written for us by a woman.
This episode is part two of a two part series
(01:27):
is about ever Heart a k Ahmad Sadi. If you
haven't listened to part one, not only will none of
this makes sense, but I will be personally not not mad,
just disappointed. I really thought we'd raised you better than that.
Ah where we last left her hero, she just fled
Algeria because she may or may not have hit a
cop with a sword. She goes back to the villa.
(01:50):
Dad is despondent but the death of his long term partner,
which is a reasonable position for him to be in,
and then her brother Vladimir has an even worse time
because his trader brother Nicholas tries to abduct him. His
brother with a bunch of Russian spies shows up and says,
I own you body and soul, and you're coming with me,
(02:11):
and Vladimir refuses. He wants to hang out with at
the villa and work on cactuses. That's super scary and
it's kind of he's kind of broken by the experience.
He starts losing track of what's happening. He just sobs
in his room until one day, not too long after,
he decides to get a head start on Sylvia Plath
and puts his head in the guess oven and dies.
(02:33):
Her father Doubly despondent writes a letter to a friend saying,
my cactiphile is dead because Vladimir was the kid who
took after his dad's love of cactuses or dads. And
she's alone in the villa now and she's caring for
alien and aging father. It is not nice times. She
almost marries this like Turkish diplomat guy, but he gets
(02:53):
really needy and started acting like he owns her. So
she's like, no, I'm good, I'm not marrying you. And
her dad is real his throat cancer from the smoking.
I don't know if you knew this, but smoking is
actually not good for you. It's actually bad for your health.
Despite all of the cigarette ads that we run on
this show, I don't think we get cigaretted at the
(03:16):
idea of getting cancer back in those days is so terrifying. Yeah,
I mean it's ter it's terrifying now. Yeah. Yeah, So
he gets his affairs in order, like, he arranges money
as best as he can for his his remaining kids,
the two who aren't traders, and he leaves really detailed
(03:36):
instructions for how to take care of his cactuses, and
then he dies of throat cancer. Some people say that
Isabelle poisoned him, but if she did, which I don't
think is true, it was to end his suffering. The
people at the time who said she poisoned him were
the Russian siblings who are conspiring against her an anarchy
dad in order to try and get the money from
the estate. Basically, yeah, so they're just they're just talking shit. Yeah, yeah,
(04:02):
And I wouldn't put it past this Russian nihilist to
be like, isabel bring me my murder pill or whatever,
you know. I don't know. Yeah, I've had family, friends
and hospice, and that's that's a not an unlikely story. Yeah,
(04:25):
so Isabel's like, well, fuck it, back to adventuring. It
is possible that at this point she steals a hundred
forty thousand Swiss francs from the villa in order to
keep keep it from falling into the hands of her
Russian half siblings. I don't actually think she did, but
it's like part of what they allege against her, along
with like poisoning Dad. It's like stealing a hundred forty
(04:46):
thousand francs or whatever, which I couldn't figure out how
to convert the modern money. It's a bunch of money.
So she gets dressed up in her best men's clothes.
She takes off her tunis the capital Tunisia, which is
also now a French territory after they stole it from
the Ottomans who stole from the people who lived there.
She dives right into hanging out with sales. She does
what she does best. She gets there, She hangs out
(05:07):
with sailors. She focks who she wants to funk. She
does what she wants to do. She dresses as a man,
and she demands a society view her and treat as
a man. But she's not actually disguising her sex or
to use just to use more modern terms for gender.
And how old is she at this point? Yeah, the
stuff in her life happens fast. Like at one point
(05:32):
in this I'm just like, wait, what she's only like
twenty four? When is her? I don't know anyway, Yeah,
and she's sort of a trust fund kid like for
the best possible reason, which is that her dad robbed
her granddad. But she's still a rich kid who wants
to go live in a colonial land. So she rents
a nice house on a hill. She gets a dog
named a Dale, a black spaniel, and she hires a servant,
(05:55):
a seventy five year old local woman. And at this
point she's really just living as a man, at least
in her public life. See Mahma Sati is his name.
As far as we could tell, it's not that people
believe she was a man. It's not like people thought
she had a dick under her robes. And it gets
into this ship that like, as we were talking about
a little bit last time. Generally speaking, the Muslim world
is a better place to be gender deviant and sexually
(06:17):
deviant than Europe. For an awful lot of history, including
probably this period, none of it maps easily to our
current definitions of sexuality and gender. Europe had its own
conceptions of the time. Homosexuality and heterosexuality were both coined
and starting to be understood around this time as codified things.
The Ottoman Empire had its own thing going on, which
I think I'm not an expert about this to find
(06:39):
things more by acts than identity, So like it worked
for Machma to just be mahmad. She wasn't cross dressing,
she was just dressing. And within European conceptions, she might
not have been gay because she was sucking men, possibly exclusively,
although she did go to Brothels to hang out as
an observer at various points, whereas the Arab world's time
and contrast was kind of like, look, I don't want
(06:59):
to be rude, and she says she's a man, so
I guess I'll call her a man. This politeness, in
this attitude of taking people as they asked to be taken,
it sees her well for the rest of her life,
which is frankly how my my grandparents generation has tended
to handle my transness. And I don't know it works
for me. Sometimes it's nicer than all the like fucking
around about specifics. If I was going to force her
into a modern category might be gender fluid historians want
(07:20):
to work really hard to make her like be actually
sis by just and just pretending to be a man
for safety, but that it absolutely goes against what she said.
But at the same time, she also was not, by
any modern conception trans masculine or a trans man. She
referred constantly to herself also as a woman. She would
refer to herself as both at a regular I don't know,
(07:40):
whenever she would want to. People also wonder this is
the promised what types of sex did she have? Segment?
People also wonder how she never got pregnant. And there
are two main guests people present. First, she might not
have been biologically capable. There's like so many I'm not
even like even ruder than conjecturing about like how she fucked.
(08:01):
I think it's conjecturing about like her body and how
it presented and stuff about fertility. So I'm not going
to get into that. People have various ideas about how
she didn't have periods maybe or something I don't know whatever.
Won't get into that. And Second, she might just not
have been really into penis and vagina sex, like maybe
PIV wasn't her thing. There's this uh presentation that at
(08:23):
least was held by at least a historian. I read
that Anal was very popular in the Muslim world in
comparison to the European world, because Europe was super fucking
conservative at that time. I can come up with a
lot of ways to fuck that don't get you pregnant,
but that's one of them. Anyway, God bless historians and
(08:43):
pop historians, every single one of us were sitting around
and trying to figure out if c. Machmasai liked anal
you all went away in or should we just move on? Yeah,
that's the that's their business, and good for her. I
feel like you said all the words magpie. Yeah. So
(09:09):
she's running out of money and she fox off from
Tunisia back to Algeria because she misses the desert. She
wanders poor as funk around the desert hanging. This is
like the quintessential thing that she's now going to do
every now and then for the rest of her life.
She wanders around, poor as funk around the desert. The
whole trust fund kid thing is starting to run out
real fast. She's hanging out with the different tribes there,
(09:30):
and her passport there is that she's devout. People accept her.
She stays up late talking about Islam. She becomes probably
the first European to really wander much of those areas
on encumbered and accepted because she's not trying to show
up as an outsider, but as a Muslim, and people
saw and respected that. It's really fascinating. And this whole
time she's writing about it for European audience, which is
(09:52):
like everything about everything about her life. You can see
in a bunch of different ways. First, she's tying into
the orientalist fad that's running across Europe and is making
her money from it. But she's also laying down the
groundword for an anti colonialism and starting up support for
seeing these colonized people as people, not as this fantastic other.
And her relationship with anti colonialism is it's actually more
(10:13):
consistent than her gender, but not not a lot more consistent.
She's sucking a drinking and smoking how she's the whole
time and just living her best life. It sucks up
her health real bad. And as like a journalist observer role,
she starts working sometimes with the colonial government. She spends
two months helping tax collectors go around and rob the locals,
(10:35):
just to sort of see how it's done, but also
participating in it directly. It's like her job. They round
up all the people who haven't paid their taxes and
they all come into the public square, and she like
reads off the list of names um as the debtors
or either imprisoned or forced to give up more of
their stuff, So we could read her as like an
embedded journalist or as complicit, right, And I think either
(10:59):
reading is fair, frankly, and I think it will continue
to be complicated in a lot of different ways. And
she goes back and forth between Europe and North Africa
all the time to check on her remaining brother, Augustine,
the black sheep, who did the drugs but didn't have fun.
He's married now his new wife does not like Isabelle
ever heart. It's like this lady is a bad influence
(11:21):
on you, which is probably true. And to try and
sell the old villa, which she still couldn't do because
of the family conspiracy, is contesting the will and all
that ship. Everything is falling into ruins, and it's becoming
a pretty potent symbol of how you can't go back
to childhood. She writes about this a lot. She like
goes and sees, you know, her father and her brother's
grave and things like that. Eventually, the villa sells to
(11:46):
exactly zero fanfare because lawyer fees and ship means she
makes negative money off of it. Like in the end,
she walks away with negative sixty francs from the sale
of the villa. But then something positive happens in her life.
She makes her way back to South Algeria, to the desert,
and for the first time in her life, she falls
(12:06):
in love. She falls in love with this Algerian soldier
named slee Men And this is politically messy. He is
from a family of trader cops, local folks who wore
high up for the French colonial police, and he himself
is basically a trader. He's in the French colonial government military, sorry,
French colonial army. She tries to keep the relationship a secret,
(12:30):
I think honestly because she doesn't want to be associated
with the French military. But he like runs around and
brags to all of his army buddies and so like
everyone knows, and he's in a cavalry. So every night,
and it's a very kind of sweet. Every night he
comes over to her place and with borrowed horses and
they ride off and make love in the desert and
then come back at dawn. And then once again she
(12:51):
keeps calling herself poor. She moves into a big, old
fancy house in the city allowed that has multiple servants,
or she gets multi servants of this house. But once
again I can't tell what to make of this, because
probably she's just poor by rich European lady standards, not
by like people who are from these poor colonized places standards.
(13:12):
But there's this stories about how her and her boyfriend
and her servants all like together as friends close out
the bar every night in the area, like are just
like going out and partying all together, and so this
like servant thing might have been as much like a
way to like give her friends like jobs in a
place to crash and not actually like making them be servant.
(13:34):
I don't know. It's hard to read it. And part
of why it's hard to read, right, she has amazing
security culture left over from her anarchist days, and it's
why we only know a tiny portion of the political
intrigue she was part of. She like constantly left politically
involved figures out of her writing, so she's like writing
about a bunch of people. If someone there is like
(13:58):
up to no good in a way she approves of,
she doesn't write about him. And one colonial administrator, he's
doing his due diligence about her when she's like comes
to an area one colonial administrator who's doing his due
diligence about her and then soon spying on her and
following her referred to hers still involved actively in the
socialist and feminist movements um in Europe and I believe
(14:18):
also in North Africa. So we literally don't know if
she ever stopped rolling with the anarchists and the socialists
and show when she had the chance, because she wouldn't
have written about it if she did. But well into
being a die hard Muslim who writes only about how
it Islam is the only thing she'd be willing to
spill her blood for. She clearly still has some affinity
for her old revolutionary roots or her other revolutionary roots.
(14:42):
She writes this one short story, for example, about a
group of Russian anarchists with one christ who one of
the anarchists christ like accepts the punishment for all the
crimes of all of his friends and he's sent into
Siberia and exile, but he's like not to be pitied
because he is instead living a holy life as a
as a martyr, and drawing comparison between anarchism and religion
(15:04):
and a favorable light, which I feel like kind of
sums up a lot of how her politics and her
political understanding is moving. Well. I mean, I even I
mean I remember like hearing Emma Goldman talk about that
like like using like religious language. So I mean, I
just don't I don't understand how you could even say
(15:26):
certain things without religious language, especially at the time. Yeah, no, totally.
I mean we we talked about martyrs all the time, right,
and like that's religious language, you know. Um, But I
love hearing how the Kurds talk about they're they're martyrs
like in it, and it seems it seems very secularized
(15:50):
and it's very like direct and it's not like this
one guy. It's like everyone who has fallen in defense
of this area is as a martyr. Yeah. Now it's
really interesting. I hadn't. Yeah, So she's living possibly a
double life, not just between being Shamasati and Isabel eleber Heart,
(16:12):
but between being a colonial reporter and working sometimes with
the resistance. Or maybe that's what I want her to
have you been doing, because I always want her to
be doing the right thing. But none of us do
the right thing except Sophie and Anderson. So and her
involvement in anti colonialism is tape ring off at this point.
Her boyfriend, the imperial stooge of a soldier. He's part
(16:34):
of this, but she does Okay, I think this actually
explains it better. He's part of the Sufi Brotherhood, the Kataria,
the Kadari Brotherhood, and the Sufi's. They're kind of the
esoteric or mystical side of Islam. The Kataria had been
around since the eleven hundreds, there may be the oldest order,
and they're decentralized, with each group determining their own practices.
(16:54):
For the most part, one of my best friends as
a Sufi. Okay, awesome, and they're really into the Catteria,
are really into the personal connection between the person and
God and are opposed to the large institutions and governments
and Orthodoxy and all that ship that disconnect people from God.
It's not a surprise that this child of anarchists ends
up with them. And for the most part, the Sufi
(17:19):
orders have been like peace and love throughout history, but
sometimes you got to get an anti colonialism done. There's
this guy. I hope he gets his own episode one day,
because I want to know more about him. Basically I
like leave these like almost like notes to myself of
being like I want to know more about this person,
but since I have to write a new episode every
single week, I don't write and read any history that
isn't directly related to what I'm working on. Thank you,
(17:40):
thank you for your service. Um. This guy's name is
is Abdalkator and he's the leader of the Kataria at
the beginning of the French colonial rule, and for years
he led held a modern military at bay with the
lusiffiliation of tribes people. They hold huge ton of the
country for a long ass time. And the whole time
(18:00):
he did it, he's fucking on it about human rights
of his Christian enemies. He allows religious freedom for the POWs.
He goes down in history. Is like basically like the
guy who was best to the people he captured in war,
even decades after he lost. He intervened directly at great
personal risk during an anti Christian riot and the city
of Damascus, sheltering people in his home with his kids,
(18:22):
roaming out roaming the streets, saving more people's lives. And
he wasn't the only Sufi at the forefront of anti colonialism.
Sufie's were involved all over North Africa and South Asia.
But this is the leader of the Kataria for a
huge trunk of the nineteenth century. But by the turn
of the century, the Katia are in this position where
they decide that they are begrudgingly accepting French rule because
(18:44):
they believe that it will be temporary and they just
have to outlast it, and that being an open revolt
against it is a bad idea. Yeah, they wanted to
they wanted to avoid more bloodshed. Yeah. Basically this is
the attitude that Isabelle is working with two greater and
lesser degrees for the rest of her life. She's fighting
for autonomy and holding onto Islam and cultural values while
(19:04):
without trying to specifically overthrow the French government. And occasionally
she works to further the French government because a lot
of times when people want to avoid further bloodshed and
like seek peace, they do so by working with her enemies,
you know. Historically, Yeah, I could almost be seen like
her moving towards a liberal stance. Yeah, and like a
(19:26):
but it's interesting because she doesn't come across it as
like she's not getting into it as like this, like
European liberal woman who has calmed down. She's like learning
it from this Sufi brotherhood that she joins. Even though
brotherhood is in the name, the order she joins Kataria
is open to any Muslim man over the age of eighteen,
(19:46):
and they know she's not technically a man. They don't care.
There's a few other women in the ranks of the
brotherhood at this point, as daughters and widows who have
inherited some status within the organization. I'm unsure whether other
women had been directly initiated or whether they had only
kind of inherited their way in, but so's it's either
they were like, whatever, we don't care that you're a woman,
or they're like, what will you car yourself a man?
So fuck it and so cool, I know. And the
(20:10):
thing that's unprecedented about her joining isn't her gender, it's
that she's the European. She doesn't write much about her Sufism.
It's part of I think this whole security culture thing,
and that ship was secret, so no one quite knows
how important it was to her. It was obviously very
important to her, and she writes about some of it right,
but it she kind of leaves it out of a
lot of including her diaries and ship. Have either of
(20:33):
y'all been to a mosque ever? I have not. My
Sufi friend took me to the Women's Mosque of America
and it was like one of the loveliest times I've
ever had in any kind of religious setting. It was
so beautiful. And I was raised in a really stupid cult,
so I hate religious stuff, like even like my parents,
(20:55):
my poor dumb parents met as as like Joe's witness
and like I so like I've had to like work
really hard to like heal from that experience and like
all this like family trauma around that, and like going
to the mosque was the loveliest religious experience I've ever had.
(21:18):
It was called the Women's Mosque of America. Very peaceful,
beautiful place. There are a lot of women who were
raised in the Nation of Islam and came back to
regular Islam, and it was just like it was so
it was such a diverse environment. It was so it
was so cool, and it didn't feel religiously to me,
(21:41):
like it it felt just like people trying to support
each other in living a good life. Yeah, I mean
that makes sense. That's like one of the main things
that religious institutions like are capable of being used for,
and a lot of ways come from uh, you know
what else is capable of No, I don't really have
(22:04):
anything good here, um, but we're going to interrupt you're
listening to make you press the forward button probably six
or seven times on your podcast listen to app because
advertisers until you here on woman again. Yeah, and we're back. Yeah.
(22:27):
Actually that's the I feel like that's one of the
most important parts of the musical cue in the podcast
is so that you know where to stop. Literally. I
I had people that were like, no, I don't really
want to have music ad person. I was like, yeah,
you do. It's part of the listeners quality of life.
So these are some of the happiest days of her life.
(22:51):
She's participating in cool mystical secret rites. She's living with
her drug buddies and our servants. She's sick a lot,
and her boyfriend Sliman is sick a lot too. And
I feel like this often gets left out of stories
of adventurers, is that like, actually, like not everyone's like
fully able bodied at all times as they do these things,
you know, and they go ahead and get married at
this point, although religiously and not legally because Muslim weddings
(23:13):
are not enough for the French authorities. But she marries him,
and she makes it clear that she is not his servant,
and she says as much. She's more his brother Mahmud
than then she is his wife and servant. And yeah,
remember how her dad was involved in a plot to
funk up the Russian royalty and how that keeps catching
(23:33):
up with her. They come back, Yeah, what happened? They
hold a grudge. Uh, fucking Russian aristocracy. You gotta get
it done. He got he can't let him come after you.
They have the means. Yeah, so the Russian conspirators, probably
(23:55):
her brother Nicholas, write a letter to the colonial authorities,
being like, isabel Leberhard is a fucking spy who hates France.
This might be true, it might not be true. And
she totally killed Alexander Trofinowski in order to steal his
money and keep it from the rightful airs. That's the
that's the real black sheep of the family right there. Yeah, yeah, totally.
(24:19):
And it's like possible that she stole some money from
the estate, but I don't care at all. But it is.
It's not good that her reputation in the crimes of
the family are catching up with her. Slamanez transferred pretty
much just a funk with them, the two of them
to a frontier city called Botana, and she decides to
(24:39):
go with him, but first some worship happens. This isn't
anod transition, it's just an assassination attempt. She's hanging out
with some of her fellow sufi's working to translate a
letter for someone in January when a fucking dude with
a fucking saber hits her three times with a goddamn sword,
once on the head and twice on her arm, and
(25:01):
she survives. She actually jumps up and tries to go
for a sword on the wall, but the blow to
her head had her fucked up and she collapsed. The
assassin gets away and he yells basically like I'm gonna
go get a gun and finish her off. That's my paraphrase.
Pretty quickly, I believe that seems like a direct quote.
I'm on board. I mean, it's it's it's pretty it's
(25:22):
pretty direct, just vernacularly changed. He's like, I will go
get a gun and return and finish this job pretty quickly.
They figure out that it was someone from a rival
Sufi brotherhood that t Janaya. Oh no, he's caught and
he's cut because the head of her Sufi order goes
to the head of that Sufi order and it's like,
(25:42):
if you don't give this dude up, it's gonna be
really bad. It's just gonna be really bad. And so
they gave him up. He gets caught and he says
God told him to kill her. Meanwhile, Isabel, her hand
is almost severed from her wrist. It's like cut through
the bone. Fucking hell yeah. The blow to her head
(26:03):
wounded up like negligible because a washing line had deflected
the full of the blow, and she recovers. She spends
four weeks in the hospital, but she's never able to
bend her arm at the elbow again. I think that's
where the third blow got her. Almost certainly the guy
had been sent by the colonial administration to kill her.
The administration immediately after the attempt puts in motion a
(26:24):
campaign of slander, specifically that she had been fucking the
head of the Sufi order. Almost certainly she hadn't been
in this particular time, and as soon as she gets
out of the hospital, she rides off to Batten not
to reunite with with with her boyfriend. Clement says he
wants to marry her legally this time, but the commanding
officer disallows it for quote reasons, I won't tell you,
(26:47):
so yeah. In May, they just straight up kick her
out of the country. They don't want her, They're too
much trouble. So she goes to Marseilles to live with
her brother Augustine, but as a lever heart, you just
don't she doesn't stay down. As soon as she's in France,
she starts writing more again and getting published, and she
starts politicking really hard for two ends. One she wants
(27:10):
Lament transferred to Tunisia, and two to get it so
that she can marry him legally, which involves like basically
like writing all these high up people being like, I'm
not so bad after, I'll let me marry my boyfriend. Meanwhile,
her assassin goes on trial and she's allowed back into
Algeria For the trial. Everyone wants her to dress up
(27:31):
as a European woman instead of a Muslim man because
she'll get more sympathy and ship right, and she comes
up with this compromise. She's like, I'll dress up as
a European man, but she doesn't want to dress up
as a woman. But in the end, and this is
left out of some of the faster versions of people
telling her story, she dresses as a Muslim woman. In
the end, she decides it's the safest thing because she
(27:54):
wants to keep the cross dressing out of the trial
as much as possible, Like in case his defenses, she
was cross dressing, so I had to kill her. Yeah,
which when he was put on the stand was his defense.
She was cross dressing, so I had to kill her. Oh,
I mean, this is it's kind of shades of Joan
of Arc a little bit Joan of ARC's trial. I
(28:17):
haven't done the Joan of Arc episode yet. I've been
really looking forward to it, so I only know the
like cliffs notes of Joan of Arc. M she I
mean she you know, she dressed as a man in battle.
And also some people say as like to somehow to
protect herself from being sexually assaulted in jail, but she
(28:40):
was convicted by the court for for a cross dressing.
Never change, anti transpigoted society has never change in her
politicking she makes about the trial. She makes one thing
clear in the papers. She was not has never been
(29:00):
a Christian, She has not been baptized. This was not
an act of Muslim barbarism against a good Christian woman.
And more importantly so it basically she's working to make
sure that this trial doesn't play into Araba phobia. Awesome,
and in clever ways she manages to avoid saying it
(29:20):
was the French government that tried to murder me. But
she said it was the French government that tried to
murder me, like in all of the like weird politic
e ways where you're like everyone knows that's what she's
trying to say, but she does it and like covers
all of her bases because she's sucking smart. Did she
was she covering her head in court? I don't know
the answer to that. I know in general she shaved
(29:42):
her head and like most of the time war a Fez.
I don't know about her specific court clothes amazing, but yeah,
she hasn't had hair in a long time. But I
suppose if she and she comes up as an as
a Muslim woman, so probably so why we think why
I think that this assassin had been sent by the
French government. The French government was like really eager to
(30:05):
funk over this assassin. Whether they hired him or not,
it's and it's possible that he had been wanting to
kill her as a front against Islam, but it's more
likely been paid to by the French. He had gone
on a trip to the city without any money and
come back with a bunch of spending cash shortly before
the murder, and thirty years later a colonial official who
liked Isabelle dug more into it. But all of the
(30:26):
relevant records had been quote eaten by rats, and so
basically there's a cover episode as all this happened. Yeah,
but even some evidence of some blood money. Even though
this was their guy. The French government wanted to pin
the assassin as a religious zealot and make him useful
in a crackdown in Islam, so he was found guilty
(30:48):
and he was sentenced to a life of hard labor.
During the trial, the French also decided to give Isabelle
her formal year band forever from Algeria letter. She was
allowed to keep the sword he'd tried to kill her with,
though as a moment and she held onto it for
the rest of her life. She's like, you know if
I'm like, yeah, that's saber, that's the saber that dude
(31:10):
try to kill me. As soon as she leaves the court,
it's like fucking rules. As soon as she leaves the court,
she sets about on a campaign for amnesty for her assassin.
It works, and she gets his sentence knocked down to
a ten years instead of life of hard labor. And
at this point she's like starts her anti colonialism is
(31:32):
shifting yet again. At this point, she's like trying to
prove that Muslims are just as smart and capable of Christians.
And she wanted slamin her husband to rise in the
ranks of the very In her letters, she's like, rise
in the ranks of the very same agencies to whom
we owe our misery and become learned and read the
classics and ship. And she's kind of losing me with
that strategy. But well, she got into everyone in her
(31:54):
family that's left. It's just her and her brother, well
besides the two that don't count their destitute at this point,
like they're pawning their fucking clothes is they're like, sorry, coat,
we need food. More, she gets a job as a
dock worker, even with her fucked up arm and translating letters,
and she's still away from her husband. Meanwhile, Sliman he
(32:16):
gets acquainted with old friend of the pod tuberculosis. He
gets laid up in the hospital and takes a while
to recover, and Isabelle is out of her mind with worry.
She's like, if he dies, I'm going to throw myself
into babbyl and die too. Finally, he shows up in
France and they're allowed to get married. She's succeeded at
all of her politicking. She puts on a black wig
(32:38):
and a blue dress. Marrying him in white would obviously
be a lie, and they tie the knot, and there's
like why she marries an address It like might have
to do with kind of this, Like yeah, yeah, yeah.
The whole point of this is to like, we're already
married in the eyes of God. This is just inst
that the eyes of the French government let us be
married so I can get the funk back to North Africa.
(32:59):
You know, was marrying in a white dress of thing
at the time, because I know that's kind of kind
of modern, like when is this happening? This is nineteen
o one and it is presented in the book. I
read that she specifically was like I believed it would
be scandalous, like there would be like people would be
talking about her if she married in white because everyone
(33:22):
would know that it's not true, and so she I
think she wrote about it. I think that's who we
have it from, is that she wrote about not wanting
to cause a stir or whatever, which doesn't sound like her.
But she's calming down. She's getting pretty old at this point.
She is twenty four years old. Good lord, like I
thought I had an adventurous early like adulthood. No. Absolutely.
(33:51):
A few months later, her husband's terms of service or
up and he gets the funk out of the military
and the two moved to Algiers into some sheep apartments.
She's starts wandering around cafes again by herself. This is
like kind of and she's already writing her in her diary,
but she's kind of bored and annoyed by her husband.
She starts working more again as a writer. She hadn't
really stopped, but she had a lag in her career
(34:12):
because a writer um was like perceived as like to
like uneducated and essentially proletarian by like like bougie socialists basically,
but which is like there's some irony, right, and also
at the same time it wasn't quite revolutionary enough because
she's just writing about daily life in Africa. But the
French authorities are fucking terrified her and her writing, and
(34:35):
they follow around constantly, like it's been several years now
at this point that she's just always tailed everywhere she
goes around living her life. It's like part of how
everyone knows the blow by blow of like what she
did and where she went. You know, yeah, this is
really impressive. Eventually she meets an editor who loves her work,
who also loves Russian socialism and nihilism and anarchism, althoughays
(34:56):
much more reformist than revolutionary himself, which honestly sounds like
about style at the time. And they hit it off
at the very least as um a professional level. And
if you want to hit it off at a professional level,
you can buy my new service in which you give
(35:17):
me money and I tell you how to give other
get other people to give you money. Does seem like
a good strategy. He's starting, You're starting at MLM. I'm
not a Marxist Leninis maoist, terrible Sander. But now that
you mention it, that is kind of how like the
(35:38):
Marxist Lenis maist thing works. So I guess I won't
do that. I guess I uh, I will avoid the MLM.
It seems like a bad business model. Okay, Well, instead,
I'll just convince people to run advertisements during my podcast.
What about that as a strategy. It doesn't seem morally uncomplicated. Okay,
(35:58):
all right, well that's what we're gonna do. Here's amounts,
and we are back. Hello, Hello, Hi, Sophie. You didn't
say hi, Hi. Thanks. So she gets to go back
(36:22):
now that she's like writing again and stuff, she gets
to go back to doing what she fucking is best
and love. She's wandering the desert. This time she's becoming
more and more just like her thing is mysticism, right uh,
this time in Suphie Brotherhood and all this stuff is
like big part of it. And she also starts basically
like in her diaries, she's like more and more after
the assassination attempt, she's more and more like I am
destined to be a mystic. I don't know if someone
(36:45):
hit me three times with the sword. Once one of
them made in my head and I got saved by
a clothes line. I might be into some mystic ship. Yeah, yeah,
I can, I can. I absolutely understand it. Yeah, And
so she starts visiting various magicians and rines, and her
and Slaman moved to this town of Tanez for his
(37:06):
new job translating. Then she becomes a war correspondent and
becomes embedded in the French military that's trying to pacify
the southwest of the country, and then she becomes a
spy for the French. This is the most morally compromised
period of this story. Wow. And the whole time everyone's
like following her around, being like this radical is doing
(37:28):
everything bad and she's like kind of middle of the
road at this point in most contexts, but it's not
enough for people. And so she starts working for the
French colonial government. She meets this this like gentler, kindler
colonial officer who is really into building peace treaties instead
of just shooting people, and she's like, Yeah, this is
(37:48):
the this is the ticket, this is what matters. And
so she starts writing this like liberal pro French propaganda
and spine and she starts writing about how like, maybe
it's better the French invaders than the Turkish invaders. Maybe
colonization is always bad, but sometimes there's like little benevolent
things you can pull out of it. But at the
(38:09):
same time she's doing that in her like official writing,
that's like propagandistic. She continues to write about daily life there,
and she writes a ton of stuff that's explicitly how
the French cultural invasion is unwelcome and unfitting, and then
France needs to leave people hell alone, which is basically
like this, um, kind of pushing for a protectorate instead
(38:30):
of direct colonial administration. This is not a positive I'm
not being like, this is good. This is what she's doing. Yeah,
I know. Those those are like published writings that she
was she was getting out at the time, a lot
of them. Yes, Um, some of it is, right, I'm
conflating a little bit of what she's writing in her
diaries and what she's writing in the papers at that point.
But the stuff she's writing about daily life and how
(38:51):
French French culture invasion is unwelcome, that is for papers, right,
And then she's part of this and after a few
months she's like, Nope, that doesn't fucking work. She sees
that the peaceably conquered people go through life without spark
in their eyes, when they have fear behind their eyes.
And she's like, oh, this isn't better. I love her,
(39:15):
I know, I know. So she stops writing propaganda. She
probably stops spying for the French. You know, there's there's
some case to be made that at various points she's
probably providing information in a double agent way of various ways,
but she wouldn't have written about it. So yeah, and
she was, she was. She was trying to trying to
(39:38):
pay the bills too. Yeah, absolutely, and she was like hounded,
but you know who else hounded her? Her new dog.
She has a new dog. This dog's name You just
made a hounded joke because it's a dog, Margaret. So
(39:59):
at this point point she goes back to doing again
what she loves, wandering around doing journalism and adventure. She's
sick about half the time. At this point, she gets
a bout after a bout of malaria, and at this
point she has syphilis, which is you know, sounds real bad. Yeah,
she hasn't she hasn't seen her husband about eight months
(40:19):
she's cheating on him, he's cheating on her. It is
not happy polyamory. She's going behind his back. At one
point earlier, when she's like being faithful to him, she
like thinks about fucking this guy and tells her husband like,
I'm thinking about sucking this guy, and her husband is like,
I'm gonna murder you, and then myself for even having
(40:41):
thought that, And then the two of them, I know
it was really healthy relationship. And then the two of
them go out into the desert drunk with a handgun
and decided to kill kill themselves together, but instead they
stay up late telling stories and drinking more and then
wake up hungover and grab the gun and go home
and then here like finding it for a while. That's healthy.
(41:05):
It's a little, you know, romantic date with your heart.
About the dog, first of all, yeah, so we don't
know very much about him. Had long black hair, and
he was possibly he was a long dog. It might
be the way. Was he like a was he a
docks in? What's happening do we know? I don't know.
I don't know. She's traveling around mostly on horseback, so
(41:27):
I like to imagine she either has like a lap dog.
That's like riding adventure for dogs. Oh I would love
that for her. Okay, that's what she has. What's his name? Anything?
I can't I couldn't find it. I only found the
old dog's name. I also didn't find out what happened
to the old dog or the new dog. People just
don't talk about. It's maddening. We need to go back
(41:48):
and just do a cool dogs of history where we
learned about the dog. I like that. I'm down. So
so her husband is like, I'm writing you a letter
to say I found someone else. That's chill, all right, Okay,
I know now, to be fair, she's just fucking people
and not telling him, I think, But actually I'm not
(42:10):
entirely certain because what did he say? Why do I
feel like it's going to be mad rude? Oh well,
it gets welcome to the okay anyway. Um, So she's
trying to go around doing her thing. She's like wandering
and has a puppy and it's like, yeah, I know,
I know, but she's getting too sick, and so she's
(42:33):
laid up in a military hospital in the south the country.
She writes slimming. She says, I miss you who I'm sick,
please come, basically, and there's nothing like illness to make
us appreciate our sickness and health partners. So Sliman packs
his bags and he heads off to take care of
his wife. Maybe he at least goes there. We know
that he goes there. They meet up, she discharges herself
(42:56):
from the hospital, and they talk about their future, and
she's like, babe, I got a fast car, fast enough
to get us away from here. They talked about their
future and how she's got a book waiting with a
publisher in France, and how that she's just going to
get some money as soon as it it sells. This
is a lie. She's finished the book, but it's currently
the manuscript is like in an urn in her house
(43:18):
or something. But she just wanted to start. I need
to start. I need to get an urn to keep
all my unfinished songs in YEA good idea, actually, yeah.
And you'll see why that is materially important soon. So
it's possible that he came down there to reunite, and
it's possibly came down to break up, and we'll never know.
(43:41):
The very next day, quote Slimmon, we were on the
balcony of my room, on the first floor. Suddenly there's
a roar, like the procession of wagons. It came nearer.
People ran by, shouting the waddy, the waddy. Waddy is
a usually dry riverbed, like a seasonal run. I didn't understand.
The weather was calm, there was no rain, no storm.
In a minute, the water came down the riverbed, rising
(44:02):
up like a wall, running like a galloping horse, at
least two ms high, dragging along trees, furniture, bodies of
animals and men. I saw the danger and we fled.
The torrent caught us up in it. How did I
get out? I have no idea. My wife was carried
away and searchers found her body beneath the stairs the
(44:22):
next day. Most likely she'd run down the stairs trying
to get out of the house and out of the way,
only to be overpowered by the water and drowned inside
the house. Some of her friends believed that she used
the opportunity as a convenient suicide. Slimans count was a lie.
She hadn't been carried away by the flood. Um it
(44:44):
looks suspicious. Years earlier, you know, threatened to kill her,
and I think some of her friends were also on
a like you know. No one knows what happened in
those brief moments. She was buried in the nearby cemetery
and Muslim fashion under a white a white sheet. She
was twenty seven years old. Salaman did not go to
the funeral. He left immediately. It was her friends who
(45:07):
looked after her funeral and her literary estate. An editor,
the editor who kind of liked her from previous compiled
her writings into a novel which was not entirely faithful
to the manuscript, and he rewrote a lot of it
because a lot of it was gone. This is a
different one than the manuscript that was So they found
the manuscripts and a bunch of writing in this urn,
(45:28):
and some of it had survived the flood. That's why
you should keep your songs in a in an urn.
So this editor puts out this book called In the
Warm Shadow of Islam. It was a bestseller in France.
Biographer and Net Quebec describes it like this quote. This
desert andrew gene Amazon and the Sahara nomad with the
Heart of Gold appealed to what has been called Europe's
(45:49):
collective daydream of the Orient. In the same way, that T. E.
Lawrence T. H. Lawrence did to the British psyche later,
and for similar reasons, both appeared sexually and politically equip cable.
Both their conquests of exotic territories seemed to speak of
more private inner conquests, intriguing to the industrial mind. Both,
perhaps by quote going native, served to appease the rumblings
(46:12):
of guilt amongst the colonial powers. Both were perfect symbols
of escapism for armchair romantics or for people who had
been comprehensively compromised in their lives and wished they had not.
And frankly, I think that's who she still is um
in a lot of how she's understood, and that's what
this episode flirts with in ways that I've been trying
to figure out how to navigate. Is this romanticization, you know,
(46:35):
And she romanticized the ship out of her life. Sliman
died three years later, laid low by friend of the
pod tuberculosis AH. When Algeria wanteds independence in nineteen sixty two,
they had nothing nice to say about their colonizers. This
was not a like you know. They systematically went through
and renamed all the streets that were named after French assholes,
(46:56):
uh and Europeans in general. They left only four, including Shakespeare,
who I guess wasn't really implicated in colonialism, and Isabel
ebber Heart. Even I know, even the French Algerian Albert
Camu was erased by the newly free country, but eber
Heart remained. That's that's saying a lot. Yeah, that's what
(47:17):
I know about Isabella eber Heart. A complicated person who
lived their best life as best they could and did
not fucking compromise on trying to live their best life.
She died so young, it's shocking, and I wonder, you
(47:39):
know how much she like what we can blame on
the culture at the time and what we can blame
on her in terms of orientalism, Like maybe she was
just like I got to be a little orientalist to like,
you know, get might get the story and the paper
(48:02):
and maybe that'll you know, help do an anti colonialism
or you know, like I'm like you you have to
just work with the culture that you're given at the
time in order, if you know, especially if you're in
the limelight the way she was, and she was using
her shred of celebrity purposefully. Now you're right, And I
(48:27):
think that's something that gets left out of it too, right,
is that you know, even like her her compromising attitude
towards colonialism in a later part of her life was
like seems to be coming from her experiences from like
her husband and the Sufi brotherhood that she was part of,
you know. And so it seems entirely possible because overall, um,
(48:49):
that I've been able to find, it seems like she
has a very positive overall conception from an anti colonial
point of view, and specifically the work that her work
did to get Europeans to understand what was harmful about
what was happening in North Africa, you know. Um. And like,
I'm focusing so much on her life right now, and
(49:10):
I like didn't focus nearly as much on her writing
because it's like a harder thing to tell a compelling
story in the in the audio medium. But yeah, now
that's that's such a good point. Yeah, she's using her
her bit of celebrity everywhere she can for both keeping
herself alive as best as she can and also pushing
for the things that she cares about, which is of
(49:33):
the cultural autonomy of North Africa and a lot of UM.
And I mean, you know, her celebrity was um was
extremely uh minimal. Yeah, and she was she was doing
what you know, it was mostly scandal. It was like tabloid. Yeah.
(49:55):
And then people used her in a million different ways
after she died, Like there's so many, especially for the
next couple of decades. There were so many like plays
about her life and stuff that would like create this,
I create her as an icon rather than a person,
you know, mm hmm. And I completely get it. Yeah. Oh,
(50:16):
she also probably died stoned, which is probably a nicer
way to die. I forgot that part. Yeah, I don't know.
I just remember that die the way that she died
for sure. Yeah, sounds terrifying, it really does. On that
uplifting note. Do we have any plugables, Yeah, I want
(50:36):
to talk about my new book raw Dog, I wrote
under a pseudonym nom de gear I've been using called
Jamie Loftus. And people should go out and pre order
this book. It's about hot dogs, a lifelong something that
you eat all the time. Margaret, that's true. Um, but yeah,
(50:57):
so go out and pre order Jamie. Absolutely preord Rod
by Jamie Loftus in You can also pre order Margaret's
book Escape from Insult Island just got a memorable title,
each Other's Plugs, Yeah, which actually Jolly wrote under my
name is kind of weird. Yeah, Julie, is there anything
(51:18):
that you would like Lukes just to know? Um, I am.
My next studio record is coming together. I am, and
it's going to be called Haunted Mountain. And my friend
Buck Meek, who's in Big Thief, is also putting out
a record called Haunted Mountain at the same time, which
(51:39):
I think is hilarious. And we we co wrote a
bunch of songs together and they sound a little like this.
Oh that's worth the shot. I was just trying to
put you on the spot. That reminds me of like
people in the airport it and they're like, you're gonna
(52:01):
gonna flue their guitar for us. Yeah, alright, it's where
the shot? And where can people follow you on socials?
Julie Holland Music on Instagram and Twitter? Awesome, We appreciate
you coming on. Yeah, thanks for thanks for having me.
It was great to get this storytelling about Isabel ever
(52:27):
Heart of Close And seriously, if you haven't heard it,
go check out the song old Fashioned morphine. It is
one of the best accepting that the world is doomed
and it's fine songs that exist. And it's possibly where
I first heard of Visible Our Heart and it's by
Julie Holland. I love your I love your analysis and
the song your artistic. You know that's all that. Yeah,
(52:51):
they like you know, the world's almost done. Whatever bucket.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. M
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
podcast that doesn't have a tagline because the tagline is
in the title. I'm your host. Margaret Keljoy with me
today is an absolutely fantastic musician, the one and only
Julie Holland. Julie, how are you? I am utterly thrilled
to be here with you. Yeah, I'm glad you're here.
(00:21):
Our producer Sophie, who is better known for her work
as a dog mom to one of the two best
dogs in the world. So are I three best dogs
in the world? Anderson Huh, yep, that's Sophie. No notes. Yeah, Julian,
What's I wrote in the script? Do you have any pets?
But before we started, we we made this clear, but
do you want to introduce the listeners to your pet?
(00:44):
The dog? The dog in my life is His name
is Jocko. He's not named after Jocko Pastorius. He's named
after the werewolf cartoon character that Michael Hurley has drawn
for a number of decades. He's that Jocko. I do
not know either Jocko. So it was like it was like,
(01:05):
Margaret's not gonna go any of that. But that's great.
He's a nice dog though I'm very, very very handsome boy.
He's very beautiful. I love him and our audio engineers Ian.
Our theme music was written for us by a woman.
This episode is part two of a two part series
(01:27):
is about ever Heart a k Ahmad Sadi. If you
haven't listened to part one, not only will none of
this makes sense, but I will be personally not not mad,
just disappointed. I really thought we'd raised you better than that.
Ah where we last left her hero, she just fled
Algeria because she may or may not have hit a
cop with a sword. She goes back to the villa.
(01:50):
Dad is despondent but the death of his long term partner,
which is a reasonable position for him to be in,
and then her brother Vladimir has an even worse time
because his trader brother Nicholas tries to abduct him. His
brother with a bunch of Russian spies shows up and says,
I own you body and soul, and you're coming with me,
(02:11):
and Vladimir refuses. He wants to hang out with at
the villa and work on cactuses. That's super scary and
it's kind of he's kind of broken by the experience.
He starts losing track of what's happening. He just sobs
in his room until one day, not too long after,
he decides to get a head start on Sylvia Plath
and puts his head in the guess oven and dies.
(02:33):
Her father Doubly despondent writes a letter to a friend saying,
my cactiphile is dead because Vladimir was the kid who
took after his dad's love of cactuses or dads. And
she's alone in the villa now and she's caring for
alien and aging father. It is not nice times. She
almost marries this like Turkish diplomat guy, but he gets
(02:53):
really needy and started acting like he owns her. So
she's like, no, I'm good, I'm not marrying you. And
her dad is real his throat cancer from the smoking.
I don't know if you knew this, but smoking is
actually not good for you. It's actually bad for your health.
Despite all of the cigarette ads that we run on
this show, I don't think we get cigaretted at the
(03:16):
idea of getting cancer back in those days is so terrifying. Yeah,
I mean it's ter it's terrifying now. Yeah. Yeah, So
he gets his affairs in order, like, he arranges money
as best as he can for his his remaining kids,
the two who aren't traders, and he leaves really detailed
(03:36):
instructions for how to take care of his cactuses, and
then he dies of throat cancer. Some people say that
Isabelle poisoned him, but if she did, which I don't
think is true, it was to end his suffering. The
people at the time who said she poisoned him were
the Russian siblings who are conspiring against her an anarchy
dad in order to try and get the money from
the estate. Basically, yeah, so they're just they're just talking shit. Yeah, yeah,
(04:02):
And I wouldn't put it past this Russian nihilist to
be like, isabel bring me my murder pill or whatever,
you know. I don't know. Yeah, I've had family, friends
and hospice, and that's that's a not an unlikely story. Yeah,
(04:25):
so Isabel's like, well, fuck it, back to adventuring. It
is possible that at this point she steals a hundred
forty thousand Swiss francs from the villa in order to
keep keep it from falling into the hands of her
Russian half siblings. I don't actually think she did, but
it's like part of what they allege against her, along
with like poisoning Dad. It's like stealing a hundred forty
(04:46):
thousand francs or whatever, which I couldn't figure out how
to convert the modern money. It's a bunch of money.
So she gets dressed up in her best men's clothes.
She takes off her tunis the capital Tunisia, which is
also now a French territory after they stole it from
the Ottomans who stole from the people who lived there.
She dives right into hanging out with sales. She does
what she does best. She gets there, She hangs out
(05:07):
with sailors. She focks who she wants to funk. She
does what she wants to do. She dresses as a man,
and she demands a society view her and treat as
a man. But she's not actually disguising her sex or
to use just to use more modern terms for gender.
And how old is she at this point? Yeah, the
stuff in her life happens fast. Like at one point
(05:32):
in this I'm just like, wait, what she's only like
twenty four? When is her? I don't know anyway, Yeah,
and she's sort of a trust fund kid like for
the best possible reason, which is that her dad robbed
her granddad. But she's still a rich kid who wants
to go live in a colonial land. So she rents
a nice house on a hill. She gets a dog
named a Dale, a black spaniel, and she hires a servant,
(05:55):
a seventy five year old local woman. And at this
point she's really just living as a man, at least
in her public life. See Mahma Sati is his name.
As far as we could tell, it's not that people
believe she was a man. It's not like people thought
she had a dick under her robes. And it gets
into this ship that like, as we were talking about
a little bit last time. Generally speaking, the Muslim world
is a better place to be gender deviant and sexually
(06:17):
deviant than Europe. For an awful lot of history, including
probably this period, none of it maps easily to our
current definitions of sexuality and gender. Europe had its own
conceptions of the time. Homosexuality and heterosexuality were both coined
and starting to be understood around this time as codified things.
The Ottoman Empire had its own thing going on, which
I think I'm not an expert about this to find
(06:39):
things more by acts than identity, So like it worked
for Machma to just be mahmad. She wasn't cross dressing,
she was just dressing. And within European conceptions, she might
not have been gay because she was sucking men, possibly exclusively,
although she did go to Brothels to hang out as
an observer at various points, whereas the Arab world's time
and contrast was kind of like, look, I don't want
(06:59):
to be rude, and she says she's a man, so
I guess I'll call her a man. This politeness, in
this attitude of taking people as they asked to be taken,
it sees her well for the rest of her life,
which is frankly how my my grandparents generation has tended
to handle my transness. And I don't know it works
for me. Sometimes it's nicer than all the like fucking
around about specifics. If I was going to force her
into a modern category might be gender fluid historians want
(07:20):
to work really hard to make her like be actually
sis by just and just pretending to be a man
for safety, but that it absolutely goes against what she said.
But at the same time, she also was not, by
any modern conception trans masculine or a trans man. She
referred constantly to herself also as a woman. She would
refer to herself as both at a regular I don't know,
(07:40):
whenever she would want to. People also wonder this is
the promised what types of sex did she have? Segment?
People also wonder how she never got pregnant. And there
are two main guests people present. First, she might not
have been biologically capable. There's like so many I'm not
even like even ruder than conjecturing about like how she fucked.
(08:01):
I think it's conjecturing about like her body and how
it presented and stuff about fertility. So I'm not going
to get into that. People have various ideas about how
she didn't have periods maybe or something I don't know whatever.
Won't get into that. And Second, she might just not
have been really into penis and vagina sex, like maybe
PIV wasn't her thing. There's this uh presentation that at
(08:23):
least was held by at least a historian. I read
that Anal was very popular in the Muslim world in
comparison to the European world, because Europe was super fucking
conservative at that time. I can come up with a
lot of ways to fuck that don't get you pregnant,
but that's one of them. Anyway, God bless historians and
(08:43):
pop historians, every single one of us were sitting around
and trying to figure out if c. Machmasai liked anal
you all went away in or should we just move on? Yeah,
that's the that's their business, and good for her. I
feel like you said all the words magpie. Yeah. So
(09:09):
she's running out of money and she fox off from
Tunisia back to Algeria because she misses the desert. She
wanders poor as funk around the desert hanging. This is
like the quintessential thing that she's now going to do
every now and then for the rest of her life.
She wanders around, poor as funk around the desert. The
whole trust fund kid thing is starting to run out
real fast. She's hanging out with the different tribes there,
(09:30):
and her passport there is that she's devout. People accept her.
She stays up late talking about Islam. She becomes probably
the first European to really wander much of those areas
on encumbered and accepted because she's not trying to show
up as an outsider, but as a Muslim, and people
saw and respected that. It's really fascinating. And this whole
time she's writing about it for European audience, which is
(09:52):
like everything about everything about her life. You can see
in a bunch of different ways. First, she's tying into
the orientalist fad that's running across Europe and is making
her money from it. But she's also laying down the
groundword for an anti colonialism and starting up support for
seeing these colonized people as people, not as this fantastic other.
And her relationship with anti colonialism is it's actually more
(10:13):
consistent than her gender, but not not a lot more consistent.
She's sucking a drinking and smoking how she's the whole
time and just living her best life. It sucks up
her health real bad. And as like a journalist observer role,
she starts working sometimes with the colonial government. She spends
two months helping tax collectors go around and rob the locals,
(10:35):
just to sort of see how it's done, but also
participating in it directly. It's like her job. They round
up all the people who haven't paid their taxes and
they all come into the public square, and she like
reads off the list of names um as the debtors
or either imprisoned or forced to give up more of
their stuff, So we could read her as like an
embedded journalist or as complicit, right, And I think either
(10:59):
reading is fair, frankly, and I think it will continue
to be complicated in a lot of different ways. And
she goes back and forth between Europe and North Africa
all the time to check on her remaining brother, Augustine,
the black sheep, who did the drugs but didn't have fun.
He's married now his new wife does not like Isabelle
ever heart. It's like this lady is a bad influence
(11:21):
on you, which is probably true. And to try and
sell the old villa, which she still couldn't do because
of the family conspiracy, is contesting the will and all
that ship. Everything is falling into ruins, and it's becoming
a pretty potent symbol of how you can't go back
to childhood. She writes about this a lot. She like
goes and sees, you know, her father and her brother's
grave and things like that. Eventually, the villa sells to
(11:46):
exactly zero fanfare because lawyer fees and ship means she
makes negative money off of it. Like in the end,
she walks away with negative sixty francs from the sale
of the villa. But then something positive happens in her life.
She makes her way back to South Algeria, to the desert,
and for the first time in her life, she falls
(12:06):
in love. She falls in love with this Algerian soldier
named slee Men And this is politically messy. He is
from a family of trader cops, local folks who wore
high up for the French colonial police, and he himself
is basically a trader. He's in the French colonial government military, sorry,
French colonial army. She tries to keep the relationship a secret,
(12:30):
I think honestly because she doesn't want to be associated
with the French military. But he like runs around and
brags to all of his army buddies and so like
everyone knows, and he's in a cavalry. So every night,
and it's a very kind of sweet. Every night he
comes over to her place and with borrowed horses and
they ride off and make love in the desert and
then come back at dawn. And then once again she
(12:51):
keeps calling herself poor. She moves into a big, old
fancy house in the city allowed that has multiple servants,
or she gets multi servants of this house. But once
again I can't tell what to make of this, because
probably she's just poor by rich European lady standards, not
by like people who are from these poor colonized places standards.
(13:12):
But there's this stories about how her and her boyfriend
and her servants all like together as friends close out
the bar every night in the area, like are just
like going out and partying all together, and so this
like servant thing might have been as much like a
way to like give her friends like jobs in a
place to crash and not actually like making them be servant.
(13:34):
I don't know. It's hard to read it. And part
of why it's hard to read, right, she has amazing
security culture left over from her anarchist days, and it's
why we only know a tiny portion of the political
intrigue she was part of. She like constantly left politically
involved figures out of her writing, so she's like writing
about a bunch of people. If someone there is like
(13:58):
up to no good in a way she approves of,
she doesn't write about him. And one colonial administrator, he's
doing his due diligence about her when she's like comes
to an area one colonial administrator who's doing his due
diligence about her and then soon spying on her and
following her referred to hers still involved actively in the
socialist and feminist movements um in Europe and I believe
(14:18):
also in North Africa. So we literally don't know if
she ever stopped rolling with the anarchists and the socialists
and show when she had the chance, because she wouldn't
have written about it if she did. But well into
being a die hard Muslim who writes only about how
it Islam is the only thing she'd be willing to
spill her blood for. She clearly still has some affinity
for her old revolutionary roots or her other revolutionary roots.
(14:42):
She writes this one short story, for example, about a
group of Russian anarchists with one christ who one of
the anarchists christ like accepts the punishment for all the
crimes of all of his friends and he's sent into
Siberia and exile, but he's like not to be pitied
because he is instead living a holy life as a
as a martyr, and drawing comparison between anarchism and religion
(15:04):
and a favorable light, which I feel like kind of
sums up a lot of how her politics and her
political understanding is moving. Well. I mean, I even I
mean I remember like hearing Emma Goldman talk about that
like like using like religious language. So I mean, I
just don't I don't understand how you could even say
(15:26):
certain things without religious language, especially at the time. Yeah, no, totally.
I mean we we talked about martyrs all the time, right,
and like that's religious language, you know. Um, But I
love hearing how the Kurds talk about they're they're martyrs
like in it, and it seems it seems very secularized
(15:50):
and it's very like direct and it's not like this
one guy. It's like everyone who has fallen in defense
of this area is as a martyr. Yeah. Now it's
really interesting. I hadn't. Yeah, So she's living possibly a
double life, not just between being Shamasati and Isabel eleber Heart,
(16:12):
but between being a colonial reporter and working sometimes with
the resistance. Or maybe that's what I want her to
have you been doing, because I always want her to
be doing the right thing. But none of us do
the right thing except Sophie and Anderson. So and her
involvement in anti colonialism is tape ring off at this point.
Her boyfriend, the imperial stooge of a soldier. He's part
(16:34):
of this, but she does Okay, I think this actually
explains it better. He's part of the Sufi Brotherhood, the Kataria,
the Kadari Brotherhood, and the Sufi's. They're kind of the
esoteric or mystical side of Islam. The Kataria had been
around since the eleven hundreds, there may be the oldest order,
and they're decentralized, with each group determining their own practices.
(16:54):
For the most part, one of my best friends as
a Sufi. Okay, awesome, and they're really into the Catteria,
are really into the personal connection between the person and
God and are opposed to the large institutions and governments
and Orthodoxy and all that ship that disconnect people from God.
It's not a surprise that this child of anarchists ends
up with them. And for the most part, the Sufi
(17:19):
orders have been like peace and love throughout history, but
sometimes you got to get an anti colonialism done. There's
this guy. I hope he gets his own episode one day,
because I want to know more about him. Basically I
like leave these like almost like notes to myself of
being like I want to know more about this person,
but since I have to write a new episode every
single week, I don't write and read any history that
isn't directly related to what I'm working on. Thank you,
(17:40):
thank you for your service. Um. This guy's name is
is Abdalkator and he's the leader of the Kataria at
the beginning of the French colonial rule, and for years
he led held a modern military at bay with the
lusiffiliation of tribes people. They hold huge ton of the
country for a long ass time. And the whole time
(18:00):
he did it, he's fucking on it about human rights
of his Christian enemies. He allows religious freedom for the POWs.
He goes down in history. Is like basically like the
guy who was best to the people he captured in war,
even decades after he lost. He intervened directly at great
personal risk during an anti Christian riot and the city
of Damascus, sheltering people in his home with his kids,
(18:22):
roaming out roaming the streets, saving more people's lives. And
he wasn't the only Sufi at the forefront of anti colonialism.
Sufie's were involved all over North Africa and South Asia.
But this is the leader of the Kataria for a
huge trunk of the nineteenth century. But by the turn
of the century, the Katia are in this position where
they decide that they are begrudgingly accepting French rule because
(18:44):
they believe that it will be temporary and they just
have to outlast it, and that being an open revolt
against it is a bad idea. Yeah, they wanted to
they wanted to avoid more bloodshed. Yeah. Basically this is
the attitude that Isabelle is working with two greater and
lesser degrees for the rest of her life. She's fighting
for autonomy and holding onto Islam and cultural values while
(19:04):
without trying to specifically overthrow the French government. And occasionally
she works to further the French government because a lot
of times when people want to avoid further bloodshed and
like seek peace, they do so by working with her enemies,
you know. Historically, Yeah, I could almost be seen like
her moving towards a liberal stance. Yeah, and like a
(19:26):
but it's interesting because she doesn't come across it as
like she's not getting into it as like this, like
European liberal woman who has calmed down. She's like learning
it from this Sufi brotherhood that she joins. Even though
brotherhood is in the name, the order she joins Kataria
is open to any Muslim man over the age of eighteen,
(19:46):
and they know she's not technically a man. They don't care.
There's a few other women in the ranks of the
brotherhood at this point, as daughters and widows who have
inherited some status within the organization. I'm unsure whether other
women had been directly initiated or whether they had only
kind of inherited their way in, but so's it's either
they were like, whatever, we don't care that you're a woman,
or they're like, what will you car yourself a man?
So fuck it and so cool, I know. And the
(20:10):
thing that's unprecedented about her joining isn't her gender, it's
that she's the European. She doesn't write much about her Sufism.
It's part of I think this whole security culture thing,
and that ship was secret, so no one quite knows
how important it was to her. It was obviously very
important to her, and she writes about some of it right,
but it she kind of leaves it out of a
lot of including her diaries and ship. Have either of
(20:33):
y'all been to a mosque ever? I have not. My
Sufi friend took me to the Women's Mosque of America
and it was like one of the loveliest times I've
ever had in any kind of religious setting. It was
so beautiful. And I was raised in a really stupid cult,
so I hate religious stuff, like even like my parents,
(20:55):
my poor dumb parents met as as like Joe's witness
and like I so like I've had to like work
really hard to like heal from that experience and like
all this like family trauma around that, and like going
to the mosque was the loveliest religious experience I've ever had.
(21:18):
It was called the Women's Mosque of America. Very peaceful,
beautiful place. There are a lot of women who were
raised in the Nation of Islam and came back to
regular Islam, and it was just like it was so
it was such a diverse environment. It was so it
was so cool, and it didn't feel religiously to me,
(21:41):
like it it felt just like people trying to support
each other in living a good life. Yeah, I mean
that makes sense. That's like one of the main things
that religious institutions like are capable of being used for,
and a lot of ways come from uh, you know
what else is capable of No, I don't really have
(22:04):
anything good here, um, but we're going to interrupt you're
listening to make you press the forward button probably six
or seven times on your podcast listen to app because
advertisers until you here on woman again. Yeah, and we're back. Yeah.
(22:27):
Actually that's the I feel like that's one of the
most important parts of the musical cue in the podcast
is so that you know where to stop. Literally. I
I had people that were like, no, I don't really
want to have music ad person. I was like, yeah,
you do. It's part of the listeners quality of life.
So these are some of the happiest days of her life.
(22:51):
She's participating in cool mystical secret rites. She's living with
her drug buddies and our servants. She's sick a lot,
and her boyfriend Sliman is sick a lot too. And
I feel like this often gets left out of stories
of adventurers, is that like, actually, like not everyone's like
fully able bodied at all times as they do these things,
you know, and they go ahead and get married at
this point, although religiously and not legally because Muslim weddings
(23:13):
are not enough for the French authorities. But she marries him,
and she makes it clear that she is not his servant,
and she says as much. She's more his brother Mahmud
than then she is his wife and servant. And yeah,
remember how her dad was involved in a plot to
funk up the Russian royalty and how that keeps catching
(23:33):
up with her. They come back, Yeah, what happened? They
hold a grudge. Uh, fucking Russian aristocracy. You gotta get
it done. He got he can't let him come after you.
They have the means. Yeah, so the Russian conspirators, probably
(23:55):
her brother Nicholas, write a letter to the colonial authorities,
being like, isabel Leberhard is a fucking spy who hates France.
This might be true, it might not be true. And
she totally killed Alexander Trofinowski in order to steal his
money and keep it from the rightful airs. That's the
that's the real black sheep of the family right there. Yeah, yeah, totally.
(24:19):
And it's like possible that she stole some money from
the estate, but I don't care at all. But it is.
It's not good that her reputation in the crimes of
the family are catching up with her. Slamanez transferred pretty
much just a funk with them, the two of them
to a frontier city called Botana, and she decides to
(24:39):
go with him, but first some worship happens. This isn't
anod transition, it's just an assassination attempt. She's hanging out
with some of her fellow sufi's working to translate a
letter for someone in January when a fucking dude with
a fucking saber hits her three times with a goddamn sword,
once on the head and twice on her arm, and
(25:01):
she survives. She actually jumps up and tries to go
for a sword on the wall, but the blow to
her head had her fucked up and she collapsed. The
assassin gets away and he yells basically like I'm gonna
go get a gun and finish her off. That's my paraphrase.
Pretty quickly, I believe that seems like a direct quote.
I'm on board. I mean, it's it's it's pretty it's
(25:22):
pretty direct, just vernacularly changed. He's like, I will go
get a gun and return and finish this job pretty quickly.
They figure out that it was someone from a rival
Sufi brotherhood that t Janaya. Oh no, he's caught and
he's cut because the head of her Sufi order goes
to the head of that Sufi order and it's like,
(25:42):
if you don't give this dude up, it's gonna be
really bad. It's just gonna be really bad. And so
they gave him up. He gets caught and he says
God told him to kill her. Meanwhile, Isabel, her hand
is almost severed from her wrist. It's like cut through
the bone. Fucking hell yeah. The blow to her head
(26:03):
wounded up like negligible because a washing line had deflected
the full of the blow, and she recovers. She spends
four weeks in the hospital, but she's never able to
bend her arm at the elbow again. I think that's
where the third blow got her. Almost certainly the guy
had been sent by the colonial administration to kill her.
The administration immediately after the attempt puts in motion a
(26:24):
campaign of slander, specifically that she had been fucking the
head of the Sufi order. Almost certainly she hadn't been
in this particular time, and as soon as she gets
out of the hospital, she rides off to Batten not
to reunite with with with her boyfriend. Clement says he
wants to marry her legally this time, but the commanding
officer disallows it for quote reasons, I won't tell you,
(26:47):
so yeah. In May, they just straight up kick her
out of the country. They don't want her, They're too
much trouble. So she goes to Marseilles to live with
her brother Augustine, but as a lever heart, you just
don't she doesn't stay down. As soon as she's in France,
she starts writing more again and getting published, and she
starts politicking really hard for two ends. One she wants
(27:10):
Lament transferred to Tunisia, and two to get it so
that she can marry him legally, which involves like basically
like writing all these high up people being like, I'm
not so bad after, I'll let me marry my boyfriend. Meanwhile,
her assassin goes on trial and she's allowed back into
Algeria For the trial. Everyone wants her to dress up
(27:31):
as a European woman instead of a Muslim man because
she'll get more sympathy and ship right, and she comes
up with this compromise. She's like, I'll dress up as
a European man, but she doesn't want to dress up
as a woman. But in the end, and this is
left out of some of the faster versions of people
telling her story, she dresses as a Muslim woman. In
the end, she decides it's the safest thing because she
(27:54):
wants to keep the cross dressing out of the trial
as much as possible, Like in case his defenses, she
was cross dressing, so I had to kill her. Yeah,
which when he was put on the stand was his defense.
She was cross dressing, so I had to kill her. Oh,
I mean, this is it's kind of shades of Joan
of Arc a little bit Joan of ARC's trial. I
(28:17):
haven't done the Joan of Arc episode yet. I've been
really looking forward to it, so I only know the
like cliffs notes of Joan of Arc. M she I
mean she you know, she dressed as a man in battle.
And also some people say as like to somehow to
protect herself from being sexually assaulted in jail, but she
(28:40):
was convicted by the court for for a cross dressing.
Never change, anti transpigoted society has never change in her
politicking she makes about the trial. She makes one thing
clear in the papers. She was not has never been
(29:00):
a Christian, She has not been baptized. This was not
an act of Muslim barbarism against a good Christian woman.
And more importantly so it basically she's working to make
sure that this trial doesn't play into Araba phobia. Awesome,
and in clever ways she manages to avoid saying it
(29:20):
was the French government that tried to murder me. But
she said it was the French government that tried to
murder me, like in all of the like weird politic
e ways where you're like everyone knows that's what she's
trying to say, but she does it and like covers
all of her bases because she's sucking smart. Did she
was she covering her head in court? I don't know
the answer to that. I know in general she shaved
(29:42):
her head and like most of the time war a Fez.
I don't know about her specific court clothes amazing, but yeah,
she hasn't had hair in a long time. But I
suppose if she and she comes up as an as
a Muslim woman, so probably so why we think why
I think that this assassin had been sent by the
French government. The French government was like really eager to
(30:05):
funk over this assassin. Whether they hired him or not,
it's and it's possible that he had been wanting to
kill her as a front against Islam, but it's more
likely been paid to by the French. He had gone
on a trip to the city without any money and
come back with a bunch of spending cash shortly before
the murder, and thirty years later a colonial official who
liked Isabelle dug more into it. But all of the
(30:26):
relevant records had been quote eaten by rats, and so
basically there's a cover episode as all this happened. Yeah,
but even some evidence of some blood money. Even though
this was their guy. The French government wanted to pin
the assassin as a religious zealot and make him useful
in a crackdown in Islam, so he was found guilty
(30:48):
and he was sentenced to a life of hard labor.
During the trial, the French also decided to give Isabelle
her formal year band forever from Algeria letter. She was
allowed to keep the sword he'd tried to kill her with,
though as a moment and she held onto it for
the rest of her life. She's like, you know if
I'm like, yeah, that's saber, that's the saber that dude
(31:10):
try to kill me. As soon as she leaves the court,
it's like fucking rules. As soon as she leaves the court,
she sets about on a campaign for amnesty for her assassin.
It works, and she gets his sentence knocked down to
a ten years instead of life of hard labor. And
at this point she's like starts her anti colonialism is
(31:32):
shifting yet again. At this point, she's like trying to
prove that Muslims are just as smart and capable of Christians.
And she wanted slamin her husband to rise in the
ranks of the very In her letters, she's like, rise
in the ranks of the very same agencies to whom
we owe our misery and become learned and read the
classics and ship. And she's kind of losing me with
that strategy. But well, she got into everyone in her
(31:54):
family that's left. It's just her and her brother, well
besides the two that don't count their destitute at this point,
like they're pawning their fucking clothes is they're like, sorry, coat,
we need food. More, she gets a job as a
dock worker, even with her fucked up arm and translating letters,
and she's still away from her husband. Meanwhile, Sliman he
(32:16):
gets acquainted with old friend of the pod tuberculosis. He
gets laid up in the hospital and takes a while
to recover, and Isabelle is out of her mind with worry.
She's like, if he dies, I'm going to throw myself
into babbyl and die too. Finally, he shows up in
France and they're allowed to get married. She's succeeded at
all of her politicking. She puts on a black wig
(32:38):
and a blue dress. Marrying him in white would obviously
be a lie, and they tie the knot, and there's
like why she marries an address It like might have
to do with kind of this, Like yeah, yeah, yeah.
The whole point of this is to like, we're already
married in the eyes of God. This is just inst
that the eyes of the French government let us be
married so I can get the funk back to North Africa.
(32:59):
You know, was marrying in a white dress of thing
at the time, because I know that's kind of kind
of modern, like when is this happening? This is nineteen
o one and it is presented in the book. I
read that she specifically was like I believed it would
be scandalous, like there would be like people would be
talking about her if she married in white because everyone
(33:22):
would know that it's not true, and so she I
think she wrote about it. I think that's who we
have it from, is that she wrote about not wanting
to cause a stir or whatever, which doesn't sound like her.
But she's calming down. She's getting pretty old at this point.
She is twenty four years old. Good lord, like I
thought I had an adventurous early like adulthood. No. Absolutely.
(33:51):
A few months later, her husband's terms of service or
up and he gets the funk out of the military
and the two moved to Algiers into some sheep apartments.
She's starts wandering around cafes again by herself. This is
like kind of and she's already writing her in her diary,
but she's kind of bored and annoyed by her husband.
She starts working more again as a writer. She hadn't
really stopped, but she had a lag in her career
(34:12):
because a writer um was like perceived as like to
like uneducated and essentially proletarian by like like bougie socialists basically,
but which is like there's some irony, right, and also
at the same time it wasn't quite revolutionary enough because
she's just writing about daily life in Africa. But the
French authorities are fucking terrified her and her writing, and
(34:35):
they follow around constantly, like it's been several years now
at this point that she's just always tailed everywhere she
goes around living her life. It's like part of how
everyone knows the blow by blow of like what she
did and where she went. You know, yeah, this is
really impressive. Eventually she meets an editor who loves her work,
who also loves Russian socialism and nihilism and anarchism, althoughays
(34:56):
much more reformist than revolutionary himself, which honestly sounds like
about style at the time. And they hit it off
at the very least as um a professional level. And
if you want to hit it off at a professional level,
you can buy my new service in which you give
(35:17):
me money and I tell you how to give other
get other people to give you money. Does seem like
a good strategy. He's starting, You're starting at MLM. I'm
not a Marxist Leninis maoist, terrible Sander. But now that
you mention it, that is kind of how like the
(35:38):
Marxist Lenis maist thing works. So I guess I won't
do that. I guess I uh, I will avoid the MLM.
It seems like a bad business model. Okay, Well, instead,
I'll just convince people to run advertisements during my podcast.
What about that as a strategy. It doesn't seem morally uncomplicated. Okay,
(35:58):
all right, well that's what we're gonna do. Here's amounts,
and we are back. Hello, Hello, Hi, Sophie. You didn't
say hi, Hi. Thanks. So she gets to go back
(36:22):
now that she's like writing again and stuff, she gets
to go back to doing what she fucking is best
and love. She's wandering the desert. This time she's becoming
more and more just like her thing is mysticism, right uh,
this time in Suphie Brotherhood and all this stuff is
like big part of it. And she also starts basically
like in her diaries, she's like more and more after
the assassination attempt, she's more and more like I am
destined to be a mystic. I don't know if someone
(36:45):
hit me three times with the sword. Once one of
them made in my head and I got saved by
a clothes line. I might be into some mystic ship. Yeah, yeah,
I can, I can. I absolutely understand it. Yeah, And
so she starts visiting various magicians and rines, and her
and Slaman moved to this town of Tanez for his
(37:06):
new job translating. Then she becomes a war correspondent and
becomes embedded in the French military that's trying to pacify
the southwest of the country, and then she becomes a
spy for the French. This is the most morally compromised
period of this story. Wow. And the whole time everyone's
like following her around, being like this radical is doing
(37:28):
everything bad and she's like kind of middle of the
road at this point in most contexts, but it's not
enough for people. And so she starts working for the
French colonial government. She meets this this like gentler, kindler
colonial officer who is really into building peace treaties instead
of just shooting people, and she's like, Yeah, this is
(37:48):
the this is the ticket, this is what matters. And
so she starts writing this like liberal pro French propaganda
and spine and she starts writing about how like, maybe
it's better the French invaders than the Turkish invaders. Maybe
colonization is always bad, but sometimes there's like little benevolent
things you can pull out of it. But at the
(38:09):
same time she's doing that in her like official writing,
that's like propagandistic. She continues to write about daily life there,
and she writes a ton of stuff that's explicitly how
the French cultural invasion is unwelcome and unfitting, and then
France needs to leave people hell alone, which is basically
like this, um, kind of pushing for a protectorate instead
(38:30):
of direct colonial administration. This is not a positive I'm
not being like, this is good. This is what she's doing. Yeah,
I know. Those those are like published writings that she
was she was getting out at the time, a lot
of them. Yes, Um, some of it is, right, I'm
conflating a little bit of what she's writing in her
diaries and what she's writing in the papers at that point.
But the stuff she's writing about daily life and how
(38:51):
French French culture invasion is unwelcome, that is for papers, right,
And then she's part of this and after a few
months she's like, Nope, that doesn't fucking work. She sees
that the peaceably conquered people go through life without spark
in their eyes, when they have fear behind their eyes.
And she's like, oh, this isn't better. I love her,
(39:15):
I know, I know. So she stops writing propaganda. She
probably stops spying for the French. You know, there's there's
some case to be made that at various points she's
probably providing information in a double agent way of various ways,
but she wouldn't have written about it. So yeah, and
she was, she was. She was trying to trying to
(39:38):
pay the bills too. Yeah, absolutely, and she was like hounded,
but you know who else hounded her? Her new dog.
She has a new dog. This dog's name You just
made a hounded joke because it's a dog, Margaret. So
(39:59):
at this point point she goes back to doing again
what she loves, wandering around doing journalism and adventure. She's
sick about half the time. At this point, she gets
a bout after a bout of malaria, and at this
point she has syphilis, which is you know, sounds real bad. Yeah,
she hasn't she hasn't seen her husband about eight months
(40:19):
she's cheating on him, he's cheating on her. It is
not happy polyamory. She's going behind his back. At one
point earlier, when she's like being faithful to him, she
like thinks about fucking this guy and tells her husband like,
I'm thinking about sucking this guy, and her husband is like,
I'm gonna murder you, and then myself for even having
(40:41):
thought that, And then the two of them, I know
it was really healthy relationship. And then the two of
them go out into the desert drunk with a handgun
and decided to kill kill themselves together, but instead they
stay up late telling stories and drinking more and then
wake up hungover and grab the gun and go home
and then here like finding it for a while. That's healthy.
(41:05):
It's a little, you know, romantic date with your heart.
About the dog, first of all, yeah, so we don't
know very much about him. Had long black hair, and
he was possibly he was a long dog. It might
be the way. Was he like a was he a
docks in? What's happening do we know? I don't know.
I don't know. She's traveling around mostly on horseback, so
(41:27):
I like to imagine she either has like a lap dog.
That's like riding adventure for dogs. Oh I would love
that for her. Okay, that's what she has. What's his name? Anything?
I can't I couldn't find it. I only found the
old dog's name. I also didn't find out what happened
to the old dog or the new dog. People just
don't talk about. It's maddening. We need to go back
(41:48):
and just do a cool dogs of history where we
learned about the dog. I like that. I'm down. So
so her husband is like, I'm writing you a letter
to say I found someone else. That's chill, all right, Okay,
I know now, to be fair, she's just fucking people
and not telling him, I think, But actually I'm not
(42:10):
entirely certain because what did he say? Why do I
feel like it's going to be mad rude? Oh well,
it gets welcome to the okay anyway. Um, So she's
trying to go around doing her thing. She's like wandering
and has a puppy and it's like, yeah, I know,
I know, but she's getting too sick, and so she's
(42:33):
laid up in a military hospital in the south the country.
She writes slimming. She says, I miss you who I'm sick,
please come, basically, and there's nothing like illness to make
us appreciate our sickness and health partners. So Sliman packs
his bags and he heads off to take care of
his wife. Maybe he at least goes there. We know
that he goes there. They meet up, she discharges herself
(42:56):
from the hospital, and they talk about their future, and
she's like, babe, I got a fast car, fast enough
to get us away from here. They talked about their
future and how she's got a book waiting with a
publisher in France, and how that she's just going to
get some money as soon as it it sells. This
is a lie. She's finished the book, but it's currently
the manuscript is like in an urn in her house
(43:18):
or something. But she just wanted to start. I need
to start. I need to get an urn to keep
all my unfinished songs in YEA good idea, actually, yeah.
And you'll see why that is materially important soon. So
it's possible that he came down there to reunite, and
it's possibly came down to break up, and we'll never know.
(43:41):
The very next day, quote Slimmon, we were on the
balcony of my room, on the first floor. Suddenly there's
a roar, like the procession of wagons. It came nearer.
People ran by, shouting the waddy, the waddy. Waddy is
a usually dry riverbed, like a seasonal run. I didn't understand.
The weather was calm, there was no rain, no storm.
In a minute, the water came down the riverbed, rising
(44:02):
up like a wall, running like a galloping horse, at
least two ms high, dragging along trees, furniture, bodies of
animals and men. I saw the danger and we fled.
The torrent caught us up in it. How did I
get out? I have no idea. My wife was carried
away and searchers found her body beneath the stairs the
(44:22):
next day. Most likely she'd run down the stairs trying
to get out of the house and out of the way,
only to be overpowered by the water and drowned inside
the house. Some of her friends believed that she used
the opportunity as a convenient suicide. Slimans count was a lie.
She hadn't been carried away by the flood. Um it
(44:44):
looks suspicious. Years earlier, you know, threatened to kill her,
and I think some of her friends were also on
a like you know. No one knows what happened in
those brief moments. She was buried in the nearby cemetery
and Muslim fashion under a white a white sheet. She
was twenty seven years old. Salaman did not go to
the funeral. He left immediately. It was her friends who
(45:07):
looked after her funeral and her literary estate. An editor,
the editor who kind of liked her from previous compiled
her writings into a novel which was not entirely faithful
to the manuscript, and he rewrote a lot of it
because a lot of it was gone. This is a
different one than the manuscript that was So they found
the manuscripts and a bunch of writing in this urn,
(45:28):
and some of it had survived the flood. That's why
you should keep your songs in a in an urn.
So this editor puts out this book called In the
Warm Shadow of Islam. It was a bestseller in France.
Biographer and Net Quebec describes it like this quote. This
desert andrew gene Amazon and the Sahara nomad with the
Heart of Gold appealed to what has been called Europe's
(45:49):
collective daydream of the Orient. In the same way, that T. E.
Lawrence T. H. Lawrence did to the British psyche later,
and for similar reasons, both appeared sexually and politically equip cable.
Both their conquests of exotic territories seemed to speak of
more private inner conquests, intriguing to the industrial mind. Both,
perhaps by quote going native, served to appease the rumblings
(46:12):
of guilt amongst the colonial powers. Both were perfect symbols
of escapism for armchair romantics or for people who had
been comprehensively compromised in their lives and wished they had not.
And frankly, I think that's who she still is um
in a lot of how she's understood, and that's what
this episode flirts with in ways that I've been trying
to figure out how to navigate. Is this romanticization, you know,
(46:35):
And she romanticized the ship out of her life. Sliman
died three years later, laid low by friend of the
pod tuberculosis AH. When Algeria wanteds independence in nineteen sixty two,
they had nothing nice to say about their colonizers. This
was not a like you know. They systematically went through
and renamed all the streets that were named after French assholes,
(46:56):
uh and Europeans in general. They left only four, including Shakespeare,
who I guess wasn't really implicated in colonialism, and Isabel
ebber Heart. Even I know, even the French Algerian Albert
Camu was erased by the newly free country, but eber
Heart remained. That's that's saying a lot. Yeah, that's what
(47:17):
I know about Isabella eber Heart. A complicated person who
lived their best life as best they could and did
not fucking compromise on trying to live their best life.
She died so young, it's shocking, and I wonder, you
(47:39):
know how much she like what we can blame on
the culture at the time and what we can blame
on her in terms of orientalism, Like maybe she was
just like I got to be a little orientalist to like,
you know, get might get the story and the paper
(48:02):
and maybe that'll you know, help do an anti colonialism
or you know, like I'm like you you have to
just work with the culture that you're given at the
time in order, if you know, especially if you're in
the limelight the way she was, and she was using
her shred of celebrity purposefully. Now you're right, And I
(48:27):
think that's something that gets left out of it too, right,
is that you know, even like her her compromising attitude
towards colonialism in a later part of her life was
like seems to be coming from her experiences from like
her husband and the Sufi brotherhood that she was part of,
you know. And so it seems entirely possible because overall, um,
(48:49):
that I've been able to find, it seems like she
has a very positive overall conception from an anti colonial
point of view, and specifically the work that her work
did to get Europeans to understand what was harmful about
what was happening in North Africa, you know. Um. And like,
I'm focusing so much on her life right now, and
(49:10):
I like didn't focus nearly as much on her writing
because it's like a harder thing to tell a compelling
story in the in the audio medium. But yeah, now
that's that's such a good point. Yeah, she's using her
her bit of celebrity everywhere she can for both keeping
herself alive as best as she can and also pushing
for the things that she cares about, which is of
(49:33):
the cultural autonomy of North Africa and a lot of UM.
And I mean, you know, her celebrity was um was
extremely uh minimal. Yeah, and she was she was doing
what you know, it was mostly scandal. It was like tabloid. Yeah.
(49:55):
And then people used her in a million different ways
after she died, Like there's so many, especially for the
next couple of decades. There were so many like plays
about her life and stuff that would like create this,
I create her as an icon rather than a person,
you know, mm hmm. And I completely get it. Yeah. Oh,
(50:16):
she also probably died stoned, which is probably a nicer
way to die. I forgot that part. Yeah, I don't know.
I just remember that die the way that she died
for sure. Yeah, sounds terrifying, it really does. On that
uplifting note. Do we have any plugables, Yeah, I want
(50:36):
to talk about my new book raw Dog, I wrote
under a pseudonym nom de gear I've been using called
Jamie Loftus. And people should go out and pre order
this book. It's about hot dogs, a lifelong something that
you eat all the time. Margaret, that's true. Um, but yeah,
(50:57):
so go out and pre order Jamie. Absolutely preord Rod
by Jamie Loftus in You can also pre order Margaret's
book Escape from Insult Island just got a memorable title,
each Other's Plugs, Yeah, which actually Jolly wrote under my
name is kind of weird. Yeah, Julie, is there anything
(51:18):
that you would like Lukes just to know? Um, I am.
My next studio record is coming together. I am, and
it's going to be called Haunted Mountain. And my friend
Buck Meek, who's in Big Thief, is also putting out
a record called Haunted Mountain at the same time, which
(51:39):
I think is hilarious. And we we co wrote a
bunch of songs together and they sound a little like this.
Oh that's worth the shot. I was just trying to
put you on the spot. That reminds me of like
people in the airport it and they're like, you're gonna
(52:01):
gonna flue their guitar for us. Yeah, alright, it's where
the shot? And where can people follow you on socials?
Julie Holland Music on Instagram and Twitter? Awesome, We appreciate
you coming on. Yeah, thanks for thanks for having me.
It was great to get this storytelling about Isabel ever
(52:27):
Heart of Close And seriously, if you haven't heard it,
go check out the song old Fashioned morphine. It is
one of the best accepting that the world is doomed
and it's fine songs that exist. And it's possibly where
I first heard of Visible Our Heart and it's by
Julie Holland. I love your I love your analysis and
the song your artistic. You know that's all that. Yeah,
(52:51):
they like you know, the world's almost done. Whatever bucket.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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