Navigatina the Mezzaterra: Home, Harem and the Hybrid Family in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

CATHERINE WYNNE

When Lady Lucie Duff Gordon arrived in Egypt in October 1862, she left behind in England a husband and three children, the youngest of whom was only three years old. Suffering from consumption, Gordon's seven-year, self-imposed exile was a desperate attempt to prolong her life in a dry, hot climate. In order to finance her stay she published Letters from Egypt in 1865. In her memoir of her mother, Janet Ross commends Gordon's 'vivid, life-like descriptions ofthe people among whom she dwelth, her aspirations for their better destiny, and the complete amalgamation of her own pursuits and interests with theirs'.' Despite Gordon's cultural, political and personal engagement, however, these were 'also years of chronic illness, intermittent depression, and intense longing for her absent husband and children'.^ Dear but not near in a spatial sense, extended separation from her family necessitated the frequency of Gordon's letters home. Their subsequent publication ensured Gordon's place in literary history and in accounts of nineteenth-century female travellers. More significantly for the purposes of this essay, Gordon also appears in a contemporary novel by the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif. The Map of Love (1999) opens in Egypt and America in the late twentieth century, but shifts in time to explore and imaginatively reclaim the terrain of a Victorian woman's travels in Egypt. The novel explores the links between a contemporary American-Egyptian family and a nineteenth-century Anglo-Egyptian one. By focussing on the hybrid family and by drawing on historical figures such as Gordon and the English Orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis, Soueif seeks to explore the complex dynamics of intercultural discourse. The Map of Love destabilises the homogeneity of a patriarchal and imperial narrative (several of Soueif's nineteenthcentury British characters are anti-imperial) and it is through the representation ofthe harem as desirable domestic space that Soueif's
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revisionist project advances a positive vision of nineteenth-century Arab-Muslim domesticity and culture.^ These representations also align her project with nineteenth-century female travellers' accounts of the harem. The Victorian section of The Map of Love not only establishes an anti-imperialist theme in terms of its politics but also domesticates it, as the sins of the empire return to haunt the British home. Isolated by a husband who 'is not himself after his imperial campaign in the Sudan, Lady Anna, on her doctor's orders walks each day to the South Kensington Museum where she becomes enthralled by the 'luminous beauty' of Lewis' harem paintings.'* After her husband's tortuous death, Anna travels to Egypt in pursuit of domestic tranquility and to see if Lewis' image of the harem is 'a world whieh truly exists' (46). As harems were segregated quarters in Muslim households that women lived in secluded from the outside world, they conjured a potent image in the Western imagination from the late seventeenth century onwards. Malek Alloula notes that 'a simple allusion to [the harem] is enough to open wide a floodgate of hallucination'. One interpretation of the fantasy projected 'an erotic universe in which there are no men',^ but the very fact that male outsiders were not permitted into the harem made it also more appealing and available for the Western female gaze from the late eighteenth century after Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's descriptions of the interior and inhabitants of a Turkish harem were posthumously published in her Turkish Embassy Letters (1763). The fictional Lady Anna's desire to see the inside of a harem, then, was not unusual for the nineteenthcentury female traveller of her class. Indeed, harem visits were, as Reina Lewis points out in her recent work on the Ottoman harem, a 'staple of the tourist itinerary' that initiated changes in the way that Western and Muslim women viewed each other.^ The sense of tranquillity that the image conveys to Anna also has historical precedents. Ruth Yeazell argues:
For those who wished to view the home as a sanctuary from the world around them, the walls of the harem could appear to enclose the ultimate version of the place - a feminized refuge securely marked off from public conflict and danger.'

Whether as erotic space or female refuge, both are projections of Western desire.

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In The Map of Love Anna's travels culminate in marriage to an Egyptian nationalist, Sharif. She gives birth to their daughter, Nur, and settles into a happy domesticity in Egypt. Her story is framed in another narrative as it is pieced together in the late twentieth century by her Egyptian descendent through marriage, Amal, when after almost a century, Anna's journal is discovered in a trunk that is brought back to Egypt from America by Anna's great-granddaughter, Isabel. Amal also discovers in the trunk Anna's first letters home after her arrival in Egypt, missives that Anna has duplicated and filed with a view no doubt to potential publication. The letters reveal that she is, as Amal notes, 'a little self-conscious perhaps, a little aware of the genre' (58). Amal, with the benefit of a post-colonial perspective, perceives that Anna's accounts ofher Egyptian travel are inspired by Gordon's Letters from Egypt. Gordon is seemingly reclaimable for Soueif as she was amongst 'the more open-minded and judicious of travel writers'.^ Compare her to her more famous predecessor, Florence Nightingale, whose Letters from Egypt (1849-1850), for instance, describe the country as 'utterly uninhabitable'.^ Gordon interacted on a daily basis with Egyptians as she pursued an itinerant lifestyle in search of dry weather and elusive health. In her daughter's words, she was a 'settler, not a traveller' in Egypt.'*' For Soueif, Gordon was a figure who inhabited what she defines in her 2004 collection of essays as the mezzaterra, a meeting point for diverse cultures and traditions, a common ground, which she argues is not competitive, but rather offers 'at once a distillation, an enrichment of each thing, each idea'." The mezzaterra
was a territory imagined, created even, by Arab thinkers and reformers starting in the middle of the nineteenth century when Muhammad AH Pasha of Egypt first sent students to the West and they came back inspired by the best of what they saw on offer. Generations of Arabs protected it through the dark time of colonialism. A few westerners inhabited it too: Lucy Duff Gordon was one.'^

Soueif, a recipient of an Egyptian and English education and socialisation, is preoccupied with meeting grounds throughout her writing. In an early short story '1964', for instance, a fourteen-yearold Egyptian girl who comes to England with her postdoctoral parents remains 'on the outside, looking in' at the alien terrain of a Putney comprehensive. Her immersion in European literature only serves to alienate her from fellow pupils, a point illustrated by her teacher's

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comment to the class that it takes an 'Egyptian [...] a foreigner, to teach you about your native language'.'^ Attempts to navigate the mezzaterra are mediated through the family and particularly through the mother. The daughter of an academic, Soueif continues her description of the mezzaterra with an account of how her mother,
who had fallen in love with the literature of Britain at school, and who could not be appointed English lecturer at Cairo university until the British had left, did not consider that rejecting British imperialism involved rejecting English literature. She might say that the true appreciation and enjoyment of English literature is not possible unless you are free of British colonialism and can engage with the culture on an equal footing.'''

Indebted to the work of Edward Said, the model for Omar in The Map of Love, Soueif fictionally explores the common ground in her novel's focus on the hybrid family and strives to come to terms with making a space - real or imagined - amidst the complexities and problematics of history and representation in an imperial and postimperial context. However, Gordon's occupation of Soueif's common ground is a contested issue. For Charisse Gendron, Gordon's letters demonstrate that at 'the height of imperial progress, the ability of the British to connect did not entirely fail'.'^ Mervat Hatem argues, however, that though the radical liberal Gordon propounded the equality of Islam and Christianity, 'she did not repudiate the key Orientalist assumption about the essential differences between the Orient and the West.'^ This point is explicit in Gordon's published letters. In a letter dated 18 April 1863, she describes how she is 'in love with Arab ways and I have contrived to see and know more of family life than many Europeans who have lived here for years'.'^ In a letter of 25 May Gordon reverts to Orientalist stereotyping: '[Egyptians] are extremely clever and nice children, easily amused, easily aroused into a fury which lasts five minutes and leaves no malice, and half the lying and cheating of which they are accused comes from misunderstanding and ignorance'.'^ Gordon's occupation ofthe mezzaterra is partial. Rebutting the Orientalist stereotype in this instance merely reinforces it. At the same time, Gordon's immersion in two cultures necessitated often complex familial and personal negotiations. Her mother-in-law records in her diary on 29 December 1866 that 'Alexander's family is always a thorn in my side. Lucie's health and mind, her completely

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Arab character, make one feel that he has no home'.'^ In a similar, though more sympathetic vein, her mother Sarah Austin laments:
It is only at Thebes that she is comparatively well. There she can live, and live with something like comfort anywhere, it is a blessing for which I am duly thankful. But enough of sorrow remains. Her husband's broken life and broken home; her children motherless and homeless.^"

However, it is through the story of her maid - a story that is silenced in the published letters - that Gordon reveals her class and racial allegiances. When Sally Naldrett bore a child to Gordon's servant Omar, Gordon packed maid and child back to England and retained her Egyptian servant. In unpublished letters she describes the child as 'hideous, but I dare say the Arabs think it lovely as it has light hair and blue eyes and an extremely white skin'.^' Despite Gordon's Arab ways and Arab character she refused to countenance the hybrid family. The son of Sally and Omar exposed the limits of Gordon's intercultural encounter. By dismissing her maid, however, Gordon relinquished her English life and chose to ally herself with her Egyptian servant. Indeed, by disciplining Sally - an act that was not supported by either Gordon's mother or her husband - Gordon was policing the boundaries of empire and gender and purging her Egyptian home of the more visceral dimensions of cultural interaction which are embodied in the 'hideous' child. Soueif briefly explores this historical incident in The Map of Love. Anna is accompanied to Egypt by her lady's maid but in her diary she records how Emily is resistant to her mistress' cultural expedition and on a trip to the Pyramids sits 'staring obstinately away [...] towards the lush vegetation that precedes Cairo' (96). Emily reminds Amal of Gordon's Sally who was 'pregnant with the child of her mistress's favourite servant' (68). Amal returns to ponder Emily's possible story one that remains silent in the Victorian lady's journal - by asking 'what does she want for herself? Is she saving up to start a milliner's business? Does she have an illegitimate child lodged with a foster mother in Boumemouth[?]' (68). James Clifford argues that nineteenth-century servants 'never achieved the status of "travellers". Their experiences, the cross-cultural links they made, their different access to the societies they visited - such encounters seldom find serious representation in the literature of travel'.^^ Amal's articulation of class marginalisation underlines Anna's privileged social status and underscores servants' repressed narratives of family and personal desire.

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Despite certain reservations with respect to Gordon's habitation of the common ground, Soueif's text reappraises the Victorian female traveller in the context of empire and as such mirrors current feminist approaches to women's travel writing. Sara Mills argues that the writings of female travellers do not fit neatly into an Orientalist framework and often seem to 'constitute an undermining voice' within the colonial discourse. Their relationship with the 'dominant discourse is problematic because of its conflict with the discourses of "femininity", which were operating on them in equal, and sometimes stronger, measure. Because of these discursive pressures, their work exhibits contradictory elements which may act as a critique of some of the components of other colonial writings'.'^^ The experience of the Victorian female traveller's encounter with the harem was one of sameness and difference which concurrently destabilised and validated Orientalist discourse. For instance, in a published letter to her husband Gordon describes a harem that she visits in Cairo in 1863 as both familiar and exotic. Billie Melman argues that many Victorian female travellers 'did not perceive the oriental woman as absolutely alien, the ultimate "other". Rather oriental women became the feminine West's recognisable image in the mirror'.^"^ Gordon's account confirms this:
I went to two hareems the other day [...] A very splendid Turkish lady put out all her splendid bedding and dresses for me, and was most amiable. At another a superb Arab with the most grande dame manners, dressed in white cotton and with unpainted face, received me statelily. Her house would drive you wild, such antique enamelled tiles covering the panels of the walls, all divided by carved woods, and such carved screens and galleries, all very old and rather dilapidated, but superb, and the lady worthy of the house. A bold-eyed slave girl with a baby put herself forward for admiration, and was ordered to bring coffee with such cool through polite imperiousness. One of our great ladies can't half crush a rival in comparison, she does it too coarsely. The quiet scorn of the palefaced, black-haired Arab, was beyond any English powers. Then it was fun to open the lattice and make me look out on the square, and to wonder what the neighbours would say at the sight of my face and European hat. She asked about my children and blessed them repeatedly, and took my hand very kindly in doing so, for fear I should think her envious and fear her eye - she had ^^

The examination of the Eastern woman and her status could serve as a reflection of self and status in England. Gordon, in her description of the scene, identifies by class with the 'superb Arab', and the latter's

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dismissal of the slave with her baby echoes Gordon's treatment ofher maid Sally. Gordon draws her husband into the scene through splendid furnishings that would drive him 'wild' and through class identification with the unnamed Arab. The effect is simultaneously inviting and distancing, as Gordon relishes her privileged access to the harem. Gordon's exposure at the opened lattice signals her difference from the harem's inhabitants. Her position as outsider in Egyptian culture also marks her as an unconventional English woman - a point that is reinforced by the Arab woman's repeated questions about her family. Gordon died of consumption in Egypt in July 1869 far away from family. Lewis, another figure who could arguably be seen as occupying a Soueifian mezzaterra, spent eleven years in the East between 1840 and 1851. During his Egyptian years he had, William Makepeace Thackeray records, 'adapted himself outwardly to Oriental life [...] The great pleasure of pleasures was life outside Cairo in the desert'.^^ Lewis returned to England and painted many of his tranquil harem scenes in a London studio. The splendour of a privileged Cairene society is imagined and re-created through beautiful and luminous paintings. Many of them depict recumbent but de-eroticised Circassian females enjoying the serenity of domestic life - an image not far removed from the idealised Victorian home of the mid-century. Lewis' harem scenes were rendered as familiar as Ingres' lurid Turkish Bath (1863) was 'othered'. The harem, as desirable domestic space, is represented as both same and safely exotic in Lewis' paintings. It is picturesque, framed, containable and reproducible. On one level, Soueif's deployment of Lewis as the inspiration of Anna's lived experience draws the text within the very problematics of what she is seeking to escape. After all, as Roger Benjamin notes, 'art is indelibly a cultural legacy of the colonial process'.-^^ Lewis' paintings are made possible by European control of the East, but Lewis as an English male would not have access to harems. By drawing on Lewis, Soueif reinscribes traditional discourses of the Orient. Anna's Egyptian years are both familiar and foreign - a recreation of an image that is first encountered in a museum and as such her experience is defined by painting and by an English Orientalist painter. At the same time, Anna's attraction to the tranquillity of Lewis' representation is seen as a liberation from her repressed Victorian marriage. Like the historical painter, thefictionalAnna adapts to Oriental life and she cross-dresses to experience life in the desert, but parts from

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Lewis' partial identification by marrying into the Egyptian upper class. For Anna, though, the harem remains the embodiment of a Lewis painting. Kidnapped by ill-advised political agitators, and abandoned when they discover that she is a woman and not the young Englishman that they had assumed she was, she awakens from her ordeal in the home of her future husband to discover that she 'had slipped into one of those paintings, the contemplation of which had given such rare moments of serenity during the illness of my dear Edward. There above me was the intricate dark wooden lattice-work and beyond it a most benevolent, clear blue sky' (134). The image is completed by the presence ofa sleeping woman:
She was Egyptian, and a lady - the first I had seen without the black cloak and the veil. She had pulled a cover of black silk up to her waist, her chemise above that was the purest white, and then again, her hair vied with the silken cover for the depth and lustre of its black [...] she lay on the cushions of deep emerald and blue and the whole tableau was framed, yet again by the lattice. (134)

Anna is 'in one of [her] beloved paintings' (137). For the art historian, John Sweetman, Lewis 'became obsessed with the same subject of figures seen against architecture, often silhouetted in doorways, but also set against the elaborate screen-lattices [...] sometimes with the added effect of light stabbing through these on to the decorated surfaces of tile or drapery'.^* The Egyptian woman framed by the lattice emulates Lewis. The point is underlined in a subsequent conversation between Sharif and Anna: "'You came to look for that world you saw in your museum. And you have found it?" "In your house, monsieur," I said' (216). Later, after Anna's marriage, the harem is rendered familiar and thus it confirms Melman's account of the familiarity that many English women found in the harem. Equally, Sharif believes that Anna was 'inventing' him: 'the desert and the stars and an ancient monastery with a mosque nestling within its walls. Those were his settings. Those and the old house out of the paintings that had brought her to Egypt in the first place' (271-72). She looks forward after her marriage to 'choosing the fashioning of the furnishings' ofher new apartments, confirming that she 'can draw on [her] beloved Frederick Lewis for inspiration' (324). Early in the novel, Amal, in the process of arranging Anna's papers in a chronological order, reflects that she is attempting to read the

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journal year by year even though she 'knows how the story ends'. She continues in a reflective vein: 'We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens afong the way' (74). The love story of Anna and Sharif is an escapist fantasy that creates a benign vision of intercultural exchange through the personal relationship of two members ofthe Egyptian and English elite. Both have navigated personal conflicts and unhappy relationships. By the time she meets Sharif, Anna has rejected the confines ofthe Victorian wife's duty and has renounced her husband's imperialism, and Sharif has ended his arranged marriage by divorcing a wife he does not love.'^^ They encounter opposition in the British-dominated Egypt for their crosscultural union and the marriage alienates Anna from British society in Cairo. In order to reach their common ground, they must also communicate through French as neither speaks each other's native tongue. The union is brief. Sharif's struggle for Egyptian nationalism and his campaign for female education have produced various enemies. He is assassinated by unidentified political opponents. His final request is that Anna should leave Egypt with their daughter by stressing the impossibility of remaining without his protection. The hybrid family is dispersed as Anna returns to England with her infant child. The details of" her English life and her subsequent connections with her Egyptian relatives are silent. Tellingly, the journal remains unfinished. The novel's presentation of the contemporary world focuses on another hybrid family. Isabel's relationship with Amal's brother, Omar, results in a son named Sharif. The contemporary family represents both repetition and renaissance. Omar, who lives in 'no-man's-land between East and West' because of his outspoken views and his immersion in Palestinian politics, has cultivated enemies (515). The novel ends with Amal dreaming of Sharif and awakening in fear for her brother's life. The geopolitical uncertainties of the late twentieth century are immobilising and Amal identifies with Anna's sense of helplessness. The novel remains ambiguous about Omar's future but his son represents hope. While waiting for Omar's arrival, the Egyptian Amal, the American Isabel and Sharif reside in the Amal's Cairo apartment. While Isabel sleeps, Amal contemplates Anna's trunk which brought the diffused family together again after nearly a hundred years of separation. The end of The Map ofLove lacks the serenity ofthe Anna's harem fantasy but creates a female-centred, hybrid family in which the child promises regeneration at least within a familial context.

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Soueif's work juxtaposes imperial and postimperial politics within the context of domestic and familial relations, and simultaneously interrogates the complexities of cultural interaction. As a Saidian subject, she recognises the implications of the imperial engagement, an(( in her imagined recovery of ancestral history, the past may be rendered more beautiful but always remains a framed empire. These representations reinscribe a more benign version of an Orientalist discourse, presenting us with an imaginative vision that attempts to illuminate a common, cross-cultural space. Soueif's point that English literature could only be truly appreciated and enjoyed after the departure of Britain as an occupying power offers an optimistic perspective, raising the question of how former colonised countries can relate to the history, literature and culture of empire. The revision of a cultural history is both enabling and disabling. Not only are we still enmeshed in the legacy of empire but any engagement, fictional or otherwise, with the history of empire, raises proliferating complexities vis-a-vis representation. 'There are so many hybrids now,' Soueif argues, 'people who are a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The interesting thing is, what we make of it, what kinds of hybrid we become and how we feel about it'.^*^ By drawing her work into dialogue with historical andfictionalfemale travellers in Egypt, Soueif's writing unveils the heterogeneity and complexity of intercultural engagement. The novel reveals the common ground as partial,fleetingand ultimately as illusory as Lewis' nineteenth-century harem paintings. Concluding with Amal cradling Sharif and surrounded by the scattered fragments of Anna's Egyptian sojourn. The Map of Love's return to domesticity and family provides only transient respite from the relentless political exclusivity of East and West.

Notes
1. Janet Ross, 'Memoir', Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt, rev edn, intro. George Meredith (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902), 12. 2. Katherine Frank, 'Introduction' in Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1865; London: Virago, 1983), vii. 3. On this point see, Amin Malak, 'Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif',^/i/- Journal of Comparative Poetics 20 (2000), 152. 4. Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 27. 5. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myra Godzich and Wlad Godzich, intro. Barbara Harlow (1981; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 3, 35.

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6. Reina Lewis, Rethitiking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 14. 7. Ruth Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. 8. Ibid., 20. 9. Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849-50, intro Anthony Sattin (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 139. 10. Ross, 'Memoir', 12. 11. Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 8. 12. Ibid., 6. 13. Ahdaf Soueif, Aisha (1983; London; Bloomsbury, 1995), 29, 33. 14. Soueif, Mezzaterrra, 6. 15. Charisse Gendron, 'Lucie Duff Gordon's "Letters from Egypt'",/4rie/./4 Review of International English Literature 17.2 (April 1986), 60. 16. Mervat Hatem, 'Through Each Other's Eyes: Egyptian, Levantine-Egyptian, and European Women's Images ofThemselves and of Each Other (1862-1920)', Women's Sttidies International Forum 12.2 (1989), 192. See also Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim, 'Gender Politics in a Colonial Context: Victorian Women's Accounts of Egypt', in Interpreting the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East, eds Paul and Janet Starkey (Reading: Ithaca, 2001), 119. 17. Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 55. 18. Ibid., 69. 19. Quoted in Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 291. 20. Ibid.,29\. 21. Quoted in Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, 294. 22. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 33. 23. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 91. 24. Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women in the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 316. 25. Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 72-73. 26. Quoted in Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A., 1805-1876 (Leigh-on-Sea: Frederick Lewis, 1978), 23. 27. Roger Benjamin, ed.. Orientalism; Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: Art Gallery of New SouthWales, 1997), 10. 28. John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture, 1500-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 316. 29. Alan Duben and Cem Behar argue that fi-om the late nineteenth-century onwards the model ofthe Western family with its emphasis on the primacy ofa love relationship between couples started to influence the Ottoman family. Istanbul Households: Marriage. Family and Fertility, 1840-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246. 30. Quoted in Amin Malak, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 133.