After reading Eberhardt’s writings, I have been struck with the intense feeling that she really wasn’t one way or the other. She neither went native nor prostituted her writing to the French as a lackey of the colonizing effort of North Africa. Instead, she played a literary game, switching sides when it suited her interests, to quench her thirst for adventure, travel, and new experiences. No great morals held sway over her writing. She switched perspectives as easily as the French Foreign Legion would turn on their own indigenous troops.
At times, she wrote bubbly narratives of love between a Frenchman and a Berber girl. Other writings expressed her French patriotism, regardless of the fact that she wasn’t French. Yet others were simple descriptive sketches of places and people, neither leaning one way nor the other.
To travel, Eberhardt sold herself to whichever devil would take her the farthest into new and unexplored territory. At times it was the French; other times the Sufi brotherhood, yet other times, random clerics wandering the desert. Her pen was the means of funding her life. In the same way that many people work at jobs they dislike or even hate, she too would pick up disdainful writing gigs in order to travel further into the unknown.
Who is the real Eberhardt? That’s hard to say. I haven’t read her diary or journal. Even that collection of writing may very well be misleading. The truth will never really be known without a time machine and a mind probe. Being hounded by every government she came in contact with, she surely put up many defenses in her speech and writing. Even her thoughts were probably screened to assure nothing particularly damning would escape her lips or fingers. One scrap of paper declaring her undying love for the nomads and her distain for France would have ended her romanticized wanderings of the Magrib. She was too shrewd of a woman to allow that to occur.
Given the opportunity to travel far and wide in such remote and foreign territory in which few Europeans had ventured, I too would walk the fence between “going native” and being a lackey of Europe. It’s a dangerous game to play but the rewards of adventure and learning far outweigh the destruction of personal morals and professional credibility.
Eberhardt may have whored her words to both sides of the equation, but she didn’t compromise her one true passion – journeying into the unknown. Throughout her short life, she quenched her thirst for adventure – always walking to the top of the next mountain or dune to see what was on the other side – regardless of which camp she slept in at night. Being in a Sufi brotherhood and employed by the French as a war correspondent was a true stroke of genius on her part. She was welcomed almost everywhere – save for the guy with the machete that tried to split her in twain.
