RESPECT, POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE TRAVEL WRITING OF FREYA STARK
By
CYNTHIA YOUNG
Integrated Studies Project
submitted to Dr. Carolyn Redl
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts – Integrated Studies
Athabasca, Alberta
March 20, 2014
Abstract
In recent years colonial travel writing has come to the attention of postcolonial theorists.
Because colonial travel writing describes the colonized from the colonizer’s perspective, it can be used to illustrate the construction of the Other through the discourse of West- ern imperialism. However, not all travel writing is the same. Freya Stark was a staunch believer in the ideology of British imperialism, but came to realize that imperialism could not work because of a lack of cultural understanding of the indigenous peoples. This paper examines the travel writing of Freya Stark focusing on the years 1928-1933 when she travelled extensively through Iraq, Iran and Syria and will illustrate how these works transcend the gender divisions of travel writing and anticipate the concerns of contem- porary postcolonial theory.
Table of Contents
Background and Introduction…………………………………………………….4
Methodology……………………………………………………………………….9
Baghdad Sketches and Postcolonialism………………………………………10
The Valleys of the Assassins and Travel Writing……………………………..18
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………29
Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..32
Cynthia Young 2750807
Dr. Carolyn Redl
MAIS 701
March 20, 14
Respect, Postcolonialism and the Travel Writing of Freya Stark
Background and Introduction
A prolific writer, Freya Stark published 30 volumes of travel writing, autobiog- raphies, and collections of essays during her lifetime (1893-1993) and many of these have been recently re-published. She was the recipient of several awards and grants from the Royal Geographical Society and was known as ‘the poet of travel’. In 1972 she was awarded an O.B.E. and became Dame Freya Stark. In recent years she has been the subject of three biographies: Freya Stark. A Biography by Molly Izzard (1993), Freya
Stark by Caroline Moorehead (1985), and Passionate Nomad. The Life of Freya Stark by Jane Fletcher Geniesse (1999). Several of Stark’s books are included in lists of the best travel literature of the 20th century. Travel editor Thomas Swick chose Beyond Eu- phrates. Conde Nast Traveler selected The Lycian Shore and smithsonian.com chose
The Valleys of the Assassins. Colin Thubron preferred Ionia: A Quest, while Sara
Wheeler chose A Winter in Arabia.
Stark’s unorthodox upbringing seems to have prepared her for a lifetime of travel.
She was born in Paris to British parents and spent most of her life in Italy. Aside from a few years during her early childhood and brief intervals pursuing her studies, Stark spent very little time in England. From 1929 to 1946 Stark travelled extensively through- out the Middle East not only for her own pleasure, but also to aid in the British war effort during WWII. After the war, her travels focused mainly on Turkey. Her last expedition was to Afghanistan in 1970. In between her travels, home for Stark was Asolo, Italy.
Stark suffered from a facial disfigurement, the result of a childhood industrial accident producing a self-consciousness in Stark that may have given her impetus to travel to distant places where her scar would be unnoticed and irrelevant. She suffered from a myriad of physical ailments (arguably both real and imagined) that often had an impact on her travels. In contrast to many of her contemporary British travel writers, Stark was largely self-educated, poor, and without political and diplomatic connections. Most re- markably, she travelled into areas where no other Europeans, male or female, had ven- tured without an entourage, simply with native guides and a couple of donkeys. She re- lied upon the hospitality of the Arab people she encountered as she travelled through remote regions of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran. This, and her Arabic and Per- sian language skills, enabled her to interact with Arabs on a very personal level and she recorded these interactions as well as her impressions. She often associated cultural disparity with an adaptation to the mostly harsh environment and difficult living condi- tions.
Although travel writing is one of the oldest and most popular forms of literature, it did not achieve much notice from literary critics until relatively recently. 1 According to
Hulme and Youngs, “critical attention was lacking, perhaps because literary modernism valued fictional complexity over mimetic claims, however mediated” (7). Travel writing gained academic attention in 1979 with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism,
“the first work of contemporary criticism…to take travel writing as a major part of its cor- pus, seeing it as a body of work which offered particular insight into the operation of co- lonial discourses” (Hulme and Youngs, 8). Because travel writers describe another cul- ture for an audience at home, travel writing has become fodder for postcolonial theorists examining cultural and colonial discourses. Culture is the baggage travellers and travel writers carry with them and influences the way in which they perceive another culture.
Stark’s writing is distinguished by the non-judgemental way in which she describes the
Arabian culture, striving to understand the Other point of view.
Until the discovery by feminist critics, travel writing by women has been largely ignored. According to Carl Thompson, “men’s travel writing has been stereotypically as- sociated with intellectual seriousness and women’s travel with frivolity which influences the reception accorded male or female travel writers” (175). Sara Mills concurs with this stating, “the most striking difference often lies not so much in the writing itself (although differences may be found there) but rather in the way women’s writing is judged and processed” (30). The idea of a quest and journey of discovery or exploration has al- ways been considered to be a masculine domain. Thompson observes that, “a common
1 The exception to this is fictional travel literature. Books such as The Odyssey, Robinson Cru- soe, Heart of Darkness, and many others comprise a significant portion of the Western literary canon.
yardstick for demonstrating and asserting masculinity in travel has been the degree of danger and discomfort involved in the journey” (176). There is little doubt that the dan- gers and discomfort of travelling through Arabia as an unaccompanied woman would only have been magnified for Stark, especially considering her physical frailty. The dif- ference may be is that she entrusts the Arabs with her well-being; there is nothing ad- versarial in her approach to the indigenous peoples. There is little in her writing to indi- cate that she is in dangerous territory and in fact she believes the opposite as she states in Baghdad Sketches,
[t]here are ladies whose fascinations are a constant worry to them when they travel. The most unsophisticated savage appears to fall in love at first sight. The Desert Chief no sooner sees them than he wishes to carry them off. As for me, being small and plain and quite insignificant, such dangers do not trouble me: unflattering as it may be, I wander about the East with- out being incommoded at all (41).
Despite the physical difficulties of her travel, Stark never sacrifices her femininity. She always had a proper English woman’s attire: a dress, a hat, usually a parasol and al- ways an appropriate night dress.
The genesis for any of Stark’s travels was consistently a quest. Based on exten- sive and thorough research, Stark’s quests usually focused on some facet of ancient
Arabic history. She attempted to re-trace historical spice routes or the search for rem- nants of ancient castles, cities and civilization. One adventure even consisted of a search for a hidden treasure. Like many travellers, male and female, she did not always accomplish the goal of her quest, but in her search for ancient Arabia she discovered and documented contemporary Arabs and their multifaceted culture.
Stark’s writing requires some work from today’s reader on several levels. The
Arabian lands she traversed now have some different names and border distinctions.
She uses British and Arabic colloquialisms which might be unfamiliar. Her small-scale, hand-drawn maps are difficult to decipher or to place within a larger scale. The re- publication of her books would have been greatly enhanced by the addition of glossa- ries and more illustrative maps. In spite of this, Stark’s writing provides evocative de- scriptions of the landscapes, the Arab people and their culture as well as the coloni- al/imperial relationships that existed in that region from 1926-1946.
Despite the continuing popularity of her works and the accolades they have gar- nered, there are virtually no critical assessments of Stark’s works. Any mention of Stark by academics refers to what she did rather than what she wrote. It seems that her larg- er-than-life persona has overshadowed her literary accomplishments. Youngs suggests that, “concentrating on individual actions ignores the reproduction of cultural forces and neglects the workings of discourse in white women’s texts” (133), and this appears to be the case with Stark. While rejecting the constraints of her own culture, she can explore the constraints of another culture.
There are aspects of Stark’s writing that lend themselves to postcolonial analysis.
Although Stark writes within the parameters of her own cultural discourse, she does ex- pand those parameters to expose the racist views of the European imperialists from an
Arab perspective, all the while remaining a staunch imperialist herself. Not only does
Stark give the Arabs a voice, she occasionally prioritizes that voice by silencing the voice of the imperialists, contrary to Edward Said’s concept of orientalism as well as re- cent postcolonial theory advocated by Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. At the same time, Stark exemplifies the concept that one’s culture is inescapable. Aside from a few short years during her early childhood, Stark did not spend any time actually living in
England. Her home was a small village in Italy, and it remained her home through two world wars, fascism, the imprisonment of both her elderly mother and family friend, and appropriation of her property by the Italian army. Despite all of this Asolo, Italy was
‘home’ for Stark but she steadfastly maintained her British culture no matter where she travelled in accord with what postcolonial theorists have noted of other colonialists.
The underlying theme in all of Stark’s writing is the concept of respect: who gets it, who gives it, who doesn’t and why. It is Stark’s use and interpretation of this concept that makes her writing distinctive among her contemporary Arabian travel writers. She accords the indigenous peoples and cultures of her encounters with a measure of re- spect uncommonly found in colonial travel writing. This paper will examine a selection of
Stark’s Middle East travel writings and her use of respect in terms of contemporary co- lonial travel writing criticism and postcolonial theory, referencing works in these fields of study by Peter Hulme, Tim Youngs, Bill Ashcroft, Sara Mills and others.
Methodology
The primary texts by Stark chosen for this study are: Baghdad Sketches (original- ly published in 1937), The Valleys of the Assassins (originally published in 1934) and
Beyond Euphrates (originally published in 1951). Each text represents a different style and format of travel writing. Baghdad Sketches is a collection of articles Stark wrote for the English language newspaper, The Baghdad Times, that describe her life in Baghdad from 1929 to 1932. These short vignettes deal not only with Stark’s impression of the
Arabs while she was living amongst them in a ‘native house’, but also her relationships with the British in Baghdad and her observations of the British/Arab cultural interface.
Essays and anecdotes are combined and often show Stark’s disappointment with the
British imperialistic attitude. Although these are Stark’s earliest writings, they were not published in a collection until after the success of The Valleys of the Assassins. The
Valleys of the Assassins is a full-length travel book describing Stark’s first solo excur- sions into the remote and dangerous regions of Iraq between 1930 and 1933. Few, if any, Westerners had ventured into these areas up to that time. Beyond Euphrates is the second of Stark’s autobiographies and covers the years 1928 to 1933. This autobiog- raphy is based on letters Stark wrote to friends and family during this time. Each section is prefaced by a reflective essay written from a much later (1951) perspective. The let- ters provide more insight into Stark and her travels in the sense of their immediacy and will be used as a cross reference to the other two books. Brief excerpts from these books will be examined from the perspective of postcolonial theory and travel writing criticism.
Baghdad Sketches and Postcolonialism
Stark’s sketches are by turn eloquently descriptive, humorous, satirical, and nos- talgic. Some deplore the racist and imperialistic attitudes and behaviour of the British civil servants. Stark was quite unprepared for the ostracism she was forced to endure from the British in Baghdad. She was excluded from the British colonial society to which she thought she belonged. To the British, it was unseemly that she was there only to travel and learn Arabic. In a letter to her mother dated 17 December 1929, she writes,
I am surrounded by a kind of frost, and Mrs. Drower tells me that all the men disapprove of me. It makes me feel like a kind of pariah from my own kind and awfully disgusted, because after all I really have done nothing, beyond wishing to speak as much arabic as I can, and regretting that we can’t be less superior and more polite. I am not even pro-native, certainly as much of an imperialist as any of the people here. But Mrs. Sturgess told me today that one can’t be friends with the natives and British both, and so what is to be done (1985, 111).
Stark was marginalized within her own society and in actuality, she found the Arabs in
Baghdad much more friendly than the British. She was a single woman travelling alone without connections to any sort of diplomatic service. She was also on a very small budget requiring that she live in a ‘native house’ rather than a more upscale hotel where her compatriots would have expected her to reside. In a more lighthearted approach,
Stark describes this as, “the British Civil Service thinks that ladies who travel in the East for fun are eccentric: it discourages as many as it can and bears the rest with patience.
I, however, was being not eccentric but merely economical” (2011, 37). Hulme and
Youngs explain that women travellers are, “categorized as doubly different: they differ from other, more orthodox, socially conformist women, and from male travellers who use the journey as a means of discovering more about their own masculinity” (266).
Mills describes this as, “a tradition of reading women’s writing as trivial or as marginal to the mainstream, and this is certainly the attitude of women’s travel writing, which is por- trayed as the records of the travels of eccentric and rather strange spinsters” (61). In other words, women travellers can be seen as being outside the societal norm and dou- bly marginalized by not behaving as women normally behave and not travelling for same reason men travel.
Stark explores her marginalization and British racism further in an essay in Be- yond Euphrates,
I was soon considered a rebel, a dangerous eccentric, or a spy, and my lodging with a shoemaker’s family…a flouting of national prestige….half a dozen women told me in a marked way that they had lived in Iraq for a varying number of years ‘and never had a wog’ across their door- step….[t]he first impact was like a cold shower on someone who is not ex- pecting it. It was my first meeting with one of our worst English character- istics - the absence of any human curiosity, a result of the degraded habit of classifying human beings in sets: and this offended me in an abstract way (1985, 86).
Because Stark was living in a ‘native house’, she was seen to be denigrating the British persona. Obviously it was considered un-British to associate in any manner with the lo- cal Arab population, let alone live with them, and to do so meant she was an outsider, not really a member of British society. David Spurr perceives this colonialist attitude of the British as “debasement” of the Other,
where the constant threat to a precariously established order serves to in- tensify, in rhetoric as well as in more material forms of oppression, the ob- sessive repudiation of the Other…[and that] in Western writing, the de- basement of the Other often suggests a prohibition designed to protect the boundaries of Western cultural value (79).
In her early writing, Stark clearly associates the British colonial attitude towards Arabs with her own marginalization.
Stark pursues the issue of double marginalization further in “Concerning Man- ners” from Baghdad Sketches. This vignette begins with an essay and concludes with an illustrative example. In the essay portion, Stark tries to find reasons for the racist and imperialistic attitudes for the British (the women in particular) and almost manages to
excuse it. However the example she provides is a harsh portrayal of British ‘manners’ in action. She opens with a very insightful and intuitive paragraph:
[e]very country has its own way of saying things. The important point is that which lies behind people’s words, and the art of discovering what this may be considered as a further step in the learning of languages, of which grammar and syntax are only the beginning. But if we listen to words merely, and give to them our own habitual values, we are bound to go astray (61).
Stark realizes that language and culture are inseparable. To the multi-lingual Stark, lan- guage is key to learning about another culture. In postcolonial studies translation is con- sidered to be an important issue and Ashcroft et al apparently concur with Stark: “[t]he process of translation must take into account a number of factors, including context, the rules of grammar of both languages, their writing conventions, and the cultural nuances of the translated text” (215). Stark seems almost prescient in her concern for the ‘cultur- al nuances’ that interest academics in the fields of ethnography and anthropology today.
It is this concern that raises her ire towards the British civil service wives who make no effort to engage with the indigenous people and comments, “a want of interest is the most insidious way of hurting…feelings” (2011, 63). Disinterest can also be interpreted as a lack of respect, not only for an individual but also the culture they belong to.
The illustrative portion of the sketch describes the day a British wife, referred to as “Mrs. X.” by Stark, made an unexpected visit. Stark was in her ‘native house’ with two male Arab friends, Nuri and her Arabic teacher Nashir Effendi. Stark effectively de- scribes the encounter:
“What she did was to look straight before her as if the gentlemen on either hand had become suddenly invisible and disembodied. She looked at me and talked to me: they might have been sitting in the moon, and that is no
doubt what they felt like, for the atmosphere was cold….After a decent in- terval of conversation like an Arctic Ocean, with remarks like icebergs floating about, few and far between - Mrs. X. took her leave….She was quite unaware of having awakened hatred in the heart of a peaceful citi- zen” (2011, 64-5).
Stark’s Arab friends were very aware of being rudely snubbed by “Mrs. X”, and Stark clearly shows their perspective by allowing Nasir to have the final word: “‘I knew she wanted me to go’, he said, ‘I could see what she was thinking. They call us wogs’”
(2011, 65). Stark never saw her teacher again.
It is important to remember that Stark was writing for a very specific audience here: the British in Baghdad. She is in effect holding up a mirror to show them their bad behaviour, and she uses some subtle touches as well. Nasir and Nuri are the only named and described individuals in the piece. There are no physical descriptors of Mrs.
X. and none of her dialogue is transcribed by Stark. The only voice heard is that of Na- sir. In effect Stark silenced the imperialist voice in order for the Arab voice to be heard and respected.
In the final sketch, “Nejf”, Stark finds herself the victim of racism:
[I] was suddenly shocked to see an old shoemaker cross-legged in his booth staring at me with eyes of concentrate hate…it is horrid to be hated all for nothing. And what a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact!…And if he had been able to look past my English bod- ice into my heart, he would have seen that what it was filled with at the moment was a friendly respect (2011, 199).
This excerpt echoes the sentiment Stark feels when ostracized by the British. The term respect can be defined as “proper acceptance or courtesy; acknowledgement [and] to
show regard or consideration for”2. Stark knows firsthand the sting of disrespect particu- larly when respect is given and not granted in return. She was hated by the shoemaker simply because she was English, not for anything she said or did, just as Nasir and Nuri are disrespected by Mrs. X. The shoemaker and Mrs. X. demonstrate that racism can be reciprocated; neither of them showed respect for someone of another culture; in fact both practised blatant racism.
There are certain circumstances in which respect must be demanded. When
Stark began working at the Baghdad Times she found herself in this position:
[o]n my first day, no one rose to greet my arrival, and I made a little speech in the clerk’s room explaining that office women are to be thought of as queens, and men stand when they come in: and stand up they did, for the whole of the year that followed (1985, 244).
Respect begins with good manners as far as Stark is concerned, and in this example, respect generally in accordance with behaviour during her time for her gender more than for her nationality.
During her first two years in Baghdad, Stark struggled with the rules and regula- tions regarding residence and travelling issued by the Ministry of the Interior for “Euro- pean and American Ladies in Iraq.” These regulations were printed in the Baghdad
Times. Stark responded with a very satirical letter to the editor, questioning them,
I gather from the above-mentioned document that if she is neither a Lady, nor possessed of any Social Status in particular, the authorities do not re- ally mind what becomes of her, and she may picnic off the main road without notifying the Ministry of the Interior (2011, 59-60).
For her initial forays outside of Baghdad, Stark obeyed the regulations and always had an appropriate male escort and/or entourage with her. However, it did not take long be-
2 “respect.” dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Dec. 2013.
fore she began pushing the boundaries of those restrictions. She accepted an invitation to visit a desert sheik which caused some consternation among the British. As Stark re- lates it:
[t]he truth is that the people here don’t want any English in the land except themselves: they feel responsible, and yet can’t actually order you about if you are an independent traveller. In fact it really is the attitude of A Pas- sage to India, though I would never have believed it before, and it does make one rather sad (1985, 112).
In this Stark deplores the attitude of the colonizers towards the colonized and uncon- sciously exhibits a postcolonial attitude decades before the study of postcolonialism be- gan.
Postcolonialism attempts to describe colonialism and its lasting effects from the colonized or ‘other’ point of view. In 2003,Young describes postcolonialism as,
a body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the re- lations between western and non-western people and their worlds are viewed….It means turning the world upside down. It means looking from the other side of the photograph (2).
In another letter to her mother, dated 25 November, 1929, Stark does exactly this by describing a day she spent with Arab friends, Dr. Raghib and his wife and daughter,
[t]heir idea of pleasure is to drive in an open car round the suburban roads of Alwiyah [a suburb of Baghdad where many of the British lived] and ‘look at the English’, a sort of substitute for a zoo. I was taken and found it quite amusing to watch the curious spectacle of may compatriots playing golf, etc. from this new angle (1985, 103).
Stark is aware that those being viewed are also looking back and that there is another side to the photograph. She also makes an important observation about cultural practic- es when viewed from outside that culture: that they may seem absurd or strange when taken out of context or without cultural understanding. This is also an important feature
of Stark’s writing: throughout her travels she describes the cultural practices of those she encounters without ridicule or making judgements no matter how different or absurd they might seem from a Western perspective.
Stark strives to understand the perspective from the ‘other side’ of the photo- graph. In another letter to her mother, 6 May 1930, she describes why her orientalist studies have been inadequate and wrongly focused,
[a]gain I was right and the experts wrong; they told me the Quran was no use now for getting into touch with people. The Quran has been their one source of inspiration for centuries: it is their background - and however Eu- ropeanized they may be, one is sure to get nearer to them really if one comes at them from behind as it were, through the things they knew as children, or that their parents and nurses knew, than if one comes through the medium of a new civilization which means something quite different to them from what it means to us. When I take the old Mulla’s standpoint, I know where I am and what to expect: when I take a European standpoint with a ‘civilized’ oriental, I can never know where I am, for I have no means of judging what ‘European’ means to him; it is certainly not what it means to us (1985, 160).
In this passage Stark delivers a clear indictment of orientalist studies and also empha- sizes that there is another side and the difficulty of expressing that perspective. This ob- servation by Stark precedes the publication of Said’s seminal work Orientalism by near- ly fifty years.
Stark does not allow her own religious convictions to colour her cultural observa- tions and, aside from noting that she is Christian, Stark does not identify her religious affiliation or its importance in her life. However, she does have enormous respect for
Islam and its influence upon Moslem people. In an eloquent passage from Baghdad
Sketches, she describes walking home late one night during Ramadhan,
[t]he extraordinary unity of Islam comes over me. These crowds are mov- ing through all the cities of the East: from Morocco to Afghanistan, from
Turkey to India and Java, they walk abroad through the nights of the Fast. In their shadows they are dim and unreal, less clear to the eye of the im- agination than that Arabian Merchant who first set them in motion twelve centuries ago. How firmly he pressed his finger into the clay of the world! So that these sheeplike figures still obey, moving hither and thither in the night; and made one think, marvelling at its range of mediocrity and splen- dour, of the power of the mind and the will of man (79-80).
Stark recognizes the power and authority of Islam, that she can admire, respect and be in awe of it, but never fully understand its power or succumb to its authority. One of the final lines of Baghdad Sketches is, “[w]ho are we to criticize a faith that gives so much?”
(200), A similar attitude prevails in all of Stark’s writing: a non-critical acceptance and respect of cultures different from her own. As her biographer, Jane Fletcher Geniesse writes, “[a]gain and again Freya would discover how important her knowledge of the
Muslim holy book was in gaining the respect and confidence of the people she met”
(104). At that time, the teaching of Arabic language skills in Arabia was based on read- ings from the Quran, as Stark knew well from her years of language study and even en- rolment in an Arabic girls’ school. Stark understood that for the Arab people their lan- guage, culture, politics, laws and day to day living were finely integrated with their Islam- ic religion. At times her life depended upon this knowledge, respect and understanding.
The Valleys of the Assassins and Travel Writing
The study of travel writing is interdisciplinary in nature as it may have relevance to literary studies, ethnology, feminist studies, history, geography, anthropology, culture and postcolonial studies. It is perhaps this multi-disciplinary interest in travel writing that provides many different definitions of the genre. Tim Youngs describes travel writing as,
“predominantly factual, first-person prose accounts of travels that have been undertaken by the author-narrator” (3). This allows for the inclusion of self-writing such as journals, letters, and diaries as well as actual travelogues which form the basis of most of Stark’s writing. Unlike many travel writers of her time such as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene, Stark did not begin to write until after she began to travel. She found that the sales of her articles and eventually her books provided her the financial means to continue to travel. Writing was not the motivation for her travels. Instead, as she admits in the preface to The Valleys of the Assassins, “I travelled single-mindedly for fun” (xxii). Fun for Stark at that time meant travelling on her own into the remote are- as of Luristan, a wild mountainous region between Iraq and Iran that was sparsely in- habited by poor nomadic tribes and bandits.
The Valleys of the Assassins describes several of Stark’s forays into this danger- ous region and each involves a separate quest, what Youngs describes as,
the single-most important organizing principle of travel writing….Over the centuries, the object of the quest and the way that the quest story is told may have changed, but the basic structure of subject, object, passage and obstacle remain (101).
A quest concerns a goal and, for each of her trips, Stark had clearly set goals, whether to loot graves in search of the prized Luristan bronzes, to find a treasure in a cave, or to search for the castles of the fabled Assassins. Interestingly, historian Albert Hourani dismisses the myth of the Assassins as fable brought back to Europe during the time of the Crusades, “that gave rise to the name of ‘Assassins’ and the story, not found in the
Arabic sources, that they lived under the absolute rule of the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’”
(96). Hourani states that the myth was an 11th century local resistance on the part of the Isma’ili sect to Sunni rulers. Although Stark did meticulous research on her subjects,
her writings are based on the orientalist knowledge of the time. Many of her goals were unrealized as she was intercepted by the Iranian police on several occasions. Her larg- est obstacle was always her own health, and Stark came close to death from malaria and dysentery on one of these quests. However, Stark always came home with new mapping information for the British Intelligence as well as photos and topographical de- tails for the Royal Geographical Society and of course a wealth of experiences for her articles and books.
A quest involves more than simply travelling to attempt to achieve a goal. Be- cause the quest itself is told from the perspective of the searcher, Youngs asserts that,
the importance of the goal overrides the interests of those whom he or she encounters along the way. The places and the people they meet on the way are subordinated to…and exist in relation to the quest, aiding or hin- dering its accomplishment…quests are for the benefit of the self. They reinscribe oppositions of self and Other and they do not allow for the direct representation of the Other’s point of view (94).
For the reader of Stark’s writing, it is her description of the landscapes and interaction with the people that impress the most. The quest may be a personal goal ‘for the benefit of self’ for the writer, but for Stark’s readers it is the journey itself that is of paramount interest. This may be true for Stark herself,
I reached Baghdad and settled in my room on the Tigris with the four months in Persia and all their memories to arrange in my mind: the un- mapped hills and rivers, the saucer plains enclosing little worlds whose voice is never heard beyond their borders, the open hunted freedom of the southern ranges are always with me, and flit refreshingly through any dusty day (1985, 191).
After four months in Persia, she reflects not on her goals, achievements or disappoint- ments, but the memories of the land and the people. Stark’s mode of travel was de- pendent upon the hospitality of those people she met. Many of them aided her in her
quests, but there were those who hindered as well. She had problems with some of her guides in particular, but Stark transforms their ineptitude into humorous interludes. She describes Ismail as, “the most loutish, clumsy, incurably stupid type of stable-hand that
Persia ever produced” (2001, 206) and also, “[h]e was terribly stupid. His daily food, which consisted of an ancient cheese in a furry bit of goatskin round his neck, made him very trying at close quarters” (2001, 192). There is also the guide Stark dubbed the “Phi- losopher”, who was by trade a quilt maker. She describes him,
[a]s an attendant he left much to be desired - everything in fact if an at- tendant is supposed, as I take it, to attend. But he was a charming old man, and would sit for hours, while all was bustle around him, filling little tubes of paper with native tobacco, lost in what one might take to be the ultimate perfection of resignation, but which was really a happy daydream, far from the toilsome world in which I was looking for keys or dinner, or any of the other things he was supposed to see to (2001, 49).
Often Stark finds her journey delayed because of her guide lacking a passport or even, in one case, a pair of trousers. She saves her ire, however, for a Hungarian engineer whom she blames for her failure to climb the famed mountain, The Throne of Solomon,
[b]ut though there are few instants in themselves better than those when, from an escaladed ridge, one looks upon new country, the joy of complete achievement was not ours: and if this were a story with a plot instead of being merely the matter-of-fact diary it is, the Hungarian engineer would certainly figure as the villain. It was he, though we did not know it at the time, who robbed us our triumph….I curse the engineer in my heart, wish- ing him that his wife may never cease from talking and his angles be per- petually inaccurate (2001, 247).
Stark’s use of the possessive pronoun should be noted here; she is including her native guides. According to Melman,
the role allocated to the tribesmen in the Arabian travelogue involves more than their speaking up or back to the Western observer: they become co- travellers. During the long and arduous journeys, all travel- lers…Westerners especially, depended entirely on the tribes’ protection of
life and limb…[and] under such circumstances conventional colonial hier- archies broke down (117).
Melman also describes this relationship as familial but not a parental-filial bond which might have been expected within “the paternalist Orientalist framework, but rather a bond between siblings” (117). As The Valleys of the Assassins ends and the journey is over, Stark and her guide ‘Aziz, “said good-bye to each other with hands upon our breasts” (2001, 292). Clearly they had forged a friendship based upon mutual respect.
As Stark’s lengthy sojourn in search of the castles of the Assassins continued, she as- sociated herself more and more with the people and the land,
[i]t was pleasant to think that we were not marked on any map; that, so far as the great world went, we were non-existent; and yet here we were, har- vesting our corn, living and dying and marrying as busily as elsewhere (2001, 218).
Mills recognizes this aspect of women’s travel writing stating, “[t]his alternative, more personalized form of writing by women…constitutes both a challenge to male Oriental- ism and a different form of knowledge about other countries” (199). Stark focuses on the universality of mankind. Her self-inclusion makes her a participant rather than simply an observer.
Stark’s concept of British imperialism also began to change. Geniesse describes this change,
Freya thought long and hard about whether colonial peoples should be al- lowed to govern themselves and concluded that most people would rather take their lives into their own hands, even if doing so meant going without bridges, paved roads, and modern hospitals. She was certain that while the British did it better than anyone, it was better not to be doing good for people who didn’t want to be done for. She was beginning to formulate for herself a definition for a ‘new imperialism,’ which kept a benign eye on former proteges but no longer actively governed (139-140).
Stark debates this issue with herself in a long letter to Sir Henry Lawrence,
[e]veryone agrees that Iraq is not fit to govern itself (might be said of lots of countries in Europe too). I think the Iraqis themselves agree in this: the difference is that they don’t care so frightfully much about being well gov- erned. It is rather peculiar of us to be so particular about it, don’t you think? And a mistake to assume that other nations are the same….Anyway I have come to the conclusion that they value politeness more than philanthropy (grace and works), and no amount of solid good balances the hurt vanity (1985, 128-129).
Stark’s problem with imperialism is people-centred: she does not like the way the British make the Arabs feel inferior. In other words, it is the issue of respect that concerns her.
She continues in this letter to describe how she gets along so well with all the people she has met because she is poor and living as they do: they don’t feel inferior to her.
Mills believes that,
[t]his stress on people from other countries as individuals is in marked contrast to much Orientalist work, where the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is carefully policed. It is this lack of demarcation in women’s writing which constitutes the point at which colonial discourse is most unstable, and which women’s writing helps to expose (106).
This is aptly demonstrated in Stark’s writing. Ideologically she supports the imperialist view, but struggles with the effects it has on the people.
Through direct quotation, Stark often represents the Other point of view. At the time of Stark’s travels in Persia, the Shah had decreed that the male populace must ad- here to Western standards of dress. This meant the cutting of long hair, the adoption of trousers and jackets as well as discarding ethnic headwear in favour of a Pahlevi hat.
The police were directed to enforce these regulations upon the remote tribal villagers.
While in the village of Kafrash during one of her travels in Luristan, Stark was present
while a policeman told the villagers that they had only five days to comply with the di- rective from the Shah. Stark interjected,
‘Do you think the Ferengi clothes keep rain and snow out as thoroughly as these felt coats?’ I asked at last. ‘Oh no,’ said the policeman. ‘I should think the Pahlevi hat would not last long in this climate either?’ ‘No time at all,’ the tribesmen said in chorus, with obvious joy (2001, 10).
Stark not only captures the viewpoint of the Other, but also illustrates what Youngs re- fers to as a “sense of catching things just before they vanish…the idea of having arrived in time to witness a sight that will be gone before one’s readers get the chance to see it”
(95). Stark was well aware that she was witnessing a culture that would be disappearing or transformed in the not too distant future and addresses it eloquently in the preface to
Baghdad Sketches,
[w]hether these Western floods, to which all her sluices are open, come to the East for baptism or drowning, is hard to say. total immersion in any case she is bound to submit to and we - who love the creature - wait with some misgiving to see in what condition her regenerated head will reap- pear above the water; we stand upon the shore and collect such odd- ments as we find floating in chaos - her customs, religions, her clothes and trinkets and some, alas ! [sic] of her virtues. We snatch them as they drift for ever [sic] out of sight, and encase them in an armour of words - and by so doing, not unhopeful of the future, yet wage our little losing bat- tle against the fragilities of Time (x).
Billie Melman addresses this issue as well stating,
[t]he travellers’ project of humanizing the Arab, documenting his life and making him audible is marked by a paradox. What they describe as ‘au- thentic’ is itself about to disappear…because the related processes of im- perialism, Westernization, and modernization were irreversible (117).
But Stark’s writing is also imbued with a sense of the ancient historical past as well as the inexorable advance of time: “[a] sense of quiet life, unchanging, centuries old and forgotten, held our pilgrim souls in its peace” (2001, 235). Perhaps this was Stark’s ulti- mate quest.
The concept of the ‘quest’ can also be influenced by gender and the issue of gender in travel writing has become a topic of increased study in recent years. Susan
Bassnett describes the theory of the exceptional woman as one,
…who is somehow different from other women and therefore empowered to perform feats no normal woman would be capable of carrying out. [This] has been one of the classic ways of marginalizing women’s achievements (228).
Stark’s travels were exceptional in the fact that they went beyond what anyone, male or female, had managed to accomplish at that time. It was important to Stark that she be the first person to explore remote areas of Arabia and Persia, not necessarily the first woman. However, she is very aware of the anomaly she presented. When on her quest for the hidden treasure, Stark was captured by the Persian police and taken to see the
Governor of Pusht-i-Kuh. He found the situation quite amusing,
[h]e tried not to show it, but his eyes were dancing as he, also, asked me how I had lived and lodged in the mountains. ‘No wonder,’ said he politely, ‘that yours is a powerful nation. Your women do what our men are afraid to attempt.’ (2001, 137).
According to Youngs, “[s]ome travel writers and critics are certain that women observe details inaccessible to or overlooked by men. Many proponents of this view also con- tend that women are more likely than men to exhibit empathy with colonised peoples”
(130). As a woman travelling in a Moslem country, Stark had access to the mysterious harems, an access denied male travellers. Inside she found herself discussing the uni- versal topics of fashion, cosmetics, illness, medicine, children and marital problems.
Because of her access to the women, Stark can describe not only their living conditions, but their cultural conditions as well. Often she finds herself a very honoured guest of impoverished families. In one such instance, Stark concisely describes the cul-
tural restraints faced by the women. A meal is prepared for Stark and her guides and was served while the very hungry women and children of the family watched,
I myself was hungry enough to have demolished all three dishes at once with the greatest ease; but who could withstand so heartrending a specta- cle? To say anything was impossible” our hostess would have been humil- iated beyond words’ but one could leave part of the dinner on one’s plate. I pretended to be satisfied halfway through the microscopic meal, and the four little boys lapped up what remained. As for the daughter, she had learnt already what is what in this world. She neither got nor expected a share (2001, 62).
Not only does Stark describe a cultural gender bias, she also demonstrates her respect for cultural practices, with which she may not agree, in this case finding a compromise.
Stark rarely interfered with cultural practices which from a Western perspective could be viewed as abhorrent. In a rare example, she was beginning her trek into Persia and travelling by car with a Persian, two veiled ladies and a little girl and describes this sce- ne,
[m]y fellow-travellers had been to a brother’s funeral in Hamadan: they were now taking his small child home to marry their little boy later on: they would send her to school first, they said. ‘In our country, if you marry them too young their children die,’ said I, trying to do the best I could for the little bride. She was seven years old. ‘We shall wait another five years,’ said they (2001, 162).
Later Stark wrote of her astonishment, “with which [she] became aware of the British official attitude towards women” (1985, 84). She is able to discretely make a comparison between the Eastern tradition of harems and British civil service wives,
[t]he English woman in Iraq was never thought of as in a street at all, but as wife, mother or daughter attached to a ‘man in the street’ at a distance - in fact safely indoors. This double loss of individuality, inflicted on one-half of the human race, came to me with a shock of even greater surprise than that of the wholesale classification of men (1985, 84).
However, she may have been thinking of more than British cultural traditions when she continues to write, “there is a similarity in the structure of all human ceremonial, so that insight will produce tolerance - which is but the recognition of sameness under an ap- parent diversity” (1985, 85). It is her insight and tolerance that allows her to objectively describe, for the most part, the gender inequalities that she encounters in her travels.
Thompson notes that some women travellers,
…were struck by the unsettling comparisons that could be made between their own social status and the conditions of life for women in supposedly more backward, repressive cultures…and often worked to complicate and problematize imperialist assumptions about the moral superiority of the traveller’s culture (194).
In reading Stark, one does not get a sense of the writer having moral superiority. In fact the opposite is the case. Stark describes her Lurish hosts,
[t]hey never expected to be paid in any way. They may contemplate a raid on their guest’s luggage while he sleeps, but that is another matter: it is the country’s national pastime, with rules of its own: and who are we, after all, to demand consistency in morals! (2001, 22).
Stark herself was such an object of curiosity among the native people that she basically became what Geniesse calls “the third sex” (100). She ate with the men, talked with the men after dinner and then was relegated to the harem or women’s area to sleep (if indeed there was one at all). Stark describes her meeting with some Lurish women: “[t]hey came to look at me yesterday, and refused to believe that I was a wom- an, to dare to come among them. ‘She is more than a man,’ said Hajji [her guide]”
(1985, 226). Although Youngs claims that women travellers, “are forced to adopt a manner of self-presentation associated with men, compromising and distorting their self-
expression” (135), this was never the case with Stark. Not only did she always dress as a proper English woman, she is not above using her gender to get her way. Stark her- self admits, “[t]he great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised” (2001, 49). She is also aware that she is being judged by the tribespeople she stays with on the basis of her gender as well as her nationality: “[a]s I have the onus of making a precedent for any British lady who may ever come this way, I am trying to make her as comfortable as
I can” (1985, 166), as she made a request for hot water to wash every evening. Once again, Stark is very aware that the Other is looking back.
Besides being quests, Stark’s travels were also journeys of self-discovery. Prior to her solo ventures, she writes to her mother 6 May, 1930,
[d]on’t know why, but I am so very depressed this evening - feeling so old, and as if my whole life were wasted and now it were too late to do any- thing with it….And as if what I do do were not worth doing: no one seems to think it is, but just wonder at me and are sorry for me if they are nice, and disapprove if they are not. To be just middle-aged with no particular charm or beauty and no position is a dreary business. In fact I feel as if I had been going uphill all the time to nowhere in particular…envying all these women with their nice clean husbands whose tradition is their tradi- tion, and their nice flaxen children who will carry it on in the same simple and steady way. And though it is my tradition too, no one thinks it is, be- cause of a silly difference of form and speech and fashion - so that I feel as if I had no people of my own. If only I could eventually find some work that would make me feel settled and interested; I hope it may be: but no one seems to want women very much (1985, 138-139).
It is by her travels that she gains empowerment and authority. After months of arduous travel and living with people who were not judging her by any cosmetic standard (since they had no one to compare her with), Stark became her own person. Years later, Stark
comments on her sense of personal accomplishment she felt at the end of her four months in Persia,
[f]rom then on I never again had to suffer among my own people from a want of sympathy, encouragement or kindness in my ventures; and in fact I soon realized that a woman gets far more than her legitimate share of praise, merely because of her comparative rarity in the explorer’s world (1985, 188).
As Bassnett writes, for Stark travelling and writing about her travels, “seems to have arisen from a dual process of self-exploration and a desire to inform Anglo-Saxon read- ers of the wonders of the Arab and Persian worlds” (236), rather than a kind of “populist journalistic motivation” (236). Stark does not merely describe people and landscapes, she lives them.
Conclusion
Stark’s writing is distinctive not only in literary style and descriptions of places and people but in non-judgemental objectivity. In Baghdad Sketches, she writes that the key to travelling is,
…your customary thought, all except the rarest of your friends, even most of your luggage - everything, in fact, which belong to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance….But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a lei- surely and a blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you (11).
She emphasizes this in Beyond Euphrates, “[t]he secret of travelling is to leave one’s past behind, and to keep a mind a little blank and empty for the new to be received”
(246). Postcolonial studies tell us it is impossible to view another culture without being influenced by our own cultural background. Perhaps it was Stark’s multi-cultural back-
ground that allowed her to carry less cultural baggage than most and permits her hu- manistic depictions of the indigenous peoples take the forefront in her writing. However, her cultural background at times does influence her writing; she is unable to shake the
British concept of ‘class’. As with most British travel writers, she identifies the Beduin as the aristocrats in the Arab world, and she ranks hill dwellers, plains people and towns- people into a hierarchy of class. But this sort of cataloguing of people does not affect her personal relationships with them. This is particularly evidenced in Baghdad Sketch- es in which she observes the cultural interface of the British and Arabs.
Stark firmly believed in the ideology of British imperialism as a helpful ‘big broth- er’ to underdeveloped regions. She was politically naive in many ways, claiming that,
“the one only vital problem is to find out how the things we are interested in can be made safe independently of native politics. If this were solved, all the rest would follow - including as much Arab freedom as their geography allows” (1985, 129). In other words, she thought the best solution would be for Britain to have control of the oil fields and the
Arabs could have the rest, a truly imperialist position, but to her it was a compromise that would make everyone happy. She not only empathized with the indigenous people, she understood their opposition to colonial intervention in their government, but the im- perialist in her would not give up the commercial advantages. It is perhaps this paradox which makes her writing about the people so intriguing.
Stark’s attitude toward the indigenous peoples is clearly much more humanist than the attitude displayed by the wives of the British diplomats in Baghdad. However it should be kept in mind that Stark was travelling in Arabia by choice, whereas the British
wives had dutifully followed their civil service husbands to Baghdad. Stark attributes her different approach to travel to her upbringing:
[t]he life I left behind me had given, without my knowing it, some of the necessary ingredients for travel. In the first place, I had learnt to rely on myself…[My sister and I] had nothing but our own intrinsic selves to rely on, and came to look naturally at the intrinsic qualities of other people. Perhaps this is the most important of all assets a traveller can possess, for it minimizes barriers, whether of nationality, race or caste; and in fact I have never been able to feel that human beings differ except in things far more deeply rooted than their manners, habits or outward appearances or colours (1985, 4-5).
Self-reliance and the ability to respect people as people regardless of their cultural background, combined with the ability to write engagingly and sometimes poetically of her travels distinguish Stark’s works. As Stark says, “[w]e all travel…even though we stay at home” (2001, 94). Her travel writing makes this possible for her readers.
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