Part Two: Isabelle Eberhardt: The Genderbending Vagabond

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? 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,

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 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. 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,

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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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. 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, 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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