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