On blazing hot suns that have set on the British Empire

Earlier this year I read and reviewed a book called Loot, which was about museums and theft and stuff. My mom (hi Mom!) sent the review to the family friend who gave me the book for graduation (hi Ellen!). Ellen sent me a nice email, a newspaper clipping about the Getty sharing pieces with Italy and the prosecution of Marian True, and another book, because she is awesome.

The book was Janet Wallach's Desert Queen, a biography of Gertrude Bell. Shamefully, I had never heard of Gertrude Bell before I was given this book, and so I had no idea who she was. Apparently, she was the “uncrowned Queen of Iraq”--the daughter of a rich industrialist, the first woman ever to obtain a history degree at Oxford, the first woman to serve in the British Empire's political bureau (her title was “Oriental Secretary”), a British spy during the First World War, an archaeologist, the first Westerner to penetrate the Arabian desert, and a key player in the formation of the state of Iraq. She was a very busy and smart lady, basically. Despite working for the British Empire (the mightiest and most elitist Empire in the history of imperialism! And that's saying something!) and occasionally campaigning against the suffragist movement (WTF?!)*, she was fascinating to read about and I found her a rather inspiring figure, particularly for those of us who are wasting some years after college floating around aimlessly wondering how, exactly, our current day jobs are going to help us get all famous and accomplished and feeling guilty that Mary Shelley had written and published Frankenstein by our age. Or perhaps that is just me.

Anyway. After graduating from Oxford, Gertrude “came out” and did her three “seasons” like a proper Victorian lady, where she utterly failed to secure any marriage prospects, due to her constant opinionatedness and failure to defer to men's opinions and bat her eyelashes or whatever subservient shit she was supposed to do to prop up the fragile egos of well-bred young British gentlemen. The only people she got along with were diplomats and officials several decades her senior, from whom she learned all sorts of stuff about the history and politics of various far-flung parts of the British Empire. After her seasons were up and she got bored of sitting around England being a wealthy spinster, Gertrude would take periodic long vacations around the world, as you did when you were a proper Victorian member of the leisure class. However, instead of going to tame little resorts in South America or wherever else her peers went, Gertrude most frequently leveraged her friendships with her diplomat relatives and acquaintances and went off to the Middle East, where she had real adventures, traipsing around the desert on camels and making friends with all the Arab sheikhs and excavating ancient Mesopotamian archaeological ruins. On one of these trips—taken to distract herself from grief after the death of her boyfriend, which to me sounds like something out of a bad novel, but whatever—she decided to go into the Arabian desert, where Westerners never went. This necessitated signing many waivers basically saying that she wasn't really going with the permission of the Turks or the British, they'd just given up trying to stop her, and if anything terrible happened to her, well, they'd warned her. On this trip Gertrude was indeed held prisoner for a month by Ibn Rashid in some ridiculously picturesque medieval city (the book has pictures)**, but was eventually let go unharmed.

This all turned out to be rather a good thing, because with Gertrude's habit of writing long and detailed letters to everyone she'd ever met, by the time World War One rolled around there were several connections of hers in the British diplomatic corps who were all full of helpful knowledge obtained from Gertrude's unofficial reports, and believed that she could be of even greater use if they made her write official reports about the Middle East, since she was at this point personal friends with all the nomadic tribal leaders whose names the rest of the Empire's Middle East officers didn't even know. So she went off to Cairo, and then Baghdad, and did research and visited all her old Arab friends and wrote thousands and thousands of pages on everything and everyone in the regions of Arabia and Mesopotamia. When the war ended, she continued to live in Baghdad, and made a lot of Arab friends and a lot of British enemies by being smart enough to drop the stuffy imperialist act for long enough to support the idea of an independent Arab nation-state of Iraq, realizing that if the British just moved in to become the new Turks except not Muslim, they would have a rebellion on their hands. Unfortunately, in the time it took for A.T. Wilson (a staunch imperialist, and her boss) to move out and Sir Percy Cox (who favored transition to independence) to move in, the situation had become even more volatile than when the war first ended. However, Gertrude and her buddies pulled off some amazing feats of diplomacy and networking (my dad would be super impressed), and managed to pull off a relatively peaceful transition from a British military occupation to a fairly functional independent-but-on-friendly-terms-with-Britain-so-they-could-use-their-petroleum Arab constitutional monarchy. This monarchy would not outlast its first king, because his successors were fairly useless with managing the diverse groups that were all living in the geographical entity of Iraq, but getting the state established instead of just annexing it was a pretty impressive feat of statesmanship and a fascinating, fascinating story.

One thing I really like about this biography was that it has an almost novel-like level of characterization for Gertrude and her buddies, due to Gertrude's amazing volume of letters and diaries. We aren't trying to piece together the bits of her private life from public records, and we almost never have to guess what Gertrude's thoughts or feelings on something were. We are treated to ridiculously detailed notes on Gertrude's and some other people's exact thoughts and feelings, and a wealth of detail on exactly who said what to whom and where, and who wore what to what function, and what food was served at which dinner party or in which sheikh's tent. While this could have devolved into a morass of useless detail, Ms. Wallach's research and writing is discerning enough that it instead paints a brilliant picture of 1920s-era Baghdad (among other times and places both Eastern, Western, and weirdly mixed) that did as much to transport me away from myself as the most well-done epic fantasy. In the freezing train cars of the Worcester-Framingham line, which is where I read most of the book, I felt  myself in the unbearable heat of Baghdad in July, where social events happen at six a.m. because that is the only time it is cool enough for people to put clothes on and go outside and the British ladies wear veils of mosquito netting over their fashionable European dresses and big hats. My only stylistic issue is that Ms. Wallach refers to a few too many instances of Gertrude's writing things as “scrawling,” which has left me desperately curious about how bad her handwriting actually was, and if there is a noticeable difference in her letters and diaries between “written” and “scrawled” matter.

Anyway, I found this both to be a really entertaining read and extremely educational (my World War One-era history is sadly lacking, as is my Middle Eastern). I also found it quite thought-provoking; it's easy to be like “Bah, the British Empire sucked” and “Bah, Iraq is all fucked up” and “Yay, Gertrude broke the rules like nobody's business,” but how do you put them all together? You get a much more nuanced look at how different factions of the British Empire dealt with new territories once the whole independence thing started to catch on, and Gertrude herself is a very interesting character due to her combination of being whip-smart and not taking any shit from anybody, and her distinctly upper-class British conservative roots. It also answers the “What were they thinking?” question that has bugged me ever since I learned that Iraq is basically made out of three random ethnic groups who don't get along—it turns out they were thinking a lot of really complicated things, some of which were ridiculous, and some of which were not.

I feel like there was something else I had wanted to say that I wrote in my first draft of this review, but I can't remember what it is. Yes, this is the second time I had to write this review. If you are interested my the trials and tribulations of attempting to LJ on the MBTA, it is here.

*I don't know if this makes it any better, but Gertrude's opposition to the suffrage movement seems more classist than the subservient self-loathing of a lot of the female anti-suffragists (particularly the ones that bothered being anti-suffragists before the Pankhursts). Gertrude was an upper-class lady and as such didn't see voting as a right, because upper-class Brits didn't really believe in fundamental human rights; they believed in rights of status/earned rights (and believed them to be the same thing, of course).  As upper-class twits, many of them also found the Pankhurts' methods vulgar and shocking and other such upper-class-twitty expressions of scandalizedness (scandalization? I cannot word today). Gertrude's writings seem to focus on the notion that British women weren't educated enough to vote well. Considering her efforts to secure the education of Iraqi women, I am assuming that she thought that women's suffrage was something that could eventually be acceptable? Although I wonder as to her opinions of the voting habits of England's lower-class men.

**What we get of the history of the power struggles within the Rashid family and the feud between the Rashids and the Sauds made me really, really want to learn more, and possibly for it to be turned into a ridiculously melodramatic costume drama like The Borgias. Except I'm not sure you could even begin to tell this story without bringing up probably well-founded charges of Orientalism, because it sounds like the Rashids made the Borgias look like they weren't even trying to be fucked up. Reading about them made me get the opening number from Aladdin stuck in my head. “Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face,” indeed.

Thank Whatever It's Friday

This morning, I tried an Experiment!

My Experiment was to see if I can utilize some of the time I spend on the train each day to more productive ends than just reading, because as much as I like having three hours a day to read, it is resulting in getting through a LOT of reading and having no time left to review them, or do my freelance assignments, and also I end up checking my email in the evening and then whoops, all my time is gone and I didn't do anything else I was planning to do. So this morning I brought along my netbook to see if this trial they are running of free wi-fi in the train cars is any good.

For the record: I adore the notion of free wi-fi in train cars. For some reason I always associate train use with being somewhat old-fashioned, probably because most of the rail systems in the US were built like a hundred years ago and I think most of the train cars are at least as old as I am. Trains have become sort of a second-teir mode of travel since their golden age, and the commuter rail systems very clearly reflect last century's urban-and-suburban job structure, so I always associate trains with being in some odd way historical curiosities. Even though they are still being used. But anyway, trains with wireless Internet just seem sort of weirdly steampunky to me. Perhaps I am just completely bananas, though.

Anyway. I got online successfully this morning, answered some emails, and opened up LJ to do my review of Desert Queen. I wrote the whole thing, and then, in a moment of thoughtlessness, hit the “tags” button to add tags, which causes a pop-up box these days, and the MBTA's wi-fi is basic enough that that was a really bad idea. Attempting to open the fancy pop-up window took about ten minutes, during which time the tag window never loaded, I was just unable to access the regular posting. Had to shut the window and hope I could auto-recover before getting into Back Bay; alas, it only auto-recovered the first paragraph or so. So I decided I should probably just write the things in OpenOffice and copy-paste from now on. So I started draft #2 during lunch, and finished it on the train ride home, which is where I am now. I'll post it and add the links and tags and stuff when I get back to Worcester, I suppose.

But at least I know I can do some basic Internetting before and after work!

In other news, I looked at a sublet today, and I will look at another one tomorrow, and I think I may bring my regular laptop on the train for that so I can do some of my Elance reformatting work on that trip. I am trying to talk myself into finding it possible to go to the gym first things in the morning, too. Tonight, I am going to read silly fantasy and brainstorm my Brilliant Business Idea with Liz (I am not telling you what it is) and maybe even get some Elance work done if not being Busy for ten minutes starts to wig me out, which it might. I am sorry about yesterday's stress-bomb; I got to the bank this morning so I am sure it will all work itself out. I just need to keep busy and keep writing.

Also in the past few weeks, I read a book about ambition, read two vampire books, went to see Jane Eyre, and watched the first two episodes of Game of Thrones. I will review Game of Thrones eventually, I promise. Perhaps after the third episode.

Happy Friday!

P.S. I refuse to either rant about being sick of the Royal Wedding or make a joke about not being invited to it. I will only say this: Where was our media when Kronprinsesse Victoria of Sweden got married last summer? I had to go to Sweden to hear about it. I mean, do we like fancy princess weddings or don't we? Or would having subtitles on the TV give Americans hives?