Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

Between ‘the me that leaves and the me that returns’: Gertrude Bell’s Persian Gateways and Walls

Persian Pictures, Gertrude Bell’s first published collection, differs substantially from her later works; critics have accused it of sentimentality, lack of substance – a mere ‘folly’ incommensurable with Bell’s later writings. In the present article, I intend to advocate for Bell, though, proposing to see the supposed faults of Persian Pictures as the work’s greatest strengths which in fact reveal the author’s other, more lyrical and less ‘business-like’, side. With special emphasis placed on the concept of gateways and walls I will attempt to shed light on how, by traversing and/or transgressing borders of various types and putting herself to a series of identity-forming tests, Persian Pictures – to the contemporary reader – offer insight into the broader apparatus of British (and Western) colonialism.By linking each of the selected essays with one of John Frederick Lewis’s orientalist paintings, I hope to further strengthen my argument that aspects of Persian Pictures, originally seen as the work’s weaknesses, have the potential to actually enrich discussions of Western mis/representations of the Orient, without compromising its author, and should thus be approached as instances of powerful and vivid responses to the ‘shock of the new,’ as experienced by Gertrude Bell – and, in fact, many other travellers, male and female alike, who ventured into these realms.

Los problemas políticos de Irán desde el punto de vista de las mujeres viajeras en la era Nasseri

El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los problemas políticos de Irán desde el punto de vista de las mujeres viajeras en la era Nasseri. Esta investigación se ha realizado mediante el método descriptivo y mediante el estudio de trabajos escritos e históricos. Los investigadores han extraído material examinando libros, artículos y escritos históricos. Asimismo, se recopila e soluciona los problemas de los pasajeros. Los resultados muestran que durante la Era Qajar, debido a la posición estratégica de Irán y el Golfo Pérsico, esta región fue de particular interés para las potencias internacionales superiores; por lo tanto, viajaban a Irán viajeros, estadistas, embajadores y comerciantes de muchos países europeos y no europeos. En estas delegaciones y grupos políticos extranjeros también hubo figuras femeninas, entre ellas Lady Sheil, Jane Dieulafoy, Gertrude Bell, Madame Wolfson, Isabella Bird Bishop y Carla Serena. Algunas de estas mujeres llegaron a Irán como miembros de delegaciones políticas y otras con fines turísticos o económicos. Con respecto a su estatus y posición, proporcionaron a los funcionarios de Qajar informes en los que abordaban los problemas políticos de Irán, como el fracaso del gobierno en la gestión de la salud pública y la justicia, el manejo de la inseguridad, la corrupción económica generalizada entre los estadistas y otras autoridades del gobierno de Qajar, opresiones, y similares. Según los resultados, se puede decir que la mayoría de estos problemas están relacionados con la estructura interna de Irán así como con la cultura iraní y algunas costumbres de esa época.

The Race for Hafiz: Scholarly and Popular Translations at the Fin de Siècle

The great Persian lyric poet Hafiz was first translated into English by Sir William Jones in the 1780s. In the course of the nineteenth century many further translations would appear, initially intended for the use of oriental scholars and students of the Persian language, but increasingly also for the general reading public. The paraphrasers or ‘popularizers’ who devised the latter category of translation competed with professional scholars to shape the dissemination and popular perception of Persian poetry. Owing to a variety of factors, the middle of the nineteenth century saw a marked decline in the number of new Hafiz translations, and it is not until 1891 that a complete edition of Hafiz's works finally appeared in English. This led to an unusual situation, particular to Britain, in which scholars (Edward H. Palmer, Henry Wilberforce-Clarke, Gertrude Bell), and popularizers (Richard Burton, Herman Bicknell, Justin McCarthy, Richard Le Gallienne, John Payne) all jostled to fill the vacuum created by the absence of a definitive version. Their competition created, in short order, a diversity of versions presented to consumers, which allowed Hafiz's influence to be felt in twentieth-century poetry untrammelled by the impress (as became the case with Omar Khayyam) of one dominant translator. While the refraction of Hafiz through the biases and predispositions of multiple translators has been regarded as hopelessly distorting by Julie Scott Meisami, I argue instead that it highlights lyric, in the richness and diversity characteristic of Hafiz, as the Persian poetic mode which has been more influential on English writing and yet the most difficult to categorize and integrate. Lastly, by paying heed to the popular transmission of Hafiz in English, we might better understand the reception of Persian poetry in its generic, rather than only its formal character.

Mujeres narradoras de viajes: Gertrude Bell

Este trabajo se realiza con el fin de crear un itinerario a través de los principales destinos turísticos visitados por Gertrude Bell entre el 1 de diciembre de 1899 y el 14 de junio de 1900. Para su elaboración, fue necesario llevar a cabo una extensa investigación sobre el contexto para entender las posibilidades de viaje para mujeres de siglos pasados, cómo la fotografía y la literatura de viajes pueden llegar a estar relacionados con la industria del turismo y llegar a ser vías de promoción, la potencialidad de la ruta como un producto viable, la vida de Gertrude Bell y su personalidad como viajera. El método aplicado consistía en el estudio de cada diario y carta escrita y fotografía tomada por Gertrude Bell durante el periodo mencionado anteriormente; información turística e histórica sobre los destinos del itinerario y la manifestación de los sentimientos y pensamientos por parte de la autora de las cartas y diarios. El resultado fue la creación de una guía culturalmente rica basada en las emociones de Gertrude Bell, para atraer la atención del lector y llamar a su empatía, de manera que derivase en una ruta basada en la subjetividad.

Gertrude Bell and her Travel Writing in Syria (1907) and in Mesopotamia (1911): an Uncertain Orientalism at the Beginning of 20th Century

This article focuses on two pieces of travel narratives – in Syria and in Mesopotamia – by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, which date back to the first decade of 20th century. While giving visibility to women writers and their trajectories, we attempt to understand the elements which reject an orientalist discourse, following Edward Saïd’s definition of this term. Given that The Desert and the Sown and Amurath to Amurath were written at the height of the British Empire, this study does not aim to deny the imperialist aspects within these works; rather, it highlights the originality and the complexity of these texts, full of uncertainties and contradictions.

Heteroglossic itineraries and silent spaces: the desert cartographies of Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence

This article advocates for the central importance of examining cartography for the understanding of literary travel narratives, focussing on accounts of travel in the deserts of the Middle East written by Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence, both explorers, archaeologists and authors who were implicated in British activities in the Middle East before, during and after the Arab Revolt, and who travelled through the region during the early 20th century. This article seeks to explore the connections between the authors’ textual depictions and the maps that they authored, using close readings of their travel narratives and their maps to arrive at a more profound understanding of how these processes of authorship resulted in the production and mediation of ‘Arabia’ as an imaginative geography. Drawing on archival research and a range of textual sources, the development of this literary geography is traced through the early research of TE Lawrence on crusader castles in Syria and Lebanon, Gertrude Bell’s descriptions of using maps in The Desert and the Sown, Lawrence’s account of collating a map of Sinai for the War Office and the relationship between local navigational knowledges with their cartographic activities.