“Foreign Woman, Do Not Look!” Spring in Egypt and Lesja Ukrajinka’s Confrontation with Orientalism
From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi Slavistici
Marko Pavlyshyn, Monash University, Melbourne
Larysa Petrivna Kosač — Lesja Ukrajinka — spent much of her life travelling. From ten years of age a sufferer from tuberculosis, she sought treatment in Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin and Zürich. She journeyed to the peripheries of the Russian Empire — to Odesa and Crimea for her health, and to Georgia to be with her husband. Between 1909 and 1913 she spent three extended periods in Egypt, encountering a land which bore visible monuments of the greatness of its ancient civilization, but which had not been governed by native rulers since the fourth century b.c. After centuries of Greek, Roman and Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman overlordship, from 1882 onward Egypt had been under de facto British occupation. Among the vehicles of cultural influence that accompanied the European military and economic presence in Eg ypt was tourism, including the health tourism in which Lesja Ukrajinka participated. Lesja Ukrajinka was attentive to the depredations of colonial-ism in general and to the colonial marginality imposed upon her own and other cultures within the Russian Empire in particular.
In the dramatic poems Orhija (The Org y, written in 1912–1913) and Bojarynja (The Boyar’s Wife, written in Egypt in 1910), for example, she offered astute representations of the discursive strategies by which imperial metropoles exploit and appropriate the human and cultural capital of their provinces or colonies, while simultaneously subjecting them to disparagement and mockery1. It is scarcely surprising, then, that her sojourns in colonial Egypt gave rise to literary reflections on the mechanisms by which colonial power is exerted.Stimulated by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, literary and other humanities scholarship has become increasingly sensitive to manifestations in cultural texts of the power disequilibrium between Western (and other metropolitan) cultures and those not Western and not metropolitan. Orientalism, defined by Said as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978: 3), has become a short-hand term for the many ways in which Western discourses and practices reflect and extend Western domination over the East. These include Western description and study of the Orient that figure the observer as superior and the object of inquiry as inferior, and various rhetorical templates for representing and interpreting the Oriental Other — as, for example, feminized, eroticized or infantilized.
As has long been recognized, Orientalism is not solely the province of consciously supremacist ideology. In many instances it functions as an “unconscious and sometimes benevolently intended set of attitudes and preconceptions arising out of relations of power” (Marcuse 2004: 809–810), and the boundary in such cases between the virtuous intentions of the actor and the underlying structure of domination in which the actor is complicit may be subtle. Given her many travels, her erudite Europe-influenced world-view, her choice of the ancient and modern Orient as thematic background for many of her works, and her personal experience as an intellectual in a subaltern culture within an imperial con-text, Lesja Ukrajinka presents a complex and fascinating case of the tension between, on the one hand, anti-colonial solidarity with oppressed peoples and classes and, on the other, the inextricable enmeshment of Orientalist postulates and attitudes with the European Enlightenment tradition. My objective in the present inquiry is to illustrate this tension through examination of a single poem (Khamsin)2, within the context both of the poem cycle which it initiates, Vesna v Jehypti (Spring in Egypt, 1910), and of Lesja Ukrajinka’s Egyptian experiences. The following analysis will show that Lesja Ukrajinka was informed about and respectful of Egypt and its people, empathetic toward the oppressed indigenous population, and confident in her ability to observe, understand and generalize — perhaps too boldly — about Egyptians and their plight. It will focus on Khamsin as a poem which clamors to be interpreted as a flash of insight into the frailty of Orientalist claims to knowledge, as an expression of the inflection such claims receive when articulated by a woman, and as a diagnosis of the fin-de-siècle crisis of the Occidental knowledge system.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-10042
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/ss/article/view/10042
