As European colonizers began to infiltrate the Middle East and North Africa, they became privy to cultures with contrasting ways of life. Greedily, they consumed “the Other”, seeing what they called “the Orient” as primitive and barbaric, yet mysterious, and exotic. (i) These ideas culminated in Europeans’ fascination with women who wore veils. They decided that the barbaric men of the Orient must be forcing women to cover up, that they must be hiding something beneath their coverings; to unmask her would be to penetrate the space of women and thus the secrets of the Orient. (ii)
In her work Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism, Meyda Yegenoglu links this ideology with European ideas of modernity and the enlightenment. (iii) The enlightenment prizes the dispelling of myth, focusing on the axiom of “knowledge is power”. The veiled woman created anxiety for westerners as she was out of their control; while she was able gaze upon and thus know them, they were unable to gaze upon and thus know her. Europeans became obsessed with the veil as they saw it as a deception and a seduction. The veil functioned as an extension of the private domestic space of the harem into the public space, making the symbol of the veil a metaphor of membrane for westerners to penetrate and thus dominate the Orient. (iv)
This ideology was proliferated by 19th century European artists and intellectuals, both in how the west perceives the east and how the east perceives themselves. (v) Moroccan born artist Lalla Essaydi, now based in the United States, strives to subvert these stereotypes in her photography through using the Arab female body to disrupt Orientalist tradition.(vi) Essaydi’s photography features women covered in calligraphy made of henna lounging in the private space of the harem in an examination of the importance of space in Islamic
culture.(vii)
In this essay I intend to study how Lalla Essaydi's work Bullet #3 (figure 1) subverts Orientalist views of the eastern woman. I will use Meyda Yegenoglu's
Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism as a lens in which to analyze Essaydi’s use of space, both actual and metaphorical, and how it relates to the Arabic and Islamic worlds. I will first use Veiled Fantasies to lay a groundwork to examine the hegemonic patriarchal western ideals of domination and penetration that drove Europeans to transgress the private space of Arab people through investigating the tropes of the veil and the harem. Then I will identify how Essaydi’s use of space in her work Bullet #3 appropriates these tropes, allowing her to reclaim the private sphere. Furthermore, I will examine how the work elucidates how internalized Orientalism has affected Arab and Muslim people.
The ideology “knowledge is power” is dangerous when wielded by a people who believes that they are the sole makers of knowledge. Yegenoglu references philosopher Michel Foucault’s problematization of this belief as it creates the perception that understanding how one’s space is organized will reveal how one works.viii In the case of the Orient, for the west to have complete control over the east, they could not tolerate any secrets, insisting on shining a light on anything they did not understand. They felt particularly threatened by the private space of women, obscured to them in public spaces by the veil and in the domestic space of the harem. What was hidden to Westerners thus became an obstacle to their authority over the Orient as the veiled woman could see them, but they could not see her. To justify their conquest for control, Westerners framed Arab Muslim woman as oppressed by Arab men and needed to be saved by western men. (ix)
Despite the west’s proclamations of heroism, 19th century writings frame the eastern woman as an object to be conquered. (x) It was hypothesized that the oppressed Arab woman’s eroticism was hiding just below the surface of her veil, turning her into a deception. Westerners conflated the mysterious sexuality of the veiled woman with the Orient as a whole, theorizing the east as an enigmatic monolith hiding something beneath its veil.xi Thus, the act of unveiling becomes a seduction, the need to know takes on sexual undertones, fulfilling the European fantasy of penetration into, and dissolving the boundaries between, the public and private spaces.
Essaydi’s work studies the relationship between architectural and psychosocial boundaries in Arab cultures; traditionally men have defined public spaces while women have been confined to the private space.(xii) In combining the traditionally feminine art of henna with the traditionally masculine art of calligraphy, Essaydi bridges the two worlds of public and private, male, and female, rather than dissolving them as colonial powers have done in the past. Aware of her largely western audience, Essaydi thus creates her own representation of the Arab woman, subverting pervasive stereotypes and working to heal the wounds inflicted by colonial narratives.
Essaydi depicts the harem in her photograph Bullet #3 featuring a woman sprawled across a divan. She is adorned in glittering gold sequins that match her surroundings; on closer inspection the viewer can recognize the shimmering bits of metal as bullet casings. The work is inspired by the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010s where uprisings spread across the middle east against their governments; and the resulting invasive role of violence that permeated peoples private and public lives. xiii In European art history, the woman might be called an odalisque, defined in the western canon as “a female slave or concubine in a harem”.xiv Odalisque became a genre favored by European artists to depict titillating nude middle eastern women, anglicized to appeal to the tastes of their western male buyers.xv However, the word originally stems from the Turkish word odalik, meaning “belonging to a chamber or room”.(xvi) This misnomer exemplifies how European knowledge making has shaped perceptions of the east, literally turning Arab women into objects of desire. Bullet #3 plays into this trope, constraining women to their “proper place” in the harem and posing the model like an odalisque. The woman’s clothes and henna fuse her with the corresponding décor, literally turning her into both an odalisque and an odalik. As she is enveloped into her surroundings, she reclaims the private, female space of the harem. The combination of the violent bullet casings with the henna calligraphy, a medium centered in local artistic practices, recontextualizes the eastern woman, exposing how Orientalism distorts Arab women.(xvii)
Despite Westerners’ discomfort with the veiled woman’s ability to gaze without being able to be gazed upon, middle eastern women were never viewed as people, instead they were conceptualized as sex objects to be penetrated through brute force. In gazing upon the viewer, the Arab woman regains her power as not just something to be objectified. The photograph retains the agency of Arab women as it reveals an accurate depiction of the harem: the western gaze has penetrated the private space not to find a simpering whitewashed Arab woman but the reality, a real Arab woman in traditional dress reckoning with the effects of colonial violence in her home, yet defiantly staring back at the western gaze.
In the modern day, the west continues to use the excuse of saving Arab women from Arab men to justify infiltrating middle eastern countries as can be exemplified by the United States intervening in Afghanistan following the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.xviii Following the event, news media looked to Arab culture, particularly its treatment of women and religious beliefs, to demystify why the attacks occurred. This puts the onus of the violence on Islamic and Arabic culture rather than on the ongoing history of colonialism and imperialism in the region by the United States and other colonial powers. This propaganda allowed the United States to encroach on the middle east under the guise of saving women from their barbaric culture rather than the reality of imperialism. If to penetrate the private space of women through unveiling is seen as a conquering of the Orient, the relationship between the east and west can be seen as that of female and male.(xix) Essaydi believes that this influences how Arab people view themselves and their culture; depicting Arab women as sexual victims of depraved Arab men emasculates the latter, challenging values of honour and family. xx This leads to stricter rules for women rather than liberation; Bullet #3 thus shows the different ways colonial violence manifests in Arab and Muslim women’s lives, however violence does not define them. Essaydi strives to represent her own experience as an Arab woman, using her photography as a vehicle to find her voice as an artist rather than as another victim. Being defined as only a victim of violence deprives her, and other Arab women, of the very complexity she wishes to express. (xxi)
Meyda Yegenoglu illuminates how westerners’ hunger for domination over the Orient in the name of knowledge making resulted in a dissolution of the cultural boundaries between the public space of man and the private space of women as is represented by the veil. In her work Bullet #3, Lalla Essaydi reclaims the veil and the harem as well as expresses the impact of internalized Orientalism on Arab and Muslim people. Ultimately illuminating the dangers of hegemonic knowledge making, Essaydi shows that these wounds have not yet healed, and are perhaps only beginning to clot.
Works Cited
i Lalla Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” essay, in Islamic Art: Past, Present, and Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 85–103, 87.
ii Meyda Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism,” essay, in Colonial Fantasies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39– 67, 39.
iii Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 40.
iv Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 47.
v Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” 87.
vi Fahmida Suleman, “Lalla Essaydi,” essay, in Being and Belong : Contemporary Women Artists From the Islamic World and Beyond (Toronto, ON: ROM, 2023), 34–35, 34.
vii Suleman, “Lalla Essaydi,” 34.
viii Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 40.
ix Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?,” essay, in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 27–53, 33.
x Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 43.
xi Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 44.
xii Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” 96. xiii Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” 96. xiv “Odalisque Definition,” Dictionary.com,
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/odalisque#:~:text=or%20o·da·lisk,as%20by%20Ingres%20o r%20Matisse.
xv “Odalisque.” Oxford Reference.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100245438#:~:text=A% 20female%20slave%20in%20an,reclining%20in%20a%20voluptuous%20manner.
xvi Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” 92.
xvii Naïma Hachad, “Lalla Essaydi’s Bullets and Bullets Revisited Aesthetic and Epistemic Violence in a Globalized Art World,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-8790196, 4.
xviii Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?,” 31.
xix Yegenoglu, “Veiled Fantasies,” 56.
xx Essaydi, “Gender, Power and Tradition,” 102.
xxi Suleman, “Lalla Essaydi,” 35.
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