Emily Ruete (1844–1924)

Zanzibar (semi-autonomous region of Tanzania).

Though you wouldn't know it from this memoir, Ruete left Zanzibar not because of political machinations but because she became pregnant. This missing fact goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise rather inexplicable internecine strife that followed her flight to Europe. Politics do play a role before and after this event, but because she is explicit about the relationships between people and states, these intrigues make much more sense.

Ruete describes her childhood and early life in Zanzibar. This is generally clear, thorough, and visually evocative. These sections are particularly interesting, though the entire book is engaging.… (more)

Emily Ruete is here to reminisce about the days when she used to be Princess Salme of Oman and Zanzibar, but she’s also here to sell it to a Western audience, specifically a nineteenth-century German audience, and as a result she really has no viable choice except to trade in the tropes of Oriental–Occidentalism. But this is someone who grew up royalty in Zanzibar, made things very uncomfortable for herself there after an abortive palace coup, married a German merchant and settled in Hamburg, and then returned to Zanzibar as a Christian foreigner to play weirdly with her roots—as might be expected, the only way she can interact honestly with the stereotypes is by flipping them, sometimes successfully, as with her comparison of dowries, which keep a girl safe, and Arab marriages, which can be love-matches as long as the parents and society receive absolutely no indication of that fact (in contrast with the European mealymouthedness around it, where we pretend it’s all beautiful but it’s really coal magnates putting the lean on their cutest daughters). Or Ramadan, which she spins as not about austerity at all but a way of being as sybaritic as you possibly can be, because there’s no feast like the one after the cannons go.

Other times she’s not nailing it, like with all the “Occidentals drive like this, Orientals (=Arabs only just like in Said) drive like this” crap. Arabs may be sexually repressed, but Europeans are licentious! Arabs may dress too hot in the hot, but Euros dress too cool in the cold! At least it plays up the stupidity of that stuff.

But certainly overall she takes pains to stay roughly impartial—even if sometimes, as with her disgusted-bordering-on-enraged discussion of Arab (=Zanzibari and to a certain extent Omani; I have no idea to what extent her findings might have been generalizable) medical superstitions and general indifference to whether they live or die cos it the will of Allah, turning the unimpressed German to the max; and sometimes, as on slavery ….

Well, the chapter on slavery is really interesting, actually. She starts by talking about how the British rolled in and forced the sultan to free all the slaves and then they were all starving because the people who had kept them in board couldn’t afford to pay wages (without ever answering the question of why they couldn’t have been taken on in their old jobs but with the ostensible freedom to leave—but that’s me splitting hairs, and no doubt the Anglo-American capitalist has always thought in terms of souls delivered up to economic freedom, with little concern to how they live or die, like the Catholic Church on abortion). But then she’s also a huge racist essentialist who has not, in her time in Germany, come around to the idea that “lesser” races may be “improvable”—the “Suahely” and other blacks are lazy rotten to the core. And I mean, okay, I see that this still colours our discourse around matters African (my own issue that I have trouble dealing with in a balanced way isn’t so much “lazy” as “half-assed”—no care for taking one second to do things properly even when it’s driving or condoms, in other words, their lives—just the 2012 African version of “Allah’s will,” I guess. Other institutions noted by both the princess and me: interminable boring visits; expecting somebody to support you because they gave you change last week or once bought lunch for your dad. Ha ha, I love it here, but I’m leaving at the right time), but with Ruetesalme it seemingly passes for the whole story. She is a game lady, if mendacious, and gives us the southern US (more than 30 years too late), Brazil, political prosoners in Siberia, the industrial proletariat, and most cuttingly, the Europeans who show up in Zan and buy them some slaves and throw themselves a rape party—in contrast with Arab masters who treat them like lesser members of the family, and that I can more or less believe, especially because in West Africa, which I know a little more about on this score, that imbalance was there, although you stood a decent chance of getting slain by your Mandinka chieftain–class master too.

Still, pointing out your opponent’s hypocrisy isn’t an argument. Still, compare Salmeruete to someone like Mungo Park—her social conscience is, like, plum-sized as opposed to cherry. In the end, the key point for us now is that she provides an illuminating view of the debate as it looked to an Arab aristocrat of the time. Oh, and she smacks down the Catholics for putting up a church on the slave market an being all cry in me ye wretched, which fucking yeah because the church condoned slavin’ almost all along, and especially given their long view on so many matters they had best just to shut up on this. And I got kicked out of that church yesterday by this annoying dude because I walked through the wrong gate or something. So reading that felt righteous.

But she keeps you interested—the less personal sociology and ethnography and “the way we wore” and whatever is bookended by her childhood mems on one hand and a fairly gripping yarn of palace intrigue and high-flown diplomacy on the other—we don’t get much insight into Salme as a person, the dinner parties on his roof with which her future husband captivated her from her adjoining roof, his untimely death juuuuuuust after upheaving her life irrevocably; that is quickly disposed of. We do get the sense of what it’s like to be in an imperial family who love and are always trying to kill each other, in more candid less rarefied way than with, like, Caligula.

So she tweaks the Euros, gives us some dynastic history, some grandma-y family stories, and some cod-philosophy of nations. Plenty to hold the interest here.… (more)

The first known autobiography written by an Arab woman, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess is an interesting look at the island of Zanzibar (part of modern Tanzania) in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It's a slim book, and I think it was written with an eye to earning some money for Ruete, especially its first part—she had been living on very slender means in Germany for a number of years with her young family, and I think she would understandably have been interested in profiting from...more The first known autobiography written by an Arab woman, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess is an interesting look at the island of Zanzibar (part of modern Tanzania) in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It's a slim book, and I think it was written with an eye to earning some money for Ruete, especially its first part—she had been living on very slender means in Germany for a number of years with her young family, and I think she would understandably have been interested in profiting from the late Victorian interest in the Middle East. The most interesting part for me was seeing her views on race and gender and class—she's very much aware of her status as the daughter of a Sultan, sees flaws and merits in both Western and Middle Eastern ideas on the role of women, and sees anti-slavery campaigners as not understanding the "proper" role of Africans. In some ways her views are very modern, but in others—particularly those on race—they're very much of her time… (more)