Ivan Davidson Kalmar
University of Toronto
This online version of the
paper should be read in conjunction with the list of illustrations and the
references.
The pipe was an essential object in the fantastic scenes that nineteenth and early twentieth century artists passed off as pictures from the 'Orient.' (The term, at the time, meant mainly the Islamic world). In the multi-sensory delirium of their canvases, luxurious draperies - and often, luxurious female flesh - appeal to the sense of touch, and musical instruments address the sense of hearing. To include taste and smell, there may be a brass pot of coffee with cups. The pipe, too, like coffee, evokes flavour and aroma. But what makes its role in creating the 'Oriental' atmosphere even more important is what smoking it could do to one’s state of mind. It was reported, not without foundation, that Muslims sometimes filled their pipes with hashish and even opium. But even the standard pipe contents - aromatic tobacco – could intoxicate you if you kept on smoking it for hours on end.
Long, leisurely smoking is just what the orientalist artist imagined. Odalisques or soldiers around the pipe recline unhurriedly, oblivious to the world’s demands. Each of the two types of pipe that appear in orientalist art suggests taking one’s time. The long-stemmed pipe, typically reaching four or five feet in length, is hardly something to smoke on the go. The octopus-like houkah – by far the most frequently depicted 'oriental' pipe – insists by its very shape that users sit around it patiently, passing its tubes from reveller to reveller.
In short, the pipe was used in Western 'orientalist' art to associate the Orient with a sensuous high that was very, very slow. Oriental sensuality was seen as lazy.
Such idleness was not without its appeal to the 'civilized' inhabitants of the West, who were familiar with complaints, voiced in every generation from Rousseau's to beyond Freud's, about the way modern society prevents us from taking time to smell the roses. Being busy was recognized, even two hundred years ago, as the distinguishing virtue of the bourgeois. The image of deep-reaching laziness offered by 'orientalist' art therefore provided some attraction to the anti-capitalist instincts of a wide variety of people suspicious of work as understood by the bourgeois: aristocrats, the large numbers of semi-rich who lived on interest income and were known in France as rentiers, dandies, romantics, bohemians, and artists themselves.
Orientalist art did not, of course, provide a radical critique of capitalism. Nor did it, in spite of the sincere admiration some felt for the Orient, provide a radical critique of Western domination. Ultimately, the lazy pleasures of the East were understood as but the reverse side of its inefficient sloth, and its sensuality was held to prove its underlying irrationality. In fact, the indolent pleasures suggested by the houkah could be seen as proof of the orientals' opposition to, or indeed their inability to perform diligent work. Since there could be no progress without a work ethic, the inhabitants of the countries of Islam would need - in order to lift themselves out of what Westerners often described as sleepy stagnation - the intervention of the West.
In other words, what some individuals may have felt as an admiration of the slow, smoke-filled sensuality of the Orient was based on assumptions that also justified the West's colonial domination. Consequently, the greatest flowering of orientalist art coincided with the expansion of European power in the Muslim East. It was prepared by Napoleon's exhibition to the Eastern Mediterranean, which unleashed a craze in Europe for anything 'Egyptian.' It took a new impetus from France's occupation of Algiers in 1830. And the heyday of orientalist art came during the period of high imperialism: the last decades of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War.
Of course, romantic orientalist fantasies (like the desire to control the Islamic world that they ultimately hide) survived long beyond that. The camel on the eponymous package of cigarettes, like the smoke inhaled by Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich in 'Casablanca,' comes from a period of early decline in the colonial empires. Perhaps some of its orientalism was experienced as nostalgia even when the film was new.
Regardless, Camel's advertising is among the best illustrations of the sexism that had characterized the artistic genre of the pipe-smoking Oriental from its beginning in the early nineteenth century. Orientalism almost always encodes not only the domination of East by West, but, perversely, also the domination of women by men.
The erotic image on Camel's bonus money (illus. 1) means to associate the pleasures of smoking a Camel with the 'pleasures of the Casbah.' The curvaceous resident of the Casbah might be a belly dancer such as one might see in one of the clubs where she would be available to a European’s gaze or more. But, more excitingly still, the Camel smoker is perhaps encouraged to imagine a 'Casbah pleasure' forbidden to him – gaining access to the forbidden possession of a Muslim male: a harem girl.
[illus. 1 about here]
No doubt cigarettes evoking the harem sold well at a time when orientalist imagery was still quite popular. The harem had long been associated with smoking. More than in any subgenre of classic, nineteenth-century orientalist art, in harem interiors a pipe is almost a must. The famous 'Great Odalisque' by Ingres, painted in 1814 clearly set the tone for much that was to come (illus. 2). In Ingres’ masterpiece the invitation to touch extended by the exquisitely portrayed if disproportionately bottom-heavy body is amplified by a profusion of draperies and the luxurious, peacock-feather fan. In the right-hand corner a long-stemmed pipe suggests that the additional pleasure of a smoke.
[Illustration 2 about here]
It is possible that the odalisque (harem girl) herself has just used the pipe, causing her to exude as she does a lazy sensuality, perhaps under the influence of a more powerful drug than tobacco. But more likely, the pipe has been prepared for the odalisque's male visitor, who at one point after he enters this interior will pick up the pipe and sit down on the chair next to it. It is at him, the approaching male, that the woman is gazing already. We as viewers stand in his place, and are asked to fantasize ourselves into his position: that of a man who can enter a harem unimpeded, to be welcomed by a beautiful odalisque.
Let us ask whose place it is that we so occupy. The Muslim lord of the harem is never included in paintings of odalisques, and he is just as surely eliminated from the sexual fantasy being offered here. In television and film studies, much has been made of the kind of social situation that is projected onto the viewer. The issue is also relevant to orientalist painting. The projected viewer (ourselves, watching Ingres’ work) is a European male. He has penetrated the Muslim man’s harem, encountering no opposition. (Presumably, his Muslim opponent has already been defeated.) The odalisque is waiting for him.
[Illustration 3 about here]
Like Ingres’ odalisque, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment (illus. 3) is a prototype of the 'harem interior' genre. The houkah, though in fact less common in Algiers at the time than in Beirut or Damascus, suits this type of work better than the long-stemmed pipe. In part this is because the houkah, which unlike the pipe can stand on its own, can more easily be placed in a prominent place in the painter’s composition. But another reason to use it is that in smoking it is passed around from person to person. This allows the presence of multiple smokers. In Delacroix’s image, the central position of the houkah indicates that the women have smoked it themselves, and smoked it together.
Replacing the single odalisque with a group
stresses the harem's role as a major metaphor for a man’s ability to possess a
multitude of women. The orgiastic
aspect of the fantasy is strengthened by the fact that the women smoke at
the same time – their facial expression and posture indicate that all three
have already been intoxicated.
The master is still nowhere to be seen, but the group portrait
continues, of course, to place the European male viewer in his position.
Very common in the background of harem scenes is the suggestion of a mysterious interior beyond, here indicated by the half-open doors. What we see here is probably only the beginning; there are further interiors beyond the interior revealed in the painting. The interiority, not coincidentally stressed in Delacroix’s and other orientalist artists’ titles, has obvious vaginal connotations, but it also stresses the male, European viewer’s – and the artist’s – feat in penetrating a forbidden, Muslim space. The further interior beyond the visible space amplifies this sense of penetration, and at the same time produces a fantasy of more inmates and more sexual experiences; in effect, an unending supply of compliant women in a harem without limits. If depicted, there is little doubt that each additional space would include, in addition to more women, another houkah.
In much of orientalist imagery, the harem inmate who gazes at the white intruder turns out to be, surprisingly perhaps – white. Ingres’ Great Odalisque is physically French. If Delacroix’s women are not quite so it is because they are presumably images of living models, probably Jewish. Their physiognomy departs somewhat from that of European women. This may be one reason why a black servant is included in Delacroix’s picture. Her dark skin makes the odalisques appear more European by comparison.
No one painted more perfectly marble-white harem inmates that Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), one of the most important French orientalists. In spite of his many oriental voyages and reputation for veracity, Gérôme seemed to find exactly the same marble-skinned women regardless of whether they grace the banks of the Nile or the Seine. A particularly striking example is The Harem Bath (illus. 4), where three lily-white women abandon themselves to the pleasures of smoking while another nude does her leisurely toilette in the foreground.
[Insert Illustration 4 about here]
Yet, though Gérôme’s women are unambiguously white, he too sometimes includes a black servant in his canvas, proving that the reason for the practice is not merely to create a visual contrast with the odalisque’s white skin. In the Moorish Bath (illus. 5), Gérôme pictures one of his landmark marble nudes accompanied by a very dark, masculine-looking female attendant. Her un-feminine features underline the fact that she is not to be imagined as the master’s sexual partner. She is not the one bathed and perfumed for him; the houkah, too, is not for her.
[Insert Illustration 5 about here]
Examples of a black slave attending on a white harem inmate are innumerable in orientalist art. It is European women that are here the willing prisoners in a harem that has been taken into the imagined possession of a male European spectator, in an ironic twist on the very old plot of European men rescuing white females as in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. To this extent, the orientalist harem painting is not a projection of the East into the West, but a perverse projection of the Western woman into the subject position of a powerless sex slave. It is a patriarchal response to the gender politics of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe.
There is, however, more than that. As always in orientalist art, sexism and imperialism go hand in hand. There is a reason why white flesh alone does not suffice, and a black servant, though unattractive, is required to complete the scene. The black attendant universalizes the master-slave relation beyond what could be blamed on Europeans. If in the harem the white slave herself is given a black slave, it proves that Muslims, too, keep slaves, and African ones at that. In the Western world black slavery had just recently been abolished, so the 'fact' that Muslims continued the practice helped to dispel any belief that occidentals were particularly prone to enslaving others. Indeed, it showed up the Muslims as worse than the Christians. Surely, it must have been felt, Muslims cannot object to the Western desire for power over them, when they themselves have, presumably for centuries, dominated others and still persist in buying and selling slaves – even white ones.
Marble-skinned women were rarely found in real as opposed to imaginary harems, however, and this posed a problem for the photographers who toward the end of the nineteenth century began to try to provide photographic documentation of the same images painters had been, and continued, selling to an eager public as Muslim women in 'their interior.'
Familiarity with the Orient grew through travel and, more importantly, through direct military and commercial expansion, and Westerners demanded 'realistic' information about the Muslim world. Gérôme’s canvases were characterized by maximum precision and crispness; indeed their apparent realism exceeded that of contemporary photography, which could not yet use color. Nevertheless, the invention of photography introduced a medium that could claim verisimilitude for its products, not because of the illusion it created but because of its ability to capture a 'real' moment in space and time.
Photographers were no more successful than painters in gaining access to actual harems, so, like the artists, they continued the practice of arranging fictional harem scenes. Models, often prostitutes, were photographed in 'native costume' and in poses predetermined by Ingres, Delacroix and other orientalist painters of the previous generations. The orientalist habits of imagining the harem allowed the viewers of the resulting photographs to believe that they were looking at ethnographic truth, captured for them by the eye of the camera.
To heighten the sense of scientific reality, photographs often carried captions ostensibly presenting the models not as sex objects but as 'types' representing some racial or geographic variant of the 'oriental.' In Malek Alloula’s fascinating study of French Algerian post cards, the same woman is shown, in the same oriental costume, as a 'young Bedouin woman,' a 'girl from the South,' and a 'Kabyl girl!'1 These captions certified the model as genuinely exotic. In the place of an imaginary white slave now appears a truly 'oriental' woman whose fictional subjection in a harem masks – not always very deliberately as we shall see – her true subjection as a prostitute.
In the photographs the houkah is just as much present as in orientalist painting. In Scenes and Types - Moorish Woman in Her Interior by 'L.L.' (illus. 6), the smoking implement represents a rather rude intrusion into the composition, interrupting the graceful line of the model's long legs.2
[Illustration 6 about here]
As so often, there is a coffee set next to
the houkah. Notice that there
are three cups rather than one. The
odalisque is never truly alone. She
shares her 'interior,' and her master’s sexual attentions, with fellow harem
women. If it is he who next comes to
drink the coffee and puff at the houkah, he will do so in the company of
the odalisque in the picture, plus another.
Beyond earlier artistic models, post cards of harem women took as their model contemporary pornographic photos whose models were prostitutes. Even more than orientalist painting, orientalist photography would suggest to European men a location that many were quite familiar with: the brothel. The harem was, to them, an exotic extension of the brothels they knew at home. (Indeed, brothels like burlesque theatre often included 'oriental' props – hence the term, 'exotic dancer.') The particular attractiveness of the harem inmate as an imagined version of the prostitute was that she was available only to the one man who owned her. The fantasy appealed to the frustrated sense of power of the male who, at home, could typically afford to pay women to please him only if he shared them with others.
Alloula's post card collection includes some 'works' where the emphasis on the canonical artistic tradition represented by Ingres and Delacroix is frankly replaced by the very thinly veiled desire to depict an 'oriental' whore. Such women were known carnally by many Europeans traveling or 'serving' in Muslim lands. Many photographers probably patronized them as well.
In these 'ethno-pornographic' works the houkah is often replaced by the familiar sign of a prostitute: the cigarette (illus. 7).
[Illustration 7 about here]
As both in orientalist painting and in Western pornography, depicting more than one woman was popular in this medium. The photo of the Moorish Women of Algiers (illus. 8) borrows a modicum of respectability through its ethnographic title reminiscent of Delacroix's famous painting. However, the presence of the cigarettes as well as the facial expression, especially of the woman on the right, suggests the sexual abandon associated both prostitutes in general and with 'oriental' women in general. In this context, the title affirms the hidden thought that no doubt appeared in the mind of those who first beheld this image: 'all Algerian women are whores.' All are - or should be? – available to the European.
[Illustration 8 about here]
As even under colonial rule Muslim society managed to protect most of its women from the predations of the Europeans, such a statement remained a frustrated fantasy. But it represented a semi-conscious desire, the sexualized version of the wish to have unlimited rule over the people of the 'orient.'
Since it was Muslim soldiers that were often the major obstacle to the European male’s domination, both sexually and politically, it was encouraging for Europeans to see them depicted, in orientalist art, as languishing in the same lazy stupor as the harem girls.
Here again we find a mixture of superficial admiration mixed with underlying contempt. Gérôme Bashi-Bazouks (illus. 9) is a scene of relaxed male camaraderie such as a Westerner could appreciate. The scene is almost Netherlandic in its folksy charm, recalling a canvas by Jan Steen. It would be a pleasure to join these men for a smoke.
[Illustration 9 about here]
In the diary of his Eastern voyage, Benjamin Disraeli, later Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister, fondly recalls his visit with an Ottoman dignitary in Albania:
I am quite a Turk, wear a turban, smoke a pipe six feet long, and squat on a Divan. Mehemet Pacha told me that he did not think I was an Englishman because I walked so slow.3
To Disraeli, smoking a pipe with the Turks represented friendship and, beyond that, a willingness to participate, even if temporarily, in the habits of an alien culture: 'I am quite a Turk.' The act is reminiscent of smoking the peace pipe with the Indians, which was to become a cliché for friendly relations between 'whites' and 'natives' in America. (Tobacco was associated in the West both with the American Indians and the Muslim East. More generally, parallels between stereotypes of the American native and the Mediterranean Muslim have recently been masterfully explored by Nabil Matar.4)
Yet, however admirable in some way, the 'slowness' of the Muslim soldier always carried with it a connotation of ineffectuality: such a soldier was ultimately easy to defeat. In the Arnaut Blowing Smoke at His Dog (illus. 10) Gérôme transforms the fierce cruelty that was the reputation of the Muslim soldier into an ineffectual, childish act of malice towards his pet. Though belittling Muslims was never Gérôme’s conscious aim, it is clear that such a warrior could never be a serious threat to the power of the West.
[Illustration 10 about here]
The perception that Muslim males were not men enough to challenge a Western male partly explains the Western preoccupation with oriental homosexuality. In Gérôme's The Serpent Charmer (illus. 11) warriors wearing costumes from different parts of the Ottoman empire watch a naked boy make a cobra rise to the sounds of a gourd pipe. They repose indolently on each side of the green-turbaned elder, who hold a long-stemmed pipe. The pipe's long shape here echoes that of many of the weapons and the flute: the phallic, homoerotic and paedophile connotations of the whole need hardly be belaboured. Work like this no doubt helped some Western men (including Gérôme?) to externalise troubling features of their sexuality by projecting them onto the Muslim male.
[Illustration 11 about here]
Such ineffectual, emasculated Muslim warriors could hardly be imagined to keep the Western male at bay for long. Under the surface of the relatively innocuous ethnographic image there is in orientalist art a hint of the classic military victory ending in the 'elimination' of men and the sexual subjection of women. In this delirious imperial fantasy the conqueror is free to enter the luscious odalisque’s chamber with not a Muslim man in sight. She will offer herself to the triumphant Western male. When he is ready for a smoke, she will soothe him with a peacock-feather fan.