Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,13
suddenly on fire. The French are direct about sex and nudity. But some cultural norms don’t transfer. They aren’t imprinted on DNA. “I . . . uh . . . I meant that it seems like an intense family burden,” I sputter.
“Ahhh. It’s not that bad. It’s how I learned about the Hash Eaters. From my uncle. He’s the reservoir of family knowledge—the only one trying to salvage what we have left of Dumas. He would probably love to read your essay.”
I ignore his comment because it was devastating enough when Celenia Mondego ripped my essay to shreds, and if an actual Dumas read it . . . Well, I might be the first person to die of impostor syndrome. Still, I can’t deny that it would be amazing to interview his uncle if I manage to come up with a new thesis for my essay—hello, expert source. But I’m not there yet. So I ask, “Who else was in this cannabis club besides your many-greats-grandpa and Victor Hugo?”
“Many renowned artists and writers of the time, including our friend Delacroix. They got the hash from Morocco and apparently wore some kind of vaguely Arabian dress when they met for their hash-inspired hallucinations.”
“Of course they did. It’s a classic colonizer tale: steal or appropriate the interesting stuff; oppress or kill the people who created it.”
Alexandre nods, his face serious. “My sixth-great-grandfather should’ve known better. Dumas’s grandmother was an enslaved woman. He might have been partly, begrudgingly accepted into French society because of noble birth, but he was still subject to ferocious racism. There are incredible stories about Dumas tearing people apart when they insulted his African ancestry. He even wrote a novel called Georges about racism and colonialism. I guess he didn’t think that applied to him and his friends.”
Studying Delacroix’s Giaour series, I came across a lot of writing about the role of Orientalism in his paintings—the prejudiced outsider lens through which the West sees and depicts the East. And especially because of Mom’s academic specialty, we’ve had lots of long dinner conversations and debates about how that worldview still colors how the West sees Islam and the East in general. My mom can draw a road map from Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Egypt to the recent crop of authoritarians who use the rhetoric of Islamophobia and racism to bolster their campaigns. But even though Papa is French, I haven’t thought of my own ancestors in that light; it must feel weird for Alexandre to investigate his family that way. Maybe we all should because the past is complicated, and what is history but the everyday lives of our families?
“It’s Orientalism, right? The idea that any culture that’s not Western is somehow savage and inferior and needs to be conquered and saved.” I glance at Alexandre, who seems both fascinated and bewildered. “In both the Byron poem and the Delacroix paintings, the Giaour, he’s written as Christian—an infidel in a Muslim country, and he’s the noble hero, the savior—and the Pasha is the cartoonishly evil villain. I mean, sure, he could’ve been a villain, but there’s never any nuance. Leila, the harem girl, is the one who needs to be saved. She’s the currency between two men. She’s voiceless and objectified—it’s sexism and racism in one fell swoop.” My body hums with anger. I take a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to go off. It’s the curse of being a child of two professors—I found a rumor, a little thread connecting that Delacroix painting to Dumas, and I had to unravel it.”
While I’m trying to calm myself down, trying to figure out why this rage came on suddenly, I remember that I gave Zaid nearly this exact same lecture when I first took him to see the Delacroix at the Art Institute. I wasn’t as angry, not like this, but, then again, I was only starting to peel back all the layers to this painting, to the poem, to the history it came out of. And I hadn’t crashed and burned yet.
And Zaid, in that moment when I was going off on the Orientalism of the painting, about how it was rooted in a centuries-old Islamophobia . . . Zaid held my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “I know.” He understood. He got it. He lives under the shadow of