The environmental delineations of desert life dictated, in part, certain defi-nitions of community in colonial Algeria. Early, nineteenth-century dis-cussions of desert environments helped frame, though did not determine,
debates about the Sahara throughout French colonialism in Algeria. In 1859, Jules Duval, a magistrate, administrator, journalist, and economist in the then-province of Oran, neatly cleaved his world in two: “The Tell,”
the hills of littoral Algeria, “reflects . . . the mores, the sciences, the arts of civilization. . . . Everything else is the Sahara. . . . Here wealth is of another nature.”11 Other natures—deserts in place of hills—implied, for Duval, other human natures, other forms of wealth and organization. Geogra-phy—physical, spatial difference—marked for this administrator clear disjunctures, despite the movement, migrations, and exchanges that linked desert, plain, and coast. In a later text, he maintained that “through its benefits, the artesian well gives to the Sahara material life and, up to a certain point, moral life.”12 Water coded for a range of moral attributes subsumed under the imperial rubric of “civilization,” and its mere presence proved, Duval claimed, transformational in the moral lives of desert Algerians.
This cleavage required particular constructions of desert environ-ments and life. Various writers through the French occupation of Algeria referred to the Sahara as the Ocean of Sand, a label attributed to the Roman stoic and traveler Strabo.13 Those with actual experience in the desert dis-missed the label as misleading, fanciful, a gross misunderstanding of the diverse environments of the Sahara. The explorer Fernand Foureau rather plaintively noted that, in fact, vast rocky expanses and sizable mountains rendered his voyages considerably more difficult than navigating the vast, flat expanse of sand conjured by the phrase.14 The military commander V. Colomieu contended that, in 1862, an ocean voyage offered significantly fewer dangers than a desert one.
The poets have often compared the desert to the Ocean. . . . To this just comparison one must add that the Ocean is known, its reefs are marked, its harbors described and illuminated with lighthouses, while the map of the desert does not exist, reefs are more numerous there. . . . A map of the desert would exist, but, whatever care taken in establishing it, it would be insufficient to guide the voyager in an effective manner.15
However poetic the ocean of sand as a category, explorers and colonial military officers found it lacking as an effective description of the Sahara itself. Colomieu presented the geographic menaces of the Sahara as, in some sense, unknowable, unmappable, incapable of textual or poetic representation. Paradoxically, the depths of the sea held fewer surprises for him than the expanses of the desert.
Other hazards awaited in the Sahara, as well. Referring to what is now eastern Algeria and western Libya, Eugène Daumas’s 1853 Mœurs et cou-tumes de l’Algérie called it “veritable desert, the ocean of sand, of whom the Tuareg have made themselves the pirates.”16 Colomieu, too, singled out pirates as an element that rendered at least some truth to the comparison to the sea.17 The nomadic Tuareg, many of whom made their living pillag-ing caravans, found themselves transformed, not inaptly, into pirates of the desert. Ocean narratives, whether of sand or water, do not require pirates, but seem more captivating for readers with their presence. However facile the analogy, for Daumas, environmental conditions defined the Tuareg as a community of pirates.
But the Sahara exists, and not just as a discursive ocean of sand. It is a real place, real in Blackbourn’s sense, physically, corporally, environmen-tally, and historically real. As Colomieu noted, its “pure reality is rather ter-rible: thirst kills, and sand covers over the cadavers.”18 In Arabic, Algerians refer to one particularly desolate part of the desert as the bilâd al-(atash wa al-khawf: the land of thirst and fear. People died in the desert. They died, however, in different parts of the desert, in some parts more than in others. Arabic distinguishes different portions of the desert in different ways. Fayfâ’, in colloquial fiafi, referred, like sahrâ’, to the desert generally, but also at times specifically to the portions of the Sahara with inhabited oases. Qifâr called to mind wastelands, not full desert, but rocky, stony, apparently useless land that nevertheless could spring to life with the in-frequent and unpredictable rains. Algerians sometimes referred to this as khalâ’, the void. The most deadly and empty parts of the Sahara, however, were the falâ, the completely sterile lands without water.19 These terms dis-tinguished, usefully, between different environments, between dry lands with scattered oases, dry lands with the potential for providing good, if temporary, forage, and for dry lands threatening all but the best prepared travelers with death.
Some early explorers attempted to elucidate distinctions similar to those articulated in Arabic by Algerians. James Richardson, in his 1850 Routes du Sahara, remarked that “generally, the Great Desert, in many places, is not as arid and as dry a country as is generally depicted.”20 Nevertheless, the repetition of the adverb “generally” indicates something of a struggle with perception, a looming sense that the very definition of the Sahara had ossified into one category of environmental understanding that elided crucial differences among different ecosystems.
Despite the utility of these distinctions, “the land of thirst and fear” as articulated through nineteenth-century texts and images became definitive.
French writers on the Sahara applied it more broadly geographically, and imbuing the phrase with near-talismanic qualities, used it to summarize the ecological and psychological challenges of a desert empire. The menace of the desert was not drowning (except during flash floods), but rather thirst. The bilâd al-(atash wa al-khawf marked the Sahara as an environ-mental community defined through both bodily and emotive experiences.
Those stark deaths became fodder for representational, as well as bodily, constructions of desert life. The sands of the Sahara, in particular, have long proved fertile ground, if not for agriculture, then for the germina-tion of Orientalist romance. Not surprisingly, this romance emerged early on in France’s imperial project in North Africa. Eugène Fromentin, the traveler, writer, and artist who inducted many in metropolitan France into his cult of Saharan romance, visually situated the Sahara in a clear Ori-entalist trajectory. His 1859 La rue Bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat depicted, in near-canonical fashion, an Orientalist scene of the so-called Arab street, inscribing colonialist representations of feminine seclusion, masculine public life, and decadence on canvas. Ten years later, however, the jumbled bodies of Rue take on a decidedly more sinister tone in 1869’s Le pays de
Figure 3.1. The Land of Thirst (Le Pays de la soif). 1869. By Eugène Fromentin (1820–76). From Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon. The Bridgeman Art Library International. Reproduced by permission.
la soif. Fromentin’s palette has little changed, and though his subject mat-ter ostensibly has, the prone colonized body still takes central position in the canvas. Fromentin’s “land of thirst” communicated the physical experiences of the desert to a wider audience. Thirst, rooted in specific environmental landscapes, became an artistic still life rooted in a specific geographic and embodied landscape.