When French colonial armies arrived in Algeria in the early twentieth century, they were accompanied by photographers. France had occupied Algeria since 1830—the occupation would last until 1962—and these photographers wanted to take pictures of Algerian women as they’d imagined them: lounging in harems, smoking hookahs, trapped in the prison of their own homes, topless, sexually available. But when they reached the country, they encountered women whose bodies could not be seen. Veiled from head to toe, with only their eyes visible, Algerian women were inaccessible to the photographers’ gaze.
The photographers were undeterred. They hired models, often from the margins of society, and paid them to pose and to wear costumes. In their studios, the photographers used props and backdrops to create bedroom interiors, decorated spaces with hookahs and coffee pots and rugs to look like harems, and placed bars on windows to produce a sense of imprisonment. If Algerian women would not take off their veils voluntarily, the photographers would pay them to do so.
These staged photographs, which became picture postcards, are the subject of “The Colonial Harem,” by Malek Alloula, an Algerian poet and literary critic who died, in 2015, as an exile in Paris. The book, which is dedicated to Roland Barthes, was first published, in French, in 1981; it was translated into English by Myrna and Wlad Godzich five years later. Though the photographs that Alloula examines in the book were staged, they were captioned as if they documented life in Algeria. For example, a photograph of two women viewed through a barred window is labelled “Moorish women at home.” Three separate images of a single woman, in the same outfit, are captioned as if she were three different women, from three different places: “Young Bedouin Woman,” “Young Woman from the South,” “Young Kabyl Woman.” A woman shown in a jewelled and tasselled headpiece, her elaborate dress opened to show her breasts, is captioned “Moorish Woman in Housedress.” The images reveal not Algerian women but the colonial photographer’s fantasies about them. They are an illusion.
In the introduction to “The Colonial Harem,” the human-rights scholar Barbara Harlow, who died in February, quotes the theorist and activist Frantz Fanon: “The occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria.” I thought of Fanon’s line, and Alloula’s book, this past August, when I read an article in the Washington Post and learned that, in order to convince President Trump to send additional troops to Afghanistan, H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, “presented Trump with a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul.” His goal was to use the photograph to show Trump “that Western norms had existed there before and could return.”
Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband’s weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush’s speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. How women make sense of the situations in which they live—whether, for instance, they see the veil as oppressive or as a symbol of resistance or simply as an important religious practice—is irrelevant. Instead, imperialism is presented as a necessary act of deliverance. They don’t know how to treat their women; our job—really, our moral obligation—is liberation.
Alloula’s project in “The Colonial Harem” was highly personal. Born in 1937 in the port city of Oran, he grew up during the colonial era, and attended French schools in Algeria. Though he spoke Arabic at home, only French was allowed at school. “The Arabic language was a foreign tongue in our own country,” he said. He wrote “The Colonial Harem” in French, while living in France, about postcard photographs taken of the homeland for which he longed. (The book has not yet been translated into Arabic.) He describes the act of writing the book as a kind of “exorcism.” His enterprise, he insists, “would be entirely superfluous if there existed photographic traces of the gaze of the colonized upon the colonizer.” But Alloula was unable to find photographs taken by Algerians of their French colonizers. In their absence, “in the absence of a confrontation of opposed gazes,” the book is his attempt to unmask the images that do exist—to expose them as counterfeit, fraudulent, violent.
In each chapter, Alloula reproduces sequences of similar pictures: veiled women, women in prison, women in their homes, couples and families, women in harems, entertainers, pairs of women, women exposing their breasts. Looking at the book’s repeating images, I was reminded of a former student who made a video of curated clips from television commercials: woman after woman taking tiny bites of chocolate, or making euphoric sounds while washing her hair with floral-scented shampoo, or joyfully cleaning messes made by her husband and sons, or smelling food rather than eating it, or leashed or caged or made to lay over the hoods of cars. Grouping parallel scenes reveals the recurring image as trope, as construction—as a kind of currency. Sexism is not an isolated incident, such arrangement illustrates. It is systemic. Curation is a way of taking charge of images that were designed to hurt you—and this is the work that Alloula does in “The Colonial Harem.” Through his arrangement of images, Alloula demonstrates that the postcard women do not represent Algerian women “but rather the French man’s phantasm of the Oriental female.”
The purpose of a postcard, of course, is to show someone who is not present in a place what that place is like, by sharing an image—a cityscape, or countryside, or wildlife. The postcard thus “straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach,” Alloula writes. He argues that the very flatness of the staged colonial postcards, with their plain descriptions of a foreign place and its people, persuaded French viewers of the photographs’ authenticity. But they were not plain descriptions; they were designed to convince those living in France that Algeria and its topless, trapped women were better off being colonized. The colonial postcard engages in the “rhetoric of camouflage,” Alloula argues. It is a “mirror trick” that “presents itself as pure reflection.” The colonial postcard “rests, and operates, upon a false equivalency—namely, that illusion equals reality. It literally takes its desires for realities.”
In the current political moment, the charge of fake news is bandied about between people of opposing viewpoints: what confirms my version of reality is true; what challenges my version of reality is false. “The Colonial Harem” reminds us that this impulse is not new. For Alloula, the colonial postcard is a “ventriloqual art.” “It does not speak . . . it is spoken,” he writes. “The postcard, even—especially—when it pretends to mirror the exotic, is nothing but one of the forms of the aesthetic justification of colonial violence.”
I have long been concerned with how to view photographs that were taken with the intent to harm or violate their subjects. If the digital photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison were meant to compound the prisoners’ torture, what does it mean to look at them? Alloula’s book helps one see in such photographs a light that shines through the subjects—a force, a humanity, immortal, resilient, beautiful—that cannot be extinguished, no matter the photographer’s objective. It provides a method for viewing images that were taken to justify colonial violence by challenging what such images make visible, refusing the version of reality the photographs claim to show, and, as Alloula puts it, returning “this immense postcard to its sender.”