English 015 - Americans Abroad
Arab Homes
Arab Homes
Category: 3E: Bowles | Meaghan Tanguay
“[Port] did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next…” (p.13-14). As time passes and Kit and Port travel farther into the desert they lose their sanity because they belong nowhere and cannot find homes or small places of comfort in their travels. They purposely try to leave all of Europe and the war behind them by pushing further into the unknown with no set travel plans. Instead of searching for familiarity and comfort within each other when they need it, as many of the characters had in the previous novels, Kit and Port progressively lose touch with each other and “reject those elements [they] find not to [their] liking” (p. 14), and the comfort they knew with each other. Eventually they revert to trying to finding obscure places of comfort with the native Arabs, and because they can not find comfort and security, Port dies and Kit loses her sanity.
Kit and Port are aimless wanderers always searching for a better place than the one they were momentarily in. Port describes their purpose, “the only way to travel, at least for us, is to go when you feel like going and stay where you feel like staying” and they never feel like staying in one place for very long (p.61). After too many days of waking up in the same room in the company of the same people, Port and Kit feel stuck in one place. They try to avoid feeling stagnant by pushing away both mentally from each other and physically from their surroundings. Port is the first one to show this tendency, “the idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation” (p109). Port felts a strong need to separate himself from the people he is with: Kit, Tunner, and the Lyles.
In the first Arab town Port, Kit, and Tunner arrive at, Port wanders off at night alone and meets an Arab named Smail. At first it is unclear why Port would go out and leave Kit, his wife, behind in an unfamiliar and creepy Arab town. Port makes himself completely vulnerable wishing to experience Arab culture. He does not know any of the streets and he quickly finds himself lost. It is not until he is walking around with Smail that the people on the street stop staring at him. He is aware that when he is with Smail he does not stick out as a foreigner. “No one stared at them [Port and Smail]. One would have said that the presence of the Arab beside him made him invisible” (p.28). At this moment he feels more like a traveler that belongs than a tourist that has no lasting purpose. For Port, being with Smail is comforting. Being with a native gives Port license to explore the city at night and see and experience things wouldn’t get to alone. He feels invisible so he carelessly follows Smail to the edge of town to meet a prostitute in a camp full of men. Ironically, when Port is in the Arab camp he is comfortable enough to become sexually engaged with an Arab girl; whereas he is never sexually comfortable with Kit and he pushes her away. Kit and Port always stay in different hotel rooms although they are husband and wife. Kit reflects, “but in spite of her willingness (in the beginning of their trip) to become whatever he wanted her to become…he was unable to break out of the cage into which he shut himself, the cage he had built long ago to save himself from [her] love” (p.100). Port embarks on another search to find a place of comfort or familiar home in the desert with another Arab prostitute.
Later on, Port searches for sexual comfort again and this time, he finds for more control in another Arab town, Ain Krorfa. Port wanders off with another Arab, Mohammed, who brings him to a whore house. The second prostitute he finds is blind girl. Immediately, Port is infatuated with the idea that the girl cannot see him and he has total control to act out his wildest fantasies, “And in bed, without eyes to see beyond the bed, she would have been completely there, a prisoner. He thought of the little games he would have played with her, pretending to have disappeared when he was really still there, he thought of the countless ways he could have made her grateful to him.” (p.140) In the moment Port has a greater sensation of comfort and security then he has found in the desert so far. However, this feeling quickly disappears and he is left with destructive self pity, because he knows the moment will not last. As soon as Port comes out of his fantasy for the blind prostitute he experiences, “a physical shudder; he was alone, abandoned, lost, hopeless, cold” (p.140). Ports desperate search for a place of comfort in the desert with the Arab natives has been a failure. His penalty for abandoning Kit and Europe: death.
Kit’s fate is insanity. While traveling around Africa with Port, he often leaves her alone. Kit has nothing to belong to, not even her husband. She has no physical or mental place of comfort and familiarity in Africa, so when the opportunity arises to belong to something, Kit pursues it. Like Port pursues the first prostitute, Kit pursues Tunner on the train to find a place of comfort and love that Port does not give her. Kit tells herself on the train when Tunner opens the champagne he brought, “he’s very different from Port. Port would never have done this (p.79)…She reclined partially against him, her head on his shoulder. ‘This should make me feel comfortable,’ she was thinking” (p.82) However, searching for comfort and security in Tunner does not give Kit any added security; “it only makes everything worse. I’m going to jump out of my skin” (p.82) Kit exclaims. It just complicates her emotional situation with Port and drives her further from both Tunner and Port and later into the arms of an abusive Arab, Belquassim.
It is not until Port dies and Kit goes off with the Arab men that Kit really begins to search for comfort in native people. Kit starts to push Port away even before he dies because she knows she has to detach herself from him and continue the search for a place to find comfort so she can survive alone in the desert. Kit has already lost Tunner. She loses Europe completely when she arrived in El Ga’a and the last thing she loses is Port. He takes her sanity when he dies because she is forces to find a home in the Sahara. Kit’s fatal mistake is seeking comfort and security in a place and in a man she doesn’t understand. She should have just gone back to New York, yet she tries to find comfort in the most obscure place. While Belqassim was raping her, “little by little she found herself considering him with affection: everything he did, all his overpowering little attentions were for her. In his behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight” (p.273). Kit is in the depths of the Arab desert with no connection to her former self. Kit’s punishment for abandoning Ports memory: insanity.
Kit is not special. She is the sixth sexual martyr. The list reads: Daisy Miller, Mrs. Slade, Mrs. Ansley, Alice Toklas, Laura, and to top it off: Kit. These women willingly suffer in the wake of their sexual partners or love interests. Daisy Miller suffers and sacrifices herself because Winterbourne, her love interest, is too embarrassed to be with a “pretty American flirt”. Mrs. Slade suffers because her husband is not faithful to her and he has an affair with Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Ansley’s affair with Mrs. Slade’s husband imprisons her sexual freedom. She has to be married right off, ending the future she was free to experience. Finishing up, Alice Toklas willingly sacrifices her life to her lover Gertrude Stein’s social dominance and in “Flowering Judas,” the revolution kills Laura’s sexual freedom. However, Kit’s tops the list because she is a martyr twice. At first she sacrifices her life to Port’s whims and then she sacrifices her freedom as Balqassim’s sex slave.
Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 02:19 PM
Comments
The several readers in our class who celebrate Kit’s freedom at the end of SS could sharpen their arguments by grappling with your strong counter-argument. Though this essay has some grammatical problems that seem the result of haste, and it could be more certainly paced, it is a coherent and lively challenge to the valorization of ‘traveling’ in your opening quote. You prove skeptical and strong enough to assess that notion on its own terms and find it wanting.
The strengths of this paper are really the strengths of parallel construction. You define a pattern with Port – one of running away from the familiar, with increasingly disappointing and dangerous results – and so, when you turn to Kit, you’re ready to fit her into the same pattern. It doubtless occurs to most readers that P & K put themselves in similar situations, especially sexually, but your essay helps us to appreciate the almost schematic structure of this novel, its repeated foregrounding of the dangers of travel. The paper is strongest when assessing Kit’s behavior after Port’s death precisely because you frame it for us as following his lead.
Your tracking of Port’s progressive defamiliarization is interesting – I was especially taken by your portrayal of Smail’s presence as ‘comforting’ – but you might have been a little more orderly here, and met some objections. After all, P is continually vexed by Smail – and how might this fit into his antagonism with Mohammed? How is the blind dancer a step further away from the familiar than the prostitute who sees Port all too much as she tells her mysterious story? And finally, who or what is leveraging the ‘penalties’ you so strikingly assign to these misguided Americans? Are they defeating themselves with notions of ‘travel,’ or is there another dangerous lure (like Smail) at work?
The conclusion is an interesting index of sexual martyrdom in the works we’ve read, yet it remains schematic and, in at least the case of Alice B. Toklas, not that compelling. It would have been stronger to keep closer to your thesis, to consider which of these variously unfortunate women embark on ‘travel’ as SS defines it, to a similarly disastrous end.
Posted by: Mark Phillipson at December 2, 2003 02:15 PM