Baghdad In the Past

This is a video of sights in old Baghdad. Most of what is seen here is long before the Saddam era.

An American and Napoleonic Romance: Jerome Bonaparte and Elizabeth Patterson

In my post on Prince Charles Napoleon the great great nephew of Napoleon, I promised to write about the great grandfather of the "latest Bonaparte" on the scene.

Prince Charles Napoleon's grandfather was Jerome Bonaparte the youngest sibling of Napoleon. He was born in Ajaccio, Corsica in 1784. Jerome entered the French navy, and while on a stop over in Maryland, he was welcomed into Baltimore high society where he met a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth "Betsy" Patterson (born 1785).

Betsy was the daughter of the second richest man in the state, William Patterson, a merchant who was an immigrant from Ireland. When they met in August 1803 it was love at first sight for the handsome, dashing Jerome and the lovely, witty, and cultured Betsy who was fluent in French. The two were captivated with each other, but Betsy's father was extremely cautious. Though he did not entirely doubt the sincerity of Jerome's love for Betsy, he doubted that the ambitious Napoleon who was rapidly rising in Europe would approve of his young brother marrying an American without noble blood and without his permission. Jerome's prospects seemed too good for him to get bogged down in America, so Betsy's father hesitated for at least for awhile. However, by Christmas Eve 1803 William Patterson's reluctance had evaporated, and Jerome and Betsy were married. Jerome had just turned 20, and Betsy was 18.

Once Jerome's family had learned about the union, almost everyone seemed to approve, except Napoleon. Even though Napoleon was not the eldest Bonaparte child, he had long before pushed aside his older brother Joseph to establish himself as the family's head. He made the final decision on everything including whom his brothers and sisters could marry.

When Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French in May 1804 he ordered Jerome to come home, "without the young person to whom you have connected yourself." Sympathic to your younger brother's plight, Joseph and another brother Lucien encouraged Jerome to get American citizenship, as did also Betsy's brother. However, Napoleon was having none of it and ordered Jerome to come home immediately and for Betsy to not even think of setting foot in France.

The couple finally realized that they could not continue to ignore Napoleon's demands, so they sailed from America in one of William Patterson's ships. Betsy was pregnant. Once they arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, they saw to their dismay that Napoleon had sent a French frigate to prevent Betsy from disembarking. During their journey, Betsy had been convinced that with her charm and learning she might be able to plead their cause with Napoleon since Jerone had told her that his older brother was very susceptible to feminine beauty. But adamant, Napoleon had shown by sending a frigate to block her way, he did not want to see or speak to Betsy.

Reluctantly, Jerome left his wife to go on alone to Paris to beg Napoleon to allow them to stay together. In the meantime, Napoleon had been working fiercely to get the marriage annulled. He had gone to the pope with his demands, but had been rejected. Nevertheless, cowed by Napoleon, the imperial council of state had agreed to have the marriage declared null and void. On hearing that Jerome was on his way to Paris to see him, Napoleon wrote this letter to him:

My brother,

Your letter of this morning informs me of your arrival in Alexandria. There are no faults that a true repentance will not efface in my eyes.

Your union with Mademoiselle Paterson is null, alike in the eyes of religion and of the law. Write Mademoiselle Paterson to return to America. I will grant her a pension of 60,000 francs during her lifetime, on condition that she will under no circumstances bear my name,--she has no right to do so owing to the non-existence of her marriage.

You must yourself give her to understand that you are powerless to change the nature of things. Your marriage being thus annulled by your own consent, I will restore to you my friendship and continue to feel for you as I have done since your infancy, hoping that you will prove yourself worthy by the efforts you make to acquire my gratitude and to distinguish yourself in armies.

After Jerome's departure, Betsy's ship sailed to Amsterdam, but once again she was not allowed entry on land since now two men-of-war ships blocked her way. Seeing that she could not receive entry on this route as well, Betsy's ship sailed to England where she gave gave birth to a baby boy, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, whom she called "Bo."

Jerome and Betsy were to never see one another again. Jerome was remarried on Napoleon's orders to a German princess, Catherine of Wurttemburg, and he was crowned King of Westphalia also in Germany. Prince Charles Napoleon whom I wrote about comes from this union of Jerome and his German princess.

Betsy never remarried. After the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty under Napoleon I, she left America for awhile and traveled in Europe being welcomed and feted in European high society as a beautiful, tragic, and intelligent curiosity. For decades she fought to have her marriage to Jerome recognized as legal and her son listed as legitimate. Oddly enough, Jerome seemed to had forgotten all feeling he once had for Betsy because he actively fought against Betsy's son having the surname of Bonaparte. With three children from his royal wife, he wanted Betsy's son to be known only as Jerome Patterson. After Jerome's death in 1860, Betsy's case was resolved and her son was recognized as a legitimate child of France. Still Betsy's long time desire that her son be accepted as a member of the Napoleonic dynasty of Europe would never come to pass. She died in 1879.

Because of the short lived union of these star-crossed lovers, there was the American Bonapartes, the line of which ended in 1945 when the last male Bonaparte died. Betsy's grandson, also named Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, was a soldier who served on the Texas frontier and who also joined the imperial French army. He received medals for his valiance in the Crimean War from not only France and the queen of England, but he even received a medal from the sultan of Turkey. Another grandson, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, served as US Secretary of the Navy and US Attorney General and was the founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

King Ludwig II and My Two Favorite Castles

19th century/Basje posted on her delightfully informative blog on the Victoria Era an article today about a German king whom some call "Mad King Ludwig." If the term "mad" or "insane" are too harsh for him, Ludwig II of the Bavaria (1845-1886) was certainly an eccentric and a Romantic. He commissioned several fairy tale like castles, but the most famous of them all is Neuschwanstein Castle which is my first favorite castle in the world. The official website for the castle can be visited here.

Ludwig was inspired to build Neuschwanstein because of his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner.

My second favorite castle is the Alcazar or Segovia Castle in Segovia, Spain.

The Alcazar was first built during Moorish times. Over the centuries it was repeatedly renovated. Throughout the Middle Ages it was the favorite residence of the rulers of Castile. It was also one of the key fortresses in the defense of the region. One of the last major renovations was done during the reign of Philip II.

(As an aside, I am trying to finish a rather bland biography of the life of this king. The book is written by Henry Kamen who presents a different portrait of the king than the usual one of the cold-blooded, religious fanatic making human torches of heretics whereever he was present. The traditional Philip that has come down to us is the one more recently presented in the movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age starring Cate Blanchette and the Spanish actor Jordi Molla as Philip. What is wrong with Kamen's book is that it speaks too much about King Philip's administrative duties, particularly about his always being flooded with paper work. Otherwise, I have read worse. Still this one has been a slow go.)

Neuschwanstein and the Alcazar are in my opinion examples of perfect castles. Both are built on high, which give them an otherworldly affect. Both look like they came straight out of a fairytale. I hope that I can eventually visit both castles one day.

The Empress Josephine @ MySpace.com

While looking up information on Josephine's best friend during her society "girl" years, whom I will present in an upcoming post, I happened to run across on Google information about a MySpace page for the empress. The page is a beautiful and delightful place to explore for those who are Josephine lovers and other things and people who are French. Here you can also see some of Josephine's personal treasures.

I feel I am too mature to haunt places like MySpace, but in the future, I will be seeking out other historical figures there.

Enjoy, and also read my other two posts for today;)!

Empress Josephine de Beauharnais

For some reason Josephine's surname from her first marriage is used more often even in history books than her maiden name or her surname from her second marriage to Napoleon.

Aimee du Buc de Rivery: Cousin of the Empress Josephine & The Ottoman Turkish Connection

No one will know the actual fate of Aimee du Buc de Rivery who was the empress Josephine's cousin. Nevertheless for almost two hundred years there has been so much speculation that the story of two empresses who were related and ruled simultaneously has captured the imaginations of writers as diverse as Prince Michael of Greece to the African-American fiction writer Barbara Chase-Riboud.

The story of Aimee du Buc de Rivery runs basically that she was a cousin of the empress Josephine, and like her more well-known cousin was born on the island of Martinique . When both were 12 they went to a famous black fortune teller on their island who told Josephine that her second husband would be so powerful and glorious that she would be more prestigious than the queen of France. Aimee was told an even more incredible prophesy. She would be captured by pirates and sold to a powerful ruler who because of her beauty, would make her his mistress and favorite. When she had a son by this ruler this would increase her position. Through her son, she would have great power and influence.

The legend of Aimee goes on to say that when she was returning to Martinique from studying in a convent in France, her ship was hijacked by Barbary pirates. She was captured and given to the Bey of Algiers. In order to garner favor with the Ottoman sultan, this girl of great beauty was sold into the harem in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. There Aimee captured the eye of the sultan and became his wife. She was given the name of Nakshedil, and is said to have taught her husband French, thus opening up the Ottoman Empire to France and ultimately the west. Because of her, other reforms were introduced during her husband's and son's reign.

Aimee proved to be a survivor in the violent, political atmosphere of the harem and Topkapi Palace. Though she converted to Islam, she was always in her a heart a Christian. When she was dying, her son allowed for the first time for a priest to come into the palace to administer the last rites to his mother. So ends the story of the girl whom history and legend says was a cousin of Josephine, born to a wealthy family on Martinique and who died in a palace in Istanbul, the most powerful woman among the Turks.

I first heard about Aimee du Buc de Rivery when I read Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel, Valide: A Novel of the Harem while I was a graduate student. A black Muslim woman, whom I am not sure was orthodox or a member of The Nation of Islam, told me about Aimee and the book. Life is unpredictable, so when I read this novel of Romance, violence, and intrigue, I had no way of knowing that Turkey would become a part of my life in so many ways years later.

In conclusion, here is a long, but interesting article from Journal of World History entitled Royal French Women in the Ottoman Sultans' Harem .

The Original French Romance: Napoleon and Josephine

My title is not quite accurate because really the original French Romance could be said to have been between the medieval Heloise and Abelard, which hopefully I will get around to writing about in the future.

The present first couple of France Nick Sarkozy and Carla B. seem to have inflated egos too along with all their other unappealing qualities, so I would not be surprised if they start advertising themselves as the new Napoleon and Josephine. Well, these two do not have an ounce of class compared to Napoleon I and his first empress.

Napoleon and Josephine are my favorite of all the Romantic couples of history. Their's was a passionate, but extremely rocky Romance. In the beginning Josephine was the one who supposedly cheated. Disillusioned and angered by her unfaithfulness, Napoleon took on a string of lovers, but his attachment to them was never as passionate or enduring as his feelings for Josephine. In the 1987 Emmy nominated mini-series, Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, Napoleon played by Armand Assante tells Josephine played by Jacqueline Bisset, "You are my obsession; my addiction." To me, Assante and Bisset will always be Napoleon and Josephine. They brought the two historical lovers completely to life.

Both Napoleon and Josephine were born on islands. Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica in 1769. His family was of the minor Italian nobility. Josephine was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1763. Her family was also well to do, but had fallen on hard times after a hurricane wiped out their sugar plantation. Napoleon's family had also fallen on difficult times when his father, and attorney, died. However he was rescued some from hardship at home when he was sent as a child to study at a military academy in France. Napoleon's first language was Italian. He was never able to relinquish his Italian accent even though he ruled the French people, and actually became more French than the French. Josephine was rescued from her family's circumstances by marriage to a cousin, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who was a part of the French nobility. Josephine had two children, but had to endure the unhappiness of having a husband who was a habitual womanizer. Once the French Revolution brewed, she, her husband, and their children were imprisoned. Her husband was condemned to death and was executed on the guillotine. Josephine and her children just narrowly escaped the knife.
After the Revolution and she was freed, Josephine become a celebrated socialite and the reputed mistress of several men in the French government. While being kept by the top man in the government at the time, Paul Barras, Josephine met Napoleon. For the younger, extremely serious and ambitious Napoleon, it was love at first sight. He was already a general in his 20s when he met the older more sophisticated Josephine. For Josephine, it was just another seduction. She had been hurt so much in her marriage and had gone through so much doing the Revolution, that she had developed a carefree cynicism about life and men. But undeterred by her slight indifference, Napoleon wrote to her not long afterwards:

"I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses."

The painfully passionate love letters would keep pouring in. In this, Paul Barras saw his chance. He really wanted Josephine off his hands because she was proving too expensive to keep, so he encouraged the affair between Napoleon and Josephine, keeping his fingers crossed that the end result would be marriage. They did marry, and the rest is history.

Napoleon eventually divorced Josephine, not because of the turbulence in their relationship, but because she could not produce the heir he needed to carry on the Napoleonic line. Napoleon had wrestled with the issue of Josephine's or his possible infertility for years. He had even designated Josephine's daughter Hortense's son as his heir. Hortense was married to Napoleon's younger brother Louis. Steadfast in his hope for an heir, Napoleon coaxed Josephine into seeing his logic, and so she agreed to a divorce.

When Napoleon divorced Josephine, it seemed that his star began to wan. Before he had been unstoppable in his conquests and moves to unite Europe. After the divorce came the disasterous Russian campaign, which destroyed his Grand Army. Of the 690,000 men who marched in this army only 93,000 survived the retreat from the Russian steppes.

Josephine did not live to see Napoleon go into his final defeat and second exile. She caught a chill and died in 1814 at age 50. Napoleon died in exile on the island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa in 1821 of stomach cancer. There have been occasional disputes that he was not ill with the disease but was actually poisoned. On his deathbed Napoleon's final words were:

"France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Josephine."

In 2003 another mini-series was shown in the US. It was called Napoleon and starred Isabella Rossellini as Josephine and the French actor Christian Clavier as Napoleon. These two were not as softly cute and youthful as Assante and Bisset had been in the 1987 mini-series; plus I did not get to watch this version of the lives of my favorite Romantic couple. I still have the series with Assante and Bisset on a cassette which I recorded from the original program. I plan to eventually buy or rent the Napoleon DVD. I hope also that Amazon will eventually offer the 1987 series before my cassette disintegrates.

This video with scenes from Napoleon is wonderful to watch if you are a fan of N & J and a Romantic. The song Anytime, Anywhere is sung by Sarah Brightman.

The Legend of A Female Pope

For centuries there have been whispers of a woman of great learning who donned the clothes of a man and was elected pope by cardinals who had no idea that they had chosen someone of the "weaker sex" to sit on the highest throne of the Roman Catholic Church. This legend of a female pope had largely been unknown to most in the current generation until Donna Woolfolk Cross resurrected it in her amazing and controversial novel, Pope Joan, published in 1997. I read Pope Joan a few years ago, and the novel is one of a few books where I actually saw aspects of myself in the character.

Pope Joan is the story of a girl born in the 9th century to an English canon and his Saxon wife in Frankland in what is now Germany. The canon had come to Frankland as a Christian missionary to convert the heathen people to Christ. There he had spotted and fallen reluctantly in love with a pagan Saxon woman. The marriage is very unhappy because the canon despises his wife because he sees her as an instrument of the devil, seducing him away from his Godly mission and causing him to lose his purity in the possess. He goes into violent rages when his wife seems to hang on to her heathen gods and passes the stories on their daughter. He hates just about every thing about women because like the Biblical Eve, he believes women are always the impetus for sin and trouble. He is abusive of his wife and daughter, whereas he is more lenient with his two sons whom he encourages to be scholars.

Early on Joan has strong curiosity about learning. When a Greek scholar in exile from Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) comes to their town, he teaches Joan's brothers not only about the great authors of the church like Augustine, but also those from classical Greek and Roman history like Plato, Seneca, Ovid, and Homer which were almost unknown or banned by the western church, but appreciated by the church in the east. The 9th century is at the tail end of the Dark Ages in Europe. Learning and scholarship have moved east to Constantinople which is the capital of Byzantium which was the Byzantine Empire (Rome in the east). The Greek scholar witnesses Joan passion for learning and stands up to her father, demanding that he be allowed to teach her as well. Like the slogan for the National Negro College Fund here in the US, to him "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," even if it is a female mind.

The patience, devotion, and attention that the Greek gives Joan plants a seed that will eventually carry her to a Benedictine monastery where she will further her learning. After her last surviving brother is killed in a Viking attack she cuts her hair and dresses in his clothing. No longer does the questions she has asked herself plague her, "Why am I different? What is wrong with me?" She has come to terms with the fact that she and no woman with potential should be confined to a life dictated by men and society. She will go her own way, but living as man because she knows that in her world, women are confined to the home as only wife and mother. Learning and scholarship are not an option.

In time, Joan goes to Rome posing as John Anglicus. She wins the respect and envy of many. During her years of study she has become a physician, eventually becoming the personal doctor of the current pope. She is the one person who inspires this pope who is a fat overeater and a crybaby to be courageous. The Rome of Joan's era is a place of piety, corruption, nepotism, sexual licence, competition, and murder, even in the halls of the Vatican. In the meantime, Joan has also fallen in love with a handsome, open-minded German landowner and minor noble named Gerold. Gerold was married when she first met him, but his family and estate is wiped out in the same Viking attack in which Joan's brother was killed. Gerold follows Joan to Rome, and when she is elected pope he remains faithfully by her side, keeping the secret that the most powerful personage in Christendom is a woman.

Joan's robes and mien conceals her deception until she becomes pregnant by Gerold. Joan is so ambitious that she is set on never allowing her secret to come out, even to him. She knows that Gerold would tell her to stop her act, vacant the papal throne, and marry him. Stubbornly Joan concocts a potion that she takes to abort her child. The potion does not work until a terribly violent tragedy happens in the streets of Rome one day to Gerold right within Joan's view. Now without her lover and best friend, Joan miscarries and dies in the street to the horror and fascination of the people in her papal entourage and the general populace. As Joan dies moving from grief to fear to peace, the people around her nearly riot believing that it is witchcraft that has gripped their beloved pope or that "he" is possessed by a devil. Others think it is a miracle because a tiny premature infant has appeared beneath the pope's robes. For almost 2 years, Joan named Pope John, has been the supreme leader of the church. She had come a long way, extracting herself from a limited life to a life of power and prestige. But in the end, in her 40s, even though she had played the role of a man, the reality of her sex had come to haunt her in a way she had not expected at her age to have happened. Since Gerold her friend, adviser, protector and lover was even older than she, she never believed that she might become pregnant.

The legend of Pope Joan has been around since the Middle Ages. The legend was once as popular as that of King Arthur. Writers such as Boccaccio even mentioned the female pope. However, the Catholic church has vehemently denied the existence of an amazingly scholarly woman who tricked the church establishment and ascended to the throne of St. Peter over 1000 years ago. The Catholic church has viewed the legend as a weapon of the Protestant Reformation to discredit the church. Arguments by some who say that the church waged an active campaign after Joan's death to expunge her from history are championed by other scholars as unfounded. They feel she never existed. The first mention of La Popessa was in the 13th century 400 years after the time of Joan. So the skepticism remains, but I love the idea of a woman who overcame the chains of her age to go out into the world to seek her fortune.

In 1972 the Swedish actress Liv Ullman starred in a filmed entitled Pope Joan.

Now I have learned that next year Donna Woolfolk Cross' novel is slated to be brought to the big scene. Franke Potente, a German actress, recently seen in the US movies Blow and The Bourne series starring Matt Damon will be playing Joan.

The novel Pope Joan brought to life a time of savagery, brutality, and Romance. The novel is a fast read even though it is a little over 400 pages. All the elements of human drama, life in The Dark Ages, and of even our time can be found in the novel. Joan's story is timeless and universal, because as Cross said in an interview at the back of the novel:

"I want readers--particularly women--to understand one basic truth: to empower yourself in this world you must learn. Joan armed herself with the power of knowledge. This knowledge allowed her to rise to the very highest rank of the most powerful institution of her day. Even today in countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, the first priviledge that is taken away from a subservient group such as women is the right to an education."

As an African-American woman and being a part of an group where too many now encourage mediocrity and low achievement because to learn and to be articulate is "being white" or to be a "real woman" you must have a child before you are 15 or 16 by some immature teenager or some worthless guy with no intention of being a man and responsible, Cross' words speak volumes to me. Most of my life, I have gone against the grain of what it means to be a black woman in America. I have flown and fell down, but always with the determination to be unique and to go totally against the grain.

British sculptor Philip Jackson's piece called Pope Joan.

The official website for Joan Woolfolk Cross' novel Pope Joan can be accessed here.

Murasaki of Japan

Long ago in the mists of time in feudal Japan a daughter was born to a provincial governor and his wife. They named her Murasaki Shikibu.

Not only was the governor an official, but he was also a scholar. The traits of the enjoyment of learning and curiosity was passed on to his daughter who from a young age showed a remarkable ability to grasp and understand literature and languages. This was a miracle and a source of pride and disappointment for Murasaki's father who once said to her, "If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!"

Murasaki's brother, unlike her, did not display her swiftness in learning. In ancient Japan, women were allowed to do some basic learning, but the realm of the classics which were in Chinese was the province of men. Being a man with an open mind and appreciating his daughter's singularity, Murasaki's father allowed her to sit in on her brother's private tutoring sessions.

When Murasaki came of age, she was married off to a distant relative. She bore him a daughter. In time, plague appeared in the land, and Murasaki's husband was carried off in the epidemic. Alone, except now for her daughter, Murasaki began to write a book. Since she was the daughter of a prominent man and quite a curiosity herself, she captured the attention of the empress. She was brought to court, where she became the special companion to the empress, even teaching her Chinese in secret. She is given the title of "lady."

Lady Murasaki continues to write her book which is about a prince named Genji, getting ideas for the plot from her surroundings. She also keeps a diary which is a vivid description of life at the Japanese court and also expresses her distaste for what she sees as a vapid existence of nobles intriguing, backbiting, and focusing mainly on the silly and trivial. She writes one day in her diary, "Pretty and coy, shrinking from sight, unsociable, fond of old tales, conceited, so wrapped up in poetry that other people hardly exist, spitefully looking down on the whole world-such is the unpleasant opinion that people have of me. Yet when they come to know me they say that I am strangely gentle, quite unlike what they had been led to believe. I know that people look down on me like some old outcast, but I have become accustomed to all this, and tell myself, 'My nature is as it is."Despite her indifference and dislike of court life she becomes a reluctant celebrity when her novel, The Tale of Genji, is discovered. It is presented as a serial and read orally. Lady Murasaki writes this in her diary, "His Excellency saw The Tale of Genji laying about in the Empress's apartments. He made his usual stupid jibes, and then handed me a poem written on a piece of paper to which he had attached a branch of plum-blossom: 'What with these ardent tales of love, little can I think that men have passed you by, as they might this plum-tree's sour fruit.' And so I replied, 'If no man has tasted, who can say if the fruit is sour, or if the writer of these tales herself has known such love?'' Is the novel's hero, Prince Genji, Lady Murasaki's alter ego?

Unlike most at court who live only for the moment, Lady Murasaki knows winds of change are moving inside Japan. The decadent lifestyle of the court will eventually be swept away by the samurai who will install a military dictatorship ruled by a shogun.

At age 50, Lady Murasaki asks to retire from the court, leaving it for the peace and serenity of a convent. Finally, she is at peace.

This is my personal rendition of the life of Lady Murasaki (973-1025?) She is believed to have written the first modern novel, The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and the Diary of Lady Murasaki can be purchased on Amazon.com. The quotes listed in my tale are from Lady Murasaki's diary.

In 2001, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist and the only westerner to have been trained as a geisha, wrote the novel The Tale of Murasaki which is a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu.

Ideas for the writing style in this post were inspired by entries in the blogs The Victorian Era and Emma Alvarez Site, Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm, and The Thousand and One Nights.

The Romance of Historical Fashion

When I was a child I would spend hours looking in the historical fashion section of our Britannica and Collier encyclopedias. I am fascinated by historical costumes from ancient times on up to the early 20th century. My favorite period of historical dress was during the Empire and Regency periods of the late 18th and early 19th centuries when women let go of so much tight corseting and put on dresses and gowns inspired by the ancient Romans and Greeks. The high Empire waist line from that time is currently back in style again, and I love it.

In the last 4 decades, fashion has basically been recycled over and over. This was not the case through the centuries. Braun and Schneider's historical fashion plates published in the late 1880s attested to diversity of fashion throughout the ages. Last year I bought Dover's edition of Braun and Schneider's work called Historic Costume in Pictures which can be seen here. All 125 plates which were published from 1861 until 1880 can be seen online. A prelude to all of the costumes are the ladies dancing above, these Turkish Ottoman ladies and an ancient Egyptian ruler and his servants.

Enjoy!

Excerpt From The Africans: A Triple Heritage

Yesterday in my post Ali A. Mazrui: Intellectual and Romantic, I mentioned his documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage. On YouTube I was able to locate an excerpt from the 9 hour documentary where Dr. Mazrui explains why Africa has failed to advance technologically. I am sure there have been many changes since 1986 when this series was produced, but Africa still lags behind many places.

Three Coliseums

The University of Georgia where I did both my undergraduate and graduate studies periodically sends me travel brochures of their annual trips around the world. The trips are always to exotic and beautiful locations dripping with Romance and history. Two years ago, I received a brochure that stunned me. On it was a photo of a structure that the average person is probably not aware of. Most everyone has heard of and seen photos of the coliseum in Rome, famous for its gladiatorial fights and notorious for the martyrdom of many early Christians. I was stunned to see on a brochure about a trip to Croatia that there is another ancient coliseum still in existence which is in better condition than the one in Rome. This second coliseum is located in the city of Pula and can be seen here.


Even in my mundane southern town, there is also a coliseum on the campus of my old university. Here is an old post card of it. It can be said that I graduated from high school in a coliseum because the building below is where I and my 12th grade classmates gathered on evening in early June to end one phase of our lives and to begin another.

The Brutal Romance of Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was a Norwegian novelist born in Denmark who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 mainly for her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter about the life of a woman in 14th century Norway. Undset is largely unknown today outside of Norway and except by a few Catholic scholars which is a shame because her writing is truly some of the most powerful, beautiful, realistic, and brutally Romantic works ever written. She is my all time favorite writer not only because I revel bathing in the Romantic, obscure, and the beautiful, but because she is indeed one of the giants of western literature.

Sigrid Undset's power as a writer was influenced by several sources. Her father was an archaeologist, and she developed an extensive knowledge of the old Norse and Icelandic Sagas. She was also influenced by several prominent Scandinavian writers of the 19th century like August Strindberg , the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and other writers like the Brontes, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare. Though she became renowned for her novels set during the Middle Ages in Norway, Undset's early novels and short stories dealt with the lives of young women living and working in Kristiania, which is now Oslo. Her modern characters show an alienation and lack any spiritual base to help them survive life's often boisterous and brutal storms.

Her novel Jenny (1911) caused a scandal because of it dealt with sexual issues. The main character Jenny is a young artist living in a community of young expatriate artists in Rome. She is loved by a fellow Norwegian artist, but cannot bring herself to respond to him; still she becomes engaged to him. When she returns to Norway, she meets her father, a rather weak man who is hounded by his wife. Jenny feels sorry for him, but does not love him. After a brief liasion with the father, she learns that she is pregnant. The story ends tragically like most of Undset's novels and short stories. Jenny, unlike, Kristin Lavransdatter which is Undset's masterpiece, was out of print until 1997 when I had the longed for opportunity to read it in Tiina Nunnally's collection called The Unknown Sigrid Undset. The descriptions of Rome and the countryside outside the city are breathtaking. You can almost hear, breathe, and smell nature in Undset's stories. You can also relate to the character's feelings and passions.

For years Kristin Lavransdatter could only be read in an older version of English, but in 1997 Tiina Nunnally translated the it into simplier modern English. Kristin Lavransdatter is in three volumes and a must read. It is the story of Kristin the daughter of a wealthy Norwegian landowner in the 1300s, her passionate love affair with the darkly handsome, erotic, and reckless Erlend, who seduces her when she is taking a spiritual retreat at a convent, their turbulent marriage, her decision to become a nun after the death of Erlend, and her and a number of her children's deaths during the Black Death. This novel is a beautiful but difficult read because of the amount of tragedy. It contains passionate love scenes (without sex described in detail), violence, the death and injury of young children, and lush descriptions of nature. The saintly and the sinful are presented. Kristin's spiritual journey is told just as it is in Undset's other medieval masterpiece The Master of Hestviken whose protagonist is male, a highly moral person, who passionately loves the same woman from childhood, but even though he is a highly decent person, goes on to commit murder when the honor of the woman he loves is wrecked.

Sigrid Undset soaked up life. The realism, beauty, passion, Romance, despair, and raw brutality of her works are a reflection of her own life and spiritual journey. When her father died, she had to abandon her dream of getting a university education. For 10 years she was an diligent office worker and secretary, feeling frustrated in having to do work that really did not reflect her talents. Early on, she dreamed of being a writer, devouring works by her favorite authors, and trying her hand at writing a novel set in the Middle Ages. Her first published work was set during the modern era and dealt with adultery. Later she distanced herself from modern themes and placed her characters in medieval settings, but gave them range and emotions that people in all times and places can relate to.

Being rather shy and reserved, Undset probably did not have a relationship until she was 30 when she met a Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad during a trip to Rome. Svarstad was 9 years older and married with a wife and 3 children back in Norway. It was probably love at first sight, and they began to live together, marrying about 3 years later once he was able to get a divorce. The marriage produced children, but eventually broke up. During the time, Undset, because of the demands of being a wife and mother was not able to write. She also had the first rumblings of a spiritual crisis which would lead her to reject Lutherism and become a Roman Catholic.

When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Sigrid Undset fled first to Sweden and then to the US. While in America she pleaded for her country's liberation through her writings. After the fall of the Nazis, she returned to Norway, but for whatever reason never wrote again. Why she never wrote again is a mystery, maybe she was just too worn out and the creative juices had just dried up. So much had occurred in her life, that she was probably also rather disillusioned.

The article Reading Sigrid Undset gives more insight into her writings as also articles and speechs on Nobelprize.org which can be viewed here.

Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in 2004 (Boy, did I ache with thrills that an African-American woman would promote and recognize a classic of world literature!) helped it to be an bestseller even though Anna, the main character commits suicide and the novel was published in the 19th century . So like Oprah I endorse the Romance and realism of Sigrid Undset.

Discover.

A New Discovery, Sort Of...

When I was an undergraduate at The University of Georgia, I almost majored in anthropology. At the time my alma mater was seeking or claimed to be diligently seeking minorities especially African Americans to major in fields which did not usually attract blacks. Among my choice of electives I picked anthropology since then as now I was extremely interested in world cultures. The professor I studied under encouraged me to consider majoring in the field because I did so well in my studies, getting all A's. I evaded her urgings for reasons I will not go into here.

Around 2003 or 2004 when I was hunting online for any information I could find on Iraqi reactions to what was happening to their country, I found a site called Iraq4u.com which catered to Iraqis who no longer resided in Iraq. On the site were some Iraqi music by various singers, and because of my search there I fell in love with the music of Ilham al Madfai. I subsequently bought one of his CDs. But besides discovering al Madfai, I learned from the site that a people whom I thought had vanished in the pages of Biblical history still existed in Iraq. These people are the Assyrians, the fearsome warriors spoken of over and over in the Old Testament portion of The Bible. The ancient capital of the Assyrians was Nineveh, and even today in Iraq there is a province called Nineveh (Ninawa). There is very little left of what was once the ancient city of Nineveh, however, the descendents of these ancient people who had one of the first Middle Eastern high cultures live on, not as the worshippers of pagan gods like their ancestors millenia ago, but as Christian people. The Assyrians live dispersed throughout the world now. Assyrian minorities who still live in the regions which is their homeland are threatened by Arabization and Islamic extremism. About 400,000 live in the US.

The Assyrians are a Semitic people, whose native language is a form of Aramaic called called Neo-Aramaic or Syriac. Jesus is believed to have spoken Aramaic, so I am sure knowledge of this gives the Assyrian people a lot of pride. When I was Turkey in September, I watched a program on Al Jazeera English one afternoon, about a soccer team for the Assyrian community in Sweden. In this report, I heard for the first time about the Turkish genocide against the Assyrians who lived in eastern Turkey. I was well aware of stories of the Armenian Genocide, but here was a second group who apparently is not fighting as aggressively to get Turkey to admit to crimes as the Armenians are doing. At least I have not heard of any uproar coming from the Assyrian quarter to the degree it does from the Armenians.

What I am learning about the modern day Assyrian people is fascinating along with their music. One of their top singers who was born in Baghdad, but now lives in California is Linda George. She sings in Syriac (Neo-Aramaic) and English and has been inspired by such singers as Anita Baker and Barbara Streisand. Her official website can be accessed here.

The Assyrian people are very proud of their heritage and dream of being able to reclaim their homeland. They were after all the old kids on the block before the Babylons, Medes, Persians, Arabs, and Turks showed up in their territories. Nevertheless, the Assyrians are a mixed "race" of people. I personally think the ones I have viewed online resemble the Turkish people more than they do Arabs, Iranians, or Kurds.

It is said that Assyrian culture was around over 6,000 years ago. They had converted to Christianity before Islam existed. When I look at the products of Assyrian nationalism, it is a interesting mixture of their pagan and Christian heritage. These people are proud, ancient, and becoming a group which is a rare entity in the Middle East: they are Christians.

Here is a video by Linda George about Iraq.



A video by Assyrian singer Faris Esho with a lively couple dancing in traditional Assyrian costume.



A nationalist Assyrian video with (can you believe it?!) the rapper 50 Cent wearing a muscle shirt with the Assyrian flag on it. Is he Assyrian? :) Or does he even know that what he is wearing is the Assyrian flag? Perhaps an Assyrian fan gave it to him.




Here is another Assyrian nationalist video which has art referencing ancient Assyrian civilization.

Finally this video explains Assyrian traditional clothing

I really hope this ancient people can survive because the world will be less colorful without them.

Romance of the Despot

As you get older it seems that years just wisk by leaving you to wonder how a year seemed to drag on when one is a child or teenager, but once you pass 30 or 40 how it just seems without explanation to speed up. Well, one year ago one of the most blustering and dramatic of the world's strongmen was executed: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.

Saddam Hussein, "The Butcher of Baghdad," "The New Nasser," "Liberator of Palestine," "The Godfather," "The Anointed," "Great Uncle," along with other titles he probably reveled in and loathed, really had an amazing career which was Romantic by its' rise from the dirt and desolation of the Iraqi village of al-Ouja to "great" Arab lion and leader with over 30 palaces scattered throughout Iraq to the gallows of one of his former prisons. Saddam's story was definitely one of the poor boy who makes good, but his own pride and miscalculations along with the pride and miscalculations of others led to the suffering of millions of Iraqi innocents. There has been much written about Saddam, much of which is only rumor, speculation, and sensationalism. Feelings about him run from passionately for him to passionately against him. Just look at YouTube in the last year where there are more and more videos put on in honor of the man. The comments about him after these videos run the gamut from calling him a saint and martyr to a dog and bastard. Some think he is either in Heaven or Muslim Paradise and others think he is burning in Hell with his two sons Uday and Qusay who preceded him in death. Rarely is there a middle ground reached where Saddam is concerned.

Today in Tikrit which is basically Saddam's hometown (al-Ouja is where he was born and apparently in close proximity) he was honored with songs and chants by children, many of whom are so young they don't remember him. There were also fiery speeches. Saddam was loved and hated by many. When he was executed last year, demonstrations broke in of all places, India. India has the largest Muslim population of an country on earth even though the chief religion is Hinduism, but for some reason there was a lot of outrage there on December 30th last year. Some of it was certainly because Saddam was executed on the first day of

Eid, but Saddam has also been rumored to have given aid to India in the past. The reason why Indian demonstrated may have been because his personal physician is said to have been Indian. Saddam was also said to be generous to those whom he felt honored or liked him. Here is a photo of him back in the 1970s on a visit to India when he was vice president of Iraq.That is Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, beside him. Like her counterpart in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who died on Thursday, Indira met a tragic end. Bhutto's father who was president and prime minister was executed by hanging like Saddam. The real relationship between Saddam and the Indians is unknown to me. I do know that over the years, Saddam actively courted friendships with some countries in Africa. He was a friend of Castro and Qaddafi, and near the end of his rule was visited by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as this photo attests.

Saddam was a Romantic Despot and once the special glowing friend of the US in the region. At one point, before Iraq entered the war with Iran in 1980, Iraq was the most advanced nation of the region with a highly literate population, many of whom had university educations. Saddam, himself, always aspired to the best. He listed himself as both a lawyer and a general, but both titles were false. As a young man, Saddam allowed his penchant for politics to interfere with his quest to become an attorney. He tried to get into the military academy in Baghdad, but he was rejected. Being a tall man at 6'2" who at different periods of his life was strikingly handsome, he might have done his country a better service if he had become an actor. Saddam loved to dress up and would don the robes of the Bedouin chieftain, the general, or the look of the 1930s style gangster. He was a family man who loved to swim and play with his children, or at least he created this image for the public.His youngest daughter Hala was his favorite and was often seen with him even at political meetings when she was a little girl. She is reputed to have been a very sweet girl who loved Iraq and the Iraqi people, even stealing money and jewelry from her parents to hand out to poor people. Here is Saddam playing with Hala.

Here is Saddam sewing the sleeve on the dress of his eldest daughter Raghad, but it may possibly be Hala.


Here is Saddam and family in an old photo from the 1970s or 80s. The little girl beside him sucking her thumb is Hala.Saddam was said to have been married possibly 4 times. The photo above is with his first wife Sajida, who was also his cousin. She is the blonde lady. Saddam's and Sajida's marriage was arranged when he was only 3 years old. They met when he was about 10 and had run away from home to be with Sajida's family where he would be allowed to go to school, Sajida's father being a school teacher. Saddam's stepfather was totally against him receiving an education, beat and abused him, and felt Saddam should only aspire to be a farmer. Saddam obviously thought otherwise and hit the road to find his destiny.

Saddam Hussein saw himself as a Renaissance man, a throwback to leaders of old like Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin. Like Old King Neb, Saddam promoted colossal building programs for his country with many monuments to himself also thrown in. When he began modernizing his country while still vice president, he had electricity put in place throughout Iraq, plus he also made sure that every family received a television set and a refrigerator. More darkly, Saddam also got ideas from Joseph Stalin to whom he bore a slight physical resemblance. Saddam had the ancient city of Babylon reconstructed. He claimed to be a direct descendent of the prophet Muhammad. He was a patron of the arts with artists constantly using him in their subject matter as the "New Saladin" on a white horse leading Arab armies into victory or dressed in the garb of a Babylonian or Assyrian warrior in a chariot firing arrows. Saddam forged and forced a common identity on Iraq, a country pieced togther and created by the British. Out of Sunni, Shiites, Christians, Bedouins, Yazidis, Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, Turkmen, Syriacs, Chaldeans, and even Jews Saddam demanded that they all see themselves as not just inheritors of an Arab state, but as descendants of the ancient empires of the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Saddam saw himself as a poet and also as a novelist, writing about 5 Romantic novels with political and allegorical themes. One of his first was Zabibah and the King. Even in his second and final imprisonment, Saddam was writing poetry.

Over the years we have heard mostly about the very bad Saddam Hussein, a man viewed by many as a brutal criminal, but don't we all have our faults, some of us with small and others with gargantuan. Saddam was a big promoter of the importance of education and pushed for women all across Iraq to be educated. All of his supposed wives were educated women. Under Saddam, the Christian community of Iraq was protected, but now they are threated and persecuted. One of Saddam's highest ranking officials was Tariq Aziz, a Catholic, who is still imprisoned by US forces. In the documentary Uncle Saddam, Saddam is shown as a man who saw himself as a father figure to his nation, encouraging people in the basics of just taking baths everyday in his regular TV announcements. When all hell broke loss in Iraq, some people lamented that perhaps Saddam knew what he was doing by keeping his foot on the necks of the Iraqis. He obviously was more well versed in Iraq than we Americans were.

Saddam's rise and fall were dramatic. When he was found in a hole in December 2003, he showed the world that the old adage, "the bigger they are the harder they fall" is very true. Saddam had gone from gangster to dishoveled Santa Claus. As my pastor said, "That was a SAD end."Saddam's destiny ran full circle in December 30, 2006. After the embarassment of being shown to the world as a poor old man pulled out of a hole and living in a two room filthy hut just across the river from one of his palaces, Saddam redeemed himself on the gallows. He died bravely and with dignity, praying the prayer which Muslims say before they die. The world's reactions were mixed. I was in Turkey at the time, and one of my colleagues who was Australian told another one of my American colleagues, "That was WRONG what the Americans did to Saddam Hussein. There is going to be hell to pay for this." Even the Vatican condemned the execution as morally wrong and said that modern nations do not engage in conduct such as hanging.
Though the world now does not seem to have the time or the common sense to learn and remember tough lessons, the life of Saddam Hussein is a lesson which many of us could benefit from by learning about.

To wrap this post up, here is a very well done tribute to Saddam Hussein. There are many on YouTube using Arabic songs, rap tunes by Tupac Shakur, and I even found one with a Hallelujah tune. The song in this video is sung by Hussein Al Jasmi.