In the pages of our cultural supplement of Wednesday September 4, Jacques Franck had praised Mesopotamia with a very favorable review (3*). In an interview, we return with the author to this book which sheds light on many aspects of the current powder keg in the Middle East through the little-known story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), British adventurer, archaeologist, spy, friend of Lawrence of Arabia. She drew the borders of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in this thousand-year-old Mesopotamia, cradle of humanity between the two rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The critique of Mesopotamia by Jacques Franck
Why your fascination with Gertrude Bell? Had she been forgotten?
Her career was exceptional: archaeologist, explorer, spy, intelligence chief, kingmaker. She was the most powerful woman in the British Empire in the 1920s. Her career, the political influence she had, the consequences of her actions and dreams for which we still pay a high price today, deserved a book. Like other women, she had disappeared from the books a little, pushed aside moreover by the tutelary figure of Lawrence who wrote a masterpiece, The seven pillars of wisdom, which she didn’t do. Then the film about Lawrence d’Arabie finished creating a global myth around Lawrence alone. And the kingdom of Iraq that she had forged was swept away by the revolution of 1958. The Faisals that she had installed in power were assassinated. Iraq was a stillborn creature, a source of imbalances of all kinds. Gertrude Bell’s posterity suffered from it, even if she left to her credit the creation of the archaeological museum of Baghdad, but which itself was crushed by the war in 2003.
There was indeed Werner Herzog’s film in 2015, The Queen of the Desert with Nicole Kidman, which was dedicated to him?
I haven’t seen it so as not to be influenced by Werner Herzog’s vision. But I spent years preparing this book because the documentation is enormous if you want to write about a historical figure like her and if you are interested in the Middle East. Seeing how all this was done at the time a little quickly with a crazy nonchalance. It was fascinating to tell. All the historical facts and the characteristics of Gertrude are true.
Did it all start with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War?
The Middle East was forgotten, it had vegetated for centuries, abandoned by the great powers in favor of America and Africa. But with the Suez Canal and the discovery of oil reserves, it became again, as it was in Antiquity, the barycenter of the world. So all the great powers threw themselves on this territory all the more so because there was a power vacuum. Great Britain in the lead, the greatest power of the time, with the complex diplomacy of a “thousand-cushion billiards”, with three decision-making centres (London, Delhi and Cairo) each pulling in its own direction. There was also a global conflict underway and in order to achieve victory, everything was promised to everyone at the same time!
Without taking into account the local populations…
The fate of the world was at stake and it was a question of winning the war, with the end justifying the means. One appeared to be in the most urgent position according to the interests of the moment. At the time, it was considered that the Arabs were small change, that they had been out of History for centuries under Turkish domination. On the other hand, there was the German threat of Jihad which wanted to cut England off from the Indian Empire.
This arbitrariness sowed the seeds of the conflicts that we are still experiencing in the Middle East today.
It’s like in Central Europe. In all these regions, there were great empires with mixed populations at all times. From the moment when they wanted to impose nation states, it was total madness. Imposing Faisal at the head of Iraq, as Gertrude Bell did, interested me because I saw how this woman had at one point given in to excess. She was locked in her own glass tower. She had done what the Europeans had done in the 19th century, by placing a Bavarian sovereign in Greece, a German sovereign in Romania and Belgium. Faisal was in fact a very interesting man, but very unlucky.
It is a novel about hubris, that of Churchill, of Lawrence, of the French.
Daesh still justified its war with these agreements between major powers.
The way the Middle East was redrawn in a few weeks by a few people was madness, that’s for sure. The title “Mesopotamia” is a concept, that of the tomb of Empires, from the Persians, the Abbasids, to the Westerners. It is the tomb of excess. Mesopotamia, because of its natural riches, and since the dawn of humanity has always attracted conquerors. The English and Gertrude Bell are only the umpteenth to fall into this trap and to think that they will succeed while all the others have failed. And the English and the Americans have made the same mistake again 80 years later!
How did she look like Lawrence?
They were different but very close. They both felt cramped in England and both found, especially in the deserts, a land of freedom. They were dreamers. They were only pawns on a chessboard that they did not control and when they were no longer needed they were thrown out and never recovered. England had become a scorched earth for them.
She was ambiguous.
The current era is quite Manichean while people are complex, ambiguous and she is the embodiment of this complexity. She is everything and its opposite: rebellious and conservative, emancipated and prudish, in love and not in a relationship, Arabist and imperialist, woman and not at all at the forefront of the feminist fight. She remains an exception as a woman to have played such a political role but she saw herself as a man. She refused the constraints that the English society of the time imposed on her as a woman. She wanted to be in charge, ready to succeed at all costs. She died of sadness, desperate, she had nothing left in front of her. We will never know if her death was a suicide. It was not her condition as a woman that interested me but her trajectory carried by the idea of excess. What was this turning point? The last sentence of my book is a quote from Lawrence: “Dreamers of the day are dangerous men, because they can act on their dream with their eyes open, to make it possible.” In her and Lawrence’s fascination with the Middle East, there is probably the metaphysical dimension found in these landscapes but there was also the idea of reshaping the oldest country in the world. There is the drama of Gertrude Bell: believing that Mesopotamia can be resurrected. It is a novel about thehubristhat of Churchill, of Lawrence, of the French in Syria, etc.
His fall was brutal
She had become a symbol of a bygone era and King Faisal no longer wanted a chaperone, a guardian, at his side. Faisal wanted to be King of Iraq while she would have liked to be one in her own way. And then times had changed. She represented the old generation of the Empire and by the 1920s everything had changed, after the World War and the first anti-imperialist movements in Britain.
Churchill is seen as the saviour of the West against Nazism. In your book his image is quite different.
At the time of Gertrude Bell, he was still young, a whimsical, ambitious, vain character. We live in a current era where everything should be seen in black or white. No, people are complex. I am not here to judge Churchill or others. I tell stories. Gertrude Bell had an incredible career, she did terrible things, but was very touching in other ways, as she showed exceptional courage and strength. This did not prevent her from giving birth to a kind of monster with Iraq. Churchill had absolutely brilliant intuitions, understanding before anyone else the importance that aviation would take in the wars to come. The RAF will train in Iraq in the 20s and 30s. Without this training in Iraq we can guess what would have happened in the summer of 40. Let’s get away from the hypersimplification of History, let’s stop saying that this one is a bastard, that one a saint. There is no thesis in my book, I show the rough edges, the complexities, the folds, the nuances that are much more interesting.
Olivier Guez in the footsteps of Mengele
Your historical novels evoke what has shaped our present.
I try to tell a story of the Continent through characters who lived, geopolitical novels. I deal with a series of fictions the origins of totalitarianism studied by Hannah Arendt. These are the totalitarianisms that shaped the world as we live it. We are still paying the consequences with their ghosts. Europe has never recovered from Mengele’s crimes. Today’s Europe is constantly struggling with the colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, postimperial question. We are still in those moments. Europe is in a kind of gigantic identity crisis partly because of that history.
Mesopotamia, by Olivier Guez, Grasset, 416 pp.. €24 digital: €16
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