The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt (June 2018)
On the back cover of Isabelle Eberhardt’s Oblivion Seekers is this ‘review’ – one of the strangest documents a woman has ever given to the world. This clever quip, attributed to Cecily Mackworth, makes for a compelling advertisement but doesn’t exactly reveal much about the book (1). In fact, it’s probably not a very accurate assessment of the book at all – the book is a little unusual but I wouldn't be confident suggesting it is among the strangest documents ever produced by man or woman in world history.
There were two pieces that I marked down to reread after finishing the book – ‘Outside’ and ‘Criminal’. The pieces are similar in their central focus on the injustices of poverty and, taken together, suggest a theme for the entire work. The latter story is a tale I’ve heard all too often in the past about how a victim becomes a criminal after being victimized by another's abuse of power. In Eberhardt's story the criminal, initially caught up as ‘collateral damage’ when a colonial oppressor seizes power, demonstrates an entirely understandable definition of justice by taking revenge against a symbolic representative of his faceless perpetrator and demonstrates how crime can sometimes be a freeing act for those who feel enslaved by their poverty (2).
‘Outside’ examines the injustice of poverty from a slightly different angle. In this haunting story, a dying wanderer reflects on a lifetime of suffering poverty’s daily punishment. As his mind drifts back and forth over the threshold of life and death, he wonders why he always had to ask for the basic necessities that others consider due to them by right. Was it not enough to simply have never done anything wrong?
These stories and what each says about the other form my basic understanding of The Oblivion Seekers. At some level, we all live life like the illiterate who is still required to follow written law – we know our shortcomings, we try to intuit what's right, and we hope one day to understand. Until then, all we can do is hope others give us what we need before we are forced into taking it for ourselves.
Footnotes / strange things from women power rankings?
1. Cecily Mackworth obviously has never read The Animorphs…
If anything, the quote probably says more about Mackworth than it does about The Oblivion Seekers. It reminded me of my rule of thumb for asking questions – never ask a question if it reveals what I know instead of prompting someone to share what I want to learn. (This rule of thumb might be valuable in other areas as well because of how it takes aim against confirmation bias and self-aggrandizing behavior).
I could probably find better ways to spend time than determining what is worthy of the title ‘strangest document a woman has ever given to the world’. However, it almost certainly isn’t The Oblivion Seekers, even if the book is hard for a bookstore to classify. Plus, as the introduction reveals, the book wasn’t put together from front cover to back by the determined and consistent effort of Isabelle Eberhardt so it isn’t exactly accurate to describe it as ‘a document’. (It was assembled posthumously and includes recovered letters and writings in addition to a manuscript partially recovered from the debris of a natural disaster.)
2. It’s funny how the mind makes associations of generally unrelated ideas…
This thought echoes an observation Katherine Boo makes in Beyond The Beautiful Forevers – the poor can be defined by how they steal from each other. Compared to Eberhardt’s thought, Boo’s observation is very different but comes from the same place – the injustice of poverty is how the poor have very little to do with becoming poor in the first place.
