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Defne Türker Demir, Lunéville, juin 2017Sven Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ is a travel narrative par excellance, with five different journeys interwoven; the author’s actual journey in Africa, the author’s journey into his own past, and the author’s journey into the colonial enterprise constitute the contemporary travels depicted in this work. Whereas Lindqvist’s references to Joseph Conrad’s actual journey into colonised Africa, and finally the journey in Joseph Conrad’s best known work The Heart of Darkness -to which the title of Lindqvist’s  book is a reference- complete the list. Lindqvist survives all these journeys to tell them, whereas in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the anti-hero, Kurtz is undone. Kurtz is destroyed spiritually by his travel into “the Heart of Darkness” that is Africa, “the dark continent”. His white man’s burden, the duty of the “civilised” European to “enlighten” the Africans and save them from savagery, has proven too much of a challenge for Kurtz. Instead Kurtz has gone native. Just before his imminent demise, he is disgusted by the people he was supposed to save and says: “Exterminate All the Brutes’”. To Kurtz the African is a mere animal, and has to be destroyed, since his own attempts to rehabilitate them has resulted in his own debilitation through long exposure to the continent he deems dark and the savage people that inhabit it. Kurtz’s deification stands as living proof of his failure.Sven Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate all the Brutes’ is a travel narrative that could all in all be read as the comprehensive history of the nineteenth century colonial enterprise. The author’s travel into the heart of Sahara serves as a frame to his historical research that traces the roots of imperialism and racism in Western thought and practice. Hence, Lindqvist’s geographical and linear movements in space are subtexts to a journey backwards in time, a journey that is further enhanced by brief introspective memories of childhood and hallucinatory, nightmarish visions. Along with his heavy suitcase and his computer, fear accompanies Lindqvist in his journey. Lindqvist associates the act of travelling with fear to such an extent that he asks himself the following question: "Why do I travel so much when I am so terribly frightened of travelling? Perhaps in fear we seek an increased perception of life, a more potent form of existence? I am frightened, therefore I exist. The more frightened I am, the more I exist? " (5)In addition to the First and the Second World wars that caused mass upheavals in terms of population movements, the end of the colonial era ushered in its own multiplicity of dislocations, as the peoples of the former colonies started flocking from the periphery into the colonial centres. Today, on the other hand, while peoples are taking the dangerous journey towards the EU by sea and by land, rampart fear reigns on both sides of the divide. With civil wars wreaking havoc in Central Africa and the Middle East, the overall situation was dubbed “the worst migrant crisis since the WWII” by The New York Times in 2015. On the whole, gaining impetus with “The  War to End all Wars” the 20th century witnessed an unprecedented flow of peoples, and the 21st is already marked not only by civil disturbances, but also the resultant migrations.[caption id="attachment_321" align="alignnone" width="600"] Schrodinger's immigrant[/caption]Whereas the individuals taking the leap from the periphery into the centre construct new subjectivity positions, not only the centre, but the periphery itself is transformed in the process. Likewise, Salman Rushdie’s book title Imaginary Homelands aptly suggests that the periphery cannot remain static, but is re-inscribed as part of a dream vision for those who have left, while it is perpetually re-imaged and re-imagined. Consequently, the phantom homelands or phantom-ness of homelands are perpetually interrogated by migrants and refugees.Madan Sarup, migrant and theorist, in her work Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World defines who a migrant is and problematises the concept of home in the following manner:"A migrant is a person who has crossed the border. S/he seeks a place to make ‘a new beginning’, to start again, to make a better life …. While writing, I often keep thinking of home …. But what makes a place home? …. Is home the place from where you have been displaced, or where you are in now?" (1)In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva in her turn delineates the alterity introduced by the concept of the newcomer, or the foreigner by the following words:"Who is a foreigner? The one who does not belong to the group, who is not “one of them,” the other.The foreigner, as it has often been noted, can only be defined in negative fashion.Negative with respect to what? The other of what group?…. At first, he blends with the enemy." (95)Yet, often enough, the Other is conflated with the enemy not only at first, but once and for all. Thus the Other remains equated ultimately with the enemy.If migrants are the strangers and the foreigners, and this is the reason for their Othering and imminent dispossession, then what can we say about the peoples who are marginalised in their own lands? Starting with late 15th century, the voyages to Americas have resulted in the domination of the locals by the migrating populations. The colonial practices of the Iberians in Central and South America, especially the Spanish were derided by the AngloEuropeans as acts of blood thirst and brutality, whereas in North America, things looked better at first. At the initial moment of contact, in late 16th century, the Native Americans were deemed to be fit to become good servants for the newly arriving AngloEuropeans and were depicted by John White in his watercolours as carrying the objects given them by the conquerors, learning from the newcomers already. Or alternatively, the Indian Americans were represented as busy and prolific in food production by John White. It should also be remarked that his paintings fixed the image of the Native American in the  imagination of the Europeans for centuries to come. Thus we have the prototypes of the noble savage, in their innocence, ready to be civilised by the AngloEuropeans, who will carry the white men’s burden, make the Natives into good Christians and save their souls in the process.[caption id="attachment_344" align="aligncenter" width="186"] Sloan, Kim. A New World – England’s First View of America, British Museum, 2007[/caption]&#160;Even the catastrophe of the Lost Colony of Roanoke apparently did not have an impact on John White’s paintings that could be read as visuals of advertisement bidding the Europeans to move to the New World.  The colonist that disembarked in Roanoke in 1587 simply disappeared. It was a group of 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children, including John White’s own wife and daughter. The fate of these earliest settlers remain a mystery even today. After the misadventures of Roanoke and Plymouth, the Europeans had finally settled in the New World by 17th century, and their relationship with the Native Americans soured as they pushed more and more into the lands of the American Indians. Although the AngloEuropeans were not able to turn the Natives into servants, we see that the Natives in their turn captured the newly arrived whites, and either used them in chores, or integrated them into their own communities. This was done as a corrective to the huge depletion in the numbers of the Native Americans, which resulted from both the ongoing warfare between them and the migrants, and also the illnesses that spread in the wake of the arrival of AngloEuropeans.Captivity Narratives constitute a genre by themselves which is a testimony to the violent interaction between the new and old inhabitants of North America. These Captivity Narratives relate the plight of the whites, especially the women in the hands of these wild Others. True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) is a case in point. In the text, the Natives are depicted as animals, barbarians, and diabolical beings, and the salvation of Rowlandson is the triumph of the righteous against the heathen, showing God is on the side of the Puritans. It is God who is using the Natives as a scourge to test his faithful, and saving the Puritans body and soul as a proof of his favour.Similarly, Hannah Dustan’s story of her captivity and escape was included in the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana or the Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702) as a “A Notable Exploit; Dux Faemina Facti". The title means “a woman was the author of the achievement ” and thus the inclusion of a woman’s exploit into the history of New England proves the importance of the event and the prestige accorded to Hannah Dustan. Hannah Dustan’s fame continues well into the 19th century, since she becomes the very first woman whose statue was erected in United States. Her brevity lies in the fact that she kills and scalps her ten Native captors, although the majority of them children. In this statue we see Hannah Dustan pointing her finger righteously at her invisible captors who would soon perish at her hands, while in her other hand she holds her weapon -a scalping knife- in a menacing fashion.Yet, what the 17th century colonialist and artist John White, and his fellow migrants failed to acknowledge was the indomitable spirit of the Native American peoples who are even now putting up a stance, against the Dakota Access Pipeline today. If migrants are the strangers and the dispossessed, then which category fits the Dakota who are trying to protect their own land from the pipeline of the conquerors in the 21st century? The Native Americans yet remain marginalised in their own lands, and argue they are not post-colonial peoples or communities, since their colonisation continues. The contemporary resistance movement that started in 2016 is also known by the hashtag #NoDAPL, and is a grassroots movement that aims to stop the construction of Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. The pipeline is to pass across the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal lands in North Dakota, pausing a big threat of spillage and pollution for both the water reservoirs and the land itself, which are sacred for the American Indian peoples.Consequently it was this same spirit of resistance on the part of the Native Americans that resulted in yet other population movements. While the American Indians fought back the AngloEuroeans instead of becoming good servants, the AngloEuropeans were forced to bring labor from elsewhere. One largely forgotten source of labor and at that a white migrant population was the indentured servants from Europe, who as Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States argues were kept separate by the establishment of the concept of Colour Line or the Colour Divide. Although technically slaves, the indentured servants from Europe were not allowed to mix or form solidarity with the slaves from Africa. In this new hierarchal structure, whites were placed higher than the Africans, so much so that different punishments were afforded for the same crime depending on the skin colour of the perpetrator.However, the majority of the new arrivals into North America comprised of the Africans captured in their homelands and shipped off by the Portuguese. The Atlantic Slave Trade constituted a new phase of inhumanity of man towards their own kind. During the Middle Passage, that is the sea journey from Africa to Americas, the bodies of the captured Africans were stacked like sardines in a can, which resulted in a very high death toll.NourbeSe Philip’s 2006 poem “Zong!” is inspired by the events that took place on the slave ship of the same name. What transpired in year 1781 on the slave ship Zong would come to be named a massacre, and serve the case of the abolitionists as a most grisly example. During the Middle Passage, due to a shortage of provisions, 132 slaves were thrown overboard the ship Zong. Since the slaves were considered merchandise, the losses of the shipowner would be reimbursed by the insurance company. In Philip’s poem, we see the words scattered on the page, like the bodies of the people, rendered useless, made to transpire amongst the waves. The shock, the fear, the incoherence reaches us over the Atlantic and the ages in the broken syntax and the incomplete words, as if the lives of the people uttering them did not suffice their completion.Those who survived the Middle Passage into Americas did not fare much better either. Since slavery was conflated with skin colour, no reprise or ransom was possible for the Africans after they reached the New World. Once a slave always a slave, as was the case with Mary Prince, whose owner refused to sell her and instead preferred to spoil his merchandise by sending her to the salt pits, where the body would open up in wounds, and the slave’s life would end before long. Mary Prince’s life story, one of resistance and endurance was published in early 19th century and became the first autobiographical work by an African woman, and widely utilised by the Quakers in their attempts  for the abolition of slavery.While African bodies were being traded across the Atlantic, a somewhat similar fate awaited those in the Mediterranean region in the Early Modern Era. Wars and piracy were the main sources of slaves in the Mediterranean context, and the captured men would serve especially as galley slaves on both sides of this Muslim vs Christian divide and take on various journeys, until they found a way to buy their way out of slavery and back home, if they survived this very physical ordeal. Slavery in the Mediterranean remains temporary and impermanent since there is no clear Colour Line/ Divide that marks the slaves as less than human, in which case ransoming is possible but left to the own ingenuity, and the private pockets/ resources of the captives.One work that delineates the life and adventures of a German slave in the Muslim world is by Michael Heberer. Originally published as Aegyptiaca Servitus, Michael Heberer von Bretten’s memoirs A Slave in the Ottoman Empire (1585-1588) is a testimony of his survival at the Ottoman galleys for 3 years. Heberer travels the ports from Alexandria to Constantinople time and again, and recounts the geographical details of the journey diligently, alongside the people he meets. According to Heberer, his plight is another example of God testing his faithful, and his ultimate salvation is a clear indication of his status as one of God’s chosen, and a confirmation of his Protestant creed.Likewise, The Extraordinary Memoirs of an Ottoman Soldier 1688-1700 by Osman Aga of Temesvar was published in 1724. Born in the territory that belongs to Romania today, Osman’s captivity and servitude take him through present day Hungary into Austria where he spends 12 years in the households of various high ranking generals. At one point Osman is thrown into a dungeon and closely escapes being sold off to Venetians as a galley slave. In summing up his adventurous life in writing, Osman appears more rebellious than contended:"According to the holly verse, it is imperative that the believer shall suffer either one of the following ills: The first is physical illnesses; the second is lack of material welfare; and the third is humiliation, to be embarrassed in the face of all. A believer shall suffer one or the other of these ills. Praised be Lord I suffered them all… " (235)While the few men who escaped slavery wrote their adventures into memoirs, others were using this craze for life narratives in fabricating narratives of an altogether different type. These Captivity Narratives of Women are fake memoirs by fictional women and they were written in abundance from the Early Modern period well into the 19th century. In these texts women’s bodies served the double function of a source of titillation and war mongering. Utilising not only the discourse of “us” against “them” these texts underlined the idea that the dark men were to take the European -that is “our”- women and defile them, and the resultant would be miscegenation, the mixing of races that is a monstrosity in itself. Therefore the Other men ought to be stopped at whatever cost, so that the European women’s honour which is equated to their bodies and their lineage will remain pure.An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley, The Wife of Capt. James Bradley, of Liverpool, Commander of the Ship Sally, which was Wrecked on the Coast of Barbary, in June 1818 is a case in point. Mrs. Eliza Bradley falls into the hands of the Arabs, and endures “incredible hardships” during her captivity, the worst of which being her separation from her husband, “and every other civilised being”. The visuals of the text in recounting the dangers she is exposed to depict her as riding on a camel -exotic as well as erotic-, and reading in a tent in the middle of nowhere.Although professing to be autobiographical, the fictional nature of these works are revealed by the way almost identical titles and visuals are used in “representing” the fates of separate women whose sole common reference point is their “European-nes” be them Greek or Dutch, and their female vulnerability in the hands of the infidels. An Affecting History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, an Italian Lady, who was seven years a slave in Tripoli, three of which she was confined in a dungeon, loaded with irons, and four times put to the most cruel tortures ever invented by man, is another sensationalist work, published possibly in 1802. The visuals of the text highlight the nakedness and bondage of the female body in the hands of the wild dark men. While the female body is thus exposed to the gaze of the readers, the highlighting of the torturous nature of the women’s sufferings pander to sadomasochistic tastes as well.Thus in another text from 1818, while the woman’s bosom is slightly more covered than that of “Mrs. Mary Velnet” the shackles and irons remain, not only to emphasise the torturous nature of the captivity, but to titillate the readers. The title of this work reads History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Maria Martin, who was six years a slave in Algiers, two off which she was confined in a dismal dungeon, loaded with Irons, by the command off an inhuman Turkish officer. Also professing to have been written by “herself” even the title of the text reads like a verbatim rip-off from that of “Mrs. Mary Velnet”. Therefore, in these texts the nationality of the women vary, but she remains a white European. There are slight changes to the exact locale of the fantasy, and the identity of the torturers, too. Yet the setting remains constant, that is the Orient, and the torturous brutes are Arab/ Turk/ Moor or Moslem -categories already conflated to constitute the Oriental Other.While the AngloEuropeans enslaved their Others, and were busy creating fabulous sufferings of fictional white women, in the Muslim world slavery raged on as well, as both men and women, European and African continued to be sold into slavery. With the introduction of the genre of novel to the Ottoman empire in late 19th century, novels that either represent or entirely focus on slavery appeared. These novels had a corrective and westernising agenda, and aimed to appeal to the emotions of their Ottoman/Turkish readers by depicting the sad plight of the slaves, and their in-equal place in the fabric of the family. Sergüzeşt by Sami Paşazade Sezai, published in 1889, deals with star crossed lovers, the woman a slave, the man her master’s son, and as expected catastrophe befalls the couple. In Taaşuk-u Talat ve Fitnat by Şemseddin Sami, published in 1872, the slave is no longer the protagonist, but is still central to narration. Notwithstanding their revolutionary agenda back in their day, the covers of the contemporary prints of the texts conflate slavery with erotic fantasies of harem and bear witness to the auto-orientalising tendencies at work today.What these two early Turkish/ late Ottoman novels have in common is that in both it is further East, where slaves are bought and sold, although the novels have İstanbul as the setting. Therefore, the Westernising Ottomans are already positing Egypt as the location of slavery and concubinage, and trying to set a physical as well as a mental distance between themselves and the practice of slavery. However, it was only by 1846 that the Slave Market in İstanbul was closed. Likewise, in 1857 African slave trade was banned in the Ottoman Empire. And finally in 1909, white  slave trade was outlawed. Nevertheless, the practice or slavery firmly withstood the newly passed laws and it was only by the founding of the Turkish Republic that slavery was actually abolished.Then, if we define slavery as an institution which conflated the stranger and the Other and confirmed his/her subject position, how do we react to its revival in the contemporary context? When a second generation British subject is married off into the East, to Yemen in particular, will that constitute slavery as the title of the book suggests? Or will that simply constitute kidnapping? But what if the father of the girl is an accomplice? Will it then become an arranged marriage or yet again slavery as the autobiographical account suggests? Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery, published in 1991 by Zana Muhsen and Andrew Crofts is a case in point. Its sequel reads A Promise To Nadia: The A true story of a British slave in the Yemen, again by Zana Muhsen and Andrew Crofts, a narrative on the life of the sister who remains in Yemen. The Mohsens are indeed a prolific family, and the mother writes a book on the same theme, too which is named Without Mercy.It can be argued that even the name of the book echoes the Early Modern fictional texts that profess to be autobiographical, and thus seek sensation which inevitably raises the question of the amount of intervention by the co-author to boost the sales figures. In Zana Mohsen’s co-authored book, the conflicting cultural practices of the East and the West is presented as “a clash of civilisations” a term that was coined by the Harvard academic Samuel Huntington in the 1970s, and would be made popular in the post 9/11 era. Throughout the text the Orient and the Occident are coded as irreversibly at odds with one another in every respect, while the main dichotomy is presented in terms of the gender inequality that persists in the East. As Edward Said emphasises in his  seminal text Orientalism, approached from the Western perspective, the Orient is knowably immune to change and development, and this unchanging nature of the East is underscored time and again in Zana Mohsen’s book. The phrase “as was done for the last thousand years” is repeated on average every 20 pages. Furthermore, the misdeeds of private individuals are made into essentialist statements, and overall a case of arranged marriages and the receiving of dowries is posited as if actual slavery still persists in a broad portion of the world, that is the entirety of the East. Consequently, are such overstatements normalising the possibility of slavery, reducing it to an ordinary event in the contemporary Middle East? Or is the metaphor of slavery, attempting to work against the grain, blowing the reality out of proportion while trying to publicise a dramatic and drastic situation experienced by two individuals only?Today on the other hand, the Middle Easterner is enslaved by the second generation Easterners coming back from Europe, to establish the Islamic State in the East. The Yazidi constitute a population which is openly targeted by DAESH as they are deemed devil worshippers. DAESH objectifies both male and female bodies, yet utilises those bodies differently. Men are tortured and executed sometimes by fire, and sometimes by water, while the whole process is filmed and posted online, to recruit followers, taking on the function of gory spectacles like the auto-de-fetes of the Spanish inquisition. On the other hand, the female body’s objectification starts taking place in the public domain, and the abuse continues in the private sphere. The female captives are actually enslaved and sold. Women are paraded, chosen and dragged off by the victors. This auctioning of the bodies is done very openly and publicly. The publicity of executions and auctions serve the agenda of spreading fear and therefore become part of the propaganda war DAESH is waging. The estimated number of Yazidi women still in captivity is around 6.000.So people took voyages helped by increased opportunities in travel. They traveled to discover, and to explore. They were dominated and they dominated. Lands were invaded. The people become conquistadores and colonisers. Foreigners, strangers. Imperialists and colonists. Easterners and Westerners. Of the South and the North. Us and them. The conquered and the conquerors. Slaves and slavers. The barbarians and the civilised. Orientals and Occidentals. The beastly and the huMAN. Captives and captors. Migrants. Emigrating and immigrating. Affecting change, and being impacted. Altering the lives of the Others. The remaining question is the identity of the Other. Who may he/she be? Whose Other are we?Dr. Defne Türker Demir, Assistant professorWorks Cited:“An Affecting History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, an Italian Lady”. Avrupalı Esireler ve Musluman Efendileri - “Turk” İllerinden Esaret Anlatilari (European Female Slaves and Muslim Masters – Captivity Narratives from the “Turkish” Lands). Ed. Irvin Cemil Schick. Trans. Zulal Kilic and Irvin Cemil Schick. Istanbul, Kapi Yayinlari, 2005.“An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley.” Avrupalı Esireler ve Musluman Efendileri - “Turk” İllerinden Esaret Anlatilari (European Female Slaves and Muslim Masters – Captivity Narratives from the “Turkish”  Lands). Ed. Irvin Cemil Schick. Trans. Zulal Kilic and Irvin Cemil Schick. Istanbul, Kapi Yayinlari, 2005.Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London, Penguin. First published 1902. 1994.Heberer, Michael. Osmanlıda Bir Köle – Brettenli Michael Heberer’in Anıları 1585 -1588.  (A Slave in the Ottoman Empire – Memoirs of Michael Heberer von Bretten 1585 -1588) Trans. (from German) Turkis Noyan. Istanbul, Kitap Yayinevi, 2003.“History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Maria Martin”. Avrupalı Esireler ve Musluman Efendileri - “Turk” İllerinden Esaret Anlatilari (European Female Slaves and Muslim Masters – Captivity Narratives from the “Turkish” Lands). Ed. Irvin Cemil Schick. Trans. Zulal Kilic and Irvin Cemil Schick. Istanbul, Kapi Yayinlari, 2005.Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilisations?” http://users.metu.edu.tr/utuba/Huntington.pdf. 2004. Acessed 24.July. 2017.Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. New York, Columbia University Press. 1991.Lindqvist, Sven. ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’. Trans. Joan Tate. London, Granta. 2002.Mather, Cotton. “A Notable Exploit; Dux Faemina Facti". Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Ed. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. New York, Penguen Books, 1998.Muhsen, Zana and Andrew Crofts. Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery. London, Little Brown Book Group, 1991. 2010.Philip, NourbeSe.“Zong!”. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241119/pdf. small axe 26, June      2008, p 80–111. Acessed 24.July. 2017.Osman Aga, Temesvarli. Bir Osmanli Askerinin Sıradisi Anilari 1688-1700. (The Extraordinary Memoirs of an Ottoman Soldier1688-1700) Trans. (from Ottoman Turkish) Orhan Sakin. Istanbul, Ekim Yayinlari, 2007.Peçanha, Sergio and Tim Wallace. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/21/world/map-flow-desperate-migration-refugee-crisis.html?smid=tw-nytimes&#38;_r=1, June 20, 2015. Accessed: June 23, 2015.Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”. Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. NY, Oxford University Press, The Schomburg Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers. 1989.Rowlandson, Mary. “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Ed. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. New York, Penguen Books, 1998. pp. 7-51.Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London, Granta Books, 1981, 1992.Said, Edward. Orientalism. London, Penguin, 1995.Sami, Şemseddin. Taaşuk-u Talat ve Fitnat. İstanbul, Say yayınevi. 1872. 2012.Sarup, Madan. Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1996, 2002.Sezai, Sami Paşazade. Sergüzeşt. İstanbul, Bilge Kültür Sanat. 1889. 2015.Sloan, Kim.  A New World – England’s First View of America. London, British Museum Press, 2007.Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States.