Isabelle Eberhardt’s Wildly Unconventional Life

A coda to the opera “Song From The Uproar” discussed in Lisa Mullins’ interview on February 24th.

Isabelle Eberhardt, lived a wildly unconventional existence. She was a late 19th century explorer and writer, and an incredibly daring woman.

Her short life is the stuff movies are made of, or in our case, the stuff operas are made of. The new opera “Song from the Uproar” debuted over the weekend in New York.

The multimedia work is the brainchild of composer Missy Mazzoli, and filmmaker Stephen Taylor. It is based on Eberhardt’s journals.

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877 in Switzerland, the daughter of a Russian mother and Armenian-Russian anarchist. That’s to make a very complex story short.

She was home-schooled in many languages and became fluent in Arabic. Part of that unconventionally cosmopolitan education included wearing male clothing, which presumably gave her more freedom to go around.

Here is Missy Mazzoli talking about Eberhardt’s education.

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There are photos of Eberhardt in boys’ clothes with a sailor’s hat, and in several North African male outfits. Just picture Lawrence of Arabia (who was a contemporary of Eberhardt’s), only with a woman wrapped in the draping clothes.

At the age of 20, Eberhardt traveled to North Africa with her mother. They both converted to Islam, which Eberhardt saw as her true calling.

After the sudden death of her mother, father and half-brother within a few years of each other, Eberhardt was even more determined to live in North Africa. She went around on horseback, wrote travel journals and articles for newspapers, and eventually joined a Sufi sect in Algeria.

She went by the name Si Mahmoud Essadi.

All that didn’t stop her from marrying an Algerian soldier, Slimane Ehnni. She fell madly in love with him, though her fierce need for independence created tensions in her married life.

Eberhardt’s bold individuality made her stand out, and she made some enemies.

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Isabelle Eberhardt did meet an early death, though. And the way she died was as unusual as the way she lived. As fate would have it, she drowned … in the desert, when a flash flood engulfed the Algerian desert village where she’d been staying for only a day.

She was only 27-years-old.