by Jason Porath
• ART NOTES, OR WHY DOESN’T SHE HAVE A FACE? •
You may have heard that Islamic tradition can be very particular about depictions of their holy figures. In modern times, holy persons are often portrayed with either light or golden fire obscuring their features or just a big golden dot over their face. Here, the spilled golden ink—spilled by two dueling hands, each seeking to literally reframe A’isha’s image—serves that purpose.
The unfinished golden borders around the image are mirror images of one another—except one side is all vines and blooms and the other is all fire, symbolizing how one side holds her as a positive influence, the other as a negative one.
Half the crowd is enraptured by A’isha’s teachings (or call to action?), and the other half—not so much. This represents the Sunni/Shi’a split.
The camel on the left side of the image is a reference to both A’isha’s steed at the Battle of the Camel and the animal who carried her sleeping quarters away in the Incident of the Lie.
The dogs on the right side of the image are a callback to the Parable of the Dogs of al-Hawab. In some traditions, their barking at A’isha as she led forces to the Battle of the Camel was indicative of her doing the wrong thing.
Olga of Kiev
(890–969, UKRAINE)
The Saint Who Set Fires with Pigeons
The story of Princess Olga starts in a familiar manner: her husband is killed, their heir is too young to step up, and so Olga steps in. In this case, her husband, Igor, had been gruesomely killed* by the Drevlians* for overtaxation and general being-a-jerk-itude. Assuming Olga would be overwhelmed by the pressures of ruling, the Drevlians demanded that she marry their Prince Mal, thus effectively transferring the throne to the Drevlians.
The Drevlians were wrong. They were so, so wrong.
But they didn’t appear to be at first! Olga timidly acquiesced to the marriage, and even offered a suggestion to cement the Drevlians as the new overlords in everyone’s eyes. “Come back tomorrow,” she said to the 20 emissaries before her, “and have the citizens of Kiev carry you to me.”
So they did as she suggested and were soon being carried through Kiev like big, manly, conquering babies. When the Drevlians came to the throne room, the Kiev citizens proceeded to unceremoniously toss them into a hidden pit they’d dug overnight. Olga then asked, “How you like me now?!” as she started scooping shovelfuls of dirt on them, burying them alive.
Next she sent a message to the rest of the Drevlians, asking that their wisest citizens accompany her as she journeyed to meet her new Drevlian husband. When the elite Drevlians came to Kiev, she said, “Oh, you must be tired from the long journey! Here, rest a bit, take a bath.” Once they all went in the bathhouse she’d prepared, she locked the door and set the bathhouse on fire.
And she wasn’t done! Having murdered all the Drevlian upper crust, Olga next invited the remainder of its citizenry to a funeral feast to mourn her late husband, Igor. When asked where the high-class Drevlian emissaries were, she replied, “They’re right behind me.” She then got the unsuspecting Drevlian revelers drunk and killed over 5,000 of them.
At this point, the Drevlians began to wise up. When Olga appeared at their gates with a massive army next, they threw up their hands in surrender. “Good lord, lady,” they said, “what do you want?! Furs?! Honey?! Whatever it is, we’ll give it to you, just stop already!”
“Oh, really?” she said quizzically. “Well, I don’t want anything. If you’re willing to have peace between us, then just give me a little tribute. Simply send me some doves or pigeons as a token of your good faith.”
Relieved, the Drevlians obliged. Olga promptly tied bits of burning sulfur to each of the birds and sent them back home, thus setting every house in the Drevlian capital on fire at the same time. When the Drevlians tried escaping, she either killed or enslaved them.*
And here’s the kicker: she’s an honest-to-God Christian saint. As the first ruler of Rus to convert to Christianity, she widely proselytized the religion and helped establish a foothold for it in that corner of the world. She was then canonized as Holy Equal to the Apostles. Yes, that’s right: in the eyes of the Church, Olga of Kiev, possibly the only person to burn a city to the ground with pigeons, is on par with any of the 12 disciples of Jesus Christ.
Now, her deeds are almost certainly hyperbolic propaganda—for one thing, the area talked about didn’t have any birds that would live in roofing—but it’s really fun propaganda.
Agontime and the Dahomey Amazons
(19TH CENTURY, BENIN)
The Fiercest Women in the World
In the 1800s, in present-day Benin, there was a kingdom called Dahomey. If you’ve ever heard any horror stories about African cannibalism or human sacrifices, they likely stemmed from tales of Dahomey. Although the bloodthirst of the Dahomeys was massively overstated, they were undeniably aggressive. In fact, a huge portion of the Dahomey economy stemmed from selling their conquered into slavery.
This includes one of their queen mothers, Agontime.
Ousted in a coup and shipped off to Brazil, Agontime was seemingly destined to disappear into the fog of history. However, her story took an unexpected twist: she was found and brought home. The ones who brought her back were quite possibly accompanied by Dahomey’s elite warriors—famed and feared worldwide.
Those warriors were the Dahomey Amazons.* And they were all women.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To really appreciate the tale of Agontime and the Dahomey Amazons, one must first understand a bit about Dahomey itself. Much of Dahomey’s culture was built around a religious love of symmetry. The Amazons themselves were a female counterpart to male fighting units, although usually better trained. This symmetry extended even to the ruling class—for each king, there was a queen mother (kpojito), who held equivalent, but different, power. While kings would largely make the final decisions, the kpojito controlled what the king knew and who got to see him.
The power of Dahomean women extended beyond that. Women could divorce men, but not vice versa. Royal women could take whatever lovers they wanted, including married men, but men could not do the same. New mothers were given a guarantee of three months of maternity leave that could extend to 12. While the new mother was taking care of her new child, the other women of Dahomey would chip in and provide for her and the rest of her family.
Not that any of these practices made the headlines in the European press, who chose instead to focus on the Amazons themselves. One of the recurring descriptions would detail their facility with traversing thorn hedges. At the time, most smaller African villages were protected by eight-foot-tall barriers of sharp thorns. A British officer described them thusly: “I could not persuade myself that any human being, without boots or shoes, would, under any circumstances, attempt to pass over so dangerous a collection of the most efficiently armed plants I had ever seen.”
One minute later, the entirety of the barefoot Amazons had run headlong through the thorn wall.
Some descriptions:
• Induction into the Amazon corps involved cutting your arms, pouring blood into a human skull, mixing it with alcohol, and then drinking it.
• Amazons could imitate bird calls expertly and used them as a method of sending signals to one another in the field.
• Many would grind their teeth to points and hang the skulls of their enemies around their waists.
• Many considered themselves men, chanting, “As the blacksmith takes an iron bar and by fire changes its fashion, so have we changed our nature. We are no longer women, we are men.”
• However, Amazons were not fully considered men until they had disemboweled their first enemy.
How much of this is factual is a matter of some debate. Many of these reports come from observers brought in specifically to witness displays arranged by the king. Others fought the Amazons in pitched combat and had every incentive to paint them in an unflattering light*—to this day, if you search for pict
ures of the Amazons, the first thing you’ll find is probably a picture of one holding a decapitated head. Nevertheless, the fact that the scores of independent eyewitness accounts all detail virtually the same points over and over lends the claims significant weight.
The Amazons largely died out due to a series of wars against the Egba and the French in the late 1800s. Stubbornly clinging to outdated military technology and techniques, the Amazons were gunned down in droves as they rushed their enemies.
But let’s not forget Queen Agontime.
Shipped off to Brazil, Agontime spent 24 years as a slave, likely near São Luís de Maranhão. By 1823, the king who had exiled her had himself been ousted by King Gezo. Gezo considered Agontime his mother, although she may have been a non-biological relation. Once returned to Dahomey, Agontime, by her very presence, helped legitimize Gezo’s claim to the throne. In fact, she only took the name Agontime after coming back: the word is from a phrase literally meaning “the monkey has come from the country of the whites and is now in a field of pineapples.”
The details of her rescue are scant. Some convincingly claim that she was in fact never recovered. Her retrieval, if factual, was likely conducted by two of Gezo’s male attendants independent of assistance from the Amazons. In the end, though, her return—or rather, the story of it—served more as a symbolic truth than a historical one. To the people of Dahomey, it represented not only a victory over the cruel king who had sold her into slavery in the first place but the ability of their Gezo to achieve the impossible.
And if the facts of the case are going to be that loosely interpreted, who’s to say that an elite squad of Dahomey Amazons did not, in fact, bust Agontime out of a plantation and escape with her through unfamiliar Brazilian jungle, killing slavers as they went? Not this book, certainly.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
There are two Amazons hidden on the left and right sides of the image—one is in a tree, situating herself to snipe off the pursuing Brazilians. This was a technique the Amazons regularly employed in battle.
The gold adornments on the head of the closest Amazon were symbols of distinction within the Dahomey military and can be found in several historical depictions of the Amazons.
Mata Hari
(1876–1917, FRANCE)
The Double Agent Who Wasn’t
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Mata Hari wasn’t a spy.
“But,” you might exclaim, “she was tried as one! And executed!” Continuing, this fictional you would then say, “I don’t know much about her, but ‘Mata Hari’ is practically a synonym for ‘sneaky lady-spy’! It’s like I don’t know anything anymore! My world is falling apart!”
First off: Calm down, hypothetical person. It will be okay.
Her story begins with an unhappy marriage. Mata Hari, born Margaretha Zelle, was a woman of few prospects. Impulsively wed early in life to an abusive womanizer who gave her little more than grief, bruises, and syphilis, she spent her formative years as his captive in everything but title.* When she finally escaped, she found herself in Paris with little education, fewer contacts, and almost nothing to distinguish her from the crowd save the fact that she’d spent several years in the Dutch Indies.
In the end, she smartly leveraged that one fact to reinvent herself as Mata Hari: exotic Indonesian princess and burlesque dancer.
“But,” you the rhetorical audience person now stammer, “that’s ridiculous. How could anyone believe her?” Well, many didn’t. But understand that most Europeans knew little of the Dutch Indies. (As you’ll soon find out, pasty white Princess Caraboo pulled the same trick.) Also, her skin tone was somewhat dark—sufficiently so that many in the Indies had assumed she was a native. So when she invented a sultry “dance of seven veils” and branded herself as the “eye of the day” (as “Mata Hari” translates to in Malay), audiences ate it up. She quickly became one of the most popular acts in Paris, and then one of the most popular across Europe.
Yes, it was shameless cultural appropriation. But Mata Hari was doing the only thing she could to get out of a bad situation.
For about 10 years, life was good. Mata Hari had both money and the affections of men in abundance, things she’d sorely been lacking for the first half of her life. Her attempts at greater credibility were stymied by the Parisian elite, who held her (and her largely untrained dancing) in low esteem. She found refuge in feeding her more dubious traits—being a profligate spendthrift and unrepentant flirt. It was through a combination of those two pastimes that she entered the world of spying.
“Wait,” you now shriek uncomfortably loudly at me, “you said she wasn’t a spy! You lied to me! And just when I was opening myself up to your peculiar yet reckless style of storytelling!”
Get down from that table, invented reader persona. She wasn’t a spy—or at least, not much of one, as you are about to see.
With the advent of World War I, Mata Hari’s career as a dancer went into decline. Partly this was a matter of her age—she had been a novelty of the stage for a decade, and age was starting to take its toll in a career that demanded youth—but the increasing conservatism of the age played a larger part. Immigrants of all stripes were now viewed with intense suspicion, and even foreign nannies were subject to relentless interrogation. A shifty traveler such as Mata Hari, with influential lovers across the globe, would inevitably be suspected of being a spy.
Which is not to say she had no connection to the world of espionage—but here her story turns into a bit of a “he said, she said” arrangement.
In 1916, she met with Georges Ladoux, head of French counterespionage. To hear her telling, he asked her to do some work for him: to get info from her international network of paramours. Although utterly bereft of training and less than enchanted by Ladoux and French intelligence,* she carried out the job, to some success. She uncovered information about U-boats in Morocco, secret fingernail ink crystals, and German code-breaking efforts. Her lack of training, however, shone through in her attempts to report back to Ladoux: she sent the information in unencoded letters to his work address, through the post office.
In Ladoux’s version, he never approached her with work and instead suspected her from the start to be a German double agent. Having come into his position with a desire to publicly expose foreign agents, he worked tirelessly to uncover her true allegiance—which he did with a series of communiqués that he presented at her subsequent trial for being a German spy.
It is important, at this point, to note three things. First, said communiqués were clearly fabricated, likely by Ladoux, who wanted some high-profile victories. Second, several observers decried her trial as full of rookie mistakes, with one using the peculiar description of there not being enough evidence to whip a cat. Third, and most important, Ladoux was himself arrested for being a German spy a mere four days after Mata Hari’s death.
Yes, Ladoux was a slimebag of staggering immensity.
Ladoux’s faulty evidence and testimony were enough to convict Mata Hari of espionage and sentence her to death. She spent the last months of her life in a prison for prostitutes where the inmates lived in such squalid conditions that riots were a nigh-monthly affair. This, despite persistent public rumors that she bathed in milk and was awash in flowers and chocolates from admirers.
She was executed by firing squad at the age of 41. Some of her last recorded words were: “I know how to die without weakness. You shall see a good end!”
After her death, her image as a femme fatale extraordinaire became the de rigueur representation of her life. Many books and plays expanded on the small scandals of her life, ballooning her exploits to cartoonish proportions.* The not-insignificant detail of Ladoux’s arrest for treason,* on the other hand, was kept secret for nearly a century.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
In the far background of the image is a statue of Shiva. In her act as a lost princess, Mata Hari would enact scenes of worship of the deity. Given the historical detai
ls that remain of her act, it is safe to assume she had scant knowledge of Hinduism.
Late in her career, Mata Hari attempted to enliven her act with the addition of live musical accompaniment. The leader of that band? Inayat Khan, father of World War II heroine Noor Inayat Khan, featured elsewhere in this book.
Although she often stripped nearly nude (usually with the aid of a flesh-colored body sock), Mata Hari almost never removed her brassiere. The reasons for this are subject to myriad rumors, but the most reasonable (and oft-cited) explanation was body image issues—despite being the most desired woman in Paris.
On the left side of the image, we have three tiers of people from her life. On the bottom is Ladoux, leading in a legion of French troops as he pulls the curtains on her. In the middle are the disinterested German political elites, with whom it’s unlikely she had much interaction. On the top is her ex-husband, Rudolf, and their son—who, after a lifetime of custody battles between his parents, died at 21 of complications possibly related to his inherited syphilis.
Josephine Baker
(1906–1975, UNITED STATES/FRANCE)
Queen of the Stage
Virtually every culture has its variation on the Cinderella story, of a peasant girl lifted from poverty to royalty by the love of a kindly prince. But Cinderella was just a fable—Josephine Baker was real. And her prince was herself.