Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Samira Ahmed

  Alexandre laughs. “How very French of you. Now you will have a Delacroix in your home like I do, a secret only you and I will know. A private souvenir.”

  A lump wells in my throat. “Thank you, Alexandre,” I whisper. Another tear falls down my cheek. We haven’t talked about what happens tomorrow when I leave for home. He lives here; I live in Chicago. And there are a whole lot of jagged truths between us.

  Still.

  I lean over and kiss him. It’s a goodbye. It’s a gesture that holds no promise. It’s closure. It’s not perfect, but it’s how our story ends, at least for now, and that’s okay.

  I wonder what things would’ve been like if we’d really met accidentally or if he’d emailed me and asked me to coffee. I think about our first kiss in his library and how it tasted like books and Orangina. And how things were good and then chaos. And how lies and truths commingle in all our lives. I think about the flat circle and how at some point in that never-ending loop, our paths crossed, maybe in a different way, and we found Leila and we found each other and we found the truth.

  If eternal return is real, and the universe keeps expanding and events keep recurring, then eventually this moment will happen again. And then once more, for an infinity of lifetimes. Maybe one of those times we’ll get it exactly right.

  Somewhere along that circle, the tale will be told and retold. There, Leila and Dumas and Delacroix and Byron and Alexandre and Khayyam will travel down a long, winding road that will eventually bring us together, unlikely companions finding one another through space and time to tell a truth.

  In the end, we all become stories.

  Author’s Note

  This story is fiction.

  But it also tells the truth.

  All stories start with a seed and for me that seed was planted years ago when I first crossed paths with Lord Byron’s epic poem, The Giaour, along with his deeply ingrained Orientalism and sexism. In college, I took a class that centered around Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that I found threaded with the Orientalist stereotypes of the time. Yes, even our favorite iconoclastic feminists held entrenched prejudices—mostly toward women of color (See: Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Shelley’s mom, Mary Wollstonecraft, where she imagines Muslim women as servile and soulless, unthinking sexual curiosities). My seemingly fated meeting with the Romantics led me to my bachelor’s thesis, which examined Napoleon’s influence on British Orientalism—a corporate and literary institution that allowed the West to create, restructure, and appropriate the East in accordance with its colonial endeavors. Through my research I realized that the Orientalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest was still very much present and flourishing in our world today. Control the narrative, control the people. Sound familiar?

  I wanted to write a story that would bring those connections to light. I wanted to create a character, a girl like all the other girls finding their voices, a young woman who could reach back into the past to seize a stolen narrative and reclaim it—as a woman, as a Muslim, as a human being fighting for a space of her own. That character is Khayyam and the voice she freed is Leila’s. Two young women connected through time both giving utterance to a powerful idea: they are the heroes of their own stories.

  The Giaour, published in 1813, is a fragmentary poem of 1300 lines with three different narrators and points of view telling the story of a young woman, Leila—of her life in a Pasha’s harem and her affair with the Giaour, an alleged infidel, her drowning in a sack death when her betrayal was discovered, and a fight to the death between the Pasha and the Giaour. It is a story about a woman, in which the woman has no voice. It is the story of the East told completely through the lens of the colonizer. It is the story of a Muslim, written by an Orientalist who fetishized the harem and who was convinced Muslim women had neither the power nor desire to speak for themselves.

  While the Leila in Byron’s The Giaour is fiction, some scholars suggest she was “inspired” by a sixteen-year-old girl who Napoleon took into his own colonial harem during his ill-fated attempted conquest of Egypt. When he abandoned her (along with his entire army) as he escaped back to France, she was killed by local authorities for her alleged collaboration with Napoleon—bound in a sack and drowned. The tragedy of this sack death that Byron seized upon for his poem eventually led to a series of paintings and sketches by Eugène Delacroix informed by Byron’s work. One of those paintings, The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, was once believed to have been owned by Alexandre Dumas, père. An entire history of a woman, under the ownership of men.

  When we say history is written by the victors, we mean history is written by the patriarchy.

  Women have always played a central role in building society, yet here we are, even today, our word and our testimony deemed unbelievable, our work undervalued. Even more so if you are an individual of color, nonbinary, queer, trans, an immigrant, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, et al intersections of identity. Because of millennia of this hegemony—of this racial and gender inequality, we don’t just live in the patriarchy, the patriarchy lives in us. And if you believe, as I do, that a just and exemplary society is one free of discrimination, where each human being is treated equally, we must—all of us—deliberately, consciously work toward that goal. A very simple step in that direction is this: recognizing that for too long the spotlight has shined on too few and too many stories are relegated to the margins.

  One doesn’t need to dig too deep—indeed you can simply scratch the surface of history—to reveal the stories of countless women that remain untold, their names and achievements unrecognized. I wrote this story to help change that. That’s what Khayyam seeks to do when she first comes across the intriguing possibility of Leila: unearth a treasure that deserves its moment to shine. And while she advocates for Leila’s story, she finds that she’s fighting for her own story, too.

  Leila and Khayyam may be figments of imagination, but Byron and Delacroix and Dumas are very real men whose lives and works we know. We’ve read their letters, reveled in their art and genius, too easily excused their shortcomings. In writing Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know—about two fictional women whose lives intersect—I felt a profound sadness for all the real genius we failed to celebrate. For all the art we will never see and the stories we will never read because their creators were not history’s conquerors, because their lives were deemed unworthy.

  History doesn’t need to be an exclusionary tale. Our lives and worlds are richer for the diversity inclusion brings. The present always holds the power to write history. Let’s write the truth. There is room enough on our shelves, and if you find you’ve run out of space, construct a new bookcase. Build another library. Dig deep to reveal the wrongs of the past, so we can write this world as it should be. So we can right this world. Period.

  #WriteHerStory

  Acknowledgments

  A decade ago, publishing my third book was barely a hope at the blurry edges of my dreams. Yet, here we are and I am deeply indebted to every person who has made my work possible in this world.

  My gratitude to Daniel Ehrenhaft, Bronwen Hruska, Alexa Wejko, Rachel Kowal, Janine Agro, David Lanaspa, and the entire Soho Teen squad. So proud to have another book with you!

  Big love to my fabulous agent, Joanna Volpe, and the amazing team at New Leaf, especially Jordan Hill and Abbie Donoghue. You helped me bring this story home. That means the world to me.

  I am grateful beyond words to friends and family, early readers and joyful cheerleaders, who lifted me up, listened, and helped bring life to my writing. Merci beaucoup: Pierre Jonas, Marie-France Jonas, Elise Warren, Shveta Thakrar, Rachel Strolle, Amy Vidlak Girmscheid, Julia Torres, Gloria Chao, Eric Smith, Sangu Mandanna, Patrice Caldwell, Alia Thomas, Sona Charaipotra, Kim Liggett, Farah Naz Rishi, Dhonielle Clayton, Lizzie Cooke, Ronni Davis, Kat Cho, Rena Barron, Anna Waggener, Amy Adams, Claribel Ortega, Sarvenaz Tash, Raeshma Razvi, Nathan Small Claus. To the twel
ve+, whether I see you at Thanksgiving or not, those fry-filled late nights at the Herrington with Hal fueled many a story. And to Professor Jim Chandler, for teaching a class so thought-provoking it led to this book.

  Heartfelt thanks to my parents, Hamid and Mazher, and my sisters, Asra and Sara, for their enduring support and love. Bulldogs forever!

  Lena and Noah, you are my inspirations, my reasons for everything. I love you up to the moon and back, plus two to three weeks (at least).

  Thomas, if time is a flat circle, my story returns, eternally, to you.

  Resources

  1. pp. 108–109, 143–144 translated and paraphrased from “Le Club des Hachichins,” published in the Revue des Deux Mondes February 1846.

  2. p. 173 George Gordon, Lord Byron. “She Walks in Beauty,” London, 1814. https://poets.org/poem/she-walks-beauty

  3. p. 231 George Gordon, Lord Byron Letter to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli: https://englishhistory.net/byron/selected-letters/countess-teresa-guiccioli/

  4. pp. 259, 299 “. . . happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach.” Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1844–1846. (Serialization in Journal des débats.)

  5. p. 273 “There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.” Baudelaire, Charles. Spleen de Paris (petits poems en prose), Paris, 1869.

  Selected additional sources:

  Books:

  Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

  Byron, George Gordon. The Giaour in Byron, edited by Jerome J. McGann, pp. 207-247. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte-Cristo. New York: Bantam Dell, 2003.

  Gautier, Théophile. Romans et Contes, “Le Club des Haschischins.” Paris: Charpentier et Cie, Libraires-éditeurs, 1863.

  Johnson, Lee. The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, Volumes 1 & 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

  Robaut, Alfred. L’Oeuvre Complet de Eugène Delacroix: Peintures, Dessins, Gravures. Paris: Charavay Frères Editeurs, 1885.

  Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

  Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

  Websites:

  The Art Institute of Chicago: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/110663/the-combat-of-the-giaour-and-hassan

  The Château de Monte Cristo: https://www.chateau-monte-cristo.com/main/

  Le Petit Palais: http://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/en/oeuvre/combat-giaour-and-pasha

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336577

  Musée National Eugène Delacroix: http://musee-delacroix.fr/en/

  The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3672150/Alexandre-Dumas-the-lost-adventure.html