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Narghile in painting, literature and poetry
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Rudolf Ottenfeld, Backgammon 1890 |
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In the
western and oriental imagination, narghile appears as an artistic
artefact. Let us consider, for example, this gold-coloured harmoniously
enamelled of blue and green hookah from Cashmere, or those of Indore, a
city of Indian Madhya Pradesh, the coconut of which, used for its
elegant shape, is "mounted in silver with very good native work" (cf.
R.Blackner' site) "Chillums" of the same area are sometimes moulded in
the same metal and provided with a conical lid. Some are made of "glazed
pottery, biscuit background colour with a green pattern and ruby spots"
(Id.). Let us also appreciate this Ottoman baluster shaped chiselled
narghile decorated with diamond points, knocked down at 35.000 French
francs"… Thus, in the Orientalist painting, the artists definitely had a
taste for representing the narghile. Any research in this field comes
under a real visual anthropology. Let us quote, among others:
- Léon Belly, Inside of harem ( 1878 ), which can only put in mind of
Eugène Delacroix's painting Women in Algiers, in which the artist,
making use of rich and deep colours, also fixed women sitting around a
narghile.
- Paul-Désiré Trouillebert, The harem handmaid ( 1874 ). In this
painting, the "beautiful and cold topless slave" holds a tray supporting
a small narghile. The long hose coils up around the mast in five to six
loops.
-Angel Tissier, An Algerian women and her slave ( 1860 ). A woman,
elegantly dressed in the old Turkish tradition, nonchalantly holds the
hose of a narghile. She sits near a wooden inlaid with mother-of-pearl
ebony table.
-Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque and slave. In an indolent
atmosphere, an almost undressed woman, lies on a bed. In the foreground,
to the right, discreetly stands a tiny narghile.
- Jean-Léon Gérôme Ferris, The Afternoon Siesta. in this painting
exhibited in 1884 in New
York,
opium and hashish smells seem to wave. A woman lies on a low bed, near a
narghile supposed to be responsible of her dosing …
- Stephen Wilson Van Schaick, Turkish Idlers (1872). Two men are sitting
on a coloured carpet, against a wall, in the shade of a cloth stretched
out over their heads. One of them leans on its sabre. Their shoes stand
around the carpet. The other man holds in his hand the hose of a
narghile which seems to be well balanced because of its large based
water vessel.
-Thomas Hicks, Bayard Taylor with a View of Damascus. In fact, it is a
self-portrait in oils. Squatted, wearing a turban, dressed in the noble
oriental suit, the painter has put his left hand on a pillow while the
right one supports the hose of a magnificent narghile the water vessel
of which is diamond-shaped. Far off the vast plain stands the ancient
Omeyyades'capital, Damascus.
Finally, the artist who, to our opinion, most represented narghile, is
Jean-Léon Gérôme. Two paintings deserve a mention: Young Oriental Woman
with a Narghile and A Woman lighting a Narghile. A commentator noticed
that in this last one, there is a striking contrast between the nudity
of the woman who carefully lights the narghile by the pool and others
basking on the side of the pond, and a group of veiled women watching
the scene, in the background, behind a hand-rail.
Literature
For any analyst of the relation between the artefact and literature, a
review of the Orientalist production, but also of the local one, is
essential. In a Najîb Mahfûz' novel, the plot of which takes place under
the roof of a floating hut on the Nile river, narghile is cast for a
central part, that of conversation catalyst and, after all, even becomes
the indispensable element without which the novel would not have come to
light. His author, holder of a world literature prize, is interesting
because he is a writer of everyday's Egyptian life. Now, in the Arabic
language literature, it is important to disregard the romantic side of
the artefact because it is a trivial element of the related societies
daily life. No author, here, went away to carry out an initiatory
journey to a far "Orient" - which could well be in this case Asia,- to
bring back recollections of it and images liable to feed a literary
production as the European writers did in the last centuries.
Taha Hussein is here an original case because he is blind. So, he does
not describe the pipe in a physical way as his peers did but rather
bases himself on sensations others than visual: sounds and flavours. In
an autobiography, the sightless man described by twice the gurgling of
the narghile.
Beyond the simple aesthetic pretext made of it, which leads writers or
poets to use the word "narghile" in the very title of their works, one
may wonder how this artefact calls upon the imagination sphere called
"inspiration". Indeed, from a purely physiological point of view, the
narghile excites the five human senses: the vision as a craft object,
the touch through the manipulation of its numerous elements, the taste
and the smell through the absorption of its flavoured smoke and the
hearing by the gurgle of water inside the vase. This light and discreet
sound, similar to that of a fountain, does not it come to break the
silence by which the poet is inspired ? This would explain the famous
verses which Alphonse de Lamartine, during his journey to Lebanon
and Syria in the nineteenth century, wrote for a girl sitting in a
garden in the city of Aleppo. She made "the tepid water gurgle in the
very heart of the narghile..." (" Quand, ta main approchant de tes
lèvres mi-closes ; Le tuyau de jasmin vêtu d'or effilé ; Ta bouche, en
aspirant le doux parfum des roses ; Fait murmurer l'eau tiède au fond du
narguilé [...] )
The tones of the above may call back, somewhat, A. Shirâzy who was,
towards the end of the 16th century, the first one in the Persian
literature, to mention narghile (from French, by H. Semsar): " Le
narguilé s'enrichit de tes lèvres ; Et son bec devient une douceur ; Ce
n'est point la fumée qui enrobe ton visage ; C'est un nuage qui glisse
vers la lune ")
Some
other landmarks
Lewis Carroll actually deep-rooted narghile in the western collective
memory thanks to his tale for children entitled Alice's Adventures in
Wonderlands:
" […]
She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the
mushroom and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar,
that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long
hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else."
Théophile Gautier is interesting from several points of view.
First of all, he described, in 1856, with an ethnologist's precision,
the different types of tobacco one could find by that time on the
market. Then, he established a geographic comparison of narghile use. He
noticed that in Smyrne (today, Izmir),
people smoke narghile while in the capital of the Ottoman
Empire,
the chibouque is given preference. Finally, he participated in its
practice:
" Rien
n'est plus favorable aux poétiques rêveries que d'aspirer à petites
gorgées, sur les coussins d'un divan, cette fumée odorante, rafraîchie
par l'eau qu'elle traverse, et qui vous arrive après avoir circulé dans
des tuyaux de maroquin rouge ou vert dont on s'entoure le bras, comme un
psylle du Caire jouant avec des serpents. C'est le sybaritisme poussé à
son plus haut degré de perfection. L'art ne reste pas étranger à cette
délicate jouissance; il y a des narguilés d'or, d'argent et d'acier
ciselés, damasquinés, niellés, guillochés d'une façon merveilleuse et
d'un galbe aussi élégant que celui des plus purs vases antiques; les
grenats, les turquoises, les coraux et d'autres pierres plus précieuses
en étoilent souvent les capricieuses arabesques ".
Honoré de Balzac, even if he was known to be tobacco-phobe, was
nevertheless lenient only with narghile: " En fait de jouissances
matérielles, les Orientaux nous sont décidément supérieurs. Le houka,
comme le narguilé, est un appareil très élégant; il offre aux yeux des
formes inquiétantes et bizarres qui donnent une sorte de supériorité
aristocratique à celui qui s'en sert, aux yeux d'un bourgeois étonné ".
Gustave Flaubert
"wasted" much of his time during his journey to
the East:
" Nous
menons une vie de fainéantise et de rêvasserie; toute la journée vautrés
sur notre tapis, nous fumons des chibouks et des narguilés, en absorbant
de la limonade et en regardant les rives du fleuve ".
Pierre Loti,
a great amateur, intensely practised narghile and really found it
amazing:
" ...sous
les treilles aux pampres frais, sous les glycines, sous les platanes;
des narguilés par myriades, le long des rues, exhalaient leur fumée
enjôleuse ".
C.M.
Leconte de Lisle
saw rich Babus, sitting under the floor timber, smoking hookahs full of
spices and smells, or eating grapes, pistachio and nuts…:
" […]
Là, les riches Babous, assis sous les varangues ; Fument des hûkas
pleins d'épices et d'odeurs ; Ou mangent le raisin, la pistache et les
mangues ; […] Jamais, sous les berceaux que le jasmin parfume ; Aux
roucoulements doux et lents des verts ramiers ; Quand le hûka royal en
pétillant s'allume ; Et suspend sa vapeur aux branches des palmiers… "
A Rebetiko song by Artemis
(1935)(from Gail Holst)
" In the bath of
Constantinople,
a harem is swimming.
Arabs guard them and take them to Ali Pasha.
He orders his guard to bring them before him,
To make them dance and play the bouzouki.
Narghiles for him to smoke with Turkish hashish
And hanoumia to dance the gipsy tsifteteli.
That's how all the Pashas live in the world,
with narghiles, bouzoukis, caresses and kisses "…
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