In Discourse on Colonialism, the Martiniquais writer Aimé Césaire‘s 1950 essay, he writes: “Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” It inevitably leads to savagery.
I had just read those lines in Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong?, applied to the Israeli settlers’ terrorism in the West Bank and what Bartov calls the Israeli military’s “war of annihilation” in Gaza when I coincidentally read Maupassant’s “Châli,” his 1884 story of a reminiscence by the Admiral de la Vallée of a British-paid astronomical assignment to India when he was around 30 and India was a British colony.
The admiral had been welcomed by a local ruler, the “opulent, authoritarian, violent, generous and cruel Rajah Maddanking” who, like Trump, liked to watch and applaud men reduce each other to bloody pulps. The admiral stays with him for a while. One day he walks into his quarters to find “lined up against the wall by height, six little girls, side by side, motionless, like a skewer of smelts. The oldest was perhaps eight years old, the youngest six.” The rajah was gifting him a harem. The admiral is at first horrified. He cannot reject the “gift,” as that would be taken as a capital insult.
“I remained completely confused and embarrassed, ashamed, in front of these kids who were looking at me with their big, serious eyes, and who already seemed to know what I could demand of them,” Maupassant’s first-person narrative goes. Rather than abuse them, the admiral turns fatherly toward the girls, playing with them, telling them stories, bringing them sweets, treating them with kindnesses they had not know. So it went for eight days. You begin to think this will be one of Maupassant’s fairy tales.
“Then, one evening, I don’t know how it happened, the tallest one, the one named Châli who looked like an old ivory statuette, became my wife for real.”
We are suddenly in Gide territory–André Gide, the Nobel laureate who turned North Africa into his own harem of little boys and who, impudent and unapologetic, would tell the tales in the very books that would win him the Nobel in 1947, the year Césaire wrote his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. In “Châli,” the suggestion of savagery is the furthest thing from Maupassant’s intention, at least on the surface. He portrays the admiral as kindly and the relationship, what we would term the rape of a child that would earn the admiral life in prison these days, as mutually and sweetly loving.
Maupassant describes this in a single line that also reveals the admiral’s awareness that he is committing a crime, even then: “She was an adorable little being, sweet, shy, and cheerful, who soon loved me with an ardent affection, and whom I loved strangely, with shame, with hesitation, with a kind of fear of European justice, with reservations, scruples, and yet with a passionate, sensual tenderness. I cherished her like a father, and I caressed her like a man.” We are to believe that they were inseparable. Did I mention that Châli and the other girls were the rajah’s slaves?
The admiral had taken possession of them–each one a little Lakshmi, if you remember Sold, the Patricia McCormick novel–Châli in particular, confusing the savagery Césaire was referring to with lyricism, which is really the essence of colonialism and occupation: you deceive yourself so much that your own inner Lucifer is a born-again messiah: “And I felt a confused, powerful, and above all poetic sensation: the sensation that I possessed an entire race in this little girl, this beautiful, mysterious race from which all others seem to have sprung.” How many white brutes who thought themselves royalty have spoken the same illusions about possessing an entire race?
Still not where Maupassant is going. Maupassant can sometimes be accused of shallowness, skimming over depths for the seduction of narrative arcs that were just too precious to tarnish with psychology. In this story, like his hero, he is using–or abusing–Châli as an instrument to his sentimental end, to that twist he was so famous for, and to which he is sacrificing the girl’s innocence, and soon, as we see, her life.
The time comes when the admiral must leave. Châli is devastated. She is inconsolable. The admiral decides to regift her one of the gifts the rajah gave him: “It was simply a box of seashells, one of those cardboard boxes covered with a layer of small shells glued directly onto the dough. In France, it would have cost at most forty sous.” Châli swoons. The separation is eased. The admiral leaves. Of course there’s not a thought to maintaining any type of contact, to ensuring that his slave is cared for, maybe protected from the undue sadism of the rajah.
Two years later the admiral has reason to visit India again. He decides to drop in on “my dear little wife Châli, whom I was going to find much changed, no doubt.”
She was dead. The rajah’s aide informs the admiral that Châli had been found guilty of theft for stealing a box of seashells. She pleaded innocence. She swore that it had been a gift from her master the admiral. “But,” the aide tells the admiral, “it was not believed that you would have offered a slave a gift from the king, and the rajah had her punished.” She was wrapped in a burlap bag and thrown out the window into a lake to drown. The window in the room where she had shared the admiral’s bed.
We are to think in Maupassant’s telling that this is the harshness of “native” norms, and how fortunate we are to be so much more civilized. But Châli’s killing is a murder, and the murderer is her blithe rapist and, in his ignorance of native assumptions, the gesture he had taken for kindness. He not only remains clueless, as colonial savagery can be, but sounds as disconsolate and galling as Maupassant, who has him say: “And I now believe that I have never loved any other woman than Châli.”
At least Jules Verne, whose racism could also be boundless, had Phileas Fogg save Aouda, the Indian woman, from her husband’s funeral pyre and take her back to London to be his wife. Of course the admiral could not do the same with the child, though if he loved her so much he could have adopted her as his child, prying her from the cruel rajah–buying her, if necessary. He had already done much worse. But he had no interest in her as a human being with her own agency. In Paris, colonizing her à-la-Gide would have landed him in prison. Bringing her back alive would have severed the narrative arc. And Maupassant would not have had a story to sell Gil Blas, the magazine that ran it on April 15, 1884, four months before the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty, that other French gift the admiral would have applauded with all the fervor of Boule de Suif‘s self-righteous bourgeois, was laid down.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. Reach him by email here.
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