Claiming modernity in Egypt: decadent orientalism and Mayy Ziyādah’s Fleurs de rêve

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ABSTRACT In the Western decadent imagination, Egypt has been figured as the site of Orientalist fantasy, a land of sphinxes, pyramids, and mummies having little to do with modernity. For a modern Arab writer in Egypt to write in a decadent mode would be to risk recapitulating Europe’s Orientalizing vision. And yet, for the poet and feminist intellectual Mayy Ziyādah (1886–1941), to write in such a mode is also to assert one’s experience of colonial modernity. In her 1911 volume Fleurs de rêve, written in French, Ziyādah ironically undercuts the Orientalist vision of European writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Charles Baudelaire, and Pierre Loti with a picture of the modern female Arab subject as a full participant in the drama of modern consciousness. Ziyādah sets this performance against the backdrop of Cairo, a city freighted with Europe’s belated imperial presence. Ziyādah’s playful and ironic approach to decadence asserts Egypt’s modernity, reterritorializing a decadent sensibility to Cairo and rendering her speaker a subject prone to the tumults of ennui, violent mood swings, and the horrors of living death.