It is often said that every person in the world has a role to play, everyone will make a place for themselves: to live life to its fullest. Similarly, The Nomad by Isabelle Eberhardt and Their Heads are Green by Paul Bowles convey the quest for a peaceful niche away from Western Society.  Paul Bowles conveys a spiritual connection with The Maghreb and its people, which is especially evident in his essay “Baptism of Solitude”. In comparison, Isabelle Eberhardt’s move to North Africa is also a spiritual one, but it is also linked with her convalescence. Both writers have a lucid writing style that reflects a touch of reclusiveness and detachment.  

        Isabelle Eberhardt first visited North Africa with her mother in 1987. Eberhardt was only twenty years old, at the time of visit. This first journey had an indelible effect on Isabelle; she made a spiritual connection with North Africa, and became a follower of Islam.  The next three years in her life were tormenting to say the least. Her mother, brother Vladimir, and father Tophimowsky died in quick succession. Also, her brother Augustin married a lady who had no understanding with Eberhardt. After all these hardships, Eberhardt’s only positive aspiration for the future was: Quote “Right now I long for only one thing: to go back to Africa and reclothe myself in that cherished personality the real and true one” “I long to doze off in the sorrowful yet serene knowledge that I am utterly alone, that no one pines for me anywhere on earth.” These two statements have a wistful tone, in which she broods for North Africa and detachment from the world around her. At times she feels she has no identity; she has no family or friend, she just has Islam and North Africa. Quote: “…have no fatherland besides Islam and neither family nor close friends…”   At one point in Geneva she says: Quote “I feel as morbid and oppressed as I used to in the old days, in this evil city, in which I have suffered so much. All I want to do is get out for good. I would like to go to Ouargla settle there and make a home, cultivate odd vegetables and have a few animals to warm my lonely heart.” This melancholic sentence shows her future desire of a small home, away from sinful and evil Geneva. In Algeria she has a feeling of “profound bliss”. She did have her fair share of problems in Algeria as well; someone tried to assassinate her and she was even deported for a while.  Nevertheless one can say she did find a niche; her niche was North Africa.

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Similar to Eberhardt, Paul Bowles also found a niche in North Africa, which is especially evident in his essay “Baptism of Solitude”. Bowles did not intend to go to North Africa, but when Gertrude Stein advised him to go visit the place, he thoroughly enjoyed the “inexhaustible succession of fantastic spectacles”. North Africa was so seductive Bowles kept returning again and again, until he permanently shifted to Tangier in 1947. Once he shifted he reveled in the simple, austere living, and was struck by “the indifference and the impersonality of the world outside”.  Bowles felt that North Africa is a ...

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