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In this paper I examine the Orientalist discourse of the silent movie The Sheik and its contribution to the cultural construction of the Western empire. I argue that despite the orientalizing representation of the Arab “other,” this discourse fails to complete its mission and hence problematizes the cultural identity of the sheik. The movie focuses on the sheik as a villainous Arab whose identity, as the film develops, is revealed to be of European origin. This hybridity problematizes the colonial identitarian discourse, reflects cultural anxieties intrinsic to the West and disrupts the colonial dream of conquering and dominating the “other.” Orientalizing the Arab in Hollywood’s popular silent films According to Matthew Bernstein, “Orientalism describes a strand of colonialist discourse in the ideological arsenal of western nations” (1997: 2). It is a system of knowledge about the “other” that leads to the creation of a structured dichotomy between the East and the West. It is what Edward Said calls “imaginative geography” (1979: 49), whose material influence extends beyond the investigation of academic interest to the arena of 1 Lecturer, Faculty of Letters and Human sciences Dhar el-MehrazFez, Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco. politics, ideology and the production of culture. Yet, as Bhabha (1994) points out, the discourse of Orientalism is by no means stable nor homogeneous; its ambivalences are symptomatic of many cultural anxieties and contradictions of the West that disrupt its dreams of conquest and domination. The instability of Orientalist discourse is also fruitfully investigated from the perspective of postcolonial feminist theories that, following Said’s contention of the gender dimensions of Orientalist discourse that privileges the West as masculine and the Other as feminine, explore the interstices of power and gender relations in their critique of patriarchy. These critical interventions in the homogeneity of Orientalist discourse have enabled a rethinking of the constructions of stereotypes in many areas of cultural productions. The cinema of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects the Orientalist paradigm as well as its contradictions. Through the construction of visual narratives and tropes, identitarian stereotypes of the West and the ‘Other’ are constructed on the basis of binary relations of good/bad, masculine/feminine, civilized/ barbaric, advanced/primitive, and so forth. These are repeated and become part of the popular cultural imaginary. This process of cultural production is particularly evident in the popular genre of adventure romance set in the desert at the beginning of the twentieth century. It may be said that the popularity of this filmic genre and the influence it exercises on the construction of the Arab stereotype was due to the phenomenal success of The Sheik. Following its release in 1921, The Sheik won international popularity and paved the way for other similar cinematic exotic The Anxieties of the Silent Colonial Discourse in “The Sheik” 43 fantasies. Among the movies we find: The Sheik’s Wife (1922), Burning Sands (1922), Tents of Allah (1923), The Arab (1924), The Son of the Sheik (1926), She is a Sheik (1927), The Sheik Steps Out (1937), to name but a few. As Shaheen has argued, these films have been influential as “repetition teaching tool” (2003: 1) for fashioning and perpetuating the Western perception of the Arab as savage and backward. While there is no doubt about the influence of this representation of the ‘Other’ as well as the visual narrative and tropes—the adventure of a European male/female, his/her captivity, identity twist, followed by a subsequent rescue and revelation, it is also important to be attentive to the ambivalences embedded in the cultural stereotypes that the narrative both reinforces and undermines. In this article, both the stereotypes and their contradictions will be examined through the consideration of the desert as a trope of wildness and adventure, and the ambivalences of the two main protagonists —Diana and the Sheik—and their interactions. The desert: orientalized geography of wildness and adventure The Sheik is a classical silent film that relies on familiar Orientalist stereotypes of the ‘Other.’ Right from the beginning, the film focuses on the desert as a trope for the imaginary Orientalized space. Recognizable exotic tropes are quickly introduced: palm trees, oasis, camels, veiled figures, horsemen in flowing robes on powerful Arab steeds, sand dunes, minarets and Muslims at prayers. These are succeeded by scenes of Arabs at their simple daily chores of herding, fetching water and food, and children taking their lessons from their teacher with a stick and the desert floor as their “classroom” and learning tools. The film titles make sure how these images of ethnographical and geographical survey are to be read: they make up the exotic world of “peace and flame” where “children of Araby dwell in a happy ignorance that civilization has passed by.” The conjunction of “happy ignorance” with “civilization” of course dispels any association of childlike, happy innocence with this imaginary space and insinuates it to be a place of backward barbarity. As the film’s unfolds, these attributes are encoded in the film’s narrative that focuses on the marriage market taking place in the garden oasis. This is the world of inhumane barbarity where maidens are bought in a marriage market by wealthy merchants, where women are subject to men’s sexual desires, where affection and love are replaced by wealth and lust, and where these practices are sanctioned and enshrined as “an ancient custom.” The film reinforces these meanings by focusing on the group of maidens as an object of the Arab male gaze, especially on the imploring look of the unfortunate one about to be chosen against her will. In other words, through the desert trope and its narrative of marriage auction, the film defines the Orient to be a site of the Other as barbaric, primitive, and a site of male domination and lust to be feared and kept under surveillance of the West. As an imaginary site of the Orient, there is of course more to the desert than just a place of barbaric backwardness. According to Said, to the European mind, the Orient was also “a place of romance, exotic being, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1979:1). In The Sheik, these associations are encoded through the desire of Diana, a young English-rose aristocrat in whose eyes the desert is a site where her desire MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No. 18, 2009 44 for adventure and independence is to be fulfilled. This aspect of the Orient as a place of allure is further complicated by the transgressive nature of Diana’s desire. In the eyes of other colonial women, her planned trip to the desert, accompanied only by an Arab guide, is a “young madcap’s wild scheme!” Yet her offense is more than an affront to feminine attributes of modesty and propriety. It is no less than a defiance of Western values of rationality and civilization. These are also encoded in gender terms through the concept of chivalry. Thus, Diana’s proud spurning of the her European suitor’s avowal of love and marriage proposal, and his gentlemanly offer of protection—“give me the right to go with you”—is an affront to European values of civilization that distinguish European identity from the Arab savagery as in the marriage market. Indeed, as manifest in her subsequent defiance of her brother, her desire is no less than a defiance of European patriarchy on which colonial superiority and power is based. In the white colonial eye, then, her desire is nothing short of a forbidden desire. Diana’s transgression of the white feminine identity and her forbidden desire to discover the Orientalist space is further exacerbated in the scene where she disguises herself as an Arab dancer to gain entry to the casino. Taken over for the exclusive entertainment of the Sheik and his men for one evening, the casino becomes a temporary Orientalist site where white people are forbidden entry. The intended entertainment is a marriage gamble, which, according to the title, is “like a page from the Arabian nights—the marriage gamble where brides are won on the turn of the wheel.” The casino is now a mirror image of the desert where the marriage auction is held earlier in the film. For Diana, that the casino is ‘out of bounds’ simply stirs her curiosity, desire and defiance. The film shows Diana not only gazing longingly at the female Arab dancer, but also physically moving beyond the European boundaries, marked by the presence of a European male standing at the arch. The film’s semantics of the visual space is here elaborate, with Arabian-style niches that function as a space of forbidden desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, arches that double as cultural thresholds and ‘keyholes’ to the forbidden space of desire beyond. Once in and now disguised as an Arab dancer, Diana’s identity is further destabilized. Seated among the Arab women, she gazes at the dancing girl who is about to be ‘won’ by a lucky man/gambler. Her reaction is in marked contrast to the leering Arab men, driven wild with sexual excitement. The title here pointedly reads: “to the English girl this marriage fair suggests the slave mart of the barbarous past,” and thereby confirm Diana as a European and a woman against the Arabs as the primitive barbarian. Yet, in a series of rapid identity twists that follow, it is precisely Diana’s crossdressing that quickly undermines her European identity and superiority. First, her disguise as an Arab woman leads her to be taken as the next ‘item.’ Next her European identity is recognized by the Sheik, who derisively calls attention to her “pale hands and golden hands of a white woman.” Then, standing in front of a bemused male audience, her folding cover now removed by the Sheik to revea

The Anxieties of the Silent Colonial Discourse in the Sheik