TOMB OF ISABELLE EBERHARDT
Tomb of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) in the Muslim cemetery of Sidi Boudjemâa, Aïn Sefra.
To see, the moving tomb of Isabelle Eberhardt in the Muslim cemetery of Sidi Boudjemâa, west of Aïn Sefra.
She was born in Geneva in 1877 to a German Jewish mother and a father of Armenian origin. In 1897, she joined her brother in Algeria, who had joined the Foreign Legion. Seduced by Islam and the life of the nomads, she converted, married Slimane Ehni in 1900 in El-Oued and disguised herself as a man to better discover the country where she spent only seven years since she died in Aïn Sefra in October 1904 during a flood of the oued. The texts she wrote during her stay, collected in Écrits sur le sable (Grasset), are one of the best testimonies of Algerian life and the practice of Islam at the beginning of the twentieth century without falling into the orientalism that was still prevalent in French artistic circles.
To read: Un amour d'Algérie by Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu (Joëlle Losfeld, 1998). The two journalists, in love with Isabelle, went to Algeria in her footsteps after having worked on the edition or reedition of her texts. Un désir d'Orient: jeunesse d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 1877-1899 and Nomade j'étais: les années africaines d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 189-1904 by Edmonde Charles-Roux (Grasset, 1988 and 1995): 1,400 pages and unpublished photos to live a few moments at the side of the intriguing adventurer. Si Mahmoud ou la Renaissance d'Isabelle Eberhardt by Catherine Stoll-Simon.