Heterotopian Lemonade

“[The Heterotopia of Compensation’s] role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled…I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner.”- Michel Foucault, Des Espace Autres (1967), Heterotopias.

David Lean’s mise en scène of the British officer bar in Cairo—uniform, clean and refinedly English with its modern Western leisure amenities and accoutrements—captures Foucault’s heterotopia in classic celluloid. Acting as a neo-medieval bastion of othering, a fortified barrier removed from the crowded streets of Cairo and the disorder of the military campaign, the bar superimposes ‘English civilisation’ on Egyptian civilization. Intentionally disconnected from the outside, and complete with its own ideal social hierarchy and power dialect (“wog”) [1], the bar is an artificially constructed microcosm of upper English society. For the privileged officer corps, it is the “absolutely perfect other place” whose “sanctity” is preserved through barring the colonized and lower-class cockney guardsmen entry [2]. When Lawrence enters the bar with the Arab Farraj dusty, tired, tanned, and draped in Eastern clothing, he awkwardly transgresses the spatial divide and spurs a charged heterotopian anxiety. The scene is one of the most significant of Lean’s leitmotif depicting Lawrence’s other “revolt in the desert"—his revolt against not the Turks, but against his own British social order. This other struggle is fought through his iconoclastic repudiation of his bourgeois background, his acts of blatant insubordination, and his violation of the heterotopia—his defiling of it by barging in as Lawrence al-Arab (with a ‘wog’ of all things) demanding “two large glasses of lemonade!”

Notes:

[1] Wog (n.) Offensive slang. 1925-30, from ‘Golliwogg’: a 19^th century blackface doll; or alternately, an acronym of ‘(W) orthy (O) riental (G) entleman’… racist; a black African or dark-skinned South Asian”- Urban Dictionary

[2] Foucault, Michel. OF OTHER SPACES (1967), HETEROTOPIAS. http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html