Carmen—femme fatale, diva, bruja—the name alone evokes myriad images of the eternal, unconquerable female. Whether portrayed in opera, dance, or film, in black and white or slashed with red, the legend of Carmen is both satisfying and deeply unsettling. In Carmen: A Gypsy Biography, Ninotchka Bennahum provides a meticulously researched feminist reading of myth, history, music, and dance, and examines the timeless appeal of Carmen, the eternal feminine principle that cannot be ruled.
The story of Carmen can be understood as a loud meditation on one woman's struggle to be free to live and love as she chooses. Or it can be read, as it is in Bennahum's handsomely illustrated volume, as myth and metaphor—a sustaining and rebellious image that originates “after the long winter of Ice Age Europe” (7) and threads through Mozarabic (Christian, Sephardic, and Muslim) civilization to the present day. Bennahum allows the reader to travel with her through time and geography while she examines ancient roots and modern manifestations of the symbolic Carmen. With a firm grasp of historical detail and a wide lens, the author tracks her subject from the archetypal to the theatrical, illuminating the long path that led to Prosper Mérimée's French Romantic novella, which in turn inspired Georges Bizet's masterful opera. But this arrival is in many ways just a point of departure; Bennahum demonstrates how as the Carmen image gels into a stage character, she is further elaborated, projected upon, and re-examined by artists into the twenty-first century.
In creating this historiography, Bennahum foregrounds the Gypsy. This is more difficult than it might seem. The author asks, “Is it possible to hold in the bounds of human form the past, present, and future, to carry historical memory on your back as you walk or dance through space and time?” (94). In many ways, this is the central question of the book; in tracking multiple iterations of Carmen, the author follows a nomadic route. She suggests that a people can embody their history in ways that they can never document or explain. As Ann Cooper Albright puts it, “[Thus] to understand the ways the dancing body can signify within a culture, one must engage with a variety of discourses: kinesthetic, visual, somatic, and aesthetic, as well as intellectual” (Cooper Albright Reference Albright1997, 5). In deciphering the Gypsy's embodied past, Bennahum does just this, calling upon sense and sensation, and constructing a multidisciplinary arc that connects fact, feeling, and iconography.
Gypsy culture defies the grasp of the historian, acknowledging only the present. Bennahum cites an interview with Gypsy musician Pedro Cortés, who states, “Gypsies live only in the present moment, never in the past or the future. They have endured so much oppression, they can't be sure of what's next” (94). Gypsy culture, and Gypsy flamenco dance, are at the core of Carmen. The original 1904 Bizet opera contained “no less than one hour of flamenco dance in the second act” (152). Federico García Lorca gets closest to describing the essence of Gypsy flamenco in his seminal Reference García Lorca and Maurer1933 lecture, “Juego y teoria del duende” (“Play and Theory of the Duende”). But the artistic soul of flamenco, the duende, cannot be translated into English. This intangibility adds to flamenco's allure, inspiring poets and painters, but evading scholars. The uncertainties of flamenco's oral and embodied narratives inform the basis of Michelle Heffner Hayes's Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance (Reference Hayes2009), a book that embraces questions of historiography. Heffner Hayes and Bennahum are complementary but never redundant: their work bolsters the small cache of flamenco dance scholarship in English, providing aesthetic, theoretical, and cultural insight into this elusive form. By acknowledging the ahistorical nature of Gypsy existence, Bennahum is freed to alight and circle back to eras and locations that span millennia and continents. She weaves together ideas and imagery that might otherwise seem disparate: French Romanticism, Neolithic goddess worship, Islamic architecture, and Surrealism. The author pulls us along as she unravels myth and history, evoking Carmen as the embodied center: “her fingers, hands, arms and feet inscribe a map of the world …” (2).
Delightfully rhapsodic, while strongly rooted in theory, the text is most satisfying in its rich examination of cultural, artistic, and political detail. Delving into specifics about virtually every aspect of Carmen's many incarnations, the author provides surprising gems of information. Chapter Three, “Mythic Space and Ancient Carmen,” is especially satisfying. In this historiographic tour de force, Bennahum supports her claim that “The evolution of Carmen's mythic status recapitulates the origins of the female archetype that emerged as a goddess figure in the world of ancient Middle East” (68). While it may seem that childless Carmen makes an odd fertility goddess, Bennahum argues convincingly that the Gypsy icon is kin to female deities going back to the third millennium B.C.E. She lucidly moves through eras, documenting frame drums in the Neolithic Age, bull goddesses of Paleolithic Egypt, and Babylonian creation myths that predate the Hebrew book of Genesis (wait, when was Genesis written?). From creation myths, she segues to stories of the underworld, from Sumerian myths to Byzantine visions of Hell. She discusses the Code of Hammurabi, which prohibited fertility priestesses from bearing children. She places the beginning of the harem, meaning “forbidden,” in the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. (81), with veiled and secluded women dancing for each other, in what would become raq sharqui, danse du ventre, or belly dancing (see also Helland Reference Helland, Dils and Albright2001; Saleh Reference Saleh and Cohen2005). Bennahum considers Lilith, Cybele, Aphrodite, Demeter, and Persephone. She returns to the bull-god, to Theseus, and Ariadne pulling her thread. She cites Eve and the Virgin Mary, the bad woman and the good, and illustrates how repeatedly a male god, born of the female deity, replaces her in primary importance. As Riane Eisler chronicled in her groundbreaking The Chalice and The Blade (Reference Eisler1987), the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy benefitted the nation state, militarism, and autocracy. Cue Franco's Spain, where Gypsies and flamenco were persecuted. As Bennahum frames goddess worship, ritual prostitution, trance music, and many faces of the Minotaur into dance terms, she illustrates the primal war between the sexes, seismically transforming how ancient lives were lived. Bennahum's unique contribution here is that she returns this key discussion of formative gender struggle to a native realm—dance—where changes are manifest, embodied, and preserved in ritual.
The author plumbs a wide range of sources, constructing a multidisciplinary arc to connect theory, fact, and iconography. Themes of female empowerment/disempowerment, heroine/anti-heroine, and mother/seductress thread through the book. Bennahum makes judicious use of feminist theory. While referencing Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and Anne Fausto-Sperling, she avoids restating the obvious, instead making substantive, detail-rich connections. She explains, for example, that “Rules for moral and social conduct emerged under the Assyrians, and by the time of the Babylonians, women's purity—their chastity—was enforced by legal code” (81). This places Carmen in high relief and historical context; as the indomitable female, her insistence on freedom is both her allure and her undoing. Quoting Edward Said on Orientalism, Bennahum explores the Orientalist impulse that first brought Frenchmen to the entrancing Gypsy cigar worker (137). With characteristic thoroughness, she details three styles of Gypsy performance that “fed the Romantic inclination” of Europeans in the nineteenth century: Ghawazi, or belly dance; Tuareg, the dance of the blue veils; and Sevillian café performance (141). This kind of specificity makes the book a trove of information; the reader can forgive Bennahum's occasional flights into the obscure tangent or hypothesis.
Working with a subject that is both legend and cliché—the ill-fated Gypsy firebrand—Bennahum reveals unexpected facets of a socially relevant icon. Expanding from flamenco dance into other artistic media, she explores how literature, opera, ballet, film, theater, and painting have portrayed the woman and the myth. She examines author Mérimée, composer Bizet, and artist Picasso through their entanglements with the chameleon Carmen. Bennahum descriptively analyzes notable productions where the iconoclastic cigar worker is portrayed as ballerina, flamenca, bisexual, or horsewoman. The list could go on indefinitely, but Bennahum omits Mats Ek's bullish Carmen, who pulls a lit cigar from between her legs, Matthew Bourne's campy The Car Man, and the Santa Fe Opera's 2014 version set on the Mexico–U.S. border. Carmen remains elusive in all her incarnations.
While acknowledging other scholars and citing her references scrupulously, Bennahum's ideas stand on their own. As a flamenco scholar, she has earned her place in the canon; her body of work continues to bring this romanticized and misunderstood form into focus. At the heart of Carmen: A Gypsy Geography lies a poetic paradox: the elusive Gypsy past—marginalized by politics, obscured through time and space—is illuminated by the trail of Carmen's dancing body.
