The English Patient

Two of the novel’s central characters, Hana and Almásy, have complicated relationships with the non-Western world and the occupants of that world. While they both value the presence of people of color in their lives and try to respect any cultural distinctions they observe, they also fetishize and take advantage of these distinctions.

For Hana, Kip’s perceived exoticism adds excitement to her mundane life at the villa. For Almásy, explorations of the North African desert allow him to escape his personal unhappiness and make him feel like part of an expansive, ancient landscape. While both Hana and Almásy seem to engage with non-Western cultures and geographies from a place of good faith, they cannot avoid treating these people and places like curiosities that exist to make their own lives more interesting.

The term orientalism was coined by Palestinian academic Edward Said in 1978. According to Said, Western representations of North African, Middle Eastern, and Asian cultures are often inaccurate, romanticized, and insulting. Orientalism, Said argues, is rooted in imperialist power structures and, thus, never serves the interests of the people being depicted in those representations, only the interest of the white creator or viewer. Part of an orientalist stance is the belief that Western countries are motivated by rationality and discipline—and are thus superior—and non-Western countries are underdeveloped because their inhabitants are inherently decadent, lazy, violent, and overly sexualized.

In The English Patient, Hana is initially attracted to Kip because of his dark skin and unfamiliar religious and cultural practices. She watches him from the house, sometimes using field glasses, as he washes his hair in the garden (72). After they become lovers, she pays even more attention to his skin: “She learns all the varieties of his darkness. The colour of his forearm against the color of his neck […] the darkness of fingers separating red and black wires […] the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent” (127). Words like “dark” and “darkness” are often found in orientalist representations of non-Western peoples; this language not only emphasizes the tendency of Westerners to sexually fetishize people like Kip because of their appearance, but also echoes descriptions of the entire non-Western world as dark, foreboding, dangerous, and violent.

While both Almásy and Katharine are white, their sexual relationship begins in Cairo, and in Almásy’s mind, their romance is deeply connected to the Egyptian-Libyan desert. When he met Katharine, he says, he already had the “labels” of a man who had explored the desert and knew it intimately (231). Almásy sees his own personality as having changed because of his relationship to the non-Western landscape. When he and Katharine become lovers, they call the small indentation at the base of her throat—a spot with which Almásy is obsessed—the Bosphorus, after the Bosphorus Strait, which is located in Turkey and connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara.

As Katharine’s white body becomes increasingly sexualized through her relationship with Almásy, it thus becomes remapped as a non-white, orientalized body. This echoes the Royal Geographical Society’s attempts to map the actual deserts of North Africa but reimagines what that mapping would look like when driven by the same sexual and romantic desire Westerners often associate with non-Western peoples and cultures.