Transoceanic Orientalism and Embodied Translation in Sayyida Salme/Emily Ruete’s Memoirs

Emily Ruete’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess was first published, in German, in 1886, on the threshold of the nineteenth-century imperialist “Scramble for Africa.” Ruete’s exilic relationship with both Europe and Africa made her an insider-outsider, well positioned to capture the imperial stage of Enlightenment Orientalism in flux and transmit it across the oceans to a public who would have found the life she describes unimaginable. In relaying the story of how Sayyida Salme became Emily Ruete, the Memoirs employs a mode of translation that is simultaneously linguistic, cultural, religious, and material. In Ruete’s case, translation is an embodied act. As a translator, Salme/Ruete critically and comparatively translates Zanzibar, and by extension the “Orient,” for a Western audience by virtue of her body being able to enter into and to pass through multiple social and cultural spaces.