Reading the War's Colonialism: E. M. Forster and Mohammed El Adl (2014)

E. M. Forster does not belong within the canon of British First World writers, nor did he have any desire to be there.1 Yet Forster spent most of the war in Egypt, working as a Red Cross researcher whose job it was to tour the hospitals of Alexandria interviewing about their missing comrades.2 For most critics the central event of Forster's life in Alexandria was his intimate relationship with Mohammed El Adl, an Arab Egyptian (Martin and Piggford 13).3 Ever since Sara Suleri proposed that homosexual desire was key to British colonial power in India, Forster's work has played a significant role in postcolonial and queer literary studies (Singh 39). His cross cultural, same-sex relationship with El Adl has been folded into debates about colonialism and homosexuality, but neither postcolonial nor queer studies scholars have attended to the war context of the relationship or of Forster's Egyptian writings. Only Forster's recent biographer Wendy Moffat has pointed to the importance of his war experience for Forster's philosophy of intimacy between men (106). Yet, by virtue of his struggle to represent the interconnections among war, colonialism, and same sex desire, Forster invites us to read his Alexandria writings across the lines that separate war writing colonialism. Reading across these lines, however, requires us to integrate the methods and insights of First World studies into analysis of mainstream twentieth-century literature.A welcome feature of the war's centenary has been a wider acknowledgment that Britain's Great War was a global war fought by an imperial nation in the context of a changing world order. The impetus for this reconsideration of Britain's imperial war story has come scholars such as Santanu Das, Rozina Visram, Richard Smith, Christian Koller, amongst many others. Their work, over several decades, has given new visibility to the major role played in the war by peoples and societies outside Europe. Das, for example, urges scholars to embed the experience and memory of the First World in a more multiracial and international (Empire 1). That framework includes the far-reaching consequences of the war for the home populations in nations, regions, and cultures outside Europe and North America, as theatres of war or sources of labor, money, and goods. Colonized subject peoples of the European and Ottoman empires, the indigenous peoples of the Dominions and the United States, and contract laborers countries outside the imperial orbit, such as China, played a major role. During the war, Britain mobilized around 1.4 million men the Indian subcontinent alone, additional to the standing army in India (Thompson 158). Indians served as both combatants and laborers in the Middle East and North Africa. And, for the first time, Britain used Indian soldiers, in France and Belgium, in combat against Europeans. They were not alone. Troops and labor came across the empire, Ireland, South and West Africa, the British West Indies, Newfoundland, Fiji, and beyond. The war produced what historian Koller terms transnational military migration from the colonial world to Europe on an unprecedented scale, with significant cultural effects on the mutual perception of Europeans and colonial soldiers (Koller 114, 113).Contemporary British war studies needs to decouple our late-twentieth and twenty-first century interpretations of the First World a historical formation of the imperial nation, which too often governs our assumptions about whose experience matters. The task of recovering the experiences of non-European war migrants is complex, demanding the construction of new archives. As Jo Lunn points out the majority of non-white, non-European participants came largely non-literate and semi-literate societies, and have leftprecious few records of their wartime ordeal (France's Legacy 108). Their experiences and perspectives are often missing the traditional Eurocentric and text-based First World archives. …