Mirrored interiors so disoriented non-European visitors they mistook buildings for open streets

Evidence

An earlier Egyptian writer recalled a similar experience with mirrors, on his very first day in a European city. Arriving at Marseilles, he had entered a café, which he mistook at first for some sort of ‘Vast, endless thoroughfare’. ‘There were a lot of people in there,’ he explained, ‘and whenever a group of them came into view their images appeared in the glass mirrors, which were on every side. Anyone who walked in, sat down, or stood up seemed to be multiplied. Thus the café looked like an open street. I realised it was enclosed only when I saw several images of myself in the mirrors, and understood that it was all due to the peculiar effect of the glass.’ In such stories, it is as though the world of representation is being admired for its dazzling order, and yet the suspicion remains that all this reality is only an effect. Perhaps the world remains inevitably a labyrinth, rather than an interior distinguished from – and defined by – its exterior. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 79

Categorization

• SHARE: An Egyptian traveler’s first day in Marseilles mistaking a mirrored cafe for an open street — a vivid, self-contained anecdote worth sending to anyone interested in cross-cultural perception or colonial-era travel writing.
• XREF: Connects to discussions of the gaze and representational order in postcolonial theory — echoes the reader’s knowledge of Said’s Orientalism and the staging-of-the-exotic theme.