References
are to the Century Publishing/Hippocrene edition of 1984. Page references are in parentheses; numbers
in brackets refer to endnotes.
People are sometimes curiously self-conscious
about being tourists. In the days before
cell phones, I myself never liked to
stroll through foreign squares with a camera around my neck. Even looking around a new city in the United
States, the visitor often strives to “fit in” and pass for a local. The reason for this wish is not immediately
obvious. After all, the locals are
merely going about their quotidian routines, while traveler, like an
aristocrat, is not working and has expended money and time in pursuit of
pleasure alone (and a little new knowledge can be as pleasurable as a new
French sauce). If anything, one might
think the outsider could claim superior prestige. An additional complication has arisen in
recent times with those who criticize some aspects of interest in other societies
as psychologically colonialist, “cultural appropriation” [1], or simply serving the interests of the
observer more than a true understanding of the other.
Yet since Herodotus’ time, it has been
recognized that the traveler is likely to experience benefits more substantial than
a view of Mont Blanc or the glow of Gothic stained glass. The cliché declaring travel to be broadening
might be rephrased by saying that the sight of foreign lands provides a kind of
heightened awareness of alternatives, a sort of inversion of Dubois’ double
consciousness in which the observer is privileged rather than oppressed. Yet this gain is by no means regularly clear
and straightforward. Very often people
project onto the “other” their own psychic contents: medieval monks stewing
about how lusty women were or American minstrelsy making comic theater of the
oppression of slavery. Very often such
judgements are intuitive and mingle justification of the writer’s own practices
with genuine new insights adopted from other points of view.
A rhetorical vocabulary has developed in
travel writing that embodies a view of the exotic scene not as another equally
valid way of being human, but as simultaneously real and unreal, familiar and
strange, understood and mysterious.
Edith Wharton’s In Morocco is in many ways an excellent book [2]. Wharton had toured the country in 1917 as the
particular guest of the country’s Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, allowing her
chauffeured rides and introduction to the traditional rulers. She describes Morocco as having long been self-isolating
after the manner of Japan with very few outsiders allowed to enter. She obtained rare permission to visit harems
and antiquities like the Saadian tombs, moving in a milieu that still included
numerous absolute rulers surrounded by slaves and courtesans.
She provides ample information about the
country’s history and circumstances including pages recording Gen. Lyautey’s
achievements and an essay on Moroccan architecture [3]. Yet her skill is less in historical or
political analysis than in description.
After one such detailed passage noting the sights before her eyes, the
donkeys and camels, the mourners at a funeral, and an old “philosopher” smoking
kif, she reflects on the character of her own vision.
One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that
northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores
of the same ocean. This is what Moghreb
must have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to Norman
knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, of Hansa merchants devising, in
steep-roofed towns, of Barbary, and the long caravans bringing apes and gold-powder
from the south. (32)
Though she is in fact in Africa, she
acknowledges that her view is subjective and may owe as much to her imagination
as to the local scene. Not only does she
suggest the strangeness of life in Rabat by conceding that her view is that of
an outsider, she feels motivated to make it stranger yet by referring it to
centuries gone by. After using the now-romantic
term Barbary, she concludes the passage with a lovely evocation of something
she has not actually seen at all. (While
she did witness camel transport, she was unlikely to have seen apes or gold in
their cargoes.) Thus her reportage is at
once precise and specific and oneiric.
This sort of conceit is woven throughout
Wharton’s account. What she sees before
her eyes she regularly describes as unreal.
Morocco is “fantastic” (the word recurs five times in the course of her
account), a “dream” (nine passages), where one may witness “wonders” (ten
times). The visitor feels she is living
in a work of fiction, an “Oriental fable” (62).
The whole country for her was
wrapped in “a blessed air of unreality” such
that “the scene became merely
symbolical” (54). Everything is visible
only as though through a foggy “haze” (30) where the very light “gives a
foretaste of mirage,” “magic becomes real,” and “the boundary between fact and
dream perpetually fluctuates” (44) [4]. In an oddly tangled figure of speech, she says
that “If one lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were
a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn.” (28)
Here, in a strange reversal, the modernity to which the writer is
accustomed becomes the fabulous carpet which, when removed, reveals a timeless land
beneath.
Its timelessness comes, however, at a
cost. Morocco to Wharton is moribund and
static. “The performance, like all things
Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning
and no end, it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped
its thread.” (121) The Moroccans practice
“supine indifference” that “lets everything crumble back to clay” (77). They do nothing to maintain their own
antiquities and holy places (33) resulting in ”catastrophic desolation” (64), but, then, “nothing
endures in Islam” (72). Thus “long animosity against the intruder has
ended up by destroying her own life” (37) and the palace of Moulay Ismael has devolved into
“a carcass for his carcass” (70). Modern
Moroccan architecture is a tasteless imitation of Europe (35).
Her belief in the timelessness and
“stagnant domesticity” (152) of North
African culture has political implications.
She admired Resident General Lyautey and described herself as a “rabid
imperialist” [4]. To her “General
Lyautey has twice saved Morocco from destruction” (161) and the general
influence of French colonialism is wholly beneficent.
Not all tourists, of course, are conscious
imperialists. Yet today even those who
explicitly praise another country’s way of life may be accused of “cultural
appropriation,” a sin the boundaries of which are far from clear. Someone from Omaha who relishes an hour
enjoying an espresso and cognac at Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain
is more likely to be admired for cosmopolitanism than to be criticized for trying to be French. Ralph T. H. Griffith served in the British colonial service, yet most would feel
that his translation of the Vedas constituted a service to the Indian people and
not a theft.
Even the most outlandish examples of
cultural appropriation seem to be in origin naïve tributes rather than acts of
oppression. Liberals at least can agree
that it is unseemly for high school teams to be called Braves, Chiefs, or even Redskins, but what is one to make of the fact
that nearly a hundred thousand Germans are members of Indianerclubs? Members dress as Native Americans and hold
pow-wows at which they dance and enact ceremonies, all the while professing
great admiration for the people they mimic [5].
While such hobbyists may be accused of racial stereotyping, they are
innocent of racist contempt. In the same
way some Americans purchase tattoos of Chinese characters which neither the
customer nor the artist can read, sometimes with amusing results. Yet the reason people wish to have their
bodies ornamented with Asian-ness is surely that they associate that part of
the world with wisdom and beauty. Are we
to make any distinction between Griffith’s despicable portrayal of Blacks in Birth
of a Nation and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer? The theme, after all, of the first, was the
defense of slavery and the Confederacy while the second centered on Jakie
Rabinowitz’ love of Black music, a love that estranges him from his own culture
and family.
Inevitably less aware of the nuances of
art and customs than a native, the tourist’s appreciation is always based on
only partial knowledge. An outsider’s
enthusiasm (or criticism) may be less a reaction to the other than to the
visitor’s own. The Cubists imitated
aspects of African art without any attempt to understand it in context and the
Imagist poets wrote lyrics based on Chinese models they were, for the most
part, unable to read. Yet the European
art that resulted is accepted as beautiful as well as innovative, even if the
artist knew little of genuine Yoruba or Tang conventions. What applies to the reception of art surely
may be said as well of the tourist’s view of another society.
Wharton seems to have taken great pleasure
in her Moroccan tour. If her rhetoric
indicates that she is far from an objective camera simply recording facts, that
does no more than concede her inescapable limitation. The reader may turn to anthropologists and
historians for information about the country.
If one reads a novelist’s account, it is surely for a different
reason.
To the
art critic what matters about an attitude is what comes of it. I recently saw the 1939 film of the D’Oyly
Carte Company doing The Mikado. It
was an altogether delightful performance; the wardrobes and makeup usually clever,
the singing and dancing all first-rate, though it was assuredly not Japan at
all, nor was it in fact pretending to be.
The action takes place in a completely fanciful and rather silly realm the
ruler of which has a Japanese title, probably as fanciful to most Victorian
Englishmen as names like Pooh-Bah and Yum-Yum.
If the costumer consulted authentic Far Eastern fashions at all, it was
merely as a starting point from which his fancy might fly. In the end we have a fine entertainment. Likewise, if some Dusseldorfer plumber enjoys
daubing his face with war paint on weekends, I would be more likely to envy his
ability to have fun than to object.
I recall when I first set foot on Moroccan
soil over fifty years ago and was utterly bedazzled. That first day I may have had less
understanding of Moroccan ways than I had gained after a few months there, but my
initial ignorance allowed me a measure of wonder as valuable, I think, as
knowledge. We have a fine book by Edith
Wharton. It is about Morocco, but
unashamedly expressing Euro-centric notions.
Nonetheless the book is filled with fascinating descriptions, memorable
phrases, and curious anecdotes with which one might while away an afternoon. What more could one ask?
1. The term’s first use according to the OED was
in 1945 in an essay on Orientalism by Arthur E. Christy. The same phenomenon was discussed as
"cultural colonialism" in the
‘sixties and ‘seventies (for instance, by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith). Both phrases imply criticism, an improper and
very likely misunderstood use of another’s culture.
2.. The book was completed in 1919 and published in 1920. Wharton had been living in France and in 1914
had visited Algeria and Tunisia.
3. She is said to have written the book under
contract while in urgent need of income.
Perhaps some of this information was simply padding to meet a
publisher’s desires.
3. Letter to Sara Norton, March 12, 1901.
4. Similar expressions include “cities of
ancient mystery” (23), a “vision” (71) as though preserved by “some powerful
enchanter” with “a wave of his wand” (73).
The observer has a
“dream-feeling” (77) as though walking into the Arabian Nights
(36). Morocco is to her “fantastic”
(58), a “marvel” (61) full of “wonders” (62).
The entire country is for her a “dream” (127) in which “twilight adds to
the mystery” (82-3).x
5. The expression Indianertümelei has
been coined on the model of Deutschtümelei (a chauvinistic exaggerated
preference for things German). Such
groups have a considerable history. The
first “cowboy club” (which included “Indian” participants) was founded in
Munich in 1913. This phenomenon is
neither confined to those outside America nor to the ignorant. In his great study of the Iroquois Lewis
Henry Morgan mythologizes them by likening them to Homeric Greeks and in recent
years sweat lodges and the like have become the vogue among some New Agers.
