Wharton’s Morocco and the Conundrums of Travel

                                        Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco

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.

Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.

Notes on Recent Reading 37 (Waley, Wharton, London)

Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (Waley)

     Waley never fails me. Indeed, all English-speaking readers who love Asian literature must be thankful for his labors. Though he acquired his knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages under Laurence Binyon at the British Museum, cataloguing visual art, he eschewed academic posts and consistently wrote for that virtually extinct creature, the generally educated reader. He never visited China or Japan, but lived in Bloomsbury in London where he associated with literary figures rather than Sinologists. A friend of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others, he was as well an early admirer of Ronald Firbank, for whose first collected works he and Osbert Sitwell wrote an introduction. Ezra Pound recommended his work for the Little Review. His literary value has held up; while his translations are not the most scholarly, they are often the best choice especially for non-specialists.
     Yuan Mei was a poet, artist, and food writer -- a translation of his gastronomic classic Suiyuan Shidan is forthcoming this year as Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. He wrote as well a theoretical work on poetry, the Suiyuan shihua. A brilliant student at a young age, he even left a guide to scoring well on the imperial exams on the Confucian classics. He worked in several government posts of which Waley provides sufficient details that we do not wonder why he abandoned the civil service at the age of thirty-two to devote himself to art.
     Why do I feel such kinship with certain Chinese poets? Surely their participation in academic examinations on the classics is a part of what we share. Add to that the implied pathetic fallacy so widespread in traditional Chinese verse and part of today’s poetry in English since Waley’s first translations and the advent of the Imagists. Finally, there is a profound sympathy in world-view. Yuan Mei paid respects to Ch’an Buddhism while maintaining a position of unashamed hedonism, aesthetic and otherwise, as sufficient for everyday conduct. It is what might a few hundred years ago have been called a kind of natural religion. Simple though it be, such a position has been the refuge of more than one fine soul.
     Waley’s book is unfailingly entertaining and readable. It is astonishing what details about the poet’s life survive in documents and how smoothly and novelistically Waley uses them to frame the many lyrics included in this volume.


In Morocco (Wharton)

     Edith Wharton’s 1920 book describing a month touring Morocco, much of it devoted to Fes and Marrakech, is as engaging as one might expect. Wharton had lived in France for most of the previous decade and toured Morocco as a guest of the French Governor-General Lyautey (her fulsome praise for him cloys). As a dignitary she drove about in a French military vehicle and visited the residences of both French and local potentates where she sometimes participated in dinners served by slaves. She saw a good deal that an ordinary tourist would have missed, including the Saadian tombs and harems (the women she finds boring and a bit pathetic).
     Apart from the well-sketched vignettes of Moroccan life of the time, the book would make a case study in the apologetics of imperialism, as Wharton hasn’t a doubt that France arrived at the invitation of the North Africans and in fact saved them from themselves.
     Though this conviction would find fewer partisans today, many of her comments would be echoed by later visitors including myself. Her sense of having stepped far back in time is familiar even to today’s escorted tour customers, and her exposition of the country’s contradictions is illuminating, even when only half-informed. The phantasmagoria of Morocco is, of course, an illusion born of unfamiliarity, but it is no less intoxicating for that reason.


People of the Abyss (London)

     Jack London’s story of his descent into the city of London’s East End, masquerading with rough clothes to impersonate what he had in fact been only a few years before, an itinerant laborer, remains powerful today, over a hundred years later. London sleeps in sordid quarters when not in workhouses, eats in the filthiest coffee houses, and fraternizes with the urban proletariat at a time when many in the greatest empire of modern times were literally starving. Apart from his own observations and the tales told him by many a hard-working tradesman fallen on hard times, London responsibly provides much statistical documentation of the plight of the poor, though this is perhaps less useful to today’s reader. His transcriptions of dialect seem authentic and his righteous indignation is exemplary.
     The concrete particulars are necessary for a contemporary reader to realize how recently the great majority of the working class, not the lumpen or underclass, was in desperate straits in even the most developed capitalist economies. This book takes its place between Engels’ 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England, London’s own The Road about tramping in the USA) and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. London himself said, “No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor."
     London’s militance is inscribed in the text but not without a certain ambivalence as well. His distaste for the poor and for their wretched conditions is evident, but an even deeper contradiction, expressed in The Iron Heel as well, is his own Nietzschean preference for the strong and his almost eugenic conviction that the urban poor had in fact declined through devolution into something only just barely human.

Strong Stuff [Marrakech]

     The sweat trickles down the visitor’s back as the afternoon sun approaches a hundred degrees in Marrakech’s celebrated Djema el Fna, but the unapologetic naked intensity of the heat can seem almost bracing. The elements here may feel extreme, but at least they lack hypocrisy.
     The vicious cruelty of the old rulers matched Caligula’s, and the slave market in the Souk Zrabia flourished until the French occupation in 1912. Today men’s aggression is for the most part displaced into commerce and socio-economic hierarchy. The assault of self-interested hustlers has abated since the government has got after them, but their importunities were little worse than the gauntlet of shopkeepers who will go so far as to seize the arm of a foreign passerby. Business here may seem recreational, but everyone knows it is always a matter of getting one’s hand into another’s pocket. The pitches to the visitor are transparent: “it is bad luck not to make the first sale of the day,” “just for looking, no buying,” and always the earnest “for you, a special price.”
     Though the beggars are also a result of a greed-based economy, and they sometimes distress the tender-hearted visitor and annoy the rest, but they testify also to the vitality of Muslim charity or zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. The Arabic word means “that which purifies” [the giver] and such donations are enjoined by the Koran; to give what one ought is a prerequisite for one’s prayers to be heard. Almost always aged, crippled, or holding a baby, sometimes in orderly rows chanting outside a mosque, the appeals of beggars are regularly heard by the more affluent. Certain medicants make a regular circuit of souk merchants, receiving a coin from each. Have they somehow a franchise on the route? Compassionate giving may extend even to animals. Outside the modern carrefour where one may purchase forbidden goods such as cured pork from Savoy and wine, the feral cats find plates of milk and scraps of rotisseried chicken, perhaps left by a worker who recalled the story of Mohammed’s cutting off his sleeve to avoid disturbing his cat Muezza who had fallen asleep there.
     Travelers are one of the categories of people to whom zakat should be given, and hospitality to travelers remains strong in spite of the constant procession of foreigners, now decades-old. Though anti-American demonstrations are at this moment turning violent in Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan, we are consistently greeted with smiles and waves of the hand even from passing cars. The wanderer lost in the medina’s maze who asks directions will receive warmth as well as aid.
     Pleasure may be mingled with suffering, generosity with selfishness, civility with barbarism, but each element is undiluted and manifests without disguise. The head of household (the king even) slaughters his sheep for the Aid el Kebir. The stench of the tanning vats makes a miasma of a whole neighborhood. The diner knows the source of his meat and the stroller the origin of his shoes’ leather.
     One reads that Thami el Glaoui, Lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, entertained not only the French officials with whom he collaborated, but Churchill as well, Colette and Charlie Chaplin, offering his guests hashish and opium as well as girls and boys snatched from the tribes of the Atlas. He was, not surprisingly, hated even before he turned on the king. The indulgences of his palace were beyond the means of most Moroccans, but a pipe of cannabis was not. If kief is no longer consumed openly, this is the result of government fiat under international pressures. Sebsis and shkaufs (pipe-stems and bowls) for its consumption are for sale in the markets yet today, and the use of alcohol, which I would agree with the imams is less desirable, is surely increasing every year.
     Islam itself seems a creed fiercely insistent and singularly simple and direct. When compared to the multifarious maze of Hindu mythology, the subtle metaphysics of Buddhism, the pomp of Roman Catholicism, or the denatured Puritanism with which I was raised, Islam’s requirements are few but absolute. The insurgent dynasties, the Almohads and then the Almoravids were puritan simplifiers out of the desert, and today the Sufis, the marabout cults, and the remnants of Berber animism continue to lose ground to the grand simplicity of orthodoxy. Experiential emotion is replaced by authority and variety by uniformity. The shahada, the basic statement of Islamic belief is a single sentence, stark and simple: “There is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet.” It must impress even those of us it cannot convince.
     In Paul Bowles’ Moroccan stories one finds the same extreme forms of friendship, sensuality, betrayal, and agony. There is but one sun in the Sheltering Sky, and its heat overwhelms all else. The wanderer in the Djema el Fna can feel in his whole body that animating heat that chastens and mortifies even as it vivifies. Among the multifarious distractions of the square and of the wider world beyond, the joy and the pain of being alive, the love and aggression of the world, are here unmistakable.

The Theory of Souvenirs

     Souvenirs are surely as old as recreational travel: among medieval examples are clay water bottles or tin badges for those who had visited Santiago de Campostela; for those who made it all the way to Jerusalem: River Jordan water, models of the Holy Sepulchre, or, for the really big spenders, pieces of the True Cross. According to The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain’s party was partial to chipping off pieces of every monument they encountered in hopes of bringing a bit of the sublime to their own home parlors.
     For every souvenir has a spiritual character, rising above a simple tchotchke primarily because of its associations. As assertively lowbrow as the Donald McGill cards on which Orwell wrote so well and as full of content, the souvenir is fully present only to the purchaser who “remembers.” (This can prove a handicap, as in the case of the sizable equine skull I came across in the middle of a Mexican field and hauled home, worried that customs agents would find the bits of dried flesh clinging to it to be inadmissible to my hygienic and vasty land. It took years after my return to find a means of passing the thing on without offending the alert hollows where once were eyes.)
     The linked reminiscence is less in the case of the stack of museum post cards, though even these were purchased in the excitement of viewing the originals and deciding that I must take the image with me. The aura of the low-fire Tarahumara pot is more luminous when I recall buying it from a lady who lived in a cave with a front porch of the most casual stone construction. Once Patricia and I were given a ticket and resulting fine by the French police for hitchhiking before they returned us to the same spot where they had found us by the edge of the autoroute and wished us “Bon voyage!” The documents of this incident would surely be a bore without the story. In fact, this slip of paper should perhaps go – even the story is insufficient to redeem it.
     On the other hand in a prominent spot over my fireplace hangs a rectangular piece of cloth in a West African palette: orange, blue, red, and black. A large head of ripe grain is surrounded by lines radiating in all directions. The fact that it is a piece of a shirt which I came upon in a roadside ditch in the Niger Delta of West Africa does not prevent me from regarding this image as revealing much the same profound principle as the “ear of corn” that Hippolytus said was the holy of holies for the Eleusinian Mysteries. Roadsides and crossroads in particular often in that hot and humid climate held offerings bearing people’s poignant wishes, pointing to the gap that defines desire.
     My own first stage of souvenirs was preceded by an anticipatory period in which I was beguiled by the associative bouquet of other people’s souvenirs. An Eiffel Tower is a snow globe would have held little appeal for me, though I am told it was in the nineteenth century the most popular reminder of Europe. My taste ran more to a cancelled second-class ticket from the Métro or a plastic bag from Monoprix. A recently returned traveler might possess a precious pack of Turkish cigarettes, impressively cheap and foul. The stamps in passports were resonant, each with its own unique timbre. Before my first trip abroad, I saw once a great hunk of hashish with gold markings I was told was the tax stamp from the Indian state where it had been purchased.
     But best of all were the stories. I recall a friend aglow with the memory of what he called “a plum of a job,” civilian supply clerk on a American base, where he could read Hegel in German all day long and then walk the cobbled streets of the Old World in the days when the dollar was strong. Another friend who had served in the Peace Corps in Ghana had a half hour riff on the “car parks” where one might get a seat in the highly competitive collective taxis. A third who had been set up and then busted for pot in Thailand then surprised the authorities when he not only failed to offer an immediate bribe,but also, after being convicted, he refused to pay the small fine, preferring to spend six weeks in jail where he became very popular teaching English to the other inmates. I heard stories of the territories popular in the hip Cook’s Tour of the day: Morocco, Ibiza, Amsterdam, Kathmandu.
     With a backpack, a Swiss Army knife, and s few pairs of jeans we wandered around Europe and North Africa for much of 1970 and ’71. Our worldly possessions consisted of a few cardboard boxes, mostly books, art works, and papers, stored in a parent’s home. In part because we had so very little, we did buy things now and then. Being in foreign markets reminded me of first visiting Cost Plus, up by Fisherman’s Wharf in 1967. The store still exists, but I cannot say whether it fills the role it did forty-five years ago. The warehouse-like aisles (a novelty at the time) held an endless variety of cheapo goods from all over the world. Everyone whose living room I passed through seemed to have been there for Indian bedspreads, incense, paper lanterns, beaded curtains, Mexican drinking glasses, Spanish botas, and Thai teacups. Within a single shopping trip one could establish a recognizable style on a budget. Just as in thrift stores, the value of such purchases testified to one’s taste rather than one’s wealth.
     So while traveling we gathered this and that to ornament our imagined apartment of the future. Every few months we sent a parcel in motion to the USA, always labeled “gift – value under $25” to avoid customs. Sent by the defunct category of sea mail, these boxes moved very slowly about the globe, taking as much as six months to arrive at their Midwestern destination. Several only made an appearance long after our return.
     We were snobbish enough to consider a potato peeler from Paris to have a certain cachet, even if its French aura be invisible to others, and a sweater from a Paris shop was an extravagance, but one that could be savored. In Barcelona we bought an elaborate antique-style lamp and a hammered copper pitcher, but perhaps the wisest investment was a genuine (if imperfect) art nouveau candle-holder in the form of a flower. Our collection of carved wooden pipe-stems and clay bowls (sebsis and shkaufs) from Morocco have not been used or displayed, but they carry to the present minute the savor of our days in Mufis’ café and the Gout de Fes. We sent back ephemera as well: leaflets from the tourist offices of a dozen cities, receipts of various sorts, bits of windblown litter like an advertisement for a small traveling circus in Ibiza featuring el hombre electrico.
     A few items were more substantial: on the wall outside my bedroom hangs an old Tunisian carpet. I know nothing of its provenance. In the spring of 1971, I saw it in a merchant’s stall of used goods in the medina of Tunis. We talked, had tea, yet could not agree on a price. On each of the four days Patricia and I stayed in the city, we returned to admire the piece and to bargain a bit more. Finally, we bought it, dearer to us for the memory of the recreation potential in commerce, though hardly dearer than a pizza and a half.
     Our place acquired in time sufficient satisfying clutter that we decided that the truly tasteful traveler will avoid shopping for amusement and acquire only a very few items of high quality. In this category I place a new carpet of subdued palette bought in a Marrakech souk the evening before we returned home almost twenty-five years ago. I recall the mint tea, the unrolled carpets expanding from the front of the shop into the dusty lane, and I recall our companion, the musician Hassan Hakmoun, with whom we had visited a market in Ourika and hiked for miles to a cataract above Setti Fatma. When we bought the carpet, Hassan bought a small rug for his son which we carried back to New York and when we went to take it to him in Harlem I locked myself out of my car and Hassan had to jimmy the door with a long blade which he tucked in to his sleeve while strolling up his street. And in this way the forest of narratives branch and continue and link like neurons to make new data and connections and comparisons and the web of words connected to the carper is as tightly woven as the fabric itself, if one tried to tell all, there would be no end to the language until the story-teller or listener has had enough for the time and snips the thread at a convenient spot.
     All the same, I sometimes doubted the aesthetics of souvenirs. Though we lived most of our lives on a fraction of what the government considers the poverty level, I knew that some people consider travel conspicuous consumption. Souvenirs might be a display potentially not of wealth alone, but of sophistication as well. Are they inevitably aggressive or at least ego-assertive? I recall uncomfortably reading an essay that compared people’s Guatemalan weavings and wooden Chiwara antelopes from Mali with a previous generation’s French tapestries and elephant leg ash trays. Magnates swollen with money like Vanderbilt and Hearst brought home chunks of palaces and chapels as proof positive of power and taste.
     A new philosophical phase of souvenirs succeeded in which it seemed that one need buy nothing at all, that the real memories are mental and the most sublime approach to travel would be similar to the hiker’s creed “take nothing, leave nothing.” Abandoning the commitment to discernment inherent in the previous phase for its dialectical opposite, the traveler now proceeds on the premise that all objects properly regarded have the same associative value. Unfortunately, this assumption rather casts the motive for travel at all in doubt. This is surely the part of wisdom if only to remind the traveler that whatever object he seeks to hold will fall from his hand at last. But then life consists of distracting oneself from impending disaster, and I suspect that any aid we can utilize toward that end is worthwhile.
     I settled in the end at last to a less monistic daily practice, picking up a trinket or two in a casual way, a number of them made as souvenirs,: a fine blanket of baby alpaca, a Huichol peyote bud yarn painting, a plastic laundry bag from a hotel in Chichicastenango. I once spent a week by the Ganges in Varanasi, hearing chants and flute tunes all night long and seeing the saddhus doing yoga and telling fortunes out the window. There were a half dozen shrines containing Shiva lingams within a hundred yards of our guesthouse. I thought of the Rev. William Ward whose 1815 book fixed early British attitudes about India to whom such figures were “too gross . . . to meet the public eye” and of Ramakrishna’s devotions which led Vivekananda to claim righteously that the lingam was by no means phallic. Even Christopher Isherwood felt obliged to argue in “Early Days in Dakshineswar” that the lingam and yoni are no more sexual than a Christian spire and font. We brought a small Shivalinga home with us, trusting that it was, indeed, sexual, and it took its collegial place not far from the Jesus night light, the red Haitian candles of male and female forms, and the Buda de Dinero good-luck money-attracting spray. A second lingam we sent to a friend who wrote back, “What a good little lemon squeezer!” (which would have made good sense to the Robert Johnson who sang the “Traveling Riverside Blues”).
     A conventional European meal -- even an airline meal -- seemed a marvel when we flew out of Nigeria after eating nothing but food from the local market all year, yet I clearly do not wish wholly to leave that wet and sunny land entirely behind, because in my attic I have yet, though I rarely look at them, a monkey’s hand from the Benin City juju market and an enormous black beetle whose larvae grew in the fruit of palms and were eaten with relish by the locals and by us with a bit less enthusiasm. (Once our dignified Yoruba principal in his three piece British woolen suit was bedeviled by one of these monsters while trying to give a speech.) And we have as well a humble figure, carved by the local Master of Ughelli, a crude tortoise-like object which doubtless contains at least as much mana as the more elaborate objects vended in the foreign oil compounds.
     And so, we all surround ourselves with the household gods that time has shown will serve us. We go through life carrying our memories behind, unable to reenter the gone moment or to leave it entirely. Like clothes long unworn at the back of the closet or a ten-year-old check register, be it ever so mundane and arbitrary, each souvenir signifies the ineluctable passage of time and the sweet affection that so tragically ties us to this world. Twain and Cooper both record the humorous usage by which Americans who had gone abroad were called hajjis, but surely there is something of pilgrimage to our peregrinations, no less when we muse at home as when we travel to far-away places.

Cookie Man

     During the month the travelers had been in Fes, they had become habitués of two cafés: the first a small hole-in-the-wall operated by gold-toothed Mufis and his teen-age worker Ahmed who slept on a rug in the back and the second, the Gout de Fes, overseen by Abdullah (who had no teeth at all) and his aged father, while their ancient carp moved sluggishly about in clouded tanks. In either café one was entitled to a comfortable seat among the company of friends if one purchased mint tea once or twice during the day or perhaps a café au lait. In a shadowy corner of the Gout de Fes one was likely to find Driss, who managed to give the impression of reclining while seated in a chair and who kept within the capacious folds of his djellaba a store of kief which the tea-drinker might purchase for a few pennies. Some regulars kept their pipes behind the counter.
     Kief (the Arabic word means “well-being” or “pleasure”) refers both to the potent resin glands (or trichomes) of cannabis and to the mixture of this material with finely ground tobacco which is commonly smoked in the Maghreb. Though its use is traditional, it has been technically prohibited since 1954, and many smokers in 1970 were semi-discreet. Still, each café (except for a few would-be French places) had a dealer like Driss who simply lounged about and chatted between serving his clients who sometimes included police officers and army men. Workmen often kept a long pipe with its very small terra cotta bowl next to them as they wove or hammered patterns in metal trays. Though one saw users everywhere, on one medina wall was a government poster warning against cannabis with the most striking skeleton in electric primary colors smoking the Moroccan sebsi and shkaff. Had the traveler only had the temerity to snatch one, it would have been a fine souvenir!
     After traveling to Rabat. they were seeking new contacts. They had a room at the Hotel Rigini in the old town for $1.20 a night. Musicians strolled by the streets outside, followed by butchers carrying carcasses, donkeys with bales, and people hawking every sort of goods including, of course, what the travelers sought. When they first encountered the Cookie Man he babbled about his relations with American GIs during World War II, then trailed off in a more confidential voice, slightly husky and damp, naming his prices. At their next meeting both parties felt all right about becoming slightly more trusting. The travelers were prepared to follow to where the Cookie Man led.
     Walking along the old city walls, they came upon a series of cafés, the first rather neat and trim for an old town place, the second more funky, descending next to the third and then the fourth level, all contained within the walls of the medina. They entered the humblest establishment close behind their guide. The space was dark and smoky, low-ceilinged but crowded. The Cookie Man pointed wordlessly to a ladder that led to a loft above. They emerged into a room with balconies somehow invisible from below. They ducked next through a low passage to enter a second chamber on this level where they settled in to talk business. The Cookie Man spoke slowly, almost wearily, of his wares in a voice that sounded hypnotic or perhaps hypnotized. He had a variety of kief and hashish. In the middle of leisurely explanations about the town where each product was produced, he paused significantly, and, with an air of incredible lasciviousness, said, “You know, though, what I got is cookie, I got good cookie, gooooood cookie, ahh! Show you good time. Want some coookie?”
     He reached into his djellaba and rummaged around, reached a bit further, and withdrew what we recognized as a bit of madjoun, the Moroccan cannabis confection. In this “cookie” were kief and ground almonds and cinnamon and clove and honey and bits of detritus from the realms beneath the Cookie Man’s robes, and the travelers had a taste for it nonetheless and tried some and bought a bit more, and chewed thoughtfully, and eventually somehow they made their way down from the mysterious chamber where he held court and through the twisting streets, through a dozen blind turns, past a lane of metalworkers and the next of leather craftsmen, out in the end to the coast by the old Casbah (or fort). People there were cleaning clothes, where a freshwater stream entered the ocean. The travelers clambered atop huge rocks like frozen sponge, like the surface of the moon, and watched the people doing laundry.
     Suddenly the adhan, the call to prayer, arose: Allahu akbar! The people put aside their work, turned to face Mecca, and prostrated themselves in prayer. And, as the sea struck the rocky shore, and an odor of incense mixed with grilled lamb drifted by in the wind, the unbelievers watching from the rocks were moved and doubtless benefited from the pause in the day’s occupations. The water’s roar, constant and urgent as time’s arrow nearly obliterated the sound of the muezzin, whose melancholy soulful tone undermined the reassuring list of certainties he was reciting. “Hayya ‘ala ‘l-falah!” [Come to success!]

Najibe’s Stories

These stories were collected from Najibe who was at the time a street boy/hustler in the fabulous city of Fes. I describe him in a posting for February of 2010. I have many pages of these. They vary from old jokes to folk motifs to careless obscenity. I imagine I was influenced by Paul Bowles who gathered such fine narratives from similar informants.

The Moroccan Visits Paris
One time a Moroccan man went to Paris and there he spent all that he had for a suit of clothes and he went to see the rich people and he convinced them he is the rich man of Morocco. He found the richest man there and he borrowed five million francs from him. He said, “Come to visit me in Fes, and I will pay you back. My name is Sidi Monarfft.” [?] Now what that means is “I don’t know.” So then the next week, the rich Frenchman went to Morocco and he saw a big building, seventeen stories high and he asked the man in front of it who owns it and the man says “Monarfft.” [“I don’t know.”] He strolled into the market and saw a huge rug shop with many salesman, and he asked a passerby whose shop it is and he was told again “Monarfft.” He thought his friend must be indeed wealthy, perhaps even wealthier than himself. Then he passed by a home decked out in mourning. He asked who had died and was told “Monarfft.” “Oh, no,” he thought, “now he’s dead! My money’s gone!”

Zh’hah is Caught Pickpocketing
One day Zh’hah go pickpocketing – he’s caught and brought before the king and the king sentenced him to three hundred lashes. “Oh, king,” he begged, “please permit me first to go and inform my aged mother of my disgrace. I promise to return promptly.” The king gave him permission, but he did not go to his mother’s house. He went instead to the market where he began calling out, “Three hundred clubs for sale. Three hundred strong ones. My price is not high.” And he found a customer and brought the man before the king and said that he had purchased the punishment.

The Fat Man and the Baby
There was once this man who was very fat and he was feeling he should do something so he went to see a doctor and asked if he could become thinner. Now this doctor, he had one woman who makes love for money and she had a baby that she did not want. So he told her to put that baby in his laboratory and he made that fat man go to sleep and when he woke up he gave him baby and said, “Look what I found inside of you!” And the man said, “I don’t seem thinner yet,” and the doctor said, “Don’t worry. Take these pills and you will be” and he sent him out the door with the baby. And the man went to his driver who was waiting by the car and he said, “Look what you do! You joke around with me and so now we have baby!”

The European, the Jew and the Muslim
Some guys were walking along, three of them, a European and a Muslim and Jew and they saw a girl and they went, you know, to speak with her, and she said, “No it’s late now. Tomorrow come see me.” And the first one to come to visit her was the European and he asked her, “What is your name?” and she said “Life.” And then she asked him what he wanted most and he could get it right away. He said, “I want to study” for in Europe everyone is a student. “Give me a book to read,” he said. Now the next to come is the Jew and he said, “Give me good business and intelligent men to help.” Now the third to come was the Muslim who said, “I just want to fuck.”

The Muslim and his Jewish Neighbor
There was a Jew and a Muslim who lived next door to each other in Fes and the Muslim noticed that the Jew went to his Jewish mosque every day. One day the Muslim go first to that place, very early, in disguise and he hid in the attic and later the Jew came in to say prayers and the Muslim called out from the attic, “I am you god, what you want?” The Jew say, “What I want is big money business” and the Muslim in the attic say, “That is easy. Just give ten dirham to your neighbor the Muslim who live on the same street and soon your wish will be granted.” He say, “Okay,” and the Muslim from above say “Then go get all your Jewish friends to come and see god too” and each of them he told to give five dirham, and that’s how one Muslim got to be rich as Jew.

Where Silver Comes From
The teacher in school ask where silver comes from, and one boy says, “That is easy. I know the answer,” and the teacher ask “Where?” and the boy say, “When I need coins for market, I ask, and the silver comes from my mother.”

The Telephone
One man had a telephone that didn’t work and he looked out the window and saw someone coming, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone in person – he just wanted to be able to use the telephone. So he stood right in his front window and pretended to be talking on the telephone. He said, “No, I can’t see you, I am too busy. I don’t care how important your business is. I can’t see anyone.” And the man who had come walking up knocked on the door and the man look out the window and said, “You cannot come – I am too busy. You must have heard me telling this other one.” And the visitor said, “I have come to fix your broken phone.”

The Kief Smokers
One day two fellows are sitting smoking kief, you know, just like us, and one fellow he sees a fly on the ceiling and he says “Is King Fly,” and the other says “If is King Fly you need a motorcycle.”

A Problem on the Border

     When I first traveled abroad, I thought I was a bit more clever than others. Forty years ago many people used cash or traveler’s checks (or “cheques” as American Express would have it). In those distant days, even credit cards were uncommon, and I certainly had none. I obtained a letter of credit from the Northern Trust Company, my bank in Chicago, a document usually used by businessmen. In this way I would risk carrying no money and my savings could continue to bear interest in my absence. I then plagued banks throughout Europe and North Africa by showing up and requesting twenty or twenty-five dollars in the local currency. This worked well, we found, even in out of the way places.
     We were proceeding across North Africa mostly by train. At that time, the Moroccan trains had four classes. The last of these was our inevitable choice and we rumbled across country in cars with backless wooden benches that reminded me of trains in old Western movies. Oujda was our last Moroccan town – we bought some Algerian money from a street hustler before boarding the train. The black market existed because the Algerian government currency was controlled; that is, it did not trade freely but was maintained at an artificial level by the government.
     We had had some difficulty entering Algeria. My profession was listed as “editor” on the visa form, and the USA was uneasy with the Algerian National Liberation Front which had clear alliances to the Vietnamese one. After all, under Boumédienne, members of the Black Panther “international section” were guests there and, in a few months, Tim Leary would arrive to join them. I convinced the immigration people that I was harmless, and I was admitted to the land by someone who presumably understood that I would receive money through the banks’ approved pipelines.
     In fact, I had no difficulty using the letter of credit in Algeria, and I retained all the documents and receipts accompanying the transactions. In Annaba we sought to buy tickets through to Tunis, but the clerk insisted that we have a bon de passage, while the issuing official, unfamiliar with letters of credit, wanted to see the more conventional document recording currency imported, changed, and carried out. Having imported no money – well, we had, in fact, but that was illicit unreported cash – we had never received this form.
     We were stalemated. It did no good to point out that the immigration man’s principle would mean that we could never leave his country, a result desired by no party. He simply turned up the palms of his hands in impotence. He had the bureaucrat’s taste for asserting power when possible as well as the typical minor functionary’s fear of doing anything outside of standard operating procedure. He surely toadied to his superiors and thus had a reasonable expectation that his inferiors would do him the same courtesy.
     We decided to head toward the border anyway. Early in the morning we took the train to Souk Ahras, built on the ruins of Tagaste, Augustine’s birthplace and a Roman municipium. There, in an office at the train station, we encountered the same obdurate official refusal to allow us to leave. The immigration officer had returned to his heaps of paperwork, and we were quietly discussing what might happen if we simply walked to the border when the chef de gare strolled by, resplendent in his perfectly pressed uniform. He wore decorations like a soldier’s and walked with military bearing.
     Pleased to observe that something out of the ordinary was transpiring in his domain, he took an interest and summoned us into his office. He offered tea and we could see things were looking up. We passed a few pleasantries back and forth in our imperfect French and exchanged opinions on world events. We discussed the glories of Algeria and the virtues of the current regime. When I ventured to ask about our immediate circumstance, he sighed, as though such trivial matters were very nearly beneath his level of perception, signed the necessary paper, and pushed it toward us. Beyond the stage of relishing manipulation, he knew the meaning of noblesse oblige. As a big man, he demonstrated his power by patronage. Fortunately, that day, he chose to patronize us.

A Waterfall Near Marrakech

     I read that now Setti Fatma has been overtaken by tourism.  This account of it in 1990 as "the town where the road ends" has become obsolete and has gained the scent of nostalgia.

     We left the market at Ourika, driving on with Hassan and Abdan bi into the mountains along the route of a lucid oued whose rock-filled bed is much larger than its present stream, passing a few small settlements, a pottery shop, terraced gardens, too small to be called fields. Above, the snowy heights passed in and out of view as the road twisted. The driver of our broken-down Mercedes played Bob Marley tapes and sang along in English with great cheer, innocent of any knowledge of the language. At one point we noticed a number of houses by the stream severely damaged, with exposed iron reinforcements protruding from their concrete walls and floors. Hassan said that at times the river swells immensely and pushes through the valley with a force that is titanic, if short-lived. Patricia asked if the builders didn’t know their work would be undone. “Oh, sure,” he answered, “but they sell it to some foreigner who wants a house by the river.”

     We arrived then in Setti Fatma, "sixty women,” says Abdan bi, though printed sources gloss the name as Lady Fatima, a female scholar and legendary founder of the settlement.  Here the road gives out, turning to a rocky track shortly before the map says it will. We scampered around the river bed, taking pictures and goofing, together under the sun in sharp clear air. We walked on a bit further and then set out to climb toward the cascades. (Hassan asked the next passerby heading back toward town to tell the driver we will not return for some time.) Following the river up the mountain, we passed little homesteads with tiny lush green terraces. Small goats hopped manically around cattle with deep and empty eyes, but the homes soon gave out as we ascended, keeping close to the river bed. There had been a path at the start, but now we simply spied out the most likely route, making decisions moment by moment, passing from one side of the water to the other. Hassan explored ahead and waited, intentionally choosing the more difficult climbs for his own amusement. Abdan bi, in spite of his crippled leg, leapt and landed and leapt again. After Hassan told him “You are a monkey,” there was no stopping his scratching and vocalizing. We made our way over boulders, across slippery rocks as the temperature drops and new vistas appeared with every twist of the trail.

     Once or twice we hauled over a rock to construct a better crossing. Rock to rock. I’m reminded of Dharma Bums, rock to rock. Back in time, the rip-rap of things, and here. And we’re holding hands and hoisting each other and making it higher and higher into the wet and shadowy crevice of the mountain. When we came to a handsome if modest little waterfall, Abdan bi merrily shouted a word he knows in English: “Higher! Higher!” And we climbed and climbed for hours until it seems almost too much and then – of course – Hassan pointed around the next rock and up – the cascades we were seeking!

     Unaccountably, there’s a little wooden booth there, one man’s franchise. Who buys this man’s Coca-cola? His bread? Does he climb up here daily? His cell adjoined his business. We sat for coffee and gazed contentedly at each other. More pictures. Talk turned to racism. Abdan bi said, “People who feel that way should remove the pupils of their eyes since those are black.” Hassan found he has lost the pin he had been wearing for days picturing himself with Miles Davis. “He’s returned to Africa,” I told him. He said he wouldn’t care but had wanted to give the pin to Abdan bi.

     There was ice there where the water trickled down the rocks. The falls were high, but afforded no sight at their foot of the massive white peaks. Suddenly, it was cold – time to go.

     “We must leave here before 5:30,” Hassan said, “The water will come all at once and very big. I wouldn’t want to live here like this guy. Also, the big – er, monkeys, you know, they come down to find women who are virgins and they want to do some thing with her.”

     Starting back, we discovered a better path, high above the stream, some passages even cut into the rock, much swifter going though still blocked here and there by boulders. Eventually the town below came into view, but we were a distance from the stream now, entering the terraced gardens. Making our way down into the village, we were on the wrong side of the river, but found another little rough bridge of untrimmed wood. “One at a time,” said Hassan. (Earlier, as we had crossed a similar structure, Abdan bi had launched his simian hijinks, jumping up and down to shake the flexible but makeshift little crossing.)

     After a brief outburst of haggling over our prolonged absence we started back for Marrakech. Hassan recovered Miles Davis, not lost really, but waiting in the back seat of the beat-up Mercedes.

Jemaa el Fna

Though the name is sometimes translated as “assembly of the dead,” Marrakech’s main square, the Jemaa el Fna, is, in fact, teeming with life. Before us passes a glass case cart with great wheel-like flatbreads, while a bearded blind beggar led by a small boy chants his appeals for alms, and a bit of a crowd gathers around a man on whose mat are displayed an egg, some herbs, and a desiccated lizard. The water-man with his leather bag and gala costume seems lost and bewildered. Two ladies’ black veils make them look like mischievous conspirators as they exchange confidences.

Even now, early in the morning, the sound of drummers pulses under a wailing pipe. From the direction of the souks comes Arab pop music playing a more festive and soaring soundtrack, but one no less melancholy in its disarming moist blues vulnerability. A madman passes laughing as his eyes look inward.
The crowd has swollen around the man with the mat.

Someone slips a snake about my neck – the specter of greed!

We meet Hassan in a café on the margin of the square and order mint tea. A grizzled old man passes before our table moving smoothly, seemingly just above the ground. Hassan hails him, tells us that he and his brothers had performed with this man in the deep south where the elder had at the time been considered a great singer. He had looked after the Hakmoun boys like a father, arranging for their rooms and seeing that they ate well. The man looks back blankly. His eyes are glazed. He remembers nothing. He holds a used pair of high Italian-style shoes he had meant to sell in the street. His chin is frosted with whiskers, his mind far off somewhere. He wears two grey-striped djellabas in the afternoon sun under a thick brown one. Finally, he seems to remember just a bit. Suddenly Hassan offers him 150 dirham for his ring. Hassan tells us it is very powerful, although the stone is lost. Having known this ring during his childhood, he has no doubt. It will bring strength of will, success, it is a treasure to acquire if only to pass it on to his son Jamel. “Such a ring,” says Hassan, “is all but unobtainable in these days.”

Tetouan

Another night in a hotel without a toilet. (See Creel in October 2010 posts.)

     The two made the crossing from Algeciras, Spain, just by Gibraltar, onto the African continent, landing in Spain’s remaining enclave of Ceuta. After long delays, at the Bab-Sebta border crossing – in those days, long-haired men were often turned back at the border, as were women traveling alone -- they set out on our way only to be stopped by a second contingent of customs officials who searched the bus (though their colleagues had searched it minutes before) by the roadside.
     In Tetouan they were hardly down from the bus when they were approached by Aziz, one of the myriad young male hustlers so common in Morocco, claiming to be a student wishing only to practice English. He offered to get them a bed for six dirham (the dirham was then 20¢), but the proprietor asked eight. They accepted anyway, after bringing a kerosene lamp into the room and seeing a charming old pitcher and basin for washing. Though they managed to shake Aziz (who surely received a commission on their room), they were soon accosted by Mohammed, likewise eager to “practice English.” After repeating to the point of rudeness and slightly beyond that they did not want a guide and hearing his insistence that he was only “a friend,” they wearied and gave way before his stubbornness, and he did indeed proceed to take them through the town, negotiating the narrow and winding ways past bearded men on horseback and tattooed women selling on the street, though the medina with its Andalusian, Jewish, and Berber sections (a UNESCO World Heritage site). Stopping in at shops working leather, metal, and cloth, they shared a few puffs of kief with the tradesmen as they paused in greeting. Feeling powerfully affected as they had been for the most part abstinent for several months, the travelers invited Mohammed to dinner, a fitting and “friendly” recompense for his trouble, they thought.
     After the grounding of a satisfying meal of legumes and lamb with round whole wheat loaves, they set out strolling again, here and there, in the end passing through a door under the house number 7, they mounted a flight of stairs to find a café full of robed figures drinking mint tea and smoking kief. Above a television set played what seemed to be mad, shifting images, moving from what a newsman to a cartoon to a musician in the course of a minute. The café was over a lane, in construction that connected buildings on either side of the street, and the window looked directly over the crowded passage, even at this late hour full of people bargaining, laughing, moving fast.
     After a few contemplative hours, Mohammed made his move. He wanted his new friends to take some stuff into Europe for him, with big profits for all. When they demurred, his stubbornness reasserted itself and he became slightly vehement. When he eventually realized that they were not in fact going to be persuaded, he threw up his hands in frustration and stormed out like a madman.
     It was after midnight. They had no idea where they were, but, after a few inquiries, they made our way back to the central square and found their hotel. When they emerged from their room the next morning, they encountered Mohammed again. In the brief interval between when he had left them and when they had located their lodging, he had somehow managed to forge such a relationship with the two young Scandinavian women who had taken the room next to them that he had, in fact, spent the night there.

More Portraits from the Floating World: Pa'ahssysy and Spector

Pa’ahssysy

     Pa’ahssysy, we were told, was a kula or kief wino. In the mornings he washed cars, preferably for tourists, for an hour or two, and he contrived to stay stoned most of the rest of the time. Around mid-day he would enter Mufis’ hole-in-the-wall café in Fes's new town and call for mint tea. Mufis would continue reading the paper, then he might bark a few orders to his assistant Ahmed and proceed to stare into space for ten minutes, only then rising to make the tea. Pa’ahssysy could sit, then, satisfied, for half the day drinking his tea and smoking tiny bowls in an unhurried and consistent pace, blowing the ash to the floor. The slow service may have reflected Mufis’ feeling that Pa’ahssysy’s custom was a liability to his establishment, though he cared to go no further than to hedge a bit about the charity required of every Muslim.
     Pa’ahssysy resembled an amiable if slightly pixilated bear, very dark with a woven cap ornamented with stars and a black three-quarter length pseudo-leather coat tied about the middle with grimy raveling string. His eyes, it must be said, were somewhat weary and blood-shot. He often slept in the park.
     Pa’ahssysy spoke no French, so our communication was largely through gesture and expression. He delighted in repeating his name and laughing as though it were an excellent joke, but he also made sudden, apparently unmotivated, growls. If a police officer were to pass by on the street, he would assume a scowl and declare, “Yechh – police” and then laugh harder yet. His attitude must have grown from experience. He had recently spent six months in prison for accosting a woman on the street outside his carwash and making bold advances. When she resisted, he claimed to be chief of police. Ahmed told us that while he was playing cards, Pa’ahssysy had stolen his wallet (which must have had precious few coins) and vanished for a week or two.
     Once we met Pa’ahssysy in the medina and he took us on a tour of the “shnen sbil” (a garden that felt to him like home), the Oued Fes, Moulay Idriss, the Bab Boujeloud. These place names became charms of friendship that day.
     Shortly before we moved on, Pa’ahssysy made another of his periodic reappearances, now sporting a new blazer with a woven crest of Fenwick High School in Oak Park on the lapel.


Lester Spector

     At breakfast on the rooftop of the Sita Guest House in Varanasi, as the waiters stood by with sticks to threaten monkeys eager to snatch a bit of food, Lester Spector told me he had been practicing meditation for thirty-six years. “But I’m a Jewish boy from the Bronx – I don’t expect to be enlightened – still it helps me to carry on.”
     And the man certainly does carry on. During his career, apart from a year with a guru in Patna, he had been a lawyer in the US, later a law professor in Toronto and then in Western Australia where he had also sat for a decade as a Supreme Court judge and wrote a number of scholarly books on legal topics. Apart from these substantial professional achievements, he had studied Jungian psychology and had published a widely sold road novel about two unlikely seekers in India.
     Australian tax authorities were pursuing him yet with an annoying civil suit seeking to recover a considerable sum. “I’ll win eventually, but it will take years. I occupy myself by making obstacles in my life this way.” This legal entanglement may account for his avoiding Australia in recent exploits.
     He said he had spent a year doing work for a gangster-linked business in Moscow. When his intention to leave them emerged, they tried “at gunpoint” to reclaim his compensation. Though rather foggy about the details, his account had him outwitting the tough guys and making off with the money. He seemed at any rate somewhat flush.
     His girlfriend was on her way back to Australia. He said his novel had been optioned by a major studio and he was scouting, among other things, locations for filming. Whatever it was he was after, his restless eyes did move in an unusually lively fashion.

Two Pictures from a Floating World

The traveler's consciousness of "just passing through" affects behavior. On the road, in a floating world, one's perspective is different from at home. These are the earliest two of a series of portraits of people met while traveling.


1. Sandro

     Alessandro said, “I think that the only way to overcome the temptation is to succumb to it. Besides, to feel pleasure and pain, one learns so much more.”
     His young friend Hector had just returned from Nepal. “I turned the prayer wheels a little, but I had not the right spirit. I was always waiting to see what I’d win.”
     “You know, I go to The Tavern,” says Sandro, “and every American I meet, no, I don’t meet him, I sit near to him, and after he gets a little drunk, he says to me, ‘I don’t really dig this place because it’s just like home.’ ‘I don’t like American freaks,’ he says, ‘because I know them so well.’ ‘All the people here,’ he says, ‘they have brought their American hang-ups with them.’ Then ten minutes later, someone else, he says the same words to me, I mean the same words, four, five times in the evening, and yet I see them all there, all together still.
     Americans, they are always laughing, always sticking their elbows at each other, making those double-entendre, what?, smart remarks. They always talk about the future, they will go away, go home, should I go home, they even ask this of others . . .”

     We had gone to Sandro’s place yesterday to take a shower and smoke a little Afghan hash. He tells us he has published two novels and a volume of short stories in Argentina and won some national prize only to refuse it.
     “You know, I just write them a very short, simple note, like a child, I say I will not take the prize because I do not like you. And I enjoy it very much from here, I get the Argentine newspapers and I see the big fuss and what can they say? They cannot say young Argentine writer refuses prize, he says he does not like us. It is the government gives the prize, you know.

     This novel I work on now, it is near to the truth, I think, but I hope mainly that I can take a trip to India with Hector maybe. [His manifest destiny, Patricia called it.] I know what I want, it will come. This happens to me always: I find friends, good situations, drugs, I am satisfied intellectually, physically, sexually, emotionally, and it happens in very funny ways sometimes.
     For instance, I once see this picture of a girl, she is with Pablo, Hector’s brother, in India and I think, I could get along very well with this girl and six months later I marry her, Pablo marry at the same time her girlfriend.”
     The next day he was full of notions about the conjunction of people and places. “How do you find it here? These rocks, they seek people out. We find them, they find us. I’ve met very fine people among in these rocks. And we shall meet again, too – you know – the similar-minded – we shall find ourselves always at the same places.” We never saw him again.
Ibiza, 1970


2. Najibe

     A cute trickster always doing business at the youth hostel, Najibe described himself as “first hippy of Morocco.” When we first met him in Mufis’ hole-in-the-wall café, he claimed to be a student at an American school and hastened to exhibit a card and a song sheet from some program there as evidence.      Najibe would go on about his rich wife in Paris: “She have three hotels, no less than $20 a day, any room. When she die and say I am her man you can come, eat, drink, have room in hotel free. I come back to Morocco, build seventeen story hotel, buy good shop in the old town.” 

      He often repeated, in a slightly melancholy tone “Is first two in Morocco smoke too much, is Pa’ahssysy and Najibe.” 

      When another foreign visitor responded to Najibe’s fantasies of world travel by asking if he hitchhiked on the road, he answered with a contemptuous wave, “Me – avion, very time.” When we showed him a photograph of ourselves, he palmed it and wouldn’t return it (aware, I suppose, of the pleasures of recollection, as I am now, thinking of him). 

      Najibe fabricated endless lies sitting in the cafes talking of his friends James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, talking, too, of depression “I think of life, I think of no life,” talking of homosexuality “all of Morocco, it is homoseckual 100% because it needs much money to pay for wife for marriage, the marriage it is not for me, because I am marry with the homosexual.”
 Fes, 1971