Moroccan Dreams: Oriental Myth, Colonial Legacy 9781350987241, 9781786730176

Table of contents :
Cover
Author biography
Endorsements
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Yes, we conserve
2. Mosaïque
3. Lyautey’s Dream
4. Medina
5. La Place
6. Kasbah
7. Sahara
8. Mogador
9. Lighthouse
Finale
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Claudio Minca is Professor and Head of the Cultural Geography Department at Wageningen University. His current research centres on three major themes: tourism and travel theories of modernity; the spatialization of (bio)politics; and the relationship between modern knowledge, space and landscape in postcolonial geography. His most recent books are Hitler’s Geographies (with P. Giaccaria, 2016), On Schmitt and Space (with R. Rowan, 2015) and Real Tourism (with T. Oakes, 2011). Lauren Wagner is Assistant Professor in Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University. A cultural geographer and linguistic anthropologist, her research concerns the dynamics of migration and diaspora between Morocco and Europe, as related through tourism encounters and linguistic practice.

‘Making a significant contribution to tourist studies and postcolonial theory, in this eloquent, evocative and richly illustrated text, Minca and Wagner produce a compelling account that reveals Morocco as a (post)colonial tourist dreamscape par-excellence. Drawing on a wealth of historical, travel and academic texts, the authors take the pulse of contemporary Moroccan tourism while tracing a historical trajectory that emerged from the visions of Marshal Lyautey, instigator of the dual city. Demonstrating how these French colonial designs rendered the country ripe for European appropriation through fantasy and desire, the authors weave a subtle, kaleidoscopic narrative that homes in on selective sites: Rabat’s “dual city”, the intoxicating and baffling medieval labyrinth of Fez, the spectacularized stage of Marrakech’s Jemaa el-Fna, the mysterious Kasbah, themed Saharan landscapes, the shifting hybridity of Tangier and the modernity of chic Essaouira. In these realms, tourists and locals consume particular forms of the “exotic” and reiterate performative conventions in the ongoing assembly of an imaginary colonial geography.’ Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University ‘What are the commonalities between colonial and tourist narratives about an authentic or exotic Morocco? Moroccan Dreams examines how Moroccans and foreigners transact orientalist visions of the Kingdom. Claudio Minca and Lauren Wagner blend historical and contemporary sources with ethnographic research to unveil the modernity and duplicity of these visions. This book will surely inspire others to follow these authors’ footsteps.’ James D. Sidaway, National University of Singapore

MOROCCAN DREAMS Oriental Myth, Colonial Legacy

CLAUDIO MINCA

AND

LAUREN WAGNER

From Claudio to Konrad. From Lauren to Beth, who helps her persevere.

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2016 Claudio Minca and Lauren Wagner The right of Claudio Minca and Lauren Wagner to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by the authors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Human Geography 34 ISBN: 978 1 84885 015 6 eISBN: 978 1 78672 017 7 ePDF: 978 1 78673 017 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Stone Serif by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface

vi xi xiv

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

1 31 74 104 133 163 187 217 243

Yes, we conserve Mosaı¨que Lyautey’s Dream Medina La Place Kasbah Sahara Mogador Lighthouse

Finale

273

Notes Bibliography Index

275 276 289

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1 Lyautey (Agence de Presse Meurisse 1920)

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Figure 1.2 Cover of the Protectorate monthly Nord-Sud (c.1939)

4

Figure 1.3 Lyautey in action, in a French children’s textbook (Flandre et al. 1955)

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Figure 1.4 ‘Moroccan People’ on display (Moroccan Tourist Authority 2004)

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Figure 2.1 Looking across the Straits of Gibraltar from Tarifa (Friendly Rentals 2012)

32

Figure 2.2 Jewish man and woman of Tangier (Taylor 1826)

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Figure 2.3 Moroccan and Tunisian pavilions at the 1867 Exposition (Lancelot 1867)

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Figure 2.4 English explorer and author A.J. Dawson, in ‘Moorish guise’ (1904)

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Figure 2.5 ‘Entrance to a Mella`, or Jewish Quarter’ (Cook 1910: 175)

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Figure 2.6 The Treaty of Algeciras cover of Le Monde Illustre´ (Abitbol 2010a: 151)

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Figure 2.7 Cover of L’illustration (15 December 1917)

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Figure 2.8 The crumbling architecture of a famous Fez medrasa (Bel and Larribe 1917, plate 50)

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Figure 2.9 Le Maroc par Marseille by Majorelle (1926)

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 2.10 Exterior, Palais de la Porte Dore´e (L. Wagner 2011)

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Figure 2.11 The Jet Age in Morocco (Shor and Shor 1955)

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Figure 2.12 Travel to the country of wonders. Window of the Office National Marocain du Tourisme in Paris (L. Wagner 2006)

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Figure 2.13 Me´tro station advertisement for Nouvelles Frontie`res: ‘Arriving you are called Martine. Leaving, Sheherazade.’ (L. Wagner 2006)

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Figure 2.14 Formerly the Salle des Feˆtes, now the Forum, site of the 1931 Congre`s International de l’Urbanisme aux Colonies et dans les Pays de Latitude Intertropicale (L. Wagner 2011)

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Figure 3.1 Avenue Mohammed V, formerly Avenue Dar el Makhzen (‘house of the coffer’), looking towards the medina (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 3.2 La Poste (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 3.3 Avenue Mohammed V, looking towards the Assouma Mosque and Quartier Administratif (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 3.4 Rabat from the north, c.1900 (Kerr 1912: facing page 228)

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Figure 3.5 Prost’s plan of Rabat, 1920 (Sefiani 1991: 89)

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Figure 3.6 Rabat from above, c.1925 (Sefiani 1991: 90)

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Figure 3.7 Promenade en vieux Maroc, opening page (Montfort 1917)

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Figure 3.8 Lyautey’s frontispiece in the 1921 Guide Blue

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Figure 4.1 Protectorate-era tourism office image of Fe`s (Quesnel c.1935)

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Figure 4.2 Aerial view of Fez (Brown 1973: 20)

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Figure 4.3 French troops firing on the medina of Fez during the 1912 revolts (L’illustration, 11 May 1912)

119

Figure 4.4 The classic panoramic overlook view of Fez (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 2)

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Figure 4.5 Picturing Fez for the outsider: architecture with unsuspecting bystanders (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 8)

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Figure 4.6 Architectural interior (of a Jewish house) (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 5)

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Figure 4.7 The street of Lauren’s house (L. Wagner 2009)

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Figure 4.8 Drawing of the rooftops of Fez from Pierre Loti’s travels in Morocco, L’illustration (28 September 1889)

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Figure 5.1 Scenes from Jemaa el-Fna at sunset (C. Minca 2006)

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Figure 5.2 Tourists in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

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Figure 5.3 Tourist urban developments in Marrakech (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 5.4 Hotel La Mamounia (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 5.5 Orange juice sellers in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

152

Figure 5.6 Local ‘figure’ performing the traditional ‘dentist’ in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 5.7 Games and Gnawa dancers in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 5.8 Snake-charmer taking photos of Moroccan tourists in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

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Figure 5.9 Gnawa performing and smiling in Jemaa el-Fna (Moroccan Tourist Authority 2004)

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Figure 5.10 Bodies in the square (C. Minca 2006)

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Figure 6.1 Valley of the Kasbahs (C. Minca 2012)

164

Figure 6.2 Harris’ illustration of approaching a kasbah (1895: 76)

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Figure 6.3 ‘A Moroccan castle: The Kasbah of Ouarzazate, seen from the dry river bed’ (Babin 1907: 164–5)

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Figure 6.4 A tighrimt at Skoura, pictured in an ad from the Sherifian Tourism Office (L’Atlas, Spring 1939)

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Figure 6.5 Grey economy outside Kasbah Taourirt (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 6.6 Muse´e du Cine´ma, Ouarzazate (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 6.7 Kasbah Assafar’s interior design (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.1 Dunes, Erg Chebbi (C. Minca 2012)

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 7.2 Merzouga from the dunes (C. Minca 2012)

198

Figure 7.3 Camping ‘in the desert’ (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.4 Reference to Le Touareg (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.5 Reference to Western literature (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.6 Orientalist riad in Merzouga (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.7 Remnants of the aircraft used to film Le Petit Prince (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.8 Family on motorbike translated into ‘ethnographic object’ along the tour (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.9 ‘Ethnographic’ visit of nomad tent (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 7.10 Tourists climbing dunes in the heat (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 8.1 The Kasbah, seen from the port on a busy morning (C. Minca 2012)

219

Figure 8.2 Villa Maroc. Entrance (C. Minca 2012)

220

Figure 8.3 Villa Maroc, dining room (C. Minca 2012)

221

Figure 8.4 Castel Real in Essaouira-Mogador (C. Minca 2012)

222

Figure 8.5 Reference to Jimmy Hendrix, Riad Al Madina (C. Minca 2012)

228

Figure 8.6 Place Moulay Hassan, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

231

Figure 8.7 The beach, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

234

Figure 8.8 Everyday fishing port scene, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 8.9 Promenade en Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

238

Figure 8.10 Internal courtyard, Riad Al Madina (C. Minca 2012)

240

Figure 9.1 Pastrana Tapestries, Afonso V of Portugal (late fifteenth century), ‘The Fall of Tangier’

244

Figure 9.2 Braun, G. and Hogenberg, F. ‘Tingis, Lusitanis, Tangiara’ (c.1535) Cologne

248

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Figure 9.3 Teatro Cervantes in Tangier (Cosmo45 2005)

250

Figure 9.4 Vue de Tanger, prise du champ des sacrifices (Taylor 1826)

252

Figure 9.5 ‘A family group in 1911’ (Keene 1911: front matter)

257

Figure 9.6 Lighthouse on Cap Spartel (Cook 1910: 159)

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Figure 9.7 Un coin du Petit Socco (du Taillis 1905: 148)

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Figure 9.8 Jane Bowles at the market, 1954 (K. Hamill, Millicent Dillon Papers, University of Texas at Austin)

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Figure 9.9 Cinema du Rif, Grand Socco (L. Wagner 2012)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the result of a decade of study in and travel to Morocco. There are indeed many people to thank for their contribution to the completion of this project. Firstly, Claudio would like to thank his former student Rachele Borghi for introducing him to the beauty and the fascination of Morocco in such a way that, after their first exploratory trip in 1999, he continued to visit the country every year for more than a decade. Rachele has been an important source of intellectual inspiration and a great travel companion. Claudio would also like to acknowledge all the Moroccan colleagues, students and friends who have helped in this long endevour. They are too many to be mentioned here, but Claudio would like to thank in particular the Faculty of Literature at the University Cady Ayyad in Marrakech for inviting him to spend a sabbatical period there in 2006. Two more people have played an important role in providing him with crucial insights about Morocco and Moroccan tourism: Claudio’s former student Mustapha Azaitraoui, who took him around Rabat and its secrets corners, but also provided him with important bibliographic hints, and Asmae Bouaouinate for the material generously provided on Moroccan desert tourism; Claudio is grateful to both for the rewarding conversations and their warm hospitality while in Morocco. Finally, Claudio would like to acknowledge the contribution to this book emanating from collaboration with Michael Crang, at Durham University, in preparing two grant proposals. Although the grants were not funded, the work done in their preparation was indeed very helpful in focusing on some key arguments developed in detail in this book. Several colleagues and collaborators abroad were also essential to Lauren during the writing process. Paul Dahan at the Museum of Jewish Moroccan Art in Brussels has amassed an incomparable collection of materials on Morocco and generously allowed us access, as has Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington DC. Eric Ross at Al Akhawayn University, Mimoun Hillali at the Institut Supe´rieur International du Tourisme, as well as Miriam Robinson Gould all contributed their time and considerable expertise.

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Claudio would also like to recognize the crucial institutional support that he has received during this past decade in order to pursue the Moroccan Dreams book project. The first exploratory fieldwork was done when he was working at the University of Venice; then at Newcastle University he received substantial financial support to travel to and to work on Morocco. Claudio enjoyed a oneterm sabbatical leave during that period which was spent in Marrakech. He is also grateful to the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and to the Environmental Sciences Department, at Wageningen University – where he is presently employed – for their constant support to this Moroccan project. The publisher, and in particular our editor David Stonestreet, have been very encouraging and incredibly patient. We do hope that they feel that the book will reward them for their trust in this project. The material used in this book is original and was collected and elaborated by the authors. However, as is the case with many long-term projects like this one, some of the topics treated here have been the object of work published in different forms in the past decade or so. This is the true for three chapters in particular: ‘Yes, we conserve’, ‘Lyautey’s Dream’ and ‘La Place’. Parts of these three chapters are indeed inspired by work published in the following essays: Minca, C. 2006. ‘Re-inventing the “square”: Postcolonial geographies and the tourist gaze in Jamaa el Fna, Marrakech’. In Minca, C. and Oakes, T. (eds). Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield; Minca, C. 2007. ‘The tourist landscape paradox’. Social and Cultural Geography, 8(3), pp. 433 – 53; Minca, C. and Borghi, R. 2009. ‘Morocco: Re-staging colonialism for the masses’. In Obrador, P., Pons, M. and Crang, M. (eds). Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities. Farnham: Ashgate; Minca, C. 2011. ‘No country for old men’. In Minca C. and Oakes, T. (eds). Real Tourism. London: Routledge; Wagner, L.B. and Minca, C. 2012. ‘Negotiating Marrakech: Postcolonial travels in Morocco’. In Nogue´s Pedregal, A. (ed). Culture and Society in Tourism Contexts. London: Emerald Publishing Group Limited; Wagner, L. and Minca, C. 2014. ‘Rabat retrospective: Colonial heritage in a Moroccan urban laboratory’. Urban Studies, 51(14), pp. 3011–25; Wagner, L. and Minca, C. 2015. ‘Topographies of the kasbah route: Hardening of a heritage trail’. Tourist Studies, December, pp. 1 – 27; Bialasiewicz, L. and Wagner, L. 2015. ‘Extraordinary Tangier: Domesticating practices in a border zone’. GeoHumanities, September, pp. 1 – 26. One last thought goes to beautiful Morocco. During these long years of work and travel we both developed a deep attachment to this country, and to the wonderful feeling of being there, of being in some strange way part of the ‘Moroccan dreams’ that we discuss in the pages that follow. The ‘Moroccan dream’ is indeed a pervasive colonial European project, and despite all our

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analytical efforts we could never entirely escape the feeling of being somehow involved in its enactments but also its fascination. This book is thus a tribute to Morocco but also to le Maroc, since they both contribute to the unique experience that we, as contemporary Euro-American travellers, are able to make of this extraordinary country and its real and imagined places.

PREFACE

(Post)colonial Moroccan spatialities From a European perspective Morocco has long been a mythic land, firmly rooted within the colonial imaginary and for more than a century appropriated by travellers, explorers, writers and artists such as Pierre Loti, Charles de Foucauld, Euge`ne Delacroix, Edith Wharton, Edmondo De Amicis, Paul Bowles and Elias Canetti. These imaginations are now increasingly being reconstructed for nostalgic consumption, re-inscribing the aesthetic poetics and politics at a new level, where colonial orderings are reflexively utilized in tourist products. In this book, we explore the past and present spatialities of the French ‘Colonial Modern’ in Morocco, explicitly taking these European and Western perspectives as our viewpoint and our ‘field’. This is thus not a book about Morocco: we do not claim to speak for ‘real’ contemporary Morocco, although its material geographies do provide the stage for our exploration of European conceptualizations of le Maroc, intended as a paradigmatic site of past and present imaginations about modernity. Morocco here is presented as a site of colonial spatial experimentation, but also as part of the European greater space of travel and leisure: as a space of familiar and mediated experience of difference lying just at the borders of Europe. We do so by attempting a postcolonial analysis of the ways in which the colonial legacy is actively reproduced within the social and spatial practices of many tourists, but also within the official tourist rhetoric about Moroccan culture and the place of Morocco in the world. In particular, we consider some of the effects of these processes on the definition of contemporary Moroccan cultural geographies: the ways in which urban spaces are (re)constructed and preserved; the ways in which Moroccan cultural space is mapped and defined; the ways in which new postcolonial tropes are produced and inscribed in a specific travel culture. The book uses as its starting point a geographical interpretation of the legacy of the first re´sident-ge´ne´ral of the Protectorate, Mare´chal Louis Hubert Gonzalve

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Lyautey, and his grand project for colonial Morocco. The relevance of this project for our analysis of Moroccan postcolonial tourist spatialites is twofold. Firstly, Morocco became in Lyautey’s mind the ideal spatial laboratory for the experimentation of an innovative social modernity, a crucial laboratory for the definition of the social and political future of the me´tropole and the spatial translation of the crisis of its modernities. Secondly, Lyautey was able to give concrete spatial form to his political dream of transforming an entire country – both metaphorically and materially – in little more than a decade (see Lyautey 1995 [1927]). Few, if any, other colonial projects were the materialization of the geographical imaginations of a single man; moreover, these geographies are largely still vibrant today. Lyautey’s project for a Morocco-specific politique indige`ne – distinct from Tunisia or Algeria – was articulated within three crucial concepts explicitly or implicitly recalled throughout the book: the principle of association (as opposed to the principle of assimilation adopted by the French up to that moment, and quite different from the British practices of association); with that, the idea of patrimoine (‘heritage’) as preserving otherness by means of a number of urban spatial strategies; and finally, deriving from the two previous principles, the ‘dual city’ concept that produced a genuine ‘doubling’ of the most important Moroccan cities of the time. This doubling founded a series of ‘new’ French cities alongside the existing Arab medinas, which, in Lyautey’s mind, should remain untouched and free to ‘spontaneously flourish’ (Bahi and Alami 1992; for an historical perspective see Prost 1932). Following these three main principles, the Protectorate planning machine literally produced a new and old geography of Morocco whose imprint can be clearly seen today, still perceived to represent the cultural ‘backdrop’ that attracts hundreds of thousands of European visitors to Morocco each year. What is more, French governance (like many other colonial powers of the time) also actively ‘reduced’ Morocco in cognitive terms and textualized it, enframing it within a number of new cartographies, new representations, new measures of space and culture (Bancel et al. 1997; Blanchard et al. 1993, 2003, 2005; Delanoe¨ 2002; Vaillat 1931; Vatin et al. 1984). In so doing, Lyautey’s machine succeeded (at least partially) in isolating ‘Moroccanness’ from its protagonists, in an attempt to preserve the French – more broadly European – ‘Moroccan dream’. The scripting of Morocco as a tourist destination for a European elite can then be traced back to the French Protectorate and, especially, the efforts of Mare´chal Lyautey (Rabinow 1989; Wright 1991). As noted, Lyautey’s politique indige`ne not only left existing Moroccan cities intact and built new ‘European’ cities alongside, but also encouraged indigenous arts and crafts through schools and workshops. Such policies contributed to enframing Morocco as an aesthetic object of conservation, as an-Other space to be encountered, set up for tourist consumption, even by travellers who were Lyautey’s

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contemporaries (i.e. Tharaud and Tharaud 1918, 2008 [1930]; Wharton 2004 [1920]). Postcolonial studies have long noted the paradox of even ‘benign’ imperialists destroying the cultures they set out to preserve, leaving a romantic imaginary of an unattainable and lost pristine Other as an object of nostalgia. Indeed, in our (post)colonial present, many are mourning the passing of the colonial securities and sureties, re-staging them as elegant and sophisticated lifestyles – as in films where the colonial is replayed in ways which make ‘racial domination appear innocent through elegance of manners’ (Rosaldo 1993: 68; see also Crang 2004). The number afflicted by this colonial nostalgia seems to be rising rather than falling, particularly as lived memories of the actual barbarities slide into the past (Werbner 1998). Thus, the project of this book is to investigate the deeply spatial nature of the Moroccan (post)colonial project, its representations and its practices, and, moreover, the ways in which these same are reinterpreted today within the negotiation between contemporary conceptualizations of Moroccaness and European modernity. The colonial legacy is, in fact, embodied both by the European tourist searching for a lost Oriental innocence and ready-made exoticism, as well as by the tourist industry and the Moroccan authorities, who endeavour to map ‘true’ national heritage and justify its preservation (Benjelloun 2002; Touzani 2003). For many Moroccan sites, colonial legacies have led to what Clifford Geertz termed ‘cultural involution’: rather than eroding local specificity, development leads to a reinforcement of cultural formations. Far from a bounded, static, undivided and ‘happy’ culture ravaged and preyed upon by external forces, where cultural changes arising from tourism are produced by the intrusion of a superior sociocultural system in a supposedly weaker receiving milieu (Crang 2004), our observations – over more than a decade (for each author) of contact with Morocco, as tourists and as researchers – document a coproduction of ‘Morocco’ between ‘local’ and ‘tourist’. Indeed, Moroccans have long been prepared for touristic encounters through the tutelage of colonialism; many have adopted roles from an imperial script as part of a broader vision of modernity, while tourists likewise adopt roles as ‘orientalist’ consumers. Colonial legacies thus introduced ‘Morocco’ in both tourist and local imaginations, so that today’s Moroccan tourist geographies exemplify a ‘colonial’ re-enactment in place, where diverse (contemporary) performances and identity strategies intersect with traces of the colonial project and local re-interpretations of the very concepts of ‘heritage’ and ‘culture’. Within this volume, we examine precisely such often aestheticized reenactments of the colonial, conceived as a spatially defined response to the tension of an unaccomplished modernity, as a re-enchanting of the past and of specific locations. We will also explore the ways in which ‘Morocco’ becomes complicit in the re-writing of these colonizing fictions, as part of a marketing of ‘colonial chic’, a commodified way of recycling imperialism. In particular,

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we will seek to unravel the elements that are so appealing about this imagined experience by looking to tourism and modern travel, understood as territorialized discursive regimes, as geographies that trace the borders of the European self (Mernissi 2003; Said 1993), as sets of practices that involve consuming peoples and places; but also as globalizing processes producing new knowledges, new economies and new spaces of contemporary modernity in Morocco (Minca and Borghi 2009; Wagner and Minca 2011).

Moroccan travels We explore these geographies by tracing a tour through Morocco, stopping to visit seven of the key sites that today, as in Lyautey’s time, are foci for the European gaze. In each site, we consider European tourist imaginaries of Morocco at the contact zones that emerge in encounters between visitor and local, reflecting on the negotiation of meaning implied by the definition of a postcolonial cultural identity for Morocco and the endless spatializations of this same negotiation. To do so, we adopt a number of geographical ‘objects’ as analytical tools for the understanding of these postcolonial re-enactments, to allow us to map strategically a ‘real’ itinerary through the country’s metaphors and materialities. We thus employ a methodology of travel as a spatial practice (Clifford 1997), in which we blur the roles of tourist, traveller, academic and ethnographer while embarking on ‘fieldwork’ that is simultaneously interrogative of the ‘field’ – Morocco – and the ‘work’ – the Western experience of travel there. These roles encompass our collected engagements with Morocco as they have shifted over time and with ever deeper consideration and investigation into its citizens, histories, aspirations and future directions (Borghi and Minca 2003; Minca 2006a; Minca and Borghi 2009; Wagner 2008, 2011; Wagner and Minca 2012). Our ethnographically spatial analysis, then, includes both historical and contemporary narratives as dimensions to our reflection on Morocco. At one level, we reconstruct and deconstruct the orientalist tropes that allowed the French – and the Western gaze more generally – to ‘discover’ Morocco as an exotic land, and to incorporate it as a spatial laboratory for experimenting alternative (European) modernities, ‘away from home’. On a different level, we travel to and through Morocco, and use our autobiographical accounts as a counter-narrative to still existing mainstream colonial tropes, which are very vital in the production of contemporary tourist geographies. By ‘being-in-place’ and narrating first-hand our Moroccan wanderings, paralleled by the historical narratives that laid the path for European projects in colonial Morocco, we aim to illustrate how travelling to contemporary Morocco as a tourist puts into question not only well-established colonial discourses about this country – aspects we address by deconstructing its key representations, to some extent, in the following chapters – but also our embodiment and experiences of these

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contradictory positionings as tourist and tourism researcher ‘in the field’. In other words, we approach this exploration of postcolonial Moroccan tourism by examining how Morocco comes to mean particular discourses and orientations for Western travellers, and how Western travellers become particular subjects and practices in Morocco. Our methods are situated through our backgrounds in geography and anthropology – both ‘field’ sciences – and our connection to the multidisciplinary field of tourism research. In approaching this project with an ethnographic attention to travel, we take to heart Clifford’s (1997) perspective on fieldwork as travel encounters, acknowledging that researchers themselves are following the pathways of other mobile figures, whether they be missionaries, colonialists or tourists. This recognition goes hand in hand with his point that only a thin line separates travel writing and ethnography; that ‘[t]he travel writer’s transient and literary approach, sharply rejected in the disciplining of fieldwork, has continued to tempt and contaminate the scientific practices of cultural description’ (1997: 65). We take his ironic flaunting of temptation a step further by telling our ethnography through our travel narratives, which attempt to document our subjective experiences as Euro/American in contemporary Morocco, and relating these present-day, first-person writings to other periods and other writers’ experiences of these places. Thus, while our ‘field’ is Morocco, we do not claim to document a comprehensive and ‘deep’ ethnography of Morocco: rather, our ethnography concerns the Western travel experience of Morocco, and its depth is found in our addition of contemporary experience to the wealth of historical material available. As geographers, we are also, perhaps beyond Clifford’s suggestions, concerned with spatializing our analysis. In this regard, we work from topological rather than topographical notions of space (see, amongst others, Allen 2011), which bring attention to power geometries and territorialities as spatialized discourses and discursivized spaces. This shift in configuration is key to the postcoloniality of our analysis, in that we can then approach the strongly cartographic and topographic legacies of French colonial thought by rethinking their territorialities through alternative frameworks. While this framing is not explicitly discussed in many of the following chapters (with the central exception of Chapter 5, ‘Medina’), it is nonetheless an essential part of our understanding of these colonial and postcolonial relationships and their spatial manifestations. Both of these disciplinary backgrounds coincide through our engagement with tourism research. In occupying this nexus, we are painfully aware of the hazy indistinctions between travelling researcher and traveller; though we, as tourism researchers, may often think ourselves removed from the normal flows of travel, we participate in them in order to observe. We are implicated in them as ‘foreigners’, whether we choose to be or not, as part of the pervasive development of tourism flows (particularly from Global North to Global South) that shape

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contemporary interactions between local and visitor (Franklin and Crang 2001). While we recognize that these flows are not the only trajectories for travel and tourism (c.f. Alneng 2002; Berriane 1992), we acknowledge their pervasiveness along with our situated and reflexive ability to address this dynamic through ethnography. From our specific disciplinary perspective on tourism research, therefore, we argue for the necessity of experiencing travel ‘like a tourist’ as not only a trick to get precious insights about what tourist do and say, but very often as part of the experience of actually being there, and unavoidably so. Our individual accounts discuss how, by actually travelling those very sites of tourism – where colonial tropes meet contemporary travel tropes – we are, as Euro/American travellers, inevitably enmeshed into tourist spatialities, their representations, their practices, their contact zones. At the same time, the embodied experience of being (sometimes involuntarily) a tourist-in-disguise allows us to discuss how the tourist is affected – sometimes even manipulated – by the agency of the people working with and for them. The ‘locals’ – be they guides, hotel managers, waiters, or drivers – are, equally, participants in determining the nature of the tourist experience, often relying on colonial cultural legacies, on pseudo-ethnographic and literary-cinematographic popular understandings of what the European traveller wants to get out of Morocco. Numerous examples reported here seem thus to suggest that adopting travel as a methodology may be useful in grasping the complicated encounters produced by some postcolonial tourist tropes and their related practices today, in Morocco and presumably somewhere else. In the intriguing interplay generated by the ‘encounters’ between these different subjectivities (the ‘tourist’, the ‘local’ working with the tourist, ‘us’) in some of the tourist sites here considered, what emerges is an endless series of negotiations in place. These negotiations – about what to do when there and how – are manifestations of the long history of a specific (colonial) European ‘idea of Morocco’, something that we would like to describe as a series of ‘Moroccan dreams’: that is, the result of a powerful discursive formation constantly re-enacted when the tourist – or, in our case, the tourism scholar – actually travels to these sites in ‘real’ Morocco. Our methodology is conceived, then, to provide a travel approach to the European experience of a place called Morocco, in relation to more conventional historical accounts of other protoethnographers in the same ‘field’. This combination, while clearly offering very partial and limited understandings, has the advantage of providing historical and textual backing, together with first-hand accounts of how theory and practice intersect and tend to merge in these travel spatialies. Every empirical chapter, organized by specific cities or regions that we selected to document these ‘Moroccan dreams’, focuses on a key theme around which the site in question is examined, while engaging our ethnographic, discursive and topological

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approach to that particular space and its thematic ‘identity’. Every chapter, as a consequence, critically engages with theory, but does so in an almost implicit fashion, with the deliberate intention of emphasizing the fact that, when we travel to places, our theories are not only often challenged but they become a sort of background for our actual practices, including the practice of writing. We do hope that this book will show that these parallel travels to Morocco – Lyautey’s and the contemporary touring of le Maroc – are a convincing way to illustrate the deep logic and the workings of the ‘Moroccan dream’ translated into a real geography.

The book The book is organized around nine chapters, the first two based on secondary sources and historical material, while the other seven are focused on individual sites that, in our opinion, illustrate the present re-enactment of the colonial ‘Moroccan dream’. Clearly, we could have included more sites and more chapters, but it was not our intention to provide an exhaustive mapping of contemporary tourism in Morocco. Rather, we were interested in identifying a series of sites where the intersection between the colonial intervention and the present tourist trope was particularly intense. Thus, while Agadir or Chefchaouen, or even Casablanca, could have perhaps been included in these selections, they also represent other historical flows and trends in tourism that are not as relevant to our argument. By building this geographic archipelago of postcolonial tourism, we wanted to recall the ways in which Morocco is all too often presented by the industry and experienced by the visitor: as a colourful mosaic made of shining Moroccan fragments, wherein each city has a different ‘attitude’ and appeals to a range of potential traveller-consumers. These fragments, often disconnected spatially but also culturally, make sense only if recomposed within the tourist tableau of le Maroc colonial – the former French, now pan-European and broadly Western, projection of an alternative modernity. The structure of the book thus deliberately reflects these cultural mappings, adopted as a strategy in our ethnographic experiencing of Morocco ‘like a tourist’. Chapter 1, ‘Yes, We Conserve’, introduces the historical and cultural coordinates that will accompany our journey through Morocco in the form of Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey. His personal and professional orientations created the political and, moreover, cultural technologies of the specific colonizing strategy for Morocco. His background primed him as translator of spatial theories and practices elaborated by the French colonial elite, onto a genuine territorial laboratory for social modernity – Morocco – as an experiment in spatializing the technologies and principles of his version of modernity. Largely inspired by the vast French historical and biographical literature on

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Mare´chal Lyautey and his politics, this chapter reflects on the distinct interpretation of the concept of association and on its impact in the production of a new geography of Morocco. Here, we expand on the concept of the dual city as connected to the ideal of a patrimoine to be preserved, and on the colonial exhibitions of the day that provided spectacular cultural support to Lyautey’s grand project. Indeed, it is within a range of ‘exhibitionary technologies’ – stretching from exhibitions in Europe, to the reshaping of cities to fit colonial visions, to travel practices in the colonies (Mitchell 1991; Morton 2000) – that ‘native’ culture was visualized, described and in many ways reproduced, through colonial orderings, which set bounds upon it and, by extension, European modernity. These reflections lay the ground for the intermediate stage in the journey towards the ‘real’ Morocco – the production of a European gaze described in Chapter 2: ‘Mosaı¨que’. Here we trace European interactions with Morocco from the eighteenth century to the Protectorate as, with increasing speeds of travel and communication, this distant place became more and simultaneously less familiar to European chroniclers and their publics. We consider how, through several phases of contact with successive European colonial powers, progressive versions of a ‘picturesque’ Morocco were presented for European audiences by artists, explorers, travellers, bureaucrats and authors. This ‘picturesque’ quality became mapped into its landscapes, both in representations of Morocco – the paintings, photographs, articles, novels and travelogues that circulated in Europe – and in the contact visitors had with Morocco as a version of itself, a site of heritage whose very picturesque-ness was one of the qualities Lyautey sought to conserve. Our itinerary will then continue by setting foot in Morocco, engaging with several key sites for the definition of Moroccan modernities, starting with ‘Lyautey’s Dream’: Rabat. This capital city is where the French colonial imaginary found its clearest spatial expression, in both its productive and divisive iterations (Abu-Lughod 1981). As has already been noted, French planners and urbanists redesigned Moroccan cities as spaces of hybrid acculturation, where the encounter of modernity with local traditional culture was deemed to be possible (Rabinow 1989). Within the ‘dual city’ imagination, the divided spaces of the city served not only to perform ‘modernity’ but also to re-inscribe otherness and timelessness on the native city (C ¸ elik 1997). Still today, almost 90 years after Lyautey’s departure, Rabat appears as an amazing geographical laboratory, representing in many ways the perfect ‘dual city’, where a very clear separation between the medina and the ville nouvelle is further enhanced by the colonial imprint of some key sites of postcolonial power, characterized by European-imagined Moresque architecture. It is in Rabat’s streets that we find the most evident traces left by Lyautey’s passage and the most evident mark of his spatial ideology.

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In Fez we engage with the idea of the ‘medina’ as topological space, through readings of it as orientalized urban labyrinth, inviting the European visitor into endless explorations, and as a navigable blending of interiors and exterior spaces, from its streets to its rooftops. It is the principle of colonial ‘association’ that first staged Fez as urban alterity, idealizing its medieval character, now validated by UNESCO (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2013a) and put to use to promote the city as offering ‘untouched otherness’, a time capsule for the tourist. Fez, indeed, presents itself as offering not just sights but also multi-sensory immersion: here tourists can jostle with the Other in a rich sensorium, then rise above its rooftops to look over its impenetrable streets. In this chapter we challenge the medina as a space of radical alterity by thinking through some of these topologies as we walk the streets and gaze from rooftops, reconsidering how this city becomes ‘picturesque’ in different perspectives. In Marrakech, the Moroccan city par excellence and the most visited destination of the country, we focus on the Jemaa el-Fna – La Place – as an example of the ‘perpetual seduction’ of the ‘Red City’. Marrakech is widely promoted to those seeking an ‘authentic’ experience of Moroccan culture and heritage (El Faı¨z 2002), and billed as ‘one of the great cities of North Africa’, full of ‘crowded alleyways and bustling souks’ (Moroccan National Tourist Office 2004), a place out of modern time, where the real soul of Morocco can be experienced (Minca 2006a). La Place is here discussed both as a world heritage site, celebrated by UNESCO, but also as an outdoor stage, where local people are often translated into ‘ethnographic objects’ by the colonial/tourist gaze and somehow put on display. Deconstructing a book of photos dedicated to the people of the square, Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent (Fauchon 2009), we critically engage with a postcolonial reading of the Place, particularly of its ‘inhabitants’, as the basis for exploring the everyday re-enactment of the colonial on the ‘magical square’. In Chapter 6, ‘Kasbah’, we step outside the imperial cities and into the Atlas mountain chain, to explore how the dwelling structures of this region have been integrated into its tourism routes as both spectacle and accommodation. This integration recognizes the kasbahs as part of the journey and its focal stopping points. Since the vehicular route became encoded in the 1930s, it has been a tour that moves through the landscape to observe its harshness and the traveller’s endurance – a mode established by the select few European adventurers who crossed this terrain prior to them, at slower speeds. Following this route ourselves, we observe how the kasbahs have become both places to see – as film locations and as landscape – and places to rest, as ‘authentic’ structures that reach through history to create an experience of dwelling. Next we move to the ‘Sahara’. The Moroccan desert is often marketed as enabling spiritual communion with nature as a ‘profound alterity’, appealing to Europeans exposed to literature, films and endless promotional materials that

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promise a journey into a different world and a ‘timeless tradition’. Yet the increasing traffic through this region means that this spiritual encounter becomes, like other mass tourism destinations, an experiential moment reproduced for each day’s visitors. We follow this version of the Sahara as a guided tour through real and imagined empty spaces, as they are furnished as part of the codified ‘experience’ for desert explorer-tourists. We look further into this process of museumification – or rather, theme-park-ization – at the relationships created between locals and visitors in this aggressive turn at modernity. One of the most potent attractions of re-staged colonialism is the possibility of re-living a dream of colonial elegance. For many travellers, Morocco still feels like France outre mer, an extension of European space that is chic and exotic, yet affordable. A sense so strong in Essaouira (the focus of Chapter 8: ‘Mogador’) that the Place Moulay Hassan, a large square ringed with bars and cafes serving Italian ice cream and cappuccino, would not be out of place in southern Europe. In the past 20 years, Essaouira has become a sophisticated European service class destination, marketing ‘its beautifully gentrified medina, combined with the Atlantic colonial flavour of its bastions’, and ‘famous for its laid-back atmosphere’ (Moroccan National Tourist Office 2004). Guidebooks point to the street sets of Orson Welles’ Othello, and the place of Essaouira in the itineraries of Jimmy Hendrix and Cat Stevens (whose photographs adorn countless cafes and shops). A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001, the seaside city offers a cocktail of cultural values, redolent of upmarket cosmopolitanism. This chapter will examine Essaouira’s appeal as the pre-eminent site of a Moroccan chic that is increasingly influential in shaping the ‘experience of Morocco’ and this latter’s enactment across the country. The last destination of this real-imaginary tour of Morocco will be the city of Tangier. Once the focal point for the journeys and sojourns of countless Westerners – especially Americans – Tangier is still the point where Morocco nearly reaches to touch Europe, and vice versa. During its ‘golden years’, the city played host to a vibrant colony of writers and intellectuals, whose traces can still be found today in a number of spaces that have become key sites in Morocco’s colonial imaginary (Carae¨s and Fernandez 2002). Beyond their more outspoken legacies, we also trace the nested stories of foreign residents in Tangier, whose homes, families and lives are all part of the fabric of this blended city. In particular, we consider how this long history of integration and cooperation between Morocco and Europe contrasts with the image of Tangier as a place of danger, illegality and transgression. Tangier today, we argue, is oriented to expand as a dynamic cultural nexus, enabled by its unique geographical and historical positioning between Morocco and Europe. Through these individual mappings and narratives of cities and regions that mark the Moroccan mosaic, we reflect a topographical sense of how Morocco

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came to be a colonial dream linked with a topological exploration of how that dream manifests in postcolonial realities. Though we cannot, and do not, claim an exhaustive and comprehensive authority on what Morocco means to the European traveller, we argue that the ethnographic sensitivity we bring to this analysis contributes to reconsidering how tourism intersects with colonial and postcolonial spatialities, particularly through how these spaces are produced and reproduced by all the participants, from governments to ‘locals’ to tourists. Finally, along with the myriad travel and exploration narratives preceding us, we set off with ourselves as proxy narrators of an idling voyage through the ‘Moroccan dream’.

CHAPTER 1 YES, WE CONSERVE

Yes, in Morocco, and it is to our honour, we conserve. I would go a step further, we rescue. We wish to conserve in Morocco Beauty – and it is not a negligible thing. Beauty – as well as everything which is respectable and solid in the institutions of the country . . . all of your researchers conserve and save, whether it be a question of antiquities, fine arts, folklore, history, or linguistics. We found here the vestiges of an admirable civilization, of a great past. You are restoring its foundations. (Lyautey, at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 384; translated in Abu-Lughod 1981: 142)

Paroles d’action Through his Paroles d’action (1995 [1927]) – the title of the collected speeches that exemplify his attitude towards leadership – Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral Mare´chal Hubert Lyautey (see Figure 1.1) has left an impressive legacy on Moroccan urban landscapes and on the ways in which contemporary Moroccan historical patrimony is conceived. Lyautey’s urban ideology, his mark on Moroccan cities, on definitions of the ‘essence’ of Morocco and its culture are still present and implicitly (sometimes even explicitly) celebrated today. Le Maroc as imagined by this one man still provides the stage and often the material support for most representations of the country travelling abroad, in Europe in particular; representations that, as far as cultural tourism is concerned, are also circulating for domestic consumption. This is possibly one of the few cases in history where a former colonizer is so often presented as an educated modernizer, who recognized and valorized the unique culture of the colonized land and people. The contemporary rhetoric used to ‘sell’ a romanticized and exoticized image of Morocco is populated by slogans and ‘orange’ images that resonate with Lyautey’s colonial fantasies and with the actual translation of Morocco into a

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European space of a certain kind. The cultural geographies of late postcolonial Morocco are in fact still negotiated in relation to the legacy of the Protectorate, a legacy and influence that go well beyond the achievements of the 13 years of his distinct personal regime (see, among others, Hoisington 1995; Le Re´ve´rend 1983; Maurois 1931; Pennell 2000; Rivet 1988; Scham 1970; Usborne 1936; Venier 1997). One claim of this book is that it is literally impossible to understand the ways in which modern Europe invented a place called le Maroc, and the ways in which contemporary European travellers are still imagining and travelling to that very place, without a full engagement with this legacy. The discursive formation defining the past and present appel du Maroc (see Rondeau 1999) is thus a crucial site for the exploration of how Europeans’ real and imagined experience of Morocco is presented today by Moroccan authorities – and interpreted by many Moroccans in their dealings with tourists. This book is an account of some of the spatial orderings linked to the enactments of the returned colonial gaze produced by these encounters. From the dual city model, which still underlies the overall structure of many Moroccan cities and their official cultural geographies, to the ways in which culture and art are publicly defined, Lyautey’s ghost seems to be everywhere, but is especially visible in those spaces directly or indirectly involved with Europe and Europeans. These spaces and

Figure 1.1

Lyautey (Agence de Presse Meurisse 1920)

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their itineraries through Morocco, still rife with the most orientalist elements of his ideology (see, for example, Minca and Borghi 2009), are at the core of our investigation. The French rule in Morocco, embodied by Lyautey’s persona and ideology, was, among many other things, also an attempt to realize a laboratory for social modernity. The establishment of the Protectorate in 1912 did not, indeed, merely mark the formal incorporation of Morocco into the French colonial empire after a long pursuit: it was also the beginning of a grandiose experiment in social engineering. It is in Morocco that the late nineteenth-century techniques and socio-cultural categories elaborated in the me´tropole would first be put into practice, in the attempt to realize, in these territories, the project of social pacification that was finding so many obstacles in France and outre mer (Minca 2006a). France somehow exported its social and ideological crisis to a re-invented North African country; not the first experiment of this kind to be sure. As famously illustrated by Paul Rabinow in his French Modern (1989), the French, and Lyautey in particular, saw in Morocco a great opportunity to rethink their take on modernity. Their colonial lenses convinced them that ‘there’ – in that messy and backward but still authentic and radically different outer space – they would be able to find the answers to the crisis of their own modernity, deprived of the corruption and the untenable compromises of the French political system. Some of the key protagonists of this experiment, who accompanied Lyautey in many of his projects, were indeed hoping to test in the Protectorate their social conservative idea(l)s that could not be implemented so easily in France. The ‘discovery’ of Morocco, while reflecting in many ways the tenets of the most classic examples of orientalist discursive formations experienced elsewhere, was, however, rendered unique by the cultural geographies that were at the basis of Lyautey’s colonial fantasies: that is, the spatialities of a putatively soft and gentle power, fascinated by and supportive of local history and tradition, while helping Morocco to occupy its place in the world via the celebration of its aesthetics and patrimoine. This is the way in which France attempted to (re)present its paroles d’action in relation to the revolutionary spatializations of the principle of association guiding Lyautey, a principle to which we will return in the pages to follow but that will also emerge in many of our chapters. Here, to begin, we follow Lyautey’s pathway through imagining le Maroc – the colonized vision of Morocco that he both succeeded and failed in creating – as a cultural and spatial rendering whose traces are evident in the Morocco we find today.

Le Maroc Le Maroc today – what can perhaps be defined as late postcolonial Morocco – and some of its dominant elites are still to some extent capitalizing on those very

Figure 1.2

Cover of the Protectorate monthly Nord-Sud (c.1939)

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ideas in order to build a euro-centric, but simultaneously uniquely self-exoticized and North African, image for the country, tailored for the leisure consumption of European markets (see Borghi 2008a, 2008b). Many exemplifications of this will be discussed in the chapters to follow. Indeed, the present mapping and valorization of its tourist attractions rely largely on what Lyautey identified as le patrimoine marocain, something that he committed himself to discover, evaluate, classify and conserve: Thanks to the permanence of assured power in all the successive continuous dynasties, thanks to the maintenance . . . of essential institutions, we have found a built Empire, and with it a great civilization. That was a real revelation. . . . the beautiful monuments of Morocco . . . still living beauties. We have a striking example of this in the arts: they were, so they say, lost, or being lost. It was only necessary to bring order so that these artisans and masters could be reinvigorated. It was not necessary to bring Moroccan arts back to life, only to prevent them from dying. And, at the same time, in the intellectual domain, as much as order was re-established, and as much as we penetrated further into intimate Moroccan society, we discovered scholars, savants, workers, and eminent men who were living just beyond the gap. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 423 – 4) Some of these ideas (and decrees) on heritage conservation and on ‘Moroccan traditional culture’, as we will show in the later chapters, are still in use and largely promoted by the tourist authorities. These mappings are also popular among the advocates of a ‘Moroccan difference’, that is, European and Moroccan public intellectuals, politicians or media stars claiming the supposedly unique position occupied by the country in bridging the Arab world to Europe and supporting an image of Morocco, together with the production of related spaces, that reveals clear continuities with the legacy of the extraordinary 13 years during which le Mare´chal managed to entirely transform the country (see, for example, Goytisolo 1997). European tourism to Morocco and some of its most celebrated and visited places can thus be seen as useful sites at which to reflect and actually encounter the effects of the returned gaze that makes le Maroc today; a gaze of which Lyautey may be considered, if not the initiator, certainly the main promoter. The gaze produced and legitimized in those years, we argue, is still embedded in the materialites found in some key tourist sites and in the colonial nostalgia pervading the contemporary reconnaissance du Maroc on the part of many Europeans. Their canonical ‘excursions’ to Morocco are indeed an intriguing arrangement of metaphorical and ‘real’ sites where Moroccans watching

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Figure 1.3 Lyautey in action, in a French children’s textbook (Flandre et al. 1955)

Europeans and Europeans eager to watch le Maroc et les Marocains meet in somewhat complicated ways. These sites of encounter, their hard and soft spatialities, their related practices, are at the core of our own analysis. What we claim is that by exploring the workings of these mutual gazes in situ, we can learn a great deal about the European invention of Morocco and its tenets. While the European invention of Morocco traces back its origins to the earlier explorations of adventurous travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 2), Lyautey took what until that moment was simply one out of many European orientalist mappings of the Oriental Other and transformed it into a powerful and extraordinarily ambitious modern project. What Lyautey actually did was an attempt at an imaginative and audacious experiment in matching and merging his readings of Morocco’s exoticism and unique cultural tradition with a modern social and political experiment of pacification and colonial association. Space and spatial theory were central to this attempt. This is why urban planners and, to some extent, geographers were so important for him and his plans (see Lyautey’s letter to geographer M. Hardy, Directeur Ge´ne´ral de l’Instruction Publique au Maroc, Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 383). This is also why we claim that a geographical investigation of these very real and imagined spatial orderings is necessary. The spatial implementation of his ideas was indeed

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thought to be the best way to resolve and dissolve these latter internal tensions and contradictions. To realize that, it was necessary to forge a new land, a new French Morocco, of Europe, but also out of Europe: an imaginative cultural and functional spatial laboratory where things and people would occupy their proper place and where meaning would be translated into a manageable and, to some extent, aestheticized order: The new generation brings an interest and a touching willingness to this study and works hand in hand with us to make a real link. This generation has the admirable advantage of possessing a taste for research, and is interested in the most modern questions, to be highly anxious about the traditions of this country, and fond of its history and grandeur. One can make a good and beautiful Morocco by remaining Moroccan and Muslim. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 7 December 1922; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 424 –5) We knew, in Morocco, that to govern with a spirit and a reciprocal tolerance for which I give you all my congratulations . . . Here it has been thirteen years that we work together, under this locked and practical form, and we can be proud of what we have done to Morocco. . . . I am full of confidence in the future of such a vibrant and well-ordered organism that is Morocco. (Lyautey, Paroles d’adieu au Conseil du Government, Rabat 5 October 1925; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 480–1) In this endeavour, Lyautey was strongly influenced by a group of French intellectuals gathered in those years around the Muse´e Social (see Rabinow 1989). Drawing on their theorizations, le Mare´chal believed that in the colonial context an inverse ratio existed between the welfare of a society and its dependency on overt forces of order. Order achieved by force was, indeed, less desirable and more costly than a ‘well-tempered social regulation’: a vision that the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral would promote in many of his speeches. Combining their influence with his military and colonial expertise, this project was centred on three key concepts: the ideal of the ‘association’, the ‘dual city’ system, and the related valorization and respect of the political system and cultural traditions of the country entutelage. The legitimacy of the Protectorate was based within the application of these very three concepts. The concomitant ideal of ‘pacification’ had strongly marked his previous colonial experiences in Indochina and Madagascar, bound to an attempt to identify the ‘scientific’ and cultural bases of a ‘durable and harmonious social order’. In Lyautey’s vision, colonized peoples were to be incorporated not by force but, rather, by assuring their full adhesion to the civilizing mission of ‘la plus grande France’:

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MOROCCAN DREAMS Finally, you have wanted, from the beginning, to make a place for indigenous collaborators . . . Do not forget, we are in the land of Ibn Khaldoun, who arrived in Fez at the age of twenty; the land of Averroes; and their descendants are not a disgrace to them . . . [We do not yet know enough of] the old residences, of Fez, Rabat and Marrakech, that housed men who made their home in reading, thinking and research. . . . [They remain a little withdrawn, but they are easy to tame once we show them intellectual sympathy]; as soon as they know we appreciate their value. . . . We should each adapt to the other. And there is no place more favourable for this communion that this Institute, where, at least, in emulation, in free research of Beauty and Truth, our interests will never collide . . . It is a place of social peace, a welcoming home of which close and cordial association forms the most solid and magnificent basis for a future that we ever dreamed of for this rejuvenated Morocco. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 386–7)

Albert Sarraut, a prominent advocate of the association principle and former Minister of the Colonies, summarized the relation of the colonies to France as that of pupils to their teacher: Instead of adapting all our prote´ge´s by force to the conditions of the Metropole, according to the old assimilationist error, it must be understood that, under our tutelage, their evolution should be pursued in keeping with their civilization, their traditions, their milieu, their social life, their secular institutions. (Sarraut 1923: 104; translated in Morton 2000: 188) It was in these very years, too, that the principle of ‘assimilation’ that had guided French colonial politics thus far was being seriously questioned. Problematic, above all, was its inherent contradiction: France justified its presumed superiority over colonized cultures by appealing to ‘universal’ values that guided its mission civilisatrice – a set of democratic and egalitarian values that were to bring progress and justice to the peoples under its rule. Yet once colonial subjects achieved these ideals, France’s mission would have exhausted its declared aims, thus depriving the colonial project of its legitimizing rhetoric. New justifications for French colonial rule would therefore have to be formulated. As Patricia Morton has noted, in the ‘late colonial order’, the claim to authority made by the colonizers was dependent on, the relative superiority of metropolitan culture rather that the innate right of Europeans to colonize other peoples. The change in French policy from assimilation (the prerogative of colonizers to colonize based on their absolute superiority) to association (predicated on the contingent, if

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definitive, superiority of colonizers) clearly delineated this shift from innate right to relative order. Preservation of this order of things was based on visual classification of the colonial landscape, etiquette, body language, architecture, clothing, and other outward signs of authority. (2000: 204) In response to the new theories of race and evolution elaborated in those years and conditioned by the negative results of assimilationist policy in the colonies, the French elites embraced the new ‘native’ policy of association. This policy was to be grounded in a strict physical, political and cultural segregation of natives from the French population: the ideal of the association was predicated, indeed, on the precise and subtle differentiation and division of peoples, societies and cultures into race-based hierarchies. As Morton argues, the colonized peoples had to be proved barbarous to justify their colonization, but the mission civilisatrice required that they be raised above this savagery. If the colonized peoples acquired too much civilization and became truly assimilated to France, colonization could no longer be defended, having fulfilled its mission. (2000: 7) They would also cease to be exotic objects of interest – a theme to which we will return subsequently. The principles of the French colonial doctrine of association were to be most fully enacted by the Moroccan Protectorate, under Lyautey’s vigilant guidance. Le Mare´chal believed that by preserving local ways of life, association could sponsor the renewal of indigenous culture and the creation of a modern, prosperous colonial state. His so-called politique indige`ne left existing Moroccan cities intact and built new European cities alongside; retained the traditional Moroccan government, although under indirect French control; and encouraged indigenous arts and crafts through schools and workshops set up by the French. According to Harmand (1910) – one of the key theorists of the association principle – colonial policies were to allow ‘indigenous peoples’ to evolve in autonomous fashion, by ‘keeping everyone in his proper place’, appropriate to his role in society. ‘Native’ traditions and habits were thus to be influenced light-handedly, ‘sufficiently’ to assure the maintenance of social order (see also the discussion in Hoisington 1995): If Algeria is really a ‘colony’ and Morocco a ‘protectorate’, this is not simply thus as a question of etiquette. Whereas we found ourselves in Algeria facing a real dust storm, . . . in Morocco, in contrast, we were faced with an independent historical empire, jealously guarding its independence to an extreme, . . . with its own hierarchy of bureaucrats, own representation in foreign countries, its own social organizations of which many were still functioning, despite the recent lack in central power . . . We found ourselves

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MOROCCAN DREAMS thus in the presence of a political, religious and economic elite which it would be nonsensical to ignore, to not familiarize with, or to not utilize who, because of its close association with the work we have to create in Morocco, could and must be a powerful help. In no other country then was the regime of a Protectorate better suited, not a transitional regime but a permanent one, whose essential characteristic was the close association and cooperation between the autochthonous race and the protecting race in mutual respect and scrupulous safekeeping of traditional institutions. (Lyautey at the Chambre du Commerce in Lyon, 29 February 1916; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 208 –10)

Janet Abu-Lughod, in her critical analysis of the Protectorate, suggests that the French authorities favoured such policies for two associated sets of strategic reasons. On the one hand, the French felt it necessary to maintain the fiction of Moroccan sovereignty to ‘facilitate control over the “natives” by endowing “French will” with religious legitimacy, since the Sultan’s descent assured respect’ (1981: 137). On the other, however, this fiction was also highly functional in inscribing the contest between the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral and the French government in the me´tropole, and in justifying the French position vis-a`-vis the other European powers. The colonial policies were thus elaborated with an eye towards a plural set of referents, both at home as well as ‘abroad’ (Hoisington 1995). Le Mare´chal famously insisted that North Africa was for France, what the Far West is for America: an excellent testing ground for creating new energy, rejuvenation, and fecundity. . . [Her] social imperialism would not only pacify the colonies and make them more productive; it would also provide a way to revitalize metropolitan France, regenerating politics and culture with new leaders, fresh ideas and proven methods. (Wright 1991: 3) Lyautey was one of those historical figures whose life coincided almost perfectly with his project and its on-the-ground realization. Between 1912 and 1925, Lyautey was the Protectorate, and French Morocco was, in more than one way, Lyautey. He was also someone who believed in the need ‘to get things done’, in the Promethean power of planning, especially urban planning; arguably, his unique propensity for ‘paroles d’action’ was equally matched by a unique interpretation of culture, of beauty, of spatial aesthetics: Conserve, respond. To conserve, which in its literal sense is the opposite of destroy; and respond, of abandon . . . All your research conserves, and saves, whether it is about antiquities, fine arts, folklore, history, or language.

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We have found here the crumbling vestiges of an admirable civilization, a great past . . . Yes, in Morocco we respond . . . This is not a land of inertia, and here my thoughts are not at all limited to what we might do for the public good, but they go towards all the activities, all the other, beneficial private initiatives because they are daring, they are the real honour of Morocco and the thrill of discovery for those who attempt them. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 384–5) All these things, to become a real source of pacification and regeneration, had to be imagined, planned, transformed, materialized before his eyes. What remains of these very materialities and the ideas that they incorporate is probably the most resilient element of this complicated legacy, something that we will touch upon in all the sites that make up the trajectory of our travels throughout this unique colonial and postcolonial gaze translated into solid stone.

Spatial orderings Morocco is a laboratory of Western life and a conservatory of Oriental life. (Vaillat 1934: 18; translated in Wright 1991: 85) As noted, Lyautey’s visions of urban politics and planning were strongly influenced by debates raging in France in those years surrounding the application of scientific principles of social analysis to the management of French colonial possessions and, above all, their utility in assuring a peaceful integration of the colonizers and colonized. A key concern in such debates was the ideal of order: the use of scientific principles to construct a determinate social order able to assure social harmony. Such an ‘ordered’ society, it was believed, could be assured through specific spatial strategies and the construction of an appropriate physical and social milieu (on this, see Rabinow’s 1989 extended discussion): That of which I dream, that of which many among you dream with me, is that amid much disorder which disturbs the world . . . there should begin to develop steadily in Morocco a strong edifice, ordered and harmonious, which could offer to the world the spectacle of a congregation of humanity where men, so unlike in origins, dress, occupations, and race, continue, without advocating any of their individual conceptions, their search for a common ideal, a common reason to live. Yes, I would dream that Morocco appeared as one of the most solid bastions of order against the mounting tides of anarchy. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Abu-Lughod 1981: 142, italics added)

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Henri Prost, the chief architect called by Lyautey to Morocco to plan the new cities, was a firm believer in this vision. In his official declarations, he sustained that urbanism was a, visual art which directs itself to our senses; a beautiful city which we love is one where the edifices have a noble beauty, the promenades are agreeable, and where our everyday life is surrounded by an agreeable de´cor producing in us a sentiment of profound harmony. (Prost n.d. L’urbanisme: 1, translated in Rabinow 1989: 235–6) He argued that modern urban planners had to understand that the wishes and needs of the people who were to live in the newly reconstructed cities counted more than ‘pure conceptions of the future which despised the population’s attachment to the past’ (ibid.). Accordingly, the ‘dual city’ concept was indeed based upon three main strategies: the preservation and protection of the ‘traditional’ Moroccan areas; the creation of a greenbelt around these ‘native reservations’ (as they are defined by Abu-Lughod 1981); and the design and construction ex nihilo of an efficient and elegant ville nouvelle conceived for the resident European population. This philosophy also rested on a fundamental cultural assumption: that ‘European’ cities in Morocco should be built ‘close enough for contact, but not so close to absorb the native city. Deciding how this should be accomplished required the art of the urbanist, who was called upon to integrate adroitly local social realities’ (Rabinow 1989: 294 and note 30, Chapter 9). For Guillaume de Tarde, another fervent advocate of Lyautey’s urban dream, it ought to be ‘separation, yes, but not radical separation. This is not a kind of contemptuous attitude towards the native city (an attitude which I think is the English approach)’; the Frenchman, for him, ‘loved the excitement of social life, thanks to which he knows what’s going on’ (ibid.). There was one catch in this reasoning, however. As Abu-Lughod points out, ‘in Morocco the French could not claim, as they had in Algeria and Tunisia, that indigenous urban centres lacked a system of municipal governance and administration’ (1981: 175). The Protectorate, in fact, found itself in the presence of large urban agglomerations with no ‘modern’ municipal life to speak of, in the European sense of the term, but with a long tradition of local administration of which they were proud. Prost’s plans, therefore, had to contend with this legacy, and indeed one of the centrepieces of the architect’s conception of city and regional planning in Morocco was to become the juxtaposition of old and new within the Protectorate’s cities. The new cities in this colonial laboratory usually shared a fundamental reference to the me´tropole. However exotic certain districts may have seemed, ‘the European sections of the colonial cities not only evoked the capitals and provincial towns of home: they sometimes suggested future directions for

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Western cities’ (Wright 1991: 2). While re-conceiving his new capital, for example, Lyautey had indeed a clear geography of empire in mind: Rabat, was to be an exhibition, the urban display of a strong and innovative idea of social modernity, a dream of one man translated into a real city experience – perhaps to be exported, one day, to the me´tropole (see Chapter 3 in this volume): It’s from there that our initial conception was created. To disturb as little as possible the indigenous cities. To plan at their borders, in vast empty spaces, the European city, following the most modern planning of large boulevards, sewers, water and electricity . . . To unite all the public services in a single neighborhood as much for the convenience of their neighbors as for their clients, who would be French above all . . . To plan for separate zones of ‘industrial, commercial, leisure and housing’, that do not disturb each other. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 496) Needless to say, this ambition was at the basis of several typically modern tensions: first of all between presentation and representation, but also between aesthetics and functionality, form and content, essentialized interpretations of culture and everyday life. The Moroccan dual city born of this complex set of understandings regarding the meaning – and proper place – of local/ indigenous culture was an entirely novel way of looking at the ‘Other’, couched in an apparent attempt to appreciate (and thus ‘respect’) the differences between the diverse urban contexts. As Morton suggests, this ‘respect’ was fully part of the rhetoric of French colonial urbanists: the practice of constructing new European districts outside – and separate from – traditional cities was justified by the argument for the preservation of ‘native cities’ as ‘the sites of cultures, that, although inferior to European culture, should be respected’ (Morton 2000: 147): There is, at the origins of the mutilation, even the disappearance of indigenous cities, in countries where the European makes himself at home, a natural tendency, though forced at the beginning, to build a home where life and business are active, that is, in the indigenous city . . . The native, because all of his life customs, habits are never found lacking; the European, because, no matter what, does not manage to create the comfort, ease, space, or conditions for hygiene that he needs, especially once big business, a class above the colons,. . . It requires wide streets, boulevards, high buildings for stores and lodgings, sewers for water, and electricity, which overturn the indigenous city and render its customary lifestyle impossible. You know how jealous the Muslim is of his private life, you know the narrow streets, the facades without openings behind

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MOROCCAN DREAMS which all of life is hidden from view, . . . [Yet] the European house, . . . it’s death on the terrace, the undermining of traditional life. All the habits, the tastes, contradict each other. Little by little the European city chases away the native one. . . . [In short] it is always necessary, and quickly, to finish by leaving the indigenous city and creating new neighborhoods. But it is already too late; the deed is done; the indigenous city is polluted, sabotaged; all the charm is gone and the upper class has left. The experience of too many Algerian villages teaches us as much. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 495 – 6)

The search for an understanding of ‘native’ history and culture would form the focus of a number of European intellectual circles of the period, which saw the colonies as the ideal site for the implementation of experimental social and urban planning. Robert de Souza, one of the members of the aforementioned Parisian Muse´e Social, asserted that it was in ‘the colonial lands especially, the very old and the very new, outside of all civilization, or in conflict with our own by reason of its overly archaic and inassimilable civilization’ that ‘the solution [could be identified] that will satisfy both modern, progress and the picturesque’ (de Souza 1913, cited in Rabinow 1989: 273). This assemblage of the ‘picturesque’, of ‘progress’, and of ‘civilization’ as the constituent elements of modernity was characteristic of such Beaux-Arts reformers of the period. This interpretation of the cultural and historical condition of ‘non-European peoples’ would crucially influence tourist imaginaries in the decades to follow. Indeed, the perspectives elaborated by de Souza and others at the beginning of the twentieth century continue to inform even the visions of present-day amateur ‘explorers’ of Moroccan souks and medinas. The connection is not at all remote: Lyautey clearly stated the importance of ‘cultural heritage’ for the development of tourism: Dating from this initial period is what really might be called the restoration, dare I say the Renaissance of Moroccan art. On one hand, the problem of carefully protecting, and on the other, the concern for adapting this art, without too much damage, to our life and our needs. Nothing has been more deadly to the originality and the charm of Algerian cities, of so many oriental cities, than their penetration by modern European installations . . . The preservation of the native towns is not only a question of aesthetic satisfaction . . . but a duty of the state. Since the development . . . of tourism on a large scale, the preservation of the beauty of the country has taken on an economic interest of the first order. The tourist does not come to a land where there is nothing left to see. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 493–4)

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Lyautey’s philosophical considerations regarding the value of preservation became the accepted guidelines for the management of a now-universal Moroccan historical patrimony. The effects of this strategy in fact continued to be evident many years after the end of the Protectorate – and are still, to some extent, visible in today’s tourist narratives marking out ‘authentic’ Moroccan cultures and landscapes. Writing in his influential Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow noted how, even as late as 1977, cities like Fez and Sefrou still had no automobiles in the medina, giving the impression of two civilizations living side by side though epochs apart (Rabinow 1977: 21). But the idealized ‘pure’ Moroccan space imagined within the dual city structure was never fully accomplished – not during the colonial period (as Abu-Lughod [1981] has forcefully argued), and certainly even less so today, despite the attempts of the tourist industry to rewrite its contours. The order imagined by Lyautey was never realized; it did provide, nonetheless, a formidable rhetorical tool that allowed for the mobilization of powerful processes of social ordering.

Urban dreams [I]t is a matter of coming to the city of tomorrow . . . to organize a new country is essentially to invent – to invent a future (Alfred de Tarde 1915: 21; in Wright 1991: 87) The theoretical-scientific framework that sustained the principle of association – and its accordant elaboration of an entirely new colonial strategy based on a renovated vision of urban space – found its most striking application in the ‘dual city system’ and in the related new cultural policies regarding the preservation and the regulation of Moroccan heritage. Embarking on his project to create a new model for the colonial city, as noted earlier in this chapter, Lyautey’s philosophy and strategies were enabled by contemporary movements in French urbanism. Rabinow (1989) famously illustrates how this model incorporated regulation of society – in the form of notions of sanitation, class, well-being, and empire – through spatial organization. He documents an upcoming class of E´cole des Beaux-Arts rebels, including Tony Garnier, Ernest He´brard, and Henri Prost who, unlike their teachers and predecessor recipients of the Prix de Rome honour, embraced approaches to planning and architecture that incorporated non-classical influences, like the effects of the industrial revolution and the logics of Oriental arts. Their project became an ame´nagement of social life through spatial production, taking into account organic movements of people as much as the attributes of a natural and built environment: But ‘urbanism’, as Prost brought it to us, is not only the sense and the preference for harmonious, elegant and widespread order, it is their

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MOROCCAN DREAMS reconciliation with the necessities of the twentieth century . . . ‘Urbanism’ has come late to France . . . It was the good fortune of Morocco to have, from the beginning, this wonderful team of artists and men of taste, passionately in love with the beauty of the country, and determined to save that beauty, exactly like that you have just applauded. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 500–1)

Lyautey’s enthusiasm for this approach is rooted in his personal experiences as a traveller and a military officer in the late nineteenth century. Early in his career he was stationed at Orle´ansville in Algeria, and developed a severe distaste for the French overlay of design onto spaces that did not accommodate it (Rabinow 1989: 112). The ‘Frenchified’ towns he saw stifled North African lifestyles he interpreted as holisitic (ibid.: 115). Later, as participant and witness to the effects of Joseph Gallieni’s pacification doctrine in Indochina and Madagascar, Lyautey learned to dominate colonized peoples through guiding resource development that encouraged cooperation with new regimes. Turning this process toward Morocco, he seized upon the pool of talent emerging at that moment in France as a means to create modern (French) cities that honoured the (Moroccan) localities in which they were situated. Lyautey found graduates from the E´cole des BeauxArts who were equally interested in the Orient as a style to appreciate and foster, rather than one to replace with replications of Roman classics, as he had seen in Algeria. Gathering these architects in Morocco, he immediately assigned them to study the medina and develop a Neo-Moresque or arabisance architecture that incorporated modern amenities while celebrating Moroccan arts. Lyautey recognized the productive potential of historical layering as a means toward pacification and the cohabitation of French and Moroccan interests (Rabinow 1989: 116). Building a corps of design engineers who all adhered to his dictum to privilege an indigenous style in conceiving the modern structures they were charged to create, Lyautey began to make choices as re´sident-ge´ne´ral that would lead to histories being preserved, replicated and diminished. While always seemingly acting with explicit and public motives, renowned as a ‘man of action’, his strategies for designing Morocco assumed and presumed an order to things extending from French philosophy and practice. From Lyautey’s recountings of experiences in Algeria and other French outposts, we cull an idea of the legacy he intended for Morocco. The footprint of the French would be limited so that indigenous arts would be brought to the forefront – or at least, the French interpretation of them, as in the barracks in Rabat – to create a ‘picturesque’ landscape: In each region, in each city, there were agents of the Fine Arts, understood to be bureaucrats – they needed to be part of the state administrations to receive their payment, as modest as it was – , but also as little bureaucratic as

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possible in their training, artists, men of taste. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 499) This attitude reflects a sense of inherent appreciation of Moroccan and Islamic arts as something of value, inasmuch as it required investment of resources to maintain. It is important to recollect that this perspective was not universally shared. The group Lyautey gathered around him – like Prost, Tranchant de Lunel, Rigollet and many others – were all specifically qualified to participate in this project of preservation: The significance of my boss’s first act – sending me, before doing anything else, to breathe the air of the medinas – drove home the point that it would be through us that a new style would be elaborated, executing his plan day by day, aided, even carried away, by his profound sympathy for this people and their culture. (Andre´-Marie-Henri Rigollet, speech to E´cole des BeauxArts, Paris, 19 December 1955, cited in Marrast 1960: 57, translated in Wright 1991: 108) Lyautey’s impulse to preserve was both appreciative of the past and sentient of the present and future in Morocco, on the self-designed cusp of modernity. If the new city in the dual city model reflected the implantation of colonial power, the old city would reflect and aggressively maintain the ‘tradition’ that Lyautey saw as uniquely Moroccan: Another personal memory from the beginnings. At my arrival in Fez, in 1912, I lunched at the home of one of the principal notables. A part of his house was delicious, but where we were eating had just been restored in European-style, with mass-produced iron, and garish tiles bought at who knows what store in Marseille or Barcelona, [and I was surprised that next to this were] adorable old rooms . . . associated with these hideous things. For the first time in Marrakech . . . driving to the Bahia Palace . . . I saw these abandoned gardens, these basins and fountains where water ran, and the noble layout, the porticos of grand patios, the small exquisite interior courtyards where the ponds were empty and the jets of water sleeping. . . [Happily] thanks to our collaborators . . . we could put work into the properties belonging to the State . . . Thus, in Fez, the Bou-Jeloud and Batha palaces escaped by two fingers from becoming a German hotel. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 490 –2) This attitude, however, was not wholly altruistic. It was a project undertaken also with a longue vue in mind, in part towards the future potential economic gain for

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a tourist destination where French and other Western travellers could behold and experience ‘tradition’, but especially as a broader strategy of ordering and governing ‘difference’ in association. Discovering what that tradition was comprised of involved processes of identifying, cataloguing and exhibiting, much like what had been done in other colonial regimes, in order to create the ‘Morocco’ that was to be presented to the public abroad: The continuity, duration and fertility of our establishment in Morocco have the relation with the indigenous population as their absolute condition: agricultural association, industrial, business association, but above all intellectual association, of spirit and of heart . . . [But], when this role of protector and pacifier with our army has given its fruits, the safety of our association will be in its common works: to repeat, more and more complete penetration of our spirits, of our hearts. The more that I frequent the indigenous peoples, the more I live in this country, the more I am convinced of the greatness of this nation. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 7 December 1922; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 423 – 4) The acts of cataloguing and constraining became problematic along similar lines to those that Timothy Mitchell (1991) describes in his Colonizing Egypt. There, by counting the population through villages and restricting movement out of the village, British colonial authorities criminalized quotidian mobilities that had been a normal part of rural Egyptian life. In Morocco, Lyautey and his disciples chose landscapes and artefacts to conserve, something that has shaped what histories are recognized as ‘Moroccan’ and which are not. Some examples emerge from the early activities of the Service des Beaux-Arts, particularly under the guidance of its first chef, Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, an artist and one of the first people he met on his arrival in the country. Lyautey founded the Service not long after his appointment as re´sident-ge´ne´ral, though it changed form several times during his tenure. Central to its mission was the protection of historical monuments and artefacts, first through classification, conservation and study, but later through active restoration to ensure the maintenance of the ‘indigenous picturesque’ (Jelidi 2007: 63). The Service des Beaux-Arts was responsible for a variety of ‘protections’, from administering the changing of edifices in a medina to the exhibition and exposition of Moroccan arts abroad. Following the opinions of the two leaders, Tranchant de Lunel and Lyautey, the work of the Service was directed towards preserving architecture that was considered valuable or typical to the Muslim world. Tranchant de Lunel advocated a return to previous glory (Wright 1991: 130), embodied in the Andalusian palaces and medrasas that reflected what was determined to be the ‘golden age’ of Morocco:

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Under the Protectorate, this ‘golden age’ corresponds to the end of the fourteenth century, at the downfall of the Almohad dynasty. Numerous observers agreed, saying that since then Moroccan art has not ceased to decline. Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, for example, affirmed in 1912 that the ‘monuments have been neglected for 600 years’. (Jelidi 2007: 300, citing Tranchant de Lunel 1912: 269) This penchant for preservation of buildings extended to those of lesser importance as well. While there was some precedent for regulating construction in the medina, as formerly the caı¨d (or governor) of each city could rule on petitions for renovation, under the Protectorate these decisions were no longer made on an individual basis. All buildings were regulated under ordinances – whether in the medina or the new city. Only minimal modifications were permitted in the old city, which did not violate the ‘character’ of the area, while construction in the new city was required to have the most up-to-date technologies in electricity and sanitation, as well as ‘European’ exteriors – set back from the street, following guidelines for the facade, and with no high surrounding walls (Abu-Lughod 1981, chapter 9). In other words, the old city was prevented from becoming new, and the new city was prevented from appearing old. Embedded in these projects of restoration was the potential for such sites to become tourist destinations. Using the resources of the Service des Beaux-Arts, Lyautey could enact an economic plan that would both ‘conserve’ the beauty of the country and enable its continued growth: Whether under Tranchant de Lunel, Emile Pauty, or Bore´ly, the Bureau of Fine-Arts oriented itself toward charming streetscapes that would appeal to French residents and tourists. Sablayrolles spoke of the ‘picturesque aspect of the medina,’ and Prost stressed the need ‘to conserve the physiognomy, so characteristic of their marvelous panoramic aspects, which give superb views from the principal vantage points of our Modern Cities.’ Lyautey articulated the conscious effort to promote a tourist industry by maintaining the visual charm of Morocco’s cities and countryside. ‘Since the recent, intense development of large-scale tourism,’ he explained to a gathering in Paris, ‘the presentation of a country’s beauty has taken on an economic importance of the first order. To attract a large tourist population is to gain everything for both the public and the private budgets.’ (Wright 1991: 134) Lyautey’s unique determination, amongst colonial leaders, to maintain and preserve Moroccan art and architecture is, in comparison to his predecessors and contemporaries, laudatory. Yet his master plan for preservation was not simply

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driven by his respect for the talent of Moroccan artisans. His role, as administrator of a new territory of France, was to ensure its prosperity: [Colonies] offered opportunities for extracting wealth and labor, glorifying the preeminence of French civilization, and, through all these means, asserting the power of France to the world at large. Yet ambitions alone did not generate capital investment or cultural pride . . . Aesthetic images formed a highly self-conscious element of this strategy. A proposal for an illustrated magazine on Morocco, sponsored by the colonial government, contended straightforwardly, ‘It is by images, widely distributed throughout the entire country [of France] that we will bring first tourists and then, following after them, capital to Morocco.’ (Wright 1991: 3, citing Lyautey n.d.: III) The outcome of his machinations – whatever the intention – has been the persisting discourses of authenticity and preservation that surround Moroccan medinas. These discourses emerge along with the efforts to develop the city outside the medina, almost from the moment of his arrival, rendering one part of many Moroccan cities an exhibition of modernity and the other an exhibition of traditions on the brink of disappearance: Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great governor who now administers it, the European colonists made short work of the beauty and privacy of the old Arab towns in which they established themselves . . . the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat and Casablanca is hard to estimate. The modern European colonist apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, cafe´s and cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his domination. Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated. Respect for native habits, native beliefs and native architecture is the first principle inculcated in the civil servants attached to his administration. Not only does he require that the native towns shall be kept intact, and no European building erected within them; a sense of beauty not often vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town, instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence. (Wharton 2004 [1920] KL 211 –21)

Exhibitions Car la`, le secret, c’est la main tendue, et non la main condescendante, mais la loyale poigne´e de mains d’homme a` homme faits pour se comprendre.

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[Selon la belle formule du] colonel Berriau, ‘cette race n’est pas infe´rieure, elle est diffe´rente’. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 386) Timothy Mitchell’s account (1991: 163) of the visit of a group of French ‘experts’ to Cairo in about the same period – to which we will return in the chapter dedicated to Rabat – highlights the discussion between the participants of that outing on the aesthetic of the city’s modern quarters, and their relation to the older parts of the city. One of the invited guests, writer Andre´ Maurois, was especially struck by the insistence with which Lyautey asserted that ‘there could not be reorganization of the older part, and if anything were to be rebuilt there, they said, it must be Oriental’ (1931: 252– 3, in Mitchell 1991: 163). Thus although the new order appeared at first sight to exclude the Arab town, in a broader sense, it included it. Colonialism, as Mitchell (ibid.) stresses, did not ignore any part of the city: rather, it divided the city in two – ‘one part becoming an exhibition and the other, in the same spirit, a museum’. The representation of the ‘natives’ within the logic of the exhibition was a typical expression of colonial modernity (Mitchell 2000a; Morton 2000): an attempt to conceal the contradictions inherent in a vision that advocated a progressive ideology in domestic affairs while relying on imperialist expansion in its geopolitical strategies. The urban experiment undertaken in Morocco was its perfect embodiment: a direct heir to the colonial exhibitions promoted by the French state in those very years. The most famous of these Expositions Coloniales, which took place in Paris in 1931, was organized by none other than Lyautey himself. The rhetoric of the ‘world-as-exhibition’ (Mitchell 1991) promoted in these events was fundamental in reconciling the contradictions of colonial geopolitics and the modern state. Lyautey’s project was, in many ways, above all an attempt to overcome the ambivalence of modernity’s fascination for alterity; the search for ways in which ‘other’ cultures could be adopted as a ‘background’ against which European and French identity could be defined. As noted, in the Moroccan ‘traditional culture’ for which he cared so much, Lyautey found that sense of ‘wholeness’ that he considered missing in European modernity. However, le Mare´chal was faced with a fundamental ‘theoretical’ problem in creating and managing the Protectorate and, eventually, the colonial exhibitions. How could the colony and colonization be ‘accurately’ (i.e. scientifically) understood (and thus managed) without recourse to the suspect and often carnivalesque images that had circumscribed past relationships between the Orient and Occident? Or, as Morton aptly describes, ‘how to avoid exoticism and inauthenticity and still refer to the plethora of images created by colonialism, through which most Westerners understood the rest of the world?’ (2000: 4). This, in many ways, is still the dilemma faced by tourist operators and authorities in Morocco today. Mitchell (1991) has argued forcefully that modern

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colonial strategies of conquest and incorporation of the ‘Other’ relied on the adoption of what he terms the ‘metaphysics of representation’: a binary vision framing not only all relations between ‘us’ and ‘the Other’ but also those between representation and the object represented. The dilemmas of Lyautey’s strategies of association could thus only be resolved within a ‘proper’ management of an ‘authentic’ system of representations. Mitchell, Morton, Rabinow and many others have written extensively on the ways in which the preservation of ‘native cultures’ in colonial exhibitions formed part of a much broader vision based on an interesting compromise between the ‘scientificity’ of the representations – within which ‘other cultures’ were circumscribed according to determinate rules – and a fascination for the exoticism that only direct contact with the ‘real’ representatives of these same cultures could guarantee. The scientific rigour of colonial exhibitions was assured by recourse to models elaborated within the natural history museums and ethnographic collections of the period, such as those developed by Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivie`re at the Trocadero Museum (see Morton 2000: 85). Rivet and Rivie`re approached museology through a contextualization of objects based on extensive ethnographic documentation. In their vision, the museum’s scientific role consisted of: promoting technical and sociological studies of objects and peoples cast broadly within a Maussian fait total perspective in which each object was illuminated by – and metonymic of – a whole society. Each society was juxtaposed with neighbouring regions and areas; the sum of these represented the whole world. (Rabinow 1989: 353) Morton’s work speculates at length on this element, especially in relation to the spatialities of the colonial exhibition held in Paris in 1931. For her, the most prominent application of the segregation principle was precisely Henri Prost’s plan for Rabat, which established a new European district and left intact the existing medina (see Chapter 3). The colonial exposition was the embodiment of this principle (Morton 2000: 147): the Moroccan section . . . was the culmination of Lyautey’s program to develop an appropriate French colonial style. One of its architects, Albert Laprade, had worked for Lyautey during his governorship and helped design some of its best known monuments: the Re´sidence Ge´ne´ral in Rabat and the new medina in Casablanca. (2000: 230–1) In particular, ‘the Moroccan section [of the exhibition] exemplified what Franc ois Be´guin called the arabisance of French colonial architecture in North Africa, which he characterized as “the numerous traces of the arabization of

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architectural forms imported from Europe” to North Africa and extended to include a general “climate” of sympathy to the Arab world that propagates these operations of hybridization’ (ibid.). Along these lines, novelist Pierre Mille tellingly describes Morocco as follows: ‘here the building is more than a copy: a hybridization of styles recently created by our architects and of the Moroccan style’ (Mille 1931: 267; in Morton 2000: 228). This theoretical perspective would also be applied in the management of the colonies – and their peoples. According to this logic, the colonial exhibitions of different ‘cultural wholes’ (just as tourist images today) were based upon a theoretical – and thus spatial and practical – separation between the colonizer and the colonized. The Expositions also highlighted a contrast between the colonies as ‘the Orient’ – the site of rampant sensuality, irrationality and decadence – and the colonies as the laboratories of Western rationality. This conceptual shift, as Morton (2000) suggests, was achieved through a process of scientific ‘certification’ of the authenticity of specific images, contrasted with the carnivalesque tenor of other, more ‘metaphysical’ and exotic, ones. This distinction between the image and the ‘thing itself’ was most potently enforced through the use of real persons within the exhibition, depicted engaging in their daily tasks; representing, in a sense, themselves: [T]he most efficacious means for reinforcing the apparent authenticity of the pavilions was the native, engaged in his or her ‘primitive’ crafts, rituals and performances. Natives inhabited the pavilions and performed daily activities, expurgated of European habits, clothing, and technology; as if they were in fact occupying authentic reproductions of indigenous buildings in a precolonial pastoral. (2000: 207) Such a display of people was, of course, also a display of power. The exhibition of ‘natives’ within the Exposition was also a symbolic performance marking relationships of power between exhibitor and exhibited. What is important to note, moreover, was that the relationships displayed also presented a fictitious unity of ‘colonial peoples’, within which persons differing vastly in cultural traditions and aspirations were made to appear as one within the colonial project. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her influential Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (1998), speculates at length on the process of ‘becoming’ an ‘ethnographic object’, a process that ‘brings together specimens and artefacts never found in the same place and at the same time and shows relationships that cannot otherwise be seen’ (1998: 3). This process often translates in practice into ‘the paradox of showing things that were never meant to be displayed, “exhibitions” whether of objects or people, display of the artefacts of our disciplines. They are also exhibits of those who make them’ (1998: 2).

Figure 1.4

‘Moroccan People’ on display (Moroccan Tourist Authority 2004)

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Accordingly, the French grand spatial politics of display, implemented in imagined and real Morocco at the same time, despite being rather contradictory in its political as well as cultural intents (as we have tried to suggest), fundamentally transformed Moroccan cities within the space of a few years – while assuring the loyalty of some key colonial subjects. The exhibitions organized by Lyautey in Morocco during those years enjoyed, indeed, the support of a large part of the Moroccan elite as well. The present day valorization of Moroccan cultural heritage cannot be divorced from this legacy, albeit that its discourses and strategies may sometimes differ significantly from similar colonial attempts. Moroccan ‘culture’, and the places selected to represent it, must still be ‘preserved’ according to this somewhat perverse logic of the museum. In the tourist imaginary, ‘Moroccan culture’ too often becomes an object, a whole to be narrated, interpreted and essentialized within a set of performances and places (Borghi 2005; Wagner and Minca 2015). Certainly, the tourists’ awareness of the ‘artificiality’ of such performances might disrupt the supposed ‘purity’ of the representations. Yet the game continues nonetheless, with the willing participation of both ‘spectators’ and ‘actors’. The sites of these performances become the key nodes of these strategies but also the places within which such performances create ever-changing postcolonial geographies, open to hybridization and to continual disruption of the presumed order (Minca and Borghi 2009). It is within these encounters that we can identify today the ideologies driving the preservation of cultural and archaeological heritage (including even the preservation of a supposed ‘intangible heritage’, as in the case of the Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech – see Chapter 5) by a cadre of ‘international experts’ and organizations. The assumption driving such attempts is a simple one: the present day inhabitants (‘natives’) of the places that contain such priceless testimonies of past civilizations are not able – for economic, political or ‘cultural’ reasons – to guarantee the proper preservation and valorization of the treasures of their ancestors. They must, therefore, be taught how to do it – or, better yet, they must be stripped of their exclusive claim to these vestiges, by rendering their inheritance part of a ‘universal cultural heritage’. This loss of sovereignty is legitimized and decreed through the ‘adoption’ of the site in question by, for example, an international agency such as UNESCO, and through its ‘sacralization’ within the tourist imaginary (see, among others, Winter 2007; Daly and Winter 2012; Wagner and Minca 2014). Such expropriation, carried out in the name of a higher ‘common interest’, also reaches the culture of the present, as in the case of many Moroccan sites that aim to ‘protect’ their unique heritage from . . . Moroccans themselves. Such strategies are the fruit of an exquisitely modern compromise between the need to classify all cultures within grand universal schemes and the concurrent

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search for difference, as well as the equally pressing need to mark the potential dangers posed by contamination (between peoples, cultures, etc.) and ambivalence. The whole urban experiment undertaken in Morocco was the perfect embodiment of this logic: a direct contributor and heir to the colonial exhibitions promoted by the French state in those very years. It is not by chance, then, that the most famous of these Expositions Coloniales were organized by Mare´chal Lyautey himself.

Colonial tours [T]here is no doubt that the master plan drawn up by Henri Prost was impressive. (Abu-Lughod 1981) First there is what I call the urban malaise . . . Well, yes, in the lacking of any order or organization, it was necessary to instill order . . . That is the concern here, it is all of the future of our Moroccan cities, and the lessons, that so many other new countries where such hectic clusters that today are victim to irreparable hideousness and discomfort, should not be lost. It was therefore necessary to prepare plans for alignment and extension of the cities . . . Hygiene, beauty, and comfort of our cities is at stake, even their future, and, as a consequence, the interest of you all . . . All the countries of the world have adopted today legislation intended to improve the development and formation of cities. (Lyautey at the Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, Rabat 26 May 1921; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 147–8) The 1931 International Conference on Colonial Urbanism, which took place at the Paris Exposition Coloniale, is extensively discussed by Paul Rabinow (1989) and often mentioned as a cornerstone in the appreciation of the Moroccan experiment. On that occasion: Prost lauded the political objectives of Lyautey’s urbanism. He rehearsed the list of justifications: Europeans and Muslims had different cultural habits; the Protectorate was a collaboration; it was not meant to change Moroccan customs. The introduction of wide streets and a modern infrastructure of water and sewers would ruin the medina’s charm. Aside from the aesthetic and economic advantages (tourism), there were several reasons for preserving its picturesque character: it conserved Moroccan social customs and presented an image of social hierarchy to the French. (Rabinow 1989: 301 –2) Prost was also was very clear about the political tasks assigned to the team of imaginative architects associated with Lyautey and his colonial realm. According

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to Rabinow (1989: 85), their aim was to introduce and appraise the latest concepts of contemporary city planning in the villes nouvelles, enabling them to flourish economically. Simultaneously, they tried to shield traditional Moroccan artists and social life from the potentially destructive and degenerative impact of that same modernization. Many critics noted that the rigid functional zoning applied to the different quarters, although aesthetically valid in most cases, was not a viable option for rapidly expanding Moroccan cities and was oblivious to the actual living conditions of the Moroccan population. For Rabinow, Prost’s shortsightedness was indeed representative of this era of planning: ‘This is not to deny the specificities of the colonial situation, but it does point to the more general limits of authoritarian planning by experts’ (1989: 302). However, this lack of interest for some of these expanding metropolitan areas is a reflection of what was indeed the main focus of Lyautey and his disciples. They were after something rather different. For them, the newly conceived Moroccan city was both a real and imagined place, and a site to express their creativity and genius, an ideal testing ground for talented and innovative French professionals. It was about spatially experimenting the preservation of history, while exploring new forms of social modernity; a laboratory open to an authoritarian exercise of experimental planning, and, again, an enormous field of opportunity for an entire class of architects and urban planners. Rabat and Casablanca – together and perhaps more than Marrakech, Fez, etc. – became the ideal field of operation for translating their ideas, concepts and imaginations into practice and real, hard, material space. Lyautey’s preoccupation with harmony, order and the aesthetics of the urban, also translated into ideas around the beautification of the most mundane aspects of life and a true appreciation for taste, style, culture: We benefited from finding the arts still alive in Morocco . . . At our arrival in Morocco, the industry of art was surely very sick, in need of employment in the recent anarchic and miserable years. But it was still alive, it only needed saving without delay. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 489) For him, the extension into the interior of buildings of the landscaped spaces of the new cities that he was creating was key to a much desirable marriage of different traditions, between the urban European landscape and the Arab terraced house (Rabinow 1989: 312). He even asked artist Maurice Tranchant de Lunel to ‘re-clothe’ his four-room residence in Rabat as well as the adjacent barracks, all ‘in the Arab style, making them tolerable’ – or so he assumed – to the Moroccans in the surrounding area (Wright 1991: 91). French Morocco, under Lyautey’s mindful tutelage of culture and design, was to become a

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precursor of the Moroccan chic that populates the glossy pages of many interior design magazines today, a specific, deliberately recherche´, colonial Moroccan style, European and orientalist in nature, possibly best interpreted today by the interior design of the renovated riads located in the medinas of many Moroccan cities, mostly owned by European newcomers (Saigh Bousta 2004a; 2004b). Using indigenous Moroccan motifs in the official buildings of the colonial government became part of this strategy aimed at creating a specific French-Moroccan culture of art and design, a culture that was supposed to penetrate all aspects of colonial life under Lyautey’s regime of meaning. France’s respect for Islamic culture, it was believed, might help quell the Moroccan’s hostility towards European domination ‘and thus, little by little’, Marrast wrote ‘we conquer the hearts of the natives and win their affection, as is our duty as colonizers’ (cited in Wright 1991: 1). However, for how important these ‘local’ political and cultural objectives might have been, it is must be kept in mind that, in le Maroc, the group of professionals led by Lyautey and Prost was at the same time searching for universal rules – for principles of urban design and urban policy that could be applied effectively in any context – and for the meaning of cultural particularities (1991: 12). This preoccupation was best exemplified by the layout of the E´cole Coloniale in Paris, recalled again by Wright: ‘the fac ade combined Oriental and Moorish motifs. In architecture as in the classroom, a move to integrate aesthetics and administrative policy in the colonies was underway’ (1991: 67). For Rabinow, Lyautey preached a simplicity and sobriety of style. The forms embodied the norms he sought to impose. We are attached, he said, to the best characteristics of Arab architecture which ‘prides itself on fashioning its exteriors solely with simple contours and facades’ the style of association consisted in simplicity of forms, minimal decoration and geometric spaces. Morocco’s public buildings would present Moroccan forms in the service of modern norms of technology and administration. Lyautey and Prost brought the neo-Moorish style for individual buildings to its highest point of achievement. The administrative buildings (central post office, central bank, law courts, hotel de ville, records offices, etc.) were formally distributed around the Beaux-Arts, symmetrical space. (1989: 312). This endless tension between linearity and de´cor, rationality and orientalist fantasies, efficiency and beauty, planning and everyday life, is possibly the most significant mark of Lyautey’s attempted dominion over space. It included a full array of radical ‘interventions’, such as: altering the facades of army buildings; converting the ‘Sultan’s domain’ into developable land; thinking of a city as a sight laid out for the visitor, something picturesque and touristic; creating

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architectural harmony; but also clearing the way to get to it. It consisted in a powerful and comprehensive project comprised of forcible expropriation in the name of a greater good. According to Wright ‘the process of conceiving and implementing plans for colonial cities reveals European notions about how a good environment . . . should look and function’ (1991: 1). This entailed a constant and possibly unsolvable tension between elements of rationality and culture, modernity and tradition, hygiene and control, style and functionality. If these polarities were indeed somewhat merged into the compromised spatialities of the new regime – as anyone can realize by walking, as we have many times, some of these colonial urban dreams – at the same time, this turned out to be for Lyautey and his team a sort of mission impossible. The colonial city, and Rabat in particular, was nothing but an attempt to put all this into a pacified whole – again, an urban, beautified, conservative dream. However, this attempt to translate a real city into an aestheticized object of their own metaphysics of representation was never achieved and perhaps was not achievable. Imagined and real cities, in French Morocco, remained far apart; the ‘spatial’ separate from the political and the cultural. People and stones on the one side; ideas and dreams on the other. However, the French Moroccan dual cities, torn between rationality and aesthetics, power and colonial desire, were in many ways a fictional space of culture, association and social pacification. What is of interest to the main argument of this book is thus how the distance between the two cities operated in the production of the ‘Moroccan dream’, but also, how they still operate today, compared to a very specific understanding of the colonial modern in Morocco; the invisible and at the same time very material geographies of the European tourist idea of le Maroc: Most often, we stay on the right track thanks to our sleuths, to my dear agents of the Fine Arts and their volunteers, people of taste, passing tourists who spontaneously offered themselves to avert disaster, like the charming artist Jacques Majorelle, staying in Marrakech . . . (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 500) Tellingly, in most of the contemporary brochures produced today by both the Moroccan tourist authorities and the tourist industry, the images convey a rather ambivalent message, with references to ‘upscale’ modern facilities frequently accompanied by the evocation of the work of orientalist painters like Delacroix, Majorelle and Matisse and, in general, an orientalist, colonial imaginary. The dominant trope is, in fact, the wholly-colonial ‘appel du Maroc’ – a trope that draws on a long tradition of itinerant cultural tourism,

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inaugurated already by the French during the days of the Protectorate, now revived and reinterpreted within the contemporary Moroccan ‘restaging of the colonial for the masses’ (Minca and Borghi 2009). Before we start our own exploration of le Maroc, travelling through some of its key sites guided by the double register of Lyautey’s legacy on the one hand, and of the contemporary tourist on the other, it is important to pause and reflect on the genealogies of some of the tropes that made the imaginations – but also the political conditions – for the invention of le Maroc possible. Lyautey’s dreams of a laboratory for experimenting alternative social modernities were in fact fully embedded in the orientalist and colonial zeitgeist of the beginning of the ninenteenth century; a zeitgeist that was also the result of centuries of European flirting with Morocco and its real and imagined spatialities.

CHAPTER 2 MOSAI¨QUE

The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached . . . (Said 2003 [1978]: 103)

Versions of the Orient Every era, every region has its versions of the Orient, whatever that might mean. An Orient that lies on the other side of the river, across a mountain range, or the barely visible rocky summit over the narrow strait in a wide sea (see Figure 2.1); an Orient from which come people of special characteristics, who are like us yet somehow alien, sometimes mysterious, dangerous, surprising, intriguing. The Orient as a real and imagined land of exotic Otherness as produced through Western academic disciplining in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is now accepted as fact (Said 2003 [1978]). Yet in each evolving corner of orientalist discourse, different Orients were produced, often with material effects on spaces at a distance. The ‘idea of Morocco’ and the actual territory of Morocco were, and still remain, undoubtedly entangled in such discursive layering, resulting in a contemporary Morocco being crafted from a compiled history. In this chapter we intend to pull some strands of that history out, to take a look at them, through the standpoint of Europeans travelling to Morocco and the perspectives they published about it as a result. The work of this chapter is partly an exercise in digging through artefacts that reflect impressions about ‘Morocco’ and the historical moment that enabled them. It is partly, also, a reflective exercise in considering the inevitability of Lyautey and his perspective on what would make Morocco ‘modern’ and tour-able. Yet this reflection also moves past Lyautey, through what influenced him and including his enduring influence on a philosophy of Morocco as ‘picturesque’ – a trope of an

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Figure 2.1 Looking across the Straits of Gibraltar from Tarifa (Friendly Rentals 2012) orientalizing gaze that became intrinsic to the production of Morocco as an exotic tourist playground. These movements are, of course, inseparable from historical events and processes acting on Morocco, North Africa, Europe, and the world itself as it was being divided up by colonial powers and undergoing changes in means and modes of production at an unprecedented rate. Our focus is not solely to repeat the historical timeline of this progression, as an explanatory justification for the tour-able Morocco that exists today: rather we wonder how the accounts of European travellers, writers, artists, bureaucrats, diplomats and explorers emerged from Morocco, and thus circumscribed ‘Morocco’ as a place full of special characteristics that were reiterated through subsequent generations. We suggest that the experiences of Europeans broaching Moroccan borders seem to follow a repetitious movement pushing ever inward. As the meeting point of the Sahara, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Morocco has always been an important location for the movement of goods between land and sea, and many of its early European chronicles are from the perspective of the coast. Known since the time of the Roman Empire for port cities like Tingis (Tangier), the interior of Morocco was relatively more difficult for Europeans to access. Progressive movements of commerce and colonization, with artists, musicians, technicians and literary figures along for the ride, pushed farther and farther into a Moroccan interior landscape, then into Moroccan homes. Along the way, a ‘picturesque’ Morocco became a recognizable imaginary, through representations that such individuals produced about Morocco and distributed elsewhere, and artefacts that went along with them. Finally, in the present age of intensified tourist mobility, these movements have overlapped, so that the ‘picturesque’ Morocco is mapped into Moroccan spaces by Moroccans and Europeans in concert, as an evolving cultural product being marketed to European consumers. This chapter, then, is effectively a history of Morocco and Europe as an intertwined spatial formation, taking as axiomatic that these histories cannot be

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separated (Dahan and Lausberg 2010). It is by no means, and it does not intend to be, as detailed and complete as the numerous reconstructions of Moroccan histories already produced by historians (like Abitbol 2009; Burke 1976; or Pennell 2000). Instead, we chose to reflect on spatial and temporal intersections that somehow crystallized and shifted this relationship into a new configuration, based on how Western authors and public figures at the time were discussing Morocco. Thus, our endeavour is broken loosely around key time periods (primarily from the eighteenth century onwards) and places, bookended by events that were important for this relationship, that demonstrate how Morocco was becoming present in European spaces, literatures and imaginaries. These events and epochal shifts may have been recognized as historically significant at the time, or may have spread over years with impacts that are still not fully comprehensible. Moreover, they are events with multiple locations and with a global reach: for example, a French bombardment on Essaouira that impacted English trade relations, or an exposition launched in Paris that in many ways marked the beginning of the end for the worldwide French colonial project. From the present-day vantage point, relying on this hazy spatial periodicity, a narrative emerges that likely influenced Lyautey as he was designing the modern le Maroc – a precedent to which we can attach him, and from which we can frame how present day Morocco works as an iteration of its histories.

Histories To begin, it may be of help for our main argument to recount some early histories of Morocco and Europe, stretching as far back as necessary, but trying to be deliberately brief and selective. Doing so, we keep in mind that a good part of these histories is inevitably filtered through an era of study of the Orient from which certain interpretations and statements of fact persist that warrant reconsideration (see Davis 2007, as an excellent example). In other words, these narratives from the past are inseparable from disciplinary Orientalism, as many of the European translators and record keepers of Moroccan history were inherently part of the orientalist project. Nevertheless, some dates, some movements of population, and some historical watershed moments can be charted here based on this specific body of literature and its accounts. Relatively little history of the northwest part of Africa is detailed in writing before Islamic invasion. Several important Greek, Phoenician and Roman settlements were located here, principally along the coasts at the present day sites of Tangier, Rabat and Essaouira, as well as inland at Volubilis near Meknes. Yet even for these empires, Moroccan territory was a distant and relatively inhospitable environment: Roman reports about the region – encompassing what is now Tripoli to Tangier – gave it the name ‘Barbary’, and the people were accordingly defined as ‘Berbers’, evoking the Greek notion of uncivilized

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foreigners (Cohen and Hahn 1966; Abitbol 2009). Very few indigenous written materials can be read today that document the centuries of North African life between Rome and Islamic conquest, though life is in evidence (Hachid 2000). Less than 50 years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death, an Umayyad force arrived from Damascus in what is now called the Maghreb, the farthest point west, or the ‘land of the setting sun’. By 710 CE, a great many of the residents they found there were converting to Islam; what religious beliefs they may have held before then are contested. A rampant legend espoused by colonial French governments considered Berbers to have been previously Christian, making them more suitable for modelling into French citizens in contrast to the oppressed indige`nes musulmans of Algeria (Pennell 2000: 159 – 64). There were also Jewish populations, whose origins and migration history remain foggy (Goldenberg 1992). No matter what may have come before, from this point in history until the present day, Islam has been the religious majority in this territory, with a long history of living closely with Jews, and a long history of fighting about borders with European Christians (Abitbol 2009; Cohen and Hahn 1966; Pennell 2000). Berbers quickly became part of Islam, and the Berber leader Tariq ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier, led his forces north to conquer Iberia in 711. Muslim conquest brought recorded and disseminated history to Morocco, along with a golden age of power and domination in the Maghreb and Iberian peninsula. The Umayyad governments based in Cordoba from 717, then in Granada from the eleventh century on, represented a source of wealth and prosperity, with their strong links to Almoravid and Almohad dynasties across the Mediterranean. This Christian Dark Age was matched by an Islamic enlightening, which produced scientists, historians and travellers, notably Averroes (1126 – 98), Ibn Khaldoun (1332 – 1406), and Ibn Battuta (1304 – 68/9), along with lasting architectural monuments in Cordoba, Granada, Tetouan, Fez and Seville, among others. This historical wealth of the Andalusian empires present on Moroccan territory was later to become part of Lyautey’s project to revive and preserve ancient glories from their pitiable state of decay (see Chapter 1). After more than 700 years of rule by a succession of Muslim leaders constantly at war with Christians, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella ‘reconquered’ the Iberian peninsula piece by piece in the late 1400s, ending with the fall of Granada in 1491–2 (Lausberg 2010). In the century following, many expelled Andalusian Muslims migrated to resettle across the Mediterranean, in cities that remained under Muslim control. Their traces persist in North African cultural space, from family names recognized to date from that migration, to the Al-Andalus quarter of the medina in Fez (Le Tourneau 1961). In the criss-crossing mobilities of an Africa dependent on Saharan caravans and Atlantic and Mediterranean mariners, the territory of Morocco was always a

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strong strategic position, the frontier between desert and sea. Yet for much of its history, holding together a kingdom where isolated regions were always ready to separate themselves has been the central challenge of its ruler. Successive dynasties have won and lost territory towards the southeast, around the main trade routes coming from the Sahara, and along the western and northern coastlines, where various cities today have centres that were built by the Portuguese or Spanish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Lausberg 2010). Yet most essentially, these incursions were often kept at the border; Moroccan sultans managed to earn allegiances and collect taxes to maintain a territorial unity between seats of power in Fez and Marrakech (with some periods of exception) against European and Ottoman movement from all directions (Abitbol 2009). This coherence of successive Moroccan leadership is strong enough that in 2008 the city of Fez celebrated the 1,200th anniversary of its founding by Idriss II, son of Idriss I, a descendent of the Prophet considered to be the root source of Islam in Morocco, marking a linear interpretation of the Moroccan Sultanate from then till today (Le Matin 2008). Whether through conquest or commerce, or some combination thereof, this nexus at the northwest corner of Africa has had an enduring relationship with the Iberian peninsula and other European nations navigating the Atlantic. Following the Reconquista and the dispersion of former Iberian residents into North Africa, a more competitive presence of corsairs (pirates) emerged from the ‘Barbary coast’, disseminating Iberian knowledge of sailing. From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century, ports along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of what is now Morocco were sites of exchange of pirated and acquired goods, as well as prisoners, in cities populated with Moroccans and scattered Europeans (Obdeijn 2010; Triki 2010). In this period of rapid imperial expansion, North African corsairs were the enemy in Europe’s backyard, profiting from the goods they captured as European ships passed by, and trading this wealth across Africa with Ottomans, as well as with other European nations. This point also marks initial accounts of Morocco – referring to the cities of Marrakech (called Morocco or Maroc) and Fez and their respective empires – as told by pirate captives forced into slavery during their imprisonment (Ockley 1713), and the occasional military officer returned from battle there. Morocco was doubtless a deep and mysterious Other, but in proximity, both functionally and in terms of its power: it was not an Other that could be easily and immediately defeated and colonized. Rather, Moroccan kings signed treaties with leaders in Europe, and the newly unified United States of America. This attitude was also to play a key role for Morocco’s future relationships, to the extent that, longer than many other non-European territories, Morocco was seen as an independent state and an important commercial partner, not merely a vacant territory to be conquered. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, then, Morocco was a reasonably powerful antagonist on the edge of Europe. By no means an empire competing in

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size with those in the Near and Far East, it was nevertheless an acknowledged state and a force to be reckoned with, which had successfully maintained independence from Ottoman armies approaching from Algeria. Morocco was present in a European imaginary through some images of Barbary pirates, veiled women and hooded or turbaned Muslim men (Dahan and Lausberg 2010). The names of its port cities – Tangier, Sale´ (Rabat), Mogador (Essaouira) – were marked and mapped, as were the names of Fez and Marrakech, capitals of the interior (then separate) kingdoms. Many technologies in use there kept pace with Europe to this point, particularly since the guns and ammunition from European trade ships were easily captured by Moroccan corsairs (Brown 1976; Obdeijn 2010). Moroccan products, particularly leather and wool, were in demand elsewhere (Ennaji 2010: 83). With the nineteenth century, however, technologies shifted. As trains started to travel throughout Europe, Morocco was still traversed by caravan; products from European factories began to infiltrate Moroccan markets as lower-priced alternatives. Imports began to outweigh exports and, as Moroccan polymath Mohammed Ennaji notes, what is today the most symbolic expression of Moroccan hospitality – mint tea – can be traced to the introduction of gunpowder tea by European merchants (2010: 84). Yet the fact that European powers were trading profitably with Morocco would prove an unstable protection from military takeover. Fellow European nations and ratified trading partners objected to any one power trying to forcefully intervene. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Sultan Moulay Sliman, known for his piety, managed to avert Napoleon’s ships, along with the incidental help of the British presence in Gibraltar and Tangier. In an effort to keep European relationships calm, he returned prisoners and halted the ‘maritime jihad’ (Abitbol 2010b: 110) of corsairs against European ships. But, like many Moroccan sultans, his was a tenuous hold over distant factions within the kingdom. His successor in 1822, Moulay Abd er-Rahman, embarked with an intention of developing external commerce, signing treaties with Portugal, England, France and Sardinia, but was impeded by continuing piracy out of Berber territory in the Rif Mountains, as well as several years of famine (ibid.). Which brings us to the year that marked a key turning point for the North African political situation: 1830. This year France battled the Ottomans for dominion over Algeria and won, sending Morocco into a long and finally overwhelming struggle against ideological and military enemies at its doorstep, trying to get inside.

1832 –1867: Delacroix and the French Snapshot: Summer, 1830 In the summer of 1830, French forces invade the city of Algiers and end 313 years of Ottoman rule. French control in the Moroccan government would not come for nearly a

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century, but from this moment on it is a looming threat to sultan and citizens. The threat is not simply that of a colonizing power – Morocco has already successfully guarded its independence from Ottoman infiltration. Rather, the threat is a new military might capable of overthrowing the Ottomans, and, even worse, from a Christian nation. Seen from Morocco, the imaginary of approaching armies bringing French rule is that of an ancient religious enemy trying to take control of Islamic lands – a reversal of Iberia, with new rules and new consequences (Pennell 2000). Almost immediately after French occupation, Sultan Abd er-Rahman welcomes Algerian refugees into northeastern Morocco and makes motions to aid the nascent rebellion against the Christians, spurred on by popular outrage amongst his citizenry. Of particular interest is the town of Tlemcen, just across the formerly Ottoman border, which has close historical and cultural ties with Fez. Tlemcen asks to be put under the Sultan’s rule, and Abd er-Rahman sends a nephew as its new caliph. The new King of France, Louis Philippe, sends Count de Mornay as a diplomatic emissary to encourage the release of Tlemcen to the French. Count de Mornay, dreading the boredom of the journey, brings with him an acquaintance as a traveling companion: the painter Euge`ne Delacroix.

Delacroix in Tangier Having arrived after a troubled journey overland and delays at sea, Count de Mornay and his delegation were installed with the French Consul Delaporte in Tangier for much longer than anticipated. Unknowingly, they had reached the city shortly before Ramadan, and, after the necessary honours and visits around the city’s consuls and governers, found themselves bound to wait out the holy month before traveling to Fez for an audience with the Sultan. De Mornay’s mission would eventually be a failure: he never managed to acquire any substantial agreement from Abd er-Rahman, and dominion over Tlemcen would remain unresolved until later military action. The weeks spent waiting in Tangier, however, would prove cataclysmic for the presence of Morocco in a European imaginary, as they gave Delacroix plenty of time to wander the streets, enter households, and collect notebooks of sketches and drawings that would feed his production for years to come. ‘[B]ecause Euge`ne Delacroix was a member of the mission, Morocco made a majestic entry into Western art, freeing itself from all the cliche´s accumulated by several generations of authors and artists who had used the “Orient” as an alibi for exploring an exotic world of fantasy’ (Arama 1994: 54). While de Mornay wanted to leave immediately, to return to civilized Parisian surroundings, Delacroix was fascinated. Through ambassador Delaporte, apparently as unhappy to host de Mornay as de Mornay was to be there (Arama 1994), Delacroix became acquainted with the Consul’s Jewish-Moroccan interpreter and go-between, Abraham Benchimol. He took to following him through his daily business, including being welcomed into his home and other family homes. From these encounters came several works that marked

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Delacroix’s artistic career, including some portraits and Noce juive au Maroc (1839?), which now hangs in the Louvre. Delacroix’s drawings of Morocco were starkly dissimilar to those preceding him – materials which often consisted of topographical maps, engravings of marine battles fought on the Moroccan coastline, cityscapes seen from the sea, and exemplars of dress of the Muslim man, woman or child. Baron Taylor’s Voyage pittoresque en Espagne, en Portugal et sur la coˆte d’Afrique, de Tanger a` Te´touan, published in 1826, provides a typical example: the collection of pictures on northern Morocco shows mountainous landscapes and decontextualized natives, dressed in their ‘ethnic’ clothing. Delacroix’s work moved the viewer indoors – to a realistic setting, like the unembellished central courtyard filled with music and dance for Noce juive. Or, in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), featured in the Paris Salon of 1834, Delacroix made figures who are intriguing but not overtly sexualized, lounging in a space that is colourful but not overly saturated. There is no doubt that he was as fascinated as any Orientalist by what he saw and experienced in Morocco; he referenced the six notebooks filled while traveling there for the rest of his life, repeating images from them in his artwork even as his memories faded and their realism waned (Thornton 1994: 69). Yet, unlike many, he managed to reproduce what he had seen without exoticizing it to an extreme:

Figure 2.2

Jewish man and woman of Tangier (Taylor 1826)

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The ‘specialists’ also, those who had always included North Africa in Orientalism, were surprised by Delacroix’s Morocco because he never fell into the trap of the picturesque. Moroccan life at that time was neither exotic nor quaint and Delacroix looked further, behind the landscapes, behind the faces, deep into the soul of a welcoming but not always readily open country. (Ben Jelloun 1994: 23) At this watershed moment, Delacroix’s art turned Morocco from a distant unknown to a doorstep. His work made Morocco and North Africa a pilgrimage that began to compete with the customary Italy for certain artists (Thornton 1994: 66). Yet his journey to the interior remained one that was difficult to repeat. For de Mornay’s entourage, as for any Christian, the Sultan’s permission and protection was necessary to traverse the country: ‘With a soldier and an order of the Emperor one crosses this empire in this country that seems inaccessible to Europeans’ (Delacroix 1999: 130). While Algiers was becoming an extension of territorial France, Morocco was still, possibly more than ever, guarded from entry.

The years of the English, 1835– 60 Whatever prominence Delacroix brought to Morocco in a French imagination of North Africa was overshadowed by the on-going struggle over Algeria. For much of the nineteenth century, the territory that is now Morocco remained difficult to enter, and even more difficult to traverse. On the French national stage, more exciting and plentiful accounts came on the progress in domination over Algeria – in news reports of military victories, from arriving colons writing to their families at home, and the institution of Bureaux Arabes as military and scientific reconnaissance outposts. The attempts at sociological study produced by government agents in these Arab bureaus, trying to devise a politique indige`ne to maintain power over native communities, became a basis for French social science in North Africa: ‘[i]t was through an Algerian lens that the French viewed other Islamic societies’ (Burke 2008: 160). The Moroccan Empire continued to play a role in this progress but its role was to shift from potential enemy to potential conquest. Ever the equivocating diplomat, Moulay Abd er-Rahman provided aid to the dissident Algerian leader Abd el-Kader, while also holding European emissaries at bay with promises of cooperation. Moroccan products were becoming desirable on a broader global stage, as commerce opened without the interference of pirates, and trading with Europeans – particularly the English – was becoming a secure geo-political position (Burke 1976, chapter 2); until, that is, the Battle of Isly in 1844, when French forces attacked Moroccan soil as retribution for harbouring Abd el-Kader, and then took him into custody. Historian Michel Abitbol attributes the instigation of this attack to the fact that Abd er-Rahman

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was listening more to the English than the French (2010b: 113), but there were many causes for growing tensions – most obviously, that Algerian dissidents could find safe harbour in Morocco. After dominating on the battlefield, French ships bombarded Tangier and Mogador (Essaouira), to cement the point. A treaty was signed, and both sides retreated to their corners. Distrust of France became a widespread sentiment, and the English became Morocco’s best friend in Europe, though still held at a distance. Rey, a French resident of Tangier, commented, ‘[a]s to the English, they show suppleness and prudence, and sacrificing national dignity to the prosperity of commerce’ (1844, quoted in Richardson 1860 vol. 1: 63); in other words, in this Frenchman’s eyes, the English subjugated themselves to the Sultan’s caprices to maintain their trading relations. Such commentaries by European witnesses – who, like Delacroix, would have travelled to Morocco with some difficulty – were necessary sources of information about a place that was largely free from European residents. Some merchants were present in the major cities, along with the consuls and diplomats, but otherwise there were very few outsiders. Trickles of travellers’ reports arrived in European circles – or were markedly absent. In 1835 –6, between Delacroix’s visit and the Battle of Isly, the Englishman John Davidson publicly declared his intention to be the first European to attempt to cross the Sahara from Morocco towards Timbuktu, only to be assassinated in the southern Moroccan desert. He had presented himself to the Sultan as a scientific explorer with credentials from the British monarch, but such a mission was interpreted with reservation. As John Drummond Hay, long-time British consul to Morocco, commented: The Sultan of Marocco little knows or cares about scientific pursuits. It would never enter into the mind of a Moor, not even the most enlightened, that any man would expose his life by travelling through the wild tracts of West Barbary, or attempt to penetrate into the land of deserts and death, solely for the love of travel and science. (Drummond Hay 1861: 163) Knowing something of ways of life in Morocco after having spent the majority of his life there – and having advised Davidson against continuing – Drummond Hay surmised that the threat he posed was one of commercial competition; that he had been killed because he was suspected of gathering information to take over trade in the region (ibid.: 170). Davidson’s remaining papers were published by his brother in London, and the circumstances of his death became a public incident in the relationship between England and Morocco. In truth, the notion of ‘pure’ scientific pursuit was rightly suspect. Across the border in Algeria, French soldiers were undertaking similar missions of knowledge gathering, where that knowledge had an enacted and negative purpose. Whether it was

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military or commercial, the ‘natives’ were right to recognize the potential dangers of knowledge gathering by an Other that seemed intent to infiltrate. Yet the more the Sultan set boundaries to what Europeans could know about his territory, the more they sought to trespass. In John Richardson’s Travels in Morocco, published posthumously by his wife, he describes official suspicion of a doctor who, travelling through the country, might collect samples on the road: ‘This lynx-eyed government imagined they saw in Doctor Willshire’s botanical and mineralogical rambles, a design of spying out the powers and resources of the country’ (Richardson 1860 vol 2: 143–4). French priest Le´on Godard recounts the story of a scholar whom, intent on studying the architecture of the tomb of Moulay Idriss, sought a disguise to allow him to enter what is still today restricted only to Muslims (1859: 7–8). On the way to Fez, he shaved his head and learned to imitate the postures of Islamic prayer to pass himself off as a Turkish saint, though unable to speak any Arabic. He managed to survive inspection by a local sherif, enter the tomb (with a gun under his burnous), and thus used the guise of praying to have time to look at the interior decorative detail. Godard paints this incident as bravery, concluding: ‘taking note of such barriers is enough to judge that Morocco is opposed to any form of scientific research’ (Godard 1859: 8). There is little wonder, given the measures this scholar took to disguise himself and penetrate a sacred space, that European visitors would not be trusted; and little wonder as well that, in the historical context of discovery as domination, those who managed to enter the interior of Morocco would further attempt to catalogue its glories. Particularly given that the latter part of Godard’s account contains his argument for the best method for his government to invade and conquer Morocco: Morocco, everyone understands, must, in the near future, submit to European conquest, or transform itself by opening to our influence, our explorations, our commerce, not only its coasts but also the distant regions of Tafilet and Oued Draˆa. Lifting the smallest corner of the veil that covers it would be a step in the right direction; because it would hasten, along with everyone’s desires, the moment where the violent or moral pressure of Europe will change the deplorable situation of this vast country for the common good. (1859: 3) Through the nineteenth century, Morocco was turning a corner in travellers’ discourses. Davidson’s tragic story was one of the last worldwide about an explorer in previously ‘undiscovered’ territory; others, like Godard and Richardson – both from religious orders – were on a mission of diplomacy for their personal interests. Many of the narratives from this period come from experienced travellers, who spoke some Arabic after having lived or travelled elsewhere in the Islamic world. They make reference to the previous reputation of Morocco – namely, the feared

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corsairs – in evaluation of the present and future of Morocco: observing character traits of the Sultan, whom Godard calls a ‘religious fanatic’ (1859: 2), or cataloguing the commercial resources that Morocco offers, and to whom. Richardson, for example, notes that British commerce far outweighs any other European nation in Mogador (Essaouira), at that time the main port to give access to Marrakech (1860 vol 2: 159). The population of Europeans in Morocco was composed of merchants and diplomats, but the stories that reached Europe were those written by travellers passing through, coming into contact with these residents and retelling the tales they heard. Their narratives are often stories of travel itself, as reaching a port was an exciting navigation, and reaching any interior city involved days of travel with a caravan. Because of their remoteness, inland cities were a curiosity and an unknown quantity, filled with potential wealth. ‘The strength of Morocco lies in her internal cities, her inland population, and the natural difficulties of her territory; about her coast she cares little; but the French did not find this out till after their bombardments’ (Richardson 1860 vol 2: 3). The fact that the European consuls were restricted to port cities – Tangier and Mogador – was agreed by many commentators to be a means to keep distance between the locus of power and the European Christians. These timespace coordinates, however, were soon to change. In 1863, regular steamships began trajectories between Europe and Morocco, stopping at London, Lisbon and Marseille. Morocco’s staunch independence, too, was becoming more fragile. After signing a lucrative trading treaty with Britain in 1856, orchestrated by the most resourceful of the European consuls, John Drummond Hay, Morocco was at war with Spain by the end of that decade, and in debt following the war far beyond its means. England provided the loan to help repay costs to Spain, but Spanish customs agents continued to excise beyond their due, impoverishing the people and government (Abitbol 2010a: 134–6). Throughout this period, the French stood mostly to the sidelines. After the Battle of Isly, their interest in Morocco remained its conquest, in order to dissolve a space of safety across the border for Algerian dissident indige`nes. Yet the economic interests of their neighbours and sometime adversaries – England and Spain – could have been perturbed by any military action, and may have provoked retaliation. While Morocco was part of this colonial mess, its role was to maintain a status quo: remaining a bastion of Islam and of sequestered resources that European powers prostrated themselves to obtain.

Snapshot: Exposition Universelle, 1867 – Paris, Champ de Mars Arriving by rail to Paris in the summer of 1867 is a vast change from the four days camel ride between Marrakech and Essaouira. We are here to see the 1867 Exposition Universelle, where for the first time Sultan Mohammed IV, who took over on Abd er-Rahman’s death in 1859, has sent a delegation from Morocco. The Champ de Mars,

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normally a military parade ground, is not yet dominated by the Eiffel Tower; rather it has become a temporary site of international architecture, with representations from countries around the world. Morocco is found sharing space inside the Gale´rie des Machines with Tunisia, and in competitive company with independent states like Egypt (under Ottoman protection), Iran, and Turkey from the Muslim Orient. Algeria is also featured at the Exposition, as a demonstration of French colonial power, with a mock village space to view the ‘real Arab’ (C ¸ elik 1997). For many contemporary commentators, however, Morocco is of little note; Lavoix (1867), for example, writing on the Orient at the exposition in the popular weekly L’illustration, discusses the Ottoman-influenced territories, including Tunisia, with no mention of Morocco. The commentators in L’illustration who do devote some space to Morocco, though little in comparison to Egypt, reflect the discourses of other travellers we have seen: It’s been barely twenty years since the external politics of Morocco were founded on exclusion of any exchange with Christians: the Consulates

Figure 2.3 Moroccan and Tunisian pavilions at the 1867 Exposition (Lancelot 1867)

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MOROCCAN DREAMS were barely tolerated in the city of Tangier; commerce with foreigners was monopolized in a few Muslim hands under cover of epidemic; but the empire and her holdings were closed to our investigations, as if the presence of an Infidel could have inflicted on it the greatest dangers. (Warnier 1867: 411)

Dr Auguste Warnier, who was able to travel in Morocco as a member of an Algerian Arab Bureau, goes on to mention two Europeans explorer-scientists killed recently in Morocco, suggesting that this kind of ‘governance’ merits European intervention over a territory so rich in natural value: Morocco, with mountains reaching 3500 meters of altitude and on which snow persists a good part of the summer, with immense plains fertilized by powerful flows of water, with a population of eight million inhabitants and numerous ports on the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean, just two steps from Europe, would be one of the richest countries of the world if, for centuries now, it was not held in complete isolation; if the diverse races that it contains: Berbers, Arabs, Moors, abid or mixed negroes, Israelites, did not live in a perpetual antagonism; if the government did not live on pontifical transgressions, reaching towards senility, much more than the wise notions of modern politics. (Ibid.) Franc ois Ducuing, who later compiled the illustrated review of the entire exhibition (1868), echoes the jealous, accusatory and vaguely threatening tone against the Moroccan sultan: The Emperor of Morocco, as we call him, or moreover the Emir-al-Mumenin (the Prince of Believers) passed for a sovereign amongst the most hostile to European civilization. Enclosed in his magnificent palace that could rival those of the largest in China, surrounded by his loyal black guard, he defied all attempts the European spirit could make to introduce an asylum in Mohammedanism, hunted from both the northern and eastern coasts. But the times have changed; the noise of the Christian canon set running the most tenacious prejudices. Today the Prince of the Believers does not refuse to take part in international contests to show a specimen from his hunting lodge or travel to show the art and industry of Morocco. (Ducuing 1867: 108) In fact, the ‘specimens’ that Moulay Mohammed sent to Paris were prized Arabian horses, a breed that had long been coveted by European royalty, along with beautiful mosaic decoration. To that extent, what the Sultan demonstrated to the viewing public in Paris were the material riches of Morocco – its unique

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horses and luxurious architecture – and not the innovation or industriousness of its people. Whereas Warnier dismisses the Moroccan interiors as excessively decorated, reflecting those of a rich household (1867: 412), Normand singles out the equestrian outdoor building as one of the ‘most remarkable products of Oriental industry at the 1867 Exposition’ (1870: 14). In his book focusing on the architecture of the exhibits, he reproduces the tiling detail of both floors and fountain in full colour. The architect for this building may have been French but the craftsmanship is clearly Moroccan. The entire display, from horses to fountain, hints at what the commentators noted: while Morocco inches open its doors, it teases the world with its unique genius hidden from view. While still a dangerous place, on the borders of anarchy, it is increasingly a place Europeans want to gain the privilege – to prove themselves worthy – to see.

1878 – 1907: Beating new paths Snapshot: Exposition Universelle, 1878 – Paris, Champ de Mars Paris, a scarce decade later, is much the same story. Morocco again occupies a small sliver of the 1878 Exposition. Again, the pavilion construction is executed by a French architect, in abstract reference to North Africa and not to any specific building in Morocco (Morton 2000: 230). And again there is a tent, richly decorated and attributed to the Sultan – Moulay Hassan since 1873 – as the contribution representing his country. Lamarre and Fliniaux, in their guide to Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco at the exposition, detail the geography and history of the country (to the extent that it was known), followed by a description of the pavilion and its contents – the arts, industry and produits alimentaires. Their account indicates that times are changing, but slowly: Whatever is the more or less interesting of this exhibition of Moroccan products, one can only say that it permits to be seen the presaging, from the Moroccan government, of less shadowy dispositions than in the past towards Europe and its civilization, or even a simple vague desire for connection born of a tantalizing and fleeting occasion. This country blessed by nature, that nearly touches Europe at the Cap Spartel, is much further from modern civilization than Japan. The defiance of its government on one hand, and the turbulent spirit of its fanatic inhabitants on the other, makes Morocco, still in the nineteenth century, an almost unknown land. The geography of this region is barely broached, and more so our ignorance of its mineral and vegetation production, its different climates, its dialects, its customs, and its historical ruins that mark its soil. (Lamarre and Fliniaux 1878: 78) However much is now known of Morocco – geographical and historical details, the fruits of its artistic, industrial and agricultural labour – it remains ideologically

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unknown. Lamarre and Fliniaux go on to speculate, based on recent missions by a government agent and a rabbi, about the vast potential for archaeological discoveries that are unhappily inaccessible: while opening up to further exploration, Morocco continues to be une terre inconnue. To conclude their observations, they express the impression that the ‘government’ – and the country – are opening to others. This attitude marks the next period in the imaginary of Morocco from a European perspective, in which curiosity increases along with access, until French control over the country becomes an historical inevitability. What shifted between 1867 and 1878? Politically, Morocco remains more or less the same – the Sultanate succession has been surveilling European potential infiltration, guarding against the implicit French desires to take over. England is still a brisk trading partner, and the debt incurred to Spain over the 1858–60 war is being successfully paid. Tunisia will be invaded in 1881; by 1882 the French foreign minister Ladislas Ordega will openly discuss deposing the Moroccan monarchy (Mie`ge 1968). In response to the invasion of Tunisia and France’s renewed interest, Moulay Hassan will make a show of strength by gathering his military force in Marrakech, and the seemingly inevitable invasion is evaded. Other European powers enter the conversation, as Germany and Austria take an interest in Morocco’s economic future, while French foreign interests are drawn towards South Africa, the Indian Ocean and other spaces of competition with the British. In other words, Morocco remains central yet marginal for colonizing governments in Europe, as a potential conquest rather than an actuality. While the coastal towns are known and celebrated, the territorial interior remains difficult to broach. The dynamics of European travel and exploration are also changing. In this period, steamships have reduced the journey from Marseilles to Essaouira from 36 days to seven (ibid.: 136); but the overland journeys to Fez or Marrakech, the centres of power, have not changed much, either in mode of travel or in the danger they might pose to Europeans. From 1867 to 1877, the European population resident in Morocco nearly doubles (Abitbol 2010a: 140), but these residents are concentrated on the coasts, from the Spanish-dominated Mediterranean westward until Tangier, then down to Casablanca, Rabat and Essaouira, all of which have growing enclaves. Their presence makes it easier for other Europeans to arrive and orient themselves; their growing number signifies Morocco’s increasing economic importance to Europe, even as an independent state. While travelling there is still difficult, it is a project that might be undertaken by citizens who are not on a diplomatic, religious or exploratory mission. Explorers still come to Morocco, inasmuch as the interior is still perceived as wild and unknown, but the growing class of professional travellers and travel writers also come here, in this transitional period, as Morocco becomes something between a place beyond the edge on the map and a site of peripheral modernity.

Beyond the frontier While Morocco remained, at least nominally, under the control of the Sultan, European Christians attempted to explore in places where they were ostensibly,

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and officially, not welcome. The accounts that enjoy a wider circulation came primarily, unsurprisingly, from French and English explorers (de Foucauld 1888; Harris 1889; Cunninghame Graham 1898; de Segonzac 1903; Gentil 1906). Occasionally some others entered this conversation, like the German Gerhard Rohlfs (1868), the Italian Edmondo De Amicis (1877) and the francophone Belgian Edmund Picard (1889). These others were self-motivated travellers, while national political interests, through the research committees of various national scientific societies as well as newspapers and presses, financially supported the majority of French and English reports. France and England, along with Spain, clearly had financial, political and territorial investments in Morocco’s fate. For most of these men, encountering Morocco was one of multiple potentially life-threatening trips they had made or would make, there or in other distant places. What set Morocco apart, at this late date in the history of global exploration, was the continued obscuration of parts of its terrain and territory. There remained places that European (Christian) eyes had not seen – places that were away from the coastline or not visible from the regularly travelled roads to Fez or Marrakech. To reach these unmapped places, one needed royal permission and hired soldiers accompanying the expedition. Or, in what marks these men apart from other travellers, a European Christian might adopt a disguise: Picard wore Arab dress, de Foucauld imitated a Jew, and Cunninghame Graham started out aiming for a Turkish doctor but settled on feigning a sheikh. He explained the necessity to travel in disguise as part of the dance of Moroccan diplomacy: The Sultan of Morocco, when he gives a European a permit to travel in his territory always writes on it, after the usual salutations to his various governors, ‘we recommend this Christian to you, see that he runs no danger.’ The Moor, reading between the lines, sees that the Sultan wishes him to stop the Christian visiting any unfrequented place, and naturally he puts a lion in the path. Thus, had I gone to Agadir furnished with guard and Sultan’s letter, the Governor would have received the letter, kissed it, duly placed it on his forehead, called to his scribe to read it, made me welcome, and informed me that it was quite impossible for me to go farther, as certain bastards, who feared neither God nor Sultan, would be sure to kill me on the road. (Cunninghame Graham 1898: 59) These men undertook their voyages with the goal of exceeding the local boundaries set to keep them away. De Foucauld was the first Christian recorded entering Chefchaouen in 1883, dressed as a rabbi; Harris was the second in 1888, and only narrowly escaped bodily harm (Harris 1889). De Segonzac travelled as a beggar through the Rif, gathering knowledge about the zone that had historically been the most problematic for both Algeria and the Moroccan sultan. The transgressions of these travellers put their lives at risk, as they were

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vulnerable to attack in uncontrolled and rebellious corners of Morocco, and they risked diplomatic relations between Morocco and their home countries, as the assassination of a European might become (as it eventually did) a casus belli. Yet their activities remained couched in the pursuit of knowledge: de Segonzac presents his volume as maps and scientific research, thanking a plethora of academics from geography, geology, botany, astronomy and cartography for their help in classifying his gatherings (1903: ix– x). Despite the potentially dangerous circumstances, these explorer accounts often read like a travel diary, filled with anecdotes and adventures, along with mundanities of daily life that are made exotic and interesting by their unusual circumstances. They reported banal knowledge of a place that was so proximate, yet so different; by departing Gibraltar three hours’ distance to Tangier, ‘[w]e suddenly find ourselves in an unknown land, without ties of any kind, and with everything to learn’ (De Amicis 1897 [1877]: 3). What they went there to learn was, in certain circumstances, purposefully gathered: de Foucauld’s account (1888) is prefaced with a reaction statement by fellow explorer Henri Duveyrier, on the occasion of his presentation of his report to the Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie de Paris on 24 April 1885. Duveyrier congratulates his colleague on traversing new routes through unfamiliar territory, on his topographical measurements of great accuracy in formerly unknown sections of territory, and on the bravery of his endeavour, while beginning his statement by noting how this neighbour on the Algerian border is weaker than it was 50 years ago. As much as they explored to become individual conquerors of new lands – to be the first Christian to enter a barred gate – they were also contributing to the store of information about a potential enemy.

Narrating the picturesque Whilst Morocco provided the unique experience, at that time, of ‘undiscovered’ terrain, it was also becoming part of the circulation of travel writing and touring on a broader scale. As the century progressed, more and more Europeans had reason to settle in Morocco: the presence of consuls enabled merchants to establish themselves, and the presence of merchants brought other service providers, like religious leaders and medical professionals, which required more consular support. Established residents attracted visitors, and the increase in activity created need for hotels and other infrastructure enabling embryonic forms of tourism. As Cunninghame Graham (1898) noted, Europeans in Morocco were limited to merchants, consuls or missionaries – or authors and journalists, looking for ‘copy’. This ‘copy’, as content for newspapers, magazines, circulars, or books across Europe, often adhered to broader, popular styles of narrating the exotic Orient. Many of the authors writing about Morocco wrote other novels or travelogues of other parts of the world as well (Perrier 1873; Meakin 1901, 1905; Savory 1903;

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Aubin 1904; Dawson 1904). They form part of the cohort of professional travel writers that was emerging along with the increased ease of travel in modernity. Morocco was becoming another frontier on the Grand Tour – a place in close proximity to Europe whose history was familiar but exotic, and which was becoming more and more accessible through faster transport mobilities. It was more accessible in other ways as well, inasmuch as several of these authors were women, either travelling with their husbands or with other female companions – and, in at least one case, alone. These writers often spent several months in Morocco, moving from city to city, describing impressions of the architecture and sites, along with their own interactions with people, as characteristic examples of what can be found in this country. Travel writers were in dialogue with other contemporary chroniclers, including the explorers we have already described and others who were long-time residents or as attache´s to diplomatic missions (Bonsal 1893; Kerr 1894). Occasionally this dialogue was antagonistic, pointing to inadequacies of others, as Englishman A. J. Dawson does in his travel narrative (1904). He devotes a chapter to ‘a French preface’ to Morocco, analysing the ulterior motives of French contemporary authors writing about Morocco, and arguing for the maintenance of a strong British presence there. Whether long-term or short-term residents, they all made claims to authenticity – to describing a ‘real’ Morocco, based on first-hand experience of long duration, and representing the ‘true nature’ of its people in ways that read as quite problematic today. The vignettist perspectives of Morocco these authors provide contributed to a ‘picturesque’ Morocco, one which emphasized historical imaginations of the territory embedded in romanticized literature of an exoticized Other and of an unfamiliar, oriental landscape. This sense of ‘picturesque’ was often forthright and deliberate: By the western gate of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often tempted invaders, the decrepit Moorish Empire has become itself a bait for those who once feared it. Yet so far Morocco remains untouched, save where a fringe of Europeans on the coast purveys the luxuries from other lands that Moorish tastes demand, and in exchange take produce that would otherwise be hardly worth the raising. Even here the foreign influence is purely superficial, failing to affect the lives of the people; while the towns in which Europeans reside are so few in number that whatever influence they do possess is limited in area. Moreover, Morocco has never known foreign dominion, not even that of the Turks, who have left their impress on the neighbouring Algeria and Tunisia. None but the Arabs have succeeded in obtaining a foothold among its Berbers, and they, restricted to the plains, have long become part of the nation. Thus Morocco, of all the North African Kingdoms, has always maintained its independence, and in spite of changes all round, continues to live its own picturesque life.

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MOROCCAN DREAMS Picturesque it certainly is, with its flowing costumes and primitive homes, both of which vary in style from district to district, but all of which seem as though they must have been unchanged for thousands of years. (Meakin 1905: 1 –2)

Their publications also made this version of Morocco literally pictured: building on a legacy of painting Morocco since Delacroix, many authors used photographs depicting landscapes, city architecture and street scenes, caravans in which they travelled, and occasionally interiors in homes or palaces to supplement their descriptive texts. The travelogue writers, as well as some of the explorers discussed in the previous section, also included images of themselves in ‘native dress’ (see Figure 2.4) or in some context of authenticity. Moroccans who appear in these photographs are often anonymous. They are ‘a figure by a gate’ or ‘a crowd greeting the Sultan’, sometimes individuals with a one-dimensional identity, like ‘the Jewish quarter’ (see Figure 2.5) or ‘pottery sellers’. The shallowness of these portraits, both pictorial and literary, reinforces the simplistic interpretations our European authors give to Moroccan habits and customs, with little allowance for complexities they may not comprehend. The repetition of these images across authors and national literatures enabled an image of antiquated, strange, orientalized, ‘picturesque’ Morocco that persisted through the early twentieth century. Like any other visitor, these authors read the existing literature and ‘discovered’ its truth on site. They conversed with the same small community of expatriates installed in Morocco – staying at the same hotels, interacting with the same consular agents, steamship captains, and fixers in what were then tight circles of European complicity. As their impressions and stories were printed, they gained truth through repetition. Savory (1903: 263 – 4), for example, mimics five years later almost exactly Cunninghame Graham’s contention (previously cited) about the Sultan’s double-edged instructions to allowing Europeans to travel, but preventing them from exceeding his grasp. Through these publications, Morocco was becoming more familiar to a European audience, but familiar within confined discourses of isolation and quaintness, of scheming Orientals and strange practices, of a shocking lack of railroads and a ‘picturesque’ countryside that were simultaneously inviting and forbidding. Morocco, as seen by travel writers, became an intimately known place even as it was profoundly unknown.

Preparing the way Travel writers, as much as professional and political explorers, were aware of the instability in political relations between Morocco and Europe. Some chose to address this subject directly, like Dawson in his chapter, parsing the commentary

Figure 2.4

English explorer and author A.J. Dawson, in ‘Moorish guise’ (1904)

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Figure 2.5

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‘Entrance to a Mella`, or Jewish Quarter’ (Cook 1910: 175)

of French writers and their competitive national interest in Morocco. Even under the title Le Maroc pittoresque (1905), journalist Jean du Taillis, who was accompanying a French diplomatic mission to Fez, manages to idolize ‘Fez la myste´rieuse’ while providing an overview of its potential industries that could be mobilized if only a railroad linked it to the coast. This dual gaze was not uncommon: along with colonial other interests that had developed for France elsewhere in North Africa, the value of Morocco was becoming more solidified in its economic potential rooted in its ‘backwardness’ and ‘need’ for development. In the scope of global politics, Morocco’s resistance to infiltration was becoming less and less tenable. The year 1904 marked another turning point in this history. The entente cordiale signed between England and France relinquished British interests in Morocco as part of a worldwide separation of interests between the two dominant empires (Pennell 2000: 125). Without British protection, however, Morocco was more vulnerable than ever. Sultan Abd el-Aziz, in power from 1894 to 1908, had already proven himself inept (Abitbol 2010a: 147 – 50). He was spending money faster than he could tax it, and contemporary diplomats considered him a gullible pawn, lured by fanciful gadgets and luxuries. His subjects were rapidly losing confidence in him as a protector.

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In 1905, the conflict for financial interest in Morocco shifted to a confrontation between Germany and France, which resulted in the 1906 Treaty of Algeciras, permitting French command of the police forces in several port cities, financing the Moroccan state with debt spread amongst the foreign powers, as well as allowing foreigners, for the first time, to own real estate in Morocco. Germany insisted on continued independence of government but, with footholds in economic and military control, the secession of other powers to France would not be easy to resist (Pennell 2000: 132). The opening of the conference was depicted on the cover of Le Monde Illustre´ as a foreground corte`ge of bearded men in white hooded djellabas, looking slightly disoriented and out of place in the Algeciras city hall, with men in top hats chatting in the background (see Figure 2.6). This was another image entirely of Moroccans, here on a world stage, at the centre of European politics – yet blatantly ineffectual. These figures are no longer fierce and fearful Arabs, rather pawns being pushed around by players much larger than them. This era is also a turning point for knowledge produced by Europeans about ‘the territory and the people of Morocco’. In what Burke (2008) calls the third period of French sociology of Islam, subsequent to Napoleon’s study of Egypt and the Algerian Bureaux Arabes, the academic Alfred le Chatelier created the Mission Scientifique au Maroc and coordinated a series of volumes of Archives Marocaines between 1904 and 1906. Their contents are heavily detailed and comprehensive histories of specific regions and tribes, with analyses of administrative structures, industry, religion and superstition, linguistic features, and more. These repeated the style of catalogue that French sociologists had been gathering for years in Algeria, and before that in Egypt, as a means toward knowledge and domination (Burke 2008; Mitchell 1991). Furthermore, it was exactly the kind of knowledge gathering that previous sultans had dissuaded by controlling European passage through Morocco. As competitive protectionism lessened, the French finally gained access to the intimate mechanisms they were seeking, in the name of ‘science’. In this time as well, the desire to visit Morocco seems to fade somewhat. Cook (1910) in narrating a circumnavigational tour of the Mediterranean, notes a sense of general unrest lately in Morocco, while also describing a swathe of then recent violent events, including two kidnappings and several French and Spanish attacks. He calls Moroccans a ‘virile, unruly and fanatical population’ (1910: 162), and indicates which regions have now been calmed enough for European (Christian) tourists since the recent Treaty of Algeciras integrated French, Spanish and German military controls. Morocco at this point is a land of uncertainty, where European intervention seems to be the only hope for a profitable and peaceful future. Yet as European control became a creeping reality, it seemed to instigate division between an archaic, mysterious Morocco and one overtaken by

Figure 2.6

The Treaty of Algeciras cover of Le Monde Illustre´ (Abitbol 2010a: 151)

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European military and industry. Immediately after musing on the potential for industrial development in Fez, du Taillis reflects on precisely this paradox: But great Gods! What am I doing? Mutilating the sacred city, chasing away from this panorama of another age its silence and clarity to dream of deafening noise and heavy fumes of factories! That the tourist might pardon me! I dare to hope, despite everything, that, for a few more years, Fez and its surroundings, amongst the olive trees, the murmuring torrents and the golden fruits of its gardens, will taste their sunny sleep, thus preparing the absolute calm of nature and of men yet to be born. (du Taillis 1905: 299) On the brink of the Protectorate, Morocco retained a magical air of a place lost in a pre-modern time, both to its benefit, as delicately archaic, and to its detriment, as hopelessly brutal and indolent. Along with that suspension in time came the threat of what it might become once the inevitable power of Europe took hold.

1917– 31: Rise and fall Snapshot: Ten years on A dramatic ten years passed, marked by the cover of the popular French weekly L’illustration (see Figure 2.7). To be specific, this was ten years from early August 1907, when Lyautey commanded French troops to invade from Algeria, near Oujda; ten years from 19 March 1907, when a ‘Moroccan mob’ killed Dr Emile Mauchamp, a French resident of Marrakech, whose death became the foreshadowed casus belli (Amster 2004). While Morocco would not officially become a protectorate until 1912, French control, as demonstrated by L’illustration’s issue (see Figure 2.7), dates effectively from 1907. In the interim five years, as the increasing French presence churned the population into unrest, Moulay Abd el-Aziz, whose frivolous spending had emptied the royal coffers, was replaced by his younger brother Abd el-Hafid (Abitbol 2010a: 153 –5). Yet his dethronement was too late; Abd el-Hafid was not able to recoup the debts his predecessor had incurred, nor able to form a military to effectively counter the French. Protectorate became the best of bad options. With official control in 1912, Lyautey morphed from conquering general to administrative director. Just as his programme for rebuilding began, the European continent plunged into war, which was still unresolved when this cover appeared. Morocco dropped out of public vision for a while. The lead article in this issue, ‘Ten years of French work in Morocco’ by Gustave Babin, recounts Lyautey’s battle – as Lyautey told it – against Moroccan aggression toward French residents there: ‘It was, last 5 August, ten years exactly since the first French sailors entered Moroccan territory to avenge the national honour’ (Babin 1917b: n.p.) – to take vengeance, that is, for the death of Dr Mauchamp. Babin continues, describing the ‘fanatical’ Chaouias

Figure 2.7

Cover of L’illustration (15 December 1917)

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(a tribal group) who attacked French labourers working at the Casablanca port, prompting a French bombardment later called the massacre of Casablanca. All of this is distant history now; once a problem on the Algerian border, after World War I has shattered all else, Morocco returns with fervour as a symbol of French even-handed success, and Lyautey a national hero. In those ten years, as noted in the previous chapter, Lyautey has been diligently working, gathering his team of architects and archivists, and the evidence of it is becoming clear in what these journalists see in Morocco. A later article in that same issue, ‘Promenade en vieux Maroc’ by Euge`ne Montfort (1917), enters a trope that will dominate writing about Morocco for the rest of the century. Illustrated with sketches and delicate watercolour paintings, Montfort extols Lyautey’s decision to keep Arab cities ‘respected’ and separate, and therefore ‘old’, while constructing a ‘new Morocco’ alongside. Now, with the Protectorate installed and the world still uncertain after the war, many of the European voices discussing Morocco are French, and many of them repeat this message of transition. Morocco is no longer a closed and mysterious place, rather a ‘Morocco that was’ and a ‘Morocco that will be’. Furthermore, these voices are not only explorers and journalists or travel writers – they include photographers and artists, novelists and bureaucrats, even Lyautey himself, through his endorsements of anything from novels to guidebooks and recountings of him by authors across many media. Morocco is now open like never before, and even more ‘picturesque’ in its old iterations and its new ones.

Touring and picturing Even while a ‘closed’ country, Morocco never lacked for visitors: becoming an ‘open’ country created a new genre of tourist access. As previously discussed, Lyautey’s vision for Morocco explicitly designed a path towards tourism. The realization of that goal was enabled by new periodicals popping up about Morocco. French entrepreneurs in the new Protectorate constituted a new public needing information and resources, from the Maroc Revue inaugurated in September 1919 explicitly to balance the old Morocco with the new one of development and modernity (Ferrussac 1919), to guidebooks like the Guides Bleus or those offered by the purpose-built Fe´de´ration des Syndicats d’Initiative et de Tourisme (1925), that often gave as much information for a potential tourist as for a potential resident. Coinciding with an age of popularized portable photography, these images of Morocco became even more ‘picturesque’ than before, with several photographic volumes on Morocco and North Africa published in the post-war period (Bel and Larribe 1917; Larribe [after 1917]; Pe´rigny 1917, 1918, 1922; Lehnert 1924). The photographs in these volumes depict all that might be expected of Morocco: crumbling city architecture in street scenes of monochromatic figures covered from head to toe; landscapes of rough brush or desert dunes; busy marketplaces or festivals. Or, importantly, the interiors of previously hidden buildings –

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medrasas, mosques, homes – where French photographers could now enter (see Figure 2.8). These images, for the most part do not yet encompass the development of new cities providing order on the margins of this old Morocco – those cities are still being built. Elements of them do appear, however, like the Museum of Fez already set up in the former Batha Palace with a showcase of European armaments and Moroccan crafts for the tourist visitor. These picturings of Morocco replicate the ‘old Morocco’ that persists as what attracts the tourist gaze, and begin to hint at the ‘new Morocco’ on its way, that provides ease of travel previously unknown in this territory. All of these sights, as well as the practice of photographing them and rendering them under a European gaze, folded into Lyautey’s plans for European tourism as an essential economic boom to Morocco (see Chapter 1). Most important in the ‘picturesque’ project for Morocco was the work of Jacques Majorelle, whose Marrakech home and garden is now a highlight of the tourist circuit there. In addition to his oeuvre of paintings depicting life in Marrakech and the surrounding region, he was one of the most prolific artists of promotional posters about Morocco commissioned by Lyautey’s agency for tourism (see Figure 2.9) (Blanchard 2007: 149). As Blanchard argues, in a survey of posters and images of Morocco between 1906 and 1956, Majorelle along with his fellow artists and designers in Lyautey’s employ reinforced the modern and ancient dichotomous image of Morocco until it became indisputable fact: ‘Colours, themes, characters, architecture . . . seem, all in concert, to fix Morocco in the collective imaginary’ (Blanchard 2007: 132). Their pictorial production of Morocco for the French audience was essential in attracting both migrants and tourists, in making Morocco a known place through its ‘picturesque’ images.

Ge´ne´ration Lyautey Those Europeans present in post-World War I Morocco produced pages of commentary and advice about being there. Yet many were there as part of Lyautey’s bureaucracy, as by 1921 the French accounted for 21 per cent of the population of Rabat (Abu-Lughod 1981: 154). In many ways, the ge´ne´ration Lyautey was an extension of previous structures of information in Morocco: Alfred Le Chatelier’s Mission Scientifique, begun in 1904 (see page 53), became the Direction des Affaires Indige`nes; writers, artists, journalists and other notables who visited Morocco were funnelled and channelled by these new authorities towards certain sites and locations, not unlike the Sultan had prevented explorers from straying off the prescribed path. Here, instead of limiting mobility, visitors were honoured with the attention paid to them by Lyautey and his team, whose business, in the end, was propaganda. Without seeming to have this intention – not having declared or dictated it explicitly – Lyautey managed to create a network of media infiltration

Figure 2.8 The crumbling architecture of a famous Fez medrasa (Bel and Larribe 1917, plate 50)

Figure 2.9

Le Maroc par Marseille by Majorelle (1926)

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through articles, commentaries, photographs, guidebooks, and revues by members of his staff, from those who worked directly under him to those who were charged with apparently independent posts but who would have reported to his general authority. Three central texts demonstrate Lyautey’s direct influence: the architectural revue compiled by Jean Gallotti, with sketches by Lyautey’s architect Albert Laprade (1926); Henri de la Casinie`re’s overview of the development of a new municipal code in several cities (1924); and Maurice Tranchant de Lunel’s recollections about his efforts to guard and preserve the beauty of Morocco (1924). Together, these volumes help produce a record of the physical transformation of Morocco, documenting when, how and why Lyautey’s vision was enacted, simultaneously as preservation and development. His influence emerges in less formal work as well. The Protectorate Authority produced ‘copy’ through various outlets, such as their own multilingual booklet Le Maroc (n.d.), and through periodicals where their employees were the authors, like La Vie Marocaine Illustre´e or L’Art Vivant au Maroc. These journals appear to be independently published but, tellingly, bear Lyautey’s stamp along with the Sultan’s, and the table of contents consists primarily of short articles contributed by Protectorate bureaucrats. This direct influence, as the visionary leader, was not Lyautey’s only mark on European media about Morocco. As a military man now heading a civilian government, he was connected by some degree to almost every French resident or visitor – as the former commander, as the enabler of new investment and employment, or as the gracious host. His stamp is everywhere on documents from this period: from endorsing guidebooks and travelogues (Ricard 1921), to providing the foreword in memoirs (Azan 1924), to being thanked in acknowledgements of fiction and non-fiction literature by writers who enjoyed his personal and bureaucratic hospitality (Farre`re 1924; Wharton 2004 [1920]; Montagne 1930a; Willette 1930). Edith Wharton’s In Morocco, for example, is dedicated to Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral Lyautey and Madame Lyautey: ‘Thanks to whose kindness the journey I had so long dreamed of surpassed what I had dreamed’ (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 2 – 4). She also refers to her use of a military car and driver as transport, provided by Lyautey, that enabled her cross-country exploration (ibid.: KL 12 – 27). Until his dethroning in 1925, and even beyond, Lyautey was everywhere in visions of Morocco produced by Europeans for consumption elsewhere.

Snapshot: Palais de la Porte Dore´e, Paris, 1931 Back in France after Morocco, Lyautey carries a heroic reputation and a legion of loyal subordinates. He is named director of an already troubled endeavour, the Exposition Coloniale de Paris, which, by the time he takes over, is years late and millions over budget (Morton 2000). This is not the first time that Protectorate Morocco was brought

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to France in exhibition – the 1922 Exposition Coloniale in Marseilles was a successful introduction of the youngest colony (Hale 2008: 129). The 1931 exposition, however, marks a shift: the patterns of domination in Europe are changing, and popular feeling about colonial power is becoming more uncertain. The problematic planning of the exposition, before Lyautey’s arrival and after he takes over, suggests some of the significance of its positioning. The site is the first long debate. The traditional location of past expositions in the centre of Paris, Champs de Mars, is denied, against Lyautey’s wishes, in favour of a marginal site on the eastern edge of Paris – the Bois des Vincennes – beyond a dangerously Communist and revolutionary neighbourhood (Morton 2000, chapter 4). The date, chosen explicitly by Lyautey, marks 100 years of French control in Algeria. At this centennial many are questioning what benefits had come to France to outweigh the continued uprisings and unrest in Algeria and elsewhere (Blanchard 2007; Grandsart 2010; Morton 2000). The theme of this exposition is ‘ La plus grande France’ – Greater France, beyond the me´tropole, encompassing a national population on distant islands as well as across the Mediterranean, for which the exposition provides ‘le tour du monde en un jour’. All the materials emphasize this encirclement and proximity of separate races and places (Hale 2008), using art-deco inspired imagery of strength and racial unity under French leadership, contrasting with the romantic designs of the previous exhibition in Marseilles. This especially extends to the sole permanent building left behind, the Muse´e des Colonies. Designed by Albert Laprade – one of Lyautey’s chosen architects in Morocco – the building is reminiscent of classical architecture but decorated with a basrelief on three sides depicting French colonial influence on people and locations in all corners of the globe. This process for incorporation into a single nation, however, continues to be problematic. While most of the official materials of the exposition extol the benefits of France’s civilizing prowess, as in the bas-relief and frescos covering Laprade’s structure (see Figure 2.10), or in Tranchant de Lunel’s Le tour du monde en un jour a` l’Exposition Coloniale (1931), the imagery describing many of the regions is, at this point, masking larger issues of maintenance and integration between the me´tropole and its dependants. Laprade also designed, along with Robert Fournez, the Moroccan pavilion. Lyautey allotted it a vast space, bordered with Algeria and Tunisia (Hale 2008, chapter 6; de Mazie`res 1932). It is praised as a hybridization of French and Moroccan styles (Morton 2000: 228), much like Laprade’s residential development in Casablanca had been praised as ‘neo-Mauresque’ (Wright 1991, chapters 1 and 3). The orchestrations of this exposition truly bring Morocco into France – Morocco as it is emerging, redesigned and administered by the French authorities, and being held up as an example of successful colonization. De Mazie`res, President of the Moroccan Fe´de´ration des Syndicats d’Initiative et de Tourisme, publishes his favourable review of the Moroccan pavilion in the exposition in La Vie Marocaine

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Exterior, Palais de la Porte Dore´e (L. Wagner 2011)

Illustre´e, commenting on the noticeable attention given to Morocco among the North African countries. Yet cracks were beginning to show. The exposition provided the scene for an international congress on urbanism in the colonies (Royer et al. 1932), which Lyautey attends as guest of honour. Reports are collected from a global sampling of French and others’ colonies on the problems and successes of attempts at ame´nagement. Morocco appears in several parts of the volume: two reports cover two periods of its development as a total project, as well as separate reports on urbanism in Marrakech, Tangier, and Laprade’s contribution in Casablanca. Yet famously (Abu-Lughod 1981; Rabinow 1989), Prost’s report acknowledges that his designs have not taken hold as he expected (Prost 1932). Rural to urban migration has shifted native Moroccan populations into cities, exceeding the capacity planned for them in the now limited space of the medina. The seeds of what will continue to the twenty-first century as a problem of slums and overcrowding has already begun to blossom, and will plague the remainder of French administrations in Morocco (see Chapter 3). In 1931, more than a quarter century after French influence strengthened with military force, Morocco has become a defined and publicized presence in France. Lyautey and his reputation stand at the front of this representation, along with the corps

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of urbanists he trained and disseminated into French bureaucracy. Their efforts to preserve and protect have not gone unnoticed, neither in the popular press nor, through Lyautey’s efforts, in public spectacle like the 1931 exposition. The Morocco that is presented to France is, however, distinctly divided into ‘old’ and ‘new’, much like its public spaces have been, so that the modernity and progress promised by French intervention will be celebrated as unquestionably beneficial to all.

1956 – 2010: New and old beginnings Tourism as development The February 1955 spread (see Figure 2.11) in the National Geographic Magazine opens by documenting Morocco’s importance in international relations: the airfield and American planes here may have helped prevent a war (Shor and Shor 1955: 147). Yet this modernity is only possible as paradox; as the article’s subtitle states, ‘Jet planes lace vapour trails over modern farms, but in the markets of Marrakech you can buy an evil eye for three cents’ (ibid.). The authors also

Figure 2.11

The Jet Age in Morocco (Shor and Shor 1955)

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document the on-going internal ‘terrorism’: the bombing of a French cafe´ in Casablanca, and another bombing near the retirement ceremony of the most recent re´sident-ge´ne´ral in Rabat. At the cusp of independence, long after Lyautey’s heyday, Morocco had drawing power for tourists as far as the United States. The changeover of power, as was imminent to nearly all of Africa, would have a profound effect upon who visits Morocco, but why they visit would maintain some linear thread. Morocco may be becoming modern, but the elements of its exoticism, so lovingly protected by Lyautey and his followers, persist to make it a place that is ripe for tourism. As independence came relatively peacefully to Morocco in 1956, the departure of French administration and funding left a vacuum. The newly independent kingdom suffered relatively little internal conflict, as the exiled King Mohammed V was a historically validated and inspirational leader (see Rivet 1999 for a more detailed biography). During his short tenure as king, until his death in 1961, independent Morocco was just finding its footing. As the administrative powers of government began to re-situate themselves, they turned to the assets that the French had left in place, including tourism based on the image of a preserved and timeless Morocco (Hillali 2007; Stafford and Be´langer 1996). Coinciding with this post-war period was the increase in mass tourism based on air travel, sending residents of the Global North to increasingly distant locations in the Global South on short holidays. Luxury hotels had proliferated under the Protectorate government, who targeted the wealthy Grand Tourist able to travel to such a distant place as Morocco, leaving the country poised to take part in this boom. In 1965, tourism became a central part in the Five-Year Plan for economic development (Hillali 2007: 42), which included increasing aid for privatization of the national chain of high-end hotels and transport, originally built under Lyautey as state services. The World Bank (1966), then Air France (1968), published very similar analyses of what assets Morocco had to offer for tourist trade, along with some targets for development. The warm climate and natural resources were singled out as attractive, while the system of bakshish (unofficial but expected tips) was cited as a negative, inasmuch as it created bureaucratic blockages to actually building new hotels. These goals were suggested in the early climate of global aid programmes, as an economic sector that could turn Morocco’s attention outward, towards revenue streams beyond subsistence. Along with other newly independent states in that time period, Morocco joined the ranks as a problem for development. The government, however, continued to publish the genre of advertorial journal that the Protectorate had produced since the 1920s. This ‘copy’ repeated and perpetuated otherings of Morocco, now by Moroccans themselves, within the strongly directed efforts for economic development crucial to the survival of the independent state.

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Art and ethnography Simultaneously, attention was turning towards Morocco through emerging literatures in academia and increasingly diverse popular culture. Anthropological, geographical and sociological material in North Africa had been primarily the purview of the colonial governments across the region. This meant that the tradition of French ethnographic literature, coming out of the grands e´coles in Paris, tended to ignore the Maghreb, with few notable exceptions (Gellner and Micaud 1973). The upcoming generation of social scientists, however, approached Morocco and the former French territories as a new site for historical and contemporary exploration (Ageron 1972; Berque 1962; Brunschwig 1966; Julien 1970; Le Tourneau 1949; Mie`ge 1961 –3; Vatin 1984). Several of the key figures here, including Pierre Bourdieu, had first-hand experiences with the colonial administration and the war(s) for independence (Addi et al. 2003; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). While some continued to defend French colonization, others were vehemently critical of it, and used their work to unearth the ‘real’ social structures of North Africa buried beneath the illegitimacy of French domination. The twentieth century saw another Delacroix-like catalyst, whose work reintroduced Morocco to a new generation: Paul Bowles. After The Sheltering Sky was published in 1949, Bowles’ continued presence in Tangier together with the popular success of the novel increased the attraction of Morocco for writers and artists. Unlike in Delacroix’s era, Morocco was now a place included in global mobilities and sites for dwelling, where outsiders could arrive and choose to settle without obtaining permission from the Sultan. Bowles’ long residence in Tangier, until his death in 1999, produced innumerable repercussions for literary, artistic and academic work in Morocco (Coury and Lacey 2009). As a composer and author, he embarked on preservation projects to record and publish local music and storytelling, as well as championing Moroccan writers and translating literature. His widely known sexual amorphousness, and admitted use of substances, cemented Bowles as part of the (mostly Anglophone) literary generation of the 1960s known for breaking taboos. The results of his efforts in documenting, recording and distributing Moroccan arts trickled out into emerging counterculture – both popular and academic – in the 1960s and 1970s. Recordings he made of local musicians helped entice rock stars, like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Cat Stevens, to seek inspiration – from music and from the drug culture – in Morocco (see Chapter 8). His work and the other authors he attracted for brief stays, like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (de Graincourt 2010), enabled Tangier to become a centre for literary pursuits (see Chapter 9). Furthermore, his translations of Moroccan stories became part of the catalogue for ethnographers working in Morocco, as a basis for citations and a departure point for gathering folktales and other forms of ethnography (Geertz et al. 1979),

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in what was a disciplinary turn away from master narratives and towards ‘local culture’. They also opened the field of North African studies to include more Anglophone voices commenting on contemporary topics, beyond the orientalist tradition persisting in bastions of academia. Tangier, and Morocco in general, became a place to visit on the heels of the famous and infamous. Part of the allure was a product of the worldwide movement towards counterculture. Inasmuch as this period was an era of protest and dissent, Morocco became a centre for marginality in an atmosphere where marginality was central. Excitement building around these movements, and the leaders who spent long and short periods in Morocco, started pulling a different kind of tourist than previously seen. As remembered by Esther Freud in Hideous Kinky (1992; MacKinnon 1999), the European and American hippies who descended on Morocco marked a change from the luxury tourists who had been the main temporary visitors previously. Bowles himself was originally a luxury traveller, one of a privileged elite that could afford transatlantic and transcontinental travel. The generation that followed, however, were hippies, surviving on as little as possible instead of spending money freely (again, see Chapter 8). With new waves of mass tourism towards Morocco, which was becoming an accessible part of the inexpensive Orient within close range to Europe, this sector developed into separate streams for foreign visitors of means and without means. Whereas once Marrakech had been known as one of Winston Churchill’s favourite cities to paint, it developed a new kind of counterculture aura through songs like ‘Marrakesh Express’ (Crosby et al. 1969) idolizing the rustic and the psychedelic that came to embody Morocco throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Vision 2010 All the layers of old and new in Morocco are present in the contemporary emerging image of it as a tourist destination. As much as Lyautey’s preservation efforts are part of the new Moroccan chic, the legacy of hippie culture and the invaluable aura of past celebrity visitors add to the exotic ambiance. Tourism continued to steadily increase and diversify in Morocco from the 1970s to the 1990s, building on these legacies and the push from global funding bodies towards tourism as a post colonial avenue for economic development (Minca and Borghi 2009). During his lengthy reign from 1961 to 1999, King Hassan II oversaw this progress through ebbs and flows, with his most focused effort put behind ‘priority zones’ for touristic development (Zones Touristiques a` Ame´nager en Priorite´ or ZAP). The borders of these zones coincided with areas of traditional Amazigh ‘dissent’: the formerly Spanish northern coastline, the south around Agadir, and the Saharan border with Algeria; what France called ‘Maroc inutile’ (Hillali 2007: 49). These zones had been targets of other kinds of development, inasmuch as they experienced high out-migration during guestworker

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recruitment for European countries in the 1960s and 1970s (Berriane 1992). While these efforts to develop tourism produced some effect, the amount invested seemed to outweigh the benefits (Hillali 2007, chapter 4). Taking the throne after his father’s death in 1999, King Mohammed VI has opted for an expanded approach to tourism. At a conference in 2000, the Office Nationale Marocaine du Tourisme (ONMT) announced, under his auspices, the ‘Vision 2010’ ten-year plan that anticipated 10 million tourists by the year 2010. This goal was supported with billions of dirham invested in infrastructure and the development of tourism capacities, in order to increase income and employment in this sector to 20 per cent of the gross national product (Fe´de´ration Nationale de Tourisme 2008). As much as this plan was hindered by global forces, including the drastic effects of 11 September 2001 on both air travel and tourism in Muslim countries, the goals outlined have witnessed great improvements. Recent available figures show the nearly doubled number of border entries from 4.37 million in 2001 to 8.34 million in 2009 (Administration du Tourisme 2011). Tourism receipts increased to nearly double as well, along with the national figures on hotel capacities. The Vision 2010 goals were not fully met, but the expectations and drive they generated has reshaped tourism in Morocco for a new generation. Part of what is being produced through these new investments in tourism development is a new configuration of Moroccan authenticity as contemporary design infused with historical elements: Moroccan chic. This aspect has, in fact, become part of the new Vision 2020 goals – for a Moroccan tourism that reflects ‘authenticity’, ‘preservation’, ‘quality’ and ‘sustainability’ (Administration du Tourisme 2010). An important aspect to this evolution has been the influx of foreign property owners, in a territory where the ban on foreign property ownership was once one of the causes for colonial aggression. Dating from the mid-1990s, the population of foreigners resident in Morocco shifted from second home owners, retirees and occasional expatriates to a more cohesive trend of entrepreneurs capitalizing on opportunities for tourism development (Escher and Petermann 2000; Kurzac-Souali 2005b). The most visible part of this trend has been investors remodelling traditional homes from the old medinas majestically named riads, a term which calls to mind wealth beyond the ordinary homeowner. Some of these have become boutique hotels, notably in Essaouira, Marrakech and Fez, while others are private residences for mobile professionals. This trend inevitably contributed to a dramatic cost of living increase in these areas, as housing prices skyrocketed in the transition between a local housing market and one where incomes from elsewhere set prices. It has also led to fears of ‘loss of authenticity’ in the traditionally Moroccan medinas as formerly resident families sell their homes to move to newer models, based more on European housing design than traditional Moroccan homes, at the outskirts of major cities (Kurzac-Souali 2005a).

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This circulation represents a strange inversion of Lyautey’s dual city project. His edicts to preserve the medina, such as enforcing strict building codes, have at least partly enabled the medina homes to become valued at the exorbitant level they enjoy today. The attributes of historical or traditional authenticity gained a market value, to the extent that the process of remodelling a Moroccan home has become a kind of global signifier, a project for the middle class expat to turn into a publishable narrative (Clarke 2008; Shah 2006). Yet that process has produced precisely what Lyautey forbade: European occupants in Moroccan spaces. The notorious failure by his team to predict the expansion of the Moroccan population in the cities is now matched by its inevitable reversal, as the ‘authenticity’ of antiquity gains value. Europeans are moving ever deeper into Moroccan interiors, exploring, exposing and taking them over to an unprecedented extent. Morocco through a contemporary touristic European vision – compiled along with the Vision 2010 and the Vision 2020 for the next decade – is on par with almost any other site for global mass tourism. The advertorial website of the ONMT, Visitmorocco.com, gives discrete options for several desired versions of tourist Morocco: luxury, relaxation, adventure, discovery, even ‘roots’. It uses a language rife with implications of ‘authenticity’ and tradition, promising transformations into exoticism without sacrificing any contemporary comfort. It offers a Morocco that was indelibly marked by its history of European visitors and European control, that values a certain Morocco – of light, magic and mystery – over whatever else the territory might contain.

Snapshot: Paris, 2000s Finding ourselves in Paris today (2011), or any day over the last several years, Morocco is a transient presence, appearing and disappearing in the uber-French landscape. The legacies of colonialism to be found in almost any European capital are here as well: the ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods, ‘traditional’ restaurants, shops selling tokens that signify ‘North Africa’ or ‘Morocco’ to the customer who has been there and the one who has not. These are part of an everyday fabric of encounter with Morocco found in Europe. Paris also maps, however, some events that are part of this historical progression. In the Louvre hang several of Delacroix’s most celebrated tableaux inspired by his North African journey. Around the corner at 161 rue Sainte-Honore´ is the Office National Marocain du Tourisme (see Figure 2.12), whose wide windows are decorated with enticing images of another Morocco, a touristic Morocco that Delacroix could not have imagined. Some threads remain unbroken. Morocco is still, effectively, advertising itself for a new variety of colons with expositions to show its attributes. The annual Salon d’Immobilier Marocain, held in 2012 at the high-end conference space at

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Figure 2.12 Travel to the country of wonders. Window of the Office National Marocain du Tourisme in Paris (L. Wagner 2006) Porte de Versailles, gathered 41,400 visitors in four days (SMAP Group 2012). They are comprised of potential investors along with potential migrant returnees, and other parts of new flows of development financing for a former territory of out-migration. Independent Morocco actively seeks capital, human and financial, to ensure its continuing economic improvement, just as Protectorate Morocco sought to encourage mobilities for the good of ‘la plus grande France’.

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Morocco also pops up unexpectedly in daily encounters. It is momentarily visible through signs like a hennaed hand or a sand dune in advertising for holiday packages in me´tro tunnels or on street corners. Even Moroccan chic appears in Paris now, part of the exchange of goods back and forth between cultural centres. A restaurant, for example, near the Gare d’Austerlitz is not part of the cohort advertising old world ‘ethnic’ tradition. Rather, Au P’tit Cahoua offers ‘nostalgic’ cuisine, something self-aware of its reach towards authenticity, down to the name – a French spelling of the Morrocan Arabic word for ‘cafe´’. Some nodes in the landscape that were once significant are no longer relevant. The Palais de la Porte Dore´e, built for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale as a monument to the colonies and France, is now neglected on an eastern edge of Paris that is (as of 2011) a construction site. The main road is torn up, the park beyond the edge of the city is unkempt, and the area is still one that invites new migrants and left-leaning sensibilities; not the austere, formal Paris of the western side. This building, however, will and shall remain. No longer the politically incorrect Muse´e des Colonies, but unable to be torn down because of its historical value, it has been remodelled into the Cite´ de l’Immigration on

Figure 2.13 Me´tro station advertisement for Nouvelles Frontie`res: ‘Arriving you are called Martine. Leaving, Sheherazade.’ (L. Wagner 2006)

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the upper floors and an aquarium on the lower ones. The murals and friezes depicting France, her colonizers and colonized are also under historical protection (see Figures 2.10 and 2.14). Ironically, Lyautey the master of preservation, is now preserved in a state of controversy, given the heated arguments about protecting or destroying artwork depicting the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’ of another time (Weill 2007). Instead, this building has become part of a new narrative, transformed from ‘la plus grande France’ to ‘France pays d’immigration’ – both of which were and are hotly contested as deceptive projections of oppressive regimes. Morocco strikes some of the same chords it always has: an exotic place, distant in spirit but close in travel; transformative, marginal, liminal; potentially dangerous, and elusive. It continues to be present in Europe without being imposing – part of global networks that keep getting thicker and more intricate, but not the most pressing or visible member. Morocco has not acquired the notoriety of some of her North African neighbours in 2011 as a hotbed for revolution. Tourism remains strong, despite flickers of danger like the April 2011 bombing in Marrakech. Even for that, Morocco can be forgiven:

Figure 2.14 Formerly Salle des Feˆtes, now the Forum, site of the 1931 Congre`s International de l’Urbanisme aux Colonies et dans les Pays de Latitude Intertropicale (L. Wagner 2011)

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the state acted quickly, its sympathies clearly for the visitor who can feel safe in its welcoming embrace (Gauthier and Oiry-Varacca 2011). Morocco seen from Europe maintains its layers, formed by these multifaceted interactions with a European public, with European governance, and with European dissidence over the past centuries. It becomes a legend on the edge of vision, present but not aggressive, enticing but not insistent; ready and welcoming, as ever, to the European gaze.

CHAPTER 3 LYAUTEY’S DREAM

Moroccan urban dreams Colonial Rabat was conceived as the realization of Lyautey’s dream of spatialized social modernity. Under Lyautey’s guidance, the Moroccan imperial city became a life-sized French laboratory for urban planning and an experimental space for the implementation of the three principles guiding his colonial project. Rabat was soon converted into the showcase for Lyautey’s transformation of the whole cultural and social geography of the country and, simultaneously, a model to export to France in order to demonstrate how new forms of urban planning could be the answer to the social and political crisis faced by the me´tropole. Rabat was Lyautey’s dreamt ‘capital’, the epitome of his spatial understanding of what ‘a city of tomorrow’ should be, but also the site in which his conception of the-colonial-city-as-an-exhibition found its most visible and successful manifestations. Rabat became the jewel of French urban imperialism, the experimental community where ideas of culture as something-to-be-preserved and put on display were implemented with authority and unprecedented clarity. Rabat, again, was translated into a monumental space where the dual city concept was best exemplified, and where the tensions between rationality and vernacular style, the linearity of the architectonic forms and Moroccan de´cor, the functional and the Moresque, found their most celebrated expressions. There, in a colonial city apparently capable of matching different strains of modernity and of modern architecture, all these latent contradictions seemed to (dis)solve, since the tension emanating from the cultural, social and political debates of the me´tropole were blended into a beautified authoritarian and benevolent practice of urban planning. Rabat was where Lyautey’s proclaimed politics of association was explicitly translated into urban form, where his objectives of pacification were pursued via putatively harmonious city zoning, where speculation and segregation – openly opposed by Lyautey – seemed to be kept at bay by intense

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regulation and control. Rabat is where his residence – whose interiors were soon converted into a sort of sophisticated museum of arabisance – was the functional and symbolic core of a comprehensive and incredibly ambitious imperialist project. Finally, Rabat is where, for a number of reasons, ‘it all came together’; where the colonial attempt of re-writing Morocco – le Maroc franc
ais – found its most extreme and, at least from Lyautey’s point of view, successful realization: ideas translated into physical and symbolic space. All this can be immediately realized even today by anyone who entertains the idea of sipping a the´ a` la menthe while sitting, for example, at the Balima cafe´/ hotel, right in Avenue Mohammed V (see Figure 3.1), or decides to walk the medina. The longa manus of the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral and his associates, in particular Henri Prost, is evident in every perspective, in every single corner of the main axis of the city, an avenue that was deliberately conceived in order to functionally, symbolically and visually connect the residence of the sultan and its vast gardens, on the one extreme, and the medina, on the other, via the architectonic splendour of Lyautey’s headquarters. Even today, all the principles of the association that were translated into specific spatial perspectives are largely there to be seen. While walking at the centre of Avenue Mohammed V, Claudio is confronted with a somewhat disconcerting immediacy, with Lyautey’s mind converted into an urban project, with a genuinely linear, French modern colonial space.

Figure 3.1 Avenue Mohammed V, formerly Avenue Dar el Makhzen (‘house of the coffer’), looking towards the medina (C. Minca 2011)

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The perspective from the geometrical centre of this busy street of the capital of the Moroccan Kingdom is striking. One can immediately perceive the ambitions of the French urban planner toying with the idea of realizing a perfectly balanced combination of old and new, of efficiency and culture, of metropolitan and colonial ambience, feeling, sense of order. This long avenue, dotted by beautiful public buildings mostly in Moresque style, is the ultimate showcase of what the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral had in mind: the Tour Hassan, on one extreme of the avenue, visually framed by the boulevard-like perspective of the two parallel lines of trees that deliver a specifically French sense of urban grandeur; the orange-walled entrance of the medina on the other extreme, so close and at the same so different from the exhibited rationalities of Mohammed V. A choreography of shining and perfectly preserved colonial buildings dots both wings that border the avenue: la Poste (see Figure 3.3); the old train station; the monumental Bank el Maghrib; Lyautey’s sparkling white residence. Avenue Mohammed V has remained the axis of the white ville nouvelle, while it almost penetrates the walled medina, still separate today from the rest of the city, where other signs of Prost’s imaginative hand are visible. This is the main reason we decided to start this tour of Morocco – again, le Maroc franc
ais, or perhaps we should say le Maroc europe´en, one century after Lyautey’s arrival in the country – from this beautiful and somewhat controversial city. Rabat is in fact also a key starting point for our parallel

Figure 3.2

La Poste (C. Minca 2011)

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Figure 3.3 Avenue Mohammed V, looking towards the Assouma Mosque and Quartier Administratif (C. Minca 2011) post-colonial tours of Moroccan colonial modernity because it is, by and large, ignored by most tourists; in particular, its colonial heritage, its Moresque style, its very colonial and in many ways modern Moroccan soul, are often neglected by the contemporary tours of the country. The popular circuits of the ‘imperial cities’ (Rabat, Fez, Meknes, Marrakech), when they land in the capital, focus precisely on the pre-colonial monuments that were valorized – in a sense, ‘re-discovered’ – by the French themselves. Lyautey was indeed the mastermind who decided to protect and spatially isolate – read emphasize – the main existing historical sites, like the Kasbah of the Oudayas and the Tour Hassan. The layers of rationality imposed on Rabat extend from the modern city he orchestrated through his targeted preservation of the medina and certain sites designated as monuments.This rationality today renders it mostly uninteresting to tourist visitors, who pick out the places that ostensibly predate the Protectorate – even though their ‘preservation’ was enabled by the Protectorate itself – and then move on. Through this motivation for preservation, via the institution and the actions of the Service des Beaux-Arts et des Monuments Historiques, a new historical geography of the city was inscribed in its landscape. The French turned these ‘artistic vestiges of a shining civilization’ into patrimoine. The groundwork was laid for tourism, the museumification of Moroccan culture, and a new historical

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consciousness. All these monuments compose even today what is perceived as the proper tourist visit of Rabat as part of the imperial cities circuit. Even in this, Lyautey was indeed successful: that is, in ‘normalizing’ the French ville nouvelle, while framing that tourist gaze via, again, his own idea of what was ‘Moroccan history’ and on how this was to be spatially emphasized as part of a new city, the ultimate capital of a colonial dream. What matters to this first incursion into a real and imagined place in Morocco is the special role that the colonial project, and its most ardent advocates, assigned to Rabat and its grand planning. In many ways, the present layout of the cultural and urban geographies of Morocco was experimented in Rabat first, and here they found the most fertile ground for their powerful realizations. Very few other places in the former French colonies show with such clarity the spatial imaginations that were driving a project to regenerate a nation, the French nation, via urban planning, cultural preservation and modern design. In the colonies this was possible, or at least, so thought the French intellectual gathering around the Muse´e Social. In the colonies Lyautey made it possible. This is where a man, a single individual, sought to materialize an ambitious social conservative dream and transformed a sleepy Arab city and its surrounding ‘empty spaces’ into an urban model for a new French modernity. In Rabat, more than in other places involved in Lyautey’s urban revolution, the tension between the possibilities offered by what was perceived as ‘empty space’ – what the French modern mind could realize in this supposedly empty space – and the need to conserve and ‘protect’ the existing Arab city were so clearly laid out and theorized. The ville nouvelle was in many ways a by-product of the specific ways in which the medina was conceived and frozen in time and space by Lyautey’s theories and actions. The medina, at the same time, was the result of the association principles translated into cultural and functional space. Rabat, despite and because of its scarce interest for the contemporary tourist gaze, is thus an inspiring starting point for our exploration of the colonial and postcolonial geographies of one of the most celebrated among the French colonies.

A view from the past Pause for a moment to admire the view as we approach Rabat from the north. Imagine a Morocco before French architects apportioned its landscape. Let us be clear: this is not a time before external influences or contact between this northwestern African territory and the European continent. Such a time is unimaginable, as passages and conquests have existed over thousands of years (see Chapter 2). Rather, this is a Morocco, and particularly a Rabat, one of the most purposefully transformed cities, that was on the verge. After Algeria had been occupied, but before the Moroccan Sultanate had permitted the ‘creeping

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colonialism’ (Abu-Lughod 1981) of French influence to gain much ground, Rabat was a quiet seaside city – an imperial city – on the high bank of a wide river. Figure 3.4 shows a Rabat before its reconstruction and reconstitution as the capital of the Sultanate, French Protectorate, and later the Kingdom of Morocco. It is encased by walls that are locked at night, and again surrounded by productive grazing and farming lands that keep the city alive. The flood plane of the Bou Regreg River, separating the twin settlements of Ribat el Fath (Rabat) and Sla (Sale´), nurtures some of the richest soil in the domain of the sultan, as the freshwater river feeds into the Atlantic Ocean. When approaching overland from Tangier, we encounter this view – no paved roads (not until after the French), no bridges. Only a tower among whitewashed buildings, a disused Phoenician-then-Roman ruin (Chellah), and a fortified compound (Kasbah of the Oudayas) housing the armed representatives of the sultan, the jaysh (army) clan. These architectural artefacts have some known histories. The tower was and is an unfinished minaret surrounded by columns, supporting the roof of a never-actualized mosque, abandoned after the death of the third Almohad sultan Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al Mansur (1184 – 99). He had chosen Rabat as a place to rebuild, renovating the Kasbah and beginning construction of then the world’s largest mosque, but died regretting his choice of this site as a ‘waste of the public treasury’ (Abu-Lughod 1981: 52). Marrakech was more his seat of power (where he built the Koutoubia minaret, a finished landmark), but Rabat continued to be marked as an imperial stopping place thereafter. Though Romans had used this site as a port on the Atlantic (Caille´ 1949), this position on

Figure 3.4

Rabat from the north, c.1900 (Kerr 1912: facing page 228)

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the Atlantic coast would not again be of global strategic relevance for a few hundred years. For much of its history as a Moroccan, Islamic city, Rabat was mostly unimportant. Periodically it re-emerged; as in one moment in the early seventeenth century, after the Christian re-conquest of Iberia, Muslim exiles from Andalucı´a settled around the depopulated Kasbah (Abu-Lughod 1981: 63). At this juncture, Rabat’s reinvigoration depended on its twin, Sale´, which had grown in size and importance while Rabat lay dormant, providing the goods to support new settlers. These settlers became known as the ‘Sallee Rovers’, who pirated ships crossing to the New World. In fact, these exile-pirates came from ‘New Sale´’, on the left bank of the river (Caille´ 1949: 224), using their navigational skills to exact vengeance on their Christian enemies. Though it was as enemies, this moment marked an initiation of increasing trade and contact between Morocco and Europe, as captives, armaments and stolen goods passed from hand to hand, and back. Later in the century, the sultan began taxing the take, and the region began to integrate into the makhzen of Morocco (Caille´ 1949: 371). Slowly, incidentally, Rabat emerged as a site for imperial rule, a growing settlement, and a place known in European maritime history (albeit negatively). It was never the cultural, economic and political centre that Fez or Marrakech had been for dynasties of Moroccan rulers. Rather, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was a midway point on a safe path between the two principal cities, where tribal insurrection in the mountains forced the sultan’s caravan towards the sea (Abu-Lughod 1981: 76 –8). As Brown (1976) describes, European trading intensified from early in the nineteenth century in this region, with systems of governance and the emergence of an elite, through shifts in practices of land ownership and division, and in evolving relations between producers of local goods and consumers of increasing global products. Traditional craftsmanship hovered on a precipice, as wealth had already begun to shift towards those who understood how to take advantage of external trade (Brown 1976). While ferry boats between Rabat and Sale´ were kept busy mornings and evenings, each side depended on the other, as well as on increasing connectivity with British, French and other envoys whose presence was strictly controlled by the sultan’s representatives. To this Rabat, we arrive, along with Lyautey, in order to imagine a new seat of power.

Lyautey’s vision Let’s begin with Lyautey’s often referenced first steps in constructing his Morocco. Lyautey himself, giving a speech in 1931, described how Rabat’s architecture became his preoccupation, even before it had been officially chosen as the capital of the Protectorate:

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The first time that I had seen Rabat was 1907, five years before arriving as re´sident-ge´ne´ral, as an ambassador to Moulay Abd el-Aziz. I was impressed with the charm and poetry of this incomparable city. Also, when I came in 1912 as re´sident-ge´ne´ral, I was rejuvenated by the thought, amongst the heavy concerns of that time, of what my eyes would see as my horse crossed the door. Yet, what I saw instead of the beautiful horizon in which nothing disrupted the view but the vast cemetery were two hideous constructions already at half-height. They were two barracks, which were of course necessary but one could have and should have put them anywhere else but in the middle of the indigenous city, that marvellous site. And they were two classic barracks, of the most awful regulation style. My first word was to forbid them to be continued. But I was told that the loans had already been voted by Parliament, the down payments already made, and there was no human force capable of stopping their completion. I contented myself with pausing the work to give myself time to find, if possible, a palliative. The next day I left for Fez, having in my head, you understand, many other concerns than those barracks when, the following day, chance brought to my bivouac a group of tourists returning to France. I invited them to share my short lunch. It just so happened that one of them was M. Tranchant de Lunel, former student of the School of Fine Arts, who had travelled in Egypt, the Orient and the Extreme Orient. He told me about the beauty of these countries, of which I knew nearly all, with as much ability as with taste, then informed me how much of Morocco still contained artistic treasures and of his apprehension that they be saved. Sharing his fears, I made him aware of the matter I had just seen in Rabat. He took a pencil and, knowing that we could not demolish these unhappy barracks that he had seen in passing, he made me a drawing to show how one could ‘clothe’ them in Arabic style and make them bearable. My response was to beg him not to return to France, that I would hire him immediately as provisional Director of Fine Arts and put him to work in Rabat from the next day on. In the entire early period, in the preservation of the artistic beauty of Morocco and the adaptation of administrative buildings to a local style, which nevertheless needed to be well built, he was an invaluable auxiliary for me. (Lyautey at the Universite´ des Annales, Paris 10 December 1926; in Lyautey 1995 [1927]: 498 – 9) These remarks reflect the dominant story that persists about Lyautey’s distaste for the utilitarian colonial architecture he had seen in Algeria. Historians as well as contemporary narrators recount his appreciation for the beauty of ‘Oriental’ architecture, and determination that Morocco should not become a repetition of

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Algerian mistakes. This narrative surrounds Lyautey’s legacy, and nowhere is it more visible in the built environment than in his transformation of Rabat. At Lyautey’s first passage in 1907, Rabat was a capital – an imperial city – but by no means one of the more celebrated or historically significant ones. It was a semi-blank slate: while decidedly a Muslim city (with the Jewish mellah gated at night) and undoubtedly under the domain of the sultan, who kept a palace there, Rabat had not become an established centre in its own right. While some European travellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ventured to Rabat and Sale´, for the most part the region was not penetrated by explorers’ gazes to the same extent as other renowned cities. Tangier was a busy crossroads, Fez a destination of consular missions, Marrakech an expedition over the Atlas Mountains; Rabat did not appear on this cartography of exotic and unreachable Morocco. Some Europeans were residing there, but not those seeking the wonders of the Orient. Rather, they were mostly those seeking opportunity, predicting that French colonization would spread towards Morocco from Algeria, and anticipating the move by installing themselves in this port city. Unlike Casablanca, a boomtown a short ride down the coastline, Rabat-Sale´ presented incoming Europeans with better established infrastructure, albeit with difficulty for the outsider to infiltrate. Throughout the nineteenth century, Europeans were forbidden from residing in Sale´, and they found difficulty in establishing a house in Rabat (Kerr 1894). Yet these pioneers were not often the ones writing accounts of their lives in Morocco for the public at home. Kerr, a British missionary dispatched to Morocco (whose picture in Figure 3.4 illustrates the pre-colonial city landscape) is a notable exception. Those whose travels were documented and published tend to mention Rabat in passing, or not at all (de Foucauld 1888; De Amicis 1897; Godard 1859; Picard 1889; de Segonzac 1903). Doutte´ recounts his view of Rabat near the end of the voyage he took in 1901, describing the twin cities in peaceful and somnolent language repeated by many who followed him: From the Hassan Tower, the European wanders the area of Rabat pushes up to the ‘Three Trees’: at sunset, in the peace of the descending evening, he lingers to contemplate from on high this culminating point, the two sister cities, Rabat and Sale´, two stains of bright white on each side of the Bou Regreg, between the murky sea and the somber earth. Rabat sits among gardens; facing her, Sale´ is enclosed by a wall flanked with towers surrounded by naked countryside. Down below, between the two cities, at the mouth of the river, the tide rolls its voluminous foam whose eternal murmur is heard even at this high viewpoint. (Doutte´ 1914: 400) Rabat was still an exotic place, replete with Moroccans and their unknown customs. Its history of piracy gave it a legacy that Europeans could recognize; a

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known place depicted by Defoe in Robinson Crusoe (1713) and mentioned in other accounts of imprisonment in the Barbary lands. Yet these histories had already faded. Rabat was somehow more accessible to the European visitor – more open and peaceful, more sleepily attractive, full of quiet gardens and the murmur of the river. As a habitat, it was more penetrable to Europeans than the medina of Fez or the unforgiving deserts of the south. As French presence increased in the early 1900s, Rabat became a city difficult to define in the emerging colonizing landscape. Its marginality – an imperial city but not quite; a port city but not of great importance to interior Morocco – set the stage for Lyautey’s project of transformation. In an immensely significant move away from traditional seats of power, he suggested establishing the capital of the French Protectorate in Rabat instead of the current capital, Fez. His rationale acknowledged the precariousness of the French position there, as, unlike Fez, Rabat provided a means of communication with France that evaded overland routes that might be blocked by resistance. According to Wright (1991: 71), the French Parliament took more than a year to ratify this change of venue. Lyautey’s foresight was well founded, as Fez and the Rif mountains to its north eventually became central sites of unrest. Yet his decision also incorporated the landscape that Rabat had to offer – a small city by the sea, peaceful and brilliantly white under the sun, with open fields all around it inviting development. In creating a new French capital, Lyautey was aware that it would be a city laid out for visitors, with impressive straight boulevards and imposing buildings ordering governance of the whole country. Lyautey’s vision, however, was not of the traditional, Rome-reminiscent classical architecture that defined public buildings in France. Instead, he sought collaborators like Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, the incidental traveller mentioned in the earlier passage who later became the Director of the Service des Beaux-Arts et Monuments Historiques of Morocco, an artist and architect who appreciated ‘Oriental’ arts. These collaborators would help create a new Moroccan capital city to be beheld by visitors as both a modern, rational city and the picturesque whitewashed city by the sea.

Mapping the colonial city . . . in Morocco, people believe in urbanism. (Vaillat 1931: 40; in Wright 1991: 3) Rabat is often considered one of the most successful examples among colonial attempts to translate the association principle into real space. Tellingly, the most significant Anglophone surveys of colonial French urbanism, Rabinow’s French Modern and Wright’s The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, draw

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extensively on Lyautey’s project for Morocco and in particular on his plans for Rabat and Casablanca. The sheer size and the ambitions of these plans are still now recognized as somewhat exemplary in the history of urbanism and, in many ways, successful, at least on certain levels. Even a harsh critic like Janet AbuLughod, who openly criticized his policy of what she defines as spatial segregation and exploitation, at the same time admits, ‘One could easily argue that Rabat was the most successful exemplar of French “dual city” planning in Morocco’ (1981: 155). Rabinow in particular dedicates an extended description to the plan for Rabat, to which now we turn in order to briefly revisit how the spatialities of the colonial plan were realized in this urban laboratory. Rabinow starts his description by highlighting the ‘social ambience’ that allowed for the very production of the plans, reaching deep into the history of French philosophy of social space and urbanism. This element, in his view, has not been taken into enough consideration by historians, despite the fact that Lyautey, along with other actors involved, was absolutely aware of his role in ‘orchestrating pressure and sociality’ (Rabinow 1989: 296). Lyautey’s decision to turn to Henri Prost was indeed a very strong political act, made possible precisely by the social and political conditions in which le Mare´chal was operating in the colony. The second point that Rabinow highlights is the fact that, before the distributions of spatial functions was decided, Lyautey insisted on moulding the terrain into alignments and quarters. Rabinow, citing Be´guin (1983), presents the cartographic nature of this crafting as a ‘theatralization of limits’ (1989: 299). The map of the city had somehow to prepare the city itself; it was the stage on which the real and imagined functions of the city had to be drawn in order to become a genuine urban laboratory. Prost, the central architect of the city, rendered every function in its place an orderly representational world in the making: [The] height of buildings was determined by the width of the avenues; open space and views from the buildings were fixed; and, above all, zoning was specified in detail . . . a modern rail system was planned and embedded in the city’s structure . . . The main administrative area was located away from the sea, running between the walls of the old medina and the Sultan’s palace. The European commercial district was set on largely underdeveloped land in a triangle between the old medina, the Sultan’s palace and the future headquarters of the re´sident-ge´ne´ral . . . Circulation between these zones was organized around two perpendicular systems of roads. [one] linking [to] Casablanca and Fez, [the other] linking the old medina to the residence and the palace . . . Prost included a system of parks and public gardens absent in Casablanca. Lyautey sought efficiency and beauty. (Rabinow 1989: 297)

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Avenue Mohammed V, where we are sipping our the´ at this precise moment – then called Avenue du Dar el Makhzen – was the central axis of this urban comprehensive framework, a nexus for all modern services in Rabat: Prost, perhaps inspired by Garnier, built an underground system of tracks leading to the train station. This administrative core was too a centre of circulation in all senses of the term. Stylistic control was rigorous but inventive: conceived [in order] to create a calm and intimate atmosphere for administrative activity. (ibid.: 298) Perhaps it hummed with the same relaxed but relatively lively and cosmopolitan atmosphere that we breathe today in our endless walks through the material legacy of this urban dream. The contemporary map of Rabat shows the medina and its walls in much the same shape that it had in Prost’s technical materials. Walking along its narrow streets is a fascinating experience, since it seems to match very closely what a European stereotyped idea of a traditional Arab city may induce one to expect. It is congested, messy, poor, but at the same time, clean, vibrant, ‘colourful’, very ‘real’ to the European eye. Lyautey, possibly here more than in other places, succeeded in protecting the Moroccan ‘flavour’ of the medina, and its somewhat frozen image immediately hits the visitor prepared by a century of stereotypes and an endless flow of tourist literature marking precisely that timeless image of inner city life in Morocco. An area of 250 meters around of the medina was declared a no-building zone . . . this large area described as a cordon sanitaire. . . as with Haussmann’s avenues, the potential military, police, and circulation function of such an open area are evident; Prost was continuing a tradition with this spatial arrangement. (Rabinow 1989: 298) This empty space just outside the walls is still in part there today, and it represents an incredibly lively liminal space, a threshold between the ville nouvelle and the medina, where a plethora of informal activities takes place at any time of the day. For Rabinow, even in the colonial day, it served not only as a safety zone and segregative space, but as an intercultural meeting ground where many cafes, small shops, and a bus terminal were located. Over the years the supposed cordon sanitaire functioned as one of the more socially active areas of the city. . . . . the real actors were social groups who improvised on the script planners and emperors had provided for them. (1989: 299)

Figure 3.5

Prost’s plan of Rabat, 1920 (Sefiani 1991: 89)

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We entirely subscribe to this comment, since the straight lines of Lyautey’s Rabat, though present and very visible even today, are also subject to uncontrolled processes of erosion and transgression. Making this mapped city was Lyautey’s project of social ordering and modernizing, an experimental model for the colonial city that might be repeated elsewhere in the French Empire. While the map of the colonial centre itself remains much the same – even as the urban agglomeration of Rabat-Sale´ has spread, and is spreading, far beyond this scope – the social-regulation-through-spatial-regulation that Lyautey intended to realize never completely took hold. We will return to this question later, in relation to Abu-Lughod’s treatise on ‘urban apartheid’ in Rabat; for now let us return to our walk along Avenue Mohammed V.

The philosophy of the thing As Claudio sips another the´ a` la menthe, the vibrant crowd of public servants and businessmen animate the porticos, almost indifferent to one of the most carefully conceived landscapes in the world. Their somewhat fluid movements bring the mind back in time to 1925, to an episode reported by Timothy Mitchell in Colonizing Egypt: Near the end of his period [as resident] on the occasion of the opening of the Casablanca-Rabat Standard Gauge Railway, Lyautey led a group of French engineers and journalists on a tour of Rabat, the newly built colonial capital. The writer Andre´ Maurois was among the guests and he recorded le Mare´chal words: ‘I shall explain to you the philosophy of the thing’, Lyautey began, as they got off the train at Rabat and entered the new capital. ‘The buildings as a whole form a fan. At the centre of the fan, in the mounting – those are the Administration. Beyond them, where it broadens out, are the Government Ministries placed in the logical order. You understand? For example, here, Public Works. Next to it: Roads and Bridges, and then Mines. Next to Agriculture, Forests. This, here, is the gap for Finance. The building has not yet been built, but it will be intercalated in its logical place.’ One of the guests interrupts with a question: ‘Monsieur le Mare´chal’, he asks, ‘what is this kiosk for?’ To which Lyautey replies: ‘That? That is for the sale of maps.’ (Mitchell 1991: 161, citing Maurois 1931: 319).1 Mitchell inserts this example in the culmination of his argument about the colonial creation of the world-as-exhibition, in which the practice of the colonizing gaze rendered the ‘Orient’ into a representation of itself. Lyautey’s approach to this project was not without respect for is object, the ‘culture’ of Morocco. As we saw in Chapter 2, the current literature on Lyautey tends to

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accept that he was a sincere believer in ‘culture’ and in the respect of cultural difference as an expression of national character, and that this respect was a fundamental element of his strategy of pacification. Building modern Rabat while preserving its medina intact was thus at the core of his political and cultural agenda. Rabat was thus to be conceived – and was indeed materially conceived, as Mitchell demonstrates – as an exhibition, as the representation of something else. It is worthwhile pondering for a minute on the deep nature of this ‘something else’. Both Wright and Rabinow argue at length that throughout Morocco, but particularly in Rabat and Casablanca, Prost and Lyautey attributed a major importance to public buildings. The facades, like that of La Poste (see Figure 3.2) were important in presenting the Protectorate as a mediating institution: ‘The two societies would meet there; hence its importance and the need to give appropriate form to this crossing’ (Rabinow 1989: 310). For Mitchell, likewise, ‘the method of building and naming made present to the visitor the order and the institutions of colonial authority’ (1991: 161): [T]he colonial city was to be unambiguously expressive. Its layout and its building were to represent, in the words of the architect who built Rabat ‘the genius for order, proportion and clear reasoning’ of the French nation. As a system of political expression, each building seemed to stand for something further. (ibid.) This ‘something further’ was, in essence, the manifestation of French power through the ordering of space. He claimed that Lyautey, like other colonial architects, approached the task of creating Rabat with a Cartesian dichotomy between subject and object in mind, under the assumption that the city could be set up like the great exhibitions of that age, as a representation of colonial order that could be beheld and comprehended by an unimplicated onlooker. Furthermore, Mitchell interprets Maurois’ account as linking this city as exhibition being created by Lyautey with this practice of building great exhibitions, not only because the buildings are dispersed in their ‘logical order’ but because of the kiosk for maps. ‘Both the exhibition and the city were built as political expressions, didactic in style, and both demanded the individual to be an awed and curious spectator, a tourist in need of a political guide and a map’ (Mitchell 1991: 161–2). Let us return, one last time, to the tour offered by Lyautey, which is also, in many ways, inevitably our own tour of Rabat; in fact, even today, Claudio tours Rabat sensing Lyautey’s ghost looming over his head. Maurois’ tour, Mitchell observed, had ended at the map kiosk. This part of the tour is enormously important in order to grasp the metaphysics of representation that was guiding Lyautey’s urban dream and his architectural hand.

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There was nothing before the visitors’ eyes except, as in any city, a certain distributing of surfaces and spaces. Yet the regularity of their distribution and the distance maintained between the surfaces and the eye resolved this distributing into what seemed to the observer two distinct entities, one spatial and material, the other non spatial and conceptual: on the one hand, the buildings themselves, and on the other, the plan. What was before them appeared divided into the thing and its philosophy, the city and its map – as though cities and maps belonged to two different categories of being. (Mitchell 1991: 163) The representation and the presentation of Rabat thus had to be treated as if they were radically distinct realms, as if what Lyautey’s guests were seeing was indeed the representation of something else, of a functional reality, of an urban dream of pacified cultural and social order. This underlying logic is inherent to Mitchell’s claim, and ours, that this encounter with Rabat did not pertain simply to the precision and extent of the representation but also to the absolute distinction created between the edifices of colonial power and the realities supporting them. It is not by chance then, that the coherence and the beauty of Prost’s plans were best revealed by aerial photographs (see Figure 3.6). The modernity of Casablanca and Rabat in terms of equipment, specialization of quarters, and circulation planning had to be appreciated from above, as if they were a map, because in many ways they were indeed a map – translated into a project for a new social modernity (see Rabinow 1989: 332). The ordering of this world addressed a specific audience – the ‘curious spectator’, an outsider who is specifically Western, who would consider a map to be an appropriate mechanism of orientation towards an unfamiliar landscape. Maurois was an apt embodiment of this role, a journalist and chronicler visiting from the me´tropole explicitly to document and publicize the progress of the Protectorate. His comments immediately preceding the portion that Mitchell cited, however, illustrate how Lyautey’s vision of architecture and design were interpreted through his gaze: Around us the white city, perfect, extended amongst flowers. The tradition of Muslim art had been wisely respected, adapted to new materials. The disciplined ornamentation keeps it modest place, in service of perspective. (Maurois 1931: 319) While the gaze onto an explicitly ordered city was essential to Lyautey’s construction of power, this gaze was also enveloped by an aesthetic of his purposeful Moresque design, his reputation of respect for Islamic culture, and his rational ordering of this space into tradition and modernity on opposite sides of the architectural line.

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As much as Lyautey’s goals for the city were about presenting it as a newly ‘French modern’ place of order and governance, they were also about presenting the city as preserved tradition. While Lyautey divided the old city from the ordered modernity of the ville nouvelle, it is still part of the landscape in a colonial imagination. As Mitchell reminds us, dividing the ville nouvelle from the medina may seemed to exclude one from the other, but in fact repositioned them as representations, ‘one part becoming an exhibition and the other, in the same spirit, a museum’(1991: 163). In fact, as Wright puts it, the medina became ‘a Western stage-setting for Moroccan life, a Disneyland world. It evoked the supposed harmonies of a traditional way of life that, in the Westerner’s eyes, had not changed over time’ (1991: 158). Museumification of the medina was not the expressed goal, inasmuch as the implications of museumification as understood today were not yet widely thought to be potentially negative. Creating a city that was beautiful to behold was clearly essential to Lyautey’s project in Morocco; the remaking of Rabat was undertaken to represent the beauty of power from French order and the beauty of an ‘ancient’ and ‘dying’ civilization – in fact, not dying but rendered so by the colonial project that was seizing it. This consideration of how to create beauty in a Neo-Moresque style is part of the story Lyautey effectively publicized about Morocco – with Maurois and

Figure 3.6

Rabat from above, c.1925 (Sefiani 1991: 90)

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others beyond him – and inculcated into the Western visitors’ ability to see while gazing on the structures he created. This formulation of beauty as French architectural lines touched with ‘Oriental’ arts is a significant part of how Lyautey designed Rabat, and other cities in Morocco, to be ‘picturesque’. As a philosophy of design, it incorporates the historical layering necessary to a strategy of pacification – rendering the old as part of the new rather than complete destruction, to make way for colonial imposition. But more so, it was a philosophy of design that imagined a consumer – a tourist – who would become part of the economic potential for the future Morocco. Having walked up and down Mohammed V several times in order to grasp ‘the philosophy of the thing’, Claudio can finally stop and rest, and, while sipping the third sugary the´ a` la menthe, realize that he walked nothing but a map; to be sure, nothing but the map of a colonial urban dream that could never be, since maps are, among many other things, nothing but a tricky game of endless anticipation and deferral. It is about time then to start exploring the constitution of this map translated into a spatial dream, and where the ordering of that dream began to fall apart.

The (almost) perfect dual city Creating the dual city of Rabat, or rendering the modern landscape out of centuries of organic growth, required breaking traditions and changing rules to accommodate new plans. Lyautey vocally and widely declared his logic for this, as previously discussed in Chapter 1, as a means to preserve Moroccan culture, arts and architecture. Making separate parts of the city would, to his intentions, enable modern development to emerge alongside the invaluable traditions of Morocco, both in decorative arts and in ways of life codified and replicated through medina architecture. The city Lyautey imagined was both French and Moroccan, through what he perceived as the contribution each could make: the French offering modernity, development and governance; the Moroccan offering tradition, beauty and the land itself, ready to be used. Yet the creation of that city required writing over – re-mapping – the seemingly empty lands surrounding the existing city of Rabat that were in fact part of the city’s livelihood. More than a just a plan, this remake of Rabat by Lyautey and his disciples was a laboratory for French urbanism to come – which may explain why they did not anticipate alternative possibilities for expansion of the city, especially of her Moroccan population. The central voice of critique about these unanticipated, negative after-effects lies with Janet Abu-Lughod in her analysis of Rabat over a hundred years of urban planning, published as Rabat: Urban Apartheid (1981). She argues forcefully that the Protectorate system effectively created a caste hierarchy, in which the ‘races’ of Moroccan and European were separated spatially and economically, always to the detriment of Moroccans. Though she blames the city planners as intentional

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actors, we find it difficult to assign them such agency. Nowhere does Lyautey indicate that the separation of spaces was intended to lead to a racial apartheid, as such. We would argue, rather, that the agency for this enforced class separation along racial lines is embedded in his purpose of creating order through spatial planning, along with his intent to preserve, with its resulting museumification, that disallowed the Moroccan population to develop in any other way than within French-defined boundaries of ‘tradition’. In order to create the city he envisioned, Lyautey had to transform the existing systems of land ownership and land use into a proprietary structure recognized through French law. This transformation is what Abu-Lughod seizes upon to critique as intentionally creating apartheid; yet, the separation Lyautey intentionally created was one of association, ideologically promoting diversity, not explicitly promoting a dominant race. The dominance of French interests, however, as the colonial power, was inevitable. While the new city of Rabat was expanding – under designs that reflected hierarchies of power and management in Protectorate governance – the old city was frozen, its walled edges becoming a tightening belt as the population surged with internal migration to the capital. In initiating new construction on the empty lands around Rabat – much of which had, traditionally, been under the sultan’s control but with collective rights to use – Lyautey’s corps designed with recent innovations from France and elsewhere in mind. They envisioned a city of modern technologies, like cars and electricity, as well as modern approaches to sanitation and population control (Rabinow 1989). Moreover, they were trying to prevent growth that was out of control (Sablayrolles 1925: 38, cited in Abu-Lughod 1981: 184), as had been the case in Casablanca, where land speculation exploded before governance was in place to regulate it. They used this power to regulate aesthetics as much as hygiene, putting in to place a model code for what could be built in different areas of the city: In the European quarters, generous setbacks were required, which precluded constructing a Moroccan courtyard house; any interior court had to occupy at least one-fifth of the area of the surrounding walls; a house set back from the alignment had to enclose its front yard by an iron grillwork or wall that could not be above eye level; roofs were to be slanted at no more than thirty-five degrees; special types of utilities (bathrooms of Western style) were required, and so on. On the other hand, in ‘native’ quarters, flat roofs were required and visual overviews of adjacent terraces were prohibited; no posters or European signs were permitted, and architectural style and fac
ade were rigidly specified. (Abu-Lughod 1981: 186, italics original) Abu-Lughod puts emphasis on the barring of high walls in the European quarters, a hallmark of Islamic architecture related to notions of the homespace as inward

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looking and private. She argues that such ordinances, along with the controls put on building permits, were intended to keep Moroccans concentrated in the medina, by making it impossible to build modified Moroccan housing in European quarters or modified European housing in Moroccan quarters. Over and above these techniques of persuasion was the ultimate power to deny permission to build – and although one would scarcely expect to find documentary evidence proving that the Office of Municipal Services systematically denied such permissions when they were requested by the ‘wrong’ people for the ‘wrong’ zones, I would be very surprised if this did not happen quite frequently. (1981: 187) She implies that these systems supported an unspoken but severely enforced apartheid. In fact, to the contrary, years later Prost would argue that ‘it was never in the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral mind to prevent natives from living in the European new towns if they would adapt to our customs. It was not a matter of segregation’ (Wright 1991: 147, citing Prost n.d. ‘Notes’). Reframing this segregation in terms of aesthetics rather than races returns us to the ideologies Lyautey and his disciples propounded. And, in correlation, the administrative body responsible for keeping the Europeans out of the medina was the Service des Beaux-Arts, whose ostensible charge was to preserve the architectural and historic heritage of the country. In writings and in actions, Lyautey and his planners were consistently more preoccupied with the design of these spaces as technological constructs representing traditional Moroccan architecture or modern interpretations of it, rather than with their daily use by a population. Wright cites one telling example (1991: 133): one of the many changes in organizational structure at the Service des Beaux-Arts was initiated because Lyautey noticed a telegraph wire crossing one of the medina gates. His employees were not performing the surveillance necessary to maintain the picturesque appearance of a medina unscarred by seemingly anachronous technology – for him, an equally important aspect to its preservation as the business of restoring monuments. Though ‘Lyautey and his entourage claimed that their approach to urban design would distinguish between two cultures without resorting to discrimination’ (Wright 1991: 146), in fact separation of the two cultures was perpetrated as the freezing museumification of one and the unbridled expansion of the other. The Moroccan neighbourhoods, and by extension population, were expected to perpetuate in an unchanged state, or even regress to their former glory – the Almohad period of growth and conquest which Prost dated as the ‘golden age’. Separating the medina from a new city enabled a separation of the real from the representation, rendering the medina, and its residents, an exhibition.

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It is a matter of record that, with respect to the Moroccan residents of Rabat, Lyautey and Prost’s planning severely underestimated the potential for growth. By the 1940s, the population density of the medina of Rabat – the only area where Moroccan architecture (and therefore residents) was designated by ordinance – had far surpassed a feasible ratio. In the midst of heavy rural to urban migration throughout Morocco, Rabat tripled in size between 1931 and 1951 (see Abu-Lughod 1981). Consequently, slums or bidonvilles emerged along the coastal neighbourhoods and became entrenched as residential spaces well beyond the Protectorate’s lifetime (see Bargach 2008; Bogaert 2012). In effect, Prost had designed an exhibition that showed off the Protectorate government to its best advantage, by using the medina to what Lyautey considered to be its best advantage – tourism. While cognizant of the life going on in the medina, Prost and Lyautey failed to recognize that life, or reality, might exceed the space allowed for it in what they designated as exhibition space. The exhibition, in fact, was intended for the others coming to Morocco – the 50,000 European settlers expected, and, most importantly, the tourists.

Itineraries We began our historical journey just before Lyautey arrived as the conquering general, ready to transform the city. Now re-visiting Rabat after the end of World War I, we find ourselves in a changed landscape and amongst different company. Whereas previous voyagers and European migrants in Morocco would gravitate towards places of legend, like Fez or the Sahara, Rabat has become a necessary stop for visitors. The construction of the ‘European’ city is coming to fruition, as new boulevards, new residential neighbourhoods and new arcaded businesses are growing on the land around the walled medina. The sites to be seen have now been encoded for the European spectator – the Chellah, the Kasbah of the Oudayas, the medina, the Hassan Tower – all of which can be appreciated in a short visit, after which one can retire to the comfort of a hotel with modern conveniences. This immediate access between modernity and tradition becomes the subject of visitor accounts of Rabat: the old has now been effectively separated from the new. What is codified as old about Rabat can be appreciated and admired, and the new city that is being built becomes an impressive example of the scope of change coming to Morocco. This design for appreciation by Western eyes is amply attested to by the throng of visitors after Lyautey’s arrival, who recorded their se´jour in personal accounts of Morocco – an indirect form of publicity – as well as the tourism publications Lyautey instigated as re´sident-ge´ne´ral. Lyautey’s hand was undoubtedly active in creating the impressions that visitors publicized of Rabat. Many accounts from this period include comments about, or thanks given to, Lyautey as host and guide, from providing Edith Wharton with a military car to make her journey (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 12)

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to interacting with the Tharaud brothers at their audience with the sultan (Tharaud and Tharaud 1918: 237). The General himself becomes part of the experience of visiting Rabat, as a character in novels by Robert Brasillach (1942), and in Colette’s Notes Marocaines (1935) (Potier 2006: 115–19). Those who interact with him report opinions often mirroring those expressed by Wharton (see Chapter 2): that the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral has rescued these structures from decay and is pursuing the noble goal of preserving them ‘intact’. Remember, these reports are not made from impressions or interpretations of the resurrection of Rabat’s historical sites: they are a result of interacting with the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral himself, and bearing witness to his project of ‘organizing’ the indigenous talent of Morocco and ‘saving’ its patrimoine. These published works also fit into the expanding genre of travel literature. While the present travellers are no longer explorers per se, they portray themselves as being on the brink of the inevitable decline of ‘untouched’ Morocco, as witnesses to the infiltration of modernity on a traditional people. These juxtapositions are encouraged by the monuments that Lyautey and his corps have chosen to protect. Their immobility and atemporality, having survived centuries and exhibiting their lifespan through their state of disrepair, becomes a physical and sociological contrast to the emerging city: At the foot of the solitary tower, we begin to construct our dwellings between the walls of the indigenous city, that continues to lead (inch’allah! if it pleases God!) its traditional Muslim life, and the flamboyant ramparts of the mysterious Chellah. These white masses dispersed in the groves, these gardens full of flowers, these bougainvillea bushes, these hedges of geraniums and blue convolvulus, these provisional wooden houses, these light bungalows which are there but one day, these profiteer shacks built with a few planks along dusty paths, the Sultan’s palace in a deserted countryside, these avenues already traced out but still without houses, and the houses without avenues, this cabaret full of soldiers around the oven of a potter who works today just as one worked at Carthage: it’s a new Alexandria. Tomorrow a French city will cover the vast space that our architects have reserved for it on paper. Her houses her streets; her customs will come up against the walls of the silent Chellah. For years or for centuries? the flamboyant walls of this disappeared city seem to ask with the air of the Sphinx, as all those who lived, loved and fought inside their tragic embrace are no longer living except a fresh spring and a few tombstones pushed aside by fig trees. (Tharaud and Tharaud 1918: 11–12) Sitting opposite one another, in contrast and in harmony, the ruins of the Chellah embody, for the Tharaud brothers, the previous empires that have occupied this land, face to face with the growing one at their feet.

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Edith Wharton’s book In Morocco exemplifies this moment when visitors to Morocco ceased to be voyagers and became tourists. In her preface she laments the loss of a Morocco free from ‘the great torrent of “tourism”’ (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 19), while describing its beauty and treasures that will inevitably be irresistible to passengers from across the Mediterranean. Typically for her era, the prose is full of opinions attesting her assumptions about ‘Orientals’ and the ‘progress’ being brought to them by French colonization: The Moroccan Arab, though he continues to build – and fortunately to build in the old tradition, which has never been lost – has, like all Orientals, an invincible repugnance to repairing and restoring, and one after another the frail exposed Arab structures, with their open courts and badly constructed terrace-roofs, are crumbling into ruin. Happily the French Government has at last been asked to intervene, and all over Morocco the Medrasas are being repaired with skill and discretion. That of the Oudayas is already completely restored, and as it had long fallen into disuse it has been transformed by the Ministry of Fine Arts into a museum of Moroccan art. (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 192 –7) Her account confirms that already, by the time of her visit in 1918 just before the end of World War I, the Kasbah and Medrasa of the Oudayas had been transformed from ruin to monument, and further into museum. After describing the activity that goes on in a medrasa, somewhat superficially, she details the contents of its museum: In the Medrasa of the Oudayas, these native activities have been replaced by the lifeless hush of a museum. The rooms are furnished with old rugs, pottery, brasses, the curious embroidered hangings which line the tents of the chiefs, and other specimens of Arab art. One room reproduces a barber’s shop in the bazaar, its benches covered with fine matting, the hanging mirror inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the razor-handles of silver niello. The horseshoe arches of the outer gallery look out on orangeblossoms, roses and the sea. It is all beautiful, calm and harmonious; and if one is tempted to mourn the absence of life and local colour, one has only to visit an abandoned Medrasa to see that, but for French intervention, the charming colonnades and cedar chambers of the college of the Oudayas would by this time be a heap of undistinguished rubbish – for plaster and rubble do not ‘die in beauty’ like the firm stones of Rome. (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 205 – 11) From her description, we can recognize the exhibition, as Mitchell describes it, the ‘reality-effect’ which lay in ‘this absolute distinction between mere “things in

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themselves”, as the Westerner could say, and the “real” meaning, purpose or plan for which they stood’ (Mitchell 1991: 173). Wharton’s appreciation of this exhibition-medrasa, apparently void of the students that make it a medrasa, is more real than reality because its form has been preserved by French influence. Even the displays in it, both those facing the interior, like the reproduction of the barber shop, and those facing exterior, like the vistas of gardens and the sea, become more appreciated. In her final words on the Kasbah, it seems Wharton would rather prefer the collected monuments of Rabat to be rearranged so that they are more concentrated together: The Mosque, the Tower, the citadel of the Oudayas, and the mighty walls and towers of Chella, compose an architectural group as noble and complete as that of some mediaeval Tuscan city. All they need to make the comparison exact is that they should have been compactly massed on a steep hill, instead of lying scattered over the wide spaces between the promontory of the Oudayas and the hill-side of Chella. (Wharton 2004 [1920]: KL 290 –3) In the short span of time from Lyautey’s installation as re´sident-ge´ne´ral in 1912 to the visits of the Tharauds and of Wharton during World War I, the landscape of Rabat had undergone a temporal rupture echoed in its spatial alignment. The appreciation for the ‘old’ Rabat is evident – but it is an old Rabat chosen by Lyautey to be appreciated. The same monuments appear and reappear in accounts: the Chellah, the Kasbah and medrasa, the medina, the Hassan Tower. Alongside the appreciation for those monuments is the realization that Rabat is no longer what it once was, that it is becoming something new: Five or six years ago, the expression ‘old Morocco’ had not really had a meaning. The new Morocco didn’t exist yet. But colonization has happened so rapidly, the modern planning of this old empire has made such giant steps, that it is now necessary to distinguish between two Morocco(s), the new and the old. (Montfort 1917: n.p.) The 15 December 1917 issue of the French weekly L’illustration (see also Chapter 2) is devoted to Morocco, ‘after ten years of French work’. They date French influence from the 1907 arrival of the military to protect the interests of French business there. A central article, printed in colour in an insert, focuses on the new capital Rabat and the ancient beauty it promises, amidst burgeoning construction. The New Morocco was well on its way. By 1921 the things for a tourist to do in Rabat had already become habitual: the boulevards and bridges were built, or planned and mapped; railways connected cities, from Marrakech to Tangier; and the residential

Figure 3.7

Promenade en vieux Maroc, opening page (Montfort 1917)

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neighbourhoods of Rabat’s new city were filling with French bureaucrats. The 1921 edition of the Guide Blue for Morocco was compiled by Prosper Ricard, the head of the Service des Arts Indige`nes, with a frontispiece endorsement by Lyautey (see Figure 3.8). The advice for visiting Rabat was brief: USE OF TIME. One day is sufficient for visiting Rabat. From Dar el Makhzen, one rapidly crosses the medina (p. 216) to reach the boulevard El Alou (p. 216), next to visit the Kasbah of the Oudayas (p. 217), the museum of the Medrasa (p. 218), the garden and the Cafe´ Maure, the indigenous souks of the Cousul and Souı¨ka streets (p. 216); in the evening, one will see, travelling by car, the Hassan Tower (p. 222), Chellah (p. 223), the Touarga neighborhood (p. 221), the Almohad ramparts and the Oce´an neighborhood (p.226). (Ricard 1921: 213) Remarkably, even in 1921, only one day was necessary to see Rabat. Among the important landmarks were the Chellah, medina, Hassan Tower and Kasbah of the Oudayas; beyond that were the indigenous souks, the city walls, and some of the newly built modern residential neighbourhoods. By this time, Rabat was not recommended as a place to rest and enjoy the peaceful ocean breeze or the expansive landscape: it had become a government town, as it remains today. Certainly there continued to be visitors who came to Rabat to appreciate its natural beauty, but it had not become known for that attribute. Previous travellers who recounted the sunrise over Sale´ or the sunset seen from the Kasbah were not the ones first quoted to the arriving modern tourists. With the emergence of a new and an old Rabat, alongside the new and old Morocco, these timeless attributes are difficult to locate on an itinerary. For the few foreigners who came to Rabat and stayed, in later years of the Protectorate, the capital never moved beyond its government purpose. It had not, at this time, become a site of excitement, a city with energy beyond its daily repetitions: Those who know will understand me, Rabat is a city of sleepiness. I do not mean to say that one sleeps there. One sleepwalks. I sleepwalk there also, naturally. Sleepwalking is not sleeping, but keeping a delicate line of floating life between the banks of sun and shadow; sliding into another state where perceptible life is like a dream one knows is not a dream; watching with half-closed eyes; listening from afar; thinking of elsewhere; formulating nothing but clouds but entering the nothingness nevertheless; exiting nothingness; letting oneself be diverted like water, and losing track amongst these delights . . . Nothing is sweeter than losing track to find another path and losing it too. From path to path the soul unravels, frays,

Figure 3.8 Lyautey’s frontispiece in the 1921 Guide Blue. ‘It is unfathomable luck for a country destined for such a touristic future that an edition of the Guide Blue of Morocco [illegible] happy to be printed, to the Hachette booksellers all my gratitude.’

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disperses itself and refounds in a universal being. Certainly this is not an ascetic soul but rather a dilution of one. She has charm. And Rabat has this charm. Where does it come from? Maybe the humid breeze of the apex of the sea. It’s all that the sea gives her, but, night and day, she gives it in fresh waves. Water saturates the breath; she is soaked up by flowers, leaves and the sun; she softens the skin, unbinds the nerves, slows down the blood; she clouds thoughts, gives fluidity to emotions, dampens the imagination and tilts the soul to be horizontal, towards which the body naturally tends. This inclination is not adverse to reverie. (Gardel 1999: 221, citing Bosco) Writer Henri Bosco’s appreciation for the somnolent charm of Rabat’s natural beauty came from a long residence there, having chosen it as his home from 1931 to 1955. His description leads us into a Rabat of the present-day tourist, whose itinerary still follows the modern one, but is tinged with the somnolence of a city long past its eruption into being.

L’appel du Maroc . . . ce n’est pas ici This is precisely where we like to take our last glass of Moroccan tea after this long day of exploration. It is time, in fact, to move further and reflect on how the idea of spatially separating the two cultures was conceived and implemented in Rabat, and how that translated into a new geography of archaeology and culture, with the French engaged in the rediscovering of monumental Rabat in a further, perhaps even more dramatic, ‘theatralization of limits’. In order to conclude this chapter it is perhaps useful to be a tourist in Rabat again, for a minute/page or two. Rabat today is the administrative capital of ‘real’ Morocco, while at the same time retaining, more than any other city in the country, a strong colonial flavour, together with that sense of grand spatiality and relaxed Europeanness that pervades many of its perspectives and vistas. In the frenzy of international tours, Rabat is becoming more and more a place to see quickly on the way to somewhere else. But Rabat is also where vast spatial planning is again in place, this time around sponsored by Gulf funding (Bargach 2008; Bogaert 2012), in an attempt to rethink the geometries of the city’s river in relation to new developments. Tourism in Rabat today seems to be perfectly coincidental with Lyautey’s idea of what tourism should indeed be about, in the capital and beyond. The sacred spots of the tourist geography of the city are indeed the same as those valorized by the French, and which continued to be the same during the postcolonial period: Chella, Hassan Tower, Oudayas. Avenue Mohammed V, the longa manus where we can see the traces of le Mare´chal, is by and large ignored by these tours, as are the other ‘monuments’ to the French urban grandeur. The medina is equally neglected

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in parts, but not the streets and alleys facing the tourist gaze, towards the opening of Avenue Mohammed V, or the door to the Kasbah, where tour buses stop and let the tourists roam for a few minutes. The dual cities model is there before everybody’s eyes in all its striking evidence, and disturbing fascination, in the way that the ‘modern’ is invisible to tourists, in the past and in the present. Postcolonial Rabat is indeed still in many ways, at least in its central parts, Lyautey’s city; the urban legacy of an extraordinary experiment, an intriguing laboratory for any student interested in questions of modern spatial theory in relation to ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’. Rabat, in many ways, was supposed to answer one key question for Lyautey and his theories: How would a modernized Moroccan society look? His goal was indeed that of creating ‘isles of modern civilization’ (Rabinow 1989) and Rabat was supposedly one of these isles, perhaps the most representative one. His choice of Rabat as French Moroccan capital, instead of the former capital Fez or industrious and anarchic Casablanca, was an integral part of his vision for a newly conceived map of the country. According to Lyautey, this choice was, part of a larger conception of the Protectorate, i.e. that Fez would continue as the centre of Moroccan tradition and that Casablanca was destined to be the economic centre of the country. Lyautey’s strategy was to make of Casablanca only one element of a complex whole . . . [he] intended to link these cities in a functional, national network. Rabat would be the factory headquarters . . . (Rabinow 1989: 305) But more importantly, as Rabinow rightly pointed out, Lyautey ‘wanted a colony he could run on his own terms’ (1989: 281), a spatial laboratory for his philosophy of social modernity. And this is also why this chapter is particularly important in the whole economy of the book. While the Kasbah, or the Tour Hassan have that museumlike feeling which characterizes many similar monuments in many other parts of the world, the medina seems to be indifferent to these French-European enclaves of preserved history and continues its lively existence of a walled and overcrowded, but also for this fascinating Moroccan city. Is this what Lyautey had in mind for a Moroccan social modernity? Is the dual city concept, in some perverse way, still in place? These questions will of course remain unanswered. However, Rabat remains perhaps the most impressive witness to Lyautey’s spatial thinking and of the ways in which he conceived how a colonial modern city should look. It is also witness to his trust in what urbanism could achieve in political and social terms. Tourists are not interested in the medina and the ville nouvelle; they are not interested in the non-exotic, non-‘Moroccan’, industrial and cheap Chinese products that are sold everywhere. They are more interested in what Lyautey

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taught the Moroccans about European culture and its fascination for timeless spots of radical otherness and exoticism, together with a hypostatic sense of the historical patrimoine. Lyautey imported the concept of heritage to Rabat and to the whole country, and today we can witness its workings, in place. This is also why it was perhaps necessary to start from Rabat, where in a sense it all began and came together, to walk the best preserved remnants of the spatial foundations of the European project for Morocco, before venturing into the rest of le Maroc, before visiting its old and new cultural capitals, Fez and Marrakech.

CHAPTER 4 MEDINA

Travel scene: Fe`s medina A distinguished American Arabist and student of modern North Africa tells the story of one of his early visits to Fez. A native of the city offered his services as guide; but the American, feeling he knew the city well enough and seeking to avoid the inherently superficial role of a ‘guided’ Western tourist, declined. ‘All right, but you’ll get lost,’ the Moroccan smugly retorted. The scholar set out, relishing his quiet absorption at his own pace, into this venerable Islamic city while carefully keeping mental note of his orientation as he went down one after another of Fez’s labyrinthine streets. Nevertheless, caution was not enough: some 45 minutes after his stroll had begun, he realized he was lost. Just as he began to look furtively for someone to give him directions, the spurned guide materialized and chortled, ‘See, I told you!’ (Brown 1973: 21) Medina means, simply, ‘city’. In Arabic usage, it can be applied equally to the medina of New York as of Damascus. The medina of Fez is also just a city, but rendered more so as a me´dina, an imagination of the patterns and vibrancy of a city in a densely concentrated, historically preserved form. This me´dina is unchanged since around the twelfth century, but of course is changing constantly, shedding skins and growing new ones like any living organism. Being a me´dina, as opposed to just a medina, however, intervenes in this process of regeneration in ways that were both envisioned by Lyautey and, at the same time, transcend his plans for tourist Morocco. Fez, perhaps more than many other still intact me´dina, embodies the labyrinthine, seemingly unmappable ideal of this city form. Streets begin and end with a logic related to long-forgotten agreements and inheritances, complex negotiations of land ownership and public pathways that emerged from neighbourhood governance. The flow of movement through the city is

Figure 4.1

Protectorate-era tourism office image of Fe`s (Quesnel c.1935)

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Aerial view of Fez (Brown 1973: 20)

better mapped by embodied repetition – by having a starting point of ‘home’ and a known destination – rather than following a map. For foreigners, it embodies a ‘myste`re’ of hidden paths, discovered doorways, and secrets behind the high riad walls lining the narrow streets. And still today, Fez is a city where maps usually serve little purpose; the map and the city cannot agree on a representative form that would disperse the experience of mystery for the visitor. Fez, in this sense has been (and remains) a laboratory in which modern

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European topographies, after trying to tame and ‘preserve’ the topological spaces of the urban labyrinth, were confronted with the persistence and, in many ways, the dominance of alternative spatial configurations. The mysterious and fascinating – but impenetrable – spatialities that made the medina attractive were impossible to reduce to the calculative rationalities of the colonial mind. This fascination, however, is what enlivens this medina as a me´dina – an unmappable, unplanned old city whose preservation as such has become the source of its allure. Paradoxically, its being full of inaccessible secrets and being tantalizingly difficult to navigate grants Fez an attractiveness for the visitor who can bravely attempt to dominate its mysteries, learning the pattern of the narrow streets and breaching the high walls by disappearing through a shadowy doorway. The contemporary visitor’s need to ‘know’ the city through its street map brings us back to Timothy Mitchell’s observations on the importance of maps and mapping for the Protectorate, and in general for European colonial visitors and planners. In Fez, perhaps even more than in other Moroccan cities transformed by Lyautey and his team of architects and planners, the inherent contradictions of the spatialities produced by the colonial modern emerge and are at the origin of endless episodes in which ‘the topographical’ engages with ‘the topological’ (see Allen 2011; Giaccaria and Minca 2011; Secor 2012). The need to map out all spaces in order to make them comprehensible and manageable to the colonial mind, a process so well described by Mitchell and many others, here finds expression through a series of negotiations and the coexistence of different – sometime clashing but often complementary – spatial logics. In Fez, in her me´dina, more than in other places, the ambivalence of the modern project translated into colonial fantasies and ambitions is revealed by the parallel need to impose a rational code on the spaces of the old city and the desire to preserve the intricate and somewhat impenetrable Arab urban form. Order and disorder, cadastral mapping and everyday topologies, rational urban plans and the apparent irrationalities of Moroccan urban space, were all part – and still in many ways are – of the colonial moment, of the need to combine two conflicting but everpresent ways of understanding the multiple spatial practices and imaginations that make the medina what it is. Brown tellingly concludes the anecdote by noting that ‘[o]f course, the Near Eastern city – even Fez – eventually yields its topographical secrets to the Westerner’ (Brown 1973: 21). We cannot match his certainty; in fact, we wonder if ‘topographical secrets’ can indeed be yielded, whether to a Westerner or not. Rather, we imagine such ‘secrets’ as discoveries that emerge between the meandering dweller – whether temporary or permanent, Western or Eastern – and the city itself in its fixed lines of trajectory and its shifting patterns of inhabitation.

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We see this emergence as having something to do with riad houses that were once a single family, then became many families, and are now becoming hotels. We see this also as a penetration of gazes by visitors, moving steadily towards Fez and its internal workings, opening new spaces from the inside out, making new dwellings, and constituting ever-new mappings of a very old city.

Pre-Protectorate travel One would like to describe. One cannot but cry out! Nothing of what has been said about this horrible marvel equals the impression into which it plunges you. It’s the frenzy of the heroic baroque! It’s the capital of picturesqueness in the world! The artist who has not seen it is ignorant of this mystery: the furious picturesque. (Picard 1889: 356) Long before the arrival of the Protectorate, or the realization of Lyautey’s narrative of preservation in Moroccan medinas, Fez was a city beyond the reach of European travellers, governments and commerce. Historically, the city was the seat of the sultan of the Kingdom of Fez, one of the imperial cities (along with Meknes, Rabat and Marrakech). Most importantly, it is profoundly rooted in Islam: a city begun in the early ninth century by Moulay Idriss II, whose father had brought Islam to Morocco. In this sense, for early travellers who documented journeys there, it ranks among other important cities in Islam – Damascus, Baghdad, Granada, even Mecca. By the twelfth century the Karaouine mosque, founded in 859, was the largest in Africa, and by the fourteenth the university had a student population numbering in the thousands (Najjar 1958). When our voyager narrators arrived, it was a known city on the map of important Near Eastern cities, but one that was, in an era of increasing speed of travel, paradoxically close yet difficult to reach, and even more difficult to broach for the non-Muslim visitor. As an imperial city, under the stringent protection of the Islamic Sultanate, Christians were prevented from travelling to Fez without an accompanying guard. For most of the nineteenth century, individual travellers were extremely few, with most accounts coming from members of ambassadorial corteges. Delacroix arrived there this way in 1832, as noted in Chapter 2, after his host waited months for permission and proper timing to depart from Tangier. Fez, as Godard described (see page 41), was deep in the interior of the sultan’s protected lands, while the European consuls remained purposefully poised far from the real seat of power. Not only would the city be a strange sight to behold for a European traveller, but the Christian visitor would be a phenomenon to local inhabitants: ‘I am told by Barbary Jews, it would be next to impossible for a Christian to walk without disguise in broad daylight at Fez.

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Not so much from the hostility of the populace, but from their indecent and vehement curiosity’ (Richardson 1860 vol 2: 142). Fez was, undoubtedly, a remarkably insulated capital city for this time. As Dr Gerhard Rohlfs claimed in his geographic and demographic survey, from observations made in 1861 when he falsely converted to Islam in order to travel, Fez was essentially inaccessible to ordinary Christians: The capital of Morocco has been but little visited by Europeans, and the accounts given of it by eye-witnesses are meagre. Leo’s description is the most complete, and that of the Spanish General, Badia (Ali-Bey-el-Abassi), is also trustworthy, as being from his own observations. All other information about Fez rests on hearsay only. (Rohlfs 1874: 120) By the 1870s, with the opening of Morocco’s interior to more European visitors, individual travellers began to arrive. Edmondo De Amicis’ account, dating from 1877, documents his journey to the interior but he does not enter Fez until the beginning of the second volume. With no train and no paved roads, the journey from Tangier took a week or more, under guarded escort through potentially dangerous country – as De Amicis’ entire volume one documents. Through 1910, when Joel Cook published a guide to travel around the Mediterranean, the journey still required a week to cover the 200 miles. Cook warns potential European travellers of the ‘disturbed condition of the country’ (1910: 191) since regional uprisings in 1906, but goes on to describe Fez as Morocco’s ‘most important interior community, with hardly a dozen European residents, out of a population approximately of a hundred thousand. It is a real oriental city and as yet entirely untouched by European influences’ (1910: 192). This dichotomy repeats in other accounts: the journey to arrive in Fez may be arduous and costly, but the reward is the rare jewel, the ‘authentic Orient’ that shows little sign of European influences. The relative proximity of Fez to European soil, compared with its relative distance as a spatial and temporal object, becomes part of its mystique. The francophone Belgian, Edmond Picard, evokes this fascination eloquently, comparing Fez to Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus and Istanbul: And amongst [the cities], the most crouched, the most shadowed in the desert of abolished splendours, them that we are the least reminded of, that a voyageur tries the most infrequently to find the way there, is Fez, where the sherifs, descendants of Mahomet, proliferate like priests in Rome. Immense monastery, cloistered in its intolerance and contemptuous disdain, it knows nothing and does not want to know anything of what happens elsewhere on the earth. It is not only far in space, it is far in time! It

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is five hundred leagues from us, and five hundred years behind us. A colossal Bruges intact in its construction, its inhabitants, its customs of the fifteenth century, a worn-down centenarian, conserved by a miracle, prodigiously different than our today, but with this factor the prodigy is doubled: another race. (Picard 1889: 350) He notes, however, that the isolation is not neutral: it is part of the Moroccan resistance to European – Christian, or ‘Roumi’ – conquest: ‘Only Fez is still clean from all stain’, in its distant Moroccan solitude, distant less by distance than by the lack of roads, the hostility of its men, their defiant devotion, their hate for the Roumi, their instinctive anger against the disdained but always formidable stranger. Because he brings with him, they sense by instinct, conquest. (Picard 1889: 348) While Picard’s appreciation of Fez was very much that of a fascinated explorer, it would not be long after his voyage in the 1880s that the isolated city would become more frequently visited by Europeans. Yet, despite the increase in traffic, Fez was maintained to be, by European observers, a mysterious and fully oriental place – one that was ripe for French intervention. Jean du Taillis, who visited with an ambassadorial party at the beginning of the twentieth century, exemplifies this tendency. Whereas Rohlfs, travelling independently 40 years earlier, took detailed notes of the landscape and culture from a relatively impartial political perspective (though a deceitful religious one), French travellers like du Taillis were suspected of possessing nascent colonial purposes, as fact-finders for future conquering armies. As discussed in Chapter 2, Algerian security depended on Moroccan cooperation in suppressing rebellion, and Fez was the seat of power nearest the border and most implicated in this process. The help of these explorers-cum-informants, as senator Marcel SaintGermain exclaims in the preface to du Taillis’ Le Maroc Pittoresque, was invaluable to colonial governance: That the lamentable anarchy in which Morocco is debating would stop, so we could see the agricultural and commercial importance of this country rise in considerable proportion, thanks to its fertility and richness of soil. Our neighbouring colony would assuredly profit, but what source of new revenue for the Sherifian Empire! These are the different economic and political questions to which you [du Taillis] have not remained indifferent, and in my role as representative to the Senate of the Department of Oran, the closest to Morocco, is to thank you. (du Taillis 1905: vi)

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While Rohlfs included evaluations of Fassi markets, products and industry as a catalogue of goods, du Taillis’ chapter on Fassi industry begins with advice to future (French) investors about the city’s entrepreneurial potential: Without considering that the invasion of ‘Roumis’, if that happens now, would intrinsically overexcite the fanaticism of Fassis, it is necessary to understand that, whatever the bright future reserved for Fez, as soon as we can engage capital for commercial and especially industrial enterprises, there is no place for us amongst the Fassis for a long time yet, perhaps ten years. (du Taillis 1905: 292) Du Taillis, as well as contemporary explorer the Marquis Rene´ de Segonzac, were early adopters in Morocco of photography to illustrate their travels. Like Rohlfs’ descriptions several decades previously, de Segonzac’s photographs illustrate text that primarily inventories attributes linked to places and people, like the height of a mountain or the types of ‘Braber’ (Middle Atlas Amazigh) dress, making a cartographic, geographic and anthropologically taxonomic document. Du Taillis follows Picard more than a decade earlier, who followed De Amicis more than a decade before him, even staying in the same home/ hotel. Yet du Taillis is finally able to bring photographic technology on the journey to provide visual illustration for the ordinary scenes and encounters that he describes at length in the text, creating a literally ‘picturesque’ Morocco for the armchair traveller. All three of these voyagers – De Amicis, Picard and du Taillis – are consumed with anticipation to see Fez, ‘the most celebrated city in all Islam after Mecca’ (du Taillis 1905: 251). They know the famous names and monuments that await them – the tomb of Moulay Idriss, the Karaouine mosque – and are all sensorially bombarded by their first entrance into the city streets: I remember only vaguely what I happen to see during that itinerary, since I was entirely shocked by the spectacular entry and at the same time worried to save my life while walking among those large rocks in the midst of a crowd of horses; falling in that place would have been a recipe for disaster. I recall that we went through several narrow and desert streets, sidelined by high buildings, ascending and descending, choked by the dust in the air and stunned by the noise made by the horses; after a good half an hour of walk, and passed through a labyrinth of ascending alleys . . . we reached a small door, in between two lines of red-dress soldiers who greeted us, and enter our home. A wonderful feeling. (De Amicis 1877: KL 2347) Fez! Immense madrepore [coral]!

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We circulate in this madrepore from daybreak, inquisitive, anxious, with feverish, groping curiosity, in the canals forming the axis, in the lateral canals of the enormous polyp skeleton, split into crow’s feet in crossroads, opening hollow caves between buildings, branching in sinewy streets edged with cells, the ruined descendants, the sordid replacements for the ninety thousand houses in the time of the Almohads. Our procession creeps, slides, ramps down the hallways without end, the corridors, the parades in crevices, the gigantic breaks, rock falls, pieces from mines, cut-out gorges; by shadowed tunnels opening to cavernous holes like piercing pointed tools at the foot of thick hedges, like the tracks of foxes, tunnels leading to the shelters of wild beasts. Separating the twenty-two neighbourhoods of the hoary city are worm-eaten doors, off-kilter, decorated with massive locks, long and heavy, with a menacing appearance suggesting a war machine. Not from admiration to admiration (making too much of that word that is overused in dispassionate correction), but from shock to shock, from dizzy spell to dizzy spell, we roll on buffeted about. The accumulation of the picturesque is overwhelming. Without interruption. It trickles. No respite possible. (Picard 1889: 353) I want to remind myself of some of the deep sensations, felt in those days during my walks. I want to evoke again that dread of the quiet little dirty streets, with black walls that mysteriously hide waves of white forms; I want to pass again in front of those immense houses that seemed blind, saving the only apparent openings for their many holes left gaping from the edifice once they were demolished. And also, I will remember the tangles of beams, spanning the corridors where our heads banged one another, hung looking towards the ground to find the necessary spot to step uncertainly. Yet, whether under the shadowy stoops or in the dazzling spotlight of sunbeams, that reflected the multi-coloured porcelain of a suddenlyappearing mosque, the same distant humming follows you, that of the winding flows of water, insidious, within the depths of the ground and sometimes springing from the thickness of the walls in a few artistically decorated mosaic fountains, crushing there, on the large paving stones worn away by time. And these are, you the pursuer as well, the same blood-soaked looks of deaf anger, the same contemptuous lips hurling the worst curses against the ‘Roumi’ . . . All the poetry of Islam, the permanence of its manners, the untroubled calm of its believers and the future joys of its Paradis, this vision! I have been able since then to cross many thresholds of ‘Fassi’ hospitables; my eyes have never since been so struck, nor my being so differently stirred by such spectacles that remain the same. (du Taillis 1905: 259 – 61)

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De Amicis and Picard evoke the wonder and fascination of their encounter with the city, as they navigate narrow streets with little sense of direction or destination, simply overwhelmed by the sensation of moving through the city. Du Taillis remembers fleeting images as well, of flashes of white and colour, of light and darkness, but frames it with the distrustful gaze of the Fassi on him, the ‘Roumi’ invader. Yet the images stay with him, and he is the only one of the authors from this period to attempt to capture photographically the density of the Fassi streets, showing the entrance to the tomb of Moulay Idriss despite its dim lighting conditions for the apparatus of the time. Again, the fascination for the mysterious disorder of the medina is combined with the attempt at freezing that space in images capable of providing, in the intentions of the author, some sort of alternative order, some meaning out of that urban labyrinth, otherwise impenetrable both materially and conceptually. While du Taillis effectively ‘pictures’ Fez, publishing images that the reading public can use to imagine the street scenes he describes, Picard’s narration of moving through the medina creates the picturesque sensorially, since he willingly abandons himself to the flow of the old city, emphasizing the beauty of ‘the topological’ characterizing the ‘Oriental’ city. He continues: Hit by hit, at every step, at every corner, at every turn it assails and saturates you. It’s fairy-like and devilish in the strange bright obscurity, in the nightmare of ruin, of disorder, of violence, of raggedness, of savageness, of dirtiness, of the frightening, of mustiness, of evil! The instinct is to quickly cry: Enough! and turn the bridle in panic, and to return fleeing, hands over one’s eyes, by the excess of sensations and the need to let them descend, filter, to dock in oneself the tormenting inhibition, the dislocating absorption that upsets the intelligence like the amazement of a storm to one’s vision, like the cracking discharges of artillery to one’s ears. No rest! No other rest for softening, palliating, tempering, refreshing one’s blood to escape like lizards above on the soft and delicate sky, on the minarets carved of rock and tiles, dressed like superb chandeliers, jutting up by surprise; on the figures of immobile groups of men, symbols of nonchalant and disdainful dignity; or others, in bright yellow djilla`bs, circulating silently, defiant, aggressive by a glance; or women, covered by haı¨ck with a narrow visor, by which their glances slide, cold, penetrating, sad and yet remaining straight for their sex; the more walled-up women under veils like a lair entrance for their houses without windows. – Nuremberg? Eh! Let it alone! – Tanger? A joke! – Meknes? Regular and proper! – Here a mute concert, but rich in perspectives jumping over some and under others, stacking itself up in stairways, piling calcareous monoliths of cubed houses, creating an undefined square of terraces, colossal flagstones that overlap by mysterious pressure from below that pushes them up, disjoints them, breaks them, cracks them without noise and holds them suspended in dislocation and disorder.

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. . . And from this accumulation, from this cramming together, this barbed, congealed rush towards the descent of a rolling torrent along the valley, seems to exit, unbroken and wild, a profound clamour without noise crying the past and fanaticism. And nowhere a window, nowhere a clock, nowhere a sign, these inevitable characteristics of our cities, forcing the eye to count, forcing it to read, here this machinic school work is unknown. (Picard 1889: 354–5) This topological and picturesque image of Fez stays with us; a tortured account of the European visitor thrashing against the city, being lost and being discovered, experiencing unfamiliar sensations in navigating the unnavigable streets. Picard’s description stands in contrast, however, to Cook’s guide published 20 years later, but still before the installation of the Protectorate. His descriptions follow the new voice of a tourist guidebook, instructing the visitor on what is important to be seen and how to accomplish seeing it by following to the letter the tourist map of the medina – an attempt at ordering an otherwise unmanageable space. Fez is much crowded, there being an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ town, both of them ancient, and both having narrow and dirty streets, while the houses are generally of brick with galleries and flat roofs . . . The old town is the most attractive. A wide roadway from this second square, bounded by the high walls encircling the Sultan’s garden, leads into Bu Jelud, a large open space, and at once we are amid the promiscuous crowds of the city. Here the snake-charmers and story-tellers congregate, and the devotees of various Moslem sects go through their religious ecstasies for ‘baksheesh.’ (Cook 1910: 195, 197) The visitor then follows Cook’s prescribed route through the city, to look in through the doorway of the tomb of Moulay Idriss II, pass by the Kairouan, the souks, and the craftsmen’s workshops; to see the Shrebelein minaret (‘perfect specimen of medieval Moorish art’ [ibid.: 199]) and observe the humorous and quaint idiosyncrasies of Morocco (‘Beyond this gateway is another square, with the entrances opening upon it of the private precincts of the palace, and here is usually found another guard of soldiers, often fast asleep’ [ibid.: 197]). Finally, arriving at the end of the ‘highway’, the safe route through this old city, the tourist can find the panoramic viewpoint and, right there, perform the role of a modern walking topographer engaged in exploring the mystery of the ultimate topological urban space – the me´dina – in a fascinating (and inherently contradictory) interplay between the topographical and the topological: Going out the gates and up on the hills overlooking the city, the visitor gets a lovely view of the winding valley that encloses the long and narrow place,

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with its glistening white roofs and border of groves and gardens, looking like a broad streak of white embedded in a border of the most vivid green. High on the summit of the ridge, north of the Bab el Gizet gate, where are the ruins of the tombs of the ancient Beni Merin dynasty who ruled Fez and Morocco, is got a grand view over the deeply indented valley of the town, as it slopes toward the wider intervale of the Seboo to the eastward, which can be traced far away over the western plateau as it carries the waters of the Atlas mountains out to the distant Atlantic. (Cook 1910: 203) Cook has led a sort of conquest of this old city, rendering it comprehensible and palatable to the new variety of European visitor. The city no longer dominates the visitor, who is dwarfed by its labyrinthine spaces, its splashes of light and colour, or its penetrating and accusatory gaze. Rather, the visitor now dominates the city, by appreciating its parcelled attributes as they are encountered, the gaze directed to the important aspects that make the city ‘Oriental’, while isolating the ‘rest’ as a fascinating but marginal and disordered complement to the ‘colonial’ me´dina. More than any other visitor, Maurice Tranchant de Lunel’s visit was instrumental in how Fez became the me´dina exemplaire. Writing retrospectively, after his efforts to preserve Moroccan patrimoine as one of Lyautey’s architects were long underway, he recalled his first visit to Fez in 1902 as a young traveller, passing days abandoning himself ‘in a practically complete solitude in the charm of the Unique City where, for millions of hours, their passage only marked by the song of the muezzins, beings have evolved together in an immovable frame’ (Tranchant de Lunel 2011 [1924]: 55): No where else like in this old neighbourhood is Fassi life conserved intact after the long passage of centuries. The same passers-by, the same clothes, with the same attitudes, the same allures, living the same street life and the same thoughts, expressing them with the same looks, same voices, and same gestures. They pour out like a tireless flood from the opening of the day to the fall of night, between high houses where each floor corbels around the preceding one to block out the sky completely. For he who knows and wants to see the most secret rhythms of Moroccan existence, there’s no need to wander elsewhere than certain small streets bathed, even in the noisiest atmospheres, with the same halflight of a subterranean crypt. (Tranchant de Lunel 2011 [1924]: 58) As the key member of Lyautey’s cohort charged with preservation, and specifically the preservation of monuments and buildings which are dotted throughout the old city of Fez, his early experience of this ‘subterranean crypt’ where he could find the ‘most secret rhythms of Moroccan existence’ resonates

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with his actions as first chief of the Protectorate division responsible for fine arts and historical monuments. His previous experience of picturesque Fez – the Fez that sensorially overwhelmed his predecessors and led to the touristic catalogue by his contemporaries – enabled him to focus his energy into preservation of that picturesque me´dina. His account is a telling example of the European attempts to combine a topographical (tourist) ordering of the urban with the topologies of the street, to (supposedly) relate the order of the map to the messiness of real life – as complementary, but inherently ambivalent, elements of the colonial approach to the medina and its ‘contorted’ spatialities (see Minca and Oakes 2006b). These very spatialities even today resist all attempts to reduce them to the logic of the map, as some of the examples that follow will illustrate.

Protecting Fez At the beginning, there was a source of water . . . Then life made its work with the arms of men. Some houses were built to shelter people and livestock. A mosque accompanied the site in its creation . . . The hammam owes its birth to the need for daily ablutions in relation to the imperatives of desire. (Serhane 1999: 9) Seat of civilization and progress, this all modern French city develops, without spoiling or transforming it, along the edges of the old Muslim city that keeps its integrity as a capital of Islam with its customs, its appearance of antiquity, and conserves all its picturesque with its full teeming souks, its narrow streets, dark and mysterious where, between its high and colourless walls, with a slow and silent step, slide the white shadows, magnificently draped in fine muslins, its pure masterpieces of Moorish art unblemished by any disgraceful posters or loud neighbouring cafe´s, its discreet and charming medrasas with delicate wood panelling, its grandiose mosques where, at prayer times, along the heavy pillars of the massive arcades, the prostrated forms of thousands of believers fall into line. (Pe´rigny 1917: 38–9) The ideal of Protectorate development, again in Fez as in Rabat and Marrakech, is the modern next to the traditional, without ‘spoiling or transforming’ the integrity of this Islamic city. Maurice Pe´rigny, who published a European resident’s guide to the city for entrepreneurial development after his tour of Morocco during World War I, presents a list of what makes Fez ‘picturesque’: the souks, narrow streets, high walls, architectural masterpieces, medrasas and mosques. A combination of modern cartographies: the map of the modern city combined with the cultural mappings of traditional Moroccan space, as imagined by the colonial mind. By this time, Maurice Tranchant de Lunel was already engaged in the project of preserving these monuments. This central

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task of the Protectorate trickled back to the me´tropole as these structures became inspiration for the design of the Mosque´e de Paris (Tranchant de Lunel 2011 [1924]: 6). Fez had already become the former capital of the Sultanate, and Rabat the new capital of the Protectorate. The medina was no longer the impenetrable city it had been for previous visitors; the sense of danger for Christian trespassers had been tempered by new political powers and economic potentials. It was now becoming a me´dina for aesthetic appreciation by the foreign resident or tourist, where the labyrinth would be a safe diversion from the modernity of the European city two kilometres distant. The medina becomes, then, an outer space of difference, but still a mappable space: the Arab old city is indeed located in a real and imagined space where it is supposed to perform its traditional ‘irrationalities’; a confirmation of the validity and necessity of European interpretation and intervention but also of the existence of a radical Oriental otherness, in the form of a city available to be penetrated by the European gaze (and not only by the gaze) at will. This rendering of the old city of Fez into a museum-like space or a picturesque vision, began the dissolution of the dangerous aspects of its reputation for religious piety and ‘fanaticism’ through processes that progressively undermined the raisons d’eˆtre of the city. These processes are not completely divorced from the material we rely upon to analyse them: as Janet Abu-Lughod sharply observes, the codifications of cities as ‘Islamic’ by certain scholars engendered an Orientalist fascination with their built environments as developing along inherently different pathways than ‘Christian’ cities, indeed as patterns that replicate throughout the Muslim world (1993). She hypothesizes instead that modes of development in these cities responded to terrain, territory, and the many forms and requirements of the (Islamic) state and civil society, creating neighbourhoods that reflect the connections and distances amongst and between groups, following social needs more than architectural forms. To consider these processes as socially instigated rather than architecturally orchestrated, the organic metaphors proffered by both Serhane and by Picard in the previous section provide a metaphor for the origins of an Islamic city, like Fez. Serhane starts with the source of water for growing life as much as for performing ablutions. Picard recalls the madre´ pore coral, evoking an organizational form linking water to organic and unplanned growth as calcifications build on one another. In Fez, historically, these were sites of Islamic learning, like the medrasas and the Karaouine University, which were intricately connected to the centralized power of the Sultanate and its need for educated advisors (Najjar 1958). Removing power from Fez was not only a symbolic move on the part of the Protectorate government, explicitly orchestrated by Lyautey (see Chapter 3): it cut the tree from its root, to a

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certain extent, for the importance of Islamic Fez as a seat of political power. The Karaouine became more of an architectural landmark than a university; the various renowned medrasas likewise were valued for their woodwork rather than their contribution to learning. The reputation, for Europeans, of Fez as a world city became more tangibly linked with its physical state as a monument, rather than as a centre for learning. Perhaps not explicitly intended as an assault on Islam, this separation was nevertheless an extension of Christian visitors’ experiences – and Lyautey’s own experiences – of the city. As described in the previous section, Fez held the reputation of being a place where Christians could not safely be. This was true throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth as noted previously by Cook’s warnings against ‘unrest’ in Morocco. The unrest was a formative part of Lyautey’s experience of the city as well: Fez was the site of several significant events in the process of establishing French dominance in Morocco. Telling their own story of their first arrival in Fez, with the Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral as ˆ me Tharaud relay Lyautey’s description of their guide and escort, Jean and Je´ro his first arrival there: Lyautey was set to talking. He told me that arriving here for the first time, he had seen ablaze with fires of the tribes running from every corner of the bled to make an assault on the city; he showed me with a finger some place, in that mass of houses that stretched out at our feet, a point that his eyes knew but that I could not distinguish from what was for me a blank uniformity. It was there that he set up camp with his officers, at that tragic moment: there that he learned from hour to hour about new tribal revolts, and when no longer doubted that the city would be taken, he burned his papers . . . (Tharaud and Tharaud 2008 [1930]: 15) Lyautey’s own first entrance to Fez was a moment of fear, potent with the possibility of disaster for himself and the soldiers under his command. Having conquered the city, and consequently the whole of Morocco, he rendered it a place where he, as a Christian, could move freely and gaze at will, inasmuch as he stood gazing over the city when he told the Tharaud brothers this story. Unlike Rabat, the Fez that was created with the Protectorate is maintained as two cities with a longer spatial distance, separated by two kilometres of arterial road instead of a cordon sanitaire (Ricard 1920). One part is both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Fez – Fe`s-el-Bali and Fe`s-Jdid, the original settlement and the ‘new’ addition of the thirteenth century – and the other is la ville nouvelle, still referred to as ‘la ville’. Where to place this ville in proximity to the me´dina but separated from it was part of the initial planning debate. Tranchant de Lunel claims, however, the location was never really in question:

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Figure 4.3 French troops firing on the medina of Fez during the 1912 revolts (L’illustration, 11 May 1912)

In Fez, the plateau of Dar Debibagh was the obvious choice. The important crux of communication Tanger-Fez-Casablanca-Oran could find its juncture point in the Saı¨s plain, on that plateau abundantly endowed with water, desirably placed in relation to the indigenous city, that it economically and strategically commanded. The railway station at Dar Debibagh could lead to a sufficient proximity from the antique Zaouia, surrounded by a double belt of necropolis and rugged gardens, the essential elements for economic tools favouring commercial movement and increasing tourism. The railway did not need to scrape Fez apart from one place, at Dar Debibagh. It must thus separate from the indigenous agglomeration as much as possible . . . to rejoin Taza and Algeria by the valley of Innaouen. (Tranchant de Lunel 2011 [1924]: 101 – 2) The choice of site was thus not merely about a perspective on the picturesque of the me´dina; it was calculated for strategic and economic value, as a place that connected the modern city of Fez to the resources it needed. It made room for the commons that already existed, like gardens and the cemetery, while giving access to water, to space for expansion, to the railway line that connects Fez to Tangier, Casablanca and, at that time, to Oran. It renders this chain of global connectivity

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to a space that briefly touches the zone of Fez, without disturbing the central me´dina, and passes on towards other destinations. The intentionality of this choice was appreciated by early Protectorate visitors like Pe´rigny for both its giving perspective on the surrounding area, and for it its modern French spaciousness: It is situated in the centre of the large plain that stretches between Oued Fe`s and Dar Debibagh, on the light slope of this plateau invigorated by the pure air of a constant breeze, from which the view ranges over the high crenelated ramparts behind which one can make out the tops of many grey terraces that palpitate at the foot of Zalahg like an immense wave that was suddenly petrified in a prodigious eruption. At the right, beyond the white shacks of the Dar Mahre`s camp, appears the verdant impression of Balil where Sefrou is hidden with its marvellous gardens and the snowy peaks of the Beni Ouraı¨n mountains scintillating in the distance. With its wide streets, its avenue grandly planted with trees opening onto a vast roundabout facing the train station, the new city is already taking shape to pop out in a period of full-on war, manifest proof of the confidence of France and the energy of its children. (Pe´rigny 1917: 37 –8) Pe´rigny also implies the necessity of creating this new city, as a housing crisis was already beginning in the old city for Moroccan residents, leaving decidedly no room for incoming Europeans (1917: 37). Building on the plain above the city was both practical and aesthetic, creating a fresh, open space that would allow for industrial growth while also giving a view onto the picturesque old city in the valley below. With new technologies and the actual possibility for new French residents to spend time gazing at Fez, the ‘picturesque’ of the city is soon turned into mass-produced forms. Beyond Pe´rigny’s volume, which includes several detailed pictures, a military commandant named Larribe published, with different collaborators, several volumes of photography in and around Fez. Alfred Bel provides the historical background for the first of these, based on the thirty months he spent in Fez studying Islam. He contextualizes the 120 images through their organization of the album: panoramas, military architecture, religious architecture, private architecture, public ceremonies and gatherings, street life and markets, and finally the Protectorate through its ceremonies and foires. Many of these images include individuals in their framing, sometimes identified by profession (‘water carriers’, ‘vendor of pottery’) but more often they are anonymous and perhaps unwilling participants, caught looking into the camera as part of a composition describing architecture (see Chapter 5 for an extended analysis of the effects such picturings produced in Marrakech).

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These picturings of Fe`s mark a new era, where Christian eyes are everywhere, from on top of the hill overlooking the panorama to inside bourgeois homes. Their perspective was exemplified through penetrating exotic gazes – and maps – operating under the illusion of a comprehensive domination of the Moroccan disorderly space that had to be maintained precisely so, disordered and accessible. It is an era that, arguably, continues through the present day, wherein Fe`s becomes a set of picturesque perspectives – a decontextualized me´dina – in which the livelihoods and activities of its residents are reduced to being part of the production of its Oriental character, which is soon translated into a strategy to normalize difference through a series of topographic understandings of Moroccaness and its immutable cultural spaces (cf. Maxwell and Ranger 2008). Another early visitor, Richard Curle, demonstrates how this gaze penetrated. An American tourist who self-published his experience of the city in Unchanging Fez (1925), he opens his description like others already mentioned, comparing the city to Damascus, Baghdad and Mecca, then extolling the feeling of ‘being transported’ by looking at the city:

Figure 4.4 The classic panoramic overlook view of Fez (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 2)

Figure 4.5 Picturing Fez for the outsider: architecture with unsuspecting bystanders (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 8)

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I looked upon the city and I looked again, as if my eyes could never be done with feasting upon its loveliness and drinking from that well of pure delight. But it was even more enthralling when, just before the September sunset hour of half-past six, we clambered to the top of the Dar Jamai, a palace of the lower town, once the home of a Grand Vizier, and now, unspoilt, as in former days, one of that fine string of Morocco hotels belonging to the Compagnie Transatlantique, and saw Fez-el-Bali crouching at our very feet. The heat of the day had gone, and the noises of the town, carried up to us in a confused murmur from the deep and narrow streets, vibrated about us in the clear sunset air. (Curle 1925: 2) By this time, September of 1924, the Dar Jamai Hotel, one of the first Moroccan interiors converted to host foreign tourists, is welcoming guests. Significantly, it is a palace on the edge of the me´dina, on the hill at the opposite end from the French city, overlooking the valley of Fez-el-Bali. Though tourists can now move freely through the streets – no longer the outnumbered Christians fearing they might be ejected for a misstep – the borders of lodging have become more distinct, accommodating Europeans on the edges or outside the me´dina altogether, where only Moroccans live. Where previous generations characterized the danger to Christians, at this point the me´dina was becoming something more precious, more

Figure 4.6

Architectural interior (of a Jewish house) (Larribe [after 1917]: plate 5)

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isolated, as the development of modern, industrial Fez was taking advantage of the potential for fabrication and creation of Fassi artisans. The formerly barricaded homes, behind those high impenetrable walls, became subject to the penetrating gaze from above the city onto their rooftops and into their courtyards. Lyautey’s actions precipitated a diminishing of Fassi bourgoisie power – according to Berque, many of the wealthier, more upwardly mobile moved away to Casablanca or what is now Sidi Kacem, following the trend of real economic development (1967: 173). But Fez, through its Moroccan magistrates, held on to its past glories and reputation as a means of struggling against forces moving the centre of trade in Morocco towards the coast: ‘It countered French policy with a display of piety; it brought into play the prestige of its ancient University, which, through no longer productive, was still an active centre of protest and emotion’ (ibid.). The me´dina is created again through the division of cities: the development forces Abu-Lughod observes trying to recreate Islamic cities along their historical lines is untenable because the social forces of the city have moved elsewhere. Now, the social presence of the city becomes enmeshed with the gaze that cut it into two parts, enabling many more visitors but encasing them to pass through the organic structure of the old city, or observe it from outside.

Navigating medina Me´dina, me´dinas. Arab city(ies) for Arabs, having hosted so many riches of ancient times, so many monuments, so many pages of history and a rich and diverse culture. Arab cities enclosed in ramparts with heavy doors that we close at night against strays and strangers. Closed structures, fixed in their organic specificity. In their external appearance, the facades guard the secret of their structures. Besides the quality of wood of the door, the studs that ornament it . . . , few of the elements in fact express the difference between the rich or poor residences. The past permitted this cohabitation and the architecture of medinas substantially abolished the differences and the borders between inhabitants. A single people in a single space. The contrast is in the inside. (Serhane 1999: 10) Encountering this me´dina is, in many ways, not so different for today’s Western visitor as it was for the nineteenth-century traveller. The architecture and structures are largely intact, due to Lyautey and Tranchant de Lunel’s dictates for preservation, followed by UNESCO’s 1981 designation of the Medina of Fez as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2013a). The me´dina is still a place entered most easily on foot – human or animal (Davis and Frappier 2001) – and not on wheels. It is still a place where the map-based cartography of the nonlocal visitor encounters other spatialities that shaped the patterning of the city in

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the past, and continue to pattern its daily use by residents and tourists. Considering our approach into this me´dina requires revisiting the intersections between these topographical and topological spaces that move from labyrinthine coral-esque figures to an identified set of signposted landmarks; from an Islamic city founded in water to a modern city encircling and penetrating it; from claustrophobic exterior street space to aerated interior homes, and still further airborne onto rooftops. These spatialities compete with one another but also constitute one another in the same way that the growth of the modern ville nouvelle rendered the medina of Fez into Fe`s me´dina. Part of this competition, historically, has been the struggle to actually produce a somewhat stable and reliable mapping of Fez; however, this struggle, in practice, often translated into dialectics, dialogue, compromise or even mirroring between competing but also complementary understandings of the spaces that make the me´dina what it is. Contemporary guidebooks to Morocco and to Fez often include an effort at a map, usually showing the main roads and some of the longer passages that are not dead-ends, but rarely document the plethora of tiny streets and alleys that offer a wrong turn. Even the Google map for Fez provides little detail of its streets beyond a grey canvas. Guidebooks advise pedestrians on how to walk in the me´dina, to pay attention to calls of balek or andek signalling them to move out of the way of oncoming heavier traffic. They warn that ‘[y]ou might well get lost’ (Maxwell and Ranger 2008: 35), but not to fear: you will find your way again. Once again, the same (colonial) rhetoric of order and disorder, a game of mapping but also leisurely getting out of the map to penetrate, in a glance, the spaces of the Other in a controlled and reassuring way. The Protectorate’s Syndicat d’Initiative de Tourisme, led by Prosper Ricard, began producing maps and guides as early as 1920 with the cooperation of publishers in France and in Morocco. These include significant efforts to transpose useful maps of the cities of Fez – now the old city with the ‘new’ city, and the quickly changing ville nouvelle – along with the bonnes adresses in each part of where to stay, to eat and to observe. Such efforts at mapping were not an explicitly promoted part of conquering the old city but their effect is integrated in the visitor experience of it. The first such map produced of Fez was published in 1913, showing ‘the principal streets and mosques in each of the eighteen neighbourhoods of the medina . . . the medina’s water mills, urban gardens, water canals, and the homes of influential families’ (Holden 2007: 128), but for the explicit purpose of mapping property lines and ownership. These maps were firstly part of the Protectorate orientation towards allocating land ownership in the me´dina, then useful as well for providing a means for visitors to orient themselves in the dense urban space. One of us (Lauren), once encountered this map, or one based on it, in trying to plot the location of her house in Fez.

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The cartographic impulse towards labelling ownership was a new form being introduced into Morocco, and one that remains part of a problematic legacy of French legality overlaid in Moroccan practices. As the Tharauds describe, property ownerships in Fez was particularly complex: Property there is so divided up that it is not rare, for example, to see a mill that belongs to four or five different proprietors: the walls to this one, the wheels to that one, the space between the walls and wheels to a third, the millstones to yet another, and one understands that dividing pieces amongst numerous inheritors will create disputes with no end. (Tharaud and Tharaud 2008 [1930]: 127) Holden explains part of the generation of this problem: because of Islamic inheritance law apportioning equal parts to all inheritors, it was possible to possess, for example, 1/78th of a house as it had been inherited in fractions to successive generations (Holden 2007: 128). This framework for ownership, however, clashed with French projects to organize and classify. ‘To register a property with the Office of Land Titles, an individual – whether French or Moroccan – needed to prove that they possessed it in its entirety’ (Holden 2007: 127). Those who could not prove full ownership were unable to register the property where they worked or lived. Furthermore, structures in Fez are not segmented into quadrangular lots that might be easily mapped twodimensionally; they occupy spaces above and below, sometimes overhanging public roads, fitting into corners and expanding where space was available. This non-rectilinear space is what defines Fe`s as a me´dina, what is evoked in so many of the writings of earlier visitors, but also intrinsic to Fez’s resistance to French influence. To create the administration that the French desired, Fez was truly unmappable; most me´dina homes are still today without title. Maps are produced and offered to the visitor as a facility to navigate, but their effectiveness is disclaimed from the start. They can help get you in to the city, but you will have to find your own way out.

Entering homes His house, the good Fassi must have in the Me´dina, in that mass of high residences attached one to the other like so many cells in a honeycomb, and where the narrow streets clear a path for passage with many detours, entering, where possible, under stoops and tunnels, to stop at any moment at an impassable wall. (Tharaud and Tharaud 2008 [1930]: 18) When the Tharauds wrote about Fassi homes in the me´dina, there were not as many options for leaving it. The city walls still marked the extent of Fez from

Figure 4.7

The street of Lauren’s house (L. Wagner 2009)

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the surrounding countryside; the distinction the Tharauds made was between Fe`s-el-Bali and Fe`s-Jdid. Today the urban agglomeration of Fez has radiated kilometres out from the old cities, far beyond the ville nouvelle, in rapidly expanding housing neighbourhood developments. Like Rabat, and Tunis, the me´dina has become polarized, ‘somewhat like the inner city in American urban experience – abandoned by the great and powerful, their former places taken over by the poor who are also often newcomers to the city’ (Brown 1973: 29). As is the case for many historic cities, living within historic structures is a hindrance to modern forms of everyday life. In Fez in particular, where wheeled traffic is even more restricted than some other me´dinas in Morocco, commuting to a job alone can present difficulties. Being part of a living monument often means that the monument takes precedence over efforts to shape the environment to residents’ changing needs. Buying a house in Fez brought these changes into relief. Lauren was lucky that what she finally bought was a house owned amongst one family; many of the houses she viewed were occupied on different floors or partitioned by multiple families, each of whom would have to be contracted individually as sellers. This would be too complicated and time-consuming, not to mention too expensive. Those families living in tight quarters, which are split in further parts generation after generation, will probably not benefit from the boom of gentrification in Moroccan me´dinas (McGuinness 2006). Lauren’s house, rather, was owned by the eight children of one family and their elderly mother, so the negotiation for price could be handled by a single brother. They negotiated among themselves once she paid for the full home. It was also, luckily, a house that had not been subdivided too extensively. When she cleaned it out and removed the debris left over from many centuries of inhabitants (maybe two or three), there were only a few spaces and corners where she was not certain what lay behind a wall or beneath a floor. The kitchen did seem to stick into the neighbour’s house, but the wall was thick and no one was bothered. Beyond its interior, this house offered a good location – an easy-to-remember walk from Place Er-Rcif, a main entry in the valley of the me´dina. It can be reached also fairly easily from Bab Boujeloud, the door from which most tourists and visitors first enter the me´dina now, the door that Lyautey built leading from the bus station and Fe`s-Jdid towards Talaa Kebira and Talaa Saghrira, the ‘highways’ past the main tourist sites. It is not far at all from El Karaouine and the Tomb of Moulay Idriss II, though there are no clear signs showing the way. It also offered, something her friend the agent showed her with particular pride, a beautiful view from the roof onto the rest of Fez and the Karaouine minaret just next door. He showed her the roof when they first looked at this house, saying that he knew it was the right one after seeing this view. The view, once more, was presented to the Western ‘visitor’ as an intrinsic value, but also

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as a way to make sense of what otherwise would be an incomprehensible kind of space. The view serves as a European rubric for the unmappable but fascinating messiness of real space, out there. However, for her, the view was not a bonus; she was more impressed that in the heat of summer the interior remained perfectly cool from a circulating breeze through an ingenious chimney. Moreover, the layout of the house featured rooms that resembled more the European bedrooms that she had in mind, in her hopes to rent rooms to students of Arabic. Unlike most Western me´dina property buyers, she was not looking to open a cafe´ or a boutique hotel; she wanted this house to remain a lived-in home. Buying the house, however, was only the beginning. Renovations took another year, and continued to pose problems from poor workmanship (permitted by poor overseeing) and troublesome recurring breakages. Furnishing the house was another experience: contracting a carpenter to make frames and a mattress-maker to make sofas; getting a refrigerator and oven delivered by mule. Carrying the upholstery fabric herself from the neighborhood where fabric is sold (Fe`s-Jdid) to the tailor who will sew it to fit her salons (Cherabliyine), and remembering the route each time she had to return. Not to mention acclimatizing to life in an ‘Islamic city’, as Picard noted, without clocks: she learned to follow other temporal rhythms. Call to prayer echoes across the city five times a day, passing from one minaret to the next western one with a slight delay. During Ramadan, a man, never seen, bangs on the door every day to wake her, and every other house in the street before for sohor. The mornings are busy, lunchtimes quiet, and afternoons lively again until sunset. She does not try to go out alone in the evenings. She memorized the streets around her house by repetition: counting the stairs up as she rises through the most direct route from Er-Rcif, or learning to avoid one passage that becomes impossibly crowded in the afternoons. Watching the shops across the street and on the corner change ownership, more rapidly than one would have thought. Trying to learn the most direct route to Bab Boujeloud but still getting lost. Meeting some of the neighbours, and being recognized by others on the street – sometimes purposefully, by those who she has met before, and sometimes because ‘the European’ of the neighbourhood is noticed and watched. She tells visitors sometimes that they might ask, in the right neighbourhood, for the American woman’s house and possibly be directed to hers. Being in the interior of her house is often a relief from walking the streets. These streets are no longer overwhelming as a foreign experience, as labyrinthine and dangerous, because she knows how to ask for directions to get home. She knows that the topographic map, in Fez, does not help; it serves as little more than a metaphor for the (still) colonial form of navigating Fez, rather than the actual experience that people have of those spaces. Practical knowledge and

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sensorial memories win over attempts at rationalizing something that simply does not function according to the rules of cartographic reasoning (see Farinelli 2000). But entering the house still offers a calm that other visitors might not be privileged to know: the slam of the door that completely blocks street noise and the echoing, cooling quiet of the tiled courtyard. Houses were, and still are to some extent, a woman’s domain (Sadiqi 2006), part of what previous visitors could not see, or only get a glimpse of. The very early European visitors were able to enter certain houses that were arranged for use by diplomats, but Europeans were soon installed in hotels instead, optimized for their comfort as modern travellers needing plumbing, electricity, or measures of privacy that differ from the normal guest in a Moroccan home. Being inside a house changes the perspective on the nest of streets outside it. Having access beyond the ‘insurmountable wall’, to quote the Tharauds, reframes the juxtaposition between interior and exterior in this courtyardfilled city. Inside, the home becomes a private, protected interior that is also aerated and open. The ‘inside’ is more outside than the streets, where overhanging buildings

Figure 4.8 Drawing of the rooftops of Fez from Pierre Loti’s travels in Morocco, L’illustration (28 September 1889)

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block sunlight, and dirt collects from the thousands of feet – animal and human – that pass every day. Through the home, to the roof, Fez exists on several planes simultaneously. The rooftops of Fez, above the dirt and shadows, were and sometimes still are, a domain of women: where washing is hung, where cooking is done in the hotter months, where a fresh breeze in the evening can be found. Previous visitors, schooled in the strict seclusion of Muslim women, were surprised to discover that the seemingly open space of rooftops were in fact private. Curle, for example, continues his observation from Dar Jamai: And presently from that high terrace we beheld a sight which no male eyes should look upon; on to all the roofs of Fez gaily dressed women, now singly, now in groups, began to emerge, vivacious, waving to one another, gathering in eager clusters, wives, daughters, and slave-girls happy together, until it was almost as if above the hidden streets of men another world of women had risen, unsuspected. (1925: 2) These roofs are part of the three-dimensional space of Fez not visible on maps that mark streets for tourists to pass, or demarcate property lines. The roofs, and their ‘life’, in fact are flattened out by the two-dimensional rationale of the map – they simply disappear from sight, despite being very visible from the sky (which is the hypothetical observation point of the cartographic gaze). Sitting on her roof on a summer evening, waiting for the minarets to sound, reminds Lauren that the labyrinth is in fact one of houses; interiors that European visitors, until recently, had great difficulty accessing. Not only because they were not allowed in, as successive sultans, and even Lyautey, sometimes barred outsiders from living in the me´dinas, but also because they were preoccupied with the twodimensional cartography of the streets, with ownership, monuments and modernity, and were in many ways – by the sultan’s power to keep foreigners out, and by the Protectorate’s power to settle away from the me´dina – unable to come inside.

Maps, again Despite Lauren acclimatising herself reasonably well to her house, there are still more milestones before it becomes fully hers. Like so many me´dina houses, it has no official title. Lauren cannot find out when it was last owned completely by a single owner but, as its current single owner, she starts the process to acquire a title. And like every other task for this house, it turned into a complex process. Documents have to be acquired and stamped and returned, checked and processed, then returned again; payments of fees and taxes have to be made, then finally there is an appointment with an engineer to measure it – to make sure of

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the boundaries where her house ends and begins, and how they intersect with the neighbours’ houses. The engineers need a precise location to find the house, so she is sent to the room with the maps. A friendly man (impressed by the fact that Lauren speaks Arabic) unrolls the map he thinks is the right one for that neighbourhood. It is brown and delicate, full of pencil marks; apparently dated 1912. Some squares have been drawn in ink – the houses that already have titles – but, besides the streets laid out in very precise detail, the map does not show individual structures. They start to look for Lauren’s house – in/on the map. Going over it again and again, she tells him the neighbourhood and street name but, despite both of them pouring over the right section, they cannot find it. Finally, Lauren starts to trace her route from Er-Rcif: entering this door and climbing the stairs, then turning right, left, right and left, up the stairs again . . . she follows with her finger and narrates the route until they ‘find’ the street and the location, just at the edge of the map where it would intersect with the next section of Fez. The route through the streets is familiar and brings Lauren to the right spot, even on this topographic representation of the city. Yet, as AbuLughod puts it: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the historic quarters of Arab cities were built to be imageable in a way that the gridiron-planned Chicago was not’ (1993: 22). Though we have by no means mastered these topological images, step by step we learned to appreciate the distance between them and the topographies that tried to contain them and reduce them to their calculative rationalities.

CHAPTER 5 LA PLACE

Jemaa el-Fna Marrakech est un reˆve, Marrakech est une proie. Les patres de la montagne comme les caravaniers des oasis sont envoutes par elle, ville d’amour, ville de gain, ville de feˆte. (Dorgele`s 1938 in Rondeau 1999: 87) Jemaa el-Fna est un reˆve. Jemaa el-Fna, like Marrakech, is a dream, a place of magic and spectacle and a spectacular magic place. Or so, at least, it is often presented by the tourist industry and popular travel literature, but all too often also by artists, writers, politicians, academics. Jemaa el-Fna, La Place, in Marrakech, is widely considered the most important symbolic landscape of Morocco (see Borghi 2002; Borghi and Minca 2003; Minca 2007). Jemaa el-Fna is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, since 2008 part of the ‘List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, with its ‘aesthetic coherence’ protected by a set of regulations already implemented in the colonial day: The Jemaa el-Fna Square is one of the main cultural spaces in Marrakesh and has become one of the symbols of the city since its foundation in the eleventh century. It represents a unique concentration of popular Moroccan cultural traditions performed through musical, religious and artistic expressions . . . The Jemaa el-Fna Square is a major place of cultural exchange and has enjoyed protection as part of Morocco’s artistic heritage since 1922. (UNESCO Culture Sector 2013) This unique square has been celebrated for many decades now, with present-day definitions reverberating with those of the mythical age of exploration and early colonization, when Marrakech and Le Sud were still perceived as a fascinating, but figuratively and literally impenetrable, land. It is enough to mention Andre´

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Chevrillon’s Marrakech dans le palmes (1919) or perhaps, also influential for contemporary accounts, Peter Mayne’s classic The Alleys of Marrakesh (1953). But a plethora of other well-known twentieth-century intellectuals, including Elias Canetti and George Orwell (and Churchill), have also been enthralled by the square’s special atmospheres and by the extraordinary mingling of people of all walks of life in that magic corner of the medina. According to UNESCO’s Culture sector: Located at the entrance of the medina, this triangular square, which is surrounded by restaurants, stands and public buildings, provides everyday commercial activities and various forms of entertainment. It is a meeting point for both the local population and people from elsewhere. All through the day, and well into the night, a variety of services are offered, such as dental care, traditional medicine, fortune-telling, preaching, and henna tattooing; water-carrying, fruit and traditional food may be bought. In addition, one can enjoy many performances by storytellers, poets, snakecharmers, Berber musicians (mazighen), Gnaoua dancers and senthir (hajouj) players. The oral expressions would be continually renewed by bards (imayazen), who used to travel through Berber territories. They continue to combine speech and gesture to teach, entertain and charm the audience. Adapting their art to contemporary contexts, they now

Figure 5.1

Scenes from Jemaa el-Fna at sunset (C. Minca 2006)

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improvise on an outline of an ancient text, making their recital accessible to a wider audience . . . While Jemaa el-Fna Square enjoys great popularity, the cultural practices may suffer acculturation, also caused by widespread tourism. (UNESCO Culture Sector, italics added) Tourism versus ‘acculturation’ presents quite an interesting opposition, especially when applied to a site entirely driven by the interest that it continues to provoke in tourists coming from the four corners of the globe. While Jemaa elFna is clearly not only about tourism, nonetheless it is also made of tourism: its crowd, the ‘cultural landscape’ which presumably makes it so special, is the result of endless quotidian encounters between thousands of Moroccans, visiting and working in the square, and Western and non-Western travellers, often in search of an unmediated immersion into the magic of La Place. Indeed, every single day Jemaa el-Fna is visited and photographed by countless tourists, either part of the melting pot (sometimes literally so, because of the heat) of people who together ‘produce the square’ all year long, or populating the terraces that surround it, while sipping overpriced the´ a` la menthe in one of the many gaze-driven cafe´s inaugurated by the French and taking shots of that ever-changing-but-still-thesame landscape. To abuse Derrida’s famous phrase: La Place is everyday the same, but also everyday different in its very sameness.

Figure 5.2

Tourists in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

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This emblematic site of present-day Morocco is thus daily reproduced through a mise-en-sce`ne that follows distinct rules of positioning, visualization and the hypostatization of such visualization within countless photographs (and by countless photographers); photographs that frame the very same landscape and that, at once, embody the very experience of a postcolonial landscape at a glance. This chapter is an exploration of the spatialities of these positionings, and, overall, of the disciplinary power of the gaze, especially the photographic gaze, in Jemaa el-Fna. We will briefly discuss the translation of this site into a square in line with the new colonial desires and cultural framings of the Protectorate, something that is reflected also in many contemporary performances in the square and about the square. We will then try to show how the colonial gaze is still powerfully operating in La Place, and how a series of ‘characters’ – that is, real people, but also actual bodies representing something else – are endlessly put on display in the square and in its most compelling descriptions. The chapter will then take an example of this ‘political economy of display’ (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) – the book of photos Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent (see Fauchon 2009) – at face value and will deconstruct its use of the bodies of ‘the people of the square’ as a timeless cultural cartography of sorts. We thus deliberately limit our analysis to these aspects, while overlooking the actual agency of the people photographed and the effects of their being put on display on the actual practices in the square, since we intentionally want to focus on the framings of power that the images of the squares, certain images of the square, produce together with a related biopolitics of Moroccan culture in-place.

Framing the square The mystique of the square, as the tourist brochures often proclaim, derives from the fact that there ‘time has stopped’; from the possibility it grants the European visitor to get close to the ‘real Morocco’; to understand its ‘culture and traditions’ through its symbolic landscape par excellence: Going back in time: You must absolutely take a trip through the medina or a stroll to Place Jemaa el-Fna. It will be the real start of your journey through time. Your reference points will change as you go back in time. You are no longer interested in the number of kilometres travelled. The past suddenly appears in the form of storytellers, street performers, snake charmers and magicians dispensing secret potions and medicines. (Moroccan National Tourist Office 2012) In the last few decades, also as a reaction to the presumed ‘acculturation’ of the square (whatever that means), different, deliberately non-tourist/non-colonial,

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accounts of Jemaa el-Fna have made their appearance and have contributed to implementing a presumably more sophisticated reading of its cultural spaces. These accounts have also been at the origin of a set of alternative initiatives aimed at protecting the square from the effects of mass tourism and, interestingly enough, from the changes implemented by those Moroccans who, in the perception of the promoters of these very initiatives, do not appreciate the fragile patrimony that the square contains/conveys, and who thus contribute to its progressive disappearance. One good example of these attempts at realizing alternative readings of the square is the work of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, a self-appointed resident of the square, who has given widely celebrated literary form to it but who has also acted ‘politically’, for example, by supporting the official recognition of UNESCO that the ‘oral’, intangible patrimony of Jemaa el-Fna ought to be protected and preserved as part of the universal heritage of humanity: This universe of flea market hawkers and water carriers, of artisans and beggars, of horse traders and hoodlums, of crooks with silky hands, of naı¨ve spirits, of women of easy virtue, of loudmouths, of gangsters, of the streetwise, of imposters, of fortune-tellers, of purveyors of religion, of herbalists, all this world in high colour, open and insouciant, that gives its life force to Christian and Islamic societies – much less differentiated than one would think – at time of the archpriest of Hita, has been diminished little by little, or radically, by the rising bourgeoisie and the State making lives and cities into grids; it is no more than a vague memory for countries that are technologically advanced and morally empty. The cybernetic and audiovisual influence levels populations and spirits, ‘Disneyfies’ childhood and atrophies the capacity for imagination. Only one city holds on to the privilege of sheltering the deceased oral heritage of humanity, described by many with the scorn of the Third World. I want to speak of Marrakech and the Place Jemaa el-Fna, at the borders of which, for twenty years at regular intervals, I write, I meander and I live. (Goytisolo 1997: 9) There are several interesting elements in both this quote and the previous one taken from the UNESCO website. First, there is a clear appeal to the preservation of something that will soon be irredeemably lost; such a call for a ‘freezing’ en tutelage of the square and its ‘intangible’ cultural beings is hardly post-colonial in nature, since it reverberates with many of the assumptions through which the colonial mind has for too long framed the local other and this latter presumed material and immaterial ‘culture’ (Obrador et al. 2009). The presumed incapacity of the Moroccan state and of the local administration to protect those very values is at the origin of Goytisolo’s impassionate plea for the square’s ‘recognition’ and protection. Second, both quotes assume that something ‘intangible’ – like Jemaa

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el-Fna’s oral culture – can actually be ‘preserved’ in its present state. Leaving aside the fact that oral culture (whichever meaning you attach to this term) is by definition something in constant mutation and entirely based on individuals – real people (re)producing it ‘on the spot’ – what is striking about this preoccupation with the disappearance of these ‘intangibles’ is the ontological belief in the existence of a fundamental level, a sort of true dimension, in which this presumed patrimony can be represented, established and protected (otherwise how do we know what to protect?). On a closer look, however, this protection should apply to a cultural landscape that is reinvented every day by the very coming together of all the subjects enmeshed with the life of the square, including the hordes of tourists invading many of its spaces (and what would the square be without the tourists?). The overall idea delivered by these strategies seems to be that of an open-air museum, in which semi-aware local subjects perform their self-en-tutelage and the related cultural patrimony, to be eternally reproduced in the magic spaces of La Place. A sort of in situ installation, while the borders of what is allowed and what is not within that cultural space are pre-defined by some external authority (UNESCO, Goytisolo, the multiple cultural associations that have emerged in that last decade or so in order to promote the protection of the square, etc.). Finally, in this site, the power of the colonial discourse seems to be resilient to the point of having been entirely (perhaps we should also say disturbingly) incorporated not only by the crass rhetoric of global mass tourism (nothing particularly new) but also, more interestingly, by the attempted and too often self-congratulatory ‘alternative’ readings of the square. A telling example, to which we will devote some attention in this chapter because we believe it is particularly illustrative, is a seductive book of photos entitled Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent authored in 2009 by French photographer Daniel Fauchon and dedicated to the ‘characters’ of the square and the medina. These characters are presented, with a knowing artistic touch, as anthropological specimens of sorts, rendered as ‘installations’ through a set of photos and their re-contextualization as anonymous ‘figures’: de-subjectivized subjects ‘speaking of and for the square’, representing a desired fixity of the timeless culture of La Place that evokes a not-so-hidden colonial fantasy. The title of Fauchon’s book is revealing, as is its declared purpose and methodology: If the name of Jemaa el-Fna square, formerly Marrakech’s place of execution, means literally ‘assembly of the dead’, it is for me . . . ‘The gathering of Men’, with a capital M. So it’s there, and on its periphery, the medina, that my photos from a double perspective, freezing the instant in time, speak to us of the present. In this work of creating a memory, I have in no way sought the spectacular. On the contrary, I have stuck to the everyday life – that of ordinary Men – who by the simple

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fact of their presence give to this work its true dimension. It seems that the souls of the past inhabit with their energy the Men of today. (2009: appendix, italics added) We will return extensively to the implications of Fauchon’s approach, especially focusing on the idea of ordinary men making the ‘real’ square, ordinary men presented as polar opposition to ‘the spectacular’ that, according to the author, imbues most of Jemaa el-Fna’s conventional accounts. What is perhaps worthwhile mentioning here, before moving to the next step of this brief exploration of Jemaa el-Fna, is how the study of cultural difference lies at the very roots of anthropological knowledge, in particular that kind of knowledge about the culture of others that fuelled the colonial project in the nineteenth century and beyond. Ne´lia Dias argues that in this project not only ‘the process through which difference comes to be seen, named and exhibited . . . is historically and culturally situated, such that one can retrace lines of both continuity and rupture’, but also that ‘the features which anthropologists attempted to reveal were not simply whatever was visible but only those features which were observable under a disciplined gaze’ (Dias 1998: 36, 38). This is also true of many mainstream – but often presented as ‘alternative’ – contemporary (re)presentations of the square, as we will try to demonstrate in the rest of this chapter. The very appeal to the idea of ‘figure’, with the actual use of individuals on display, immediately brings back to mind those bodily representations so popular in the colonial day, which were for long conceived both as part of grand scientific exhibitions and as part of popular displays of culture. These were very often explicit attempts at representing, in realistic terms, the cultural difference that comprised ‘human races’ (classified according to a geographical order) whereas ‘chronological diversity was mapped onto spatial diversity and the primitive was relegated to other time and space’ (Dias 1998: 48). Frozen in space and time, the photographed individuals – both in the nineteenthcentury anthropological exhibitions and in the 2009 book here in question – are extraordinary in their immobility and in the special effects of their decontextualization. The figures au pre´sent of Jemaa el-Fna seem to be heir to ‘the bodily representation in exhibitions [that] incorporated and blurred the nature/ culture boundary: crude sculptures of savages along with life-size figures and models of ethnic types were exhibited as anthropology, and photographs and pictures of costumes were displayed in a separate ethnographic section’ (Dias 1998: 46). This chapter is therefore about Jemaa el-Fna, the magic square of Marrakech. But it also about the ‘anthropogenetic dispositifs’ (see Agamben 2004; also Minca 2011) employed by a specifically colonial rhetoric in the popular and banal but also in the more sophisticated contemporary accounts of the square. In fact, as historians of colonialism and of museums have shown very clearly, while in the 1930s the display of ‘living humans increasingly became the province of carnival

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freak-shows and exposition side-shows of the exotic . . . ’ at the same time physical anthropologists were still busy in finding ‘racial typology in a morphology of behaviour and in attempts at realising a permanent representation of the world’s races’ and possibly ‘a neutral exposition of race’ (Teslow 1999: 55, 60). By the same token, the square is most often represented through some of its ‘actors’, celebrated, as it were, by both the easy-to-retain propaganda of tour operators, but also, perhaps more importantly, by artists and writers preoccupied in retaining – within their own set of representations, and through an engagement with actual bodies of the supposed ‘people of the square’ – a flavour of a past, a sort of pornography of culture that is made to coincide with the supposedly immutable secrets of a place called Jemaa el-Fna.

Marrakech Immerse yourself in the city of expansion. Try out new experiences from the range of possibilities on offer to visitors in Marrakech. Be at one with the rhythm of this legendary city, which gave its name to Morocco. Cosmopolitan, international Marrakech, like its archetypal counterparts of Madrid, Paris, Barcelona and London, surprises by its creative energy. The ramparts, gardens and fine palaces of the imperial city’s golden age are now the backdrop for cultural, sporting, artistic and economic fervour. Marrakech means a change of scenery in the space of a short hop with a predictably pleasant climate; it means suffering the agony of having to choose between the 1,000 activities on offer in the city. Will you engage in a feverish spot of shopping or relax with a well-being ritual in one of the city’s many spas? Would you prefer to sample a traditional tagine or try out Marrakech-style tapas in the latest stylish lounge bar? You have a choice between blending into the lively crowd in Jemaa el-Fna and finishing the evening in a fashionable night club listening to the greatest DJs. Will you go skiing in the High Atlas or be at one with nature in the foothills of the snowcapped Atlas mountains? What is more, these are all reasons why, as soon as you have returned from Marrakech, you’ll quickly find another reason to go back there. (Moroccan National Tourist Office 2010) Nowhere in Morocco is the investment in tourism more evident than in Marrakech. Under the aegis of Vision 2010, the Master Plan launched by King Mohammed VI in 2000 (and announced at a conference in Marrakech – see Chapter 2), the tourism infrastructure of this region has increased dramatically. As part of this mandate, since 2004 Marrakech has undergone massive urban renewal projects to reorganize city spaces as a Moroccan tourist product par excellence. This renewal has included a complete remodelling of the airport,

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which is now a key international gateway for low-cost flights from Europe. Marrakech has more than doubled its hotel capacity between 2001 and 2008 (Rouyaume du Maroc and Administration du Tourisme 2011). The devotion of infrastructure resources to tourist accommodation has had clear impacts on the city and its resident population, including effects like water shortages in response to hotels needing to fill swimming pools and fountains. Tourist expansion has also resulted in more sprawling urbanization in the area of Marrakech, as former residents of the old medina relocate outside the city to make way for boutique hotels (Kurzac-Souali 2006). Tourist development in Marrakech has also translated into a widely remarked boom in property acquisition by foreign nationals. According to McGuinness: Capital, a popular television program focusing on brands and entrepreneurs on the trendy M6 channel, ran a feature on the handful of young French people who had restored Marrakech houses as up-scale restaurants and romantic retreats. Within weeks – the urban legend goes – planefuls of Parisians were seeking property to renovate in the me´dina of Marrakech and the outlying palmeraie. (2007: 123) The confluence of successful examples, booming economic growth, and the introduction of low-cost flights connecting Marrakech with major cities in Europe,

Figure 5.3

Tourist urban developments in Marrakech (C. Minca 2011)

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rendered the city a trendy site for expatriate entrepreneurship. As foreign investors acquired old houses, property prices exploded out of proportion into the millions of euros. Cost of living prices in Marrakech have risen in tandem with the influx of international capital into the local market (Sebti et al. 2009). Tellingly, the images found on brochures and other promotional material tend to bring together references to ‘upscale’ forms of hospitality and hint at the orientalist tradition and the colonial imaginary locatable in Marrakech. Such narratives, often based on colourful visual material tinted by a neo-colonial chic atmosphere, hark back to a longstanding trope, invented and celebrated by the cultural tourism developed under the Protectorate, whose re-enactment can be witnessed today in the experience offered to the visitor by many resorts and tours. This influx has precedents in previous interactions between European visitors and the spaces of Marrakech. Since the early days of the French occupation, a campaign aimed at attracting European tourists to Morocco was launched by Lyautey. Under Lyautey, Marrakech became branded as the hedonistic site of leisure on the edge of the Sahara, as well as a central seat of power of the Moroccan government under French control. As part of his grand vision for a Moroccan Renaissance, Lyautey saw tourism as a key strategic sector to incorporating the newly conceived Morocco within the broader cultural and political geographies of Europe, and in particular of France. In addition, tourism was crucial to his plans to pacify and legitimize the new colony via the mapping and the protection of its patrimoine (see Chapter 1). The arrival of European visitors in those years (albeit few) was perceived both as a clear sign of the progressive normalization of the political situation and of the integration of Morocco into the French Empire, as well as a portent of a new sector of economic development. Concurrent developments in travel and technology enabled Lyautey’s project. The French military railway line established in the early twentieth century later became the (still operational) commercial track, of which Marrakech is the southern terminus (Demerdash 2009). As Edith Wharton exclaims in the opening to her account of travelling in Morocco: ‘Ten years ago there was not a wheeled vehicle in Morocco, now its thousands of miles of trail, and its hundreds of miles of firm French roads, are travelled by countless carts, omnibuses and motor vehicles’ (1920: 3). Tour organizers like Thomas Cook and the Compagnie Ge´ne´rale Transatlantique began to bring tours there in the 1920s as part of routes through northern Africa (Perkins 2007), capitalizing on the city’s paradisiacal orientalist reputation from the nineteenth-century art of Delacroix. Lyautey’s push for a specific vision of Morocco through Marrakech soon began to be encoded and distributed in European circles and beyond, enabled by emerging routes towards the city as a destination. In 1921, Lyautey inaugurated the Mamounia Hotel (see Figure 5.4), which rapidly gained an extraordinary international reputation, contributing in this way to the prestige of Marrakech as an international destination for the European

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elite (Bauchet 1954: 44; see also Borghi 2002; Minca and Borghi 2009). That very same year, the Guide Blue to Morocco was published with a preface signed by Lyautey (1918: 1), where he explained in enthusiastic terms why Morocco was destined to have a bright future as an exotic tourist destination. This telling episode is important in elucidating how Lyautey’s vision – and actual projects – were indeed crucial in the transformation of Morocco as a desirable European cultural and aesthetic experience, the same kind of experience that is often promised today in order to attract not only international tourists but also those Moroccans (European and non-European) who are eager to enjoy the promised aura that its cultural and historical hot spots, and in particular Marrakech, are supposed to have maintained. With independence (1956), Moroccan tourist authorities have thus incorporated in a remarkable way the rhetoric and the visual language of the cultural tourism inaugurated by the French during the Protectorate. Contemporary narratives inscribing Marrakech as a mass destination are deeply marked by Lyautey’s colonial vision, while representing, at the same time, a key element in the production of the new cultural geographies of Morocco (Minca and Borghi 2009). Tourist narratives, in fact, often present Marrakchis (i.e. the inhabitants of Marrakech) in general as ‘typical traditional Moroccans’ and their cultural landscapes as the ultimate site for the preservation of a lived

Figure 5.4

Hotel La Mamounia (C. Minca 2011)

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tradition. However, this is also true for other, more ‘institutional’ accounts. Here is how UNESCO presents the city’s universal heritage: Jamaaˆ el-Fna Square, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, is a true open-air theatre that always amazes visitors. Due to its still protected, original and well conserved conception, its construction materials and decoration in constant use, and its natural environment (notably the Gardens of Aguedal, Me´nara and the Palm Grove [Palmeraie] the plantation of which is attributed to the Almoravids), the Medina of Marrakesh possesses all its initial components both cultural and natural that illustrate its Outstanding Universal Value. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2012a) These narratives, and their accompanying visual and written rhetoric, are well consolidated today and apparently well received both by contemporary tourists and Moroccans travelling to Marrakech. Current flows of tourism to Marrakech, and the attributes that attract tourists to it, can thus be understood as layering onto previous mobilities and attractions. Prior to the Vision 2010 goals for sustainable tourism development was Lyautey’s vision of Marrakech as a leisure capital. Many elements that have enabled Marrakech’s recent growth – like the preservation of a historically distinctive cityscape and its position as a transport hub – are rooted in Lyautey’s vision for development. Yet prior to Lyautey’s arrival in Morocco, Marrakech was a nexus for religious pilgrimage, bringing travellers to the city and creating potential for expansion. All of these layers persist, occupying intersecting spaces in the city. Marrakech remains a site for pilgrimage that brings flows of (mostly domestic) visitors to the Tombs of the Seven Saints, but its more documented and visible visitors are those arriving from abroad, partaking of high-value services, and contributing most significantly to the tourism economy. These groups are not mutually exclusive – as they shop, drink, eat, and seek leisure in the city, they commingle and separate as part of a broad flow of visitors to Marrakech. Jemaa el-Fna is not only part of this geography of culture and mobility, something to be conceived and understood with a multi-scalar perspective: Jemaa el-Fna is indeed the symbolic core of this extraordinary urban machinery, the cultural hub upon which all these tropes and their related representations and practices seem to converge. Jemaa el-Fna is thus much more than a square. Its global reach has transformed it into a postcolonial site where the narratives and the built environment of the colonial and pre-colonial past intersect and intermingle, producing a kind of place that romanticized and rather static representations of culture – like the ones promoted by UNESCO and the tourism industry – are not only unable to ‘tame’ and reduce to their own terms, but actually risk being forced into a process of objectification that may indeed

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compromise the life of the square, especially by trying to translate it into a museum of sterilized things of the past.

La Place The Djemma el-Fna is the greatest tourist attraction in West Africa, but the vast majority of tourists are still, as they were in the days of the original nomad encampment, tribesmen, shepherds, peasants and craftsmen from the deserts and mountains of the interior. They come on donkeys, bicycles and archaic buses . . . to sell their wares . . . and to enjoy the sights of the permanent funfair of the Djemaa. (Koestler 1974: 189) The Jemaa el-Fna itself is, in many ways, an invention of Mare´chal Lyautey. As part of his project for the ‘inscription of local cultures’, the Mare´chal commissioned a systematic study of Moroccan history, relying upon ‘Western’ historiography and methods (Blanchard and Chatelier 1993; Blanchard and Lemaire 2003). This study was to allow the French administration to map and codify a series of key sites whose historical significance was ‘revealed’ by the commissioned research. Jemaa el-Fna was one of these key sites. The square was not only ‘revealed’ in its historical significance, however: the colonial enterprise actively created its geography as well. Before the establishment of the Protectorate, there were no clear borders binding the space of the Jemaa el-Fna. It was simply an empty expanse lying at the heart of Marrakech. It was Lyautey who first decided to measure the perimeter of this space and to map its confines. Thus inscribed, Jemaa el-Fna became a ‘square’ and also a piece of Moroccan heritage – chosen by the French as a representative site of Moroccan history and culture, and therefore a place to protect and preserve (Borghi 2008). Prior to Lyautey’s ‘discovery’ of the square and his fascination for its ‘liveliness’, no one (excluding some European travellers) had ever considered that segment of urban space as a singular place to be protected and preserved within a determinate shape and form. As noted, it is European and French-language Moroccan writers who began to grant increasing importance to the Jemaa el-Fna in their narratives (Borghi and Minca 2003), creating the myth of the ‘magic’ of the square that is by now a commonplace in all tourist brochures (Minca 2006a, 2007). Today, as noted, Jemaa el-Fna is seen by Moroccan authorities as a central part of the national historical and cultural heritage (see Moroccan National Tourist Office 2010b). The rhetoric that inscribes it draws fundamental inspiration from Lyautey’s vision: La Place is seen as the manifestation of a ‘deeper’ underlying ‘cultural essence’, to be preserved and protected from every contamination – a cultural expression to be saved from ‘modernity’. It is on such understandings that tourist narratives on/of the Jemaa el-Fna also draw; tourist

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narratives that are, increasingly, a vital factor in the symbolic definition of the square, but also within the construction of a Moroccan national identity where the imaginary of the square began playing an increasingly important role of late. Today’s tourists on the Jemaa el-Fna seem to faithfully follow the lines laid down by the orientalist aesthetic that first codified the preservation of the square’s ‘cultural heritage’: Jemaa el-Fna Square, in the heart of the medina, waits for the sun to go down before offering up its street shows, multiple stalls, crowds, noises and cries, music and improvised greasy spoons. The highlight of the evening is the street art of halka in which words are interpreted in a special way, and tales, stories and songs are reinvented for curious onlookers and performance fans who always ask for more. Jemaa el-Fna Square has been designated a ‘masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of humanity’ by UNESCO. (Guide Michelin 2013b) Tour operators’ and guidebooks’ evocations of the square and its ‘magic’ faithfully reproduce colonial imaginaries in their representations of the Jemaa elFna-as-landscape. Also, individual ‘alternative’ tourists, following the advice of popular guidebooks, are ‘directed’ in much the same way. The Lonely Planet guide, allegedly the preferred guidebook for European and North American ‘independent travellers’, so describes the ‘spectacular’ square: Marrakech is above all a city of drama. Its spectacular setting against the snow-capped High Atlas Mountains lingers long in the mind of most travellers, and the famous Djemaa el-Fna square provides perhaps the greatest open-air spectacle in the world . . . Although it’s lively at any hour of day, Djemaa el-Fna comes into its own at dusk . . . once you’ve wandered the square, take a balcony seat in a rooftop cafe or restaurant to absorb the spectacle at a more relaxing and voyeuristic distance. (Mayhew and Dodd 2003: 328, 335) How are such astoundingly orientalist depictions of the ‘mystique’ of the Jemaa el-Fna reflected in tourist practices? What do tourists actually do once in this supposedly magical place? How do they act out the performance of/on the landscape-stage, how do they negotiate the relationship between the cartographies of the official tourist narratives and their own material experience of the place-as-landscape? During our numerous visits to the site, we had the opportunity to examine in detail the geometries of their performances when faced with such a potent symbolic landscape (Minca 2007). The tourists, often observing the square from above, while sipping tea on one of the many terrace cafes built during the

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Protectorate and ‘framing’ Jemaa el-Fna as a stage, seem to be clearly aware of their ‘appropriately’ dominant position, of their choice of the right perspective, at the right time of day. They often await the sunset and the ‘perfect’ light within which to freeze the landscape before them. However, that terrace cafe´ is also part of the landscape being ‘captured’ by other tourists – or even by the same tourist in a different moment in time. In other words, the landscape that should ideally represent the essence of Marrakech and its traditions is actually produced also by the very presence of tourists who very often include the terraced cafe´s in their pictures, they themselves making the square an event to be photographed. The Jemaa el-Fna could thus be conceived as a heterotopia of sorts, where the tourist at once embodies – in different moments and spaces – both a colonial detachment and an equally colonial involvement; indeed, the interplay between being ‘in’ and/ or ‘out’ of the landscaped scene is a pivot of the tourist experience of the square. The tensions generated by the practice of such an iconic (and at once active) tourist landscape prove extremely powerful in the making of this most abundantly representative (and represented) of Moroccan landscapes (see Minca 2007). The colonial legacy is, indeed, embodied here both by the European tourist searching for a lost Oriental innocence and ready-made exoticism, as well as by the Moroccan authorities who, through the square, endeavour to map ‘true’ national heritage and justify its preservation (Benjelloun 2002; Touzani 2003). Colonial legacies thus ‘prepared’ Morocco in both tourist and local imaginations and today’s Moroccan tourist geographies exemplify a ‘colonial’ re-enactment in place, where diverse (contemporary) performances and identity strategies intersect with traces of the colonial project and local reinterpretations of the very concepts of ‘heritage’ and ‘cultural identity’. The Jemaa el-Fna’s landscape at dusk becomes the global icon of an entire country and ‘culture’: it repackages a distillate of exotic Orientalism and is constructed as an ‘authentic’ experience of Morocco, offering an intensity of the colours, aromas, sights and sounds: Filled with chicken and almonds and pigeons and prunes, I stagger back to the square for its final phase. At once I find Edith Wharton’s dancing boys performing to the resounding beat of a four-piece band. The principal dancer is a plumply pretty boy of about 13 who wears a wide band of flashing sequins around his hips. His movements are a kind of sinuous belly dance – if boys can be said to have bellies. His partner is older, a strange gaunt man with hennaed hair to his waist and a wild whirling style. I soon realize that the whole atmosphere of the place has become charged with a higher level of excitement. I am the only woman around and, for the first time, I feel a man’s hand touching me. Changing circles, I am confronted by a bare-chested man with oily ringleted hair, who takes a live snake in his mouth and begins to tear at it

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with his teeth. He peels the snake like a banana and then pops it, scarlet and slimy and, one hopes, dead, into a kettle of boiling water. ‘It’s magic,’ I’m told, not altogether necessarily. Later he uses sections of the skin to help cure the illnesses or anxieties of his audience. They come up singly and crouch down with him. I am not tempted to join them. Another magic man has not only snakes but also a large dignified owl and several sleepy-eyed baby owls. Before I can turn away he chops off chunks of a live snake and drops them into the open beaks of the suddenly wide-awake babies. A revenge, I suppose, for all the live birds eaten by cobras. Nobody seems able to explain the exact significance of these macabre rituals. ‘Magic’ is the word constantly repeated and that’s how it feels – black magic turned against the powers of darkness. In yet another, noisier circle the Devil himself appears, with long flapping ears and trailing tail. He acts out a shout-and-tumble story with a man who squirts water on the crowd from a long thin tube that he manipulates suggestively. (Billington 1986) The square’s alterity, first staged by French colonialism, is now reclaimed to offer not just sights but also multi-sensory immersion. Here, tourists can mingle with the desired ‘Other’, can immerse themselves within a rich sensorium. As we argued before, within the modern metaphysics of representation (Mitchell 1991), the subject of observation is marked by the characteristics of the observing subject. Observing is thus a means of projecting one’s own disposition, one’s very nature, upon the other. The set of meanings attributed to the Jemaa el-Fna landscape by tourist guidebooks is, however, at the same time, shaken by the practices of many tourists who, after having positioned themselves in order to observe (and subsequently having forgotten their position in order to read Morocco-as-a-truecultural-landscape) follow by immersing themselves within the very object of observation – the square itself. They become ‘actors’ on the scene, part of the immobile tableau sketched out by tourist rhetoric as embodying the ‘real’ Morocco. What we witnessed in the Jemaa el-Fna, then, is a game of detachment and participation, of framing and being framed, where putative ‘actors’ (‘Morocco’ and the ‘Moroccans’) and ‘spectators’ (the tourists) very often end up merging and, together, performing the ‘square’s scene’. And the impossibility of mapping a condition that forces one to simultaneously inhabit two positions at once is the source of the formidable tension that thrives on the tourists’ search for order (by gazing and photographing) and their concurrent fascination for disorder (by getting involved in and becoming part of the ‘gazed at’ crowd; see Minca 2007.) This tension is true for the ‘inhabitants’ of the square as well, too often portrayed as the embodiment of something beyond themselves, of a millennial

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and immutable culture which can be putatively accessed via the actual contact with those bodies in the square. This is precisely what the conversion of (local) individuals into ‘figures’ is about: their rendition to a (colonial) logic that puts real people on display through the implementation of specific visual techniques and the disposition of those very docile bodies as part of a tableau of people and culture. The tableau’s only contact with the real is the fact that it faithfully reproduces the colonial desire guiding the hand of the (invisible) author(s) of those images, of those pictures, of those actual ‘figures put in their place’.

Figures, sur La Place It is the storytellers who have the biggest following. It is around them that the crowd is the thickest, most curious. Their performances last a while: the spectators crouched on the ground before them form a first, attentive circle, showing no visible hurry to move on and let others take their place. Others, standing, form a second circle around them: these on-lookers too are practically immobile, hanging on the story-teller’s every word and gesture. Sometimes, two men will take turns reciting the story. Their words come from afar; they remain suspended in the air longer than the words of mere mortals . . . For me, these words proclaimed forcefully, with passion, were without meaning; for their owner they were precious, he was proud of his words . . . The spectators were gripped in a feverish atmosphere; and even one such as myself, with my limited understanding, could feel the life pulsating in the minds of those who were listening. As though in honour of their words, the storytellers were dressed in flamboyant fashion. Their clothes clearly distinguished them from their spectators. They favoured, above all, rich fabrics . . . They looked like dignitaries who had stepped out of a fairy tale . . . Naturally, the story-teller had noticed me, but within his magical circle I was simply a stranger, since I could not understand him. . . . At the same time, I was glad not to be able to understand. They remained for me an enclave of an older, intact life . . . Words were their nourishment and no one could induce them to trade that nourishment for another recompense . . . Just a few steps away from the story-tellers sat the scribes. Their place was a place of great peace, the most peaceful corner of the Jemaa al Fna . . . They were almost invisible, only one thing mattered here: the silent dignity of the parchment. (Canetti 1989: 93 – 126) The ‘people of the square’ have been for long at the core of many literary descriptions of Jemaa el-Fna. In colonial and postcolonial accounts they are often presented both as part of the spectacle that makes the square, and as the

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mostly silent and anonymous protagonists of that daily mise en sce`ne. Matching a specifically colonial desire for the contact zone with these unique representatives of a millennial Marrakchi culture, with the very invitation to the European visitor to be physically in/of the square, these accounts are particularly significant for understanding the ways in which Moroccan cultural spaces are often conceived and managed still today – also, but not only, as part of the grand tourist machinery. This is why a title and a project like Figures au Pre´sent is appropriate, while at the same being rather problematic for its cultural implications. Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent, as mentioned in the previous sections, is an elegant photo album, produced by French photographer Daniel Fauchon. The author is explicit about his ‘methodology’, consisting in a series of black and white photo instalments where each ‘figure’ – be it a waiter, a waterseller, a snake-charmer or a dancer – is put against an identical neutral background and is photographed with her/his daily essential(ized) ‘tools’. The result is a review of smiling – sometimes shy-looking – ‘characters’ of the square. We are not told their name, their ‘identity’ supposedly being based not on who they actually are but on what they represent: that is, the idea of traditional arts et metiers on display for the Western gaze. They are there, looking at the camera and the potential audience, in order to give form and substance to a specific idea of culture in place. When referring to the exhibition Races of Mankind hosted in 1931 by the Field Musuem of Natural History in Chicago and consisting ‘of 101 life-size bronze sculptures of the principal human racial types’, Tracy Lang Teslow (1999: 53) noted that ‘the sculptures’ active poses and cultural trappings encouraged viewers to believe that they were encountering actual individuals caught in an authentic moment of life, a series of voyeuristic snapshots’ (ibid.: 64). This is the underlying idea behind the collection provided by Figures au Pre´sent, since, again, as noted by Fauchon himself: ‘In this work of creating a memory, I have in no way sought the spectacular. On the contrary, I have stuck to the everyday life – that of ordinary Men – who by the simple fact of their presence give to this work its true dimension (see same quote earlier in this chapter.) The collection of black and white photos immediately recalls a nineteenthcentury visual chart of human characters, a formation of stereotyped ‘ordinary Men’ accompanied by a revealing set of comments on the part of the author, something in line with the romanticized tourist and colonial depiction of the individuals who supposedly dwell everyday in the magic of the square: ‘Orange juice seller . . . a dream, an illusion, a mirage, an invitation to happiness.’1 ‘Men from the desert: . . . mirage of the past, dream of caravans, from the distant pre-Saharan oasis came a long time ago, men bearing treasures.’

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Desert men are described as ‘bearing treasures’ (weren’t they supposed to be ordinary Men?), while even the juice seller becomes a dream, an invitation to happiness. (Whose happiness?) And then the iconic ‘Holy story teller: on the frontier of the worlds, between the snake charmers and the monkey trainers, some men, but not many, with the esoteric memory.’ This memory is so esoteric that there is indeed no access to it on the part of the tourist (and the artist?). Nonetheless, tourists often join in the crowd of Moroccans that normally surrounds these storytellers. The ‘oral heritage’ is thus performed, every day, with the ‘enlightened’ custody provided also by European attendants who do not understand a single word, but who quite obviously enjoy the idea of a storyteller being there, doing exactly ‘the esoteric memory square thing’. In Fauchon’s parade of colonial common places – something exemplary but certainly not limited to this book, quite the contrary – men carrying ostrich eggs become ‘magic’ and linked to the materialization of some mythical past: ‘Magic man with eggs: . . . the sun burned his skin and that of his ancestors.’ What this book seems to contribute to, together with a vast popular literature on the square of a similar kind, is a discursive formation that produces folkloric translations of the ‘locals’ – even when these accounts deliberately announce their intention to step out of that very formation, by providing non-tourist/noncolonial accounts – and their related mise en sce`ne. The voice given to the figures au pre´sent is in fact the voice of the author, compromised as it is with the colonial discourse that has produced La Place in the first place, but also with the loud proclamations that claim at all levels a more intense protection of Jemaa el-Fna and its ‘characters’. Those smiling faces in the book are a disturbing reminder of both the natives brought home (in different forms) as a result of many nineteenth-century explorations, and of the tourist rhetoric embedded in present-day representations and practices of/in the square. These accounts of Jemaa el-Fna are also an invitation to penetrate other peoples’ quotidian. All those bodies on display, in the photo book and in the square, when comprised in the cognitive streaming of this discursive formation, become components of a real and imagined muse´e vivant. Those figures are thus in many ways anthropological ghosts, bodies with their associated tool, standing there to represent their me´tier, or simply a romanticized reading of their quotidian, something that speaks to a rhetoric that describes the square/medina as a laboratory to test the (European?) borders of tradition and modernity.

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‘Woman cooking food on the street: ghosts of an evening, lost souls heirs of Vulcan, of tin in fusion, women, of another era, with a strange knowing, at the foot of the mausoleum, will make you dive into the furnace of hell or the whirlwind of happiness.’ The individual translated into an ethnographic specimen is then a product of a discursive formation that enjoys dramatizing and at the same time spectacularizing other people’s quotidian. Photographing is part of this production, including the violence implied by specific visual techniques and spatial arrangements. The result is too often a pornography of local culture, in which silent – and silenced – ‘figures’ occupy centre stage, while revealing in their posture a vague sense of being part of something that they do not control but that, in some ways, continues to interfere with their lives in decisive ways. The ‘ordinary men’ involved in these figures au pre´sent – and in all the other readings of culture of this kind – thus operate an intense process of quasi-self-objectification on the bodies of real individuals working and living in Jemaa el-Fna and in the Marrakech medina. And this is particularly true for those figures – like the water sellers – who deliberately expose their past social role to the tourist gaze and try to make a living out of it: ‘Waterseller: . . . el guerrab, once indispensible to the medina’s social life, is only present today for the photo and the memory.’

Figure 5.5

Orange juice sellers in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

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We will thus conclude this chapter by highlighting, on the one hand, the colonial and biopolitical foundations of representations of this kind; on the other, by reflecting on how place, and, in particular, former-colonial-and-nowtourist places, once they are catalogued as national or even universal heritage, tend to become modern laboratories in which the de-subjectification and objectification of ‘traditional-looking individuals’ translate into a technique for mapping out spaces of great political and cultural significance for the state and the travel industry. This operation appears to be important also in the identity formation of writers and artists who, through the square, seem to be fully entrapped within this greater cultural economy of display. In Jemaa el-Fna, and in Marrakech, the (post)colonial seems to be here to stay.

Ghosts in the square When you walk through a town like this – two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in – when you see how the people live, and still more, how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces – besides they have so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. (Orwell 1954: 187, cited in Said 2003 [1978]: 265) In her 1998 Destination Culture, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett shows how in modern cultural economies the museumification of ‘local’ subjects has gone a long way since the first forms of objectification, and how the tourist gaze has played and continues to play an important role in this process. The awareness of some representatives of what we normally define as ‘local’ or ‘traditional’ culture is a sign of the deep penetration of what she defines as the ‘political economy of showing’ (1998: 1). The interest (desire?) within tourism for the experience of otherness provided by travels in and to foreign lands has by now a long history. Colonialism and modern science, especially social science, have indeed prepared the field for an understanding of culture, of the culture of others, which has taken a (bio) political form in many of its manifestations. The ‘political economy of showing’ that has driven, and still drives today, many ‘presentations’ of culture for the visiting tourist has indeed deep roots in Western modernity and often consists, even today, in the reiteration of performances in which the idea of culture is

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mediated by the use of bodies, of real and imagined de-subjectivized bodies. This is also true, as we highlighted in the previous sections, in Jemaa el-Fna, the ultimate postcolonial site in Morocco: ‘Butcher with a big chunk of meat on his shoulder: . . . by his positioning in his neighborhood, the butcher, a discreet man, possesses a wealth of secrets.’ In addition, the rhetoric of authenticity, often associated with the reasons for actually-travelling-to-places-to-see-things-in-the-real, is also sometimes accompanied by a paternalistic language aimed at giving meaning and ethical flavor to the penetration of the living spaces of others. ‘Tanner man with pieces of cloth and mule/chart: for the hordes of tourists longing for emotions and odours, the tanner’s neighbourhood is a must . . . . A neighbourhood where people are born, live and die, like everywhere else.’ What Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as the anthropogenetic machine – that is the process of definition of the separation between the human and the non-human/animal in Man (sic) throughout modernity – here

Figure 5.6 Local ‘figure’ performing the traditional ‘dentist’ in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2011)

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operates with strategic caesurae on/in the bodies of the objectified subjects of culture: . . . the anthropogenic . . . machine is an optical one . . . constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively ‘anthropomorphous’ animal (that is, ‘resembling man’, according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses . . .), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human. (Agamben 2004: 26–7) The culture of ‘others’ is often presented with specific arrangements of bodies on display, either in the form of spectacle – in a theatrical performance of selected and orderly elements of the culture in question – or in the form of an actual penetration (again, selectively operated) of the ‘drama of the quotidian’ (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). In Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent, each page is dedicated to one person/me´tier, with a picture portraying the subjects in their daily occupation and their context – the street, the square, the laboratory, etc. – and another picture instead de-contextualizing them as instalments in a museum. The link between the drama of the quotidian and the translation of that quotidian into a ‘representation’ of culture and place is then established: ‘Tailor with his Singer: for less than a dirham, he feeds his family.’ Brochures promising cultural travel experiences in faraway lands are also populated by the smiling faces of unnamed people, often accompanied by abundant exposure of their bodies, dramatized and focused on their visible ‘differences’, and by more or less sophisticated folkloristic images; the promise here is of unmediated (often articulated in the language of ‘authenticity’) contact with the local population, of a learning experience about their deep culture; of penetration, in a respectful but nonetheless deep way, of their living spaces. ‘Veiled woman carrying bags: a shadow, silent, ghost of a woman, waits, motionless, for a hand to reach for a basket.’ Those very spaces tend to be presented as if they were a sort of open-air museum, populated by smiling people waiting to be visited and performing a reassuring idea of difference: ‘Men selling tea in the street, portrayed with many glasses . . . Now disappearing, not protected by Unesco, only a few kahouadji and their glasses of tea still work in the streets of the medina.’

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The question remains: why is cultural tourism today still so strongly determined by this disturbing economy of display of people and their bodies? For these are indeed ‘presented’ as if they were deprived of any subjectivity – a sort of bridge between an essentialized idea of culture and the corporeality of an actual human being, whose body is disposed and put on display as part of that very distinct political economy: ‘Iron man: the man is proud of his music [is he?], it comes from hard work inscribed in his memory.’ ‘Man crafting slippers: the story of the first pair of slippers . . . ’ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes in detail the process of becoming an ‘ethnographic object’, a process that ‘brings together specimens and artifacts never found in the same place and at the same time and shows relationships that cannot otherwise be seen’ (1998: 3). This often results in ‘the paradox of showing things that were never meant to be displayed, “exhibitions” whether of objects or people, display of artifacts of our disciplines. They are also exhibits of those who make them’ (1998: 2). Curiously, she continues, ‘live displays, and especially the display of humans’ (1998: 4) seems to be still central to the political economy of showing that drives

Figure 5.7

Games and Gnawa dancers in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2011)

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what we named elsewhere the ‘anthropotouristic machine’ (for more on this see Minca 2011): ‘Men with a mule: Marrakech without baroches would be no longer Marrakech.’ Tourism is in fact deeply involved in this process, ‘which not only compresses the life world, but also displaces it, thereby escalating the process by which a way of life becomes heritage’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 7). But also the production of heritage sites is part of this political economy of display, in particular when real peoples and their everyday lives are taken ‘into custody’ and protected, or even ‘preserved’. In tourist sites, people/individuals subjected to this form of colonization thus become the medium of ethnographic representation: they perform ‘themselves’ whilst the tourist often tries to establish some sort of ‘connection’ with these ever-smiling ‘locals’, revealing, right in that gesture, the non-relational nature of the tourist ‘contact zone’, the void at its very inception (on this, see Ewen and Ewen 2006; also Minca 2011): ‘Man with herbs and a bicycle: the medina, for those who take the time to lose themselves in it, is a remarkable place of encounters. With his brakeless bike, his pot, his wild herbs, the man intrigued me.’ In Jemaa el-Fna, these performances are often repeated many times in one day, hundreds of times in a single month. The snake-charmer, for example, who spends his days interpellating passing tourists, in so doing consciously mobilizes a whole repertoire of orientalist and colonial(ist) common-places. He consciously re-inscribes himself as the Oriental object of the tourist gaze, firmly bound within the modern epistemology that essentializes the radical separation between his identity and that of the European tourist. Some tourists flee his advances; others pause and let themselves be ‘enchanted’ by the music of his flute and his flowing, ‘Oriental’, movements. But this ‘encounter’ lasts an instant and, after the customary photos, takes on the form of a brief and welloiled commercial transaction: one picture with the snake, one euro: ‘I never knew his name. He called himself the cobra’s brother . . . He was an artist. You tell me he is no more, that he went back with his cobras . . . ’ What is interesting here is the relationship between the present culture of display in tourism and the eugenic tradition that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recalls in order to explain how human specimens happened to become objects of curiosity and, indeed, display. She starts from the International Eugenics Conference held in 1927 in the USA (1998: 27), where ideas of normality were discussed along with a

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selected display of a set of ‘nature’s mistakes’. The objectified nature of these exhibits raises a question that is crucial for the understanding of the typecasting in Jemaa el-Fna and the definition/protection of its intangible patrimony: ‘where does the object begin, and where does it end?’ (1998: 18). The example provided by Jemaa el-Fna: Figures au Pre´sent is illustrative of many other similar ‘gestures’ aimed at valorizing the people of the square and their culture: the individuals are ‘cut’ into the framing of the photo, accompanied by select tools, material confirmation of the broader meaning that they convey. What we see, in these photos, but also in the thousands of photos realized everyday in the square, is precisely an operation of fragmentation and recomposition, of people and things, in order to produce a specific narrative of that place. Every time we put people like fragments on display, ‘we do indeed produce fragments’, biopolitical ones. We all know, at this point in history, that ‘humans are also detachable, fragmentable and replicable as a variety of materials [quote] morbidity, living specimens . . .’ (1998: 34). This speaks directly to what Kishenblatt-Gimblett defines as the semiotic complexity of exhibits of people: ‘ethnographic displays are part of a longer history of human displays in which the themes of death, dissection, torture and martyrdom are intermingling’. We are in other words used to a culture of display ‘exhibiting the dead as if they were alive, and the living as they were dead’ (1998: 35).

Figure 5.8 Snake-charmer taking photos of Moroccan tourists in Jemaa el-Fna (C. Minca 2006)

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‘Cobbler, with his things and an old TV: . . . he was a little cobbler who was watching TV while repairing the shoes . . . nearly the beginning of a song.’ We can still experience some of these exhibits – albeit often in a reinterpreted version – in the tourist products that are sold and arranged as if they were part of a sort of ‘gallery of nations,’ or, even worse, when fragments of a globalized (but highly selective) ‘great human family’ (1998: 37) are presented as local culture and ‘experience’. Racial typologies of the past are re-enacted via the cultural geographies of a globalized market selling the experience of prima facie contact with their either smiling or hieratic representatives. The ‘theatrical’ and the ‘zoological’ intermingle in these colourful performances of the local self (Ewen and Ewen 2006). In Jemaa el-Fna, people, animals (monkeys, snakes, etc.), objects, are all comprised within a ‘picture’ of cultural presence, they are constantly subjected to the operation of reduction into the representational logic that made the square so attractive for the planners of the Protectorate, and for those who are engaged today in the interpretation and reproduction of its complicated legacy. ‘Man with chickens: the first time I met him, I was doubtful about the source and the condition of his poultry. I am still not sure.’ The (anthropo)touristic machine, here and elsewhere, is thus deeply affected by a sort of ‘museum effect’, that is, by a widespread tendency on the part of the industry and of the tourists themselves to convert the quotidian into a spectacle, though the hubris of penetrating the living space of others: ‘Tea pot seller with many tea pots: tea is the yeast of a pact between men. The teapot, its instrument.’ Displays thus populate tourist destinations as well, where specimens are often exhibited and asked to ‘explain’ the landscape, as if they were an organic part of the visited scene. These cultural geographies of display, in fact, are often translated into a scary geography of zombies, where the threshold between animality and humanity is constantly reproduced and negotiated: a zombie culture elected to relational model, the relational model of ‘cultural tourism’ in remote and not so remote areas. Especially when in contact with putative primitives and their living spaces, postcolonial travellers can literally touch and test the persistence of the monkey-men in situ, that is, of subhuman objects of observation and inspection deprived of subjectivity (see Minca 2011): ‘Man with the monkey: . . . a man, not always the same, a monkey, faithful to himself, a few tourists, a camera, a touch of emotion, a souvenir for a cardboard box.’

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These desubjectivized figures occupy the threshold between their body – a real and present body – and the equally real presence of a putative primitive/local, an idealized and normalized other on display. Not too surprisingly, tourists are invited to visit those contact zones via the performative display of other zombies as well, tourist zombies this time around: the smiling and happy tourists in the brochures are also presented as normalized travelling objects, as abstract referents for the potential travellers still at home with whom they are invited to relate and identify – for example, with the eternal smiling Indiana-Jones-look-alike traveller-anthropologist. Tourist zombies meeting ‘local’ zombies: this seems to be the byproduct of the biopolitics of tourism and cultural heritage. And this is the somewhat disturbing link between contemporary representation of, and performances in, La Place and the overall grand narratives about global heritage produced by international institutions, tourist organizations and sometimes even intellectuals and artists. The biopolitical regime imposed on a place like Jemaa el-Fna is an imagined timeless land of perfected encounters driven by the logic of deferral. In their practice, tourists and locals in fact transgress ‘the script’ all the time, but what is interesting here is the fact that despite the endless deferral of its promise and the degree of disbelief that is often expressed by the real people populating tourists places, this biopolitical model of human displays remains at the core of most presentations of cultural tourism, especially when difference and adventure are emphasized by the industry. Again, in the Marrakech medina, sur La Place, picturesque real-and-imagined figures are presented as waiting to be framed as fragments of a living heritage to be regulated and maintained at once: ‘Local antiquarian: for the museums’ custodians and the collectors, he is irreplaceable. In his modest shop, safeguard of memory, provider of treasurers ripped from time. He is one of those who still know, with the modesty of the Greats, how to share splendors and knowledge.’ Who is that person in the picture and why does (s)he smile? What is our relationship with her/him? Should we look like her/him during and after our holidays? If we think carefully, nobody actually ever looks like those hypothetical bodies; they represent indeed a sort of pornography of supposedto-be-preserved and appreciated timeless local culture: the ‘medina people’. These eternal bodies, even when artistically repositioned upon the square (like in Figures), seem to address the question of a timeless happiness based on a ‘normalized’ and controlled body, which, because of its normative and ‘normal’ characteristics, can be nothing but a manikin, an unreachable biopolitical horizon – indeed, a ‘figure’. It is precisely in this sense that we identify in the ‘zombie-local-people’ a key figure of the anthropogenetic machine. The zombie here is a figure that literally ‘embodies’ a self that never dies, but that, at the same

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time, is neither completely alive, since it does not age and does not get sick – in those images, and in the tourist accounts of Jemaa el-Fna, that discreet cultural self is there to stay, to represent something beyond him/herself, some idea of culture that exceeds their own (represented) presence. Those figures are somewhat abstract but at the same time very real bodies that, while offering a land of protection and compensation, also respond to what George Bataille (1985) – and Roberto Esposito (2009) after him – would define the ‘excess of life’, an excess that often translates into a need and a desire for a life as a form of pure immanence, pure presence. This ‘form of life’, as we have learned at this point, can find expression only in instants, in events, in the carnivalesque and the erotic of a disciplined gaze seeking for tamed experiences of difference. As we have discussed in detail elsewhere (Minca 2011), the biopolitical in tourism – and in many representational reductions of Jemaa el-Fna – can thus be perhaps described as a process of progressively intensifying immunization from otherness, difference, contamination. This process of immunization operates via the incorporation of a negative that must be recognized, incorporated and neutralized – the desert men, the storyteller, the tailor, the iron man, the ghost timeless woman, etc. This is the function of the-supposed-to-be-hospitable silent monkey-men and women, presumably waiting for the tourist as installations

Figure 5.9 Gnawa performing and smiling in Jemaa el-Fna (Moroccan Tourist Authority 2004)

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Bodies in the square (C. Minca 2006)

in situ, with their eternal smiles and open to inspection. The contact zones produced by these forms of tourism are spaces in which a reassuring difference is incorporated by the tourist and the ever-colonial practices that are sedimented in Jemaa el-Fna and that made it accessible to our realm of exoticized otherness. In long decades of cultural ‘performance’ and in its consolidated spatial arrangements, the square has become, for the postcolonial accounts that we have tried here to discuss, a land populated by ghosts of real and imagined bodies: neither too alive, nor too dead, neither too animal nor too human. Figures au pre´sent. Precisely that.

CHAPTER 6 KASBAH

Travel scene: Kasbah Assafar Kasbah Assafar, a few kilometres from N’Gouma, dominates the Valley of the Roses, with a view over the green oasis framed by the pastel colours of the rock and the surrounding mountains, an anticipation of the High Atlas farther north. Kasbah Assafar is, for some European visitors, a key site of their ‘kasbah experience’ in many different ways. First, it is located right in the middle of the Route des Kasbahs, seen as an initiation to Le Sud and the desert region, an itinerary that we will briefly reconstruct in our exploration of the contemporary spatialities of the toured kasbahs in southern Morocco. Second, while being part of these well-beaten tracks, it is somehow set apart, in the village of Ait Khyar and it can be reached only via a short but rather bumpy unpaved road. This is what makes it distinct from its close-by competitor, Kasbah Itnar, only a few kilometres away, which is apparently much more luxurious and accessible. Third, Kasbah Assafar has kept a deliberately low-key setting for its interiors, while emphasizing its embeddedness in the village and the landscape: This family kasbah, built on a cliff, was restored in the purest Berber Tradition of mud and ‘tadlakt’. Harmonious and warm colours make it an ideal place for scenery and relaxation . . . We offer you eight rooms, a lounge full of charm, mostly Moroccan and a terrace overlooking the ‘Garden of Eden’ [the Valley of Roses]. (Kasbah Assafar 2013) Despite the somewhat exaggerated comforts promised by its website, its real offer is the experience of spending a night in a basic but, precisely because of this, ‘credible’ former family house, on the top of the hill, with an astonishing view of the surroundings and the quiet atmosphere of a village composed of no more than 120 dwellings (see Figure 6.1).

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Valley of the Kasbahs (C. Minca 2012)

The kasbah, in Western popular imaginations, has become a rather complicated object of desire, but also a kind of space to consume together with the real and imagined set of postcolonial meanings attached to it. The kasbah is an ‘ethnographic object’ that has been frequently travelled to and dreamed of in the past decades, an object not only mentioned in famous songs, like Rock the Casbah performed by The Clash (1982), but also occupying a solid albeit often confused position in postcolonial Western tourism to Morocco. Most Moroccan cities with a medina have a kasbah, that is, a fortress, the part of the city, sometimes very well kept, which in certain epochs represented its most protected defensive bastion. Rabat’s Kasbah des Oudayas is perhaps the most visited one, and is currently experiencing a rapid and intensive gentrification. The same can be said of the kasbah in the Tangier medina, now featuring some of its most beautiful boutique hotels, like La Tangerina or the Nord Pinus maison d’hoˆtes next door, both pointed out as ‘historical landmarks’ to the tour groups brought into the medina. But the ultimate kasbah experience in Morocco must be lived in the south. An important part of the country’s geographies of tourism is in fact marked by the possibility of driving through and spending a night or two along the Route des Kasbahs, the

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Kasbah Valley. This is an itinerary that hypothetically starts in Ouarzazate, but that is anticipated by the Kasbah Ait ben Haddou to continue for more than 300 km along the edge of the desert, to reach out to Merzouga, one of the two gates to the Sahara in Morocco. The Marrakech-Haut Atlas-OuarzazateKasbahs-Merzouga is indeed one of the two main routes of desert tourism – routes that were designed and opened for tourists after the rebelliousness of this region was subdued in the early 1930s (de Mazie`res and Goulven 1932) – the other one being the Draa Valley, leading to Zagora. We will return to the desert in the next chapter. The kasbah is thus treated here first of all as a metaphor, that is, a travelling image of a mud castle in a desert-like landscape, something exotic and typical of a specific orientalist and cinematographic idea of the people living at the edge of the Sahara. The desert in the cinema – and in particular the kasbah as a fundamental desert/oasis form of dwelling – is indeed key to the formation of this travelling object-representation, as we shall see in the coming sections. In this sense, the kasbah is often presented as the ultimate castle in the desert, a fortress perfectly complementing the soft colours tainting the arid landscape. Second, the kasbahs in southern Morocco are the remnants of past spatialities and of specific ways of managing territories and their resources according to strategic dwelling formations. Third, kasbahs, real or re-invented, indeed dot the landscape of today’s southern Morocco and have become an important form of tourist accommodation, often, but not always, as the result of imaginative and sometimes rather well-conceived conversions of former abandoned or semiabandoned rural mansions. Kasbah Assafar was in fact the original house of one of the three families inhabiting what is now the village of Ait Khyar. Fourth, and perhaps most important, we are witnessing today the emergence of a true tourist region dominated by the ‘kasbah effect’, including the cities of Skoura, El Kelaa de Mgouna, Tinerhir, Boulmane du Dades and possibly Erfoud at the most extreme eastern tip of this itinerary. Signs of kasbahs and maisons d’hoˆtes are to be spotted at every corner of the valley, while speeding 4x4s move between different locations and the next the´ a` la menthe and couscous aux le´gumes. Questions of gentrification and of architectural codes aside, an entire tourist economy seems to be driven by the appeal of this mythical building style, while many entrepreneurs, local but more often not, are engaged in understanding what kind of kasbah experience should the tourist expect and what kind of space should be prepared for them. This chapter thus adopts a ‘mobile’ methodology of sorts, by starting with an analysis of how Western cinema has contributed to the shaping of the kasbah concept in popular imaginations. Another ‘Moroccan dream’ to be fulfilled, and another kind of space to be travelled to, for the European. The cinematographic production of real and imagined kasbahs thus leads to two additional articulations of the main argument: one showing how the kasbah, and the

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region here in question, were treated by the colonial literature and how they played a specific role in the organization of the Protectorate’s geographies. The second articulation is focused on the actual materialization of these cinematographic geographies into real space, with the Atlas studios’ settings – often visited by tourists – but also the frequent use of some of the most spectacular kasbahs in the production of new films. The cinematographic and the touristic here come together in a quite extraordinary way, to the point that, while travelling along this valley, one sometimes wonders what comes first and how this reciprocal influencing of the imagined and the material really works. This analysis then continues via the only possible way to engage with this region from a tourist perspective: driving, from kasbah to kasbah, with a tourist guidebook in one hand (the other should be on the steering wheel!) and with the cinematographic mind in action, filtering what is relevant and what is not in the discursive formation and the related practices of this ultimate modern ‘Moroccan dream’. Finally, we return to the kasbah of our own choice, where we are actually anxiously taking these very few notes in this precise moment; here/there, we reflect on how, like in the case of riads and other forms of tourist gentrification in Morocco, what we witness is not only too often the performance of Europeans hosting other Europeans, all engaged with a contemporary colonial understanding of Moroccan traditions and exoticism for tourist consumption, but also the fact that these performances are becoming more and more sophisticated, that they are appropriated more and more often by Moroccan investors as well, and increasingly by Moroccan tourists, especially those personally or professionally linked with Europe and Europeans.

Going the distance 15 October. Departure at 7 in the morning. I enter the blad es siba: I will be here for some time . . . After three hours of walking in this sad country, I suddenly come to a valley that forms the most striking contrast: hollowed to peaks in the middle of an immense plateau of rocks that rules the surroundings, she presents an appearance of being so laughing, so gay that the loneliness on the borders are gloomy and sad. At the centre, a torrent runs whose two banks are, without interruption, garnished with gardens and agriculture . . . it’s the beginning of the Oued Dra: only on her banks, and on those of the two rivers that form her, I would find these elegant and picturesque constructions that strike me to this day: tirremts with gracious ˙ towers, crenelated terraces, and just-built balustrades: houses covered with murals of designs and mouldings; ksars where the interiors, from foot to summit, are nothing but arabesques and ornaments. In these beautiful lands, even the poorest dwelling shows an appearance of well-being. The base of the buildings is in cemented rocks and the heights in adobe;

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everything is constructed with care, everything seems new; no habitation has only one floor; the second is often formed by a covered terrace, installed over it; still only a few dwellings are whitewashed: from afar, some zaouı¨a where a tirremt shows crenulations; the rest has a brown-red tint from the ˙ sandstone and adobe. (de Foucauld 1888: 86) The view south from Marrakech is of mountains beyond mountains. Cartographically, geologically, it is clear how the Red City rose to importance as the watered, fertile nexus of a plain north of the Atlas mountain range, the border between the Atlantic and the Sahara. It is equally clear how colonial infiltration was halted at the impasse of the High Atlas range southwest of Marrakech, as the French pushed towards Ouarzazate, the next major outpost on the other side of the mountain. Even before their arrival, this area was known as the bled es-siba or territory of rebellion. Successive Moroccan sultans had difficulty obtaining and maintaining the loyalty of tribes from this area, and the French did not succeed in ‘subduing’ rebellious factions until the 1930s. The bibliographic narrative of this area is rife with the figure of the European explorer, with his (male) nineteenth-century perspective on such ‘undiscovered’ places, which he is entering in order to document, catalogue, and extract resources for his empire. We can trace the specific writers who saw themselves as explorers in these places, treading beyond protected territory where Europeans were permitted to travel, into a wild unknown. Not unsurprisingly, their documentation makes these areas into a landscape of sweeping beauty, of ‘picturesque’ architectural forms, like the kasbahs themselves, and of the ‘natives’ and their strange customs – not unlike the contemporary narratives for tourists. The earliest travellers who documented their voyage here are predominantly names we have met in other cities along this journey through Morocco. Purported to be the first was Charles de Foucauld (1888), who roamed extensively throughout Morocco on his 1883 –4 voyage. His journey was undertaken as a fact-finding geographer, accepting the potential danger as a trespasser in order to extensively document the natural and social conditions of these unknown places. He approached from the north, crossing the mountains on pack animal and on foot, taking on disguises as a Muslim of foreign extraction, with complicit native guides to protect him. Following him was the Marquis de Segonzac, who travelled between 1899 and 1901 – also growing a beard in order to blend in – who then published his volume of travel narrative in 1903. Unlike other French contemporaries who explored from Algeria towards Merzouga (Douls 1888; Duveyrier 1864) via routes that in some way already belonged to the French, these two travellers cut through what was still part of l’Empire Che´rifien, where they were supremely distrusted and suspected of being part of French efforts to surreptitiously intervene in Morocco. Their work was elevated by their peers into

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reverence: de Foucauld’s is cited by many subsequent travellers as the book of reference for Morocco, and de Segonzac became head of the new Comite´ du Maroc in the Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie, established in 1904 to further French exploration in the bled es-siba (Zimmerman 1904). Under other auspices, and with other purposes, British journalist and Times correspondent Walter Harris also travelled to this area in 1894, and published his memoir of the adventure the following year. Like the French, he masqueraded as a Muslim from elsewhere but, unlike them, he tells his stories with the familiarity of a long-time resident in the Sultanate (in Tangier). His narrative voice contextualizes the sights he sees in the contemporary political situation, with occasional observations about flora, fauna, and particularities of customs from this corner of the world, documenting this journey among others he took from his home in Tangier in all directions across Moroccan territory (Harris 1889; 1895; 1919; 1921). In his book on Tafilalt (or as he wrote it in his title, Tafilet), he describes crossing the mountainous terrain on foot, and the hunger, danger and unpredictable encounters of this months’ long journey. He digresses for a chapter to discuss ‘the Atlas mountains and the Berbers’, describing those parts where tribal conflict renders the territory ‘inaccessible to the traveller’ (1895: 84). Harris himself, privileged to have travelled through this forbidden territory, describes his observations on the landscape, anecdotes about ‘the Berber race’ and their traditions and language, and above all the buildings: The change on passing from Arab Morocco into Berber trans-Atlas Morocco is in no way more marked than in the architecture. One leaves behind the mud huts and tents to enter an immense district, every habitable portion of which is thick with great castles, often over 50 feet in height, and with richly decorated towers, unlike anything else I have seen elsewhere in the world, either with my own eyes or in the works of other travellers; and I see no reason why one should not at least surmise that the style of building in vogue to-day amongst the Berbers of trans-Atlas Morocco is not a remnant of their conquest by the Phœnecians. (Harris 1895: 103) Harris himself will only spend a night at a kasbah on his return journey, when he was escorted northwards after falling dangerously ill at the sultan’s camp in Tafilalt (1895: 107). Passing by these buildings on the way southwards, he remarks that he has arrived in the lands where the ‘Moorish Government holds little or no real jurisdiction’ (107). Soon after, his route is blocked by fighting tribes in Ouarzazate (108– 9), and he reaches the last point where his path overlaps with de Foucauld, as Harris turns westward to the Sahara, and de Foucauld continued along the river towards the Atlantic.

Figure 6.2

Harris’ illustration of approaching a kasbah (1895: 76)

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As the political situation of Morocco shifted in the first decade of the twentieth century, and French intentions and presence became more blatantly focused on topographical surveillance of their colonial neighbour, the tenor of materials on Morocco also became more focused on cataloguing and mapping the resources of the natural and cultural landscape. The Comite´ du Maroc sponsored expeditions, like that of Louis Gentil, whose volume Dans le Bled es Siba notably includes photographic figures of the mountains, valleys and kasbahs that de Foucauld, de Segonzac, and Harris had sketched. Beyond that, the southern parts of Moroccan territory were a subject for the mass audience in an article in the popular weekly L’illustration, featuring photographs by a French engineer, a M. Peffau-Garavini, sent to investigate the mineral potential of the mountains (Babin 1907). The writer Gustave Babin narrates M. PeffauGaravini’s journey in just a few pages, but contextualizes him with explorers like de Foucauld and de Segonzac, even pushing beyond Edmond Doutte´, later the editor of the pre-colonial encyclopaedic series Missions au Maroc: En tribu (1914), who was stopped and sent back to Marrakech (Babin 1907: 162). PeffauGaravini’s photographs – all of them showing kasbahs and other architectural features – give an unfamiliar perspective on these landscapes, showing not only the details that de Foucauld and Harris both described, but also the people who happen to populate these colonies. Over several pages of photographs, including the double-page image on the next page, the mass consumer is brought into the exoticism south of the Atlas Mountains, a world that is hardly believable from the cold stone of Paris. Not long after this March 1907 publication, the creeping conquest of Morocco began to be more violent and swift, with clashes in Fez and Casablanca. As commander of French troops in Oujda, Lyautey would enter Fez in a mission to subdue rebellion in October that year (Burke 1976: 109). Yet relatively little was heard in the immediately following years about the kasbahs of the south, as the bled es-siba became increasingly rebellious when the Sultanate effectively lost power. Not until the 1930s was this southern landscape again a popular subject for French chroniclers of Morocco. Importantly, though, these early authors shared certain geographical perspectives in their writings, or more specifically in their narratives of exploration. They passed through this landscape, compressing hours or days of travel into a few words, then describing in detail the landscapes of ‘picturesque’ nature and architecture that presented themselves upon arrival. They are narratives of an almost aerial viewpoint, though their journeys were on foot, inasmuch as the time and space of overland travel become reapportioned in the stories. With these travellers, we move from a vision of a bleak, hardened and rocky landscape to the lush green of the river valley in moments, and stop before the kasbah to appreciate it, to linger over its architectural detail.

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Figure 6.3 ‘A Moroccan castle: The Kasbah of Ouarzazate, seen from the dry river bed’ (Babin 1907: 164– 5)

The beginning of the road Important fact in the history of the Kasbahs of the High Atlas: 16 November 1931, the Sultan Si Mohammed came by automobile to Telouet where a grand reception was made for him by the Pacha of Marrakech Si Thami and the Caı¨d Si Hammou, followed by a sumptuous diffa [feast]. Having departed from Marrakech that morning, the imperial entourage arrived at 11am at the Kasbah and returned to Marrakech at 7pm. It’s necessary to reach far back in the time of Moulay Ismaı¨l, or a little closer to us with Moulay Hassan, to see a Sultan pass the High Atlas. At most, he’s the first, adapted to modern means, who attempted the hill of Tichka by car, and that is a date. (de Mazie`res and Goulven 1932: 63 –4) French academic engagement with kasbahs re-emerges in the decades following World War I, as waves of rebellion across the Protectorate rescinded and the southern regions became more passable by civilians. Yet, by this time, mobility in the region has shifted in relation to new geopolitical framings, as well as by means of travel: Morocco had entered the era of the automobile. The magnificent castles described by nineteenth-century travellers no longer require weeks of trekking to reach, as roads and infrastructure that enable cars to traverse

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landscapes are in place, and the visitor can be there and back like the sultan – in a single day. No longer are travellers in search of unexplored frontiers, the only European footprints in this area. A new wave of researchers on the region – whose focus was the specificity of ‘Berber’ social organization and architecture – goes hand in hand with the potential for tourism and other development, all capitalizing on the perceived timelessness of these ‘untouched’ and ‘authentic’ territories. From geographical to cinematic representations, the story of the kasbahs from this point onwards is interwoven with their access by road. Coming out of this period are two French scholars whose work, while focused on spatial practices of architecture, reflects the anthropological framing of the period, which, along with the desire to classify, drew a tight association between ‘culture’ and ‘structure’. The first of these, Henri Terasse, spent several years in the region attached to the sanitary commission in Marrakech, then published an article in Hesperis, the review of the Institut des Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, on the typology of decorative and architectural varieties of kasbah he had observed in the High Atlas region. The description in the article, and in the later version extended to a full book (2010 [1938]) dissects these buildings into their materials, patterns, dimensions and uses, almost providing blueprints for how they are constructed and maintained. The second scholar, Robert Montagne, whose work is widely cited as one of the early French anthropological models for research in North Africa (Burke 2008) published volumes on the political (1930a) and spatial organization of villages and kasbahs (1930b). All of this investigation was framed as documenting ‘Berber’ life, contrasted against the Arab makhzen of imperial Morocco, and constituting a separate French formation of civilization, much in the way Kabyle (also ‘berber’) areas and ways of life had been separated from Arab zones in Algeria (see Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). And, following ideologies that authenticated Kabyle as non-Arab because of their supposedly Christian origins, Terasse and Montagne find roots for these architectural structures that diverge from Arabness, delving into ancient global histories like Roman, Greek and the nomadic Sahara, making historical interpretations from the physical forms and the local vocabulary about them. Though they edge towards anthropology, these interpretations are less reflections of use by the inhabitants of the kasbahs, and more archaeologies of living monuments, rendering kasbahs into ‘authentic’ artefacts, even while they are serving as actual living spaces for their residents. As the mountain roads became more passable, both in terms of ease of transport and of calming of rebellion, there is a distinct moment in the touristic history of Morocco when the attention of the national office for tourism was directed to this area, to develop it as a destination. Marc de Mazie`res and Joseph Goulven, president and secretary respectively of the Fe´de´ration des Syndicats d’Initiative et de Tourisme du Maroc, published a guide to visiting the High Atlas, which wanders between travel narrative and instructional guidebook. Much of the discourse of Les Kasba du Haut Atlas, like the quote beginning this

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section, remarks on the impressive modernization efforts that have brought automobile travel into this area, where the authors themselves travelled there by mule just a few years previously. Yet the discourse also situates the ‘picturesque’ beauty, architectural detail, and ‘authenticity’ of the villages and people found in this now accessible landscape. De Mazie`res and Goulven provide historical context from French readings of local history, citing, among others, Montagne, Doutte´, and de Foucauld, while also narrating their own journey, with passages through specific villages and events marked by interactions with locals. In the final chapter, they detail different routes accessible to tourists with regard to their safety, reassuring the reader by detailing the flight or surrender of various factions of bled es-siba resistance in the five years prior to publication. This book, published with the combined efforts of the tourism bureau and its dissemination arm, the weekly magazine La Vie Marocaine Illustre´e, inaugurated the ‘kasbahs road’ into a tourist path as it was no longer needed as a military pipeline. Lay appreciation of kasbahs as part of the exotic and ‘authentic’ architectural landscapes of southern Morocco, beyond and apart from the academic fascination of Montagne and Terasse, spread to popular publications not long after this road opened to safe travel. Other weeklies (Nord-Sud, L’Atlas) and other curious travel writers (Felze 1935; Madras 1938, 1950) added this journey to the list of routes inscribed through Morocco. It became the escape from Marrakech into a new unknown, along the Route des Kasbahs or ‘la Valle´e des Roses’. An article in the Belgian weekly Le Patriot Illustre´e, names the kasbahs as part of the ‘real’ south of Morocco, which the touriste must venture beyond Marrakech to discover: But, even though it’s been baptized the ‘capital of the South’, Marrakech is far still from being able to give an exact idea of the real Moroccan South. To access it, in this real South, one must cross the High Atlas. It is to the south of this powerful mountainous chain and, from there, to the northeast and the Middle Atlas, that stretches another Morocco, Berber country, that resembles very little this Morocco, Arab or Occidental, that we have known, at Fez, Meknes, Rabat and Casablanca. He who leaves Morocco, without having seen this berber South and East, has known but one of the two essential sides to this country. (Fajans n.d.: 140) Fajans focuses on the architecture of the ksours, kasbahs and tighremt (castle fortresses), highlighting the difference in style, material and decoration from Arab traditions as well as potential comparisons to ancient Roman and Greek architecture. He approaches them as unique in the world, a sight to see – to the extent that ‘numerous studies have been consecrated to them’ (ibid.: 142). Most of all, he advises the reader of the remarkable beauty in these villages:

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It is difficult to give an idea of the impression made on the voyager – tired from a long trek through a cruel path that crosses a desolate and deserted region – by the sight of a ravishing oasis, forming a dazzling band of green, above which rise the crenellated towers, massive bastions, richly crowned with ornamental architecture and fortress walls. If one has the chance to penetrate such a charming place at sunset, it’s a veritable fairyland, reminiscent of a cinematic decor. It’s a different world opening before us, a curious and strange world, made of truly original traditions that make us forget the colourlessness of modern life. (ibid.: 142) The road to arrive here is still arduous and forbiddingly barren of life, rendering the arrival at the oasis and the civilization erected near them, for Fajans, akin to a dramatic reveal in a cinematographic portrait. In this period, as the rebelliousness of the zones across the mountains calmed, tourism simultaneously and purposefully was introduced into this newly automobile topography. These discourses and narratives focus on the grand cinematic perspective on the landscape, rather than shifting to a narrow focus on the – also relatively unknown – people living there. The dramatic contrast of desert and oasis, of seeming emptiness and sudden imposing structures, extended the kasbah and its surroundings from being a source of scientific fascination to a touristic one, as more and more visitors could access it in person.

Another time of this place Skoura is situated on the open plain, and apart from a dozen or so village shops, it consists of nothing but the caid’s residence and his offices and guard rooms, all built by the French in their typical ‘Sahara-style’ of theatrical ‘Berber’ entrance gates, sloping towers, crenellations, in short, the type of architecture immortalized by the Beau Geste films of the twenties. (Landau 1969: 71 –2) The combination of road, landscape and cinema integrate well in contemporary models of mass tourism. The proximity of the Route des Kasbahs, laid out by de Mazie`res and Goulven, make it an easy day-trip from Marrakech; the remoteness and rural markers of the landscape add to the ‘authenticity’ of the experience, leaving the cosmopolitan city for a ‘real’ timelessness in these ‘ancient’ structures; and the cinematic visions of this landscape, as evoked by Rom Landau, an American who, like Walter Harris, travelled and wrote frequently in and about Morocco, are part of a media-saturated consciousness, whether or not the mass audience is familiar with the ‘Ouallywood’ of Ouarzazate (Grey 2010). While the landscape is still the central attraction, it becomes discursively

Figure 6.4 A tighrimt at Skoura, pictured in an ad from the Sherifian Tourism Office (L’Atlas, Spring 1939)

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intermixed between the contact with the ‘authenticity’ of the people and places embedded in it and the contact with simulacra of cinematic representations, when these tangible places are used to create other times and other locations. These modes of touristic consumption nourish each other, for as much as the landscape produces ‘authenticity’ that appeals to filmmakers, the aura of presence of the film production adds to the consumption value of these spaces, as a place where cinematic history happened. Importantly, the motivation for these tours, unlike other cine-tourism (Lapompe-Paironne 2011), is not cinematic history itself. These are tours of the kasbahs – primarily of the Ait-Ben-Haddou site named by UNESCO in 1987 as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2012) – which have also been used as film locations. The filmed history of the sites is part of the narrative of the spaces but not the motivation for seeing them. Instead, their filmed history dovetails with their ‘authenticity’, as these landscapes are chosen for film sites because they are able to represent diverse historical elsewheres. Ouarzazate becomes not just the site of its own Saharan history, but the site of monuments that Hollywood left behind, physical film locations that have not disappeared with the production, and provide ‘heavy infrastructure’ that can be visited (Lapompe-Paironne 2011: 95). In this sense, like all ‘authentic’ consumption, this landscape becomes a paradox of authenticity: consumed by tourists and filmmakers for the aura of pre-modern life, it is simultaneously infused with modernity because it is packaged and sold as pre-modern. The ‘untouched’ picturesque beauty becomes heavily trafficked, and heavily discursivized (see Minca and Oakes 2006a, 2011; Oakes 2006). These forms of authenticity become even more complex in relation to the physical buildings themselves. Their construction is not at all permanent, and involves constant maintenance of the ‘pre-Saharan earthen construction techniques’ that are a highlight of the site’s Universal Value designated by UNESCO (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2012). As Landau introduces his travels to the kasbahs, even in 1969, the ‘authenticity’ of different structures was in question: Before the comparatively recent influx of holiday-makers to Morocco, little was known about the extent and the authenticity of surviving examples of earlier Moroccan architecture. There were plenty of guide books and travellers’ tales, the French Protectorate issued all kinds of descriptive material, but there was no general agreement as to which remnants of picturesque edifices were truly venerable and which were merely crumbling away with almost indecent haste. (Landau 1969: 11) He goes on to lament that residents cannot distinguish between their ‘grandfather’s heyday’ and the ‘ancient’ ages of construction, distinctions of

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history that are important to the tourist consumer but not necessarily to the local community. The royal kasbahs, like those in Marrakech, according to Landau have lost their original (therefore valuable) features because of modernization (1969: 12). Yet originality is a strange concept to apply to these profoundly impermanent buildings, made of mud brick that must be perpetually maintained, so that it does not crumble back into the soil it comes from. As much as they may be ‘original’ structures, as long as they stand they are constantly renewed and reconfigured. Part of UNESCO’s requirements for heritage status reflects the enforcement of this tradition, by citing the fact that the ksar ‘illustrates the traditional earthen habitat, representing the culture of southern Morocco, which has become vulnerable as a result of irreversible socioeconomic and cultural changes’ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2012), as one of its criterion for preservation. Such criteria preclude progression into other, more stable building techniques, and compel caretakers of these structures to maintain a historical integrity in perpetuity, neither disintegrating nor advancing beyond their current form. This discourse of authenticity remains embedded in the zone today, and even into the future, as the Vision 2020 goals of the Moroccan Tourism Office include ‘saving the kasbahs’ as protected sites of cultural and architectural authenticity (Belahrach 2011). Here, part of the issue is their physical state and their dependence on continued residence and maintenance in order to avoid falling into ruin. The proposed solution is to discourage rural out-migration by revalorizing the habitats themselves for tourist consumption: The solution that imposes itself – the most valorising for our patrimony and certainly the most economically viable – is the conversion of these fortified homes (in the past intended for defense) into luxury hotel establishments with strict respect for the original materials and traditional knowledge about construction and restoration. (Belahrach 2011: 42) This is where our narrative experience of the kasbah returns. As travellers on the Route des Kasbahs, we too are bombarded with narratives of what once was here, from the physical structures of the kasbahs as ‘Berber’ artefacts, to the hollow sites in and around Ouarzazate, where various film crews did their work. As European, Western travellers, we fit into those who seek the Moroccan chic in the chance to spend a night in a kasbah, surrounded by the perpetuation of ‘authentic’ pre-Saharan life tempered with modern experience (see Ypma 2010). We can sit quietly in the kasbah, aware of the history that brought these buildings to the desert, the conquests that enforced their preservation, and the simulacra that render them recognizable and desirable landscapes of global media consumption.

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La Route des Kasbahs Heading south from Marrakech, one clear September morning, Claudio is at the wheel of a rented Volkswagen Golf. He aims at experimenting again with ‘the kasbah experience’ in the thin, but acceptable, disguise of ‘tourist’. Stepping on well-established tourist routes (for the tourism scholar) is always a slightly disturbing sensation, not so much for the fact of being confused with the touring crowd (since this is one of the intentions), perhaps more for the subtle feeling that the distance between the tourist and the researcher-on-tour is not so clear as he would like to think. Both genuine products of the modern culture of mobility, both busy deciphering others and their settings, the tourist and the driving researcher often share the same spaces, the same material problems, the same gaze, the same feeling of being constantly a bit out of place. While resisting any indulgence in essentializing these two typical figures of the colonial modern, and trying to get rid of the feeling of being somehow hopelessly trapped in their overall rhetoric of distinction, Claudio manages to safely pass the High Atlas and enter the land of the kasbahs, the once impenetrable Moroccan south. In the comfort of his air-conditioned car, smoothly engaging the rather spectacular windy road, he is caught by a sense of anticipation for the extraordinarily beautiful desert landscapes that he has enjoyed so many times in the past and, at the same time, the need to maintain a scholarly distance, whatever that means in a post-poststructuralist intellectual climate, since he is there to write a key chapter of his long due book on Morocco. Luckily there is not much time to speculate on his positionings: at about 40km from Ouarzazate, a man in the middle of the road forces Claudio to stop. The man’s car is apparently en panne and he is asking for help. He wants to be taken to the next village in order to find a mechanic. Claudio reluctantly accepts to take him on board, only to realize a minute later that, instead, a young saharoui-looking man is occupying his back seat. Welcome to the experience of the Kasbah Valley! Welcome to the field! Funny enough, the researcher-at-thewheel does not need to act in disguise here, since literally nobody cares about his hypothetical distinction from the tourist: they stop him and jump on his car despite his (at this point) rather pointless thoughts about his identity as a late modern traveller. Yassin, the guest on board, is a young and quite articulate man who immediately starts checking Claudio out, in order to position himself and ponder how much space of manoeuvre is available. A long list of questions about Claudio’s nationality, provenance, destination, motivations, family and profession follows. Claudio responds very reluctantly, and this makes Yassin slightly more aggressive, but does not help to put him off – quite the contrary. While he receives a phone call – if he has a mobile phone, why did he need a lift to call the mechanic? – Claudio decides not to reveal his actual destination, and

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actually to stop answering. This creates a strange and tense silence in the car. But then Yassin starts again, and since Claudio is Italian, he claims that his grandfather has played a role in Bertolucci’s blockbuster film The Sheltering Sky (1990). He insists that it was filmed in the desert around M’Hamid, the village where he comes from, located at the extreme southern trip of the road to the desert that takes you down south to Zagora along the spectacular Draa Valley. Interestingly, the same claim is made by the guides taking people around the sandy Erg Chebbi, in Merzouga, revealing a sort of competition between locations in the geography of filming in southern Morocco. This ambiguous situation lasts too long for both, since the actual destination of the guest remains unclear, and Claudio is now fully aware of having been caught in the old trick of the voiture en panne used by creative faux guides to stop and redirect the passing tourist (he was aware of it even before being stopped, but decided to stop anyway . . .). Yassin is indeed incredibly capable in teasing out Claudio’s desire to help and to be hospitable. Suddenly, Yassin becomes excessively alarmed about the speed limit, that is, about the possibility of being stopped by the police: not too surprisingly, a police checkpoint is just around the corner, but as usual the police are kind with the tourist and let them pass without problems. At that point the game is clear, and both parties understand that this little performance is going nowhere, or so at least Claudio thinks. However, before being dropped at the next mid-size village, Yassin plays in fact two other smart cards: first, he warns Claudio that Ait-Ben-Haddou, normally the first monumental kasbah visited by the tours coming down from Marrakech, is packed with faux guides to be absolutely avoided (implicitly suggesting that he was not one, and perhaps that he could protect Claudio from them); second, he asks Claudio a favour, that is, to stop by his brother, in Ouarzazate, in order to let him (the brother) know about the problems with his car. (Why not call him, since he had a mobile phone?) In doing this he draws a detailed map of how to get to his brother’s house, at the very entrance of Ouarzazate: that ‘house’ will then turn out to be a ‘Berber souvenir shop’, with the ‘brother’ dressed a` la tuareg waving at Claudio’s car ten minutes later . . . After this rather unsettling introduction to the Kasbah Valley and Le Sud, Claudio feels relieved that those earlier reflections on his position while walking/ driving the tourist path are now being wiped away by the (literal) intrusion (into his car) of the political economy of late modern tourism, with all its complications. The actual tour may now start (or has it already started?), a tour conceived as a real and imaginative drive throughout the Route des Kasbahs, not necessary by describing its many features – a job already done in detail by a plethora of guidebooks – but rather by hinting at the workings (and actual experience) of a travel-related geographical formation imposed over, and conspicuously detached from, local economies and people’s everyday lives. Zooming along the Route, village after village, kasbah after kasbah, Claudio

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realizes how, there, on the move, the cinematographic and the historical/ colonial come together into the production of a kind of space that is supposed to be experienced at the vehicle’s pace, into an established ‘tourist region’ produced by the combination of an intriguing set of ‘permanencies’ – the kasbahs in their historicized imagination but also in their materiality, and ‘impermanences’ – the kasbahs as the fantastic sites of an imagined exotic past and of its carnivalesque reconstruction via the tourist performance: The by now countless kasbah-hotels are indeed presented and managed as desert islands, as fortresses where time has stopped and where the offered experienced is about a quick but intense immersion into the distinct atmosphere of a mud castle – similar in many ways to the separate experience of watching a film. As in many other cases of enclavic tourism (see Edensor 2000, 2007; Minca 2009), this experience seems to be entirely detached from the surrounding environment, either by neglecting it – when ugly and too ‘modern’ – or by reading it as aestheticized ‘landscape’, when the view-from-above often provided by the kasbah-hotels allows the adequate perspective to be enjoyed while having breakfast. How colonial! How cinematographic! As mentioned, La Route proper sometimes starts with a detour to Ait-BenHaddou, to encounter the cinematographic qualities of its kasbah and the grey

Figure 6.5

Grey economy outside Kasbah Taourirt (C. Minca 2012)

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economy that it has mobilized – including bus drivers, faux and authorized guides, tour operators, local kids, restaurants, etc. Alternatively, the mobile experience of the Kasbah begins with a quick but spectacular visit to the Kasbah Taourirt in Ouarzazate: Unlike other Glaoui kasbahs, Taourirt Kasbah escaped ruin by taking a gig as a Hollywood backdrop in Star Wars and attracting the attention of UNESCO, which has carefully restored small sections of the Glaoui innersanctum, including unfurnished reception areas and living quarters. You can also wander through the village inside the kasbah walls, and crafty bargainers may be able to cut some good deals in these backstreet shops. (Lonely Planet 2013) Parking in the square in front of the refurbished main entrance often entails managing a few youngsters, who immediately try to sound you out in order to see whether they can guide you through the visit; but, more importantly, the square reveals quite blatantly the key coordinates of the geography of this celebrated route. On the one side – the best kept side of the Kasbah Taourirt – one of the most spectacular examples of this kind of architecture, despite the urban setting, a quality also recognized by the everpresent UNESCO ranking (see Figure 6.5). On the other side, a theatre-like semiarch of steps invites the visitor to gaze at the kasbah complex at the right distance and the perfect photo perspective. But the steps also introduce another adobe building, the Muse´e du Cinema, meaningfully facing the kasbah (see Figure 6.6). The two key features of the kasbah’s historicized narrative are thus there to be seen and visited: the (only partially, for the sake of the visitor) gentrified kasbah – a perfect museum-esque introduction for the European tourist – and the cinematographic experience of the same, literally mirroring each other, in the game of colonial representations, but also in their material presence. This dual element will accompany, in different combinations, the rest of the tour. It should come not as a surprise, then, that many tourists are actually introduced to the Ouarzazate by a visit of the Atlas Film Studios, right at the entrance of the city, a complex building, again, in the shape of a . . . kasbah! (see Figure 6.6) The 90 km that link Ouarzazate to Claudio’s next destination, N’Gouma, combine desert sceneries with a line-up of oasis villages, often engaged by the ‘transport touristique’ – normally buses and rally-looking 4x4 vehicles – at what seems an unreasonable speed. Apparently nameless villages, all indistinct, are like spots on the map even ‘in the real’, since the mobile gaze of the passing visitor can get the overall landscape but has no time for details, with the exception of the old and new (but looking old) mud castles converted into restaurants or hotels, that often stand out with their unmistakable shape, and the numerous signs that promote them, at times garnished by a kasbah-esque

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Muse´e du Cine´ma, Ouarzazate (C. Minca 2012)

rhetoric – including reference to authenticity, real experiences, distinction, separation, landscape. Skoura, for example, is an extraordinary oasis town, which plays a key role in the economy of the region; but, again, along La Route, Skoura is simply translated into another cluster in the constellation of kasbahs that makes this linear geography of travel so appealing to the European gaze. It is as if a selective geography of the past was constantly over-imposed on, and kept rigorously separate from, all other forms of economic activity and from the actual people living in the region. This, of course, is nothing particularly new in tourism, but the workings and the practice related to this ‘separation’ are rather striking in this case, especially if compared to another local economy of desert tourism, like the one in Merzouga described in Chapter 7, where the entire local community is involved and the entire layout of the dwelling has been transformed accordingly. While Claudio slowly approaches N’Gouma, where he intends to spend the night, he begins to feel uneasy about the pace of this driving tour and its ‘distancing’ experience, despite the fact that he is there precisely to study this parallel geography of travel. This is not the first time that, as a tourism scholar, he has been pervaded by the same uncomfortable feeling of moving inbetween places, but never being-in-place, something typical of the tourist

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experience, something he has been writing about for a decade at least, something that he normally attributed to the paradoxical nature of modernity (Minca and Oakes 2006b). Despite this awareness, this sense of unease persists, as if the screening offered by his analytics and his condition of ‘observer-onthe-move’ would not be enough to spare him the feeling of being out of place. Perhaps this is also why he has never written a single sentence on a place before actually visiting it. Caught by these not-so-new thoughts about the nature of his job when practised out there, in the field, he gets lost, missing the signs for the Kasbah Assafar while engaging with the bustling streets of N’Gouma. After several phone conversations with the owner, who is a resident somewhere else in Morocco, he finally finds the side road that takes him north towards the mountains and, after 5 km, the unpaved and rough detour to his final destination for the day. Ironically, mobile phones in this case turned out to be crucial to the very possibility of spending a night in a real kasbah, the container of a putative dive into a magical past.

A night in the kasbah . . . Let us then return to Kasbah Assafar for a paragraph or two, in order to rest a bit and put some order in the narrative that La Route has helped us develop so far. After Claudio is welcomed by another Yassin, that is, the ‘local guy’ actually taking care of the building and of his hospitality, he is offered a tour of the Kasbah and a brief history of it. The internal design, he is told, is faithful to the original, while the de´cor, clearly indulging in marks of Orientalism, has been deliberately kept low key, precisely in order to maintain the feeling of a home, to provide the visitor with the possibility of being immersed in the magic of a desert mansion of a time that was. The walls, the carpets, the rooms, the living room, all is presented as if the family who lived there some time ago had just left, or may even come back again, one day. Claudio’s room is basic but cozy, with a small window dominating the oasis down in the valley and a view of the mountain range in the background. The building is empty – he is the only guest, a condition that in many ways emphasizes the feeling of being in a bubble of sorts, in a shell of adobe – while everyday life, some real life, happens out there. This is a particularly strong realization when the following morning he decides to visit the village and the blushing oasis, during which his solitary night experience becomes something rather odd, compared to the peaceful but busy atmosphere of the surroundings, populated by people with both feet into their own late modernity. The Kasbah, a rather beautiful complex dominating the village, is back again as a fortress, this time around a compound where a cinematographic something is performed whenever there is a visitor; like a museum in a small forgotten town, the Kasbah is open only when the

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planned visitors arrive and decide to elect it as the spot to spend the night at along their itinerary. Yassin is a very kind person and makes Claudio’s visit very pleasant, especially when he (Yassin) dismisses the uniform that he wears while serving the meals (again a rather unsettling performance considering that they were the only people in there), and engages with Claudio in a relaxed conversation about the village, the tourists, but also football and the global economic crisis. The wifi advertised on the ambitious website of the Kasbah Assafar does not work, despite Yassin’s efforts to fix it. This turns out not to be a bad thing, not so much for the increased sense of isolation felt by Claudio during that short night of writing and sleep, but rather because the wifi issue illustrates very well the tensions inherent in the kasbah experience, including the desire of many visitors – or at least the perception of the operators of this very desire – to be detached for a short while, occupying a cinematographic time-space bubble in a place that was in a previously hostile land, and the parallel need to remain connected to the rest of the world, either via internet, or, simply, through the touristicized structures composing this alternative linear geography of the Moroccan south.

Figure 6.7

Kasbah Assafar’s interior design (C. Minca 2012)

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After this strange stop in such a beautiful island in the desert – but a desert clearly populated by many – Claudio’s somewhat playful tour resumes, along a desert strip that is dotted, again by many villages, all with their kasbahs, and the accompanying rhetoric. The tour touches upon Boulmane du Dades, Tinerhir, and many other smaller towns, to reach out to Erfoud, a sort of selfappointed gateway to the Sahara; all busy places connecting the local, mostly rural economies of the region, beautifully lively and messy as many others places along the main routes crossing Morocco. The kasbah economy, in that context, reveals an important element in contemporary Moroccan tourismcapitalism, with the owners/investors often living somewhere else – in bigger cities or even abroad – and many of these refurbished buildings having become the materialization of a sort of European invention of the Moroccan south, something resembling the proliferation of riads in many Moroccan medinas. The kasbah experience is presented today by coffee table books like Morocco Modern as the ultimate experience of the ‘. . . the feudal way of life that dominated in this area up until the 1950s’ (Ypma, 2010: 65), as a land ‘of mud castles’, while making reference to Jim Ingram’s 1952 travel, and his ‘apt and particularly vivid description of the region of Morocco dominated by the Berber clans’. While reflecting on the often unclear difference between a kasbah, a ksar or a medina, the reader is told by Ypma that ‘a kasbah is virtually the same as a ksar except that it is usually the domain of a single family . . . as opposed to the whole village’ (ibid.). What is missing from this picture, however, is the fact that kasbahs are not inhabited anymore – with a few exceptions – and that they have become something else, the materialization of a tourist economy based on a sort of ‘romancing the stone effect’, that highlights the importance of a specific kind of tourist architecture, based on the (rather colonial and orientalized) aesthetics of the past – on another ‘Moroccan dream’. This re-enacted colonial fantasy, once again, is fundamentally driven by the idea of Morocco as a spectacle, as scenery, as a tableau available to be penetrated by the mobile European gaze (see Urry and Larsen 2011). At the end of his tour, Claudio cannot even recall the different names and the different shapes of all these objects along the route, possibly due to the serial disposition of these strange contemporary monuments that after a while makes them appear all the same, especially when the signs alternate reference to actual historical buildings and newly built kasbah-esque hotels. Like many other cases in Morocco this kasbah-voir-riad economy orients these historical buildings in a way that reaches back to its Protectorate configurations: as a mobile, almost cinematic, space. In that they need to be constantly maintained because of the instability of their materials, they are transformed into ‘ethnographic objects’ of a sort – embodying ‘traditional’ Morocco as they are owned by Europeans and in many ways managed by Western institutions.

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But the blending together of individual kasbahs into a single kasbah experience is also part of the ways in which the visit of the route – and the appreciation of this part of the country – is organized and performed. A mobile gaze zooms through a putative mythical and aestheticized past, village after village, kasbah after kasbah, at the speed of a filmic image. Mobile subjects launched through a landscape conceived as immobile: this is what makes the actual kasbah tour the ultimate experience of a southern ‘Moroccan dream’.

CHAPTER 7 SAHARA

When a wealthy local family didn’t offer hospitality to a poor woman and her son, God was offended, and buried them under the mounds of sand 50 km south of Erfoud called Erg Chebbi. So goes the legend . . . but reality is even more unbelievable. Shape-shifting to reach heights of 160 meters, Erg Chebbi glows a stunning shade of rose gold, until afternoon sunlight tints the dunes orange, pink and purple. (Bainbridge and Bing [Lonely Planet] 2011: 158)

Merzouga Merzouga is a small village in southern Morocco, a few kilometres away from the Algerian border, made famous by its nearby dunes – composing the Erg Chebbi – and by, among Claudio’s generation in Italy, Marrakech Express (1989), a cult movie partly filmed there. Merzouga was also the final destination of Claudio’s 2003 tour of Morocco on his bicycle; a mythical ‘ending’ of sorts, at least in his then fervent travel imagination. He often recalls passing the southern city of Erfoud followed by wild dogs and slowly working his way towards Merzouga across the black and torrid hamada (rocky desert), when at a certain point those golden mountains of sand appeared at a distance, in the haziness of that long afternoon. While approaching Merzouga, the Erg began to assume clearer contours and to look like a spectacular Saharan landscape; at least as this landscape has been normally envisaged in the European colonial rhetoric. Rhetorical ‘tours’ aside, the view of the sandy Erg Chebbi from Merzouga is indeed stunning. The desert landscape as it can be enjoyed from the top of the higher dunes seems to be there to solicit colonial fantasies of adventure, exploration and, in its beautiful emptiness, even redemption (from the supposed corruption of Western modern society.) Since then, almost every single time Claudio has visited Merzouga (or its twin village of Hassilabied, that faces the most approachable and spectacular dunes),

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Dunes, Erg Chebbi (C. Minca 2012)

he has been addressed by local kids who, for a small fee, have offered to ‘show him the landscape desert’ from the top of the Grande Dune. After several visits for fieldwork in the following years, he realized that the overall assumption was that, as a European ‘tourist’, his role was to watch the landscape from a set of predetermined viewpoints. This seemed to be very clear to the kids and to a growing number of the residents who, for long, have been learning to write their everyday space through the tourist eye in order to gain a tip, offer a tour, but also in order to engage with the complicated desire for escape via contact with the magic world of tourism (see Minca and Oakes 2006; Oakes 2006). The vast majority of the tourists, for their part, seem to be willing to travel so far south exclusively to enjoy the visual experience offered by ‘locals’ – of the sandy dunes (often climbing them at dawn or dusk), the ‘real desert’ landscape, and to tour the Erg Chebbi on top of a camel (in fact, it is normally a dromedary). These practices of climbing, gazing and riding appear today (after years of consolidated tourist presence) to both the tourists and the ‘locals’ as absolutely obvious things to do when in Merzouga; indeed the only things to do. These roles shape the tourist ‘complex’ Merzouga-Erg Chebbi, today a prime destination for Morocco, and in many ways an intriguing case of how the

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Sahara experience may be spatially organized and logistically simplified – a sort of ‘desert theme park’ – in order to attract and manage a growing number of visitors from Europe in what is supposed to be a relatively hostile environment. By translating those dunes into an exotic Saharan landscape, a standardized set of tourist performances have produced a new, relatively hegemonic, spatial narrative about Merzouga and its people. Driven by a kind of postcolonial (cartographic) anxiety, the tourists not only invest their experience of the desert with a set of existential meanings – when interviewed they often refer to the deep sensations released by the ‘emptiness’ of the space enjoyed there (Minca 2006b) – but also put into practice their need for order and control, on the one hand, and adventure and transgression, on the other. That is, they take a touring perspective that allows them to make sense of what would otherwise be only ‘empty’ space and sand. These spatial narratives about the ‘desert experience’, however, produce some apparently paradoxical consequences. For example, the behaviour of some local children captures a few of the contradictions underlying these practices in interesting ways. As noted, these children seem to be very aware of the tourist’s search for adventure, mystique and order defined by the experience of the dunes’ landscape. They learned that gazing at the dunes and at empty space is something that European travellers love to do. But they also perceive (and sometimes even capitalize on) the tourist’s curiosity and concern for poverty and difference: with their very presence, these children actually break the ideal order that the desert tourist rhetoric is supposed to produce. We will discuss later how this rhetoric was enacted during a visit to ‘les nomades’ that was part of a tour ‘around’ the Erg. At the same time, the tourist’s search for immersion in a perfect desert landscape is part of the production of forms of social ordering within the village: some of the children, apparently, do not go to school in order to wait for the arrival of the tourists; they also began to present themselves to the tourist as ‘poor children’. In that way, they learned how to engage with European late modernity and its codes through a number of everyday practices, like playing and speculating to the traveller’s feelings of guilt when faced with ‘developing world’ childhood. Conversely, the tourists in Merzouga are often forced to ‘define themselves’ and their own ‘place-in-the-world’ when faced with apparent poverty, but also with the ‘local’ guides as producers of their ‘authentic’ desert experience, with paradoxically inauthentic language skills and veiled attitudes towards the visitors’ excitement about the secrets of the desert and Touareginspired European fantasies of ‘life in the desert’. The very presence of the children, of the guides, of defiant ‘fake’ Touaregs, indeed challenge the interplay between order and transgression promised by the tourist promotion of the desert experience. In other words, the search for order – the framing of a perfect desert landscape to gaze at and to explore like-a-nomad and the relative positioning of

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the subjects involved – represents by definition an unaccomplished project. It produces forms of social ordering, changing the way in which meaning is negotiated in that place, and challenging the unstable coordinates of the very (practised and performed) geographies of ‘Sahara’ in Morocco. The writing of an intriguing threshold of the Orient is actually performed on these very dunes; the production of meaning induced by the presence (and the endless re-signification) of these sandy hills is in fact influenced by a set of preordered (colonial) understandings, as well as by the ways in which the desert (landscape) is performed in place by the tourists and by all the other social actors involved in this process. Despite the unavoidable fixity of the images mobilized by the tourist industry and the related popular literature, and despite the fact that the attempted mapping of a set of feelings and (landscaped) perspectives maintains extraordinary currency in the tourist market, the tourist’s embodied experience of being-in-the-desert-landscape tends to transgress this supposed plasticity and is often translated into a set of practices within which the distance between representation and the ‘material realities’ of that same experience – the touchy feeling of being in place – tend to merge and to become indistinguishable. This chapter is thus dedicated to an exploration of the ‘Merzouga-Erg Chebbi complex’ as a kind of landlocked island, a Sahara theme park of sorts, which, within its relatively limited spaces, attracts a growing number of desert experience seekers, originating a somewhat anarchic but carefully organized (and rhetorically framed) local economy based on ‘camel rides’ and ‘dune climbing/gazing’. The starting perspective of the pages to follow is thus that the desert experience is still presented to the tourist as an adventurous – and somewhat voyeuristic – incursion into the infinite sandy horizons of the Sahara; something potentially dangerous and exciting, but also liberating and even ‘spiritual’. The Erg Chebbi thus becomes a wonderland of sand, colonized by a specific tourism geography with its consolidated viewpoints: its camel routes, its ‘shores’ and ‘ports’, its archipelago of encampments and tourist kasbahs, its Touareg-esque masquerades – including the turbans ‘protecting’ the tourist from the desert sun a` la nomad, so much celebrated by past re´cits de voyage. We start precisely there, from some of the most glorious and fantastic desert travel accounts, in order to prepare the ground for our own exploration of the Merzouga-Erg Chebbi ‘compound’ and a touring investigation of the spatialities of the desire to traverse this terrain despite its potential dangers and the potential it holds for transcendence – produced and enacted in this site through the European gaze on Morocco.

Sahara The conquest of Algiers on 5 July 1830, after the landing in Sidi Ferruch a few weeks earlier, marked the beginning of the French colonial presence in North

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Africa. The colonization of the coastal region was followed by the penetration of the interior, including the ‘pacification’ of the Sahara. According to Brouste and Brulle ‘the military occupation of the Sahara must be inscribed in the broader strategy of expansion of French influence over the continent’ (2011: 9). This strategy continued to be implemented until the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was largely promoted by the press and, in the me´tropole, by expositions and all sorts of events related to the magic and the mystery of the desert. Here we reflect on a few of the artistic, literary and geographic adventurers who journeyed through the desert, in person or in their art, and brought images of the French Sahara to a wider nineteenth-century public imaginary. These voyagers and chroniclers each contributed to the spatialities we see enacted in the contemporary touristed Sahara through images of the barren, forbidding and somehow powerful landscape and their own experiences of wonder and transcendence. The colonial dream at that point intersected a widespread fascination among the European elite of the day for exploration and adventure, often linked to the ‘absolute of the desert’ and the danger it evoked. Fantasies about fantastic lost desert cities, like Tombouctou or Smara, brought explorers like Rene Caillie´ to penetrate the inhospitable sands of the Sahara, in disguise, often at a high price in terms of sufferance and deprivation, and sometimes even death: it would be difficult for me to render the sensations that I felt when I saw myself clear forever of the Arab costume: I re-experienced in my memory all the privations, the trials that I experienced, the length of the road that I just ran, in an immense country, crossing a thousand dangers . . . (Caillie´ 1996 in Rondeau 1999: 47) Caillie´, in particular, fed into the Saharan myth by penning his Journal du Voyage . . . dans l’Afrique Centrale in 1830 under the auspices of the Parisian Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie. After his insane transafrican exploration dressed as a Muslim – the very first European to have crossed Western Sahara – Toubouctou la myste´rieuse outclassed Fez and Meknes in the popular imagination (QuellaVelle´ger 1999 in Rondeau 1999: 46). During that trip he also visited the Tafilalt – the region where Merzouga is located – helping in that way to increase the general public interest for southern Morocco and its Saharan appendices (Peroncel-Hugoz 1999: 41): Caillie´ is one of the most prominent of a long list of adventurers, whose solo explorations still inspire travellers’ dreams today: Camille Douls de´guise´ en Maure, Charles de Foucauld pretending to be a rabbi, Isabelle Eberhardt dressed like a man, Michel Vieuchange like a woman . . . (Brouste and Brulle 2011: 11)

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Camille Douls, an adolescent explorer killed in the desert by his own (Touareg) guides, also became a mythical figure for all those who followed his path in the pistes of the Moroccan desert in the decades to follow (Berjeaut 1999 in Rondeau 1999: 63). He and those who followed in the nineteenth century were obligated to adopt disguise because, given the ongoing battles in Algeria, Europeans had no assurance of protection beyond the cities controlled by the Sultan (see Chapter 2). But perhaps the most influential character in the reproduction of a specific European idea of the desert in that period was artist Euge´ne Fromentin (1820 – 1876), who contributed to creating, with his texts and paintings, a modern image of the desert. As noted, in the 1850s the Algerian Sahara had already become an important territory for the French colonial empire, especially after its formal assimilation to the me´tropole in 1846; this coincided with Fromentin’s first trip to Algeria, together with painters Armand du Mesnil and Charles Labbe´ (Cappella 2005). From this moment on, the Orient and the Sahara became a key theme of his art. In 1847 he returned to travel again to the desert and during that trip experienced the lifestyle of a nomad, contributing, when back at home, to the popularization of scenes of Arab hunting, caravans and fantasias, as well as scenes of thirst and desperation (Cappella 2005: 11). But Frometin was perhaps even more influential with his passionate written descriptions of the desert as wondrous natural beauty. His first and perhaps foremost important re´cit de voyage is Un e´te´ dans le Sahara (1857), an account that Cappella describes as, [the] modern iconography of the desert wallows in monotone photography, in which the emptiness often underlines the absolute purity and understood infinity, sometimes peopled with turbaned nomads, seemingly as free as the wind that erases their traces on the smooth and golden dunes. (2005: 5) These stark images are rooted, for him, in Fromentin as a cosmopolitan dreamer incarnate; an artist traveller who, exempt from the banal exoticism that characterizes many other similar accounts, provides a realistic depiction of the Sahara, a depiction loyal to his most intimate experience of the desert: Such are the voyagers; who are they? Where do they come from? They have crossed, without our seeing, all the horizon that I had in sight . . . the day is slow to pass, it finishes, like it started, with half-reds, an amber sky, whose depths are colored, with long oblique flames that will render purple by turn the mountains, then the sands, then the rocks to the east . . . I was on a terrace above the oasis, in view of the desert, in the deep south. (Fromentin 1853: 19 –20)

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However, like all discursive formations, that of the contemporary ‘experience of the desert’ in Merzouga (and elsewhere in southern Morocco) has been prepared by a long series of parallel and successive accounts, mostly based on different heroic expeditions in the region. After Fromentin’s influential re´cit de voyage, other explorations marked the ways in which Europeans, and the French in particular, began fantasizing the Sahara. Like the journey of Henri Duveyrier, who, ‘in 1859 – 61 will cross Algeria to reach out Libya via the Tassili des Azdjer, in a solitary endeavour that will ask the tribute of his life at the age of 20; during his itinerary he observed and reported an extraordinary wealth of scientific information on the region and its people’ (Brouste and Brulle 2011: 12, translated by the authors; see also Chapter 2). These scientific expeditions, from that moment on, were strongly encouraged by the increasingly influential geographical societies, in France and in many other countries, despite the patent risk to the participants. The next recorded French mission to cross the Sahara without casualties would not be until 1898 (Brouste and Brulle´ 2011: 13). Consequently, the 1 April 1902 decree inaugurating the Company of the Oasis Saharie`nne was approved in order to occupy and defend the Algerian oasis. Two years later the prestigious Annals de Ge´ographie announced that ‘le Sahara est ouvert’, its penetration accomplished: curiosity for the mysterious world of the nomads was significant and often characterized by a spectacular tone, like in the case of the presentation of a ‘caravan touareg’ at the winter velodrome in Paris in 1894, during the visit to Paris of the chief touareg Moussa Ag Amastane in 1910, and the Colonial Exposition organized by Lyautey at the Porte Dore´e in 1931. (2011: 17) In that same period, Rene de Segonzac, like de Foucauld 20 years before him, led his fourth expedition in Morocco, endorsed by the savants of the Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie, pushing ever farther south: on Christmas Eve 1904, captain de Segonzac cuts his hair and shaves his beard and moustache. After a last look at the Ocean that shines under the Mogador sun, his caravan heads towards the mountains (Berjeaut 1999 in Rondeau 1999, 66) De Segonzac, driven as many other travellers of the day by a colonial ethnographic gaze, visited the mid and High Atlas, described in detail the morphology of the region, documented the populations encountered, the markets, even the religious traditions. However, after World War I, this phase of colonial military conquest is considered over, and replaced by another phase

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characterized by military occupation and ‘policing’ of the desert, while the spaces of the Sahara, still idealized in the European mind, attract newcomers – the tourists, motivated by their interest in the exotic local culture and by the possibility of being part of organized adventures. The political dangers of the desert, in the form of warring tribes and murderous guides, were waning, while the natural dangers of deprivation in the harsh environment persisted in ever more manageable forms. This is also the time in which the soon mythical Avion Postale started connecting Casablanca to Dakar, a connection celebrated during the twenties by books such as Kessel’s Vent de sable (1929) and Saint-Exupe´ry’s Courrier sud (1929) (Brouste and Brulle 2011: 18). Dugas (1999: 34) underlines the enormous influence played by Saint Exupe´ry’s romantic oeuvre in linking, in the European imagination, the silence and the immensity of the Sahara to the search for an intimate dream, including the possibility of redemption via the suffering and the solitude provided by the desert experience or, even, the elevation towards what Ernest Psichari, in his Le voyage du centurion (1916), describes as an ‘immutable and quiet truth’. The desert as the site of divine intimacy is doubtless a grand theme in the history of European religious thought, something initiated by the fathers of the desert who forged the ideal of monastic life precisely by envisaging the solitude and isolation of the desert retirement. Earlier European explorers had documented their spiritual experiences as well. Charles de Foucauld narrated in his enourmously influential Reconaissance (1888) his experience of the profound solitude of the desert in the midst of his foolish (and secret) attempt to cross in disguise. This moment would prove crucial in his decision to dedicate the rest of his life to spiritual intimate research (Brouste and Brulle 2011: 101). Brouste and Brulle´ further recall how Louis Matignon came back from the Sahara converted, while Jacques Maritain once declared that ‘I started, in the middle of the desert, to think of God’ (2011: 35 – 41). Theodore Monod, who ‘enters the Sahara as one enters in religion’ (ibid.), in 1923 ‘opens’ up the Saharan coast of Morocco and the peninsula of Cap Blanc. Just before crossing Mauritania, he paid tribute to Ernest Psichari, who on 26 August 1906, with Lyautey’s endorsement, embarked from Bordeaux in order to respond to the call of ‘the greater spaces’ and to the fascination of the younger generations for colonial life (ibid.). For Monod, the grand mystery of the desert, that white spot on the European maps, remained an impossible geography that carried with it also a new fascination for Islam and for those men who lived ‘in the continuous presence of God’: but to the West, the immense unravelling without a name, the white part of the maps, the impossible geography of the Sahara! The imagination leaps from dune to dune. (2011: 42)

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Throughout his chronicle, he seems to be very worried to reassure the reader that ‘we don’t travel like tourists’, a preoccupation that resonates in most of the desert tourism popular literature today, by rather explicitly making reference to the idea of conducting ‘a real life of solitude and silence’ (ibid.). This perceptible silence continues to play a role in creating desert space for visitors today. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the inclusion of the Moroccan Sahara into tourist spatialities, Mare´chal Lyautey was also famously caught by the mystique of the desert during his early travels to the region: magical day; impossible to close ones’ eyes without seeing the light, the blue sky: wonders over wonders . . . the view expands, it’s a new world, Africa! Africa! (Lyautey, Letter de Biskra, 12 February 1878, in le Re´ve´rend 1980: 52, cited in Brouste and Brulle´ 2011: 63) As on other occasions in Morocco, Lyautey was inclined to place great emphasis on the beauty of the land and the exoticism of its atmospheres: Arrived at Biskra under the full moon in an ambient perfume of flowering acacias, between the palms. What a fairyland! . . . by horseback, at sunrise, blue moutains and purple deserts, galloping over the gold sands, live life! . . . the Biskra river, sunset, magic: the desert, the mountains in flames, the caravans covering the plain with their tents for the night, the sleeping camels . . . Magic! Magic! (Lyautey in Doury 2002: 21, cited in Brouste and Brulle´ 2011: 63) Despite the long series of massacres perpetrated in the pre-Protectorate years by the hommes du de´sert against the French (and in particular against the Pe`res Blancs in Algeria), Lyautey never refrained from indulging in the aesthetics of his experience of the Sahara (2011: 66). While visiting the oasis of Oulad Sidi Cheikh, in June 1904, for example, he could not resist from expressing romantic comments, often inspired by orientialist painters or by Fromentin’s Un e´te´ dans le Sahara: the night, the splendid moon, the palm trees with splashes of silver, the violent shadows of the red-earth houses . . . all evoking the immensity, the unknown, the brave peril that these immobile men carry, serious, covered to their eyes with black burnous, under the shadow of large hats . . . I didn’t believe that this still existed with such life, such color. (Brouste and Brulle´ 2011: 74 –5) Along this route in the desert, Lyautey encountered Charles de Foucauld, at the time one of his cadets. While in Ain Sefra, he met Isabelle Eberhardt, whose

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writing he will try to recover after her dramatic death due to the flooding of the river Sefra in that same year (2011: 76). After all, despite its wide expanses, Europeans in this desert composed a small world. This panoply of adventurers and explorers, Lyautey included, formed a cohort of Europeans who had beheld and traversed this desert, rendering it discursively into the space of danger and transcendence that tourists could then broach in the following decades. Some of the tones, perspectives, common places, but also biographical legacies about the ways in which, in a specific moment in time, the western edge of the Sahara is approached by the Europeans, speak to a colonial orientalist project that travels a long way to seek out the dunes of the Erg Chebbi and the practices of the new explorer, the tourist. Contemporary desert tourism, in Merzouga and possibly elsewhere in the western part of the Sahara, is inevitably linked to this tradition. According to Asmae Bouaouinate, in her comprehensive study of actors in Moroccan desert tourism, the tourist expects the desert to be sandy, and is less interested in monotonous and flat extensions of the hamada (2008: 2). This ‘sandy’ image of the desert is indelibly linked to those early European explorations of the Sahara and their related accounts, often emphazising landscapes made of dunes and oasis. For Bouaouinate, as a Moroccan geographer, the myth of the Sahara is thus equally influenced by the colonial literature, the military reports, the cinema and even the Paris –Dakar Rally: Land of thirst, land of fear, land of nomads . . . such are the cliche´s through which the Sahara enters the (French) cultural horizon, marked by men like Rene´ Caillie´, Foucauld, Michel Vieuchange, Henri Barth . . . Laperrine and works like L’Atlantide, L’Escadron Blanc, The Little Prince, linked to military or colonizing experiences (of France) in the Sahara, until the middle of the twentieth century and recently reinforced by the explorer The´odore Monod. (ibid.) Those that Bouaouinate lists, the few we have described, and many other writers, have, upon return to Europe, contributed to producing a certain image of the Sahara, a desert conceived like a space open to exploration, at the same time mysterious and hostile, but also spiritual and generous for the experience that it may provide, a space of silence and infinite horizons where the traveller’s mind (and body) may get lost, but also where he may ‘find himself’ again. This orientalist recomposition of the desert and its ge´ographie impossible into a European dream, together with its implications for contemporary desert tourism in southern Morocco, and in particular in Merzouga, are scrutinized in the rest of the chapter, starting from a few general considerations on how this form of tourism is organized and put into practice, and concluding with the description of an actual tour of the Erg Chebbi and its spatialities.

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Au de´sert The pages of the 2011 edition of the Morocco Lonely Planet guidebook dedicated to ‘activities’ in Merzouga and surroundings place a strong emphasis on ‘the how’ of exploring the dunes: camels are recommended over 4wds for dune exploration – though they might growl, occasionally, they’re ecofriendly . . . dromedary rides lose a certain magic when cars are roaring past, and late 4wd arrivals rudely interrupt stargazing . . . romance – some long standing encampments have streetlights that affect stargazing and romantic prospects with their brash fluorescent glow . . . (Bainbridge and Bing 2011: 158, 160) These instructions on how to appreciate the magic of the desert are indicative of a real or potential tension between different users and the different approaches to the dunes, as is typical with all forms of contemporary tourism centred on a specific natural environment. In fact, this representation of environment as ‘natural’, as ‘deserted’, and moreover as ‘authentic’ to the region is unsurprisingly, implicated in and produced through the tourism machinery in place. To discuss the mechanisms at work in these spatialities, we explore here the exhaustive research of Bouaouinate (2009) and of French anthropologist Corinne Cauvin-Verner (2007) on the functionings and dynamics of tourism political economies in the Moroccan Sahara. Particularly, they document how the desert becomes discursively hostile or alternately hospitable – at times in transgressive ways. Bouaouinate initially describes how the tourist gaze is drawn into the desert landscape: The desert has become a fantasized tourist product, over-publicized through the car races that have enabled a desert landscape to be seen and give tourists the idea to attempt a mechanical adventure there, though they give rise to accidents and deterioration of the already rare flora in this environment. (2009: 9) The growing emphasis placed on the ‘protection’ of the desert environment, including its ‘culture’, on the part of international agencies, tourism organizations, and also many tourists, has significantly influenced the ways in which the desert is experienced or, at least, should be experienced according to those who promote and capitalize on this ‘product’. Bouaouinate identifies four main modalities to approach the desert experience offered by the major tour operators: The me´hare´e indicates a ride on the camel (usually dromedary with saddle). The camel-driver hike is a walk, next to the dromedary. Contrary to the

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Figure 7.2

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Merzouga from the dunes (C. Minca 2012)

me´hare´e, the total dromedaries are fewer than participants; they are there to bring the necessities for camping (tents, blankets, mattresses, food, water bottles), but they can also carry those who are more tired. The hike with vehicle assistance alternates walking with using a 4x4/Land Rover to ensure arrival of supplies and visitors. The voyage by 4x4 or Quad is if the distances to travel are very long. (2009: 9) The product ‘desert’ in Merzouga thus comprises today both excursions on foot or on a dromedary, and long and fast incursions by mechanical means, including four-wheel-drive vehicles, trucks and even the infamous (for the Lonely Planet, at least) four-wheel all-terrain vehicles (quads). Though each of these has environmental impacts, as do any means to transport masses of visitors in and out of a remote location, the ways in which this ‘environment’ is presented are strongly loaded with emotional implications, which may turn out to be negative or positive. While the desert is most frequently perceived as a natural space, it is often marked also as a cultural space. The UNESCO programme entitled ‘The Sahara of Cultures and Peoples’ (UNESCO Culture Sector 2008) is indeed focused on

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Figure 7.3

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Camping ‘in the desert’ (C. Minca 2012)

promoting internationally the respect and the valorization of the natural and cultural desert patrimony, via an increased collaboration among the countries sharing the Sahara: In the context of combatting poverty (Millenium Development Goals), the objective of the project ‘The Sahara of Cultures and Peoples’ is to assist the member states of the Sahara in the elaboration and implementation, especially by lessons learned from field pilot projects, of strategies for sustainable development and the fight against poverty, based on the protection and enhancement of Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage and Natural Heritage . . . As a crosscutting activity, tourism can be a real tool in sustainable development and struggle against poverty, in particular in the Sahara which is a desertic ecosystem, characterized by a rich cultural, human and natural wealth, and great fragility. (ibid.) This increased international interest for the living conditions of the desert populations must of course be welcome. Desert tourism, however, as we noted in the introduction to this chapter, is indeed having important social effects in Merzouga, including an increased set of job opportunities and income sources

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related to the presence of tourism, but also a set of social problems that will be partially discussed later in this section. Looking at the Merzouga-Erg Chebbi complex – following the excellent geographic account provided by Bouaouinate – a real local political economy has grown in the past decades around the presence of tourism, including the owners and managers of the different forms of accommodation, the numerous guides (authorized or illegal), cooks, cameleers, Jeep drivers, bazaristes, folkloric groups and caravaniers. The consolidation of tourism has also given space to numerous NGOs involved in a series of local initiatives, including those attempting to support the role of women in a rapidly chaging social and economic context. A special note must be given to the presumed presence of ‘the Touareg’ – indeed absent from the region – and the adoption of Touareg-esque costumes and attitudes on the part of local guides or people working in and for local shops (often labelled as ‘berber’ or ‘nomad’): These last years, with the increase of tourism in the desert, the Touareg have become a myth that the European tourist dreams of encountering, to discover their nomadic life. For this reason, TO (tour operators) always indicate a few Touareg in the team that accompanies the tourists during the me´hare´es in the desert. This implication guarantees the success of the tour, since the Touareg (the native) takes the job of commenting on the natural and cultural environment. He is judged the most credible local and gives an air of authenticity to the trip. The tourists have not only seen, met, and photographed touaregs in villages or in nomad tents, they have them exclusively as guides. Because of this many TO insist that the guide team has Touaregs and that there are visits with Touaregs to guarantee the authenticity to the tourist. (Bouaouinate 2009: 26) These posturations, as Bouaouinate points out, relate to the well-covered idea of authenticity in tourism, and the creation of the desert experience under the auspices of ‘the authentic’ nomadic tribe. Conversely, among the most significant long-term consequences of this tourism presence are the different forms of engagement with ‘the modern culture’ delivered by the presence of European visitors, together with the (post)colonial tropes – enacted by both the tourist and the local people working with the tourist – with their sometimes perverse socio-cultural ‘special effects’. Au De´sert, penned by French anthropologist Cauvin-Verner, focuses an equally complete ethnographic attention on contemporary desert tourism in Morocco. In her analysis, Cauvin-Verner takes a close look at the multiple facets that the desert experience has manifested in Morocco. In particular, she spends a significant amount of time in describing tourist behaviour and practices – reporting interviews, but also her own participant observations while travelling

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Figure 7.4

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Reference to Le Touareg (C. Minca 2012)

with the tourists. Her account informs us both on how she observed tourist engagements with the discursive forms we have highlighted – particularly with the authenticity of nomads as ‘Touareg’ – and the complicated relationships between tourists and locals, from distant hostility to sexual encounters. According to Cauvin-Verner (2007: 16) the ‘nomads of the Sahara’ are the object of a literary cult of sorts, around which actual communities with their own prophets (from Joseph Peyre to Theodore Monod), followers (today, in particular, the tourists), rituals, sacrifices and sacred material objects (the dunes and the local costumes) are constructed. Most European tourists to southern Morocco have normally read very little on the Sahara – usually only Le Petit Prince or The Sheltering Sky – and have a tendency to indulge in caricatural portraits of the local culture: for example, by defining as Touaregs all nomads (2007: 51): ‘though there are no Touareg in Morocco, the guides of the Draa Valley pretend to be Touareg and the tourists call them that’ (ibid.: 89). The tourist often mistakes the Touareg with the populations of Western Sahara, largely arabophone, so that, from Marrakech until the southernmost border of the country, most of the boutiques selling local products are presented as ‘touareg’ and their staff are dressed like a homme blue of the desert.

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Le bivouac, supposed to be the temporary nomad encampment normally hosting the tourists overnight during their desert excursions, is prepared in order to re-enact forms of local ethnography, with the theatralization of the characters in play. This mise en sce`ne of the tourist desert dream includes not only the guides and the other ‘staff’, but the tourists themselves, who are subject to a specific plot including the previously mentioned turban and the ritual photos with the guides, the dunes, the camels, but also a set of expected, sometimes even imposed, ‘positionings’, in line with the literary and cinematographic understandings of this real and imagined experience of the Sahara: the tourists clothe themselves like nomads and throw themselves into imaginary roles: romantic voyager, do-gooder, ethnographer, etc. Mirroring them, the Arabic-speaking guides from Morocco invent themselves affiliations with the Touareg . . . Committed with an intense sexual charge, the desert upholds the touristic vulgate of the ‘three S’s’. . . it mobilizes an entire sensorial vocabulary: shivering of the skin in contact with sand, caresse of the wind, bite of the sun, vertigo in face of the immensity, etc. It is in the dunes, exaggeratedly eroticized by Saharan imagery, that most of the sexual encounters take place. (2007: 166, 251–2) In many ways, Cauvin-Verner maintains (ibid.: 103) that inventories and taxonomies produced by colonial science have survived independence. For example, the Berbers are still represented as fierce, brave and incorruptible (ibid.: 104); as a result of this no other figure in the Sahara is better known than the Touareg: ‘the real Saharan, the rooted native, it’s the nomad, of the Touareg variety’ wrote Emile-Felix Gautier in 1910 [1935] (175 cited in Cauvin-Verner 2007: 104). According to Cauvin-Verner’s investigation (ibid.: 111) the guides pretending to be a Touareg often end up challenging the rules of their religious belief, but also of their social and political context, and tend to appropriate a set of Western representations produced by the colonial culture – representations that have presented the Touareg ethnicity as a referent model for Saharan nomadism. Some of them apparently even change their names accordingly. However, for the tourist, this patchwork of rather limited and vague knowledge about the Sahara represents ‘a fictional conscience that permits them to overcome their tourist condition in order to project themselves in a genealogy of heros’ (2007: 51). Some of them, when in the desert region, become committed to generating a new order with their own presence: sometimes they perform as benefactors, others as heroes carrying (a new) civilization. As a consequence, they end up distributing medications, notebooks or clothes; when back in France, at times they keep on contributing financially in order to support local schools and hospitals (Cauvin-Verner 2007: 55). In her extensive analysis of

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Figure 7.5

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Reference to Western literature (C. Minca 2012)

both the tourists’ and the guides’ behaviour on-site, Cauvin-Verner highlights how, despite all the good intentions, the tourists very often remain critical of the presumed lack of hygiene, of the street handlers and of sexual segregation; while at the same time giving credit to a set of Western orientalist stereotypes about the people of the desert. She observes as well that a romantic fever hits a large number of the travellers, influenced as they appear to be by an orientalist culture dominated by stereotypes (2007: 59): les hommes blues, the dromedaries, the palm trees, the tents . . . Some tourists also keep travel diaries, where they often indulge in philosophical considerations or in poetics. Some tour operators are becoming specialized in providing spiritual tours of the desert, including chants contemplation, in response to these impulses. Not surprisingly, these tourists often invest in the desert experience expectations in terms of physical and emotional regeneration, as expressed by the rather emphatic language used by both the tourists and the guides, a very colonial orientalist jargon: for the former, the landscape is magic; the sun light shines, travelling is an experience; for the latter, the question is often whether the tourist wants to experience it ‘like a nomad’ (2007: 61 –2, 64).

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One final point in Au de´sert is key to our main argument about this ‘Moroccan dream’: Cauvin-Verner’s analysis presents the outcome of mediatization of this experience, in that, despite the fact that the Moroccan Sahara has become today a highly trafficked, even mainstream tourist camp, many tourists conceive their randonne´e as a challenge, even potentially life-threatening (ibid.). As noted, this area of desert has been represented for nearly two centuries as a cruel and inhospitable environment. The Paris–Dakar race, which passes directly through Merzouga, was famously launched with the following slogan: ‘Un de´fi pour ceux qui partent. Du reˆve pour ceux qui restent’. [‘A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay.’] The death of its founder, Thierry Sabine, and eventually of pilot Laurent Gueguen, are celebrated with endless comments about their heroic attitude (2007: 57). In conclusion, according to Cauvin-Verner, for the contemporary Saharan traveller, it is not peopled by warriors of disturbing prestige, but the poor shepherds and professional guides who, though worn out by the caprices of tourists, struggle to uphold the metaphorical projections of their clients. (2007: 69) Nonetheless, the tourists often read the desert as a space beyond civilization, by applying a set of spatio-temporal dichotomies: void versus fullness; immensity versus narrowness; aridity versus cultivated; death versus life. In relation to this push towards transcendence, authentic penetration of the Sahara becomes a key element in the virtual hierarchy of different groups of tourists (2007: 74): a minibus pours out its clients just next to us. The two groups eye and judge each other. The guide of the newly arrived, a young Marrakchi dressed in a polyester track suit, shines in comparison to our guides appearing as authentic Bedouins. Our group praises the ethics of its excursion, on foot, like real Saharans. (2007: 41) With the significant growth of desert tourism in the Moroccan Sahara, le tourisme de de´couverte, as it is often defined – has achieved a growing importance in the eyes and in the plans of the government, but also of the local entrepreneurs, with the consequence of profoundly altering the cultural landscape of the region involved. All along the route to Merzouga, especially via the Kasbah Valley passing by Erfoud and Rissani, the road is dotted with plates and promotional material that express a literary romanticized vision of the desert, with drawings, photos, and even citations from past recit de voyage. While the tour operators and the related textual and visual material invite the tourist to get lost and find themselves again among the golden dunes, to regenerate and to look for the ‘essential’, for the truth about life in the desert, the

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Figure 7.6

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Orientalist riad in Merzouga (C. Minca 2012)

tourist workers, and in particular the guides, seem to be entirely aware of the forces at play and of the complex nature of this extraordinary movement of people coming from other countries to experience the desert. Merzouga, the dunes, le Sahara, the specific local geographies that tourism has created, even the camels, these are all sites in which colonial tropes about the desert, a growing messy but flourishing local economy, global travelling, but also ideas about culture, nature and poverty, intersect and come together producing and reproducing through repetition and endless forms of negotiation what is often described today as the experience of the desert.

Touring the dunes Face a` l’oasis de Merzouga, les dunes de l’Erg Chebbi attirent une foule internationale varie´e. Les excursions au pied de l’erg composent un curieux ballet. (CauvinVerner 2007: 13) Claudio is waiting for the driver in the hotel lobby. While surfing the internet on his laptop, a Touareg-dressed guide approaches and asks if he is visiting Morocco

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for the first time (a question asked endless times to all tourists while in Morocco). After some random reply on his part – perhaps he said that this was the tenth time, or something of that kind – the guide jokingly claims that then ‘You are Berber!’ and tries to shake his hand. (Is he making fun of Claudio or simply ‘testing the ground’?) While Claudio continues quietly surfing, showing very little interest in him, the guide approaches again by announcing that ‘the desert is silence’ – echoing in this way writers and travellers who walked the same paths in the last two centuries or so. In the meantime, three German tourists are getting ready in the lobby for their camel ride. Their own guide rolls a turban on their heads and gently jokes with them about anticipating potential risks due to sun exposure (dangerous for them as white-skinned northern Europeans) and the immensity of the desert awaiting them. With their now Touareg-esque look, the three men show a slight embarrassment when Claudio unintentionally glances at them, presumably due to his poorly masked facial expression betraying a degree of disbelief and surprise for their enthusiasm and apparent naı¨vete´. Our 4x4 is now ready for the excursion in the desert, that is, for a complete tour of the Erg Chebbi in . . . one afternoon. We are promised a visit of the key film locations – including Le Petit Prince – and of an encampment of real desert nomads. As noted, the complex Merzouga-Erg Chebbi, since the 1970s has become a key destination for desert tourism in Morocco. The Erg Chebbi represents, in visual terms, what most Europeans would expect the desert to look like. In truth, the Ergs count for no more than 20 per cent of the Sahara’s extensions, but the key question for many tourists often remains: Is this the real desert? And what about the dark, rocky flat infinity before their eyes during the last part of their trip to Merzouga? Encompassing many factors – several decades of relatively modest figures in terms of visitors, a tradition of basic and rather inexpensive accommodations, the long-standing absence of Algeria and its desert from ‘the market’, and especially the completion of a paved road from Rissani to Merzouga in 2002 – tourism development here has now begun to take a more massive approach. New investors have appeared in the past decade, together with countless hotels, targeting new and different types of tourist (as demonstrated by the appearance of swimming pools!). In a regime of open competition like the one present in Merzouga, according to Bouaouinate (2009), anarchy and deregulation are the key words, while the very sustainability of such rapid development comes into question. Environmental factors loom large, particularly in consequence of the tragic flooding of May 2005, during which a large part of the two villages (Merzouga and nearby Hassilabied) were seriously affected, making visits difficult for a while. The situation of the Erg Chebbi remains worrisome because of the impact that tourism is having on both the ecosystem and the social and cultural context (2009: 113). Merzouga is indeed experiencing the tensions and the

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paradoxes that characterize many other similar remote destinations around the globe, where the need for increased sources of income and jobs often clashes with the social life of the different generations in the nearby villages. Our driver/guide starts the tour by highlighting that there is no real road or even clear piste to follow when exploring the dunes and their surroundings. The unspoken subtitle of this opening announcement is clear: ‘You really need me to enjoy this unique environment.’ The first part of the tour is then dedicated to the cinematographic settings of Merzouga. We begin with the site where The Secret of the Sahara was filmed, where quite honestly there is not much left to see. We then move to the setting of (presumably) Marrakech Express – again to no avail, since the site is basically empty. Claudio’s normally rather vivid imagination is indeed challenged here by the complete lack of ‘remnants’ and the pretence on the part of the guide to show places that do not exist anymore and, as cinematographic locations, possibly never existed. The third stop is to see the actual airplane used for Le Petit Prince. However, when on site, very little is left of that poor aircraft, apparently because it had been demolished, piece by piece, by Spanish tourists (at least, so we are told . . .!) (see Figure 7.7).

Figure 7.7 Remnants of the aircraft used to film Le Petit Prince (C. Minca 2012)

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Tourists, before climbing the dunes, take a picture of the miniature postal plane that served during the shooting of the Saint-Exupe´ry film, though it is completely rusted and there is no explanatory sign. Still, though the Erg Chebbi region is known for its film industry, the local actors, apart from this miniature, do not keep any of the models or sets used on the productions. [T]races of the films do not resist more than two successive sandstorms. It is true that the miniature plane is completely engulfed with sand, whatever the owner does to de-sand it from time to time. Apparently, local actors have concrete responses to our suggestions to put to use their cinematographic potentials! (Bouaouinate 2009: 135) However, what makes this first part of the tour particularly interesting is the ways in which the driver/guide describes the financial impact of films, real moments of hubris for the local community, that provide for many of its members well-paid jobs and the sense of being rather worldly, of being somehow involved with the most globalized of industries. He also explains how the by now numerous rallies that every year cross and stop by in Merzouga are very important for the local economy and for the international image of the destination. Our tour now heads towards the northern end of the Erg, where we visit the Hotel Maria, famously destroyed by the 2005 flooding, and where, a few hundreds metres away, groups of tourists are getting ready to approach the dunes on their respective dromedaries: According to the interviewed camel-drivers, the tourists come to Erg Chebbi because they want to know the desert, but they want to know and travel in the desert like locals, the people of the desert, on a dromedary. ‘If a tourist doesn’t mount the back of a dromedary and doesn’t do the dune tour, it’s like he never came to Erg Chebbi!’ The camel-driver, the hotel owner or the fake guide gives this argument to convince tourists to buy a camel ride or even a tour, depending on the tourist’s time and budget. (Bouaouinate 2009: 147) Those same tourists look at us and our four-wheel-drive vehicle and show clear signs of disdain for the presence of a motorized tour. In the hierarchy of the tourist experience of the Erg Chebbi, riding a camel is thus considered normally a more authentic and genuine immersion in the environment; a bit like ‘going local’ for a day or two. Motorized vehicles are instead perceived by many as a disturbance in that natural landscape – although all the tourists clearly reach the dunes on a motorized vehicle, and most of the encampments where they spend their night ‘under the desert sky’ are indeed reachable – and reached – by vehicles:

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According to the camel-drivers, the tourists coming to Erg Chebbi search for sand, peace and escape from everything like a city. The camel-drivers give themselves authority to say that tourists appreciate sleeping under the stars and admiring the starry sky, and that they hope to see nomads, to learn how they live and how they move. They always ask questions about water and the adaptations of these people to the desert. (Bouaouinate 2009: 147) Our tour starts again, at a higher speed this time around, since there is less to see while we are passing the northern edge of the Erg Chebbi and soon turning south, facing the Algerian border. Our zooming jeep seems to show no respect or interest for the now rather dull and supposedly boring landscape – rocks and grass here and there – when, at a certain point, a kid on a donkey attracts the attentions of the driver who decides to stop, for us to be able take a photo ‘of the nomad’. He also asks the kid and the woman who is with her to stop and get ready for a photo. Moments of embarrassment follow, where Claudio tries to mumble that he is not interested in taking a picture right in the face

Figure 7.8 Family on motorbike translated into ‘ethnographic object’ along the tour (C. Minca 2012)

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of that kid-on-a-donkey. But the driver insists: ‘Do not be shy. They do not mind. They like it!’ Only a few liberating shots allow Claudio to continue this by now cultural tour of the desert – also liberating the kid from that muse´e vivant recreated on the spot for tourists passing by. (That is, us!) However, a couple of minutes later another ethnographic ‘object’ appears on the horizon. A family – father, mother and a kid – are slowly crossing the rocky desert on a motorbike in the opposite direction from us. Again, the driver turns the wheel towards them and forces them to stop for us to enjoy another wonderful moment of mutual embarrassment. Both the family and us look at each other, waiting for the right thing to be finally done, so that we could all move on. The hard work of being a tourist! The hard work of being a researcher in disguise! With a clear mapping of the tourist ethnographic mind, the driver now leads us towards new exciting contact zones with the cultures and the peoples of the desert. First, we encounter a couple of isolated encampments, with nobody around. But after a few kilometres, we finally find a small agglomerate of tents populated by a couple of women and a crowd of very young kids. This soon becomes the most difficult moment of the entire trip. Their living conditions appear as extremely poor and they seem to suffer the arrogant attitude of the guide/driver, clearly used to his visit – and to the visit of many others, every day. The tour-of-the-nomad-camp starts with him offering us to take close-up pictures of the ‘nomads’ and continues with the possibility of having a tea prepared by them, but, especially, and here things get really unpleasant, by his proposed incursion-cum-photo of the interior of the tents. The women seem to be entirely passive – they act as if they were part of a strange predetermined choreography; the atmosphere feels thick, or at least this is our impression. The driver then explains that, despite the fact that these families look very poor, in fact, they are just nomads, and they live there because ‘they like to live with nature, in the wind, to enjoy the freedom afforded by their mobile life-style’; he also jokingly insists that they are lucky enough not to be worried about paying bills, taxes and the like! The situation is now genuinely unbearable. We refuse to enter the tents, we drop a few coins to the women who were clearly expecting them, and we ask the driver to move on. He is now visibly disappointed, since he finally perceives our unease, but he cannot make sense of it, and this – we will learn much later – may indeed compromise the final tip. After a stop at the ghost village used as a backstage by another famous French film, Mou Mou, we initiate an exhilarating gymkhana among the dunes with the roaring four-wheel-drive, something that resembles a homemade rally for dummies. The acrobatic tour would potentially be exciting if not for the plants and animals that we destroy or disturb – Claudio, indeed, spots a desert fox terrified by the speeding jeep. The sun begins its declining trajectory and the driver starts anxiously looking for a good spot for us to take a final picture of

Figure 7.9

‘Ethnographic’ visit of nomad tent (C. Minca 2012)

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the desert landscape. We climb a small panoramic dune and, there, we are instructed on how to get the best perspective of the landscape at that time of the day. Incidentally, we also spot a tourist ‘bivouac’ among the dunes and ask him to visit it. After he reluctantly allows us to do so, we realize that the encampment staff are working on the hi-fi system and are unloading food and drinks from a truck! The players are getting the stage ready and the cooks are cutting the vegetables for another couscous special dinner. What a wonderful glance of a perfectly Goffmanian backstage! The Erg is a park! The Erg is a tourist island! The final part of the tour silently takes us to the main road, the dunes disappearing in the darkness, the magic of the desert and its colours fading away, the first houses at the margins of Merzouga, some garbage here and there, an abandoned car skeleton – all signs of our sudden return to peripheral modernities. The driver, clearly confused if not deluded by the scarce enthusiasm showed for all the photo perspectives he provided us with, drops us at the hotel with no further comments, only to change his attitude again when Claudio hands him a generous tip for the effort and engagement. A few final, general considerations are here in order. Claudio has been visiting and working on/in Merzouga for more than a decade by now. During this period the Erg Chebbi continued to be represented as the ultimate desert destination in Morocco, and for good reasons. The astonishing beauty of the dunes is something truly unique. However, Merzouga has changed a great deal with the turn of the century. Especially since 2002, hotels, shops and tourist agencies have proliferated at an amazing rate. These activities have been accompanied by the appearance of new tourist kasbahs, new riads, new Berber shops (some with signs in Japanese), even new rural NGOs advertised for the tourist. The camel ride has become a ‘must do’ for the large majority of the visitors, with a constant increase in the dromedary population. The financial crisis and the deadly terrorist attack in Marrakech in 2011 do not seem to have affected European interest for the desert experience in southern Morocco. Entering Merzouga today, one is approached, sometimes aggressively, by a crowd of Touareg-dressed faux guides; the same happens, all the time, in the main square. It has become rather unpleasant to walk or even drive around Merzouga, since one is constantly harassed by people offering their presumed expertise. If rejected or ignored, the ‘guides’ sometimes turn against the visitor, by claiming, for example, that they do not behave like an Italian (in Claudio’s case), or a German, or a Spaniard, etc. The magic of the desert and the possibility of actually experiencing it are most often framed in very cinematographic terms. Cinematographic images and actual filming have been accompanying Claudio’s travels to southern Morocco all the time. Everything, from the accommodation, to the tourists’ and the guides’ costumes, to the organization of the tours, seem to be performed as if it

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was a film set of sorts. Filming and the cinema are mentioned very often in conversations with the local people in contact with the tourists. It is not entirely clear, however, if this reference to the cinematographic desert is just a postcolonial cultural formation or, also, a paradoxical way to link the place to ‘the modern world’ and its codes. Yet beyond this cinematographic history, the colonial travel literature and its mantras seem to have been entirely appropriated by the rhetoric of the tourism workers in Merzouga, and to have become the language used to approach and attract the tourist. While walking among the dunes early in the morning during his fieldwork period Claudio encountered many tourists who spent the night just outside the village, at times even outdoors, in a sleeping bag ‘under the desert sky’. The guides constantly insist on the fact that many tourists come to the desert ‘to meditate’, to ‘find themselves’ in the solitude of the Sahara, to gaze at a greater space, at the bright stars in those dark nights. When one observes the preparation of the tourists for the camel rides, their somewhat deliberate self-ironic attitude, the equally semi-serious posture and comments of the guides, the temptation to believe that a bizarre mise-en-sce`ne is taking place before that imposing agglomeration of dunes is very strong. But transcendence is discursively part of this Moroccan Sahara, and every night tourists achieve a measure of spirituality from their encounter with the sky and landscape, with or without guidance from the ‘locals’. Be that as it may, this unique game of being in the desert now attracts a growing flow of people, creates many formal and informal jobs, and mobilizes a local economy increasingly centred on the presence of this tourist formation. In the past decade or so some Europeans have become new residents – like in many other Moroccan cities. New investment continues, despite the flooding and the financial crisis. An entire new cultural and social geography of these villages is driven by the presence of the dunes and the camel industry. Everything seems to rotate around the Erg Chebbi, elected to geographical icon, to become the concrete presence of a specific, sandy idea of the Sahara. This is another ‘Moroccan dream’, a dream of sand and (supposedly) silence, a dream contained within the limited spaces of this island of dunes, but perceived by many as a limitless horizon. Every decent map could provide this sense of the limit; nonetheless, when faced with the magic of the dunes, the tourist, a novel explorer, seems to embrace a colonial and exotic understanding of the desert as an infinite space of freedom, silence, a space waiting to be filled up with (postcolonial) meaning. The Erg Chebbi is a sandy island in a sea of rocky desert. Its borders are very clear and visible, marked by the very beginning of the dunes. For those who work there, on its ‘beaches’ – that is, its bordering points of access – it is equally clear that precisely along those ‘shores’ a sort of ‘coastal economy’ has taken shape,

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fundamentally structured around the camel/dromedary experience. The ‘ports’ of these tourist spatialities are the points where the tourists are accommodated, grouped and prepared for the excursions. The somewhat limited dimension of this natural cluster of dunes makes the very geography of the tourist routes across the Erg relatively safe and manageable. Again, seen from above, it looks like an island, a playground in the desert. However, in order to attract ever new tourists, two key elements must be present and unquestioned: first, that the desert remains, in the mind of the visitors, a mysterious environment, and an infinite space of sorts, with an open horizon, in line with the colonial tropes about the Sahara; second, that the tourists never have the feeling of ‘the containment’ that the very limits of this sandy island allows to the people organizing their hospitality. The Erg, to function in the tourist machinery, must be managed as a park, but presented and perceived by the visitor as an endless, open, greater kind of space. The guides, and all the other people involved in this business, seem to be entirely aware of the importance of these two elements, and do whatever they can to keep them in place. This somehow explains their insistence on sentences like ‘The desert is silence’ or ‘Do you want to live like a nomad?’, sentences that accompany the tourist experience from its inception to the end. Like a commedia dell’arte, the desert experience in Merzouga employs its rituals and its postcolonial codes. These rituals, for example, involved the German tourists in our hotel being prepared hours in advance for their excursion on a camel and constantly addressed by the guides and the cameleers with tourist platitudes about the desert, in order to generate a sense of anticipation, to stimulate the excitement of penetrating the presumed secrets of the Sahara. However, in practice, the guides do the same thing practically every day; the tours follow well beaten tracks. Their colleagues, including the players and the singers, wait for the tourists’ arrival in the encampments; others prepare the food and everything that is necessary for the evening show, which will stage a performance of nomad life for the eager spectator. Every night, when the tourist comes, a new-to-them cultural event is re-enacted as if it were unique. Repetition and recognition is the rule of tourism, even in the desert. Erg Chebbi, after all, may legitimately be a theme park of sorts. These activities and repetitions make it a tourist park, around which a growing local and increasingly regional industry gravitates and flourishes, an industry based on a very specific, cinematographic idea of the Sahara, and an equally specific modality of experiencing the desert. Again, the extraordinary appeal of this natural congregation of golden dunes is beyond question. The ways in which the desert is ‘lived’ by the visitors – and now an increasing number of residents – however, responds to a logic produced, in the form of a powerful discursive formation, during the colonial day; a logic that, in a curiously postcolonial interpretation, seems to rely on a somewhat ironic recovery of the main colonial

Figure 7.10

Tourists climbing dunes in the heat (C. Minca 2012)

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tropes about the Sahara, and on the real possibility – although a protected, selected, and spatially and temporally partial possibility – of experiencing the desert, ‘like a nomad’: a kind of geographical European dream, the material realization of an ideal projection on a space that must be, by definition, perceived as immutable and with no limit or border.

CHAPTER 8 MOGADOR

Essaouira or Mogador as it was once called, is one of the most famous little places in Morocco. Orson Welles came here when he needed a location for Othello, and centuries earlier the Portuguese captured the town in an attempt to dominate Atlantic trade . . . even today, Essaouira . . . is unchanged since the time when it was a Portuguese stronghold . . . the cavalry no longer exercise in the village square, but the markets still exist and, judging from the myriad potions, powders, ointments, baskets, produce, woodwork, handcraft and fresh fish on offer, little else has changed. (Ypma 2010: 17, italics added)

Villa Maroc While having breakfast on the wonderful patio of Villa Maroc, Claudio reads again the celebratory notes about this hotel penned by art critic Herbert Ypma in his Morocco Modern (2010). The first time he read them – and saw the related pictures – he was in Amsterdam, at home, during a rainy and dark winter afternoon. While immersed in his reading surrounded by that rather depressing atmosphere, he was trying to make sense of the Moroccan chic atmospheres proposed by the book, where colours and bright lights were the rule, and to resist the temptation either to reject the book altogether – as a rather banal piece of orientalist propaganda – or actually to start thinking how enjoyable it would have been to read (and write) about Essaouira and Morocco while sipping a the´ a` la menthe chez Villa Maroc. And here he is now, in Essaouira, writing these very notes, on a glorious sunny September morning, while deeply breathing in his own poststructuralist version of the ‘Moroccan dream’: Villa Maroc is to be found at the heart of a world described by James Richardson in his travels in Morocco, 1860 . . . the secret of the villa Maroc’s

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success may be that it provides what can best be described as a ‘comfortable cliche´’. All the aspects of what one would expect from Morocco are here: strong saturated colours . . . Moroccan traditions such as the´ a` la menthe; beautiful, vivid examples of handcraft, such as rugs, tiles and woodwork . . . there are no give-away faux pas such as mini-bars, air conditioners or shaver points. For the first time visitor, the Villa Maroc provides an excellent introduction to the colour, craft, and style of Morocco . . . History is, literally, all around you. This is probably also one of the reasons why Essaouira’s Villa Maroc is such a popular place to stay . . . (Ypma 2010: 17–18) While this may sound like rather cheap culture for the masses in search of a new orientalist aesthetics to consume, we do believe that Villa Maroc is not only a very beautiful place but also much more. In many ways it is a perfect site to start our complicated exploration of Essaouira-Mogador, the once Portuguese port fortress that has experienced in the past decades an extraordinary set of changes, somehow related to the increasing sophistication and articulation of tourism in Morocco: Essaouira-Mogador is in fact also a site of renewed interest by national, and especially international, investors in places like this maritime town. Essaouira is where the fish served in many restaurants around Morocco is caught, sold and distributed every morning, giving life to a spectacular but not yet (too) spectacularized fish market. Essaouira is also the place of traditional music and art crafts, available just about everywhere in the gentrified and veryeasy-to-access medina. Essaouira, white and blue, very Mediterranean in her outlook, the beach for the surfers, the new spa destination, the airy alternative to crowded and dusty Marrakech. Villa Maroc is an astonishingly beautiful riad in the heart of the medina, once used by surfers and now a sophisticated laboratory for experimenting in state of the art Moroccan chic. The key ‘colours of Morocco’ are all there, including the blatant reference to la Majorelle blue, well known by glossy magazines readers for its Marrakech villa now owned by Yves Saint Laurent and converted into a garden museum. Colonial hints are placed in several corners of the impressive buildings that compose Villa Maroc (formerly four private houses), while the original de´cor of a bourgeois family house in the old city is maintained with a set of low key, tasteful details. This complex is thus an important starting point for Claudio’s auto-ethnographic account of this port city, since in many ways it represents a combination of a cutting edge museumlike boutique hotel – it includes indeed its own gentrified boutique – and an oasis of peaceful distinction. In other words, it becomes an essentialized version of some of the shops selling all sorts of local products in the style of The Body Shop a` la marocaine, in a city that perhaps for too long has conceded space to

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The Kasbah, seen from the port on a busy morning (C. Minca 2012)

massified developments, tacky souvenir shops, drug dealers, and wanna-be traditional restaurants. Villa Maroc is, in many ways, the material exemplification of what ‘EssaouiraMogador’ (or its new elites) is moving towards today and in the near future. The hotel embodies an elegant, gentrified, postmodern ‘traditional’ destination, increasingly populated by Europeans eager to live in restored mansions, where ‘the best of Morocco’ can be appreciated in a relaxed and protected fashion. It becomes something between travelling in time and through space, in line with the overall rhetoric that accompanies many promotions of traditional sites in Morocco, and a contemporary state of the art travel experience – including, of course, an efficient wireless internet access (advertised by all traditional riads), that allows those very travellers to feel at home and to enjoy their local immersions while remaining ‘connected’. In this somewhat anachronistic sense, Villa Maroc is perhaps a contemporary Mogador, a European orientalist journey through time in the heart of Essaouira, taking the ‘Moroccan dream’ very seriously. Before starting his walks throughout the city with a guidebook in his hands, Claudio finds himself repeatedly torn between going and actually staying. Out there, Mogador suddenly disappears. Essaouira-in-five-days, as proposed by some guidebooks, including the one with which we will toy a bit in the coming sections, is a pale replica of the ‘Moroccan dream’ recreated inside. Again, Essaouira, out there, the town where people

Figure 8.2

Villa Maroc. Entrance (C. Minca 2012)

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Figure 8.3

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Villa Maroc, dining room (C. Minca 2012)

actually work and live, including those people busy capitalizing on the Mogador idea and making a living out of it, promises to be a complicated business to translate into our own set of representations, especially after having been embraced by the magic of Villa Maroc. Villa Maroc becomes the most apt location from which to set the Mogador experience of the dream: the ‘real’ city soon becomes, especially after the wonderful breakfast enjoyed ‘inside the villa’, a challenge to the simplified and hard-to-believe interpretations provided by the tourist accounts of this fascinating (post)modern and (post)colonial place, au Maroc.

Mogador A city marked by a unique and important history, Essaouira enjoys a moderate Mediterranean climate and a protected harbour thanks to the presence of the socalled ‘Purple Islands’ that provide a sort of natural barrier to the bay. Because of this favourable condition and its relative proximity to Marrakech (175 km) and Agadir (150 km) its location became a safe haven for many seafarers in past ages and a key point of trade routes between Africa and rest of the world. Known as Mogador by the Europeans, identified as Amogdoul by Arab geographers – both names deriving from the saint dedicated to the city – it officially became Essaouira in 1957, in the immediate aftermath of the proclamation of independence (Ottmani 1997: 11). According to Bauer et al. (2006: note 1) the

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name ‘Essaouira’ is based on the Arabic word es-Saouira, which means ‘the fortified place’. Having been established as an important trading base for Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century, King Manuel ordered a fortress to be built at the entrance to the port – still visible in part today – while a large number of Portuguese moved to the new trading post, also attracted to the sugar cane plantation in the region and the availability of slave labour from Senegal (ibid.: 28). But the real foundation of modern Mogador, in the shape that we see it still today, is dated between 1760 and 1764, after the decision of Sultan Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah to create from scratch a new port open to the increasingly important foreign trade (Ottmani 1997: 99). Several sources refer to this move as a crucial passage in the history of Morocco, sanctioning the country’s growing dependence on international activities, often controlled by foreigners and foreign powers (see, among others, Schroeter 1988; also Ottmani 1997). According to historian Daniel Schroeter (1988: 1), the town was founded by the Sultan to serve as a royal port, a protected base where all the trade with Europe could be conducted, while containing the influence of the European powers of the day and the social and political consequences of the growing volume of trade. This explains also the choice of the location, since these activities, in the plans of the Sultan, were to be developed in relative isolation in a period in which foreigners were not permitted to access interior markets.

Figure 8.4

Castel Real in Essaouira-Mogador (C. Minca 2012)

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Some sources, still accredited today in popular accounts about Essaouira and its history, identify a Frenchman, Theodore Cournut, as the designer/planner of the new town. Cournut had apparently previously been employed by Louis XV for the fortification of Roussillon. However, Schroeter (1988: 9) argues that Cournut is absent for Arabic sources and their accounts of the memorable event: ‘It is plausible that a plan for Essaouira was drawn up by Cournut, but according to tradition, he was dismissed and the work completed by Genoese renegades.’ Be that as it may, the city was planned as a modern grid ready to host Arabs, Berbers, Jews and representatives of European merchant organizations, who were promised tax breaks by the Sultan as long as they settled in the town. Mohammed Ben Abdallah in particular invited Jewish merchants and jewellers to move there in order to profit from their trade connections and offered them personal protection and diverse trading monopolies (see Schroeter 1981 –2; also Bauer et al. 2006). While Mogador was established as an Islamic city, the most active component of its newly established population was indeed made up of Jewish merchants (soon accounting for 30– 40 per cent of the population), in many cases coming from the Italian city of Livorno (Schroeter 1988: 15). This allowed the Moroccan port to be rapidly connected to a network of international traders and commercial cities, including London and Amsterdam, while foreign and Moroccan-Jewish royal merchants were provided with special separate quarters in the kasbah. The creation of this new port town, planned according to new principles of urban development, was seen by the chronicles of Moroccan dynastic history as one of the major achievements of the Sultan (ibid.: 7). Within a decade of its foundation Mogador was already the most important seaport of Morocco, a position that it would maintain for about a century, from the 1770s through the 1870s. For Schroeter, the period 1844 –1886 is to be considered the heyday of the town as an international port. These two dates mark crucial events in Moroccan history and in the life of the city . . . In 1844 the town was bombarded by the French fleet, a punitive operation to deter Morocco from further involvement with the Algerian resistance movement. (1988: xi) Historians have identified the bombardment of Mogador in the early afternoon of 15 August 1844 as a highly significant turning point in the modern history of Morocco, an event marking the very beginning of foreign domination over the country. The treaty with Great Britain in 1856, signed in order ‘to open’ Morocco to free international trade, and the Spanish invasion of Tetouan three years later, determined an entire new relationship between the Moroccan Muslim authorities and the European powers – and their prote´ge´s (ibid.: 117; see also Chapter 2).

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Until the end of the nineteenth century, Mogador remained the most important trade port and largest shipment centre in Morocco. According to Bauer et al. (2006, 25), the city was also called the ‘port of Timbuktu’, because the large caravans crossing the Sahara from Timbuktu ended there. Important trade partners like Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Brazil built consulates there, thus highlighting the significance of their trade relations (see also Ross et al. 2002). This unique history, coupled with the presence of foreigners, helped in creating a cosmopolitan urban environment that today’s prominent Souiris often link to the cultural and religious tolerance that has traditionally characterized the city and in their view that still characterizes it. However, with the French occupation of western Sudan in the 1880s, the transcontinental trade routes soon moved eastward and the city’s importance began to decline rather sharply. The final death blow to Essaouira’s maritime economy came, however, with the rise of steamships and the overall policies of the Protectorate, implemented in the region from 1912 to 1956 (Bauer et al. 2006: 25). Mare´chal Lyautey, in fact, had no particular plans for this city in the new geography of French Morocco. Despite a relative expansion of its port facilities, its difficult entryway could not compete with the other coastal centres, including Casablanca, Safi, Agadir and newly founded Port Lyautey (now Kenitra). Ross et al. (2002) report that while its fishing fleet continued to supply the local market, and an industrial quarter with flourmills, fish canneries and leather tanneries was created outside the old city, Mogador stopped attracting important new investments. In addition, the city was not included in the new railway network built by the colonial authorities, and thus became effectively disconnected from increasing trade with Marrakech, its main raison d’eˆtre in the first place. One of the consequences of the decline under the Protectorate was the departure of its economic elite, directed towards the major cities (see Park 1988). The French, however, intervened in a selective way in the medina, but with an approach very different from the one adopted elsewhere in Morocco: [A]fter modernizing the port installations, they demolished the Royal Palace which had occupied that part of the casbah nearer the port, and in what is now Place Moulay Hassan they established a number of colonial institutions. Elsewhere they were built outside of the medina, but not here. Here the ville nouvelle instead remained only embryonic during the Protectorate. (Ross et al. 2002: 28) This unusual – under French rule – urban development paradoxically created the conditions which now make this city so attractive and, in the Moroccan context, rather unique. While most of its historical buildings were kept in rather

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poor conditions, at the same time the lack of major development left the structure of the medina relatively unchanged and ready to be valorized by the cultural tourists who would arrive, in different waves and modalities, after the return of the country to independence. This somewhat decadent atmosphere, matched by the traces of a cosmopolitan legacy typical of a port city of this nature, are indeed important components of the fascination for Essaouira displayed by those new tourists in the last decades who have elected this Atlantic town as a very attractive destination. Historically, the first tourists had arrived in Mogador already in the 1880s: British travellers on their way to the Canaries (Me´nard 2005). During the same period Mogador was recommended by the very first tourist guidebooks to Morocco, in one case listed among the Mediterranean Winter Resorts (ibid.: 157). As part of their colonization of southern Morocco, a few weeks after occupying Marrakech in September 1912, the French sent their troops, led by Colonel Mangin, to Mogador (ibid.: 173). In his Histoire d’un destin singulier, Captain Cornet, travelling as part of Mangin’s military expedition, places great emphasis on the presence of argan trees in the region. International visitors of the day are indeed fascinated by the favourable climate and the decadent beauty of the city; these include Edmond Doutte´ (1914, in Me´nard 2005: 190), who, during his ethnographic and geographical research in the region, insists on the particularly attractive climatic conditions: Completely the opposite of Safi, Mogador is unaware of the hot winds and feels nothing but the trade winds, so that summer is unknown there and that one could say Mogador and its region are a ‘Moroccan Riviera’ . . . Drowsy Mogador has become a holiday city. A triple ring of cabins circles the beach. A joyous crowd invades during the summer, fleeing the heat of the interior. Though, out of season, the city returns to its charm of an anachronistic city fixed in its historical frame; the enthusiasm softens. The humid breeze, the constant softness of its climate leans towards laziness . . . (1914, in Me´nard 2005, 189–90) Mogador is also celebrated by Comte de Pe´rigny, who ‘discovered’ it 1917: it is essential to create as soon as possible an establishment that is not, like these, completely second order, susceptible to retain the travellers attracted to Mogador by the charm of its picturesqueness and above all its gentle climate, the uniformity of its temperature, the calm of its easy and peaceful life . . . (Pe´rigny 1918: 46, in Me´nard 2005: 188) These favourable natural conditions, together with the remnants of its prestigious history, have thus prepared the conditions for an urban renaissance

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of a city otherwise destined to irreversible decline. After several decades of severe stagnation and economic marginality, Mogador, re-named Essaouira after the end of French rule, began to attract a growing number of international tourists, first for its decadent atmosphere and as part of the ‘hippie global trail’, and then for its favourable windsurfing conditions, but also for its art and music, and, more generally, a unique cultural atmosphere. Essaouira today is a key tourist destination for Morocco, included in the government’s Plan Azur 2010, aimed at developing five coastal tourist centres capable of attracting and hosting thousands of new vacationers, a plan supported by King Mohammed VI (Hoare 2008). Through this conversion from a declining local fishing port to prestigious international tourist resort, today included in the new European desire to experiment with the Moroccan chic in situ, we explore how Mogador can resurface as a ‘Moroccan dream’.

Essaouira The laid-back attitude, plum accommodation, artsy atmosphere, bracing sea breezes and picture-postcard ramparts make Essaouira a firm favourite on the traveller’s trail. It’s the kind of place where you’ll sigh deeply and relax enough to shrug off your guarded attitude and just soak up the atmosphere. (Lonely Planet 2008) As noted, Essaouira’s decline both before and after the Protectorate is what made this place potentially appealing to new European travellers after independence. In the past decades, in fact, more and more Europeans have rediscovered the city, which has become a destination for Moroccan families as well. A sort of parallel, coexisting dual identity of Essaouira-Mogador thus emerges and consolidates, with the first reflecting a ‘real’ Moroccan city in its complicated developments within the reshaping economic and urban geographies of the new Morocco, and the second becoming a brand image for the European gaze looking for accessible exotic oriental diversity. Since the 1960s, in fact, these two identities have intermingled in interesting ways, with Essaouira being the functional basis for the romantic explorations of a re-emerging ‘Mogador’ spirit on the part of different generations of European visitors. Recent tourism developments in Essaouira are officially based on three main factors of attraction, all three influential in making the city what it has become today: ‘arts’ (painting, art galleries), ‘culture’ (Gnawa music and culture) and ‘sports’ (mainly windsurfing). This type of activity-focused tourism is different from what is found in most of Morocco. Essaouira in fact appeals to tourists who prefer individual travel or small groups, and who want to get away from the mass tourism ‘package deal’ common to other Moroccan cities. According to Ross et al.

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(2002: 9), the elites that decided to promote the city have found a formula that has worked beyond their expectations. The recent boom in tourism, for them, has highlighted both the positive and negative aspects of these economic activities for the city and has become a good example of how tourism can trigger the revitalization of dilapidated traditional urban space. To explore these dynamics, we outline the recent historical emergence of this binary spirit into a singular destination, detailing how the particular iterations of music and art (as well as sport and the outdoors) encountered along the way are part of the Essaouira-Mogador of the contemporary visitor.

Trails In 1960s and 1970s the city became a hotspot of the global hippie trail, thanks to the presence of stars like Jimmy Hendrix and Cat Stevens, who sought inspiration by dwelling in the medina or in the nearby coastal village of Diabat. Their very presence was widely publicized and had an important role in attracting more and more artists to Essaouira (or perhaps should we say Mogador?); but part of this new international visibility was also due to the relative popularity of the town as a film location. Anyone visiting Essaouira today is informed that in 1952 film director Orson Welles produced Othello there, with the medina and its walls as a backdrop. To celebrate this event, one of its public squares has been named after him, another after the fictional character Desdemona (Othello’s wife), together with many art galleries and restaurants that often make reference to this event (Ross et al. 2002). Essaouira has been a favourable location for other films, including Courrier Sud, realized by Saint-Exupe´ry back in 1936 or L’appel du silence, inspired by the life and the travels of Charles de Foucauld (Damgaard 2007: 40). Here, Fernandel has played scenes of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (Becker 1954) and in 1967 Pier Paolo Pasolini directed his prestigious Oedipus Rex (Linou 2008: 22). The presence of a trendy hippie culture in town, matched by its increased cinematographic exposure, have thus contributed to a specific Essaouira counterculture, whose legacy will remain somehow present in a series of specificities that make this city today a key destination for cultural tourism in Morocco. In particular, several accounts report how the presence of a temporary but very visible community of so-called ‘children of flowers’, seeking alternative lifestyles and particularly interested in spending time or even dwelling in the decaying buildings of the medina, have become a constitutive element of the international cultural scene of the city (see, among others, Damgaard 2007; Ross et al. 2002). They are sometimes known specifically for their blatant violation of the moral and religious values of the other residents, with the widespread use of drugs, alcohol and explicit sexual freedom (see Bauer et al. 2006: 31). Bauer et al. (2006) claim that, at the height of the hippie movement, the Arab residents began to resent foreigners so much for their behaviour that it became

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Reference to Jimmy Hendrix, Riad Al Madina (C. Minca 2012)

necessary to recommend that visitors curb certain activities that might be perceived as offensive to the traditional way of living of the majority of the residents. But despite, or perhaps also thanks to, this controversial but important Western influence, the city, while remaining economically rather marginal in the national context until the 1990s, has since experienced a sort of new golden age due to the rapid growth of tourism. Most literature on Essaouira attributes this revival to a group of Moroccan key players, mostly but not exclusively part of a network of very proactive diasporic Souiris, who, starting from the 1990s, invested in the city’s historic old town and its overall image, and consequently promoted it as a cultural product nationally and internationally. These local elites founded the Association for the Preservation of the City of Essaouira during the same period, as an engine for renewed interest in supporting a renaissance of the city. In the light of the new tourist developments in Morocco and Europe, this purposeful initiative helped to create a particular momentum for the economic and cultural life of Essaouira, and managed to put the city on the map of the new ‘Maroc utile’ – to borrow Lyautey’s phrase – at the turn of the century. The official aim of the association was in fact to revive the town from its long slumber and to make it interesting for an international audience (Bauer et al. 2006: 29). In addition to promoting the city, the association began organizing a variety of cultural events, such as readings, concerts, theatrical performances cinema shows and workshops (ibid.; see also Ross et al. 2002).

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Music, the Gnawa effect Essaouira is also well known today for its music festival and for the presence of the Gnawa and their artistic syncretism, another complicated legacy of the hippie counterculture. The tourist propaganda often claims that, with the art of their music, the Gnawa – who are descendants of slaves from Sudan, Senegal and Guinea brought there by the Portuguese to work in the sugar plantations – shape the cultural landscape of the town today. Historical accounts report that at the end of the seventeenth century an important contingent of black Africans was brought to Morocco as slaves, and used also for the realization of the Castel Real. More black people from Sudan were imported in order to help the construction of the very city of Mogador in the 1760s. These people, with their art and music, were contaminated by the Berber lands of the Haha that they crossed in order to get to Mogador, or at least so claims the popular literature on the topic (Damgaard 2007: 57 –8). According to most accounts, after having dominated the musical spirit of the city for a long while, the Gnawa were ‘discovered’ by international music stars – and the related industry – during the hippie period. This is the time during which artists like Cat Stevens and Jimmy Hendrix were hanging out in the town and in the surroundings. Hendrix, in particular, who spent years in the nearby douar of Diabat, is presumed to have been influenced by the Gnawa’s ‘trance music’. Also the Rolling Stones and many others claimed in those years to have been influenced by the local music. A fusion of Essaouira music penetrated the context of the free jazz of American musician expatriates living in Tangier, such as Randy Weston, Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman (see Ross et al. 2002: 38). The so-called lilas, evening and nocturnal ceremonies, during which guests are put in a trance-like state as a result of intoxicants, music and dancing, became popular among some of these acolytes (Bauer et al. 2006). The first Festival de la culture des Gnaoua took place on 5– 8 June 1998, and apparently was attended by about 20– 30,000 people (Damgaard 2007: 61). The 2001 festival attracted, according to the organizers, more than 200,000 visitors, although the Gnawa protested that, from that year onwards, the event had become something completely different from its original inception, and had been entirely taken away from them. It is by by no coincidence, perhaps, that the event was renamed World Music Festival and the role played by the Gnawa in it significantly reduced, if not marginalized. Today it is called Festival Gnaoua et des Musiques du Monde d’Essaouira (Festival Gnaoua 2013) and normally takes places during the third week of June, attracting a truly international audience and representing a very important economic event for the city. The tourist comes to Essaouira to experience the Gnawa and their culture, but according to the Gnawa’s representatives there is little left now, after the globalization (read commodification) of their main cultural manifestations on the part of the organizers of Essaouira, city of culture.

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Patrimoine This renaissance was prepared and sparked by a series of concomitant events and by the growing international interest, in the preceding decades, in the unique culture of this coastal city. Ross et al. (2002: 31), for example, in their Assessing Tourism in Essaouira, recall a burst of publishing on Essaouira’s history, with American scholars Thomas Park and Daniel Schroeter both completing their doctoral dissertations on the history of this city in 1979 –80, while in that same period National Geographic Magazine dedicated an article to the Souiri Jewish merchant family Afirat. However, in their reconstruction, the key person in this new phase of growth for Essaouira was Andre Azoulay, an adviser to the king and an initiator of the Essaouira-Mogador Association, considered by many the primary mover of the recent tourism boom (see also Bauer et al. 2006). Another key figure in that context, for Ross et al., was Governor Belchadi, who promoted, among many other things, the activities of several NGOs, the Gnawa Festival, and the building of windsurfing facilities. At the same time, so goes Ross et al.’s account, another key event for the new international visibility of the city was the publication in 1999 of Essaouira Mogador, parfums d’enfance, co-authored by three Jewish women from Essaouira – Katia Azoulay, Elsa Rosilio, and Re´gine Sibony (2006) – a book whose distribution impacted the promotion of the city in Europe. This rather celebratory reconstruction of the key factors that allowed this formerly diasporic elite to invest in the city and to re-launch its tourist significance, continues with many other examples – like the ‘Week of Essaouira Culture’ organized in Casablanca in 1996 or the operations of two important NGOs in the mid-1990s: Localizing Agenda 21 (UN-Habitat 2013) and ENDA-Maghreb (2013), focused on bringing a new vision of development to Essaouira, and, among other things, on promoting ‘good urban governance’, and awareness for environmental issues, including ecotourism (Ross et al. 2002: 34). One of the most significant consequences of these new trends was the arrival of European investors in the 1990s, who identified potential in a series of key buildings and began refurbishing and converting them to new uses (Bauer et al. 2006: 29). This new interest went hand in hand with the broader trend of ex-pats buying a house or business in Morocco, which had first emerged in Marrakech and then, some time later, extended to Essaouira (Escher et al. 2001). Although Essaouira was regarded already some years ago as a potential tourist hotspot and an alternative to Marrakech, it really became the focus of investors’ attentions after its official designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 11 December 2001: Criterion (ii): Essaouira is an outstanding and well preserved example of a mid-eighteenth century fortified seaport town, with a strong European influence translated to a North African context.

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Place Moulay Hassan, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

Criterion (iv): With the opening of Morocco to the rest of the world at the end of the seventeenth century, the Medina of Essaouira was laid out by a French architect who had been profoundly influenced by the work of the military engineer Vauban at Saint Malo. For the most part, it has retained its appearance of a European town. Integrity: Already completed by the nineteenth century and clearly defined by its ramparts, the Medina of Essaouira possesses all the essential components for its integrity. Comprising a harmonious ensemble associated with natural elements (Mogador Archipelago) and high quality cultural elements, the town today retains its integrity and its original distinctive style. Despite its integrity being slightly altered, notably due to degradation of buildings in the Mellah district, the degree of loss does not compromise the significance of the property as a whole. Authenticity: Founded in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Medina of Essaouira has for the most part conserved its authenticity as regards the conception and outline as well as the materials (use of local stone called manjour) and construction methods, and this in spite of some inadequate use of modern materials for repair and reconstruction work. Notwithstanding the sea swell and dampness elsewhere, the fortifications and urban fabric conserve, on the whole, their original configuration. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2013b)

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Notably, what is highlighted in this description is not Essaouira as an authentically ‘Moroccan’ town, but its cosmopolitan, European architects combined with the use of local materials – its European envisioning on Moroccan soil. According to Bauer et al. (2006: 29), with that nomination, Essaouira attained a seal of approval from a global institution and had become a global asset. Several other sources, normally inclined to critically support the new trends, highlight how in this process a strong and direct involvement of an economically relevant elite – that is, affluent members of the Essaouira diaspora – was, and remains, crucial in bringing business networks, entrepreneurial culture, and a new political vision to the city and its regeneration, also capable of attracting foreign investors (on this see, again, Bauer et al. 2006)). While most of these accounts seem to be very much in line with the culture of that very same elite, at the same time it is interesting to learn how the impact of a specific group of people, well connected nationally and internationally, is often identified as key to the emerging of a renewed version of Essaouira-Mogador; only an enlightened elite, so runs the argument, has the capacity of intercepting other more general trends concerning the contemporary European interest for Morocco and global cultural tourism coming from the global North. Our inference is that such an elite was needed to find the appropriate paths and language to speak to a specific European understanding of Moroccan culture and its spatialities, in line with the tenets of the ‘Moroccan dreams’ – this time in a maritime and cosmopolitan version.

Art and culture Cosmopolitan Essaouira is not only a city of culture but also a ville d’artistes, a slogan often adopted to celebrate the brand image for its cultural tourism ambitions (Damgaard 2007: 21). The hippies brought to Essaouira a new form of art called living theatre, which included both performance and visual arts (ibid.: 40). This movement seems to have started with Georges Lapassade, the French sociologist who famously described Essaouira as a ‘carrefour culturel et ethnique’ and who at the end of the 1960s visited the city accompanied by Julian Beck, the founder together with Judith Malina of the living theatre. They connected art to the psychedelic style that decorated the most known hippie hotel there, the Riad Al Madina (ibid.: 37) the living theater, which combined elements of stage and visual arts, and the psychedelic paintings with which hippies decorated the walls of their rooms would serve as an important inspiration for the first major Souiri style of painting, the Tribal or Gnawa style now closely associated with the culture of the city. (Ross et al. 2002: 30)

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A form of supernatural surrealism of African origin is thus ‘discovered’ as part of the culture of the city, and opens the field to new forms of art expression, often with a strong surrealist imprint. Boujemaa Lakhdar was the first artist to make a career out of this movement. Its first exhibition dates back to 1959, and the initiator of the first Muse´e des Arts et Traditions Populaires d’Essaouira, strongly focused on tribal art, since for him ‘artists of Essaouira are firstly Africans’ (Damgaard 2007: 50). Another key player in this was Danish art dealer Frederic Damgaard, who arrived in Essaouira in the 1970s and established himself in this cultural climate by opening a gallery located in the kasbah and exhibiting only the works of local or Moroccan artists. He found a number of eager and interested young people, and dedicated himself to instructing them in techniques of painting. The result was the now well-known Souiri style of painting, often described as tribal or Gnawa, which gained a certain international recognition, with teams of teachers and students visiting Essaouira in order to learn this form of art (Ross et al. 2002: 45). This style is very much the product of Damgaard’s initiative, another European ‘Moroccan dream’ of sorts, this time realized by facilitating the artistic work of: men and women without any artistic training are spontaneously starting to paint their dreams, making bare their cultural mixture and their rooting in time and space. (Damgaard 2007: 41) Following his lead, new galleries began to appear in every corner of the kasbah, some owned by locals, many by foreigners. Essaouira has in this way become a true city of arts, attracting a community of people interested in the special features of the Gnawa culture and its magic. While the borders between art and commercialization are sometimes difficult to establish, the fact remains that Essaouira has capitalized on this reputation and today is economically benefitting a great deal from this recent trend. Damgaard’s claim (2007: 61) that the Gnawa have maintained all their rituals, their magic and the authenticity of the Sudanese music, and that all these have not been altered by tourism or by other foreign influences, sound far too optimistic and romantic, if not self-celebratory. At the same time Essaouira-Mogador has indeed become a city of artists, where those African influences and the surrealist magic that transpires from many artistic expressions is the result of a unique hybridization between a long-standing Gnawa set of practices and the passion of the hippie community for all forms of alternative cultural manifestation.

Windy vortex Be that as it may be, Essaouira is today a very pleasant place for the European traveller to visit, possibly one of the most relaxed and accessible in Morocco.

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As noted, Essaouira is notoriously characterized by a mild and pleasant climate, especially if compared to the extremes found in Marrakech and other inland cities. The summer months, due to the steady breeze coming in from the Atlantic and cooling the town, attract Moroccans from all over the country and especially Marrakech, who come to relax and enjoy the sun and wind on the beach, sometimes staying in their second home (Bauer et al. 2006). Interestingly enough, this form of tourism was already established during the 1960s and 1970s, when European tourists began to return: an early manifestation of the dualism between a re-functionalized Essaouira (for the Moroccans) and a reinvented Mogador (for/by the European hippies, or the cinema). A later expression of this dual nature was the arrival of increasing numbers of windsurfers, mainly from Europe, attracted to the constant northeasterly wind blowing along the coast. According to Bauer et al. (2006), this new vocation was initiated by a Swiss man named Jack, who owned surfing schools in Marbella as well as Tarifa, and settled in Essaouira in the 1980s. At his suggestion, the town began to market itself as the ‘Wind City’ in order to attract surfers. About the same period, Frenchman Michel Sautereau opened a windsurfing base on the beach and made this an important economic source for the city (Ross et al. 2002: 52). By the end of the 1980s, he managed to bring many French surfers to Essaouira and establish its popularity in the international surfing community (ibid.: 51). Commentators often argue – and we would agree with this

Figure 8.7

The beach, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

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assessment – that Essaouira’s surfing culture may be seen as a sort of reinterpreted legacy of the hippie counterculture, since it promotes alternative lifestyles, in this case driven by a degree of concern for outdoor sport and the environment, but also matched by interest for local culture and art and, in general, local products and small shops. Notably, many of the hotels in the kasbah were initially geared to cater to the windsurfers, while forms of nightlife typical of other coastal destinations have been virtually non-existent in Essaouira-Mogador. Again, the creation of a globally recognized face of Essaouira seems to be linked to the efforts of a small cohort of (semi-)outsiders, capitalizing on the city’s natural and historical attributes to render it internationally known. Seemingly magically, small acts take on exponentially increasing importance: from rampart to UNESCO site, from national to international music festival, from protected port to windsurfing haven. Yet Essaouira is the byproduct of its own history, from Mogador to its recent past, where a local culture permeated by a cosmopolitan history was influenced by diverse Western contacts, in different periods, realizing a new form of contemporary ‘Moroccan dream’; as Damgaard would put it: ‘Essaouira, ville magique par excellence’ (2007: 103).

Essaouira en cinq jours By turns called ‘Amogdul’, ‘Mogador’ or ‘Essaouira’, the little city has seen numerous voyagers come for a few hours then stay a few days or a even a few years. The cause for this attachment? The climate, the arts, the exceptional welcome of the Souiris, the sweetness of life . . . there are doubtlessly as many reasons as there are visitors. (Linou 2008: 16) Essaouira en cinq jours (Linou 2008) is a pocket tourist guide, aimed at accompanying the visitor through the spirit of the city by highlighting ‘five of everything’, starting from five itineraries touching upon all the key landmarks. With combinations of monuments, shopping, film locations, the art scene and the actual tourist tradition, these five itineraries illustrate how the interplay between Essaouira and Mogador is deliberately presented and represented to the European tourist gaze. The guide, beyond the itineraries on which we will speculate a bit here, also mentions the top five riads (including, of course, Villa Maroc), five top restaurants and five top boutiques. The coincidence between a colonial reading of the city and the suggested ‘must do’s’ is, here again, quite striking: the local culture of fishing (itinerary one) is matched, in these narratives, by the cinematographic legacy of Orson Welles (itinerary two), the culinary tradition (itinerary three), the by now classic exploration of the Gnawa presence in town (itinerary four) and ‘a taste of the desert’, among the coastal dunes (itinerary five). These five itineraries, five promenades to be more precise, are suggested as the best way to approach

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Essaouira-Mogador, its colours and its atmospheres, as promised by too many guidebooks today. Claudio followed the instructions, and walked through the city with the guide in hand to discover the different souls of the city. What an extraordinary sight: a walking researcher appearing and behaving like a tourist, while trying to connect the representational – in this case Mogador, and its magic – to the material – Essaouira, with its permanencies, but also its constant change, including the spaces of the everyday that make it a city. Essaouira-Mogador, Mogador-Essaouira, an imagined dual city that produces an actual postcolonial geography of tourism, here and now. Essaouira-Mogador, a good metaphor perhaps for the workings of the ‘Moroccan dream’, re-enacted today in all the different places that we decided to engage with and include in this book. Essaouira-Mogador, a short thread connecting all the different pieces that make this exploration of Morocco and its European dreaming what it is: the coming together of a colonial rhetoric and the actual translation of this very rhetoric into contemporary practices, something that we tried nonetheless to incorporate in our narratives of this real and imagined space. Let’s walk (in) this distant place then, before bringing this other chapter to completion. ` la rencontre des peˆcheurs, is an hour and 30 minutes walk aimed at A approaching the realities of the port and its protagonists. Walking among the

Figure 8.8

Everyday fishing port scene, Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

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fishermen, in what appears as a declining but still very active port, is presented as a key starting point in the exploration of contemporary Essaouira, something very colourful and spectacular, an ethnographic experience at a glance, a cheap incursion into the peˆcheurs’ real life. The port is indeed authentic, in the sense that the fishermen are busy with their nets and their boats and, in our impression, act as if the tourists did not exist. What a perfect situation for the visitors, eager to frame so many colourful scenes with their cameras ‘as if’ they were not seen by the fishermen. How ethnographic! As if the fishermen were actors performing some plot of real-life-as-it-used-to-be, and the boats were so colourful in order to complement the Mediterranean feeling that emanates from the medina itself! The tourist can freely roam between tired fishermen and just-dead fish, between garbage and hungry cats, as if they (the tourists) were allowed to enter on stage (MacCannell 1976), without being seen. Now we understand why Mogador, as the guide suggests, should be first approached with a visit to the port, a very colourful experience of Morocco a` la maritime. The second itinerary takes the tourist Sur le traces d’Orson Welles, considered ‘an emblematic figure of Essaouira’. This is thus a promenade cine´matographique, which starts from Square Orson Welles, and then touches upon the different architectural ‘stages’ that provided the background to his ground-breaking Othello, that are recognizable in the film. Again, the film locations – like in the desert, or along the Kasbah Valley – are void of physical traces of the filming; only a discursive space, to be experienced intangibly. After the fishing port, the fictional world of filming is a clear hint to a gaze, presumed by those who instruct the tourist, to be very eager to read the landscape as speaking to well-known narratives: that is, an attempt to recognize some of Essaouira’s perspectives as part of a global narrative that translates into a tenuously historical setting – real and imagined Mogador. The walk is a rather imaginative exploration, based as it is on something that does not exist anymore – in fact a fictional space of a film. After a few sights, Claudio decides to give up, since it soon becomes a strange practice of confirmation of the already known, like in most of the tourist film settings (see Crang and Travlou 2009). La tajine de poisson pas a` pas, itinerary number three, adopts the most appreciated dish offered in Essaouira in order to guide the visitor through the city looking for the key ingredients – in this way exploring its markets, shop after shop. The concept is rather original and may become a good excuse to roam certain parts of the city normally marginalized by more conventional tours; however, the tour soon becomes a strategic mapping of specifically themed shops, a game of purchasing the key ingredients, step by step, throughout the city and its markets (even though nobody would cook the tajine while visiting the city for five days!). One shop is remarkably called ‘l’Homme Blue’ – the nomads of the desert have arrived here as well! – where ‘Said proposes with a

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smile a selection of scents of which he holds the secret’ (2008: 73). Another secret revealed. The other one is the recipe itself, this time offered by the chef of the ‘Restaurant Berbe`re’. All must be ethnically qualified in this fictional space of colours and smellscapes. Another ethnographic tour is the Voyage en terre Gnaoua, a classic in its own kind, where Essaouira is presented again as a place of cultural encounters, well known in particular for its musical traditions and for the presence of the famous and somewhat mystical Gnawa, ‘descended from slaves out of black Africa, the Gnawa are everywhere in Mogador . . . the Gnawa claim to be from Sidna Bilal, the first muezzin of Islam’ (2008: 79). The itinerary touches upon the Zaouia, the unique sanctuary for Gnawa in the entire country, in rue Touahen. Then follows a detailed description of who attends the sanctuary (but is not to be seen), including ‘the musicians, the snake charmers (les jouers des crotales), the vagrant therapists and the adepts of the confraternity, who during a ceremony called lila (night) wear a costume made of shells’ (ibid.). The tour could not but end in a restaurant where the musicians will accompany the tourists with their Gnawa motifs and pay homage to the Gnawa master . . . Finally, the two-and-a-half hour promenade named Un the´ au Sahara is a sort of Sahara experience ‘in a nutshell’, inviting the tourist to engage with a camel ride along the coast to enjoy the dunes in their unique contact zone with the sea.

Figure 8.9

Promenade en Essaouira (C. Minca 2012)

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Starting from the ruins of the Port de Diabat, the visitors are invited to explore ‘le petit Sahara . . . sans danger’ (2008: 82), and a series of ruins related to past activities now disappeared from that part of the coast. The alternative to the slow dromedary rides are the quads, those noisy vehicles capable of speeding through the dunes mentioned in Chapter 7, not really an environmentally friendly approach to the Sahara. A cafe´ called the ‘Fanatic’ is where people are invited to stop for a drink, listening to the notes of the beach boys . . . After les cinq promenades, it is time to go back to Villa Maroc, where we started. While walking with the guidebook in his hands, people – tourists and locals – are staring at Claudio, as if he were the most typical tourist, constantly out of place and desperately trying to make sense of the world around him through the mappings offered by the guide. Mogador is indeed hard to find out there. The themed tours of Essaouira proves to be just a thin filter when our body is asked to actually engage with the street, the sand, the sun, the people working and living there. Perhaps that is why, when back in the Villa Maroc, Claudio feels that the sense of order and coherence emanating from the interiors is a relief compared to the messiness encountered during the walks. Essaouira versus Mogador. The somewhat aggressive vibrancy of city life versus the soft atmospheres of Moroccan chic.

Moroccan chic According to Ypma, in Morocco Modern, ‘because of its isolation, Morocco had lost touch with the times’ (2010: 74), explaining why ‘the achievements of more than a thousand years were thankfully preserved’ (ibid.: 76). For him, to be around after the rain in Morocco is to understand its love affair with colour (ibid.: 81), since ‘colour is part of the Moroccan way of life’ and ‘colour is a constant reminder of the character of this extraordinary nation’ (ibid.: 84), a nation where ‘colour is used as natural, time-proven way. Fashion does not play a role . . . nature does’ (ibid.). Colour. Morocco and its people are all too often described as placing an extraordinary emphasis on colour. Tainted by colonial hints and orientalist flavour, the depiction of this country as colourful settings of landscapes, people, and designed interiors is part of what we describe as Moroccan chic. The signs and the effects of a specifically European interpretation of Morocco’s artistic and architectural tradition date back to the early European exploration. This interpretation was consolidated, as we have stated numerous times in the preceding pages, by Lyautey and his regime of truth. A specific reinterpretation of that colonial gaze, and of the ‘taste’ for the colours of Morocco that accompanied it, is what today makes the idea of Moroccan chic – that is, of a unique blend of colours and interior design identified by the Western media and advertisement industry as ‘Moroccan’ – something that went hand in hand with the

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gentrification of its most traditional historical urban quarters, mostly on the part of Europeans, and the refurbishment – a` la colonial – of some of its most prestigious buildings, often converted into expensive hotels or restaurants, or sometimes private residences. Villa Maroc and the aura that emanates from its sophisticated atmospheres is a genuine product of the Moroccan chic concept. The very concept of Mogador, as ancient colonial city today transformed into a place of art and music, responds in many ways to the call for experiencing the soft pleasures of state of the art Moroccan chic, in place – an elegance you can presumably experience at the Riad Al Madina, former residence of the Pasha: Live in the eighteenth century. In the shadow of the age-old ramparts, in the heart of the medina and at 200 metres from the beach, the Riad Al Madina springs from a maze of alleys of captivating scents. This ancient Essaouira home, built in 1871, holds all the charm and elegance of that period . . . (Riad Al Madina 2013) And we could bring countless examples of how the ‘Essaouira difference’ consists more and more, especially in the changing tourist geographies of Morocco, in the re-invention of a tradition, European in its origins, that is now producing ever new places to be immersed in a re-created, gentrified, purified, sophisticated

Figure 8.10

Internal courtyard, Riad Al Madina (C. Minca 2012)

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environment. Moroccan chic is thus the discursive formation that provides the experience of travelling to Morocco as a sense of anticipation but as a clear element of class distinction as well. Moroccan chic is also the powerful hand that is transforming many buildings in the medinas of the most beautiful cities in Morocco into segregated and luxurious orientalist enclaves. Most often initiated and managed by Europeans, these initiatives are dramatically changing the urban landscape and the structure of the property in many cities, but especially in Essaouira: Who hasn’t asked themselves what must there be behind these heavy medina doors? Palace of the Thousand and One Nights, flowered and silent patios, lazy sleeping cats on carpets . . . staying in one of the riad hotels described here you will be among the privileged few to live like pachas and other caı¨ds. (Limou 2008: 36) Essaouira, having been included in this grand postcolonial narrative, has attracted important international investment in the real estate sector in the past decades. It has done so by marking itself as clearly and visibly distinct to the massive low-cost packaged tourism of Agadir, and to the metropolitan complication of a city like Marrakech. Bauer et al. (2006) spend a great deal of time in analysing the genealogy of this novel European interest for EssaouiraMogador, especially investigating the characteristics of the new cosmopolitan residents of this expanding city: In the 1990’s, however, the demand for real estate in the old town on the part of Europeans began to increase. More and more European investors are taking notice of Morocco’s historic old towns in connection with Marrakech. The broadcast of the French magazine Capital provides a compelling impetus. The program Les Jackpots de l’E´te´, which was aired on June 14, 1998 on French TV, focused on purchasing a house in the old towns of Marrakech and Essaouira under the title J’ache`te ma re´sidence secondaire. Une maison de campagne a` partir de 100,000 Francs. Feature films, print media (Maisons du Maroc, Medina, Conde´ Nast Traveller, Lufthansa Magazine), the Temps du Maroc – a programme hosted in France throughout 1999 to show-case Morocco – and finally the Internet have contributed to further bolstering foreigners’ interest in buying real estate in the medina. (2006: 32) Essaouira is indeed different and, due to its size and urban layout, very accessible to the itinerant visitor. More importantly for the progression of this dream, Essaouira is friendly to newcomers who choose to stay longer, as confirmed by the growing number of new European residents. The city has become trendy as a sophisticated destination for an affluent community of foreigners, a bit like in

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the old Mogador days, but also a bit like in the hippie period, although with very different modalities. As noted, the gentrification of the medina was possible precisely because of the lack of interest on the part of Lyautey for this small coastal town: the heavy hand of his planners was indeed focused elsewhere in Morocco. Some commentators have highlighted how the rapid advance of the gentrification of the medina on the part of Europeans of the past decades has in some case displaced poorer Moroccans, importing lifestyles in great contrast to those of the local population, especially concerning their sexual behaviour. However, these new investments in the real estate have improved the state of many areas of the medina, and created real job opportunities for many former residents, similar to other gentrifying medinas elsewhere in Morocco. Europeans seeking the oriental charm of Moroccan traditional domestic spaces, as described by Escher and Petermann (2000), have colonized part of the kasbah, and an increasing number of these new residents now run businesses (Bauer et al. 2006). Anyone visiting Essaouira today would notice a proliferation of new activities related to this expanding international interest in the city, including ‘traditional’ spas – for example, the five-star Sofitel Mogador recently constructed in front of the beach – and a plethora of ‘Berber’ cooperatives, hammams, galleries, riads, and shops specializing in products of argan oil. With the growth of tourism and the internationalization of the medina, Essaouira is getting closer and closer to the new Mogador, to the point that one wonders if one day Essaouira may not be converted into a Mogador theme park of sorts, the maritime capital of Moroccan chic, complementary to the real capital, Marrakech.

CHAPTER 9 LIGHTHOUSE

At the end of the world, the people of Tangier were summoned before the tribunal of the final Judgement and Allah, the Supreme Judge, said: ‘To be sure, you are the worst of all men. How did that happen?’ And they responded: ‘Lord, it’s true, we have sinned. But our government was international and we were administrated by all the representatives of Europe.’ And Allah said: ‘To be sure, you have been punished enough. Enter to paradise.’ (Moulay Youssef, cited in El Kouche 1996: 6)

Tangier in layers Lauren remembers the first time she entered Tangier – her first entry into Morocco. A solo backpacker, most of her clothes having just been stolen in Spain, she was a ripe victim for every scam that Tangier had to offer. After being dragged through the souk, buying some overpriced clothing and a downright expensive carpet, she escaped southward at her first opportunity. She literally fled, vowing never again to spend a night in Tangier – only to be tricked into just that on her next passage. Tangier for her, until recently, embodied its reputation: Tanger, danger, the expression in French; the only place in Morocco she felt at risk, unsafe. Only by getting to know Tangier through the eyes of residents has she shifted perspective, to recognize the other side of this coin – from hybridity as risk to hybridity as open possibility. Embodying the complex interconnectivity between Morocco and the rest of the world, though oriented particularly towards Anglophone Europe and the United States, Tangier is often described as a liminal zone, both geographically and socially. Its liminality reflects a permanent but ever fluctuating status as a border zone – in a contemporary snapshot, as Burroughs’ ‘Interzone’ in Naked

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Figure 9.1 Pastrana Tapestries, Afonso V of Portugal (late fifteenth century), ‘The Fall of Tangier’

Lunch (1959) and other novels – where rules, regulations, spaces and times are somehow malleable. But this liminality extends long into Tangier’s past, as a British- or Portuguese-occupied territory (as pictured in Figure 9.1), then as a consular city, then as a designated international free-trade zone. It is a city that integrates with each era a new layer of itself, moving down from the kasbah, the original stronghold, adding neighbourhoods and meeting places for Africans and Europeans of all Abrahamic faiths, interlocked and interdependent in this liminal city. In Arabic, liminality might be translated by barzakh, a concept with roots in Sufi Islam, literally translated as ‘isthmus’, which describes how space can be shaped by its borders: A barzakh is something that separates ( fa¯sil) two other things while ˙ never going to one side (mutatarrif), as, for example, the line that ˙ separates shadow from the sunlight . . . Any two adjacent things are in need of a barzakh which is neither the one nor the other but which possesses the power (quwwa) of both. (Chittick 1989: 117 – 18, quoting Ibn Al-ʾArabi) Tangier is, indeed, delineated by and infused into the actors populating and surrounding it – Moroccan, European, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Arab, Rifi, law-abiding and law-evading, attached to land and remaking land into territorial elsewhere. Following Edwards (2005) we focus on Tangier as barzakh, situating it as a space of imagination where dreams are formed, between corporeality and spirituality, by embodying the place through meaning and sensorial experience (Chittick 1989: 123). This resonates with Tangier’s reputation as the haven for spies, the vortex of anything goes, the drugged haze of Naked Lunch, and with its long history as

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the consular zone for Europeans in Morocco at the overlapping edge between Africa and Europe. As much as stories from Tangier extol the interstitial mixture of the city – encounters between unknown others from different sides of economic, religious, legal or national borders – they also describe darker sides of such unions. Tangier rebounds with phantoms of its former residents, both famous and notorious, and their parties, rumours and debauchery. Writing about Tangier inevitably remarks on moments of encounter with the fantastic, whether of the incredible decadence of a party hosted by some of the richest people in the world – Barbara Hutton or Malcolm Forbes, for example – or of the remarkable ease in procuring substances or subjugated persons in pursuit of iniquitous entertainment (i.e. Burroughs 1959; Choukri 1973; or, for the contemporary traveller, Eveleigh 2012). Ghosts of these traces complement each other, and fill the city with a reputation for international intrigue that is inevitably sought out and re-enacted as part of the tourist consumption of it.

Beating Tangier The Beat Generation was a post-WWII American counterculture movement that combined visceral engagement in worldly experiences with a quest for deeper understanding. It reached its apotheosis in Tangier. Many Beat artists – writer Jack Kerouac, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Curso [sic] – were just passing through, while writers William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, and the multitalented Brion Gysin, spent significant parts of their lives here, further inspiring a coterie of local artists. The result was a mixed bag, from the heights of artistic creativity to the lows of moral depravity. Today Beat history can still be found throughout the city . . . (Clammer and Bing [Lonely Planet] 2009: 177) The Lonely Planet Morocco goes on to list the sites visitors might find that are ‘legendary’ hangouts of visitors and residents, from Gysin and Bowles, to Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, to the Rolling Stones. That version of the city, however, is not necessarily what, as Edwards (2005: 86) distinguishes them, Tanjawi (Moroccan) and Tangerino (foreign) residents promote about Tangier. These ghosts, rather, reside in Tangier and refuse to leave. They are repeatedly called upon by the readers of the overwhelming amount of foreign literature (such as Bowles, Burroughs, Corso and many others) that uses Tangier and its special blend of liminality as a setting to descend into and explore behaviours outside social constraints. This vast foreign literature, unlike much of the rest of Morocco, is dominated by Anglophone voices, both in its production and in its analysis in recent years (e.g. Amine et al. 2006; Coury and Lacey 2009; Walonen 2011). Such preponderance perhaps reflects the long history of

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British relations with the Straits and English dominance in Tangier diplomacy (Caille´ 1967: 53– 5), but also the importance of American presence and influence in Tangier, as a member of its governing board of international powers and as the estranged homeland of Beat Generation writers. Importantly, literary analysts draw a clear distinction between European voices on Tangier and Moroccan replies. In a scene that has been dominated by Tangerino residents, the response of Moroccan Tanjawi authors (not only writers, as they include illiterate storytellers) gives some notion of the reverse of this experience by those who were subjugated to economic need and European desires for transgression (Edwards 2005). Here, we want to add a layer of complication to this foreign/native dichotomy by focusing on female voices that emerge in different eras of Tangier’s European-Moroccan history. Also, unlike the other historic cities of Morocco, European women came to the relatively safe zone of Tangier earlier and in greater numbers. As in other European cities, the upper-class social scene of diplomats and their families created a network of women-run households, of domestic lives and stories that are a part of Tangier’s European story as much as those of (male) illicit street encounters. These women provide a Tangerina perspective on life in the city, and reflect a new kind of barzakh, embodying the processes of foreign families settling in this Moroccan place, where the families become part of Tangier and Tangier becomes part of these families. We focus this attention on two specific milieux of the city: the Petit Socco and the Grand Socco. Both are central tourist sites of the old city but both are spatially connected to different forms of foreign engagement with Tangier. It is through this zone of borders and movement that we return, from Morocco to Europe, in the opposite direction of many of those travellers whose written accounts we have quoted in the previous stages of our wanderings in the spatialities of the ‘Moroccan dream’. Its legacy as a literary city long predates the European voices that are the focus of this volume. The phantom traces, then, make themselves known on all sides of this cosmopolitan assemblage, though the European imaginary of reckless and duplicitous Tangier tends to dominate a very specific and distinct version of the ‘Moroccan dream’, compared to the legacy of French domination (and dreaming).

Tangier, geographically: On the cusp I enquired about the new palace Si Ahmed was building himself on the outskirts of Tangier. His face brightened: a true Moor, he considered the building of a new home his chief delight in life. . . ‘Is the house going to be Moorish or European?’ My host replied with a chuckle of delight. ‘It’ll be both, Moorish inside, European outside. I am my own architect!’ (Landau 1952: 56 –7)

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The place where Tangier sits is a geographically decisive crossroads. At one time it marked a gateway to the edge of the world, a mouth from sea to ocean when voyages of discovery nearly always involved crossing water. That cusp of North Africa, placed at the northwest corner of the continent, was strategically critical to such mobilities, from all directions: for those heading northwards along the coast, pushing southwards towards Africa, or moving East and West, in and out of waters controlled and patrolled by the coastal kingdoms surrounding them. Though the site has passed through several regimes of control and their related spatialities, from ancient inter-territorial powers to modern ones, it remains a site at the edge of worlds, a border between one continent and another, a way-point where travellers even today stop to cross the frontier. The most renowned early Moroccan writer and traveller, Ibn Battuta, began his travels from Tangier, his city of origin, around 1325. The white-walled city is found in numerous medieval descriptions and depictions, unsurprisingly given its pivotal location along the Straits of Gibraltar in centuries dominated by sea travel, and its role as the edge of Muslim territorial conquest pushing northwards into Europe. Geographically, for generations the site marked a margin of mapped land, while culturally it provided the stage for a violent and ongoing war for religious and political dominance (Mie`ge et al. 1992). For centuries, Tangier existed to a broad public as an imagined location on the frontier of the ‘civilized’ (read: European) world, of a mountain fortress (the kasbah) and a sheltered, defensive port. Crucial to its history as a Moroccan city, rather than a British or Portuguese one, Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah encouraged foreign powers to establish consulates there (Abitbol 2010b: 106). It was a simultaneous freedom and imprisonment: foreigners were, for the first time, allowed to make their home within the walled city but, as non-Muslims, were thus effectively constrained from moving freely in the rest of Morocco (Caille´ 1967: 29). This transition was crucial because this designation was partially implicit in Tangier’s position at the northern edge of Morocco, looking towards Europe across the Mediterranean, but also because this move encoded that positioning into a social and political landscape of foreign power, foreign influence and foreign debauchery. The Sultan’s decision was motivated as much by jealously guarded dominion over his territories as by his stated intention to protect his people from the sins and malicious influence of Christians (El Kouche 1996: 15). Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah wanted to isolate these forces from his subjects, and thus created, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy that saw twentiethcentury Tangier as an international zone known for drugs, prostitution and laissez-faire crime. The zone became an island of foreign influence, whose majority was always, and remains, populated by Moroccan souls; a nascent and ever multiplying foundation for liminal hybrid subjectivities.

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Figure 9.2 Braun, G. and Hogenberg, F. ‘Tingis, Lusitanis, Tangiara’ (c.1535) Cologne As more and more Europeans had first-person encounters with the city, it became progressively one of the more detailed, documented and mapped locations in Moroccan territory, alongside other coastal cities that were accessible to European ships, and occasionally occupied by European powers. Literary documentation of life in the city, according to El Kouche (1996: 25), began appearing with more vigour after Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah permitted consuls to be established within the city walls mid-eighteenth century. These safe havens for Europeans, connected to European military and diplomatic establishments, enabled the observant visits of Euge`ne Delacroix (see Chapter 2), Alexandre Dumas (1848) and Charles Didier (1844), to name but a few; through the consulates and their Moroccan prote´ge´es – literally, protected by the consul – they had safe accommodations and networks to enable their interaction with local community members normally beyond European reach. Yet Tangier was essentially a city for passage from Europe onto other destinations, not a destination itself. Though it was an exotic city, a change of environment exemplified by Delacroix’s dense diary entries and fascination with sketching the unfamiliar streets and inhabitants (Delacroix 1999; El Kouche 1996: 10), travellers stayed in Tangier to get their bearings and arrange passage to the next stop,

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whether overland to Fez or Tetouan, or along the Atlantic coast to Mogador and the south. To a great extent, this trend is reflected in contemporary travel patterns as well, through which Tangier has only recently emerged as a destination for Moroccan chic (see Bialasiewicz and Wagner 2015) alongside Fez, Marrakech or Essaouira, but continues to be a stopover – or even a day trip – by ferry from Spain. Dating from this emergence of diplomacy, Tangier was a zone of intensely articulated networks of protection and allowances, where the special privileges and laws afforded to the consuls trickled down to permissibility applied to individual Moroccans who formed their networks of contact. As the city became more cosmopolitan, with a more diverse population in terms of economic class as much as national origin, its governance became increasingly complicated. Over the preceding century, increments of international influence on the management of the city for its Moroccan and European residents and of its internationally important attributes – like the lighthouse at Cap Spartel – presaged the creation of the International Zone in 1923, in which the three European powers of France, Spain and Britain had primary control, with Italy, Belgium, Portugal, the United States and the Netherlands later added to the treaty. The free zone of Tangier became a site where not only were diplomatic missions to Morocco housed, but also financial and entrepreneurial interests proliferated in unrestricted trade. Reaching its peak of foreign population after World War II (Hillali 1996: 45), the Zone began to disassemble into global populations re-aligned nationally as a reflection of post-war agreements. A significant number of Moroccan Jews migrated to Israel after its creation in 1948. In 1956, the newly independent state of Morocco dissolved the treaty of European power over Tangier, prompting those foreign residents profiting from the special status to disappear almost overnight (Hillali 1996). Though the city declined in wealth and prominence as the financial sector suddenly moved elsewhere, it remained intensively international and equally intensively unregulated. The vacuum of economic prosperity in a city where permissibility had been inextricably linked to the foreign presence made room for new presences: the Beatniks, the counterculture rock musicians, the hippies, and the underground drug and sex trades that went along with these (Bahari 1996). Though these movements have subsided, their presence has become interwoven into Tangier’s attitude, as it has been developed through the 1980s and into the new millennium with manufacturing of goods for Europe and massive domestic migration of labour to man (and woman) those factories (De Oliveira Silva et al. 2010). Tangier remains today an international city, as centuries of interwoven connections between foreign powers and this jutting headland have woven into it histories that exceed its edges. Unlike other typically Moroccan cities, Tangier was untouched by Lyautey. As part of the Spanish Protectorate, then an international zone, his philosophies of modernity could not be implemented here with the same purpose and vision as elsewhere. His ideal of the ‘traditional’ medina, unscarred by European

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influence, had not existed in Tangier for the previous century. Yet his absence is present by comparison, in that it is not a city designed to be viewed with the same attention to detail as the new boulevards of Rabat or the enclosure of the Fez medina. Urbanization in Tangier still has distinct European touches, through the architecture and planning instituted by the foreign powers and entrepreneurs to control problems of water, sanitation and flow of traffic. Tangier has its network of boulevards at the heart of its more modern side – which is not referred to generally as the ville nouvelle as it might be elsewhere, though this is the term used today by many guidebooks. These boulevards were not created to invite the French colon, but rather expanded with the city, layer by layer, in all directions beyond the city walls, from the kasbah and old walled medina up the mountain and down to the sea (Hillali 1996: 45). Tangier’s older structures reflect the community of foreign residents acting in concert for the economic expansion of the city, constructing shops, houses, theatres – like the Teatro Cervantes (see Figure 9.3) – and hotels as they negotiated their common occupation of Moroccan soil. Tangier-based geographer Mimoun Hillali (1996) wonders what makes the city ‘cosmopolitan’ even today, using details of foreign residence over the last two centuries to document ebbs and flows; those tides of mixture, contrasted with Lyautey’s more rigid separation of Moroccan from foreign, give some basis for imagining how starkly the urban life of Tangier contrasts with the rest of the territory.

Figure 9.3

Teatro Cervantes in Tangier (Cosmo45 2005)

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The Europeans who did stay in Tangier, beyond the consuls with their agents and employees, tended to be those who got waylaid by the city as a barzakh – a borderland that is a place itself, a rabbit hole through which new arrivals fall and find themselves in unexpectedly familiar surroundings (Amsel 2010, El Kouche 1996, Landau 1952). This expanding expatriate community has been in many ways facilitated by the consuls at the root of Tangier’s tendency towards cosmopolitan mixture. Not only did the presence of foreign diplomats enable other Europeans to arrive and settle, the complexity of foreign governance and influence enabled a chaotic and multifaceted urban fabric, where gaps in authority allowed indiscretions to pass through voids in the rule of law. Or, in contrast, the competing authorities were played against one another, as Landau described in 1952: A few years ago a well-to-do American-protected Tangerine Jew decided that, since the American House of Representatives did, for some reason or other, not recognize the law of the Tangier administration that prescribed a certain limit to the height of local buildings, he would take advantage of that circumstance. So in one of the town’s main streets, he erected an office building that was two storeys higher than any other in the street. When the International Administration warned him that he was transgressing the law, he replied that as an American-protected subject he stood outside the local laws and that Tangier’s law-givers had no jurisdiction whatever over him or his house. A short while later the gentleman experienced difficulties with several of his tenants who refused to pay their rent. He applied to the authorities requesting them to have these tenants evicted from the house. Not surprisingly the authorities informed him that so far as they were concerned the applicant and his house did not exist, and it was impossible to give police-assistance to non-existent entities . . . (Landau 1952: 138) The official ‘mixed tribunal’ of the International Zone was intended to incorporate the legal codes of several nations, but resulted in paradoxes, where perceivable objects may be discursively effaced in a logics of this barzakh. Crucial to our trajectory back to Europe is Tangier’s position as geographical and juridical barzakh. While Tangier embodied for previous generations – and continues to embody in many respects – the imaginary of the ‘edge of the world’ (Green 1991), it is both an edge where crossing might lead to arrival somewhere new and different, and an edge that can be crossed from elsewhere, into a city hovering on a precipice, tipping into the sea on three sides. Being between Morocco and Europe, Tangier wavers in this in-between zone as a barzakh, sometimes tending towards one side or another, depending on whose voice and perspective dominates her presentation.

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Tangier cosmopolitan: Spectral origins Coming from the south, Tangier was a very different object than when I crossed the straits to visit it, as a specimen of Barbary. In fact, it is a place equally foreign to both. The Moors designate it, ‘Infidel,’ like the Giaour of the Turks. It is the only place where Europeans reside, and there is here a mixture of all classes, Brebers [sic], Moors, Jews, and Europeans, living promiscuously together. (Urquhart 1850 vol. 2: 171) In describing his drawing (see Figure 9.4) depicting the kasbah, walls and main settlements from a high plateau, Justin Taylor (1826) points out Tarifa, the southern point of Spain visible across the water, and the masts of various consulates in the lower part of the city. Indivisible from Tangier as an international city is Tangier’s growth as a cosmopolitan city, accruing consulates and the inevitable waves of visitors and settlers that followed them. This cosmopolitanism was indelibly linked to the position of the city at the mouth of the Mediterranean and its visibility from Gibraltar. It was further encouraged at the moment it became the consular city, and was then shaped by the foreign presences that passed through and the many that stayed in Tangier. The physical shape of the city beyond its walls was influenced by Europeans long before Lyautey’s arrival in Morocco, through the neighbourhoods that international residents established reflecting European homes and habits. But Tangier at the

Figure 9.4

Vue de Tanger, prise du champ des sacrifices (Taylor 1826)

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same time remained the first encounter with the ‘Orient’ as visitors crossed over to the African continent, allowing for readings of the city as being simultaneously deeply ‘Moroccan’ in its essence and accommodatingly open for the visitor. The concentration of consulates and their resources grew slowly over time to become embedded in the city’s image. In his history of the French Consulate in Morocco, Caille´ describes how Tangier was, circa 1800, a monotonous outpost with few resources, where boredom was shared by all Christians (1967: 32). The observations of first-person visitors indicate, however, how the collectivity of consuls began to constitute a noticeable and vibrant community, though their numbers remained very low for much of the nineteenth century. Urquhart, the adventurer previously quoted, noted that ‘[t]here is here a restricted, but agreeable society of the foreign agents, and a most imposing assemblage of flagstaffs’ (1850 vol 2: 173), referring to the consular flags, shown by Taylor. As an Englishman, he commented on his sense of welcome because of his nationality (as opposed to French, already an enemy for two decades in Algeria) and also the overwhelming respect for the British Consul John Drummond Hay and his recently deceased father. James Richardson, a British missionary travelling at about the same time, likewise finds his Englishness favourably received, but describes Tangier as ‘miserable’ in comparison with Europe and Morocco as ‘something considerable’ (1860 vol 2: 39). Visiting in 1858 – 9, Frenchman Leon Godard laments the lack of Christian presence in the entire country, apart from coastal towns, estimating the Christian (read: European) population of Tangier at 400 (1859: 9). He counts the French residents as no more than a dozen outside the numerous diplomatic corps and their families. Regarding the physical description of Tangier, Godard begins by abstaining, saying that ‘[t]rop de livres l’ont donne´e avec des couleurs brillantes, que je ne trouve point sur ma modeste palette’ (1859: 10) (‘Too many books have given [description] with brilliant colours, that I don’t find much point to do so with my modest palette’). He nevertheless describes the various aspects of the city he finds unaccommodating: no place for a promenade (though the road by the main souk is quite animated by night), no night-time lighting, illpaved streets, houses that feel imprisoning, and beaches where the sand makes walking difficult (1859: 10). Despite his evidently negative perceptions of the city as inadequate to European tastes, Godard allows that ‘there is in this city all the necessary elements to compose what one calls a society’ (1859: 11, italics original) of European residents. Though Godard found society and leisure less than expected in this city, he did recommend the Hotel Vincent, where he found himself with other French travellers at a reasonable price (1859: 9). Urquhart, likewise, was accommodated by an Englishwoman serving English food (1850 vol 2: 171). Whereas arriving in Fez or Marrakech at this point still required an envoy from the sultan, and would

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for several decades yet, Tangier was home to a selection of hotels and European residents that could accommodate European visitors. Elsewhere in Morocco, for example, Urquhart was housed by Jews in the ex-urban countryside, and Godard complains of being only permitted in the Jewish quarter (mellah) because he perceives it as an insult to his status. With subtle steps, Tangier was outpacing other Moroccan cities as a place where Europeans could come to stay. More importantly for that time period, it was a last outpost of Christianity. Richardson remarks that it is ‘the only place in the empire where the Christian religion is publicly professed’ (1860 vol 1: 40), both in a convent and through private services led by British Consul Drummond Hay. Contemporary Tangier remains an intensely multi-confessional city, with the Anglican Church of Saint Andrew dominating the Grand Socco since its land was granted by the sultan in 1880, and several surviving synagogues alongside its many mosques. Faith-based communities were common in most of Morocco, but usually in separated corners; the consular community of Tangier intermingled with the Abrahamic religions in its streets. Even at this period, the barzakh of Tangier as a place of transgression was evident in the daily lives of its residents. Travellers attaining Tangier in the mid-nineteenth century found themselves in somewhere very different, yet in some ways the familiar pattern of a colonial outpost. Travel across the Straits was often remarked on as so short a distance to traverse such a distinct interval between European life and ‘Oriental’, yet many were aware that Gibraltar and Tangier had at certain historical periods been under the same governance. In fact, the two cities maintained relations, as social events brought visitors from Gibraltar to Tangier, and provisions travelled from Tangier to Gibraltar in unencumbered trade (Roscoe and Roberts 1838, Zeys 1908). The locus of this social life, connecting to Europe, was in ‘The Mountain’ neighbourhood where Europeans built homes, and where the homes are still among the wealthiest in Tangier. The undeniable English dominance in Tangier during this period links both to the social proximity to Gibraltar and to Sir John Drummond Hay’s prominence as a skilled diplomat – an official and effective barzakh. Drummond Hay – the son, in fact, of the previous English political agent to Morocco – is frequently remembered for his skill in speaking Arabic (Urquhart 1850 vol 1: 81), as well as his effectiveness as the diplomat who negotiated treaties and truces between several nations and Morocco during his tenure as consul to Britain (Srhir 2005). In this period, when it would not be unusual for any English visitor to Tangier to call on the consul for assistance (Richardson 1860 vol 2), or as an entrance to local social life (Howard-Vyse 1882), Drummond Hay was a charismatic figure. He was a focus of the social scene, because of his political clout, his well-placed homes inside and outside the city, and his leadership in the upper-class atmosphere of British subjects seeking ‘sport’

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activities (like wild boar hunting) (Drummond Hay 1896). His reputation, and the good relationship he maintained between the Sultan and England, were reflected in the warm reception English travellers received by ordinary Moroccans (i.e. Richardson 1860 vol 1: 19) – the English were seen as allies against Spanish and French aggressors. But Drummond Hay did not write a political memoir; the account he published of ‘Western Barbary, its wild tribes and savage animals’ (1861) is primarily stories of jaunts in the countryside around Tangier, chasing wild boars and conversing with locals. As much as he reflects the political era in which English diplomacy dominated European-Moroccan relations, Drummond Hay represents the barzakh connecting Europe to Morocco as it developed through specific figures and mixtures in Tangier. Himself a second generation member of Tangerino society, he married the daughter of the former Danish consul (Drummond Hay 1896: 142). Their children were brought up between his post in Morocco and schooling in Europe (Drummond Hay 1896: 223), spending summers in the balmy climate of their country house, ‘The Wilderness’. While being an echt-Englishman, he was also integrating into and respected by Moroccan peers and the broader community. His life could not be divorced from Tangier, and he continued to live there after retirement in 1886 until his death in 1893. The Drummond Hay family, and the social networks they engendered as British representatives so firmly embedded in Tangier, embodied perhaps the earliest and most intensive example of barzakh between Europe and Morocco, inasmuch as their lives were as integrally a part of Moroccan social and political worlds as they were a part of European ones. After the Spanish War with Morocco (1859 – 62) – for which Drummond Hay was instrumental in negotiating the truce – the collection of European writing on Tangier bears witness to a subtle shift. Several female authors published accounts of ‘their’ Tangier, contrasting the overwhelmingly male voices describing adventures, explorations and interventions elsewhere in Morocco. Beginning with Amelia Perrier in 1873 – a solo woman and seasoned traveller (Johnson 2001) – these accounts include both visitors who spent a season in Tangier (Grove 1902, Perrier 1873, Savory 1903, Zeys 1908), as well as wives and mothers describing their home life in this outpost (Howard-Vyse 1882, ManselPleydell 1907). While related in many ways, travel writing gives a much different account of Tangier than domestic memoirs: the one concentrates on the strangeness of encounter with Morocco, with Islam, with the picturesque natural landscape and the unfamiliar cultural one; the other provides an account of quotidian activity in these privileged households, playing with children on the beaches and hills, making calls at other European households, dealing with Moroccan servants. All of these accounts reveal how tightly knit Tangerino society was, and how it had its own practices and inside tricks:

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At Tangier there is no band and no parade, but there are more tea-parties than at any other place of its size I ever heard of. If you go to them all, it is possible to get yourself rather disliked; and if you do not go to any, you are certain to get more disliked. You do not drive about, but you ride on horses, mules or donkeys. You go to dinner-parties or dances on donkeys, and if the night is not very fine the ladies, if they cultivate abominations known as ‘fringes,’ arrive with straight streaks of hair straggling down their noses, their sleeves crumpled, and their skirts crushed. But these are novices. You soon learn how to manage these things; then, if you are young and lusty, I am told there is much enjoyment to be got out of this department of life. (Grove 1902: 3) The existence of this mixture of writings on Tangier, while the rest of Morocco was still mostly inhospitable to European residents, reflects its space of comforts and familiarity for Europeans. When Perrier travelled there in 1873, her contemporary Emily Keene was preparing to marry the Sherif Si Abdelsalaam of Ouezzane, forming a legendary partnership between Christian Tangier, where Keene had been working as a governess, and a holy centre of Muslim Morocco. Her own account of her married life as a public figure documents her role as cultural translator and diplomat (Keene 1911) – as barzakh always tied to Tangier (El Yamlahi 1996). The tone of these many accounts of daily life indicates the familiarity with which these women inhabited their surroundings, interacting with Moroccans through servants and peers in select (often Jewish) households, and encountering the city through visits to other Europeans, excursions in the countryside, and shopping in the Grand Socco market. They were firmly located in Tangier as both an exotic Oriental world, and the site of the daily lives of respectable women as much as adventurous men. These works, as well as public figures like Drummond Hay and the popular reputation surrounding him, created a cosmopolitan Tangier, composed of many multicultural elements, where society was recognizably ‘civilized’ in reference to Europe. This cosmopolitan collectivity set the stage for an increasingly international Tangier, in which the Moroccan sultan progressively relinquished means of governance to the growing number of foreign residents, and the integrity of Islam became potentially threatened by mixture that delved further into the in-betweenness of a barzakh. As Isabel Savory insightfully concluded after her 1902 visit: Tanger has two sides to it – one native, the other European. The European side is all which appears on the surface, and it swamps the other. Given each of the eleven Powers, with its minister, its minister’s family, its secretary, its attache´, its interpreter, its student; add to these a handful of English residents, a handful of English and American visitors, and a handful of varied

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‘A family group in 1911’ (Keene 1911: front matter)

nationalities thrown in; back them up with the necessary foundation of purveyors, and lower down still a substratum of leeches and black-sheep, greedy Jews, needy Spaniards, introducing drink and tobacco and gambling and there you have before you all the elements of a high civilized town on the Mediterranean shore. It may be Tangier: it is not Morocco. (Savory 1903: 24)

Tangier, internationally: Foreign powers in the commons Standing distant and alone on the promontory overlooking the Atlantic – marking, in fact, the official boundary between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean – the Cap Spartel lighthouse (see Figure 9.6) marks as well the significant collaborative effort by multiple governments in Moroccan territory for the benefit of the international commons. The Convention signed on 31 May 1865 by representatives of the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Norway, France, and of course John Drummond Hay for the United Kingdom on one side, and the Moroccan Kingdom on the other, bound all European parties to contribute equal payments for the upkeep of the Moroccan-built and sultan-protected lighthouse. Clearly a vital location to ensure the safety of military and commercial ships, this agreement represented immense diplomatic progress, only three years after a

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costly war between Morocco and Spain but ten years after the initial idea was broached among the foreign representatives (Stuart 1955: 27). As Morocco continued to resist colonial invasions or even of the expansion of European merchant classes in its territories, the sultan made slow concessions to the needs of global trade through the outpost in a neutral zone of Tangier. By the time the lighthouse was built, the sultan had already released some control over the immediate living situation in the city to the ‘Christian Powers’ – that is, the ministers – to govern their own well-being. Such domains included the Sanitary Council, permitted by the sultan in 1805 then made official in 1840, with the capacity to regulate incoming marine traffic for disease. In the latter half of the century, the Council appropriated additional responsibilities over street cleaning and sanitation in the city, to which the sultanate acquiesced unofficially by ignoring (Viehoff 2009). Seeking additional controls, particularly officially recognized power over municipal sanitation, a Health Commission was founded in 1891 and assumed the responsibilities of the Sanitary Council in 1893, with dominion granted by the sultan over the hygiene of territorial as well as marine zones, along with clean water supply – a need that was always acute in the arid climate and a source of dissension between the Christian and Muslim occupants of the city (Miller 2001). The Commission became a de facto city council, lasting in some form until the International Zone, even though its members and dues-payers were predominantly representative of foreign

Figure 9.6

Lighthouse on Cap Spartel (Cook 1910: 159)

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residents and their pseudo-colonial power, not of the (Moroccan) majority of Tangier’s residents (Viehoff 2009: 142 –4). Significant for connecting this pseudo-colonial outpost with the its imperial centres, postal offices of multiple countries – first Spain, then Britain, France, and for a time Germany – appeared late in the nineteenth century on what is now the Rue des Postes, just off the Petit Socco (Vernier 1955: 177). The British and several other legations were at that time not far from the Petit Socco, where they had originally been established (Caille´ 1967: 23), making it a significant meeting place between the international community, the Jewish shop owners of the Socco, and the Muslim residents. It was not, however, a noted location for many of the nineteenth-century writers discussing Tangier, with the significant exception of Walter Harris, long-time resident and correspondent for the Times. Writing about the preparations for an adventure in the south, he describes for the reader his familiar streetscapes as he returns home to Tangier; moving from the port up into the town, past mosques, beggars, and lawyers’ shops to ‘a sort of open space known as the Little Soko, where the Jews congregate to congratulate each other on their sharp doings and to look out for Europeans to be dragged off to the bazaars, and taken in – in both senses’ (Harris 1889: 12). Harris’ account gives some indication of how that locale was central to the city, for both its respectable and disreputable citizens. He narrates people coming there from all over Morocco, beggar and sherif alike. But, not forgetting the Europeans, he notes the Spaniards, ‘many of them half drunk, all of them most objectionable’ (Harris 1889: 14), occupying the square. He holds them accountable for recent increases in burglary, and remarks that the newly appointed Spanish minister must take action: The difficulty of bringing crime to justice in Tangier is enormous; all Europeans are under the laws of their own Consulates, and this international arrangement of tribunal – though all, I am sure, try to cooperate – is an exceedingly difficult matter, and generally results in nobody getting convicted of anything. (ibid.: 14) These commingled problems – the signs of addiction and associated antisocial behaviour with the inability of the justice system to effectively regulate resulting criminality – are precursors to what would later come to signify life in international Tangier for the reading public. Harris even points out that Tangier is ‘remarkably free from crime’, generally, as the different denominations do not interfere with one another, apart from the meaningless curse thrown on the street (ibid.: 14). In his Maroc pittoresque, Jean du Taillis (1905; discussed previously in Chapter 5), provides an extensive account of the visitor discovering different corners of the Petit Socco (see Figure 9.7). His description focuses partially on the

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impression he has of the architecture of white walls and narrow alleys, and partially on the sense of international mixture. He counts off the post offices located on the Rue des Postes conveying the sense of a busy ‘space of encounter’ of the city, which he compares to Place de la Bourse in Paris (1905: 143). Here, gossip is traded in the shops, in a square where, one meets there three times a day; one parks there in the sun waiting for ‘the green hour’ [to drink absinthe], one hastily reads his correspondence, because everyone has the habit of coming to fetch his letters at the post; one also gossips on the serious ignorance of the career messieurs and on the defiant virtue of other men’s wives. And every stranger is quickly recognized, quickly under suspicion . . . (1905: 147–8) More than many other visitors to the city, du Taillis picks out this corner as crucial to Tangier’s social atmosphere as a place of everyday commercial activity, a place to be seen and finally a place of intrigue and suspicion. It is a European-centric location, surrounded by the post offices and criss-crossed with those coming to fetch their mail, in contrast to the Kasbah, where only Moroccans may live, or the Grand Socco market up the hill, a cluttered space of Moroccan chaos. The concentration of foreign presence into this particular central square becomes part of the ‘mythical’ international Tangier beginning to fix into place. At the turn of the twentieth century, as France was pushing harder for control of Morocco, Tangier was increasingly transformed into a site of political intrigue, negotiation and uncertainty. By that time, consulates and legations have been part of this city for more than a century; the Christian powers have taken slow control over their living conditions since their arrival; generations of select Europeans have been part of this city, constituting the major foreign population living in Morocco. When French occupation over much of the Moroccan territory approaches, Tangier remains an internationally regulated zone, even while under the Spanish Protectorate; a barzakh even as its surroundings become more blurred.

The Zone People come here principally for two reasons, 1) gold and 2) pleasure. (Mediterranean American Press 1952: 3) Like many of the political manoeuvrings of European powers in Tangier, the process to arrive at the designation ‘International Zone’ was long and intricate, requiring nearly two decades of diplomacy and negotiation before a convention was crafted, and still a few more years before it was ratified by all interested

Figure 9.7

Un coin du Petit Socco (du Taillis 1905: 148)

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parties. The main powers signed it at the end of 1923, deposited it in 1924, and put it into force on 1 June 1925, with many diplomats still negotiating better conditions for their interests (Landau 1952: 37 –8). Nevertheless, while the rest of Morocco was parcelled to France or Spain, Tangier was parcelled to the world – a neutral, international, free-trade zone in the interest of all European nations wanting to protect their strategic and commercial investments in the region. Transfer to official international status would seem a cosmetic change to a city already inhabited, and to some extent governed, by Europeans for more than a century. Yet the transfer was a rupture in many ways: the Health Commission – which had in the preceding years not only governed sanitation but also organized a police force, street lighting and child vaccinations – was abruptly disbanded, though not entirely. While subscriptions were supposedly open to all residents to participate, the Commission effectively reproduced the interests of foreigners in city governance, represented by their contribution to its funding and majority presence on the board (Viehoff 2009). The United States and Italy, both late signatories to the Convention instating the Zone, refused to abandon the Health Commission until 1929, when its duties were assumed by the international administration and its records went to the American Legation (Stuart 1955: 24 – 6). The new iteration of international governing body reconstituted previous power structures, often in a way similar to the previous system, but shifting dynamics nonetheless. The international community of Tangier was no longer a fringe group, insulated by their foreign status and operating with permission of the sultan to make their own environment. They were now official diplomatic guardians of a free-trade zone on the border of two occupied protectorates, which began to attract new residents interested in the entrepreneurial potential of this barzakh. More than simply municipal management, the character of the international community changed significantly under its new aegis. El Kouche, in his carefully selected anthology of writing on Tangier, describes the change of image as taking ‘the appearance of a cosmopolitan city from the unfurling of foreign colonies’ (El Kouche 1996: 11), but the city had been a centre for a sliver of the international upper class for more than a century; cosmopolitanism was nothing new. While Tangier had previously been an outpost for a small section of Europeans – those associated with the consulates, and those who could afford the travel and could muster the introductions to visit them – it now became a more egalitarian lieu de passage for European visitors. Much like the rest of Morocco, where Lyautey was, after some delay from World War I, literally solidifying his vision of Maroc moderne as he built the villes nouvelles, Tangier joined the list of places open for migration and welcoming to the entrepreneur. The tax laws in particular were permissive for international residents (Landau 1952; Stuart 1955), and the confusion of judicial oversight encouraged authorities to overlook illicit behaviour. Visiting after World War II, Landau

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quotes an anonymous diplomat of unspecified national origin, who ‘as a boy had known Tangier before 1912’: At one time it really was an international city. The various foreign communities used to mingle, learn one another’s languages, and, above all, speak Arabic. They considered it a natural duty to know the language of the country in which they lived. And they took a genuine interest in the welfare of the natives. Today each national community is interested only in itself and in means of preserving its parochial privileges . . . Most of our recent foreign residents have come here either to escape taxes in their own country or to enrich themselves at any cost. They know nothing about the natives, never associate with them, and look upon them with contempt. At one time there existed a strongly developed espirit de corps, and the foreigners were actuated by their sense of responsibility towards the Moors. Today we are a city ruled by selfishness, national jealousies and the crassness of the nouveaux-riches . . . (anonymous interviewee, cited in Landau 1952: 109) Interestingly, this interviewee goes on to rue the lost sense of a ‘true aristocracy’ in Tangier (Landau 1952: 110), replaced by a plutocracy with no sense of social consciousness – a symptomatic shift of interwar Europe. As a barzakh, Tangier of course reflects this shift; a border that integrates qualities from both its opposite sides, the city was following the shifts and folds of Europe as much as those of Protectorate politics and resistance in Morocco. Being an international city populated by Moroccans but protected by international law made Tangier the place from which Sultan Mohammed V, later the first king of the independent Kingdom of Morocco, could openly support the nationalist cause in a 1947 speech given directly to Moroccan subjects while on ‘foreign’ soil, an event often cited as a turning point in Morocco’s struggle for independence (c.f. Pennell 2000). Here, Tangier functioned as a barzakh in its profound ambiguity: while social conditions for many Moroccan residents were declining, as the ‘aristocratic’ social influence of the former international residents disappeared, it was also the place where the future king could declare his intentions, for the first time, to resist French and Spanish occupation over the rest of Morocco, and over Tangier, the international city that all the European powers clung to with their diplomatic might. This speech is merely one of the most public moments during the post-war period through which Tangier began to become fixed in its mythical status as the ‘interzone’. It was also the only place in the world where Cold War rivals Russia and the United States shared official powers. It became a free zone of diplomatic intrigue at the highest levels, while it also became a zone free of punishment for certain types of criminality:

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Tangier assimilated into a city of drifting and debauchery, a fantastic place domesticated by smugglers, addicts, prostitutes and homosexuals, a corrupted city that didn’t resist the solicitations of the rich and gave itself to the highest bidder. (El Kouche 1996: 11 –12) How Sinful Is Tangier? DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU HEAR. Viewing the life of Tangier as seen in a bar room mirror several American journalists recently have written articles which tried to create the impression that this is a sinful city, a sort of international Sodom and Gomorra. The fact is that they met the wrong people and were taken in by a lot of tall stories. Without destroying any illusions, let’s set the record straight. Those who seek sin in Tangier will find it, but on the whole the international city is a peaceful place whose crime rate is one of the lowest in the world. It certainly is not a roaring, wide-open city in the usual sense. In fact it is noted for its good behaviour and visitors seldom have trouble in any form. (Mediterranean American Press 1952: 67) It was in this atmosphere that the important literary influences that have indelibly marked Tangier became more concentrated. Prior to Tangier’s reputation as such a haven for sin, several French writers had passed through the city – like Claude Farre`re and Henri de Montherlant, both notable novelists on North Africa – but their work more often is concerned with Frenchdominated cities farther south. Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, a longtime resident of Tangier, led the production of a book entitled Tanger et sa Zone (1921), the seventh volume of Villes et tribus, in the series undertaken by the French Mission Scientifique du Maroc providing detailed documentation of the physical geography and sociology of the region, including its international treaties. But from then, until the post-war period, relatively little voice from or on Tangier was published for the European audience abroad, apart from occasional tourism guides and advertorial magazines issued by the Tourist Office of Tangier in three languages (Tourist Office of the Tangier Zone 1934). After World War II, Tangier became a much more recognizable city for Americans for its entrepreneurial development, political intrigue and enticing and dangerous possibilities as a Mediterranean vacation spot (Mediterranean American Press 1952, OREP 1949; Stuart 1955). Paul Bowles first visited in 1931, taking a house in the Mountain neighbourhood with composer Aaron Copland. Haunted, as he described in his autobiography (1972), by this city of his dreams, he returned in 1947 to become Tangier’s most important foreign resident of the twentieth century. At the time, Bowles was not a major figure in the American literary scene – his wife Jane Auer was, in fact, described by peers as

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a better writer – but his connections to certain figures, and his and Jane’s penchant for an alternative lifestyle, created links between burgeoning American counterculture movements and the city. When they returned together in 1947 –8, Paul and Jane resolved to live in the medina, around the Petit Socco and in hotels along Boulevard Pasteur – away from the aristocratic neighbourhood and closer to the crowded streets. Indeed, the Petit Socco figured repeatedly in Paul’s remembrances, as well as many of the (male) authors who came to Tangier, as the site where drugs and prostitutes of either sex could be easily found. In some ways having become synonymous with Tangier – hardly a guidebook or anthology does not mention him or bow to his influence (c.f. Coury and Lacey 2009; Finlayson 1992; Green 1992) – Paul Bowles is reflective of the ambiguity of the city as it transitioned from international to nationalized barzakh. Undoubtedly, his presence opened doors for other American writers to visit Tangier, such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to list a few of the most recognizable names, who eventually transferred their time there into iconic landscapes and affects of their writing. Not all of these visits were directly due to Paul; Capote, for example, visited his friend Jane Bowles, who is often characterized as having settled with her husband in Tangier to the detriment of her own writing career (Edwards 2005; Knight 1996). While Paul and Jane’s alternative lifestyle was no secret – each of them having publicly known same-sex romantic companions while maintaining their marriage as a social partnership – their home became one of the social salons of Tangier, where one might encounter a literary star at their daily cocktail hour in the medina – a haven for elites, while Tangier outside suffered profound unemployment postInternational Zone (Schaar 2008). To some extent, Paul Bowles built his career on this dream city, more out of his imagined ideal of International Zone Tangier than its actual trajectory. He frequently, explicitly expressed his longing to reverse the ‘Europeanization’ of Morocco and Moroccans (Amine 2009; Edwards 2005: 228), and implicitly through recording and ‘preserving’ stories and samples of music that emphasized Morocco’s oral folklore. Indeed, his writing is analysed as reflecting an orientalist fetishization of Moroccan life and practices as reminiscent of an earlier, purer time (Aidi 2005; El Kouche 2005; Walonen 2011). Moreover, he had famously complicated professional and personal relationships with his Moroccan collaborators, with hints that he took advantage of his position as translator of their oral stories, bringing credit (and payment) to himself as author (Edwards 2005, ch. 5; Lacey 2009; Sabil 2005). Though Bowles is the most discussed figure of literary Tangiers, he is, in some sense, an untrustworthy narrator: a privileged holder of expatriate status who may have extorted the talents of others to build his reputation. The cult of personality that surrounds him, however, is very much his own, founded in his preferences for the liberties of sexuality and substance use that Tangier allowed.

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In this sense, Paul Bowles’ important role to the city was in attracting other writers, musicians, performers, and counterculture celebrities whose drugged escapades through Tangier became embedded in legends of that city, and legends of Morocco in general. Their sojourns and artistic reproductions of their experiences, through music and writing, publicized it as the place of permissiveness for forbidden activities, and made it a lodestar for later waves of counterculture pleasure-seekers (Edwards 2005; Finlayson 1993; Green 1991). An important aspect of the Bowles’ Tangier is their transatlantic connection: the majority of the writers Paul and Jane introduced to Tangier society, both its European and Moroccan elements, were from the United States. Those of the 1960s and 1970s were seeking a haven from suffocating discourses in the American mainstream, and found such a place as a home in Tangier. In fact, this is another tenor that sets Tangerine writers apart from many coming out of French Morocco: like their nineteenth-century predecessors, many became semipermanent or long-term residents of the city. For tourists, Tangier might be a lieu de passage towards elsewhere in Morocco, or a city permitting the exploration of darker sides of life; for the writers, it was a place to stay, or a place to return to again and again. William Burroughs is the prime example of this, as he completed the manuscript of Naked Lunch in known locations throughout the city during several years there, particularly around the Petit Socco; his pathways, and intersections with the Bowles’, are well mapped even today (Harris and MacFayden 2009). These writers’ self-selected escape into Tangier was not specifically into an exotic Orient, rather a permissive Orient, with support of familiar European and American social networks to prevent their being lost in the void. Their presence, and residence, cemented Tangier in an internationalimaginary as the cloud between the infinite sky and the harsh ground; the barzakh zone providing passage between real life and the abyss of the drug haze.

Tangerinas: a different barzakh Sometimes I played the part of a Nazarene fool being outwitted by two shrewd market women and it seemed to me that they were playing the parts of two shrewd market women outwitting a Nazarene fool. (Bowles 1951: 159) Meanwhile, Jane Bowles also built a life in Tangier. Her attachments to the city, however, grew in different spaces than Paul’s. If Paul’s spiritual locus in Tangier was the Petit Socco and its cafe´s, Jane’s locus could have been the open-air market on the Grand Socco. Residents and travellers of the previous century described it as a meeting place of all of Africa (El Kouche 1996: 207; Teissier 1996), where denizens of Tangier’s surroundings came to sell, including many women vendors. There, Jane met the Moroccan woman, a grain-seller always referred to

Figure 9.8 Jane Bowles at the market, 1954 (K. Hamill, Millicent Dillon Papers, University of Texas at Austin)

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in the pseudonym Cherifa, who would be her companion and perhaps lover until her death in 1973 (Dillon 1980). There she was known to prowl with her shopping basket, meeting and chatting with Moroccan women (ibid.: 236). She was also a social presence in European and literary Tangier, connected with the households up on the Mountain and the Librairie des Colonnes bookstore, still in existence, that hosted innumerable international literary figures during Tangier’s Beat heyday (Dillon 1980). While her presence is less well documented than her husband’s, it serves here as a window into the circulation of generations of women making homes in Tangier, as evidence of their influence trickles down from the nineteenth century to the present, flourishing in the open space of the Grand Socco and the boulevards that connect it to the expanding city – in parallel and in contrast to the illicit business and gossip of the Petit Socco. The Mountain and the Librairie des Colonnes are both key places in this narrative: zones of Tangier social and literary life that were operated by women. The nineteenthcentury narratives of the many Tangerina female authors discussed shows a distinction from their male counterparts in the focus on daily life: the homes, society, and ambiance that constituted their connection with others and with the city. They give us a record of Tangerine (read: European) lifestyles in the insulated diplomatic community of the Mountain, showing how their roots are planted in Moroccan soil. While this record is diminutive and less widely read than that of the Beat generation – who made the Tangier barzakh famous as a dark zone of transgressions – their century of inhabiting the city created progeny, successive generations of sons and daughters who are ‘from’ Tangier, while still being European – an expanding barzakh of individuals connected positively and profoundly to both sides of the Mediterranean. These descendants emerge as semipublic figures for the city’s arts and literature in iterations of the Tangier scene that may be less well recognized but are equally important – like Yvonne and Isabelle Gerofi, wife and sister of Robert Gerofi, who operated the Librairie des Colonnes from his death in 1951 until they passed it to another woman, Rachel Muyal, in 1973 (Librairie des Colonnes 2013). Jane Bowles and other women who arrived and made Tangier their home enabled this bridge, or barzakh, towards a European inhabitation that is of Tangier as much as in it. Jane Bowles’ story, ‘East Side: North Africa’ (1951), is indeed chosen for analysis by many literary scholars not only because it describes her relationship to Tangier in her early years there, but also because it is one of the few writings she published before a stroke in 1957 impeded her ability to work (Dillon 1980; Edwards 2005). We choose to recall it here because the story evokes the paradox her husband frequently reiterated in his fictional interpretations of Morocco: the inability for Westerners to connect to Moroccans on their terms. Yet in her story, Jane Bowles expresses this desire very differently than Paul, through her desire to connect rather than the impenetrable distance between Arabs and Westerners often described by her

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partner. In this semi-non-fiction piece, originally issued paired with ‘West Side: North America’, in Mademoiselle Magazine, Jane Bowles recounts familiar struggles of becoming part of the circle of women in Morocco – the narrator’s childish comprehension of Arabic and inability to express herself, the repeated questions about her family and her husband that do not seem to have a good answer, endless hours of drinking tea and eating cakes with no polite way to escape, and the realization that her friendships are linked to her status as benefactor. Yet Bowles’s story evokes the internal conflict about this inability to connect to these women and to the city itself, particularly with its final image of the (female) narrator reaching out to touch a wall she cannot quite meet. The narrator is described by the Moroccan woman she meets as spending half her time with ‘Nazarenes’ (Christians, or Europeans in general) and half her time with Muslims; in some sense doomed to waver back and forth between two houses, two logically separated communities. She is trying to become part of social life in her new hometown, but struggling. Her struggle to connect sets this story apart in many ways from the canon of male European writers in Tangier, where the sense of belonging is not as profoundly desired. Women in contact with other women sought connection in many generations, something that nineteenth-century artists Elizabeth Murray observed on the Grand Socco: With all the mystery attending the appearance of one who peers at you only with one eye, while she carefully conceals all the rest of her visage in the folds of her haikh, after the foresaid Fatima or Leila has sold us a dozen eggs or a pound of butter, we do not feel quite so disposed to think of these ladies only as the inmates of luxurious harems, where they repose all day on the softest couches, breathing only an atmosphere pervaded with the most fragrant perfumes, holding the amber-mouthed narghil to their lips, and constantly fanned by the black slaves who are ever at their beck. A little acquaintance with Moorish and Eastern life soon dispels much of the romance which ignorance associates with it. (Murray 1859: 67 –8) As a space of interaction, the Grand Socco enabled women from the earliest waves of European residents and travellers in Tangier to seek a connection, to better understand the Other behind the veil. While no longer an open market, today it is still a crossroads of old and new Tangier: the border of the Anglican church with the crowded Christian cemetery; under the classic Villa de France hotel, which has recently been renovated and reopened; the main gate towards the medina, where hundreds pass every day; and the restored Cine´ ma du Rif, a central pulse for the new cosmopolitan art scene that is becoming part of Tangier’s international reputation (Williams 2008).

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The Cine´ma du Rif’s co-founder and artistic director, Yto Barrada, is one of the figures towards which attention of the international press is directed when events, like film festivals, book launches, photography expositions and the like, bring Tangerine society into the Cine´ma’s Grand Socco space. A French-Moroccan woman who grew up in Tangier, Barrada’s own photographic work and public statements (ytobarrada.com) show her committed to making her city a recognized place in the arts. She is leading by example with this organization that is not just a movie theatre but a cinemathe`que, with pedagogical, archival and promotional projects for Moroccan film. Within just a few years of its opening, the cinema has become a locus of activity, from major national and international film festivals to open-air screenings over the Socco (Schneider 2011) Other women with family connections to Tangier are bringing the city into view through arts and literature. Elena Prentice, an American whose grandfather was a consul-general in Tangier and is buried there, is a long-time resident and founder of a small publishing house dedicated to the stories coming out of Morocco, of Westerners and of Moroccans (Pe´raldi 2008). The small booklets can be found at the Librairie des Colonnes bookstore – itself an institution of International Tangier – as part of the ongoing recording of the city’s literary history. These women situate themselves as inherently belonging to Tangier, as being as much part of the city as any Moroccan resident – and not without precedent. Elisa Chimenti, an Italian francophone woman who grew up and grew old in Tangier, published her Chants de femmes arabes (Rennaiat Ennesa) in 1942 as

Figure 9.9

Cinema du Rif, Grand Socco (L. Wagner 2012)

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simple stories told from her own childhood experience, but rooted in Tangier’s multi-faceted history with crossings of Christians, Muslims, Romans, English and Iberians. They were translations of traditional folktales, much like the translations Paul Bowles would later make of Mohammed Mrabet’s storytelling, but not presented as exotic kernels stolen from an inexplicable other culture. Rather, they come from a collective Mediterranean history that is located in Tangier. Chimenti sought to humanize across social boundaries, to diminish the perceived differences between Christian and Muslim communities by showing the common universals (Zemmouri 2006) – a portrait of barzakh that emphasizes the connection between the two sides. A foundation in her name was established in Tangier in 2010, with the goal of promoting solidarity and understanding across both sides of the Mediterranean (Fondation Me´diterrane´enne Elisa Chimenti 2013). Coming back to Tangier after many years, Lauren is struck by the openness and lightness emerging from these new zones of cultural interaction. It seems significant that these milieux of Tangier arts and letters are connected to women who make their homes here and women who return to a home here, tracing their ancestry deep into Tangier. They contribute to blurring the lines between Western and Moroccan, to making a Tangier that is both Moroccan and something else, and most importantly to moving beyond the Tangier of the International Zone – and its tales of vice and corruption – into a Tangier that can be recognized as vibrant in a global community. The Grand Socco is a spatial example of this rejuvenation, only recently renovated from what was widely seen as a dirty, unwelcoming space into a fountain and a new kind of crossroads, between the traditional Moroccan medina and a rejuvenated Moroccan cinema. Tangier remains a barzakh, but is becoming a more translucent one, pressing towards the syncretization of Morocco and Europe that brings elements of both into mutual collaboration and comprehension, through Western women who are both in Tangier (like Jane) and of it.

(Re)turns In the dream world, the things we perceive share in the luminosity of our own consciousness, yet they are presented to us as corporeal and dense things, not as disembodied spirits . . . the world of dreams combines unity and multiplicity. A single dreaming subject perceives a multiplicity of forms and things that are in fact nothing but his own single self. Their manyness is but the mode that the one consciousness assumes in displaying various facets of itself. (Chittick 1989: 15) The layering of Tangier is increasing, expanding in from its heart on the hillside towards Mediterranean and Atlantic shores. While its existence as a

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concentration of dwellings has always been linked to its geographical singularity, where the opposite shore of the Straits of Gibraltar is visible on clear days, its momentum today moves once again beyond that particular geography towards far distant and international connections. It continues to act as barzakh: a meeting place, a zone of confusion and transgression, a zone of contact and emergence, making possible new formulations of the metaphorical and functional links of Morocco with the world. It is from this disembarkation point that we leave Moroccan soil (if Tangier still is Moroccan soil) to return to the northern side of the Mediterranean. Yet Lauren can no longer make this journey from the port where she arrived many years ago at the base of the Kasbah hillside: the new Tanger Med port, 40 km distant along the Mediterranean coast, has opened for passenger ferries while its capacity is still expanding through 2015. Responding to desires for global mobilities of goods that exceeded the cramped infrastructure of the city itself, part of its centrality has been relocated. This relocation is also a response to shifting economic winds in Morocco and Africa in general, acknowledging the strength of the emerging Global South as investors and consumers (Anon 2008). The presence of these influences in Tangier is mostly visible in new parts of the built environment – the new port, new housing bearing the insignia of Gulf developers – and not yet in the streets and communities where Europeans have made their presence part of the city. As a barzakh, Tangier is continually shifting, changing direction, responding to new borders that reshape its movements. We watch as the ferry pushes out to sea, no longer looking at the flickering lights of the medina, but still gazing on a soil whose presence remains with us as we cross to another shore.

FINALE

To conclude our journey, we suggest that, in order to challenge the extraordinary resilience of the European dream of Morocco, a dream marked (still today) by colonial discursive formations, these very formations could – and perhaps should – be transgressed. This is precisely why we thought that it was important to critically engage with the performances of a set of hypothetical mobile subjects, the tourists, the ‘locals working with tourists’, the authors themselves, in Morocco today. This engagement brought us to travel through sites in which several past and contemporary cultural trajectories/tropes intersect, sites ‘dense’ with tourism and colonial significance, where the main tropes of the European invention of the ‘Moroccan dream’ come together and often produce something unexpected, something different from the placid waters of the Moroccan cultural mappings provided by most popular tourist literature. Lyautey’s ghost is still pervading many of the ways in which Moroccan culture and tradition are understood and presented today, especially, but not exclusively, to the European visitor. While an orientalist idea of Morocco remains influential in the crafting of ‘Morocco’ as a tourist product, revealing the enduring presence of the colonial legacy in contemporary travel culture, at the same time the enactments of the ‘Moroccan dream’ produce a much more complicated geography of practices and representations linked to those very practices. Travelling to Morocco today while engaging with the consequences of the colonial gaze reinterpreted for global tourism reveals a postcolonial condition that is all too often produced and reproduced by both the locals and the visitors, in a strange ballet where everyone seems to know the plot, but also where everyone seems inclined to transgress in every moment. This interplay between postcolonial orderings and their messy enactments, as dictated by the language of the ‘Moroccan dream’, is what we hope this book has managed to illustrate. Le Maroc and ‘Morocco’ as tourist destinations, are indeed tightly linked, but not in a simple way. The real and imagined sites taken into consideration in this book show how the entanglements between Le Maroc

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and ‘Morocco’ are not only complicated to unravel but also represent a great opportunity to reflect on the power of the colonial gaze and its contemporary, often unintended, effects. Indeed, one of the aims of the volume was to make the reader reflect on the possibility that the mosaic of the Moroccan puzzle, the geographical objects that the book intends to explore, could easily be moved around on the Moroccan tourist tableau without losing any of their metaphorical power. And yet contemporary Morocco is not a tableau, and the postcolonial encounter not just a theatrical experience. It implies, rather, a set of very real performances, very real effects; it puts into practice a series of scripts that mark the very constitution of the modern European subject with all the intriguing ambiguities and tensions that characterize every metaphorical or ‘real’ experience of otherness. Morocco, we hope to have demonstrated, remains in this sense an ideal laboratory for a geographical reflection on the production of the European Self.

NOTES

Chapter 3

Lyautey’s Dream

1. There are some potential misquotations in this citation when compared to the original. First of all, it is not clear that the group was stepping off the train to enter the capital. Additionally, Mitchell changed the punctuation significantly from the original, which reinterprets pauses and intonations from Maurois’ journalistic transcription. Furthermore, Lyautey goes on to explain the kiosk selling maps, in that ‘in France’ the state-created maps are difficult to obtain in comparison to commercially produced ones. The message seems to be that the state should comport itself more like a business, and offer their maps for sale more easily. He also notes that he ‘has vendors’ who are charged with distributing the maps, and receive a percentage of the profits (Maurois 1931: 319). This points towards the pacification doctrine, inasmuch as it represents one more way Lyautey can foster development and ingratiate himself with colonized residents (assuming the vendors are Moroccan).

Chapter 5

La Place

1. This and the quotes to follow are taken from Fauchon (2009: appendix). This rather unconventional use of quotes is intended to describe an imagined conversation between the text and its critique here. We did not obtain permission to publish the related photos. However, an idea of their content can be found at the following website: http://www.ibispress.fr/f/index.php?sp¼ liv&livre_id¼93.

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INDEX

Abu-Lughod, Janet, xxiii, 1, 10, 11, 12, 15, 19, 26, 58, 63, 79, 80, 84, 87, 91– 2, 94, 117, 124, 132, 276 Agamben, Giorgio, 139, 154– 5, 276 Algeria, xvii, 9, 12, 14, 16, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 57, 62, 67, 78, 81, 82, 110, 119, 167, 172, 187, 192, 193, 195, 206, 209, 223, 253 Andalucı´a, 18, 34, 80 anthropogenesis, 139, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160 anthropology, xx, 66, 111, 138, 139, 140, 151, 160, 172, 197, 200 apartheid, 87, 91 architecture, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26 – 9, 34, 41, 43, 45, 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88 – 93, 94, 97, 107, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 165, 167, 170, 172, 173, 177, 181, 185, 231, 232, 237, 239, 246, 250, 260 arabisance, 16, 22, 75 modern, 21, 26, 74, 75, 78, 89, 93 Moresque, xxiii, 74, 76, 77, 89 Neo-Moresque, 16, 90 Oriental, 21, 28, 81 assimilation, xvii, 8, 9 association, xvii, xviii, xxiv, 3, 6, 7– 10, 15, 18, 22, 28, 29, 74, 75, 78, 83, 92

Atlas Mountains, xxiv, 82, 111, 115, 140, 146, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170 automobile topography, 174 Babin, Gustave, 55, 170, 171, 277 Barrada, Yto, 270 Beat generation, 245, 246, 268 Berber(s), 33, 34, 36, 44, 49, 134, 163, 168, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 185, 200, 202, 206, 212, 223, 229, 242 bled es-siba, 167, 168, 170, 173 Bore´ly, Jules, 19 Bosco, Henri, 101 Bouaouinate, Asmae, xiii, 196, 197, 200, 206, 208, 209, 278 Bowles, Jane, 264, 265, 266 – 9, 271, 278 Bowles, Paul, xvi, 66, 67, 245, 264– 6, 271, 278 Caillie´, Rene, 191, 196, 278 Canetti, Elias, xvi, 134, 149, 278 Cap Spartel lighthouse, 45, 249, 257, 258 cartographies, xvii, xx, 48, 82, 84, 111, 116, 124, 126, 130, 131, 136, 146, 167, 189 Casablanca, xxii, 20, 22, 27, 46, 57, 62, 63, 65, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 92, 102, 119, 124, 170, 173, 194, 224, 230 Castel Real, 222, 229, Cauvin-Verner, Corinne, 197, 200– 4, 205, 278

290

MOROCCAN DREAMS

Chellah, 79, 94, 95, 97, 99 Chimenti, Elisa, 270, 271, 281 Cine´ma du Rif, 269, 270 cinematography, xxi, 165, 166, 174, 180, 181, 183, 184, 202, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214, 227, 235 colonialism, xviii, xxv, 21, 69, 79, 139, 148, 153 authority, 18, 88, 224 chic, xviii city, 12, 15, 29, 82, 83, 87, 88, 102, 240 desire, 29, 136, 149, 150 discourse, xix, 138, 151, 273 doctrine, 9 dream, xxvi, 78, 91, 191 fantasies, 1, 3, 107, 138, 185, 187 fictions, xviii gaze, xxiii, 2, 11, 87, 136, 193, 239, 273, 274 geography, 78 imagery, xvi, xxiii, xxv, 29, 90, 142, 146 laboratory, 12 landscape, 9, 83 legacy, xvi, xviii, xxi, 147, 273 literature, 166, 196 modernity, xvi, 21, 29, 107, 178 nostalgia, xviii, 5 orderings, xvi, xxiii, 88 project, xiv, xvii, xviii, 8, 23, 33, 74, 78, 90, 139, 147, 196 re-staged, xxv spatial experimentation, xvi spatialities, xxvi state, 9 travel literature, 213 tropes, xix, xxi, 200, 205, 214, 215 – 216 visions, xxiii, 3, 143 Comite´ du Maroc, 168, 170 Congress of the Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, 1, 5, 7, 8, 11, 18, 21, 26 conservation, xvii, xxiii, 1, 3, 5, 10, 18, 19, 26, 29, 78, 110, 115, 116, 144, 231

contact zone, xix, xxi, 150, 157, 160, 162, 210, 238 Cook, Joel, 52, 53, 109, 114, 115, 118, 258, 279 cosmopolitanism, xxv, 85, 140, 174, 192, 224, 225, 232, 235, 241, 246, 249, 250, 251, 252, 256, 262, 269 culture, xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 66, 67, 74, 77, 87, 88, 91, 93, 101, 102, 103, 136, 137, 138, 140, 144, 147, 149, 150, 153, 155, 159, 172, 177, 194, 200, 205, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 238, 271, 273 difference, 88, 139 geographies of display, 159 involution, xviii De Amicis, Edmondo, xvi, 47, 48, 82, 109, 111, 112, 276 Delacroix, Euge`ne, xvi, 29, 36 – 40, 50, 66, 69, 108, 142, 248, 279 desert, xxiv, 35, 40, 57, 83, 151, 161, 163, 165, 174, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185, 187– 216 camel/dromedary experience, 188, 190, 197, 198, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 212, 213, 214, 238, 239 experience, xxv, 189, 190, 193, 194, 200, 203, 205, 212, 214 landscape, 165, 178, 187, 188, 189, 190, 197, 212 real, 188, 206 tourism, 165, 182, 195, 196, 199, 200, 204 Drummond Hay, John, 40, 42, 253 –7, 280 Doutte´, Edmond, 82, 170, 173, 225, 280 dual city, xvii, xxiii, 2, 7, 12, 13, 15, 17, 69, 74, 84, 91, 102, 236 E´cole des Beaux-Arts, 15, 16, 17 E´cole Coloniale, 28

INDEX Empire, 5, 9, 13, 15, 33, 35, 39, 44, 49, 52, 95, 97, 110, 153, 167, 254 Andalusian, 34 French, 3, 87, 142, 192 Moroccan, 39 Roman, 32 encounters, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxv, 2, 5, 6, 25, 37, 47, 69, 71, 89, 111, 112, 124, 125, 135, 150, 157, 160, 168, 180, 193, 195, 201, 213, 227, 238, 245, 246, 248, 253, 255, 256, 260, 274 Erg Chebbi, 179, 187, 188, 190, 196, 206, 208, 209, 213, 214 Merzouga complex, 188, 190, 200, 206 Essaouira, xxv, 33, 36, 40, 42, 46, 68, 217– 42, 249 Gnawa effect, 229 hippie culture, 67, 226, 227, 229, 232, 233, 235, 249 Jews, 223, 230 Mogador, xxv, 36, 40, 42, 217 – 42, 249 surfing culture, 218, 226, 230, 234, 235 ville d’artistes, 232 ethnography, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 22, 66, 139, 158, 200, 202, 225, 237, 238 auto-ethnography, 218 object, xxiv, 23, 156, 164, 185, 209, 210 representation, 157 spatial analysis, xix specimen, 152 Europe, xvi, xxiii, xxv, 1, 2, 5, 7, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 42, 46, 49, 50, 55, 67, 69, 72, 73, 80, 141, 142, 166, 196, 222, 228, 230, 232, 234, 243, 246, 247, 251, 253, 255, 256, 263, 266, 271 elite, xvii, 142 – 3, 191 gaze, xix, xxiii, 58, 73, 117, 182, 185, 190, 226, 235 modernity, xviii, xix, xxiii, 21, 151, 189 (colonial) powers, xxiii, 10, 36, 42, 46, 55, 222, 223, 248, 249, 260, 263

291

project, xiv, xix, 103 tourist, xviii, xix, 5, 29, 53, 58, 69, 142, 147, 157, 181, 188, 201, 234 traveller/visitor, xvii, xxi, xxiv, xxvi, 2, 31, 32, 41, 46 – 50, 69, 82, 83, 108, 109, 131, 136, 142, 146, 150, 164, 167, 177, 189, 194, 196, 200, 226, 233, 254, 262, 274 exhibition, xxiii, 13, 18, 20–6, 44, 62, 74, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 139, 150, 156, 233 exhibition-medrasa, 97 technologies, xxiii world-as-exhibition, 21, 87 exotic objects of interest, 9 Expositions Coloniales, 21, 23, 26, 61 – 4, 71, 193 Fauchon, Daniel, xxiv, 136, 138, 139, 150, 151, 280 Fe´de´ration des Syndicats d’Initiative et de Tourisme du Maroc, 57, 62, 172 Fez, xxiv, 15, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 46, 47, 52, 55, 58, 59, 68, 77, 80, 82, 83, 94, 102, 103, 104– 32, 170, 191, 249, 250, 253 fieldwork, xiv, xix, xx, 15, 188, 213 de Foucauld, Charles, xvi, 47, 48, 82, 167, 168, 170, 173, 191, 193, 194, 195, 227, 281 France/French, 3, 8, 10, 11, 16, 20, 36, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 52, 53, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 72, 75, 83, 92, 125, 142, 193, 202, 224, 249, 257, 259, 260, 262 city, 16, 95, 116, 123 colonial doctrine, 9 colonial elite, 9 colonial empire, 3, 192 colonial imaginary, 39 colonies, 63, 78 le plus grande, 7, 62, 70, 72 (colonial) modern, 83, 90 urban imperialism, 74 urbanism, 13, 15, 83, 91 Fromentin, Euge´ne, 192, 193, 195, 281

292

MOROCCAN DREAMS

Gallieni, Joseph, 16 Garnier, Tony, 15, 85 geographies, xix geography, xix, xx, xxii, 2, 6, 45, 47, 77, 101, 142, 144, 159, 166, 179, 182, 184, 190, 193, 194, 213, 216, 221, 246, 264, 271, 273 colonial, 78 empire, 13 imaginations, xvii laboratory, xxiii Morocco, xvii, xxiii, 143, 196, 224, 226 postcolonial, 25, 78 tourism, xviii, xix, 101, 147, 164, 182, 190, 205, 214, 236, 240 Gnawa, 156, 161, 229, 230, 232, 233, 238 culture, 226, 233 music, 226, 229 Goulven, Joseph, 165, 171, 172, 173, 174, 283 Goytisolo, Juan, 5, 137, 138, 281 Guide Blue, 99, 100, 143 Harris, Walter, 47, 168, 169, 170, 174, 259, 281 Hassan Tower, 82, 94, 97, 99, 101 He´brard, Ernest, 15 heritage, xvii, xviii, 25, 77, 93, 102, 137, 143, 147, 151, 153, 157, 160, 177 archaeological, 25 conservation, 5 cultural, 14, 25, 145, 146 Moroccan, xxiv, 15, 25, 145 hierarchy, 204, 208 race-based, 91 hybrid acculturation, xxiii Ibn Battuta, 34, 247 Ibn Khaldoun, 8, 34 Idriss II, Moulay, 108 tomb of, 41, 111, 113, 114, 128 L’illustration, 43, 55, 56, 97, 119, 130, 170 immunization, 161

imperialism, xviii, 22, 37, 74, 75, 79, 80, 108, 172, 259 cities, xxiv, 74, 77 – 9, 82, 83, 108, 140 recycling, xviii Indochina, 7, 16 Institut des Hautes E´tudes Marocaines, 172 Islam, 33, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42, 53, 80, 92, 108, 109, 111, 116–18, 120, 124, 125, 126, 129, 194, 223, 238, 244, 255, 256 art, 17 culture, 28, 89 Jemaa el-Fna, xxiv, 25, 133– 62 Figures au Pre´sent, xxiv, 136, 138, 139, 150 – 60 as landscape, 146 Karaouine mosque, 108, 111, 117, 118, 128 Kasbah, xxiv, 79, 80, 96, 97, 102, 164– 86 Ait-Ben-Haddou, 165, 176, 179 Assafar, 163– 5, 183, 184 effect, 165 experience, 164, 165, 178, 184 hotel, 180 des Oudayas, 77, 79, 94, 96, 99, 164 Route des Kasbahs, 164, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179 Taourirt, 180, 181 La Valle´e des Roses/the Valley of Roses, 163, 173 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 23, 136, 153, 155– 7, 282 late colonial order, 8 local imaginations, xviii, 147 Loti, Pierre, xvi, 130 Lyautey, Louis Hubert Gonzalve, xvii, xviii, xix, xxii, xxiii, 1–30, 31–34, 55, 57–65, 67, 69, 72, 74–103, 104, 107, 108, 115, 117, 118, 124, 128, 131, 142–5, 170, 193, 194, 195, 196, 224, 228, 239, 242, 249, 250, 252, 262, 273

INDEX Madagascar, 7, 16 Majorelle, Jacques, 29, 58, 60, 283 le Mare´chal le Maroc, xvi, xxii, 1, 2, 3 – 11, 28, 29, 30, 33, 60, 61, 103, 273 appel du Maroc, 2, 29, 101 colonial, xxii europe´en, 76 franc ais, 75, 76 reconnaissance, 5 Marrakech, xxiv, 25, 27, 35, 36, 42, 46, 47, 55, 63, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 79, 80, 82, 97, 103, 108, 116, 120, 133– 162, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 180, 201, 212, 218, 221, 224, 225, 230, 234, 241, 242, 249, 253 Maurois, Andre´, 2, 21, 87 – 90, 283 de Mazie`res, Marc, 62, 165, 171, 172, 173, 174, 283 medina, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, 34, 63, 68, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104 – 32, 134, 136, 138, 141, 144, 146, 151, 152, 155, 157, 160, 164, 185, 218, 224, 225, 227, 231, 237, 240, 241, 242, 249, 250, 265, 269, 271, 272 me´dina, 104, 115, 125, 126, 141 medrasa, 18, 58, 59, 96, 97, 99, 116, 117, 118 Merzouga, 165, 167, 179, 182, 188 –90, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214 metaphysics of representation, 22, 29, 88, 148 methodology of travel, xix metropole, xvii, 3, 10, 12, 13, 62, 74, 89, 117, 191, 192 mission civilisatrice, 8, 9 Mission Scientifique au Maroc, 53, 58, 264, Mitchell, Timothy, xxiii, 18, 21, 22, 53, 87– 90, 96, 97, 107, 148 Mogador, xxv, 36, 40, 42, 217 –42, 249 Montagne, Robert, 61, 172, 173, 284

293

Morocco arts, 16, 18, 19, 66, 233 chic, xxv, 28, 67, 68, 71, 239– 42, 249 colours of, 218, 239 difference, 5 dream(s), xvii, xxi, xxii, xxvi, 29, 165, 166, 185, 186, 204, 213, 218, 219, 226, 232, 233, 235, 236, 246, 273 experiment, 26 French, 7, 10, 27, 29, 224, 266 heritage, 15, 145 history, 33, 78, 145, 223, 246 late postcolonial, 2, 3 mosaic, xxii, xxv, 274 old, 57, 58, 97, 99 social modernity, xvii, xxii, 3, 13, 27, 74, 89, 102 Tourism Office, 177 tourist geographies, xviii, xix, 101, 147, 240 traditional culture, 5, 21 Moroccanness, xvii Muse´e des Colonies, 62, 71 Muse´e Social, 7, 14, 78 museum effect, 159 museumification, xxv, 77, 90, 92, 93, 153 narrative, xix, xx, xxv, xxvi, 15, 33, 41, 42, 49, 67, 69, 72, 82, 108, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 158, 160, 167, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 181, 183, 189, 235, 236, 237, 241, 268 native city, xxiii, 12 native reservations, 12 North Africa, xxiv, 3, 5, 10, 16, 22, 23, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, 49, 52, 57, 63, 66, 67, 69, 72, 104, 172, 230, 247, 264, 268 Occident, 21, 173 Orient, 16, 21, 23, 31, 33, 37, 43, 46, 48, 67, 81, 82, 87, 109, 125, 190, 192, 253, 266

294

MOROCCAN DREAMS

Orientalism, xix, xxiv, 3, 14, 21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 45, 49, 50, 96, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117, 121, 142, 146, 147, 157, 165, 183, 185, 196, 203, 205, 217, 218, 219, 226, 239, 241, 242, 256, 265, 273 art, 15, 29, 83, 91, 195 consumers, xviii innocence, 147 life, xviii, 11, 254 mappings, 6 object, 157 Other, 6, 117 project, 33, 196 Other, xxiv, 8, 22, 125, 269 Ouallywood, 174 Ouazarzate, 165, 167, 168, 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182 pacification, 3, 6, 7, 11, 16, 29, 74, 88, 91, 191 paroles d’action, 1, 3, 10 patrimoine, xvii, xxiii, 3, 77, 95, 103, 142, 230 Marocain, 5, 115 Pauty, Emile, 19 Peffau-Garavini, M., 170 Pe´rigny, Maurice, 57, 116, 120, 225, 285 photographic gaze, 136 Picard, Edmond, 47, 82, 108 – 14, 117, 129, 285 picturesque, xxiii, xxiv, 14, 16, 18, 19, 26, 28, 31, 32, 39, 48, 49, 50, 57, 58, 83, 91, 93, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 160, 166, 167, 170, 173, 176, 225, 255 La Place, xxiv, 133 – 162 politique indigene, xvii, 9, 39 postcolonialism, xix, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 101, 102, 136, 144, 149, 154, 162, 164, 213, 214, 241, 273, 274 analysis, xvi anxiety, 189 gaze, 11

geographies, xiv, 25, 78, 236 re-enactments, xix spatialities, xvii, xxvi studies, xviii tourism, xx, xxii, 164 tourist tropes, xxi travellers, 159 preservation, xviii, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 61, 66, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 81, 93, 107, 108, 115, 116, 124, 137, 143, 144, 146, 147, 177 Prost, Henri, xvii, 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 28, 63, 75, 76, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 94, 285 Protectorate (French), xvi, xvii, xxiii, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 19, 21, 26, 30, 55, 57, 61, 65, 70, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 89, 92, 94, 99, 102, 105, 107, 108, 114, 116, 117, 120, 125, 131, 136, 142, 143, 145, 147, 159, 171, 176, 185, 224, 226, 262, 263, geographies, 166 planning machine, xvii Spanish, 249, 260 Rabat, xxiii, 8, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 33, 36, 46, 58, 65, 74 – 103, 108, 116, 117, 118, 128, 164, 173, 250 Rabinow, Paul, xvii, xxiii, 3, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 22, 26, 27, 28, 63, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 92, 102, 285 ready-made exoticism, xviii, 147 Re´sident-Ge´ne´ral, xvi, 1, 7, 10, 16, 18, 61, 65, 75, 76, 81, 84, 93, 94, 95, 97, 118 riads, 28, 68, 106, 108, 166, 185, 205, 212, 218, 219, 241, 242 Riad Al Madina, 228, 232, 235, 240 Rigollet, Andre´-Marie-Henri, 16, 17 Rivet, Paul, 2, 22, 65, 285 Rivie`re, Georges-Henri, 22 Sahara, xxiv, xxv, 32, 34, 35, 40, 67, 94, 142, 165, 167, 168, 176, 185, 187– 216, 224, 238, 239 landscape, 187, 189

INDEX nomads, 172, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216 theme park, 189, 190, 214 Sale´, 36, 79, 80, 82, 87, 99 Salee Rovers, 80 Sarraut, Albert, 8, 286 Sefrou, 15, 120 de Segonzac, Marquis Rene´, 47, 48, 82, 111, 167, 168, 170, 193, 286 Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, 247, 248 social order, 7, 9, 11, 15, 87, 89, 189, 190 social pacification, 3, 29 Socie´te´ de Ge´ographie, 48, 168, 191, 193 souk, xxiv, 14, 99, 114, 116, 243, 253 de Souza, Robert, 14 spatialities, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 3, 6, 15, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 74, 75, 77, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 116, 118, 124, 125, 136, 139, 152, 162, 163, 165, 172, 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 214, 216, 232, 246, 247, 271 aesthetics, 10 ideology, xxiii laboratory, xvii, xix, 7, 102 orderings, 2, 6, 11 strategies, xvii, 11 theory, xxii, 6, 102 Le Sud, 133, 163, 179 Sultanate, 35, 46, 78, 79, 108, 117, 168, 170, 258 Syndicat d’Initiative de Tourisme, 57, 62, 125, 172 Tafilalt, 168, 191 du Taillis, Jean, 52, 55, 110 – 113, 259, 260, 261, 287 Tangier, xxv, 20, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 63, 66, 67, 79, 82, 97, 108, 109, 119, 164, 168, 229, 243–272 barzakh, 244, 246, 251, 254, 255, 256, 260, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268, 271, 272

295

Grand Socco, 246, 254, 256, 260, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271 International Zone, 247, 249, 251, 258, 260, 265, 271 Petit Socco, 246, 259, 261, 265, 266, 268 Tangerina, 246, 266, 268 Tangerino, 245, 246, 255 Tanjawi, 245, 246 de Tarde, Guillaume, 12 Terasse, Henri, 172, 173, 287 territorialized discursive regimes, xix Tharaud, Jean and Je´rome, xviii, 95, 97, 118, 126, 128, 130, 287 theme-park-ization, xxv tighrimt, 175 topography, xx, xxv, 38, 48, 107, 114, 116, 121, 125, 129, 132, 170, 174 topology, xx, xxi, xxiv, xxvi, 107, 113, 114, 116, 125, 132 Touareg, 99, 189, 192, 193, 200, 201, 202, 205, 212 Touareg-esque look, 206 homme blue, 201, 237 masquerades, 190 tourism/tourist, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 2, 5, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29, 30, 32, 48, 53, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 77, 81, 85, 88, 91, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 128, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 157, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 172, 173, 172, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 213, 218, 221, 226, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 246, 264, 266, 273 biopolitics, 160, 161 cine-tourism, 176 consumption, xvii, 166, 176, 177, 245

296

MOROCCAN DREAMS

contact zones, 157, 160 cultural, 1, 29, 142, 143, 156, 159, 160, 225, 227, 232 desert, xxv, 165, 182, 196, 199, 200, 202, 204, 206 encounters, xviii ethnographic mind, 210 experience, xxi, 182– 3, 190, 208, 214 flows, xx, 144 gaze, xxiv, 58, 78, 102, 152, 153, 157, 197, 235 geography, xviii, xix, 101, 147, 164, 190, 205, 236, 240 imaginaries, xviii, xix, 14, 23, 25, 26 Lonely Planet, 146, 181, 188, 197, 198, 226, 245 machine, 150, 157, 159, 197, 214 narrative, 143, 145, 146, 167 performances, 180, 189 practices, 146 research, xviii, xx, xxi, 178, 182 rhetoric, xvi, 148, 151, 189 spatialities, xvii, xxi, 195, 214 Tranchant de Lunel, Maurice 17, 18, 19, 27, 61, 62, 81, 83, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 124, 287 travel/traveller, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 2, 6, 11, 16, 18, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 58, 65, 72, 82, 83, 95, 99, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 124, 130, 134, 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 153, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 200, 203, 204, 205, 219, 226, 233, 245, 246, 248, 249, 253, 254, 255, 266, 269 consumers, xx culture, xvi, 273 experience, xix, xx, 155, 203, 219, 241 literature, 95, 133, 213 narratives, xx, 49, 167, 172

writing, xx, 46, 48, 49, 50, 57, 170, 173, 206, 247, 255 Trocadero Museum, 22 Tunisia, xvii, 12, 43, 45, 46, 49, 62 UNESCO, xxiv, 25, 134, 135, 137, 138, 144, 146, 155, 176, 177, 181, 198, 235, 287 World Heritage Site, xxiv, xxv, 124, 133, 144, 176, 177, 230, 231 urban, xvi, xxiii, xxiv, 12, 13, 26, 28, 63, 64, 78, 83, 84, 87, 102, 107, 113, 114, 116, 125, 128, 140, 141, 144, 181, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 240, 250, 251 apartheid, 87, 91 dreams, 12, 15 – 20, 29, 74, 85, 88, 89, 91 experiment, 21, 26, 102 French, 74, 76, 83, 91, 101 landscapes, 1, 27, 241 planners, 6, 10, 12, 14, 27, 74, 76, 78, 91, 107 politics, 11 revolution, 78 spatial strategies, xvii La Vie Marocaine Illustre´e, 61, 62, 173 Villa Maroc, 217 – 21, 235, 239, 240 ville nouvelle, xxiii, 12, 76, 78, 85, 90, 102, 118, 125, 128, 224, 250 Vision 2010, 67 – 9, 140, 144 Vision 2020, 68, 69, 177 Welles, Orson, xxv, 217, 227, 235, 237 Wharton, Edith, xvi, xviii, 20, 61, 94 – 7, 142, 147, 288 Ypma, Herbert, 177, 185, 217, 218, 239, 288 zombie, 159, 160