TALES FROM MOROCCO

Paul Bowles

NEW YORK • 1984

©1982 Paul Bowles. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review.

Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Peter Owen, Limited. First U.S. hardcover edition of this book was published in 1984 by Ecco Press. First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.

For information address

HarperCollins Publishers,

10 East 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Ecco Press hardcover edition as follows:

Bowles, Paul Frederic, 1910-1999.

Points in Time. Reprint. Originally published: London: P. Owen, 1982.

1. Morocco—History—Fiction. I. Title

PS3552.0874P6 1984.

813'.54 83-16571.

ISBN-10: 0-06-113963-7 (pbk.).

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113963-5 (pbk.)

CONTENTS

FOREWORD:

Africa Minor [1959]

By Paul Bowles

1. واحد

2. جوج

3. تلاتة

4. ربعة

5. خمسة

6. سْتة

7. سْبعة

8. تْمنية

9. تْسعود

10. عْشرة

11. حْضاش

AFTERWORD:

Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations

By Brian T. Edwards

Textual Notes and Sources

Bibliography

FOREWORD

Africa Minor [1959]

By Paul Bowles

It had taken the truck fourteen hours to get from Kerzaz to Adrar and, except for the lunch stop in the oasis of El Aougherout, the old man had sat the whole time on the floor without moving, his legs tucked up beneath him, the hood of his burnoose pulled up over his turban to protect his face from the fine dust that sifted up through the floor. First-class passage on vehicles of the Compagnie Générale Transsaharienne entitled the voyager to travel in the glassed-in compartment with the driver, and that was where I sat, occasionally turning to look through the smeared panes at the solitary figure sitting sedately in the midst of the tornado of dust behind. At lunch, when I had seen his face with its burning brown eyes and magnificent white beard, it had occurred to me that he looked like a handsome and very serious Santa Claus.

The dust grew worse during the afternoon, so that by sunset, when we finally pulled into Adrar, even the driver and I were covered. I got out and shook myself, and the little old man clambered out of the back, cascades of dust spilling from his garments. Then he came around to the front of the truck to speak to the driver, who, being a good Moslem, wanted to get a shower and wash himself. Unfortunately he was a city Moslem as well as being a good one, so that he was impatient with the measured cadence of his countryman’s speech and suddenly slammed the door, unaware that the old man’s hand was in the way.

Calmly the old man opened the door with his other hand. The tip of his middle finger dangled by a bit of skin. He looked at it an instant, then quietly scooped up a handful of that ubiquitous dust, put the two parts of the finger together and poured the dust over it, saying softly, “Thanks be to Allah.” With that, the expression on his face never having changed, he picked up his bundle and staff and walked away. I stood looking after him, full of wonder, and reflecting upon the difference between his behavior and what mine would have been under the same circumstances. To show no outward sign of pain is unusual enough, but to express no resentment against the person who has hurt you seems very strange, and to give thanks to God at such a moment is the strangest touch of all.

✿

Clearly, examples of such stoical behavior are not met every day, or I should not have remembered this one; my experience since then, however, has shown me that it is not untypical, and it has remained with me and become a symbol of that which is admirable in the people of North Africa. “This world we see is unimportant and ephemeral as a dream,” they say. “To take it seriously would be an absurdity. Let us think rather of the heavens that surround us.” And the landscape is conducive to reflections upon the nature of the infinite. In other parts of Africa you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. When you have understood that, not intellectually but emotionally, you have also understood why it is that the great trinity of monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—which removed the source of power from the earth itself to the spaces outside the earth—were evolved in desert regions. And of the three, Islam, perhaps because it is the most recently evolved, operates the most directly and with the greatest strength upon the daily actions of those who embrace it.

For a person born into a culture where religion has long ago become a thing quite separate from daily life, it is a startling experience to find himself suddenly in the midst of a culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior, and this is one of the great fascinations of being in North Africa. I am not speaking of Egypt, where the old harmony is gone, decayed from within. My own impressions of Egypt before Nasser are those of a great panorama of sun-dried disintegration. In any case, she has had a different history from the rest of Mediterranean Africa; she is ethnically and linguistically distinct and is more a part of the Levant than of the region we ordinarily mean when we speak of North Africa. But in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between God and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh (or however one prefers to conceive and define that pristine state of existence we intuitively feel we once enjoyed and now have lost).

I don’t claim that the Moslems of North Africa are a group of mystics, heedless of bodily comfort, interested only in the welfare of the spirit. If you have ever bought so much as an egg from one of them, you have learned that they are quite able to fend for themselves when it comes to money matters. The spoiled strawberries are at the bottom of the basket, the pebbles inextricably mixed with the lentils and the water with the milk, the same as in many other parts of the world, with the difference that if you ask the price of an object in a rural market, they will reply, all in one breath, “Fifty, how much will you give?” I should say that in the realm of beah o chra (selling and buying; note that in their minds selling comes first), they are surpassed only by the Hindus, who are less emotional about it and therefore more successful, and by the Chinese, acknowledged masters of the Oriental branch of the science of commerce.

In Morocco you go into a bazaar to buy a wallet and somehow find yourself being propelled toward the back room to look at antique brass and rugs. In an instant you are seated with a glass of mint tea in your hand and a platter of pastries in your lap, while smiling gentlemen modeling ancient caftans and marriage robes parade in front of you, the salesman who greeted you at the door having completely vanished. Later on you may once again ask timidly to see the wallets, which you noticed on display near the entrance. Likely as not, you will be told that the man in charge of wallets is at the moment saying his prayers, but that he will soon be back, and in the meantime would you not be pleased to see some magnificent jewelry from the court of Moulay Ismail? Business is business and prayers are prayers, and both are a part of the day’s work.

✿

When I meet fellow Americans traveling about here in North Africa, I ask them, “What did you expect to find here?” Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer, reduced to its simplest terms, is: a sense of mystery. They expect mystery, and they find it, since fortunately it is a quality difficult to extinguish all in a moment. They find it in the patterns of sunlight filtering through the latticework that covers the souks, in the unexpected turnings and tunnels of the narrow streets, in the women whose features still go hidden beneath the litham, in the secretiveness of the architecture, which is such that even if the front door of a house is open it is impossible to see inside. If they listen as well as look, they find it too in the song the lone camel driver sings by his fire before dawn, in the calling of the muezzins at night, when their voices are like bright beams of sound piercing the silence, and, most often, in the dry beat of the darbouka, the hand drum played by the women everywhere, in the great city houses and in the humblest country hut.

It is a strange sensation, when you are walking alone in a still, dark street late at night, to come upon a pile of cardboard boxes soaked with rain, and, as you pass by it, to find yourself staring into the eyes of a man sitting upright behind it. A thief? A beggar? The night watchman of the quarter? A spy for the secret police?

You just keep walking, looking at the ground, hearing your footsteps echo between the walls of the deserted street. Into your head comes the idea that you may suddenly hear the sound of a conspiratorial whistle and that something unpleasant may be about to happen. A little farther along you see, deep in the recess of an arcade of shops, another man reclining in a deck chair, asleep. Then you realize that all along the street there are men both sleeping and sitting quietly awake, and that even in the hours of its most intense silence the place is never empty of people.

✿

It is only since the end of 1955 that Morocco has had its independence, but already there is a nucleus of younger Moslems who fraternize freely with the writers and painters (most of whom are American girls and youths) who have wandered into this part of the world and found it to their liking. Together they give very staid, quiet parties which show a curious blend of Eastern and Western etiquette. Usually no Moslem girls are present. Everyone is either stretched out on mattresses or seated on the floor, and kif and hashish are on hand, but half the foreigners content themselves with highballs. A good many paintings are looked at, and there is a lot of uninformed conversation about art and expression and religion. When food is passed around, the Moslems, for all their passionate devotion to European manners, not only adhere to their own custom of using chunks of bread to sop up the oily mruq at the bottom of their plates, but manage to impose the system on the others as well, so that everybody is busy rubbing pieces of bread over his plate. Why not? The food is cooked to be eaten in that fashion, and is less tasty if eaten in any other way.

Many of the Moslems paint, too; after so many centuries of religious taboo with regard to the making of representational images, abstraction is their natural mode of expression. You can see in their canvases the elaboration of design worked out by the Berbers in their crafts: patterns that show constant avoidance of representation but manage all the same to suggest recognizable things. Naturally, their paintings are a great success with the visiting artists, who carry their admiration to the point of imitation. The beat-generation North Africans are music-mad, but they get their music via radio, phonograph and tape-recorder. They are enthusiastic about the music of their own country, but unlike their fathers, they don’t sing or play it. They are also fond of such exotic items as Congo drumming, the music of India, and particularly the more recent American jazz (Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley).

At the moment, writing about any part of Africa is a little like trying to draw a picture of a roller coaster in motion. You can say: It was thus and so, or, it is becoming this or that, but you risk making a misstatement if you say categorically that anything is, because likely as not you will open tomorrow’s newspaper to discover that it has changed. On the whole the new governments of Tunisia and Morocco wish to further tourism in their respective countries; they are learning that the average tourist is more interested in native dancing than in the new bus terminal, that he is more willing to spend money in the Casbah than to inspect new housing projects. For a while, after the demise of the violently unpopular Pasha of Marrakech, Thami el Glaoui, the great public square of Marrakech, the Djemaa el Fna, was used solely as a parking lot. Anyone will tell you that the biggest single attraction for tourists in all North Africa was the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech. It was hard to find a moment of the day or night when tourists could not be found prowling around among its acrobats, singers, storytellers, snake charmers, dancers and medicine men. Without it Marrakech became just another Moroccan city. And so the Djemaa el Fna was reinstated, and now goes on more or less as before.

✿

North Africa is inhabited, like Malaya and Pakistan, by Moslems who are not Arabs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s estimate of the percentage of Arab stock in the population of Morocco dates from two decades ago, but there has been no influx of Arabs since, so we can accept its figure of ten percent as being still valid. The remaining ninety percent of the people are Berbers, who anthropologically have nothing to do with the Arabs. They are not of Semitic origin, and were right where they are now long before the Arab conquerors ever suspected their existence.

Even after thirteen hundred years, the Berbers’ conception of how to observe the Moslem religion is by no means identical with that of the descendants of the men who brought it to them. And the city Moslems complain that they do not observe the fast of Ramadan properly, they neither veil nor segregate their women and, most objectionable of all, they have a passion for forming cults dedicated to the worship of local saints. In this their religious practices show a serious deviation from orthodoxy, inasmuch as during the moussems, the gigantic pilgrimages which are held periodically at the many shrines where these holy men are buried, men and women can be seen dancing together, working themselves into a prolonged frenzy. This is the height of immorality, the young puritans tell you. But it is not the extent, they add, of the Berbers’ reprehensible behavior at these manifestations. Self-torture, the inducing of trances, ordeal by fire and the sword, and the eating of broken glass and scorpions are also not unusual on such occasions.

The traveler who has been present at one of these indescribable gatherings will never forget it, although if he dislikes the sight of blood and physical suffering he may try hard to put it out of his mind. To me these spectacles are filled with great beauty, because their obvious purpose is to prove the power of the spirit over the flesh. The sight of ten or twenty thousand people actively declaring their faith, demonstrating en masse the power of that faith, can scarcely be anything but inspiring. You lie in the fire, I gash my legs and arms with a knife, he pounds a sharpened bone into his thigh with a rock—then, together, covered with ashes and blood, we sing and dance in joyous praise of the saint and the god who make it possible for us to triumph over pain, and by extension, over death itself. For the participants exhaustion and ecstasy are inseparable.

This saint-worship, based on vestiges of an earlier religion, has long been frowned upon by the devout urban Moslems; as early as the mid-thirties restrictions were placed on its practice. For a time, public manifestations of it were effectively suppressed. There were several reasons why the educated Moslems objected to the brotherhoods. During the periods of the protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, the colonial administrations did not hesitate to use them for their own political ends, to ensure more complete domination. Also, it has always been felt that visitors who happened to witness the members of a cult in action were given an unfortunate impression of cultural backwardness. Most important was the fact that the rituals were unorthodox and thus unacceptable to true Moslems. If you mentioned such cults as the Derqaoua, the Aissaoua, the Haddaoua, the Hamatcha, the Jilala or the Guennaoua to a city man, he cried, “They’re all criminals! They should be put in jail!” without stopping to reflect that it would be difficult to incarcerate more than half the population of any country. I think one reason why the city folk are so violent in their denunciation of the cults is that most of them are only one generation removed from them themselves; knowing the official attitude toward such things, they feel a certain guilt at being even that much involved with them. Having been born into a family of adepts is not a circumstance which anyone can quickly forget. Each brotherhood has its own songs and drum rhythms, immediately recognizable as such by persons both within and outside the group. In early childhood rhythmical patterns and sequences of tones become a part of an adept’s subconscious, and in later life it is not difficult to attain the trance state when one hears them again.

✿

A variation on this phenomenon is the story of Farid. Not long ago he called by to see me. I made tea, and since there was a fire in the fireplace,

I took some embers out and put them into a brazier. Over them I sprinkled some mska, a translucent yellow resin which makes a sweet, clean-smelling smoke. Moroccans appreciate pleasant odors; Farid is no exception. A little later, before the embers had cooled off, I added some djaoui, a compound resinous substance of uncertain ingredients.

Farid jumped up. “What have you put into the mijmah?” he cried.

As soon as I had pronounced the word djaoui, he ran into the next room and slammed the door. “Let air into the room!” he shouted. “I can’t smell djaoui! It’s very bad for me!”

When all trace of the scent released by the djaoui was gone from the room, I opened the door and Farid came back in, still looking fearful.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked him. “What makes you think a little djaoui could hurt you? I’ve smelled it a hundred times and it’s never done me any harm.”

He snorted. “You! Of course it couldn’t hurt you. You’re not a Jilali, but I am. I don’t want to be, but I still am. Last year I hurt myself and had to go to the clinic, all because of djaoui.”

He had been walking in a street of Emsallah and had stopped in front of a café to talk to a friend. Without warning he had collapsed on the sidewalk; when he came to, he was at home and a drum was being beaten over him. Then he recalled the smoke that had been issuing from the café, and knew what had happened.

Farid had passed his childhood in a mountain village where all the members of his family were practicing Jilala. His earliest memories were of being strapped to his mother’s back while she, dancing with the others, attained a state of trance. The two indispensable exterior agents they always used to assure the desired alteration of consciousness were drums and djaoui. By the time the boy was four or five years old, he already had a built-in mechanism, an infallible guarantee of being able to reach the trance state very swiftly in the presence of the proper stimulus. When he moved to the city he ceased to be an adept and, in fact, abandoned all religious practice. The conditioned reflex remained, as might be expected, with the result that now as a man in his mid-twenties, although he is at liberty to accept or refuse the effect of the specific drum rhythms, he is entirely at the mercy of a pinch of burning djaoui.

His exposition of the therapeutic process by which he is “brought back” each time there is an accident involves a good many other details, such as the necessity for the presence of a member of the paternal side of his family who will agree to eat a piece of the offending djaoui, the pronouncing of certain key phrases, and the playing on the bendir the proper rhythms necessary to break the spell. But the indisputable fact remains that when Farid breathes in djaoui smoke, whether or not he is aware of doing so, straightway he loses consciousness.

One of my acquaintances, who has always been vociferous in his condemnation of the brotherhoods, eventually admitted to me that all the older members of his family were adherents to the Jilala cult, citing immediately afterward, as an example of their perniciousness, an experience of his grandmother some three years before. Like the rest of the family, she was brought up as a Jilalia but had grown too old to take part in the observances, which nowadays are held secretly. (Prohibition, as usual, does not mean abolition, but merely being driven underground.) One evening the old lady was alone in the house, her children and grandchildren having all gone to the cinema, and since she had nothing else to do she went to bed. Somewhere nearby, on the outskirts of town, there was a meeting of Jilala going on. In her sleep she rose and, dressed just as she was, began to make her way toward the sounds. She was found next morning unconscious in a vegetable garden near the house where the meeting had taken place, having fallen into an ant colony and been badly bitten. The reason she fell, the family assured me, was that at a certain moment the drumming had stopped; if it had gone on she would have arrived. The drummers always continue until everyone present has been brought out of his trance.

“But they did not know she was coming,” they said, “and so the next morning, after we had carried her home, we had to send for the drummers to bring her to her senses.” The younger generation of French-educated Moslems is infuriated when this sort of story is told to foreigners. And that the latter are interested in such things upsets them even more. “Are all the people in your country Holy Rollers?” they demand. “Why don’t you write about the civilized people here instead of the most backward?”

I suppose it is natural for them to want to see themselves presented to the outside world in the most “advanced” light possible. They find it perverse of a Westerner to be interested only in the dissimilarities between their culture and his. However, that’s the way some of us Westerners are.

✿

Not long ago I wrote on the character of the North Africa Moslem. An illiterate Moroccan friend wanted to know what was in it, and so, in a running translation into Moghrebi, I read him certain passages. His comment was terse: “That’s shameful.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because you’ve written about people just as they are.”

“For us that’s not shameful.”

“For us it is. You’ve made us like animals. You’ve said that only a few of us can read or write.”

“Isn’t that true?”

“Of course not! We can all read and write, just like you. And we would, if only we’d had lessons.”

I thought this interesting and told it to a Moslem lawyer, assuming it would amuse him. It did not. “He’s quite right,” he announced. “Truth is not what you perceive with your senses, but what you feel in your heart.”

“But there is such a thing as objective truth!” I cried. “Or don’t you attach importance to that?”

He smiled tolerantly. “Not in the way you do, for its own sake. That is statistical truth. We are interested in that, yes, but only as a means of getting to the real truth underneath. For us there is very little visible truth in the world these days.” However specious this kind of talk may seem, it is still clear to me that the lawyer was voicing a feeling common to the great mass of city dwellers here, educated or not.

✿

With an estimated adult illiteracy rate of eighty to ninety percent, perhaps the greatest need of all for North Africa is universal education. So far there has been a very small amount, and as we ourselves say, a little learning is a dangerous thing. The Europeans always have been guilty of massive neglect with regard to schools for Moslems in their North African possessions. In time, their shortsighted policy is likely to prove the heaviest handicap of all in the desperate attempt of the present rulers to keep the region within the Western sphere of influence. The task of educating these people is not made easier by the fact that Moghrebi, the language of the majority, is purely a spoken tongue, and that for reading and writing they must resort to standard Arabic, which is as far from their idiom as Latin is from Italian. But slowly the transition is taking place. If you sit in a Moroccan café at the hour of a news broadcast, the boy fanning the fire will pause with the bellows in his hand, the card players lay down their cards, the talkers cease to argue as the announcer begins to speak, and an expression of ferocious intensity appears on every countenance. Certainly they are vitally interested in what is being said (even the women have taken up discussing politics lately), for they are aware of their own increasing importance in the world pattern, but the almost painful expressions are due to each man’s effort to understand the words of standard Arabic as they come over the air. Afterward, there is often an argument as to exactly what the news contained.

“The British are at war with Yemen for being friendly to Gamal Abd el Nasser.”

“You’re crazy. He said Gamal Abd el Nasser is making war against Yemen because the British are there.”

“No. He said Gamal Abd el Nasser will make war against Yemen if they let the British in.”

“No, no! Against the British if they send guns to Yemen.”

This state of affairs, if it does not keep all members of the populace accurately informed, at least has the advantage of increasing their familiarity with the language their children are learning at school.

There is a word which non-Moslems invariably use to describe Moslems in general: fanatical. As though the word could not be applied equally well to any group of people who care deeply about anything! Just now, the North African Moslems are passionately involved in proving to themselves that they are of the same stature as Europeans. The attainment of political independence is only one facet of their problem. The North African knows that when it comes to appreciating his culture, the average tourist cannot go much closer toward understanding it than a certain condescending curiosity. He realizes that, at best, to the European he is merely picturesque. Therefore, he reasons, to be taken seriously he must cease being picturesque. Traditional customs, clothing and behavior must be replaced by something unequivocally European. In this he is fanatical. It does not occur to him that what he is rejecting is authentic and valid, and that what he is taking on is meaningless imitation. And if it did occur to him, it would not matter in the least. This total indifference to cultural heritage appears to be a necessary adjunct to the early stages of nationalism.

✿

Hospitality in North Africa knows no limits. You are taken in and treated as a member of the family. If you don’t enjoy yourself, it is not your host’s fault, but rather the result of your own inadaptability, for every attempt is made to see that you are happy and comfortable. Some time ago I was the guest of two brothers who had an enormous house in the medina of Fez. So that I should feel truly at home, I was given an entire wing of the establishment, a tiled patio with a room on either side and a fountain in the center. There were great numbers of servants to bring me food and drink, and also to inquire, before my hosts came to call, whether I was disposed to receive them. When they came they often brought singers and musicians to entertain me. The only hitch was that they went to such lengths to treat me as one of them that they also assumed I was not interested in going out into the city. During the entire fortnight I spent with them I never once found my way out of the house, or even out of my own section of it, since all doors were kept locked and bolted, and only the guard, an old Sudanese slave, had the keys. For long hours I sat in the patio listening to the sounds of the city outside, sometimes hearing faint strains of music that I would have given anything really to hear, watching the square of deep-blue sky above my head slowly become a softer and lighter blue as twilight approached, waiting for the swallows that wheeled above the patio when the day was finally over and the muezzins began their calls to evening prayer, and merely existing in the hope that someone would come, something would happen before too many more hours had gone past. But as I say, if I was bored, that was my own fault and not theirs. They were doing everything they could to please me.

Just as in that twelfth-century fortress in Fez I had been provided with a small hand-wound phonograph and one record (Josephine Baker singing “J’ai deux amours,” a song hit of that year), so all over North Africa you are confronted with a mélange of the very old and the most recent, with no hint of anything from the intervening centuries. It is one of the great charms of the place, the fact that your today carries with it no memories of yesterday or the day before; everything that is not medieval is completely new. The younger generation of French and Jews, born and raised in the cities of North Africa, for the most part have no contact with that which is ancient in their countries. A Moroccan girl whose family moved from Rabat to New York, upon being asked what she thought of her new home, replied: “Well, of course, coming from a new country as I do, it’s very hard to get used to all these old houses here in New York. I had no idea New York was so old.” One is inclined to forget that the French began to settle in Morocco only at the time of World War I, and that the mushroom cities of Casablanca, Agadir and Tangier grew up in the ’thirties. Xauen, whose mountains are visible from the terrace of my apartment in Tangier, was entered by European troops for the first time in 1920. Even in southern Algeria, where one is likely to think of the French as having been stationed for a much longer time, there are war monuments bearing battle dates as recent as 1912. Throughout the whole first quarter of the century the North African frontier was continuously being pushed southward by means of warfare, and south of the Grand Atlas it was 1936 before “pacification” came to an end and European civilians were allowed, albeit on the strict terms laid down by the military, to look for the first time into the magic valleys of the Draa, the Dadés and the Todra.

Appearing unexpectedly in out-of-the-way regions of North Africa has never been without its difficulties. I remember making an impossible journey before the last world war in a produce truck over the Grand Atlas to Ouarzazat, full of excitement at the prospect of seeing the Casbah there with its strange painted towers, only to be forced to remain three days inside the shack that passed for a hotel, and then sent on another truck straight back to Marrakech, having seen nothing but Foreign Legionnaires, and having heard no music other than the bugle calls that issued every so often from the nearby camp. Another time I entered Tunisia on camelback from across the Great Eastern Erg. I had two camels and one hard-working camel driver, whose job it was to run all day long from one beast to the other and try, by whacking their hind legs, to keep them walking in something resembling a straight line. This was a much more difficult task than it sounds; although our course was generally due east, one of the animals had an inexplicable desire to walk southward, while the other was possessed by an equally mysterious urge to go north. The poor man passed his time screaming: “Hut! Aïda!” and trying to run both ways at once. His turban was continually coming unwound, and he had no time to attend to the scarf he was knitting, in spite of the fact that he kept the yarn and needles dangling around his neck, ready to work on at any moment.

We did finally cross the border and amble into Tunisia, where we were immediately apprehended by the police. The camel driver and his beasts were sent back to Algeria where they belonged, and I started on my painful way up through Tunisia, where the French authorities evidently had made a concerted decision to make my stay in the country as wretched as possible. In the oasis at Nefta, in the hotel at Tozeur, even in the mosque of Sidi Oqba at Kairouan, I was arrested and lugged off to the commissariat, carefully questioned and told that I need not imagine I could make a move of which they would not be fully aware.

The explanation was that in spite of my American passport they were convinced I was a German; in those days anybody wandering around l’Afrique Mineure (as one of the more erudite officers called this corner of the continent), if he did not satisfy the French idea of what a tourist should look like, was immediately suspect. Even the Moslems would look at me closely and say: “Toi pas Français. Toi Allemand,” to which I never replied, for fear of having to pay the prices that would have been demanded if my true status had been revealed to them.

Algeria is a country where it is better to keep moving around than to stay long in one place. Its towns are not very interesting, but its landscapes are impressive. In the winter, traveling by train across the western steppes, you can go all day and see nothing but flat stretches of snow on all sides, unrelieved by trees in the foreground or by mountains in the distance. In the summer these same desolate lands are cruelly hot, and the wind swirls the dust into tall yellow pillars that move deliberately from one side of the empty horizon to the other. When you come upon a town in such regions, lying like the remains of a picnic lunch in the middle of an endless parking lot, you know it was the French who put it there. The Algerians prefer to live along the wild and beautiful seacoast, in the palm gardens of the south, atop the cliffs bordering the dry rivers, or on the crests of the high mountains in the center of the country. Up there above the slopes dotted with almond trees, the Berber villages sit astride the long spines of the lesser ranges. The men and women file down the zigzagging paths to cultivate the rich valleys below, here and there in full view of the snowfields where the French formerly had their skiing resorts. Far to the south lie the parallel chains of red sawtooth mountains which run northeast to southwest across the entire country and divide the plains from the desert.

No part of North Africa will again be the same sort of paradise for Europeans that it has been for them these last fifty years. The place has been thrown open to the twentieth century. With Europeanization and nationalism have come a consciousness of identity and the awareness of that identity’s commercial possibilities. From now on the North Africans, like the Mexicans, will control and exploit their own charms, rather than being placed on exhibit for us by their managers, and the result will be a very different thing from what it has been in the past. Tourist land it still is, and doubtless will continue to be for a while; and it is on that basis only that we as residents or intending visitors are now obliged to consider it. We now come here as paying guests of the inhabitants themselves rather than of their exploiters. Travel here is certain not to be so easy or so comfortable as before, and prices are many times higher than they were, but at least we meet the people on terms of equality, which is a healthier situation.

✿

If you live long enough in a place where the question of colonialism versus self-government is constantly being discussed, you are bound to find yourself having a very definite opinion on the subject. The difficulty is that some of your co-residents feel one way and some the other, but all feel strongly. Those in favor of colonialism argue that you can’t “give” (quotes mine) an almost totally illiterate people political power and expect them to create a democracy, and that is doubtless true; but the point is that since they are inevitably going to take the power sooner or later, it is only reasonable to help them take it while they still have at least some measure of good will toward their erstwhile masters. The die-hard French attitude is summed up in a remark made to me by a friendly immigration officer at the Algiers airport. “Our great mistake,” he said sadly, “was ever to allow these savages to learn to read and write.” I said I supposed that was a logical thing to say if one expected to rule forever, which I knew, given the intelligence of the French, that they did not intend to try, since it was impossible. The official ceased looking sad and became much less friendly.

At a dinner in Marrakech during the French occupation, the Frenchman sitting beside me became engaged in an amicable discussion with a Moroccan across the table. “But look at the facts, mon cher ami. Before our arrival, there was constant warfare between the tribes. Since we came the population has doubled. Is that true or not?”

The Moroccan leaned forward. “We can take care of our own births and deaths,” he said, smiling. “If we must be killed, just let other Moroccans attend to it. We really prefer that.”

After half a day’s voyage they came to a large lake or marsh. No such place now exists, the lagoons being all to the north of the cape. South of it the shore is either guarded by cliffs, steep slopes, or stony and sandy beaches.

Nor is there any sign of such a lake having existed, and the sudden winter rains which make every dry watercourse roar from bank to bank are not of a character fit to cause floods likely to be mistaken for a marsh or a lake.

✿

He dreamed of a hawk that hovered. A warning, the others said. And they went down to Asana, and a blind man at the entrance to the city raised his hand and spoke.

Pay heed to the wind that moves above this place. The drums you hear are not of our people, nor are the hands that hit the skins.

He saw the blind man’s face and remembered the hawk. Behind the walls and higher were the hills, white and hard against the noonday sky.

And they did not enter Asana, but turned southward over an empty plain, and came to the bank of a river.

Asana was destroyed. Only dust was there.

✿

Another road led from Tocolosida to Tingis. The first-named place is doubtful. It might have been Mghila or Zarhun, but it was neither Amergo nor Ksar Faraun. The stones of Tocolosida are there in the shadows below the cliff.

✿

The Moorish Sultan (who had suffered at Sierra Morena such a defeat by the Spaniards that for several days the victors used no other fuel than the pikes, lances and arrows of their fallen enemies) answered his captors with great dignity that he had lately read the Book of Paul’s Epistles, which he liked so much that were he to choose another faith it should be Christianity.

But for his part (Nazarenes have the minds of small children) he thought every man should die in the religion into which he was born. (And this will probably not get through into those pork-nourished brains.) The only fault I find with Paul is that he deserted Judaism, he told them, smiling.

✿

The old cemetery by the grottoes has been despoiled. To our great grief they have converted it into ploughed land. And by the seven sefarim and the seven heavens, by the twelve roes, by the bread and the salt, by the Name and the sacrifice, we swear that justice shall be made to prevail.

A few can remember that summer. The sun’s breath shriveled what it touched. No one went out, for there was fever in the lower city.

They say he had a walled-in garden where he walked at sunset. It could have been his prison, save that he was free, and with the leisure to invent the perils that beset him from within. “Shall the pillar of the law be shattered, and the edifice laid with the dust, the Mishnah desecrated and trodden underfoot?” With the seven categories of the just may his part and lot remain.

No one went out. We waited in our darkened rooms, and with every breath of wind that clicked the blinds we shuddered. May those destroyed by fever rest in Eden, and their dwelling be under the Tree of Life.

In the course of his travels in Portugal, Fra Andrea of Spoleto had met a man for whom he felt great sympathy, and the man happened to be a Moslem. Heretofore he had not known anyone professing that faith, none having chanced to visit the Franciscan monastery where he had lived, and he was amazed, after an hour’s talk with this Moroccan gentleman, to find him not only wholly conversant with Christian doctrine, but actually in accord with certain of its tenets.

They saw one another often during that year. As a result of their growing friendship, Si Musa conceived the idea of inviting Fra Andrea to Fez, in order to set up a small Franciscan mission there. Initially the concept struck the monk as purely a fantasy, and quite unrealizable. Then Si Musa let fall the information that his wife was the sister of King Mohammed VIII who at that time ruled Morocco from Fez.

As you know, His Majesty has had ample opportunity to study the works of the Christians, Si Musa remarked with a wry smile. Fra Andrea nodded; he understood that his friend was referring to the unfortunate king’s long incarceration by the Portuguese.

Solitude and study can make a man tolerant, you know, he went on. It would give him great pleasure to have you and your friends in Fez, so that the public could see for itself that not all infidels are savages.

Here Fra Andrea guffawed. Si Musa smiled politely, not understanding the reason for his mirth. It was this very ingenuousness in the Moroccan which delighted the monk, and which doubtless was instrumental in persuading him to accept his unlikely suggestion.

Three years later Fra Andrea arrived in Fez, along with Fra Antonio and Fra Giacomo, two other Franciscans who had gone because they considered it their duty to be on hand in Fez, where they might be able to intercede on behalf of Christian hostages being held for ransom. Fra Andrea was looking forward particularly to having religious discussions with the several Moslem intellectuals to whom Si Musa had given him letters of introduction.

From the moment of their arrival everything went wrong for the three. When Fra Andrea tried to find the men to whom he had the notes, he discovered that they were all mysteriously absent from Fez. The old palace near the Fondouq Nejjarine which Si Musa had assured him would be put at his disposal proved not to be available. Indeed, the mere mention of Si Musa’s name brought forth unfriendly stares.

It did not take him long to learn the reason. While they had been en route to Fez a new monarch had been crowned: King Ahmed III. The friars received this news with inexpressive faces, but among themselves they discussed it dolefully, agreeing that it did not bode well for their project.

They were advised to look for a house in Fez Djedid, where foreigners were not regarded with quite such antipathy as in the Medina. The house they found was not far from the entrance to the Mellah. It had only three small rooms, but there was a patio, which they soon filled with potted plants.

Fra Antonio and Fra Giacomo quickly accustomed themselves to the static life of their new dwelling. They seemed to be contented in the dreary little house. But Fra Andrea was restless; he had been counting on passing long hours in the company of new friends with whom he could talk.

The few excursions he made into the Medina persuaded him that he would do better to stay out of it. Thus he took to wandering in the Mellah, where it is true that he was stared at with much the same hostility as in the Medina, the difference being that he was not afraid of the Jews. He did not believe that they would attack him physically, even though they must have felt considerable rancor towards his Church for the recent deportations of Jews from Spain. Fra Andrea considered theirs a politically motivated hostility, whereas the hatred he had encountered in the Medina transcended such considerations. He felt free to walk in the alleys of the Mellah, and to listen to the Spanish conversation of the passers-by.

One evening as he stood leaning against a wall, enjoying the scraps of domestic conversation that reached him from inside the houses, a portly gentleman came along the alley, saw him standing there, and bade him good evening. Embarrassed at having been caught eavesdropping, Fra Andrea replied briefly and started to walk away.

The other spoke again, and pointed at a door. This was his house, he said, and he invited him to come in. Only when the monk stood inside a well-lighted room did he see that his host was a rabbi.

In this way Fra Andrea came to know Rabbi Harun ben Hamu and to pay him regular visits. He had found a Moroccan with whom he might conceivably have religious and metaphysical discussions. Rabbi Harun ben Hamu was exceedingly courteous, and showed a willingness to engage in serious conversation, but Fra Andrea felt the need to study the Talmud carefully before expressing any opinions touching on Judaic law. He could read Hebrew haltingly, and this small knowledge gained early in life served him perfectly in his present project.

For more than a year he spent most of his time in intensive study. He filled a book with notations and learned the Mishnah by heart. During this time he paid constant visits to the rabbi’s house, where eventually he was presented to two other men, Rabbi Judah ibn Danan and Rabbi Shimon Saqali. He saw that these two did not entirely accept the presence of an anonymous Christian friar in their midst, and this gave him a powerful desire to impress them. It was hard for him to sit by and be silent when he was so eager to discuss their religion with them, but he was preparing himself for the day when he would be able to meet them on an equal footing in the arena of religious polemics, so he held his tongue.

When he had decided that he knew the Law as well as they knew it, and perhaps understood its relation to Islam and Christianity rather better than they, he determined to speak on the next occasion when they should find themselves together.

He had not been wrong in expecting them to show incredulity and amazement when he began to address them. They listened, nodding their heads slowly, puzzled by his strange metamorphosis. At one point he remarked that the halakkic material had little to do with God, and that even the haggadic midrashim contained no passages dealing with the nature of God.

Rabbi Shimon Saqali stiffened. Every phrase contains an infinite number of meanings, he said.

And an infinite number of meanings is equivalent to no meaning at all! cried Fra Andrea. Then, seeing the expressions on the faces of the three men, he decided to make a joke of it, and laughed, but this seemed only to mystify them.

As the discussion progressed, he found in himself a strong desire to confound them, to confront them with their own contradictions. He had behind him years of practice in the art of theological argument, and this had given him an extraordinary memory. He could recall the exact words which had come from the lips of each man during the evening, and he quoted them accurately, his eye on the one who had uttered them.

Even Rabbi Harun ben Hamu was astounded, not so much by his friend’s sudden burst of erudition as by his masterly use of logic. Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Judah were appalled by Fra Andrea; after he had left they told their host as much. Never before had they been baited and humiliated in such a manner, they declared.

Rabbi Harun, who felt mildly possessive about his foreign friend, tried to reassure them. The Christian meant no offense, he told them. He’s not one of us, after all.

Then, as they made no answer, he added: a brilliant man.

Yes, unnaturally brilliant, said Rabbi Judah.

Fra Andrea walked back to his house that night highly satisfied with the effect he had produced upon his listeners. Strangely enough, Rabbi Harun ben Hamu continued to invite the other two rabbis and the monk together, and they continued to meet around his table. After his first indiscretion Fra Andrea was careful not to express his personal opinions regarding the Talmud. The discussions were limited to Christian theology. With his diabolically clever mind and tongue Fra Andrea invariably silenced the others. Rabbi Harun ben Hamu greatly enjoyed being host to these fiery harangues. And little by little he found himself accepting many of the monk’s premises. The other two noticed with misgiving his growing tendency to agree with him in small matters. This troubled them, and in private they discussed it.

One evening as they sat around Rabbi Harun ben Hamu’s table, Fra Andrea in passing thoughtlessly qualified the Targumim as inaccurate and inexcusably vulgar exegeses. Rabbi Judah smote the table with his fist, but this warning sign escaped Fra Andrea’s notice.

The Targum to the Megilloth, for instance, he continued, is a piece of unparalleled nonsense. How can anyone credit such absurdities?

Then with great gusto he proceeded to demolish the Second Targum of Esther, not heeding the pallid rigidity in the faces of both Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Shimon.

All at once Rabbi Judah laid his hand on Rabbi Shimon’s arm. As one man they rose and left the house. Fra Andrea ceased to speak, looking to Rabbi Harun for an explanation. But his host was staring straight ahead, an expression of mingled doubt and terror on his face.

Fra Andrea waited. Slowly Rabbi Harun raised his head and as if in supplication pointed to the door. Please, he said.

He did not rise from the table when his guest went out. He understood that the other two rabbis had come to the conclusion that the monk was in league with Satan. Although Rabbi Harun ben Hamu was a fairly learned man, the possibility of such a thing did not seem to him at all unlikely. He resolved that under no circumstances would he see the Christian again.

It never became necessary for him to implement his decision. Two days later all the notables and elders of the Mellah (save Rabbi Harun ben Hamu, whom his colleagues considered to be already contaminated by the power of evil) went in a procession to the palace. There they protested at the presence in Fez of a foreign sorcerer who had been sent to sow discord among their people. They charged Fra Andrea with “conspiracy and the practice of magic.”

The Moslems, only too happy to have a pretext for ridding their city of this undesirable Christian, agreed to arrest him.

Fra Andrea was given no opportunity of defending himself against the charges, but was thrown straightway into a cell where they tortured him for a few hours. Finally someone impaled his body on a lance.

The Armada lay under the water, and the land of Spain lay above, color of camels and saffron.

Shoubilia, Gharnatta, Kortoba, Magherit, fell under the years, to be remembered at dusk by exiles in Fez.

Then Ahmed IV, the Emperor of Morocco, sent a message to Charles I, telling of his success (illusory) in dealing with the pirates of Slâ, and suggesting the need of British aid in combating those of Algeria and Tunis.

The Moriscos of Andalucía had made every concession, undergone every indignity, even to being baptized, eating turnips in public, and wearing crucifixes, in the hope of avoiding exile.

Notwithstanding, the Inquisition did not consider their conversion a genuine one, and continued to deport them to Slâ and Rabat where, since they spoke no Arabic, they were at a great disadvantage.

Here the sun was hotter and the waves higher than at home in Almería or Motril.

The fishing, at least, was good.

At night, in the boats, the men could talk.

✿

Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.

When we went out in several boats, we spoke of revenge. What would it be like if a Spanish ship appeared and we were to overtake it and climb aboard? How would we make ourselves happy?

One day such a ship aid come along, sailing straight in our direction.

By the time they saw us, it was too late for them to change the course of the ship, and we caught up with them easily, every man pulling on the oars with all his strength.

Then we shouted: Allah akbar! and went onto the ship.

Only three of our men were lost. We finished off all the Spaniards, took what we could into the boats, and went back to the port.

Now that we had seen their blood, we felt better.

The ship drifted ashore farther south.

Soon we had good luck again, but this time the ship was British. We knew better than to kill any more than we had to.

Instead of cutting up the crew and the passengers, we bound them and carried them back to Slâ. The prices they fetched were a gift from Allah.

Little by little we gave up fishing. We were spending all our time building faster boats.

When the men of Slâ saw this, they set to work doing the same thing.

The seas are full of Nazarene ships, they said. There are enough for all. It is pleasing to the Most High that the riches of the infidels should be returned to Islam.

✿

The Sultan writes to the kings in Europe: he deplores the slave traffic, Marrakech lies at a considerable distance from Slâ, he is unable to do away with the lawlessness there, notwithstanding the great effort he is putting forth in his attempt to abolish piracy.

He does not tell them that he collects one guirch for every ten realized by the trade.

In Fez it is said that Moslems spend most of their money on weddings, Jews on Pesagh, and Christians on lawsuits. But what the people of Fez call lawsuits are the frantic attempts by Europeans to secure the audience of local dignitaries willing to help them arrange the payment of ransom for their relatives and countrymen being held as hostages.

The Sultan wrote to the British.

“Praise be to the Most High alone! And Allah’s blessing be upon those who are for his prophet.

“As for those men thou didst say were taken at sea, I neither know nor have heard anything of them.

“Our servant, Mohammed ben Hadu Aater, who came from your presence, told us that lions are scarce in your country, and that they are in high estimation with you. When your servant came to us, he found we had two small young lions; wherefore by him we send them to you.”

Heavy sea and a gale from the east.

An English privateer sailed into the bay at daybreak. We dispatched four men to bring the ship into harbor. Then we all went quickly to the shore at the foot of the cliffs and waited.

When the prow hit the reef we swam out and climbed aboard. Some of the passengers dived into the water.

The captain and the crew were on deck. This time we had orders to kill as few as possible. We took them all alive save for one English woman who drowned when she jumped overboard.

We had the chains ready, and we drove them ahead of us through Tangier.

That night there was more wind and rain, and our tents were spread on the sand at the edge of the Oued Tahadartz.

Three at a time we brought in the crew, and they sat with their chains in our tent.

Abdeslam ben Larbi spoke with them in their tongue. Embrace the true faith, and you need not be slaves.

A few screamed curses, but the rest agreed.

They were poor youths, not likely to be ransomed.

During the last hour of darkness they were unshackled and silently taken across the river. We did not see them again.

When daybreak came we set out with our captives. To be safe, we took away their heavy footgear. They walked barefoot like us, and protested greatly, claiming that it caused them much pain.

Each day more of the prisoners had bloody and swollen feet. Some could no longer walk, and we left them behind. Had it taken many days more to reach Meknes, we should have lost them all.

✿

The conquests of Emanuel the Fortunate mention the capture of Azamur, where the sun shone strong on the fort’s low tower. Hot lead splashed down the sluices. Get back! cried the crowd. Later they made the finest drums of any town along the coast. “And no Christian was permitted to ride into the city on horseback, or Jew enter it except barefooted (as in Fez and other cities to this day).”

✿

The same day thither there came aboard of us a young gentleman of that country. He had fled from his father, having had the misfortune to kill his elder brother, whom his father loved entirely.

In the courtyard. By the fountain. There was no time. I heard my father at the door. Not even time to pull out the knife. Only to hide and then run out of the house. Allah! Allah!

This young gentleman was much given to repeating the doleful account of his misfortune, amid divers piteous lamentations, and all this in such great measure that our good Captain was constrained to lock him away in the dark below, where he passed the entire voyage. It is well to remember that the Morocco pirates learned their trade from the English rovers driven out of the European area.

And the Sultan wrote to the British.

“And know that we have received, by our servants, from your master, three coach horses; now a coach requires four horses to draw it, wherefore you must needs send us another good one of the same kind and size, that they may draw the coach with four horses. Oblige us in this, by all means. Farewell! We depend upon it. Written on the seventh of the sacred month of Du El Kadah, in the year ninety-three and a thousand.”

The sound of the sea on the wind blowing through the streets of Essaouira today is the same as it was two hundred years ago, when Andrew Layton had a small exporting business there, together with two Frenchmen, Messieurs Secard and Barre. The three men often set out on their horses into the countryside roundabout, Layton’s greyhounds accompanying them. There were very few Europeans in the town, so that these excursions had become their favorite pastime.

One day the three, along with a clerk who worked in their office, went out of the town on their horses. To escape the wind they rode inland, rather than skirting the dunes to the south. Their route led them past several small Chleuh villages. The dogs raced here and there across the scrubland. They passed a hamlet where men and women were working in the fields, while cows grazed nearby. The greyhounds rushed onto the scene and made a concerted attack upon the cattle. As a calf fell, a farmer in the field raised his gun and shot one of the dogs. The others scattered.

The Europeans had seen. They rode up and dismounted, but before they had even begun to speak, the field-workers were hurling stones at them. Monsieur Barre received the most serious bruises. A general mêlée ensued, in the course of which Layton and his associates made free use of their riding-whips. Then they turned and galloped back to Essaouira in a state of high indignation. The occurrence was unusual, and by their standards, outrageous. They went immediately to see the Pacha.

To appease the Europeans, with whom he was on friendly terms, the Pacha first advised them henceforth to ride southward along the beach, notwithstanding the wind, rather than going inland past the villages. Then he agreed to call in the offending farmers. The following day a large group of them appeared in the town. They were in a state of great excitement, and straightway began a frenzied clamor for retribution. A village woman was missing two teeth, which she insisted that Layton had broken. Again and again the villagers called, in the name of Allah and the Prophet, for justice.

Perplexed by the turn events had taken, the Pacha decided to refer the matter to the Sultan. In due course a reply came from His Majesty, ordering all the parties concerned to report to the palace at Marrakech.

At the hearing, which finally took place in the presence of the Sultan, Layton was ingenuous enough to give a straightforward account of the incident. Included was his admission that he had struck the woman in the face with the butt of his whip, thus breaking two of her incisors. He offered to make monetary payment, but the villagers were adamant in their refusal. They had not come to Marrakech expecting money, they declared. What they demanded was precise retaliation: Layton must furnish them with two of his own teeth. Nothing else was acceptable.

Since the peasants were within their rights in asking that the law of the land be applied, the Sultan had no choice but to order the extractions to be performed then and there. The official tooth-puller stepped forward, ready to start. Layton, although considerably disconcerted, had the presence of mind to ask that the teeth to be pulled be two molars which recently had been giving him trouble. The complainants agreed to the suggestion. Back teeth being larger and heavier than front teeth, they felt that they were getting the better of the bargain.

The operation went ahead under the intent scrutiny of the villagers. They were waiting to hear the infidel’s cries of pain. Layton, however, preserved a stoical silence throughout the ordeal. The molars were washed and presented to the claimants, who went away entirely satisfied.

The Sultan had watched the proceedings with growing interest, and he arranged to hold a private conversation with Layton on the following day, when he apologized, at the same time expressing his admiration for the Englishman’s fortitude. He could scarcely do less, he said, than agree to grant whatever favor his guest might ask of him.

Layton replied that he desired only that the permit to export a cargo of wheat from Essaouira be expedited. His modesty and candor impelled the monarch to take a personal interest in him, and the two became fast friends.

It was the Emperor’s hope that Layton might eventually be persuaded to accept the post of British Consul in Marrakech. There at least, he argued, he would not have to contend with the wind. But the prospect did not appeal to Layton, who preferred to continue his life at Essaouira with his horses and dogs. He had got used to the wind, he said.

Whenever his own tribe won a victory in a battle with another tribe, Si Abdallah el Hassoun inwardly rejoiced. At the same time he considered this pleasure a base emotion, one unworthy of him. Thus, to fortify his sanctity he bade farewell to his students and went to live in Slâ, which is by the sea.

It was not long before the divinity students of his school sent several of their number to Si Abdallah, imploring him to return to them. Without replying, the saint led them to the rocks at the edge of the sea.

How turbulent the water is! he exclaimed. The students agreed. Then Si Abdallah filled a jar with the water and set it on a rock. Yet the water in here is still, he said, pointing at the jar. Why?

A student answered: Because it has been taken out of the place where it was.

Now you see why I must stay here, Si Abdallah said.

For thousands of afternoons in the Fondouq Askour, while the whores squabbled and shrieked in the courtyard outside his room, Sidi Moussa ed Douqqali worked at his obsessive task. He hoped to make asphodel stalks edible, but he died without having succeeded.

Sidi bel Abbes es Sebti was only fifteen when, realizing that he was a saint, he went to Marrakech to live a saint’s life. For forty years he walked through the streets of the medina, wearing only a pair of serrouelles, while he extolled the virtues of poverty. He was known for the foul language he used in upbraiding those who took issue with him.

Sidi Belyout, tamer of wild beasts, was never to be seen without his entourage of pet lions. And Sidi Abderrahman el Mejdoub, who dealt in epigram and prophecy, was not only a saint. He was also mentally deranged, thus in direct natural contact with the source of all knowledge.

Along the Oued Tensift beyond the walls, there were caves that had been hollowed in the red earth cliffs. The entrance to Sidi Youssef’s cave was protected by high thorn bushes and could not be seen from the river. He sought solitude, and although he was known for his great holiness, the people of Marrakech granted him his privacy, for he had leprosy. He claimed that the disease had been conferred upon him by Allah as a reward for his piety. When pieces of his flesh caught on the thorns and remained hanging there, he gave heartfelt thanks for these extra proofs of divine favor.

There were days when the students trembled. Are you cold? the master said.

We should sit in the courtyard, they told him. There are djenoun in hiding here.

Sidi Ali ben Harazem rebuked them, saying: Be still. If the prayers we send to Allah can reach the darker world, friends can be made from enemies, and Islam can enter there.

And the students shivered and wrote, hearing the water’s gurgle beneath the tiles. And Sidi Ali ben Harazem talked until dusk, when the swallows no longer flew above the city.

A century and a half ago, in one of the twisting back streets of the Mellah in Fez, there lived a respectable couple, Haim and Simha Hachuel. There would be no record of them today had their daughter Sol not been favored with exceptional beauty.

Since Jewish girls were free to walk in the streets unveiled, the beauty of Sol Hachuel soon became legendary throughout the city.

Moslem youths climbed up from the Medina to stroll through the Mellah in the hope of catching sight of Sol on her way to a fountain to fetch water.

Having seen her once, Mohammed Zrhouni came each day and waited until she appeared, merely to gaze upon her. Later he spoke with her, and still later suggested that they marry.

Sol’s parents rejected the idea outright: it would entail her abandonment of Judaism.

The Zrhouni family likewise strongly disapproved: they did not want a Jewess in the house, and they believed, like most Moslems, that no Jew’s conversion to Islam could be considered authentic.

Mohammed was not disposed in any case to take a Moslem bride, since that would involve accepting the word of his female relatives as to the girl’s desirability; by the time he was finally able to see her face, he would already be married to her. Since the considerations of his family would necessarily be based on the bride-price, he strongly doubted that any girl chosen by them could equal the jewel he had discovered in the Mellah.

For her part, Sol was infatuated with her Moslem suitor. Her parents’ furious tirades only increased the intensity of her obsession. Like Mohammed, she saw no reason to let herself be swayed by the opinions of her elders.

The inevitable occurred: she went out of the house one day and did not return. Mohammed covered her with a haik and went with her down into the Medina and across the bridge to his parents’ house in the Keddane.

Mohammed lived with his mother, aunts and sisters, his father having died the previous year. Out of deference to him the women of the household received his bride with correctness, if not enthusiasm, and the wedding, with its explicit conversion of the bride to Islam, was performed.

His mother remarked in an aside to Mohammed that at least the bride had cost nothing, and he understood that this was the principal reason for her grudging acceptance of Sol as her daughter-in-law.

Almost immediately Sol realized that she had made an error. Although she was conversant with Moslem customs, it had not occurred to her that she would be forbidden ever to go outside the Zrhouni house.

When she remonstrated with Mohammed, saying that she needed to go out for a walk in the fresh air, he answered that it was common knowledge that a woman goes out only three times during her life: once when she is born and leaves her mother’s womb, once when she marries and leaves her father’s house, and once when she dies and leaves this world. He advised her to walk on the roof like other women.

The aunts and sisters, instead of coming little by little to accept Sol as a member of the family, made her feel increasingly like an interloper. They whispered among themselves and grew silent when they saw her approaching.

The months went by. Sol pleaded to be allowed to visit her mother and father. They could not come to see her, since the house would be profaned by their presence.

It seemed unjust to Sol that women were not allowed to enter the mosque; if only it had been possible to go with Mohammed and pray, her life would have been easier to bear. She missed the regular visits to the synagogue where she sat upstairs with her mother and listened to her father as he chanted below with the other men.

The Zrhouni house had become a prison, and she resolved to escape from it. Accordingly, one day when she had managed to get hold of the key to the outer door, she wrapped herself in her haik and quietly slipped out into the street. Not looking to right or to left, she hurried up the Talâa to the top, and then set out for the Mellah.

The happiness in the Hachuel home lasted one day. Enraged and humiliated by his wife’s dereliction, Mohammed had gone directly to the ulema and told them the story. They listened, consulted together, and declared his wife to be guilty of apostasy from Islam.

On the following afternoon a squad of mokhaznia pounded on the door of the house in the Mellah, and amid shrieks and lamentations, seized the girl. They pulled her out of the house and dragged her through the streets of Fez Djedid, with a great crowd following behind.

Outside Bab Segma the crowd spread out and formed a circle. Screaming and struggling against the ropes that bound her, Sol was forced to kneel in the dust.

A tall mokhazni unsheathed his sword, raised it high in the air, and beheaded her.

Days of less substance than the nights that slipped between. And in the streets they whispered: Where is he?

The murmuring filled the souq at sunset as the goods were stacked away.

In irons. In Fez.

Abdeljbar.

Raised eyebrows, swift smiles, nods of understanding. For when the Riffians had burned a Nazarene ship, Sultan Abderrahman, hoping to placate the owners, had sent his soldiers to the Rif. They went directly to the caids and cheikhs, offering silver reales in exchange for the names of the guilty ones.

In the town where Cheikh Abdeljbar lived there was a youth named El Aroussi, admired by everyone for the strength in his body and the beauty of his features. For some unexplained reason Cheikh Abdeljbar detested the young man, and this was the subject of many discussions in the souq. It was difficult to find the cause of his hostility.

Those who most disliked the cheikh said it was probable that at some time El Aroussi had repulsed the older man’s attempts to seduce him. Others believed that, being of a jealous disposition, the cheikh could not forgive the youth for the many qualities Allah had bestowed upon him—particularly those qualities which made the girls and women wait for hours behind their lattices in order to see him walk by. People admired El Aroussi; they did not admire the cheikh.

El Aroussi knew nothing of the burned ship, and the cheikh was quite aware of this. All the same he named the youth as one of the raiders. El Aroussi was manacled and dragged off to a dungeon in Fez.

There in the Rif injustice was the daily bread. Everyone in the town knew what had happened, and everyone whispered. El Aroussi was a hero. The people were certain he would escape.

Time proved them right. Less than a year later the rumor was going around that he was in Tangier. Probably it did not reach the ears of Cheikh Abdeljbar. Perched above the town in his towers, he spoke only with men of importance, like himself.

The cheikh was ambitious. He hoped to marry his daughter Rahmana to the son of the Pacha of Slâ.

Included among his lands there was a castle on an estate in the Gharb, not far from Slâ, where he decided to take his family for a visit.

El Aroussi had indeed escaped from his confinement in Fez. He returned to his native town, where the people in the streets welcomed him, and commiserated with him for the unjust treatment he had received.

He listened impatiently, almost seeming not to hear them. He had grown bitter and silent. He was obliged to avenge himself against the cheikh. No other course of action was open to him. But the cheikh had gone to the Gharb.

As El Aroussi sat brooding one evening in his father’s house, he came upon an idea as to how he might proceed. He knew it would be necessary for him to go and stay, perhaps for many months, in the vicinity of the castle near Slâ, but having no access to money, he could see no way of keeping alive during the time of waiting. Now, however, he thought he had the solution.

The following morning he sought out his friends and put the question to them: would they be willing to go with him and live as bandits in the Forest of Mamora while they waited to carry out the attack upon Cheikh Abdeljbar?

In the end he recruited more than two dozen young men, all of them eager to help him clear his honor.

During the months while Cheikh Abdeljbar was making repeated visits to Slâ, as the arrangements for the forthcoming wedding slowly took form, El Aroussi and his friends lost no time in becoming the fiercest band of brigands in the region. The terror they caused throughout the Gharb was understandable, for they thought it safer to kill their victims before robbing them.

For generations the Forest of Mamora had been notorious as a robber-infested region. The outlaws raided the convoys of those unwise enough to pass within easy striking distance of the forest itself. If Cheikh Abdeljbar had spoken with the peasants working on his land, he might have been able to identify the new bandit chief from descriptions of his person in the gossip that was on everyone’s lips. But the cheikh was far too busy in Slâ settling the bride-price with the pacha, and the details of the wedding-feast with his future son-in-law, Sidi Ali.

And Rahmana lay among the cushions swallowing pellets of almond paste with sesame and honey, while maidservants massaged her body with creams and oils.

Guests began to arrive at the castle several days before the wedding feast. On the final night the entire party, led by the bride and groom, set out on horseback in a torchlit procession for Slâ, where the festivities would be continued at the palace of the pacha when they arrived on the following day.

Their way led through a countryside of boulders and high cactus. The moon gave great clarity, and a cold sharp wind ran westward. There were songs, accompanied only by the hoofbeats of a hundred horses.

As they passed between the walls of a winding gorge, a great voice suddenly sounded from somewhere among the rocks nearby.

Ha huwa! El Aroussi!

There was a second’s silence, and then the noise of thirty rifles firing into the procession from above.

In the stampede over the bodies of horses and men that followed, only the bridegroom was aware of the horseman who appeared from behind a boulder and rode straight at the bridal couple, at the last instant lifting Rahmana from her mount, and disappearing with her at a gallop into the night.

Cheikh Abdeljbar was unhurt. He and his son-in-law continued to Slâ and consulted with the pacha.

A few days later the Sultan sent soldiers to help the wronged father and husband. Cheikh Abdeljbar and Sidi Ali had taken a solemn oath to search for Rahmana until they found her.

On many occasions as they rode with the soldiers they had glimpses of the bandits just before they vanished into the depths of the forest. There were skirmishes in which both sides bore losses, but the leader was never seen among his henchmen.

It took more than a year for the soldiers to encircle the densest region of the forest. Those of El Aroussi’s followers who were left had seen the danger in time and fled.

The weeks went by, while the Sultan’s soldiers drew an always tightening ring around the part of the forest from which they were sure El Aroussi had not escaped.

It was Sidi Ali’s dogs that finally led to his discovery. They found him in a cave by the edge of a stream, his body wasted, with hunger, his face haggard and scarred.

They trussed him and took him to one of the tents at the campsite, where they dumped him onto the ground.

Then Sidi Ali squatted down, drew his dagger, and slowly amputated all ten of the captive’s toes, tossing them one by one into El Aroussi’s face.

When he had finished with this task, he withdrew to another tent to confer with Cheikh Abdeljbar on the form of death to provide for their prisoner the next morning.

They sat up half the night diverting themselves and each other with suggestions which grew increasingly more grotesque.

By the time the cheikh rose to retire to his own tent, he was in favor of cutting a horizontal line around El Aroussi’s waist and then flaying him, pulling the skin upwards over his head and eventually twisting it around his neck to strangle him.

This did not seem sufficiently drastic to Sidi Ali, who thought it would be more fitting to cut off his ears and nose and force him to swallow them, then to slash open his stomach, pull them out and make him swallow them again, and so on, for as long as he remained alive.

The older man reflected for a moment. Then, wishing his son-in-law a pleasant night, he said that with Allah’s consent they would continue their discussion in the morning.

The dialog was never resumed. During the black hour before dawn, the cheikh awoke, frozen by the sound of a voice that cried: Ha huwa! El Aroussi!

The cheikh sprang up and rushed out. The prisoner’s tent was empty. He ran to Sidi Ali’s tent. The young man lay dead. A spear was buried in his eye.

As the cheikh stood staring down in disbelief, there was the sound of a horse’s hoofbeats outside. They grew fainter and were gone. El Aroussi had mounted the cheikh’s own steed and ridden off on it.

The next morning, after washing and burying Sidi Ali (for they could not carry his body as far as Slâ), Cheikh Abdeljbar and the soldiers set out once more in pursuit.

Before noon they met the horse walking slowly in their direction, its saddle and flanks smeared with blood. The cheikh dismounted and ran to get astride it, turning it and making it retrace its steps. The forest was dense and difficult to push through, but the animal seemed to know its way.

They came soon to a small clearing where a rude hut had been built. The door was open.

Cheikh Abdeljbar stood in the doorway, trying to see into the dark interior. El Aroussi lay supine on the floor. It was clear that he was dead.

Then the cheikh saw the girl crouching by the body, while she kissed the stumps of El Aroussi’s toes, one by one. He called her name, already fearful that she would not respond.

She did not seem to hear her father’s outcry. When he lifted her up to embrace her, she stared at him and drew away. The soldiers were obliged to bind her in order to get her out of the hut and onto the horse with her father.

Cheikh Abdeljbar took Rahmana back to the Castle of Mamora. He hoped that with the passage of time she would cease her constant calling out of El Aroussi’s name.

One day when she was in the garden, she found a gate unlocked, and quickly stepped outside. What happened to her after that is a mystery, for she was not seen again. The people of the countryside claimed that she had returned to the forest in search of El Aroussi. They sang a song about her:

Days of less substance than the nights that slip between

And Rahmana wanders in the forest, and the branches catch her hair.

At night in the courtyards of the Rif, grandfathers fashion grenades. Each rock in the ravine shields a man. The Spaniard in the garrison starts from sleep, to find his throat already slashed.

At night the Légionnaires in the oasis, drunk with hot beer and self-pity, howl songs of praise for a distant homeland. The sand is cold under the branches of the tamarisks where the camels lie, shaded from the moonlight.

Ayayayay! Nothing good is going to come of this.

The Americans were here.

The people grew rich,

Most of all the women.

Even the hags tore off their veils

And filled their mouths with chewing-gum.

Men waited in vain for their wives.

Handsome faces and green eyes

Had spirited them away.

And the girls parted their hair

And wore French skirts.

They wanted to be with the Americans.

And you heard only Hokay, hokay.

The soldiers gave us cigarettes,

They gave us chocolates and dollars.

And even the oldest crones wore silk kerchiefs

When the Americans were here.

And Hokay, hokay! Bye bye!

They gave candy today and gum tomorrow.

The girls covered their faces

With powder made from chickpeas,

And they ate bonbons.

And even the hags sat drinking rum

With the Americans.

And you heard: Hokay, hokay! Come on! Bye bye!

Money for everybody.

It was the girls who brought it back.

They carried handbags.

They wanted to be with the Americans.

And all you could hear was Hokay, hokay!

Give me dollar. Come on! Bye bye!

✿

At night the French police quietly block the entrances to the Mellah, claiming to fear friction between Moslems and Jews. And at night they quietly remove the protection, allowing the Moslems to enter the quarter and pillage it.

A certain night the air was heavy with jasmine, and the bodies of Frenchmen and their families were left lying along the roads, under the cypresses in the public gardens, among the smoking ruins of the little villas. While it was still dark, a breeze sprang up.

When Spain ruled the Chemel, her officers liked to hunt for deer. The animals were few, and smaller than the ones they were used to hunting in Spain. Deer from the Pyrenees were sent repeatedly across the Mediterranean to Melilla, and turned loose in the mountains, where they flourished, and, mixing with the native herds, quickly produced a larger and stronger breed.

Under the Spanish the people of the Chemel could not own firearms. When the Spaniards went home and the Moroccans were left in charge, the law remained the same as before.

A time of trouble then began for people who lived in distant wooded areas. Reports of fatal accidents circulated through the countryside. In earlier days the stags had fled from the presence of men; now they often sought them out and attacked them, and the men had no means of defense.

Si Abdelaziz, a prosperous farmer of Tchar Serdioua, had four sons whose ages ranged from sixteen to twenty. They were still unmarried because in recent years he had been busy and had not taken the time to go out and find brides for them.

When he had a certain sum set by, he began to visit other villages in the region in order to pick out a girl for his eldest son.

Eventually, in a tchar some two hours’ walk up the valley, he came to terms with the father of a girl. Si Abdelaziz was not able to see her himself, but he was assured by her family that she was in excellent health and in perfect condition for marriage.

After settling the details in the bride-price agreement, he paid the man and returned to Tchar Serdioua satisfied with the transaction.

To his first-born son Mohammed he said: You have a wife. The wedding feast will take place the seventh day after Mouloud.

From among the young men of the tchar the son chose his wazzara, who would paint the designs on his hands with henna, build the wall of canes and bushes in front of his father’s house, and finally go to fetch the bride from her village.

The day before the wedding feast was to be celebrated, Mohammed and his wazzara still had not completed the wall. They worked from dawn to evening, and got it all finished save for one small section, which Mohammed said he would build himself after the others had gone to get the girl.

The procession set out up the valley a little after midnight, to the sound of rhaitas and drums. Si Abdelaziz, who accompanied it, said they would be back by daybreak.

There was a stream a short distance below the house, bordered on both sides by dense vegetation. Mohammed made several trips there, bringing back armfuls of green bushes to weave into the still unfinished wall. It was late by the time he had it all done. He ran down to the river once more to bathe and pray before lying down to await the arrival of the bridal party.

The women of the household were awakened by the furious bellowing of a stag, a sound that everyone in the tchar had learned to dread. They called to Mohammed, but he did not answer. The men from a nearby farm had heard the animal’s call, and they came running. As they approached Si Abdelaziz’s house, the stag bellowed again.

First they saw Mohammed’s white garments moving on the ground as the stag stamped on them and gored them with his antlers. Then they saw Mohammed lying on his side, with his intestines coiling out of him into the dirt. The stag bellowed once more, turned, and disappeared into the darkness. They carried the body up to the house and covered it.

It was growing light when the people of Tchar Serdioua first heard the sharp sounds of the wedding procession coming down the valley. A group of men ran up the road to meet it and give Si Abdelaziz the bad news. The procession arrived at the house in silence.

After Mohammed’s burial the three younger sons conferred among themselves. They were of the opinion that the stag had come to kill Mohammed because it knew he was about to marry the girl. It followed that any man foolhardy enough to take her would very likely suffer the same fate.

Si Abdelaziz, having paid for the bride, had no intention of sending her home again. He called in the oldest of the three remaining sons and told him she was for him. The youth steadfastly refused to have her.

Si Abdelaziz tried the next son, and then the youngest, but neither would agree to accept her. The girl learned of this, and begged to be taken back to her village. In a fit of anger, the old man announced that he was marrying her himself.

The three youths refused to speak to their new mother-in-law. They were waiting for the stag. Each time their father went into the woods they listened for the killer’s voice.

The stag never came. Si Abdelaziz died in bed a year later, and the girl was free to return as a widow to her own tchar.

The country of the Anjra is almost devoid of paved roads. It is a region of high jagged mountains and wooded valleys, and does not contain a town of any size. During the rainy season there are landslides. Then, until the government sends men to repair the damage, the roads cannot be used. All this is very much on the minds of the people who live in the Anjra, particularly when they are waiting for the highways to be rebuilt so that trucks can move again between the villages. Four or five soldiers had been sent several months earlier to repair the potholes along the road between Ksar es Seghir and Melloussa. Their tent was beside the road, near a curve in the river.

A peasant named Hattash, whose village lay a few miles up the valley, constantly passed by the place on his way to and from Ksar es Seghir. Hattash had no fixed work of any sort, but he kept very busy looking for a chance to pick up a little money one way or another in the market and the cafés. He was the kind of man who prided himself on his cleverness in swindling foreigners, by which he meant men from outside the Anjra. Since his friends shared his dislike of outsiders, they found his exploits amusing, although they were careful to have no dealings with him.

Over the months Hattash had become friendly with the soldiers living in the tent, often stopping to smoke a pipe of kif with them, perhaps squatting down to play a few games of ronda. Thus when one day the soldiers decided to give a party, it was natural that they should mention it to Hattash, who knew everyone for miles around, and therefore might be able to help them. The soldiers came from the south, and their isolation there by the river kept them from meeting anyone who did not regularly pass their tent.

I can get you whatever you want, Hattash told them. The hens, the vegetables, oil, spices, salad, whatever.

Fine. And we want some girls or boys, they added.

Don’t worry about that. You’ll have plenty to choose from. What you don’t want you can send back.

They discussed the cost of the party for an hour or so, after which the soldiers handed Hattash twenty-five thousand francs. He set off, ostensibly for the market.

Instead of going there, he went to the house of a nearby farmer and bought five of his best hens, with the understanding that if the person for whom he was buying them should not want them, he could return the hens and get his money back.

Soon Hattash was outside the soldiers’ tent with the hens. How are they? he said. The men squeezed them and examined them, and pronounced them excellent. Good, said Hattash. I’ll take them home now and cook them.

He went back to the farmer with the hens and told him that the buyer had refused them. The farmer shrugged and gave Hattash his money.

This seemed to be the moment to leave Ksar es Seghir, Hattash decided. He stopped at a café and invited everyone there to the soldiers’ tent that evening, telling them there would be food, wine and girls. Then he bought bread, cheese and fruit, and began to walk along the trails that would lead him over the mountains to Khemiss dl Anjra.

With the twenty-five thousand francs he was able to live for several weeks there in Khemiss dl Anjra. When he had come to the end of them, he began to think of leaving.

In the market one morning he met Hadj Abdallah, a rich farmer from Farsioua, which was a village only a few miles from his own. Hadj Abdallah, a burly, truculent man, always had eyed Hattash with distrust.

Ah, Hattash! What are you doing up here? It’s a while since I’ve seen you.

And you? said Hattash.

Me? I’m on my way to Tetuán. I’m leaving my mule here and taking the bus.

That’s where I’m going, said Hattash.

Well, see you in Tetuán, said Hadj Abdallah, and he turned, unhitched his mule, and rode off.

Khemiss dl Anjra is a very small town, so that it was not difficult for Hattash to follow along at some distance, and see the house where Hadj Abdallah tethered his mule and into which he then disappeared. He walked to the bus station and sat under a tree.

An hour or so later, when the bus was filling up with people, Hadj Abdallah arrived and bought his ticket. Hattash approached him.

Can you lend me a thousand francs? I haven’t got enough to buy the ticket.

Hadj Abdallah looked at him. No, I can’t, he said. Why don’t you stay here? And he went and got into the bus.

Hattash, his eyes very narrow, sat down again under the tree. When the bus had left, and the cloud of smoke and dust had drifted off over the meadows, he walked back to the house where the Hadj had left his mule. She still stood there, so he quietly unhitched her, got astride her, and rode her in the direction of Mgas Tleta. He was still smarting under Hadj Abdallah’s insult, and he vowed to give him as much trouble as he could.

Mgas Tleta was a small tchar. He took the mule to the fondaq and left it in charge of the guardian. Being ravenously hungry, he searched in his clothing for a coin or two to buy a piece of bread, and found nothing.

In the road outside the fondaq he caught sight of a peasant carrying a loaf in the hood of his djellaba. Unable to take his eyes from the bread, he walked towards the man and greeted him. Then he asked him if he had work, and was not surprised when the man answered no. He went on, still looking at the bread: If you want to earn a thousand francs, you can take my mule to Mdiq. My father’s waiting for her and he’ll pay you. Just ask for Si Mohammed Tsuli. Everybody in Mdiq knows him. He always has a lot of men working for him. He’ll give you work there too if you want it.

The peasant’s eyes lit up. He agreed immediately.

Hattash sighed. It’s a long time since I’ve seen good country bread like that, he said, pointing at the loaf that emerged from the hood of the djellaba. The man took it out and handed it to him. Here. Take it.

In return Hattash presented him with the receipt for the mule. You’ll have to pay a hundred francs to get her out of the fondaq, he told him. My father will give it back to you.

That’s all right. The man was eager to start out for Mdiq.

Si Mohammed Tsuli. Don’t forget.

No, no! Bslemah.

Hattash, well satisfied, watched the man ride off. Then he sat down on a rock and ate the whole loaf of bread. He had no intention of returning home to risk meeting the soldiers or Hadj Abdallah, so he decided to hide himself for a while in Tetuán, where he had friends.

When the peasant arrived at Mdiq the following day, he found that no one could tell him where Si Mohammed Tsuli lived. He wandered back and forth through every street in the town, searching and inquiring. When evening came, he went to the gendarmerie and asked if he might leave the mule there. But they questioned him and accused him of having stolen the animal. His story was ridiculous, they said, and they locked him into a cell.

Not many days later Hadj Abdallah, having finished his business in Tetuán, went back to Khemiss dl Anjra to get his mule and ride her home. When he heard that she had disappeared directly after he had taken the bus, he remembered Hattash, and was certain that he was the culprit. The theft had to be reported in Tetuán, and much against his will he returned there.

Your mule is in Mdiq, the police told him.

Hadj Abdallah took another bus up to Mdiq.

Papers, said the gendarmes. Proof of ownership.

The Hadj had no documents of that sort. They told him to go to Tetuán and apply for the forms.

During the days while he waited for the papers to be drawn up, signed and stamped, Hadj Abdallah grew constantly angrier. He went twice a day to talk with the police. I know who took her! he would shout. I know the son of a whore.

If you ever catch sight of him, hold on to him, they told him. We’ll take care of him.

Although Tetuán is a big place with many crowded quarters, the unlikely occurred. In a narrow passageway near the Souq el Fouqi late one evening Hadj Abdallah and Hattash came face to face.

The surprise was so great that Hattash remained frozen to the spot, merely staring into Hadj Abdallah’s eyes. Then he heard a grunt of rage, and felt himself seized by the other man’s strong arm.

Police! Police! roared Hadj Abdallah. Hattash squirmed, but was unable to free himself.

One policeman arrived, and then another. Hadj Abdallah did not release his grip of Hattash for an instant while he delivered his denunciation. Then with an oath he struck his prisoner, knocking him flat on the sidewalk. Hattash lay there in the dark without moving.

Why did you do that? the policemen cried. Now you’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.

Hadj Abdallah was already frightened. I know. I ought not to have hit him.

It’s very bad, said one policeman, bending over Hattash, who lay completely still. You see, there’s blood coming out of his head.

A small crowd was collecting in the passageway.

There were only a few drops of blood, but the policeman had seen Hattash open one eye and had heard him whisper: Listen.

He bent over still farther, so that his ear was close to Hattash’s lips.

He’s got money, Hattash whispered.

The policeman rose and went over to Hadj Abdallah. We’ll have to call an ambulance, he said, and you’ll have to come to the police station. You had no right to hit him.

At that moment Hattash began to groan.

He’s alive, at least! cried Hadj Abdallah. Hamdul’lah!

Then the policemen began to speak with him in low tones, advising him to settle the affair immediately by paying cash to the injured man.

Hadj Abdallah was willing. How much do you think? he whispered.

It’s a bad cut he has on his head, the same policeman said, going back to Hattash. Come and look.

Hadj Abdallah remained where he was, and Hattash groaned as the man bent over him again. Then he murmured: Twenty thousand. Five for each of you.

When the policeman rejoined Hadj Abdallah, he told him the amount. You’re lucky to be out of it.

Hadj Abdallah gave the money to the policeman, who took it over to Hattash and prodded him. Can you hear me? he shouted.

Ouakha, groaned Hattash.

Here. Take this. He held out the banknotes in such a way that Hadj Abdallah and the crowd watching could see them clearly. Hattash stretched up his hand and took them, slipping them into his pocket.

Hadj Abdallah glared at the crowd and pushed his way through, eager to get away from the spot.

After he had gone, Hattash slowly sat up and rubbed his head. The onlookers still stood there watching. This bothered the two policemen, who were intent on getting their share of the money. The recent disclosures of corruption, however, had made the public all too attentive at such moments. The crowd was waiting to see them speak to Hattash or, if he should move, follow him.

Hattash saw the situation and understood. He rose to his feet and quickly walked up the alley.

The policemen looked at each other, waited for a few seconds, and then began to saunter casually in the same direction. Once they were out of sight of the group of onlookers they hurried along, flashing their lights up each alley in their search. But Hattash knew the quarter as well as they, and got safely to the house of his friends.

He decided, however, that with the two policemen on the lookout for him Tetuán was no longer the right place for him, and that his own tchar in the Anjra would be preferable.

Once he was back there, he made discreet inquiries about the state of the road to Ksar es Seghir. The repairs were finished, his neighbors told him, and the soldiers had been sent to some other part of the country.

The river runs fast at the mouth where the shore is made of the sky, and the wavelets curl inward fanwise from the sea. For the swimmer there is no warning posted against the sharks that enter and patrol the channel. Some time before sunset birds come to stalk or scurry along the sandbar, but before dark they are gone.

NOTES AND SOURCES

I

Topographical features mentioned by Hanno the Carthaginian are no longer in existence. The Atlantic coastline of Morocco has greatly altered in the past twenty-four centuries.

II

A fondouq is a caravanserai where travellers may find accommodation for themselves and stabling for their horses, donkeys or mules.

Mention of a King Mohammed VIII in the early sixteenth century may cause surprise to those who remember that King Mohammed V died in 1961. Altogether thirteen monarchs bore the name before the establishment of the present dynasty in 1649, at which point the enumeration was begun afresh.

Passio gloriosi martyr is beati fratris Andreae de Spole to, ordinis minorum regularis observantiae p. catholico fidei veritate passi in Affrica civitate Fez, Anno 1532, Tolosoae (in verse).

(Translation into Spanish published at Medina del Campo in 1543, entitled Tesauro de virtudes copilado por un religioso portuguez, Sigue el Martyro de Fr. Andres de Espoleto en Fez.)

IV

The incident is mentioned in The Empire of Morocco by James Grey Jackson (William Bulmer & Co., London, 1809).

V

Djenoun (singular djinn) are fearsome spirits capable of assuming human or animal form.

VI

The ulema constitute a council of men versed theoretically and practically in the laws of Islam, holding government appointments in a Moslem state.

Mokhaznia are military guards.

El Martino de la joven Hachuel, la Heroina Hebrea by Eugenio Maria Romero (Gibraltar, 1837).

Reference is made to the occurrence in the Times of Morocco, 25 September, 1888. Also in Archives Israelites, Vol. XLI, Nos. 22-24, 1880.

A play based on the case, by Antonio Calle, was published in Seville in 1852.

VII

The tale appears in Morocco by Edmondo de Amicis (Henry T. Coates & Co., Philadelphia, 1897).

VIII

A literal translation of the lyrics of a popular song in Moghrebi Arabic of the 1950s.

IX

Spanish rule in Morocco terminated with Independence, in 1956. The difficulties recounted took place during the ’sixties and ’seventies.

X

A fondaq is a hotel. During the French occupation, fondouq and fondaq were used interchangeably to mean ‘hostelry’; present-day usage distinguishes between a fondouq—a caravanserai where animals are accommodated—and a fondaq—a hotel.

This episode occurred in 1980.

AFTERWORD

Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations

By Brian T. Edwards

1. Interrupting the American Archive

When Paul Bowles died in Tangier on 18 November 1999, the story was covered widely in the US press. US obituaries portrayed Bowles, with remarkable consistency, as an American expatriate connected, in spite of self-imposed exile in North Africa, to many of the most intriguing writers and artists of Euro-American Modernism. The omissions in the portrait—especially the importance of Bowles’s Maghrebi context—are endemic to a narrow conceptualization of the author’s career and indicate the resistance to thinking about US literary and cultural production in its global context. After 1941, provoked by a more immediate and massive engagement in global affairs, Americans reorganized their thinking about the foreign. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Bowles played a significant part in imagining the relationship of Americans to the foreign in general and to Europe’s former colonies in particular. Bowles’s career challenged the circumscribed sense of what counts as American literature as well as the perceived chasm separating cultural production from international politics. His residence in Tangier, beginning in 1947, corresponds with a deep involvement in Moroccan affairs by the US government during which Bowles wrote frequently about North African politics and culture. After Morocco attained independence in 1956, Bowles was the most prominent US citizen living in Morocco, someone whose statements were widely circulated and frequently disparaged by Moroccans. His work was not free of its own limitations, nor were his politics liberating. But his writing emerged from a crucial moment before US supremacist attitudes were consolidated. Most US accounts of Bowles have perpetuated the Cold War tendency to translate the foreign within the logic of exceptionalism. Yet Bowles himself had long since taken a path diverging from such a nationalist or even nation-based logic.

Since 9/11, Bowles’s name has reemerged in the US media as a prescient and missed American writer.[1] With the posthumous publication of a major collection in late 2001 and a two-volume Library of America edition of his works in 2002, Bowles’s place in the American canon seems yet more assured because of an implicit connection of recent history with his alleged “prediction” of a world gone terribly wrong in the encounter of Americans and Arabs.[2] Despite a shelf of biographies and studies, however, the scholarly record reflects little more than a smattering of information on his longtime Moroccan artistic collaborators, friends, and lovers.[3] The absence of such material may encourage critics merely to spin the established version of Bowles’s career—a writer separated by a Modernist scrim from engagement with his geopolitical context—and discourage others from seeing Bowles as deeply involved in the complex interplay of cultural and geopolitical concerns that animated the US presence in the region.[4]

If there is to be a twenty-first century rediscovery of Bowles, the pedagogical and critical danger is that readers will continue to view him through the Cold War lenses that focused his earlier reception. Namely, having long repressed the question of empire that lies at the foundation of American studies approaches to reading literature, when readers reread Bowles in the context of US empire, it will be difficult to evade what Paul Giles has derided as “the magic circle between text and context.” Critical readings of Bowles that simply extrapolate his texts as Orientalist are caught within a similar circle. This essay is interested in interrupting those frames by offering a Moroccan archive on Bowles’s Moroccan context and by attending to the various forms of disruption that Bowles’s work includes and produces. One strand emerging from the Moroccan archive seems to affirm—and extend—what has been called a “postnational” approach, namely one that sees the nation form and the related question of national literature as elaborate and influential but also historically delimited constructions. In the US, those constructions reemerge with new ferocity in the early Cold War, during which Bowles was writing narratives of Americans who depart from the various “cages” that have held them in the US. As Bowles’s case demonstrates, there are American authors of the 1940s through the 1970s whose work sits uneasily within the hypernational framework of the period.[5] Not only does this work require a comparative, multisited approach to be read properly, but also its departure from the national episteme helps rethink the relationship between cultural production and foreign relations. Bowles’s relationship to Tangier is to a place with a historically fraught relationship to the nation form, a space at once extranational and international, and a place of diasporic convergences. Bowles’s early work refuses the neocolonialist/anti-imperialist polarity that has emerged as the choice critics must make about his writing and exhibits a potentiality for an alternative engagement across national boundaries, literatures, and subjectivities. This potentiality, emerging from his early work and developed later, offers an important counterpoint to the forms of containment being consolidated on the home front while he wrote.

In what follows, I first examine US and Moroccan portrayals of Bowles in media and scholarship. Reading through Moroccan critical responses, I derive a manner of reading Bowles through an inter- or extranational formation I call Tangerian literature. Then I use this category to reread Bowles’s best-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, to pursue the novel’s relation to its geopolitical context and the potentiality Bowles explores and figures within the novel for identifications that exceed national identification. By doing so, and by contrasting diplomatic representations by the US State Department apparatus, I reconsider the space between literary representations of the foreign and foreign relations. Bowles’s attitude toward that space is complex and forces Americanists to reconsider easy invocations of the international or the political in discussions of post-1941 American literature.

Thirty-six years old when he set sail for Casablanca in 1947 with a contract for an as-yet-unwritten novel he called The Sheltering Sky (he had lived in Morocco in the early 1930s and in Mexico for a year during World War II), Bowles made a departure that was a definitive rupture and that at times bothered reviewers of his novels and has constrained the parameters for interpretations of his work ever since. Nearly all of his writing was set either in North Africa or Central America and took as its recurring subject the encounter of Anglo-Americans with these places and the people, both “foreign” and “native,” who live there. During the 1940s and 1950s, when Bowles first made a name for himself as a writer—having achieved a degree of fame earlier as a composer—his dedication to representing life outside of the US alternatively worried Cold Warriors and titillated the counterculture. In 1950, for example, Charles Jackson reviewed Bowles’s second book negatively in the New York Times Book Review and suggested that Bowles would do better to return to “his native scene” and take up “everyday” American concerns.

Upon Bowles’s death, journalists could not help but express judgment on his decision to have stayed “away” until the end. In Mel Gussow’s account in The New York Times, Bowles’s choice to spend his life abroad demonstrated something approaching a moral failing. “In many ways his career was one of avoidance,” Gussow put it. “[He] retreated to Tangier . . . and moved farther away from the worlds of publishing and society toward an unknown destination.” The tone of Adam Bernstein’s obituary for the Washington Post recalls Jackson’s comments half a century earlier: “Since the late 1940s, he had all but renounced the US, embracing what he considered the sexually, socially and culturally liberating environment of Morocco.” Writers from the major papers efface Bowles’s oft-repeated critique of the decadence of US consumer and political culture. The invention of an attitude that Bowles did not express about Morocco (that it was liberating) emerges from the journalists’ fabrication of his renunciation of the US. The decision to remain outside leads to extreme and polarized responses from those whose careers have relied on remaining within.

Despite the interpretive weight of Bowles’s choice of residence on the meaning of his life, however, not one of the US obituaries and tributes considered his half-century in Tangier in the context of the major political and social transformations in the city, in Morocco, or in the greater Maghreb, which moved from colonialism to independence through various intense struggles in the postcolonial period. In his full-page obituary, Gussow writes off all of Moroccan history in a sentence: “Eventually his dream city of Tangier was invaded by tourists and became something of a nightmare.”[6] The excuse for the omission would seem to be the US media’s firm distinction between realms of cultural production and political history. Yet Bowles’s career challenges that binarism throughout: he published a novel about the Moroccan independence movement; wrote articles about politics in Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Morocco and Portugal for the Nation and other publications during the 1950s; feared returning to the US because of prior membership in the Communist Party; composed the score for a Belgian documentary about the Congo on the verge of decolonization; and saw his own extensive recording of Moroccan music in the postcolonial period as a response to the cultural program of Moroccan nationalists.

Critics must reexamine the relationship of post-1941 US literature and foreign relations. By foreign relations, I mean both US international politics and the ways in which, through cultural production, Americans are taught to imagine the foreign; the interplay between these two meanings of the term must not be collapsed, as has become routine. In Bowles criticism published in the US, for example, Bowles’s relations with foreigners are either a point of prurient interest (what sorts of “relations” did he have with Moroccans?) or ignored. Bowles’s intriguing life was made familiar via many interviews, profiles, and accounts of visits to the errant author himself in situ. In themselves, these accounts of Bowles among the Arabs (to paraphrase a recent one), along with the obituaries, constitute an archive, stock with frequent repetitions, stereotypes, and regurgitations of colonial banalities about the Maghreb. Its predictability, however, does not diminish the power of this archive to frame readings of Bowles’s work and American understandings of the Maghreb. The unchecked interpretation of Morocco that emerges implies and constructs a contrasting setting from which readers read the articles. They repeatedly construct the binarism, then, that Edward Said has argued marks Orientalism, and challenge the recent argument that American representations of the Arab world since World War II move us beyond Said’s formulation.[7] Bowles is distanced from what is imagined as “normal” in the US: he is suspect insofar as his relationship to Morocco is seen not as an engagement with the foreign but as a prolonged lost weekend, as Jackson implied, an irresponsible bender. As a result, he became not only the conduit to the purportedly “liberating environment,” its translator, but also a tourist site himself. By the 1990s, Bowles had entered the travel guidebooks as something like required reading and as a part of the scenery.[8]

If American obituaries told one story about Bowles’s life in Morocco, a different story was being told in Morocco. In both French- and Arabic-language newspapers, Bowles’s death was front-page news. A couple of papers ran multiple articles about it on the same day. There is more proximity in the Moroccan accounts and a greater sense that the death of Bowles matters somehow, immediately. If American accounts had Bowles fleeing to a curious and marginal place, Moroccan accounts invariably ask about the effects of his writing on the postcolonial nation. There is a greater diversity of opinion regarding Bowles in the Moroccan media than one finds in US criticism. Such a disparity reminds us that Arab interruptions to American accounts of the world extend to the realm of literary criticism.[9] Yet the Moroccan archive is silenced in criticism at large: Nexis search engines will not locate, Internet searches will not reach, MLA bibliographies do not list, and US libraries do not collect the Moroccan sources that discuss and debate the significance of Bowles’s passing. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has taught in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the hegemonic archive regularly silences the past.

It is safe to say that the Bowles who lived in Tangier and Fez in 1931 and 1932 and who found himself dreaming of return after World War II did not imagine that Moroccans would eventually be reading his books. But on his return in 1947, and especially after autumn of that year, when he met Ahmed Yacoubi in Fez, the earlier Bowles quickly ceded to a Bowles who became involved (artistically, intellectually, professionally, socially, and sometimes romantically and/or sexually) with Maghrebi nationalists, intellectuals, artists, and, later, academics and students. He did not always approve of their positions (most notably on what he thought was the tendency of Arab nationalism to squelch Berber culture and to embrace the West’s worst aspects), but he could not and did not ignore the changing tide in the Maghreb. The public discussion of Bowles’s work by Moroccans did not register for a couple of decades—Abdallah Laroui critiqued him in 1967 and Tahar Ben Jelloun denounced him in Le Monde five years later—but as early as the 1950s, it was clear that Bowles’s work had a Moroccan audience. The nationalist hero ’Allai al-Fassi reportedly appreciated Bowles’s 1955 novel about the anticolonial uprising in Fez, The Spider’s House.[10] With the rise of postcolonial theory in Morocco, extended in Morocco by the work of Abdelkebir Khatibi and popularized by Moroccans returning home from the US with literature Ph.D.s, Bowles’s work gained an academic audience. His earlier writings made their way onto Moroccan syllabi in the early 1990s as Moroccan academics looked for ways to respond to the Gulf War, which had been controversial because of Moroccan participation in the US-led alliance. Moroccan students wrote theses on Bowles’s work and occasionally confronted him directly in interviews.

A couple of years before Bowles’s death, Mohamed Choukri started a firestorm with the publication of a book—Paul Bowles wa’uzla Tanja—that criticized Bowles harshly as a homosexual, as someone whose Arabic was not as good as he claimed, as someone who, in Choukri’s construction, loved Morocco but hated Moroccans. For Choukri, who had collaborated with Bowles in the 1960s and 1970s, such retrograde attitudes demonstrated that Bowles had worn out his welcome. A Tangier weekly gave Bowles the opportunity to respond; Bowles accused Choukri of insanity and referred obliquely to Choukri’s well-known and much-frowned-upon alcoholism while asserting his own right to stay “as long as the government permits me.” In 1997, Muhammad Abu Talib suggested in a Rabat-based cultural journal that Moroccans stop giving an “unnecessary, excessive interest” in Bowles or his work, which he claimed denigrated the nationalist movement. Though Abu Talib admitted some respect for Bowles’s literary abilities, he ultimately viewed Bowles as yet another foreign writer afflicted with what the Moroccan poet and scholar archly called “Moroccanitis” (English in original). Abu Talib implicitly criticized Choukri for his involvement with Bowles and noted a “disturbing influence by English” on Choukri’s Arabic prose. Softer versions of this opinion appeared on Bowles’s death in the Moroccan daily Libération, which called the writer’s passing the completion of a circle of Tangier’s colonialist ghosts; in these accounts, Bowles’s death—which came shortly after the death of King Hassan II, who had ruled Morocco for almost four decades (1961-99)—was further confirmation of the arrival of a new more hopeful period.[11]

A different tack was taken by Tariq as-Saidi, who remapped Bowles’s career in terms of its relationship to Moroccan culture: “the center of the world for him shifted from Paris to Tangier.” Writing for the daily al-Ahdath al-Maghribiya, as-Saidi makes a compelling case for Bowles’s embrace of the Moroccan imaginary as an escape from a more limited and limiting American understanding of daily life (one of the subheadings of the article translates as “Ordinary Moroccans Saved Bowles from American Stupidity”). The official obituary, which ran on the Maghreb Arabe Presse wire service (MAP), similarly emphasized Bowles’s embrace of Moroccan culture. MAP foregrounded Bowles’s translations of works by Moroccans and his recordings of an “inventory” of popular Moroccan music of the Atlas and Rif to the exclusion of most other facets of his career (“Décès”). The account by the national news agency thus offered a major interruption to US treatment of Bowles’s career, on the other pole of where, say, the Library of America’s Bowles edition stands. This is the Moroccan Bowles; Bowles, the archivist of Moroccan national culture; Bowles, the Anglophone African author.

The accounts I have mentioned thus far interject aspects of Bowles’s life that are omitted from most US accounts. But in their projection of Moroccan desires and cultural concerns, they do not fully reorganize a reading of Bowles’s literary career. Such a possibility, however, does emerge from writing by Zubir Bin Bushta, who published two articles in the days following Bowles’s death: one in the influential al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki and the other in al-Mithaq al-Watani. Bin Bushta knew Bowles personally and writes movingly of conversations about him with the Moroccan concierge at Bowles’s building and with a Moroccan nurse at the hospital (“Nihaya ustura”). Well aware of Bowles’s international reputation, Bin Bushta points to his influence on Moroccan letters and calls him the leader or scout (ra’id) of al-adab at-Tanji, a phrase I translate as “Tangerian literature.” (“Tanji” is an unusual Arabic form; “Tanjawi” is the usual term that designates Arab residents of the city. “Tangerino” denotes expatriates.) Bin Bushta emphasizes that he is departing from national categories: “Paul Bowles is a writer categorized in the column of foreign literature in America. And he is esteemed as a foreign writer in Morocco. I firmly believe that he created a new literary movement/trend [tayyar] that can be called al-adab” (“Rahil ra’id”). The phrase al-adab at-Tanji is also used by Abdarrahim Huzal, who calls Bowles “one of its founders and one of its major representatives.” Writing in al-’Alam ath-Thaqafi, Huzal responds to what he calls “naïve” accusations about Bowles’s feelings for Morocco (he names Choukri) by arguing that writers have imaginary relations to nations and, therefore, may have multiple, apparently contradictory relationships to a nation. Bin Bushta’s and Huzal’s articles move beyond the nationalist framework of Abu Talib or MAP and organize their referent around extra-national affiliations.

That both connect their understanding of Bowles’s relationship to the nation form to his residence in Tangier is important. A city with a long history of international coexistence, Tangier is understood within and without Morocco as exceptional. Legally an International Zone from 1925 to 1956, and multilingual and “multicultural” throughout the twentieth century, Tangier challenges the primacy of national identifications and resists any experience of monolingualism or unidirectional affiliation. An understanding of Bowles’s writing as “Tanji” (as opposed to Tanjawi or Tangerino) emphasizes this aspect of the city and disrupts the national framework organizing most understandings of his work. As I suggest in the conclusion of this essay, the categorization helps us to rethink Bowles’s important translations of the narratives of illiterate Moroccans and allows us to see them not in terms of bringing fame to otherwise underappreciated “writers” (MAP’s term) but rather as extranational collaborations with those marginalized by the Moroccan nation.

2. Rereading The Sheltering Sky

These analyses by Moroccan critics are a wedge with which we can pry open Bowles’s early writing. While his work matures and changes in response to his life in Morocco—never a home, always a tentative stop—and while the later work has been neglected, I want here to go back to Bowles’s earliest major representation of the Maghreb: The Sheltering Sky. A rereading of this novel is called for not only because it stands as the pillar in Bowles’s writing career, determining everything else that follows for readers, the first (and often only) book that Americans read by Bowles, but also for another reason: written in 1947-48, published in late 1949, and a bestseller in early 1950, the novel is intricately a part of that moment when the US was coming to terms with itself as a global power, a reckoning that was being played out in popular media as well as in classified State Department documents. As I have argued elsewhere, the Cold War must not be seen separately from the postcolonial period, the shifting of geopolitical and racial relations on a global scale (“Preposterous Encounters”). The Sheltering Sky is a novel that imagines—and stages—an American relationship to the foreign. As such, it engages deeply, by which I mean creatively and not programmatically, the problems and limits of the new world order that was emerging simultaneous to Bowles’s travels in Morocco and Algeria, as he wrote his novel. The novel’s ability to imagine and figure interruptions to its own narrative of “pioneering” opposes it to American narratives of a complete and transparent translation of the globe that were increasingly common. Bowles was writing in the wake of one of the most influential American narratives about the foreign, Henry Luce’s 1941 essay The American Century, in which what we might call an easy translation of the world was seen to be a prerogative of US global supremacy: the power to recreate the world environment “by imagination.” Luce’s conservative vision of a circular or tautological American understanding of the world—where US global positioning is imagined as supreme within an “imaginative” American recreation of global power relations—is something from which Bowles clearly excepted himself. We must thus be careful not to apply reading practices that unwittingly follow from Luce’s logic to our understanding of Bowles. To say that we must learn to reread The Sheltering Sky outside an American Century framework means also that we must learn to reread Bowles outside an Americanist framework.

Set just after World War II in Algeria, The Sheltering Sky depicts three Americans in their thirties—Port and Kit Moresby and their friend Tunner. In this love triangle in the desert, the secondary triangles are especially compelling: Port, Kit, and the Sahara; errant Americans, stir-crazy French colonials, colonized Algerians. Port and Kit are fleeing the decadence of the West, attempting to escape the incursion of what the novel calls “the mechanistic age.” They are also attempting to bridge a gap in their marriage. To do both, they travel further and further “in” to the Sahara, ditching Tunner. (With his “Paramount” good looks, Tunner stands in for the America they have left behind; he also has seduced Kit.) Before Port and Kit reconcile or come to a decision about their feelings about life in Algeria, Port becomes ill and dies of typhoid in a remote French outpost, leaving Kit alone. Kit, plagued through the first half of the novel by omens and fears, hitches a ride with a passing caravan, leaving Tunner to bury Port. She becomes attached to a Touareg trader named Belqassim, who brings her across the desert to his home, has sex with her and stands by while his older companion does the same, disguises her as a boy, smuggles her past his three wives, then confines her. Kit doesn’t object; rather, she craves his sexual visits. When she decides to escape, she does so rather easily. Kit makes it back to the US consulate in Oran, but the novel suggests that she has strayed too far. Though she is located, she “CANNOT GET BACK” to some place familiar to the Americans and is lost in full view.

Despite its explicit rejection of what it calls American “civilization”, the novel quickly became popular in the US. Later a cult novel, it has been continuously in print. Yet the novel is continually read within a framework it rejects: namely, that Americans have an innocent relationship to “the world.”[12] Bowles is complicit with this misreading, not only because he places American concerns at the center but also because he structures this misreading, as he is apparently ambivalent within the novel about the individual’s relationship to the nation. The characters set out to reorganize not only their relationship to each other but to their national culture itself through comparison: “another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. And the war was one facet of the mechanized age [Port] wanted to forget.” By proposing that an individual might “forget” aspects of his or her “civilization” and select others from contrasting formations in their place, Bowles initially demonstrates an understanding of national identity as one of selective memory, as some had theorized the concept of the “nation” in the nineteenth century. Yet the terms with which the project is expressed are decidedly American. The novel will later compare Port and Kit’s travel to the familiar American act of pioneering: Port thinks of his great-grandparents’ encounter with the American landscape; the Sahara is called a “wilderness.” Through such metaphors, Bowles imagines the translatability of the American frontier—the place where, according to Turner’s 1893 thesis, the American national character had been formed—to a new location and places his novel in the company of other postwar accounts of Americanness that engaged the frontier thesis.[13] During an “age of doubt,” with domestic morale low after the September 1949 news that the USSR had exploded its first atomic bomb and the fall of China to the communists in October, a climate that fed the imminent crisis of McCarthyism, the attractions to the American book-reading public of fleeing to a new frontier were tangible.

As it proceeds, however, The Sheltering Sky exhibits a sense of the discontinuities of the world, the awkwardness of translating the foreign in American terms, and the inability of Algerians to experiment with national identity. The last highlights the contingency of national identity, which throws the American characters’ project into crisis. Bowles recognizes that the project of reordering one’s identity is authorized by a US passport, which, when Port loses his, removes more shelter than the novel’s existentialist framework might have led readers to expect. “‘It’s strange,’” Port reports to a French colonial administrator, “‘how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive. But it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this to have no proof of who you are’.” Port’s experience of the Algerian landscape previously viewed from dominating vistas is now made “senseless.” After falsely accusing an Algerian hotelier of the theft—a racialized assumption that the novel deconstructs in Poe-like fashion in a scene that elaborates and distinguishes French attitudes toward Algerians from American ones—Port loses the anchor that drove the first portion of the novel. He thereby discovers that the American project in the desert can only work while the travelers block out the Algerian population. Doing so would mean also to block out the visibility of the French colonials and the relationship of American projects (whether political or epistemological) to French ones. This becomes impossible. Port’s experiment in cultural comparison must now end in failure; his death is represented as a breakdown of meaning and language. It is in the shards of that shattered relationship to US national identity that the potentiality of the novel emerges.

Before looking more carefully at how the novel figures this breakdown, I want to recover the geopolitical context of Bowles’s writing to show how his departure from a “national” framework matters. Despite the later implication that he was eccentric in his travel, Bowles was in fact one of many Americans who returned to the Maghreb after the war. A few months before The Sheltering Sky was published, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article by Demaree Bess entitled “We’re Invading North Africa Again.” The reference was to US businessmen who, urged by Truman’s Point Four program (the so-called Marshall Plan for the Third World), were returning to the places that GIs had been during the war and doing their bit to stave off the spread of Soviet influence.[14] That there could be a second invasion emphasizes the cultural importance of the first one, the North African Campaign of November 1942-May 1943, the first major deployment of US ground forces during World War II, accompanied by a groundswell of attention by US journalists and Hollywood. If the North African campaign was successful in military terms—the “end of the beginning” as Churchill called it—it had different ramifications within the Maghreb itself. From the point of view of most postwar “invaders,” World War II represented the introduction of Americans and their products to the Maghrebi market and of the Maghrebi market to Americans. “Our GIs . . . demonstrated a new way of life to the local people,” wrote Edward Toledano in 1948. The title of his Harper’s essay, “Young Man, Go to Casablanca,” made reference to Horace Greeley’s injunction to “go west” in the previous century; it thus echoed Bowles’s association of the post-World War II Maghreb with the nineteenth-century American frontier. Toledano, however, embraced the metaphor: “By their relish for the small-big things of culture—Camel cigarettes, Hershey bars, Coca Cola—[the GIs] were unconscious but very effective salesmen for American products. Morocco didn’t realize it, but the Fuller brush man had been taken to the bosom of its family. Eventually it was bound to cherish and buy his line.”

Morocco was “bound,” indeed. Toledano’s understanding of the richness of the Maghreb is built on the erasure of the incomprehensible aspects, especially Arabic language, occluded as “noise” or gibberish.[15] The only illustration in Toledano’s article is a line of magnified Arabic, the visual presence of which starkly interrupts the column of text: “The hieroglyphics stare at you,” Toledano writes forebodingly, “from buses, stores, and even from the walls of Le Roi de la Bière [a café-bar].” But no sooner is this threatening mark of difference quoted than it is translated, à la Luce, into a market of difference: “It means Coca Cola in Arabic. An American who had formerly been in the diplomatic service obtained this franchise for Morocco.” The interruption of Arabic for Toledano, then, and of Arab difference for US corporations is no interruption at all but the decorative space of another market. This contrasts sharply with what Bowles will do with untranslated Arabic. For Bowles, the mark of difference opens the potentiality for a different relationship to the Maghreb—and, thereby, to Americanness itself.

Moroccans did note the arrival of American consumer culture, and some commented on it. The Moroccan folksinger Houcine Slaoui (1918-51) sang mordantly, “zin u l’ain az-zarqa jana bkul khir” (“the beautiful blue-eyed ones brought us all good things”). Slaoui’s song “Al Mirikan” (“The Americans”), written and first performed shortly after the 1942 landings, is an anthem of the era. With its references to “shwing” (i.e. chewing gum) and cosmetics polluting Morocco, the song stands as a rejoinder to Toledano’s account of the seamlessness of the entry of American products. In incorporating American language into its lyrics—“OK, OK, come on, bye-bye” is the refrain—Slaoui highlights the interruption of American words within the Moroccan cultural landscape. But he also remakes those American words into Moroccan ones by his pronunciation and by having them repeated by a high-pitched chorus of Berber women, familiar within music of the Middle Atlas. Despite his fame in the Maghreb, Slaoui and his challenging voice remain silent within most American accounts of the US presence in 1940s Maghreb.[16]

Bowles includes the lyrics to Slaoui’s song in Points in Time, his 1982 lyrical history of Morocco. Though he offers no comment, his suggestion is that US arrival marks a rupture in Moroccan history. Bowles’s invocation of Slaoui’s song suggests a refusal to follow a seamless American translation of the Maghreb.[17] A related suggestion emerges within The Sheltering Sky: that the encounter of Americans with the Maghreb is disruptive to US thinking about North Africa, an interruption to the reapplication of the frontier myth. This will be signaled by two Bowlesian tactics: his incorporation of untranslated Arabic to figure that disruption and produce it within the text; and the narrative turn toward Kit’s relationship with Belqassim, a nomadic Touareg. Because global and domestic politics were deeply intertwined in the early Cold War, the latter turn is complicated. Kit’s relationship with Belqassim might for the novel’s first readers evoke the threat of sexual congress between white women and African-Americans. Her embrace of Belqassim also permits the novel to explore the escape from national identification: the Touareg are antagonists of the nation form; they are identified with no nation-state and are in retreat from Moroccan and Algerian national culture. These possibilities suggest both a part of the reason for the novel’s success in the marketplace—its ability to be recast as lurid exoticism—and Bowles’s disruption of dominant Cold War understandings of North Africa and the North African. Understanding this disruption helps explain more than Bowles’s novel: it helps approach how literary and diplomatic representations of the foreign setting confront, build their cases off of, and, in Bowles’s case, evade or rewrite the same set of categories.

The period during which Paul Bowles was writing The Sheltering Sky and the immediate context of its publication (1947-50) was a key transitional moment in US relations with France. France, the largest recipient of Marshall Plan aid, was vital to US interests; and to Cold Warriors, it seemed fragile. There were domestic referents for this fragility—the continual fall of governments under the French constitution of 1946, which established the Fourth Republic—and international ones, particularly France’s increasingly tense relations with its colonies in Indochina and North Africa. In The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954, Irwin Wall argues that, in the early Cold War, the US was “drawn into a network of western institutions and alliances of the postwar era rather than, as is more commonly depicted, [establishing] its role as creator or innovator.” If we are to examine US Orientalism, whether in literary and cultural production or in political history, it follows then that we must do so comparatively and extend Wall’s thesis: that US thinking about North Africa was framed by French thinking about the Maghreb. This will not mean that domestic American concerns—particularly regarding race—would not play a powerful role in US foreign relations. But, as I argue in Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, when American writers, journalists, filmmakers, anthropologists, and diplomats looked at the Maghreb, they attended to European colonials as much as they did to putatively exotic Maghrebis; their attitudes about one group were impossible to separate fully from their observations about the other.[18] For the US State Department in the late 1940s, that dual attention was of strategic importance.

The same war that the characters of The Sheltering Sky are attempting to escape was being replayed by US business interests (the second “invasion”) and the State Department, haunted by strategic decisions made during World War II. Most important of those wartime decisions was the US decision to leave French colonial structures in place in the Maghreb—what historian William Langer justified in 1947 as “Our Vichy Gamble”—despite US propaganda circulated in Morocco and Algeria at the time of the November 1942 Operation Torch landings publicizing the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter (which declared US “respect [for] the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live”). In the context of that propaganda, conversations between Franklin Roosevelt and the Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Mohammed, in January 1943 were interpreted to promise US support for Moroccan independence.[19] Yet the US declined Sidi Mohammed’s offer to declare war on Germany and Italy, not willing to imply a commitment to the Sultan over Charles de Gaulle, with the announcement that European colonies would only be independent when their leaders could govern themselves properly, a formula familiar within late-colonial rhetoric and one that lurked at the heart of postwar US thinking.[20]

It was also a formulation familiar within domestic conversations about race, namely the invocation of what Michael Hanchard calls “racial time.” The cultural importance of the North African campaign during World War II, as it was relayed to the US home front via mainstream journalism and war films such as Casablanca, was, as I have argued elsewhere, to distract America attention away from an alliance of African-Americans and North Africans, both being colonized peoples (“Preposterous Encounters”). The US deferral of Maghrebi independence is thus a powerful example of racial time, which Hanchard argues has operated as a “structural effect upon the politics of racial difference” and is one of the ways that racial difference, the materiality of which is elusive, neither reified and static nor mere social construct, has material effects on individual and group interaction.[21] The connection between the US deferral of Maghrebi independence and racialist thinking in the domestic US is more than metaphor. Penny Von Eschen and Thomas Borstelmann have shown the deep interplay of foreign relations and domestic racial politics after World War II, which Borstelmann calls “central to the American experience of the early Cold War.” Borstelmann sees the escalation of such connections after the war as part of a global reconfiguration: “The swelling tide of racial tension and violence that rolled through the American South in 1946 and 1947 was part of a global phenomenon of race relations being reconfigured in the aftermath of the defeat of history’s most murderous racists, the Nazis.” In official American thinking about the Maghreb, then, there was an interplay of racialized thinking (the domestic referent in response to the global reconfiguration) with the tendency to see the region as the French framed it. Bowles’s writing, starting with The Sheltering Sky, reflected this interplay. It also refigured it.

From his arrival at Casablanca in Summer 1947, Bowles was writing his novel in a climate in which Maghrebi nationalist claims against the French were unmistakable; his letters make this clear. It was a tense period in the Maghreb, as several years of drought exacerbated complaints against French treatment.[22] The French had responded to an uprising at Setif, Algeria, in May 1945 by slaughtering thousands of Algerians, just as they had killed thousands of Tunisians who rose up to protest the deposing of Moncef Bey two years earlier. In April 1947, the French killed hundreds at Casablanca.[23] In February 1947, at the Conference of the Arab Maghreb in Cairo, Maghrebi participants—representatives of the Moroccan Istiqlal (Independence) movement, the Tunisian Destour party, and the Parti Populaire Algérienne—declared the protectorate treaties over Morocco and Tunisia terminated and stated their “non-recognition of the rights of France over Algeria,” demanding the evacuation from their territories of “foreign forces” (US Department of State, FRUS 1947). The conference was noted by the US. Though the US had given aid to Moroccans during the famine, it maintained a delicate line: urging French reforms but worrying about the allegiance of nationalists and French communists and a continued belief in political “evolution” of Maghrebi leaders and a gradual “time table” for independence. If there was a theoretical inclination toward an anticolonial position, US interests in France kept it in check. As journalist Demaree Bess wrote in 1949, “In theory, many Americans may still disapprove of the European colonial system. In practice, the US is reinforcing it.”

After Sidi Mohammed made an influential visit to Tangier in April 1947, a turning point in popularizing the independence movement, US Secretary of State George Marshall became anxious about France’s “short range conception” in its dealings with North Africa and expressed a sense of urgency regarding the implementation of reforms (US Department of State, FRUS 1947). But by mid-1949, despite no improvement and a harsher, more conservative French administration in Morocco, the State Department relaxed. As the Cold War deepened, the US listened increasingly to French proposals for dealing with the colonies’ demands for independence. The Marshall Plan aid to France had begun with food and raw materials in 1948; in 1949 and 1950, military assistance took center stage (the larger shift toward military buildup was codified in March 1950 with NSC-68; by 1953-54, the US would be bankrolling nearly the entire French war in Indochina). The 1950 US policy statement on North Africa bears close reading:

Our policy has been to encourage the French on all appropriate occasions to put forward a program of political, economic and social reforms which would lessen the resentment of the natives toward France and would assure their gradual evolution toward self-government. We believe, however . . . that France is the country best suited to have international responsibility for Morocco. We have therefore avoided putting pressure on France by giving aid and comfort to the natives directly, although we maintain open contact with them, and consider their friendship and good will very important. (US Department of State, FRUS 1950)

That dual tone—diplomatic civility and economic patronage for the French versus paternalism regarding the “gradual evolution” of the “natives” with whom “open contact” is maintained—crystallizes the contradictions of the US attitude toward French colonies. The tension inherent in such a position manifests itself in the last sentence, where “open contact” with the “natives” is kept in check by the refusal of direct “comfort,” a formula of desire and disgust.

Given this context, how do we reread The Sheltering Sky? Before pursuing Bowles’s dual disruption—his representation of Moroccan language and the narrative embrace of the Touareg—I offer a methodological warning. While literature representing the foreign and foreign relations may emerge out of the same historical context, the disparity between the institutional locations from which the novel and foreign relations operate maintains a gulf between them in terms of material effect. We are mistaken if we read literary production as somehow engaging political history on equal grounds—grounds made equal by the space of criticism—as has been a common temptation within American studies in the wake of Said’s work. Such a temptation, however well-intended, is based on a misreading of Said and a failure to attend to his emphasis on questions of institutions rather than on “discourse.”[24] Such arguments ultimately rely on the transparency of literature and its continuity within a land of “discourse” rather than on recognizing its divergence from political discourse. As Giles puts it trenchantly, such work “hold[s] in suspension those conditions whereby the progressivist formulas of American studies would—naturally, as it were—underwrite a rhetoric of emancipation.” Though invocations of the international are now common, my sense is that much Americanist work that references the international holds in suspension the disjuncture between cultural production and foreign relations, as it does that between US cultural production (as diverse as it is) and that emerging from other national, diasporic, and linguistic traditions. Institutional disincentives to multisited, multilingual work contribute to the methodological bind. My insistence on comparative work and the interruption of a Moroccan archive is meant to challenge those formulas.

As an alternative imagination of the relationship of literature to political history, Gayatri Spivak’s distinction between philosophy and literature is helpful: “the first concatenates arguments and the second figures the impossible.”[25] Such a distinction attends to the institutional locations within which the critic works and provokes her assertion of the unavoidability of the role of the native informant. Spivak’s statement provides the critical space to attend to Bowles’s departure from the national episteme as a figuration that matters to foreign relations. His interruption of the American national subject—one with whom he can barely identify and will drop—within a novel allegedly concerned with the pioneering of a new American identity is thus seen not as a irredeemable contradiction but rather as an impossible figuration. That such an interruption is provoked by Bowles’s acknowledgment of the “native informant” is crucial, as it is precisely that figure that allows Bowles’s disruption, his movement outside the logic of the American Century’s impulse to translate out or “foreclose” the native informant. “These people are not primitives,” Bowles’s protagonist realizes too late in the 1946 story “A Distant Episode.” How does this matter to foreign relations? If the novel departs from a national epistemology, it is the same on which the State Department necessarily rests, and the same that would be trumpeted hysterically in the months following its publication during the domestic Red Scare. That scare would not only reframe meanings of the foreign, both at home and abroad, but it would also anchor its hysteria on the idea of the reliable testimony of the (native) informant: that naming names could contain the spread of communism. The 1950 review quoted earlier—which suggested that Bowles return to the US to provide “native . . . reflections or refractions of everyday living”—demonstrates the interplay between literary representation of the foreign and the domestic crisis of McCarthyism, and its immediate relevance to Bowles’s case. Bowles’s emerging focus on the Maghrebi informant—concomitant with his exploration of various Americans’ departures—moves beyond the limiting frames of national identification.

Bowles’s discovery of this departure in a novel that is about the simultaneity of physical and philosophical travel—“CANNOT GET BACK” is Kit’s telegram to the world—does not, however, provide readers with a tangible politics to follow. The second impossible figuration in The Sheltering Sky is the dissociation or distancing of American reading subjects from the developing political relationship to the Arab world that deeply informed Bowles’s novel and was thickly woven into the political and economic fortunes of the US. This distancing emerges from the novel’s existentialist frame, within which the novel (influenced by Poe’s Dupin stories and Camus) suggests that what might be called the “truth of surfaces” offers a lesson about the proper relationship of individuals to existence (sheltered by a two-dimensional sky) and between individuals (who are granted recognition as masks). For Bowles, the “truth of surfaces” extends to the superficiality of language itself—the mannerisms of speech, the difference of foreign language as screen, as printed type—and will provide a figure for disrupting the national episteme. But the political effect of erecting this existentialist screen is in fact the inscription of distance between the (literary) representation of the foreign and foreign relations, and this unwittingly benefits the imperial state. Stepping back, then, Bowles may echo something like the process Giorgio Agamben has described by which the “state of exception” captures “bare life” within the political order while simultaneously excluding it (Homo Sacer). Indeed, most readers who followed Bowles to North Africa ended up following the “wrong” message. As early as 1951, Bowles lamented the arrival of young Americans who had come to Morocco to “explore” and for the hashish (“No More Djinns”); even those hippies who later evaded the US draft by traveling to Morocco more often took a kif-fueled “Marrakech express” than engaged the local population or political climate. Bowles himself had already moved decisively toward engagement with those Moroccans at the margins of national(ist) identification.[26] By attending to the geopolitical context of Bowles’s departure, I intend to make visible (and thereby bridge) the accompanying distance between realms of cultural production and foreign relations that is so beneficial to the state. That Bowles’s writing unwittingly helps to forge that distance is its limitation, but it still offers a potent figure for disrupting the processes that would discipline it.

The Sheltering Sky is especially open to what Agamben has identified as the work of art’s potentiality to be something other than what it is, “the prologue . . . of a work never penned.” The novel’s emphasis on movement at once connects it to a postwar sense of American mobility and permits an opening to the idea that American mobility has a limit. Though Agamben suggests that one is always not writing the work implied by the potentiality of the present work, stepping back from The Sheltering Sky permits us a sense that Bowles discovers, albeit ambivalently and in the margins, an interruption to the American project of reordering American national identity in the empty space of frontier. That interruption is figured in the text as the interruption of untranslated Arabic; as the impossible dialogue with the Maghrebi subject; and, in the future of Bowles’s work, as a collaboration with the Maghrebi.

Bowles frequently inserts untranslated Maghrebi Arabic in the novel, an inclusion that is, at first, disorienting. Since language is considered by Port and Kit to be a kind of two-dimensional screen, the inclusion of Arabic phrases and sentences might at first seem mere decoration. Within French texts set in North Africa, such phrases might adorn or provide local color and familiar foreignness, with a glossary to help.[27] But in The Sheltering Sky, there is no glossary, no French proximity; Arabic does not conform to the Americans’ screen. Port and Kit speak French, but when Algerian characters speak Arabic, the Americans are uncomfortable: “the language barrier annoyed him, and he was even more irritated by the fact that [they] could converse together in his presence.” When Algerian characters address the Americans in Arabic, the phrases are for the most part straightforward: “Ya sidi, la bess âlik? Eglès, baraka ’laou’fik’”, a prostitute says to Port (“‘Sir, are you well? Please sit down.’”). Because Bowles leaves the phrases untranslated, they become textual interruptions for the American reader. And since the phrases that Bowles includes are not necessary to advance the plot, they stand out all the more strongly as marks. The words he gives to Algerians stand for disruption.

This textual interruption challenges the reader—as the sound of it challenges Port—to acknowledge the limits in Henry Luce’s proposition of an American Century. The difference of Arabic is not erased or translated; rather, it is emphasized. This disruption is repeated in the startling narrative rupture of Port’s death, which leads to the important shift of focus to Kit and her sexual relationship with Belqassim. As he dies, Port’s project of pioneering a new relationship to national identity breaks down. The failure of language to protect Port from the nothingness behind language is imagined in spatial terms. If Port’s journey leads to a place of “exile from the world”, it is because words lose their stability for him. Thus, the name of the town where Port dies (Sbâ) becomes a kind of joke when language fails to function; without that anchor, “Sbâ” becomes an arbitrary word marking an equally arbitrary place. With Port’s death, Kit too loses her ability to designate her own relationship to the world and enters a long silence. Words cease to make sense to her: “Once she almost laughed, it seemed so ridiculously unlikely. ‘Sbâ,’ she said, prolonging the vowel so that it sounded like the bleat of a sheep.” If Kit greets the contingency of language with laughter, the “joy of being” she vows to hold on to once abandoning language’s shelter leads to her deterioration. When the “earth’s sharp edge” turns back to reveal a terrifying nothingness, which is what the sky apparently shelters us from, it is a warning that language will do the same. Language, like Port’s American passport, is a sheltering screen, protective because disciplined. The ridiculousness of words, of place names, of markers opens up a potentiality within the work, that which it might have been. Kit’s embrace of Belqassim, and the narrative’s embrace of their relationship, in the context of the intertwined domestic and global referents of the Cold War, is an important turn. It allows Bowles to restage radically the American global encounter in terms that more fully disrupt Luce’s model than other contemporary novels. That sexual relationship could of course be read in 1949 or 1950 in a domestic context, within which it disturbed a racist culture and also titillated it. But the novel refuses simply to offer American miscegenation as its meaning and insists on an extranational referent. The potentiality embedded in these dual disruptions is Bowles’s greatest contribution to thinking about the 1946-50 moment, a potentiality rapidly left behind by the Cold War and its modes of thinking—but one that we may now recover.

3. Letters from Morocco: The Refusal

[O]ne is what one is . . . that is, until one changes.

—Bowles, In Touch

The difference of untranslated Arabic that in 1949 might challenge the transparency of Luce’s American Century could in later political and economic contexts signify the difference that American-based global capital seeks to incorporate. And the potentiality that emerges from these disruptive moments will eventually lead Bowles to a refusal to continue in the mode of his first novel. Such will lead to intense collaboration with the Maghrebi.

Bowles’s subsequent two novels, Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House, open themselves up further to Maghrebi voices and subjectivities, against which is juxtaposed the various restrictions of American national identity. Bowles’s journalism too makes a decisive turn toward listening to Maghrebi voices, both in his travel pieces and his political essays. If some of the latter resemble more literate versions of reports by foreign service officers in the field—in a 1951 article for the American Mercury, Bowles discusses the inhospitality of the idea of communism to Muslims and suggests the vulnerability of educated Moroccan elite to propaganda—their turn toward conversations with the Maghrebi coincides with a refusal to maintain the positive frame that underlies such analysis. “I’m heading south,” Bowles ends his Mercury article (“No More Djinns”). The essay suggests not only that “Morocco” is impossible to judge because of the inherent unreliability of testimony but that Cold War binarisms themselves are impossible to maintain once one moves from the abstraction of the general to an engagement with the particular.

Increased conversation with the Maghrebi leads Bowles, in the postcolonial period, to a new textual politics and to projects that most firmly challenge the categories of national literature. Bowles’s extended project of gathering and translating the tales of illiterate Moroccan authors is still underappreciated. This project, as Allen Hibbard has argued in Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction, affected Bowles’s late prose style, itself an important interruption to Eurocentric ideas about literary influence. Further, the very project disfigures the disciplinary frames by which the US academy has taught us to apprehend “American literature.” With one Moroccan in particular, Mohammed Mrabet, Bowles engaged in an extended project. The analphabetic Mrabet dictated to Bowles, in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, stories, novels, and an autobiography; together, they published 12 books, with both names on the title page, and published first in English. There is no “original” Arabic edition available or even possible without a further translation of the unwritten Moroccan dialect into standard Arabic. This collaboration has been controversial in Morocco, where it challenged the nationalists’ ideas about standard Arabic, as well as those Francophone Maghrebi writers who critiqued the nationalists—the Francophone author Tahar Ben Jelloun called it “a bastard literature.” But it has barely registered in the US, where it has seemed a marginal project that does not conform to our categories of American, African, or Arab literatures.[28] Yet if we listen to those Moroccan critics who propose Bowles as the leader of al-adab at-Tanji, many of the categories within which Bowles is generally considered are best left behind.

After 9/11, the definitive end of the American Century, there is a critical necessity to reflect back on the potentialities suppressed by Cold War reading practices. Because The Sheltering Sky represents the encounter of Americans with the foreign during a transitional moment in cultural and political history, the novel is especially open to misreadings that mistake its representation of the Maghreb as mere exoticism, as a translation of the foreign for the domestic market. That exoticism is surely present. But as I have argued, the novel sits uneasily in such a frame and discovers a challenging relationship to the borderless North African Berber, figured as linguistic disruption. In summoning up misreadings of Bowles’s work, I am attempting to read through them and the conditions that produce them. If a less rigid sense of the nation and of national literature results, it is surely not my suggestion that such formulations should be abandoned or that they have no meaning. Neither is it my contention that Cold War binarisms have not left a strong residue in post-9/11 US foreign relations; the fact that they so obviously have means that the work to locate other paradigms for imagining the place of America(ns) in the world is urgent. At the same time as The Sheltering Sky quietly challenged the logic of the American Century, however, it also figured the engagement of individuals across national borders in a way that underlined—even exacerbated—the disjuncture between the space of cultural production and the realm of foreign relations, a separation familiar and frustrating to us today. My modest hope for this reading, then, is that it may help recuperate and trace the routes of influence of global politics on American and other literatures, as well as the routes of influence of American cultural production on global politics. My more ambitious hope is that we may make progress on the bridge from cultural production—including critique—to that otherwise untouchable space of foreign relations.

Notes

[1] See John Sutherland, “Distant Episodes” and Francine Prose, “The Coldest Eye.”

[2] More accurately, in the 1950s, Bowles lamented the encounter of Arab nationalism with Western modernity and consumer culture.

[3] A brilliant exception is Millicent Dillon’s You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles.

[4] Mullins’s recent study of gay male writers in Tangier is strong on questions of desire and marginality in Bowles’s literary work. But it also exemplifies how the tendency to see Bowles’s career as dissociated from geopolitical concerns is reinforced by the lack of a broader archive of Moroccan materials that would allow critics without the language training or opportunity to research in the Maghreb to challenge it. Mullins argues: “American expatriate writers inhabit the legacy of American and Moroccan political history” (14). But for Mullins, the assertion that Bowles was “firmly grounded within modernism” (25) means that his work was detached from the world and geography (a position about Modernism that Mullins curiously attributes to Edward Said). This conclusion authorizes Mullins to make only loose references to political history. Francine Prose’s introduction to the 2003 Ecco edition of The Spider’s House calls the novel a “textbook” of anti-American attitudes. The metaphor not only signals her fundamental misreading of the novel but also suggests the pedagogical failure of previous Bowles scholarship to offer an alternative to her view.

[5] This period is the intersection of the early Cold War and the postcolonial. After 1973, there is an epistemic shift—caused in large part by the increased globalization of the economy; the acceleration of global movement of peoples, finances, and technology; and the Vietnam War—that alters the conditions for American representations of the “foreign.” See chapter six of my Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express.

[6] During Bowles’s time in Tangier, the population of the city grew from 50,000 to nearly one million. The primary source of this population explosion was the migration of rural Moroccans to the cities, not tourism.

[7] Melani McAlister has argued that US discourse relating to the Middle East since 1945 is marked by “post-Orientalism,” wherein “American power worked very hard to fracture the old European logic and to install new frameworks” (Epic Encounters 11). There is much to recommend in McAlister’s book. However, she defines Said’s concept of Orientalism rather starkly as “binary, feminizing, and citational” (Epic Encounters 12). She thereby misses the crucial element of Said’s definition that would challenge her own claim, namely the “corporate” aspect of Orientalism and its relationship to “institutions” (such as the media central to her project).

[8] In the Rough Guide to Morocco (4th ed., 1993), by Mark Ellingham etal., Bowles is included both in the “Contexts” section for his writing and translations and in the Tangier chapter as a living site.

[9] The emergence of Arab television station al-Jazeera as a counter to CNN offers a potent example. See Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskander, Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East.

[10] In his preface to a 1982 reprint of the novel, Bowles commented on al-Fassi’s response. Moroccan obituaries also refer to al-Fassi’s appreciation; Muhammad Abu Talib disputes it.

[11] See Salah Sbyea, “L’Amant de Tanger” and Mohamed El Gahs, “Pain Nu.”

[12] Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film adaptation, while receiving mixed reviews and modest box-office success, occasioned enough attention to bring yet another generation of readers to the novel. Bertolucci’s misreading of the novel has itself been influential. His failure to render the novel’s deep concern with French colonialism, his decision to film the novel as an epic, and the nostalgic tone of the film for imperialism are significant errors of interpretation.

[13] Simultaneously, Henry Nash Smith was writing Virgin Land (1950), which critiqued Turner’s thesis but maintained its basic premise: that American national identity was formed in relation to (myths of) open spaces. Smith’s analysis of the expansion of the US empire in the nineteenth century emerges in the context of post-World War II US global expansion, but it does not address that coincidence. We should extend Alan Trachtenberg’s well-known critique of this foundational text of American studies: not only did Smith separate myth and symbol too starkly from industrialization; he also failed to account for how his account and its institutional location were coincident with and indebted to post-World War II global expansion. The stakes of this failure are woven into the Americanist enterprise of the postwar period.

[14] For a contemporary Arab critique of Point Four, see George Hakim, “Point Four and the Middle East: A Middle East View.” In a later essay, Mustafa El Azzou investigates efforts by US businessmen to influence policy toward Morocco before independence. See El Azzou, “Les hommes d’affaires américains au Maroc avant 1956.”

[15] In chapter one of Morocco Bound, I discuss US journalists, such as Ernie Pyle and A. J. Liebling, who covered the 1942-43 North African campaign. Pyle described Arabic as “noise” or “garble.”

[16] Memissi mentions the song in her account of the US occupation of Morocco during World War II in Dreams of Trespass. Jamila Bargach has recently offered an extended critical reading of the song and includes a transliteration of the lyrics and a literal translation. Recordings of Slaoui’s song are easy to find in Morocco.

[17] Bowles uses his own translation of the lyrics. He does not attribute the song to Slaoui but calls it “a popular song in Moghrebi Arabic of the 1950s” (Points in Time 92).

[18] See my essay “The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems,” on Edith Wharton’s intertwined thinking about France, Morocco and the US.

[19] See Hassan II, La mémoire d’un roi: Entretiens avec Eric Laurent (18); US Office of Strategie Services, Morocco; and William Hoisington, Jr., The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936-1943 (284fn73). In 1948, the State Department noted the legacy of FDR’s comments in North Africa; see US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States 1948 (3:684).

[20] See US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1943 (4:741) and Pennell (263-64).

[21] See my discussion of time lag in US representations of Morocco during World War II in “Preposterous Encounters.”

[22] Algeria had drought and dismal crops in 1945 and 1947; in Morocco, 1945 was known as “the year of hunger” (Pennell 268); Tunisia was threatened by famine in 1947. See Vernon McKay, “France’s Future in North Africa” (299).

[23] See Vernon McKay, “France’s Future in North Africa” (300); Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (11); US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1947 (5:682fn).

[24] McAlister emphasizes the “knitted-together power of a discourse” (Epic 276) and the “continuous relationship” between the cultural field and “other fields in the larger social system” (7): “Foreign policy is one of the ways in which nations speak for themselves” (6). In “putting Orientalism in its place” (12), McAlister’s “postOrientalist” approach (11) mistakenly collapses the institutional space between cultural production and foreign policy. Elsewhere, she dispenses with Said’s own account of US Orientalism, which attends to this space, as “the least nuanced and interesting of [Orientalism]” (“Edward Said” 553). For her, this is because it is “focused primarily on policymakers’ statements or the work of area studies scholars” and is “essentially an ideological critique of US foreign policy” (553). Unlike McAlister, Douglas Little accepts the Saidian framework in his political history: “something very like Said’s Orientalism seems subconsciously to have shaped US popular attitudes and foreign policies toward the Middle East” (10). Yet there is no discussion of the way “culture” works to shape attitudes; for Little, the process remains “subconscious” or via “subliminal messages.” For an account of misreadings of Said and an argument about Said’s greater interest in institutions over discourse, see Timothy Brennan, “The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory.”

[25] Spivak admits that this is “an old-fashioned binary opposition” (112).

[26] See Bowles, “Fez,” “Sad for U.S., Sad for Algeria,” and “No More Djinns.”

[27] See Emily Apter, “‘Untranslatable’ Algeria.”

[28] Criticism on the collaboration includes Mary Martin Rountree, “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi”; Ibrahim Dawood, “Mohammed Mrabet’s Fiction of Alienation” and “Mohammed Mrabet and the Significance of His Work”; Richard F. Patteson, “Paul Bowles/Mohammed Mrabet: Translation, Transformation, and Transcultural Discourse”; John Maier, Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West; and Greg Mullins, Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. See also chapter five of my Morocco Bound.

Bibliography

Abu Talib, Muhammad. “Balagha Buwlz az-zuba au A ras l’ Bowles [Enough with Bowles].” Al-Alam ath-Thaqafi [Rabat] 25 Jan. 1997: 6.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

——Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. London: Verso, 1993.

Apter, Emily. “‘Untranslatable’ Algeria.” Parallax 4 (1998): 54-55.

El Azzou, Mustafa. “Les hommes d’affaires américains au Maroc avant 1956.” Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains 46 (1995): 131-43.

Bargach, Jamila. “Liberatory, Nationalising and Moralising by Ellipsis: Reading and Listening to Lhussein Slaoui’s Song ‘Lmirikan.’” Journal of North African Studies 4 (1999): 61-88.

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. “Une technique de viol.” Le monde 9 June 1972: 21.

Bernstein, Adam. “Expatriate Author Paul Bowles Dies at 88; Wrote ‘Sheltering Sky.’” Washington Post 19 Nov. 1999, final ed.: B7.

Bess, Demaree. “We’re Invading North Africa Again.” Saturday Evening Post 18 June 1949: 23-h

Bin Bushta, Zubir. “Baul Buwlz: nihaya ustura [Paul Bowles: End of a Myth].” Al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki [Casablanca] 22 Nov. 1999: 1.

——“Baúl Buwlz: rahil ra’id «al-adab at-Tanji» [Paul Bowles: Departure of the Leader of ‘Tangerian Literature’].” al-Mithaq al-Watani [Casablanca] 21-22 Nov. 1999: 8.

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Bowles, Paul. “Bowles et Choukri: Le Temps de la Polémique.” Les Nouvelles du Nord [Tangier] 28 Feb. 1997: 6-7.

——“A Distant Episode.” The Delicate Prey and Other Stories. New York: Ecco, 1972. 290-307.

——“Fez.” Holiday 8 (1950): 12-22.

——In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. Ed. Jeffrey Miller. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

——Let It Come Down. New York: Random House, 1952.

——“No More Djinns.” American Mercury 72 (June 1951): 650-58.

——Personal interviews. 9-10 July 1994. 8-13 Feb. 1996. 4-5 June 1999.

——Points in Time. London: Peter Owen, 1982.

——“Sad for U.S., Sad for Algeria.” Nation 24 May 1958: 475-77.

——The Sheltering Sky. 1949. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

——The Spider’s House. New York: Random House, 1955.

Brennan, Timothy. “The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 529-57.

Choukri, Mohamed. Paul Bowles wa’uzla Tanja [Bowles and the solitude of Tangier]. Tangier: Altopress, 1996.

Churchill, Winston. “The End of the Beginning.” Mansion House. London.

Dawood, Ibrahim. “Mohammed Mrabet and the Significance of His Work.” International Fiction Review 16 (1989)

——“Mohammed Mrabet’s Fiction of Alienation.” World Literature Toda.

“Décès de l’écrivain américain Paul Bowles.” Maghreb Arabe Press 19 Nov. 1999.

Dillon, Millicent. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Forthcoming.

——“Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century.” Comparative (Post)Colonialisms. Spec. issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23 (2003): 70-86.

——“The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems.” The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. Ed. Candace Waid. New York: Norton, 2003. 482-506.

Ellingham, Mark, et. al. Rough Guide to Morocco. 4th ed. London: Rough Guides, 1993.

El Gahs, Mohamed. “Pain Nu.” Libération [Casablanca] 19 Nov. 1999: 1.

Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

Gussow, Mel. “Paul Bowles, Elusive 10 Nov. 1942. Composer and Author Known for ‘Sheltering Sky,’ Dies at 88.” New York Times 19 Nov. 1999: C20.

Hakim, George. “Point Four and the 119-22. Middle East: A Middle East View.” Middle East Journal 4 (1950): 183-95.

Hanchard, Michael. “Afro-Modernity: 64 (1990): 264-67. Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora.” Public Culture 11 (1999): 245-68.

Hassan II La mémoire d’un roi: Entretiens avec Eric Laurent. Paris: Plon, 1993.

Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1993.

Hoisington, William, Jr., The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936-1943. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Huzal, Abdarrahim. Introduction. “Al-Katib baina maghrebain! [The Writer between Two Moroccos!]” By Antoine Poysh. Al-’alam ath-Thaqafi [Rabat] 27 Nov. 1999: 6.

Jackson, Charles. “On the Seamier Side.” New York Times Book Review 3 Dec. 1950: 6.

Langer, William L. Our Vichy Gamble. New York: Knopf, 1947.

Laroui, Abdallah. L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine. Paris: François Maspero, 1967.

Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

Luce, Henry. The American Century. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.

Maier, John. Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

McAlister, Melani. “Edward Said, Orientalism (1978).” A Companion to post-1945 America. Ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 550-56.

——Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

McKay, Vernon. “France’s Future in North Africa.” Middle East Journal 2 (1948): 293-305.

Memissi. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002

el-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Adel Iskander. Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002.

Patteson, Richard F. “Paul Bowles/Mohammed Mrabet: Translation, Transformation, and Transcultural Discourse.” Journal of Narrative Technique 22 (1992): 189-90.

Pennell, C. R. Morocco since 1830: A History. New York: New York UP.

Prose, Francine. “The Coldest Eye: Acting Badly among the Arabs.” Harper’s Mar. 2002: 60-65.

——“Introduction.” The Spider’s House. By Paul Bowles. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Rountree, Mary Martin. “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi.” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (1986): 388-401.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.

as-Saidi, Tariq. “Baul Buwlz: thuqub mali’ah bal-hayat [Paul Bowles: Holes Full of Life].” al-Ahdath al-Maghribiya [Casablanca] 24 Nov. 1999: 12.

Sbyea, Salah. “L’Amant de Tanger.” Libération [Casablanca] 19 Nov. 1999: 1.

The Sheltering Sky. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. Perf. John Malkovich, Debra Winger. Warner Bros., 1990.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Random House, 1950.

Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

Sutherland, John. “Distant Episodes.” New York Times Book Review 21 Oct. 2001:9.

Toledano, Edward. “Young Man, Go to Casablanca.” Harper’s Sept. 1948: 109-14.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “Myth, History, and Literature in Virgin Land,” Prospects 3 (1977): 125-133.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1899.

US Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States 1943-1950. 8 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964-78.

US Office of Strategic Services. Morocco. Washington, DC: Research and Analysis Branch, 1942.

Von Eschen, Penny. Race Against Empire: Black America and the AntiColonials, 1937-1957. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.

Wall, Irwin M. France, the United States, and the Algerian War. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

——The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Africa Minor [1959]

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Appendices