The Journal
of Middle Eastern and North African Volume 3, Issue 1 Special Issue |
|
The "Writing Tangier" Conference The city of Tangier in Morocco has long been a crossroads of civilizations,
a point of intersection for various encounters, and a site coveted by
different powers, Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Spaniard, Portuguese, English.
A few kilometers farther west of Tangier is Cape Spartel and the Caves
of Hercules, where the legendary hero struggled with Anteaus, and history
and legend blend to give the city its mythical dimensions. Its geographical
location in proximity to Europe has largely affected its fascinating
history, opening it to the outside world and contributing to its liberal
spirit. |
 |
| blew up Yorke Castle in the Kasbah along with other forts before their
departure. The old medina is still a rich archaeological site that has
been permanently occupied and even overpopulated. After the departure
of the British, Dar el-Makhzen palace was built upon the ruins of Yorke
Castle, and now houses the museum of Moroccan Art and Antiquities. Even
the Grand Mosque of the medina is built upon the ruins of one of the oldest
temples in the continent. In 1912, the French established a Protectorate in Morocco while ceding the north and the southern Sahara to Spanish power. In 1923, Tangier became an international zone that was politically neutral and with an open economy. The new statute formalized international control over the 140 square miles that represented the city and its surroundings. For almost fifty years, Tangier became a notorious dream city and the gathering place of a number of important Western artists, writers, and politicians who fell captive to its magical spell. These included Henri Matisse, Walter Harris, Jean Genet, and Paul and Jane Bowles. During the late fifties and sixties, the Beat Generation and their friends and associates trod the well-worn path to the underground life that marked the international city. Writers such as Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Gregory Corso, Ira Cohen, Irving Rosenthal, Gore Vidal, and Alfred Chester all passed through and left their mark on the city’s collective memory. Twentieth-century Tangier proved fascinating to a number of writers of all nationalities for various reasons. For the Algerian Rachid Mimouni, it was a place of “exile, beauty and remembrance of exile”; for the Frenchman Jean Genet, the city was “capital of treason” and a place of “subtle, skilled harmony”; for the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, Tangier was “a riddle” with a “changing capricious sky.” Most crucially, for the Moroccan Mohamed Choukri, a long-time resident and perhaps the greatest chronicler of the city’s underworld, Tangier was simply “the most extraordinary and mysterious city in the world.” Paul Bowles, the most well-known literary resident of the city, wrote that “Tangier is the dream-city . . . it’s out of the mainstream. It’s a backwater. It has changed less than most places, or is changing more slowly.” According to John Hopkins, there is a mysterious balance that informed Bowles’ choice to live and die in Tangier, a balance between the timeless civilization of the Mediterranean and the timeless nothingness of the Sahara. The first aim of the international conference “Writing Tangier” was to investigate Tangier as a signifier in the literary imagination and to ask how and why it has come to play such a central role in world literary history. In particular, the conference aimed to assess the output of the circle of Paul Bowles’ storytellers, such as Mohammed Mrabet and Larbi Layachi, as a production that cannot be read without continual awareness of a double authorial presence that includes Bowles. The organizers were also especially keen to pay homage to Mohamed Choukri who, unlike the other storytellers, was literate and brought a script to Bowles. The output of such collaborations enhances a virtual web of inter-textuality, a topic that to date has received no serious and sustained consideration. The second aim was to address the recent history and contemporary reality of Tangier and, with papers and interventions from academics, artists, and writers currently based in the city or writing about it, to consider its cultural production in relation to the hybrid aspects of its identity. The purpose was to further examine the city from the ‘inside-out’ and the ‘outside-in.’ In this way, it was hoped that many of the current perspectives of postcolonial thought would be reversed and challenged. Tangier itself was the venue for the international conference. This is a city that has always had to confront distinct and complex issues as an integral part in shaping its own history and identity: as an Arab city, a Muslim city, and for Europeans and Americans, a site of exile. To what extent, it will be asked, can these representations and identities be reconciled in writing, music, art, politics, or philosophy? More precisely, what role can the city and its citizens, writers, artists, and musicians play in the twenty-first century, when borders and frontiers are constantly being redrawn? Khalid Amine, Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi, Tétouan |
 |
 |
Middle East & North African Studies Program, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902–6000
T: (607) 777-6709 F: (607) 777-6406