Avuncular American

Newsletter: A New Way To Read TALIM Director's Blog

Most of our readers either "bookmark" or mark as a "favorite" TALIM Director's Blog (http://www.talimblog.org).  That still works like a charm, and thanks to the wonders of Google and other search engines, people continue to serendipitously stumble across our site.

Now, thanks to TALIM Board member and tech whiz Dr. Michael Toler, readers can also subscribe to our "Newsletter," which is then delivered straight to your email inbox.  The service is provided by Feed Blitz.

We have tried to include all TALIM Board members and Fellows in this initial distribution, but if you are not currently subscribed to the Director’s Newsletter, you may do so using simply by clicking here (http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=789682).

The Newsletter will list the ten latest posts on TALIM Director's Blog, and readers can click on whatever "post" or article strikes their interest.  In fact ten posts will just about cover the month of October.  Check out posts from September and August too.

Whatever way you get to TALIM Director's Blog, we hope you enjoy reading about this unique institution and our activities.  And we welcome your comments, as easy as clicking on the "comments" link at the bottom of every post.

Gerald Loftus

Impromptu Art School: Legation Courtyard

Just an ordinary Friday afternoon, an hour or so before closing.  What is this - a takeover?  More than a dozen French people, with sketch pads and watercolors, descend on our courtyard.

It's Franck Hommage (seated on chair, far right) and his friends.

This artist from eastern France (he works largely in Nancy) was enticed to travel to Tangier by some of his fans, and led a group of budding painters, some of whose work is displayed here.

The idea is to make commando style flying visits to picturesque locations.  Tangier has many, and its connection with artists over the years continues to inspire visitors looking for traces of the greats.

We welcome "cultural tourists" like Franck Hommage and his friends, who take the time not only to visit the Legation, but to linger long enough to imbibe of the charm of the place.  Its long history, the stories that happened here over the centuries.

Visit the Legation with Franck Hommage, and you'll come away with a self-made souvenir!

Gerald Loftus

When Tangier Was Casablanca: Rick's Café & Dean's Bar

 

Don't worry if you can't make out the cartoon captions.  They're in Spanish anyway.  Last night the Tangier Instituto Cervantes opened "Casablanca," an exhibit of sometimes whimsical pop art inspired by the film.

The point of this post is not creative cartoonists, but the parallels between the Casablanca depicted in the film (celebrating its "70th Anniversary") and the Tangier of the same World War II era.  And the resemblance is striking.

As owner Kathy Kriger of the exquisite "Rick's Café" in Casablanca is the first to admit, the film was shot in a Hollywood studio, and her "mythical" restaurant was recreated out of an old mansion located between Casa's seafront and medina.  Some of her customers are disappointed at hearing this, so real has the story become, thanks to the genius of Michael Curtiz, Humphrey Bogart, and Ingrid Bergman.

But the "real Casablanca" was perhaps in Tangier.  Think of it: Tangier International Zone, though occupied by Franco's Spain since 1940, continued to be a crucial transit point for the refugees streaming in from Nazi-occupied Europe.  Of course, there wouldn't have been the perfectly-cast Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault; Vichy's Morocco was beyond Tangier, beyond the Spanish Protectorate.

What there was in Tangier was "Dean.s Bar 1937," as the plaque still says.  Francis Poole, of the University of Delaware, has written a nice little book on the man and the bar: "Everybody Comes To Dean's."

While Spain administered the affairs of Tangier, the city was swarming with spies and informers from both sides of the conflict... Dean, like the saloon owner Rick in Casablanca, seemingly had no politics... [though] it was rumored that Dean worked for British Intelligence.

Later, Poole quotes Robin Maugham's North African Notebook:

... a focal point for the highly coloured collection of the fake and the genuine, the cruel and the kind, which forms the international society of Tangier... at Dean's Bar gather the bogus barons and furtive bankers, the tipsy journalists and sober Jewish businessmen, the young diplomats and glamorous spies, the slender French and Moroccan girls, the English self-styled colonels and their friends, the foreign agents...

Sounds an awful lot like Rick's of Casablanca, no?

None of this is to detract from what is one of the best films of all time, a concise 102 minutes of suspense, humor, love, and pretty good history.  Only when it was released, it wasn't history - it was current events.

When Casablanca was first shown on Thanksgiving Day 1942, the Operation Torch landings in Casablanca and elsewhere had just happened.  America's first foray into the European Theatre of WW II was weeks old, and yesterday's Vichy French and American opponents, like Captain Renault and Rick Blaine, now had to begin that "beautiful friendship."

Though Warner Home Video has chosen 2011 and not 2012 for their 70th Anniversary release of Casablanca, next year will mark the 70th anniversary of Operation Torch.  And in Tangier, we not only have Dean's Bar to help us evoke that era, but at the American Legation, TALIM's museum will feature a recreation of a 1942-era Legation office, when American diplomats helped save Jewish lives.

As Kathy Kriger says of Rick's Café, the legend continues...

Gerald Loftus

Tetouan: Morocco's Mecca For Historic Preservation

All the Morocco guide books mention it: Tetouan's Ecole des Arts et Métiers (EAO in the Spanish that is still very prevalent in Tetuán: Escuela de artes y oficios).

Weekenders should abstain: you can only visit the Artisanal School Monday through Thursday.  But it's worth rearranging your itinerary.  Tetouan is the first (established 1919 under the Spanish Protectorate, and headed in its heyday by the Granadan artist Mariano Bertuchi) and remains Morocco's only school dedicated to teaching young people the traditional arts of woodworking, zellige, sculpted plaster, etc.

Whatever the medium (painted wooden ceilings, leather, copper and brass), the students start out with meticulous geometric drawings on paper.  This discipline inculcates in the young teens the patterns recurrent throughout Islamic art.

Overseeing each workshop is the maalim, the teacher, or more accurately in this context, the skilled craftsman.  Some are themselves graduates of the school, and dedicate their lives to passing on what are increasingly rare talents.  Sadly, some of the workshops are silent, for lack of a maalim.   Other maalim have retired, but have returned to the school to help out.  These men (and women; the embroidery workshop is exclusively feminine) are national treasures.

Recently the school has welcomed a new initiative, Morocco's "Chantiers écoles," where students are given hands-on training both at the school and at historic preservation worksites.  The concept is popular in the Hispanic world (escuela taller), and has recently been introduced to Morocco.

So, what's in this for us?  Potentially, lots:

• As an American but also Moroccan site of historic interest, we need all the preservation help we can get.
• The Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation is always on the lookout for worthy beneficiaries.  The Tetouan school and the Moroccan association of chantiers écoles could not only be beneficiaries, but actors in yet other preservation efforts.
• In cooperation with the Fondation Tanger al-Madina (FTAM), TALIM has encouraged the restoration of Tangier's Borj al-Hajoui, until recently a derelict Portuguese fortress, now renovated to house cultural associations.  We are looking at involving our new friends from Tetouan in extending the restoration work.

This little field trip to one of Morocco's premier educational institutions - not a university, but turning out graduates who will help safeguard the country's precious cultural heritage - was the epitome of combining work and pleasure.  The halls of academia ring with the sounds of hammers, anvils, trowels, and knitting needles, but the overall impact is one of serenity.  One of northern Morocco's prime tourist attractions for me, and future visitors coming to see us.

  Gerald Loftus

Medina Diplomats: December 7, 1797 - October 16, 1961

"On October 9, the new office building of the Consulate General was completed, and on October 16 the move from the old buildings was completed."

The laconic entry of the anonymous diplomat or consular clerk, writing in his or her best "Palmer Method" penmanship, belies its historic importance.  What is being described above, from one of our research library's precious "Miscellaneous Record Books," is the end of close to two centuries of American diplomatic and consular presence in the medina of Tangier.

That was exactly fifty years ago today.

We rerun the tape to December 7, 1797, when the first American Consul, James Simpson, arrives in Tangier to establish the first American Consulate in the Arab world, in a Muslim country, and on the continent of Africa.  A trilogy of firsts.

Others precede Simpson on the State Department's list of Tangier Principal Officers - Thomas Barclay, the "Emissary to Barbary" who in 1786 traveled to Morocco to negotiate America's first treaty with an Arab, African, or Muslim head of state, was the first named as Consul, but he died en route to post.  So the honors must go to Simpson, who managed to arrive here, stayed for more than twenty years in sometimes rudimentary conditions, and died at post.

Simpson died the year before Sultan Moulay Slimane gave the current Legation property to the United States in 1821. Tangier was to remain the only overseas diplomatic property owned by the United States through most of the 19th century.

I'm not sure when the State Department started the practice of its consuls, consuls general, diplomatic agents, ministers, and ambassadors keeping a running log of everything they and their staff did in Miscellaneous Record Books, but when I served in the Foreign Service, starting in 1979, I believe the practice had already ended.

Embassies had already become sprawling domains of many different US Government agencies, and gone were the quaint days when the marriage of US citizens by the Consul General merited mention in the handwritten record book.  And now, things are so universally electronic that the closest thing would be the ephemeral email inbox.  Not quite as romantic as the leather-bound books of the American Consular Service.

So what happened after October 16, 1961?  The US Consulate General in Tangier moved to its new quarters in modern Tangier, into a building that featured glass and concrete, the antithesis of the Old Legation, as our building is sometimes still called.

Some day, we'll revisit the story of that new building, which lasted a quarter of a century.  But that's another story.  Today, we think back fifty years, when America's oldest diplomatic building saw its last consuls and ministers, and started on a journey that we continue today.

Gerald Loftus

Ceuta: Spain's Toehold On the Strait of Gibraltar

A shopping expedition to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta does not provide the material for sophisticated socio-political analysis, so this little report will be mostly impressionistic.

Maybe it's because we live inside the walled medina of Tangier, but we found Ceuta's 7 square miles surprisingly expansive.  Partly that's because of the fantastic coastal road that loops around the peninsular end of the territory, with its Mediterranean views on one side and its view across the Strait of Gibraltar on the other.

Then there's the ride along a hilly, forested coast to the west of the city, with a dead end at the village of Benzu, where the barrier fence starts, separating Ceuta from Morocco and creating a no man's land in the hope of keeping out waves of potential immigrants into the European Union.

We probably heard as much Arabic as Spanish as we joined the evening paseo on pedestrian streets, and certainly were among lots of fellow Moroccans at the supermarket the next day.  After all, Ceuta is the shopping destination par excellence of all those contraband traders, whose "mules" carry their wares back into Morocco for eventual sale in the souks of Tangier and beyond.

They may no longer have "souls of patent leather," as García Lorca wrote, but the Guardia Civil is still ubiquitous in Ceuta, barracks adorned with their motto"Todo por la patria" ("all for the fatherland"), still chillingly reminiscent of Franco's days.  There's also a museum of the Spanish Legion, perhaps less well known than its French counterpart, but with a similar elite status.

In fact, given the number of joggers along the coastal paths, it looks like the population of Ceuta is heavily tilted towards the various security services.  Again, it's an enclave, surrounded by Morocco, which deems it a foreign intrusion on African soil.  Those 7 square miles mean a lot of linear miles of coastline and border to patrol.

As we woke up to a fog-shrouded city, the bells of St. Mary's Cathedral replaced our usual muezzins (though the cathedral's foundations are built on the ruins of a mosque).  And that's the Ceuta effect: in but not of North Africa, peopled by happy Arabic-speaking shoppers, fit Spanish security joggers, and appliance merchants whose ancestors used to man the battlements on the lookout for Moors - anachronistic, disconcerting, but a pleasant enough place to shop for all the whiskey and jamón you can spirit back across the Moroccan border.

In the best trabendo tradition.

Gerald Loftus

Museum-Quality Extinguishers: Fire Prevention Week

L to R: Tony Spears, Mhamed Ismaili, Tommy Johnson

Earlier this year I joked that the Legation fire plan consisted of praying to St. Florian, patron saint of fire fighters.  In the ensuing year, we have made a little progress towards our goal of surviving a fire, and saving the contents of this historic building.

During our fire drill in January, we discovered that the fire hose in our library - 8,000 volumes, many of them rare editions, in an 18th century medina courtyard building - wasn't even fed by a water supply.  We remedied that, and now the water can flow in case of fire.

We still don't have any fire extinguishers worthy of the name: Tony Spears, visiting State  Department OBO fire expert, told us that our most recent models are 1992 vintage.  Above, with OBO Rabat Facility Manager Tommy Johnson and his associate Mhamed Ismaili, Tony accepts our modest gift to the OBO fire office.

Now OBO Washington has a historic fire extinguisher from America's oldest diplomatic building.  We still have some that will be polished and go into our museum - as exhibits.

Soda acid extinguishers, like our venerable ALFCO model at right, date back to the 19th century, though ours is probably only sixty years old or so.

Our hopes are pinned on this new interest in fire protection for our building, and we hope to mark National Fire Prevention Week next year with a picture of brand new extinguishers.  So we won't have to celebrate the 20th birthday of our youngest extinguishers.

Then we'll inaugurate a shrine to St. Tony.

Gerald Loftus

"Goodbye Morocco" - Filming Tangier's American Steps

Maybe the Escalier Américain or drouj merican didn't need a thorough steam cleaning for the shooting of "Goodbye Morocco," Nadir Mokneche's forthcoming film.  Sometimes grungy is authentic, and if you don't have to paint on fake dirt, it's much cheaper.

The Legation's medina neighborhood was the site for some location shooting this week.  We've been after the police for ages - in vain - for roving patrols to destabilize the local criminals, so the relative clout of Legation vs. film land was evident.  Not only did the police post officers to keep stray pedestrians out of camera range, but the teeming traffic at this corner of the city was re-routed - a major feat of daring.

But we were happy to meet director Nadir Mokneche, whose films on contemporary Algeria are finely constructed parables on the no-man's-land of a country which hasn't found its way.  It will be interesting to see what Mokneche does with Goodbye Morocco, which he has chosen to shoot in Tangier.

After the American Steps, Mokneche was off doing takes in front of the venerable Cinema Rif, now the Cinémathèque.  The Cinémathèque has a great collection of film posters - going back to the Thirties - of movies shot in Tangier.  Great titles like "That Man From Tangier," and plenty of cloak and dagger intrigue from World War II and Cold War days.

Now, Nadir Mokneche will have to donate a poster of Goodbye Morocco for the collection.

Gerald Loftus

Tangier - Worthy Of UNESCO Status?

The Kasbah Museum (Moroccan Ministry of Culture) partnered with Italian NGO COSPE to host a two-day seminar on Tangier's architectural and cultural heritage.  A worthy effort, one that this city sorely needs, with developers greedily eyeing every square meter of available land.

A parade of presenters, including a Moroccan director at the Paris Institut du Monde Arabe, shared insights on how other cities, in Morocco and elsewhere, have sought to safeguard their historic buildings and districts.  It starts with an inventory of what you have already.

Strangely, the only building that actually is designated - the Tangier American Legation, the only US National Historic Landmark outside the United States - does not feature on Tangier's wish list for conservation status.  That's because the historic landmark designation is American, not Moroccan.

Actually, the Legation is doubly designated, as it is also the oldest American diplomatic building, the jewel in the crown of the Secretary of State's register of Culturally Significant Properties.

Tangier, though not a royal city like Fez or Meknes, does have its share of other buildings worth preserving.  There's the forest hideaway of Ion Perdicaris (of "Wind and the Lion" fame), pictured at right.  The house, properly restored, would be an instant draw, and would typify Tangier's days as an international city.

Going even further back in the city's long history, there's the tomb of Tangier's most famous native son, Ibn Battouta.  The inveterate traveler's final resting place is reachable through the winding streets of the medina, but you have to be a determined pilgrim to find it, and when you do, you will be disappointed at how poorly his city honors him.

Ditto for the picturesque Teatro Cervantes, photographed by thousands of tourists every year, magnificent in its decrepitude.  Sceptical participants in the seminar questioned the laborious listing process: "we've been trying to get it listed for more than ten years, and in the meantime it continues to fall to pieces."

Which brings me to my question: is Tangier worthy of the UNESCO World Heritage status that some would like to see it get?  Sure, Tangier has many buildings that hark back to the layers of civilization which once called this place home.  But doesn't there have to be a strong element of local pride in these places?  A concerted effort to conserve them?

The people around the table at this week's seminar are the converted.  Preaching to them doesn't stop the bulldozers.

Gerald Loftus