Avuncular American

Tangier Filmmaker Finds His Dream Audience - at TALIM

 

 

El Ayel - A Muslim Childhood - Le Gosse de Tanger

Poster by AST Head Librarian Serena Epstein

"They accuse me of making 'intellectual' films, so the presence here of so many women from the medina - from our Beni Idder neighborhood where Le Gosse de Tanger is set - is extremely important to me."  So Moumen Smihi, veteran Tangier and Paris filmmaker, greeted our very respectable gathering on Wednesday, on the margins of Morocco's National Film Festival, in Tangier for the 13th year running.

"Respectable," not only in terms of the quality of the people attending, but in their number: we had literally just gotten the word out less than 24 hours before, and our posters (above) were only distributed hours before our showing.  But most importantly, the women that Moumen Smihi were referring to were "our" women from the TALIM-FTAM women's literacy program housed at the Legation.

Why was this so important, to us and to the filmmaker?  Well, it was a first.  Smihi is used to appearing before cinéphile audiences, congnoscenti who know what he means when he compares his returning references to the Tangier of his youth to Woody Allen's use of New York as a setting for his films: "it's the place I know best... with its multiplicity of languages and cultures, and the destiny of people to live together, whatever it takes."

And it was that aspect of Le Gosse de Tanger (2005, 90 minutes) that spoke most strongly to the women of our literacy program.  Several of the older ones (Smihi's film takes place in the 1950s, when Tangier was still the International Zone) vividly remember this very neighborhood in the days when Muslim mothers brought in Spanish seamstresses to make trousers for their sons, or a Jewish matron sought advice from a Muslim sage, or Christian prostitutes shared the street with their colleagues from the other communities.

Sure, the x-rated language of the Fifties-era street kids did shock some in the audience, and some of the mothers regretted that they couldn't show the film to their children.  Of course Moumen Smihi understands this, but explained that his goal was to portray the reality of growing up in a time and place where the respectable lived next door to the rejected, and the tempations of the street were a danger to boys even from the happiest of families.

For our impromtu showing, we even had the benefit of academic analysis - in French and Arabic - by Dr. Peter Limbrick of the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), Smihi friend and professor of Arab and Middle Eastern cinemas.  Be sure to read Peter's excellent "guest post" after the page break at the bottom of this post.*

There are touches of Cinema Paradiso here, and one of the most memorable images is of the little friend "Ouahrani" mesmerized in one of Tangier's old cinemas before the flickering black and white images of a world that he will never grow up to know.  Moumen Smihi has given us a loving, lasting work, one that would be a nice addition to any serious study of Tangier, International Zone, as seen by the Muslim population of the time.

Gerald Loftus

*UPDATE 29 January: Guest Post by Dr. Peter Limbrick

A Muslim Childhood at TALIM: Putting le gosse back in Tangier!

One of best things about writing and teaching about film is getting to experience a film with new

 

1992-2012, Algeria-Morocco: Political Islam(s)

 

On a January night 20 years ago this month, tanks were rolling down the Avenue de A.L.N in Oran.  At first I was simply concerned that they would knock down our venerable building by mistake when one of them stopped to make a U-turn in front of the American Consulate, where we lived.

Then I realized what was happening.  Democracy was in the process of suffering a severe U-turn in Algeria, and the consequences of the January 1992 overturning of the Islamist FIS-won parliamentary election would be far-reaching and violent.  The Algerian army's move led to a lost decade through the rest of the '90s, and endemic insecurity in some areas means that Algeria is still on many countries' travel advisory lists.

How ironic, then, exactly two decades later, that the Moroccan Islamist PJD Minister of Foreign Affairs, Saad Eddine Othmani, has just accomplished his first trip abroad since his party won the parliamentary elections of November 2011 and parliament approved the formation of the PJD-led government this week.  His trip was to Algeria - the first for a Moroccan foreign minister since 2003.

Back in Oran, I remember an FLN loyalist opining in the early Nineties, "the Moroccans have yet to have their revolution."  As a proud Algerian nationalist, he obviously felt that things were just fine in his country, thank you, and that Morocco was changeless.  This was before the Islamist electoral victories of June 1990 and December 1991 challenged his complacency.

Okay, so now change has happened, peacefully, in Morocco.  Morocco in 2012 has done what Algeria refused to do in 1992: accept the results of elections which gave victory to an Islamist party.

That said, some observers still reserve judgement on the Moroccan dalliance with political Islam.  The country's population pressures and high unemployment make for a volatile mixture in a region where sparks fly.  And yet, the contrast with Algeria, faced with an elected Islamist majority in January 1992, is striking: in Morocco, no one appears to fear an Army backlash, or voices the concern heard in Algeria twenty years ago.  Those concerns? That the FIS would be a "one man, one vote, one time" party.  The FIS never got a chance to disprove that supposition.

Moroccan Minister of Communication, government spokesman, and PJD political bureau member Mustapha El Khalfi spoke January 27 at the Tangier HEM - Haute Ecole de Management - "Université Citoyenne," HEM's series of lectures on a variety of hot topics.  El Khalfi, who spent 8 months as a Congressional intern in Washington and was at Johns Hopkins SAIS (he also attended, in his previous role as a jounalist, TALIM's 2010 April Seminar), was to talk about democracy and political Islam.  He did, but in reassuring terms, preferring to talk about "democratic Islam."

In his view, the difference between Algeria in 1992 and Morocco in 2012 is that two decades ago, the Islamists in Algeria threatened the existing order, and presented themselves as a radical alternative.  Certain sectors of Algerian society - especially the military - felt threatened.  Whereas the PJD is a businesslike player, as well as being part of a wave of moderate Islamist parties in the mold of Turkey's ruling AKP.

Some Moroccan news outlets have created unrealistic deadlines for the Benkirane government, demanding tangible success within the usual 100-day grace period or political honeymoon.  After Algeria's FIS won local and regional elections in June 1990, their subsequent 18-month record of municipal governance was the subject of criticism by those looking for them to fail - but Algerians again gave the FIS their vote in December 1991.  Until the Army stepped in, cancelling the second round.

100 days, 18 months... Morocco's many challenges will take years of concerted effort at the national, regional, and local levels, and in a variety of key sectors: health, education, environment, employment, to name a few.  At least the current consensus is that Morocco's first freely-elected government is a "player."  Businesslike is a good point of departure.

Gerald Loftus

Filming Morocco's Lower Rungs On the Social Ladder

On the Edge (Sur la planche) - Leila Kilani, Morocco 2011

Death For Sale (Mort à vendre) - Faouzi Bensaidi, Morocco 2011

We were very well advised, at the outset of Tangier's just-concluded 13th edition of Morocco's National Film Festival, to see the two films that in fact came to win the top two prizes.

 

Leila Kilani's Sur la planche, her first feature film, following her excellent 2008 documentary Nos lieux interdits, won Grand Prize.

This time her focus is on an unlikely caïd-ah (can the Arabic word for a local crime boss use this feminine suffix for the head of a group of amateur thieves?), a young woman whose day job is at one of Tangier's Free Zone factories, peeling shrimp by the thousand (she likes to count them, even though she's paid by the kilo, as a way of resisting what she calls slavery).

Sur la planche appears to have been filmed mostly at night and/or in the rain, so don't expect to see the usual Tangier vistas.  But for a glimpse of the world that most of only pass by on the way to Rabat - the sprawling Free Zone which employs thousands of young women like Badia and Imane - Sur la planche ("On the Edge" will be the international title) is cinéma vérité at its raw best.

Writer/director Kilani provides us with a single-minded Badia, intent on scrubbing out that smell of shrimp as intensely as she drives her foursome (pretty Asma and Nawal dabble in the seedy nightlife of illicit Tangier, the chance pickups with characters who might best be described as biznismen - traffickers, "importers," contrabendistas).  But it's not a "team;" Badia is too much the loner, both at work and in her extracurricular hours.  She is driven.

Sur la planche moves at a frenetic pace, perhaps Leila Kilani's way of getting us to appreciate the hard lives of these young women On The Edge.  The performances of apparently first-time actresses Soufia Issami (Badia) and Mouna Bahmad (Imane) are particularly impressive, and we expect to see them a lot more.  Jury - well done.

- - - - - - - - -

Jury duty can't have been easy, because Faouzi Bensaidi's Mort à vendre - which won the Special Jury Prize - is a powerhouse of a movie, a film noir shot in the spectacular setting of nearby Tetouan, overlooking the Rif Mountains.  Though there is beauty out there, the action takes place in Tetouan's poor neighborhoods, where things are not always what they might seem.

Family breadwinner - and baker - involved in drug trafficking?  Job for big sister in a textile firm - steady work, much appreciated - but where she gets frisked exiting the factory in the struggle against contraband.  That long-haired beauty taking in the mountain view - but maybe she's a prostitute?  Mort à vendre ("Death For Sale" in international release) reserves many surprises for its characters, and for the viewing audience.

Tracing the - probably short - lives of three friends caught up in petty crime, Faouzi Bensaidi's film has themes familiar to the genre: street toughs getting into a league way over their heads; tough, world-weary cop (played by the director with gusto, and with the baggiest eyelids ever committed to film) who will extract a price for favors rendered; the hooker who needs saving by the film's "hero"...

But as with the other prize-winner, Mort à vendre is also a window into Morocco's underside, where people show up at nightclubs and blow their questionably-acquired wealth on overpriced drinks, where the street justice meted out to purse-snatchers can be swift and violent, where you might be "saved" by the brothers of the Islamist gang that patrols the woods, but you will be expected to help them in turn...

Tangier and Tetouan, Leila Kilani and Faouzi Bensaidi, Sur la planche and Mort à vendre - two prize-winning films which merit audiences beyond Morocco.  A few years ago, Moroccans were concerned about not only their film industry's annual numerical output, but also by the quality of the films produced.  I only have two years' worth of National Film Festivals to judge by, but I think that the depth of talent here rivals many a country with long cinematic traditions and much more means than Morocco.  Hats off to the winners.

Gerald Loftus

What You Must Know About (Protectorate) Morocco

 

French Protectorate brochure for the Morocco Pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, TALIM museum and research library, Tangier

In this year of the centenary of the 1912 Treaty of Fez, retrospectives on Protectorate Morocco abound.

The first thing you must know about Morocco, 100 years ago, is that two Protectorate zones were created: one French, which covered a good four fiths of the country, the other Spanish, much less well known, covering a largely mountainous northern slice from the Atlantic port of Larache, skirting Tangier and its international enclave, then following the Strait of Gibraltar along the Mediterranean to the Algerian border.

Smaller territory, but way bigger problems: the Spanish Protectorate was born in war, and it took French intervention in the 1920s Rif War to extricate the Spanish from a complete rout at the hands of Rif tribes bent on independence.

Some of the journalistic efforts at "commemoration" cherry pick the writings of Maréchal Louis Hubert Lyautey, the grand old man of French colonialism in Morocco.  Until he was replaced by that other Maréchal - Pétain - in 1925, to conduct what today would be called a more "robust" Rif war effort (aerial bombardment of civilian settlements), Lyautey practiced a more veiled form of tutelage.

Lyautey's pen dripped with what today comes across as the ultimate hypocrisy, writing apparently without irony in 1913 - a year after France and Spain divided the country between them - that Moroccans, "jealous, to the extreme, of their independence, rebelling at the notion of servility..." constitute "a political, religious, and economic elite that France would do ill to ignore."

Moroccans were probably not duped by the frustrated French monarchist's ostentatious "fealty" to the sultan ("Lyautey le Marocain," as he was known, went as far as holding the reins of the sultan's horse in official ceremonies).  People knew who was the real boss.

"Baeza Hermanos" building, Larache

It would be useful to have a similar in-depth look at life in the Spanish Protectorate, but much  less is available online, other than intriguing looks at episodes like Moroccans in Spain's Civil War.  Perhaps it is time to plumb the fading memories of this period in the way Actuel does with the French Protectorate.  Sounds like a job for us, in our conference center role...

In the meantime, we will focus on Tangier as the exception to Protectorate Morocco.  Pre-protectorate, and during the 1912-1956 period, Tangier was different, and during the years of the International Zone, had a specific form of international consortium government unique in history.  Now that's a story we can get our teeth into.

To be continued, in this space, on the walls of our museum, and in our research library.  Scholars and writers welcome!

Gerald Loftus

 

Copyleft Your True Story: Histoires Vraies de Méditerranée

 

 

François Beaune wants your (true) story.  Your Mediterranean story, in whatever language (French, Arabic, Hebrew, English, Spanish... the Med is a melting pot of languages too) you choose.

And though the invitation is open - "I believe in copyleft, and want stories to be shared" - there are some conditions for submissions.

Inspired by American writer Paul Auster's 2001 compendium of NPR radio stories, published as True Tales of American Life, Beaune has enlisted the city of Marseille - European culture capital in 2013 - and his publisher Editions le bec en l'air in an inspired project: collect stories from thirteen Mediterranean cities from Barcelona to Tangier to Haifa to Palermo, in the language of the storyteller's choice.

HistoiresVraies.net has published our true Tangier story, The American Diplomat in Tangier Who Saved Jews in Budapest, the story of wartime Legation Chargé d'Affaires J. Rives Childs and his intervention with the Spanish occupation authorities, which we uncovered last year after years of its languishing in the archives.  This kind of story is compelling, and not just for our museum visitors or library researchers: last month Spanish prime time TV aired the story of a Spanish diplomat, Ángel Sanz Briz, El Ángel de Budapest, who saved thousands of Jews.

Yesterday at Tangier's venerable-but-trendily-updated Librairie des Colonnes, Beaune enthralled the audience with his description of the project - "I have the best job in the world, travelling across the Mediterranean, listening to people's stories."  2012-2013 is his "raw material" stage.  To get our storytelling juices flowing, he recounted a wonderful tale from a French woman who had traveled to Spain in the days immediately after dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975.  A gripping lost traveler's tale transformed into an uncanny insight into the fear of living in a police state.

François Beaune says "we don't all have a novel in us, but everyone has a true story to share."  He has chosen his Moroccan Mediterranean city well; Tangier has stories on so many levels.  Tangier International Zone.  Tangier the city forgotten by King Hassan II.  Tangier the freewheeling city of the Beat Generation.  Tangier, Boom Town.  Tangier-As-Casablanca (the movie).

One level that would perhaps otherwise be ignored would be stories by people who cannot write them, people who are struggling with illiteracy.  TALIM's women's literacy program includes hundreds of medina women who are either current students or who have graduated newly literate over the last thirteen years.

We've introduced François Beaune and the Histoires Vraies de Méditerranée team to our women, and are hopeful that, like the American NGO Stories Exchange, we can get our medina neighbors to share their stories.

The story of the Mediterranean will be all the richer for it.

Gerald Loftus 

Domesticating Foreign Ads or Translating the Maghreb

 

 
Foreignization, domestication, transmutation... Karima Bouziane has mastered the vocabulary of her topic. At today's presentation at TALIM, the audience caught on immediately to this specialized world of semiotics, which has to do with the study of signs and communication.

The capacity audience (09:00 on a Friday morning - a major feat!) was composed largely of students and faculty from the King Fahd Translation School of Tangier/Tetouan's Abdelmalek Essaâdi University.

We thought that we had hosted the last of the Maghribi Grantees in Tangier last December, and in a sense, we had - Karima Bouziane was a summer 2011 grantee in Tunisia.  Her research topic: "Foreignization and Domestication in Outdoor Advertising in North African Countries: The Case of Tunisia."

Based at  Chouaïb Doukkali University in El Jadida Morocco, Ms. Bouziane conducted her work in Tunisia in the summer of 2011.  Due to timing considerations, she hadn't been able to present her findings (Download Powerpoint Presentation) to our colleagues at the AIMS sister center in Tunisia (CEMAT).

So TALIM and its guests benefitted from her excellent presentation.  Actually, the audience was perfectly targetted: the students had conducted their own research in the translation of ads on Tangier's main commercial thoroughfare, Boulevard Pasteur.

From their comments and questions, our audience knew the topic.  As might be expected from Masters students at Morocco's premier translation school, Karima's choice of English as the language of her research and briefing posed no problem.

 

 

And, just like Karima's shot of the backside of a Tunis bus, with its dodgy mutant "carnivore" ad for a fast food outlet (above), the Fahd School students had plenty of examples of advertisements that had been lost in translation.  There was a lively exchange about whether images could be "translated" (as opposed to text), and socio-political positions taken on the desirability of publicizing luxury goods available to only a minute portion of the population of the Maghreb market.

In all, Karima Bouziane's presentation was further proof - not that any was needed - that the demise of the Maghribi Grant program (apparently the US Government is short of the $25,000 it takes to fund the 10 grants awarded annually) is a travesty.

We thank Karima Bouziane and the dozens of other Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian - and Libyan and Mauritanian - scholars who have shared their work with the three AIMS centers over the past decade.  And we hope - and are actively campaigning - for the identification of the twenty five thousand dollars that it would take to enable the program to be continued in 2012.

Gerald Loftus

Tennessee Williams' A Cat On The Fire

Poster adapted by Serena Epstein, American School of Tangier

As we walked, I showed Tennessee the Arabic translation of his play, and explained that the title in Arabic meant: A Cat On the Fire.

Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams in Tangier (1979, Cadmus Editions, translated by Paul Bowles)

Choukri's little book recounts one of the playwright's several trips to Tangier, in the days when American writers were thick on the ground here.  "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof," published in 1955 and turned into the cinematic version we watched last night, even has a reference to these parts - someone accused of homosexuality chased "all the way to North Africa" - though the action is entirely in the American South.

With the rapid-fire dialogue, regional accents, and tendency for characters to interrupt one another, we thought it prudent to use the DVD's subtitles - in English.  That was, after all, the point of inaugurating our monthly Movie Night at the Legation: get Tanjawis to use their English.  There was a nice leavening of expats in the audience to provide additional English exposure.

There were no experts in the room, just people who enjoy seeing good films, and those eager to engage in a little thoughtful discussion on a Monday night.  There was a good showing from AST, the American School of Tangier, our partners in this venture.

Since arriving here in 2010, I've been struck by the number of Moroccans who want to use their English and crave contact with native speakers.

English is Big in Morocco.  From the American Embassy's RELO (Regional English Language Office) and the American Cultural Association with its language centers throughout Morocco, to the British Council and the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English (MATE), English is sprouting up everywhere.

We probably broke no new ground in our discussion of mendacity, sexual ambiguity, and family dysfunction - all themes in Williams' play, though the film presents a MPAA-acceptable version that could pass 1958 muster for general audiences.  Writes Emmanuel Levy (Cinema 24/7) of Cat's cinematic context:

A lush, Technicolor production, it opened at the Radio City Music Hall, and featured an all star cast headed by Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives. The success of this picture is all the more remarkable when placed in context with the other popular movies of 1958. In addition to South Pacific, the top moneymakers were: Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell; the military comedy No Time for Sergeants, based on Ira Levin's play and starring Andy Griffith; the Oscarwinning musical Gigi; and the historical adventure The Vikings, featuring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.

While I like The Vikings, I have to admit that Cat On a Hot Tin Roof has had a much longer shelf life than any of its fellow 1958 top grossers.

Next month on Movie Night we hope to go the documentary route, and henceforth alternate between classics, feature films, and non-fiction.  After a while, we hope that our public will become even more at ease expressing their opinions on the films, and that English can be seen as another natural vehicle of expression.

Gerald Loftus

Deep Education: Olmstead Scholars Learn More Than Arabic

"To provide outstanding young military leaders an unsurpassed opportunity to achieve fluency in a foreign language, pursue graduate study at an overseas university, and acquire an in depth understanding of foreign cultures, thereby further equipping them to serve in positions of great responsibility as senior leaders in the United States Armed Forces."

The Olmstead Scholarship Program

Friday's visit to TALIM by Olmstead Scholars Captain Jamil Musa (left, USAF) and Captain David Saunders (right, USMC) educated us about this longstanding program (since 1959) that helps create internationally-aware military officers.

You may knowingly remark that lots of soldiers in the US military are fully aware of foreign locales, places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...

Yes, that's true.  But in an institution as large and far-flung as the US military, it's still probably an exception to find people like our two young officers, spending an extended course of study at a Moroccan university, immersed in the language and culture of their Moroccan counterparts.  That's deep education, and hats off to the George and Carol Olmstead Foundation for sending them our way.

Already, with our hosting of the Tangier CLS program, we do our best to encourage young Americans to learn Arabic beyond the textbook.

This is Professional Military Education (PME), but to a different tune than the usual service school (West Point, Naval Academy) or war college routine.  Surprising, perhaps, but then again, the US military has the means to invest in infrastructure of all sorts, including the education of its future leaders.

I remember studying Arabic years ago with some US Army officers, who, unlike me - studying with a follow-on assignment to Egypt - had no idea if or when or where they'd be using their Arabic.  One of them explained, "the Army decides it needs to pre-position X-thousand tanks in the Arabian Peninsula, in the event... (this was in the early 1980s, so he was very prescient).  Well, like tanks, they also say - 'we need x-dozen Arabic-speaking officers...'."  Stockpiled, so to speak, to be deployed at the right time and place.

Several Middle Eastern wars later, the Army presumably has hundreds of Arabic speakers, so the refinement of the Olmstead program is that the uniformed services will also have a handful of officers who will have deep knowledge of Arab societies like Morocco which are not at war.  Countries where young people struggle to get an education and enter the job market, or find a place to live to raise a family.  That kind of deep knowledge is longlasting, and can be of use in war or in peace.

If you tell me, I'll listen.
If you show me, I'll see.
If I experience it, I'll learn.

- Lao Tse, 430 BC

That snippet is from an Air Force document looking at PME in 2020.  Not that far away, and in an age when the US no longer has a monopoly on strategic thinking.  Lao Tse knew the value of experience in learning back in 430 BC.  In the 21st century, his modern Chinese descendants are vying with Americans to learn Arabic.

That's why General Olmstead's investment in several generations of internationally-aware officers is so important.  It's not just the tool of language, it's also the qualitative experience of their immersion in foreign culture that will last them a lifetime.

Gerald Loftus

Let It Rain, On Morocco

From "Précipitations Annuelles," dry month map inset at TALIM research library, from the colonial era Institut Scientifique Chérifien

The Scientific American picked up Reuters' article from today "Morocco prays for rain for first time since 2007."

Now, I don't think that my prayers for dry weather last fall, when the Embassy contractor started our latest re-roofing project, were the cause of Morocco's extended dry spell.  No, it wasn't really a prayer anyway, more like fingers crossed, with a dose of inshallah.  It worked; the roof was stripped and re-surfaced, all before the first timid rains of the usually torrential November - April rainy season.

"Précipitations moyennes annuelles, 1925-1949," showing Tangier and the Rif in blue, reflecting rainfalls traditionally much higher than the rest of Morocco

This year, there has been no such "season."  No, Morocco's tourist industry has been blessed by blue skies and mild weather, which is causing concern for its other big employer, the agricultural sector (said to represent some 40 percent of the workforce).

We have no political position on prayers for rain, and understand when nations (and US state governors) feel the need to invoke the Almighty to make the heavens pour.

People here remember when Tangier had to ration water use, and had to bring in water on board cargo vessels, just like Barcelona did in recent years.  Since then, dams have been built, and water distribution appears to be stable, though its high cost is a cause of popular ire.

So, on the day when the faithful in Morocco prayed in mosques for rain, we say let it pour, and leaks be damned.  Sorry, that's not terribly pious, but we're keeping our fingers crossed - this time for rain, inshallah.

Gerald Loftus