Avuncular American

Morocco - US Strategic Dialogue at TALIM April Seminar

April Seminar, 2013

The Morocco - United States Strategic Dialogue

Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies 

This year, our annual April Seminar had a decidedly political flavor, so it was appropriate that it be launched at a sufficiently high level.  US Ambassador to Morocco Samuel Kaplan opened the seminar at a time of unusual - and uncharacteristic - tension between the two old allies.  The chairs that remained empty at the seminar about the bilateral Strategic Dialogue had all been slated for Moroccan speakers.

Quel dommage. The entire point of a strategic dialogue is that countries espouse their own national interests, and see where those interests converge.  We missed an opportunity to hear a definitive Moroccan explication of their country's firm position on a matter of vital national interest.

Moroccan dissatisfaction with a perceived change in American policy over human rights reporting in the Sahara marked the proceedings, mostly by a no-show of a number of officials and other invited speakers.  Quite a change in atmosphere compared to Washington in September 2012, when then Secretary of State Clinton hosted the first edition of the Morocco-United States Strategic Dialogue.

In a week where the news from the Maghreb had been catastrophic - Ambassador Chris Stevens had just been killed in Libya - Secretary Clinton recalled why the Strategic Dialogue was important:

No country has been a friend of the United States longer than Morocco. You were the first nation to recognize us back in 1777. But we’re not satisfied with simply having a friendship that is longstanding. We want one that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future.

Which is what brought TALIM to devote this year's April Seminar to a sort of status report on the Dialogue.  Our proceedings covered the same four areas that involved Working Groups composed of diplomats and experts from both countries: Political, Economic, Education & Culture, and Security.  Our format was to mirror the "WGs" with speakers, Moroccan and American, on each of these four pillars.

In light of the - we hope temporary - boycott by Moroccan officials of certain American events, all of our panels but one had an empty chair at the table. 

Security

Mr. Larry Velte of the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center (NESA) provided an excellent inventory of the rich variety of security sector cooperation between Morocco and the United States.  Classic service programs (Navy to Navy, etc.) exist, but so too do connections where no institutional counterpart exists - the Moroccan gendarmerie, for instance.  In an area like disaster relief, it was the state of Utah National Guard that was the quickest to react, while the DOD was still trying to sort out fiscal data.  Utah didn't ask, "who will pay for it?"

AFRICOM social scientist Dr. Liza Briggs, freed up from the "deferred" African Lion '13 joint exercise, attended the Seminar, a reminder that the flap over the Sahara UN issue carried a price in terms of a long-running symbol of security cooperation.  Dr. Briggs, in her conversations with soldiers from the US and Morocco, indicated that "mil to mil" relations were going along smoothly, and of course go beyond the matter of a postponed exercise, costly as that might be in terms of logistical expenses and opportunities lost.

Update, Wednesday 25 April: the US Embassy in Rabat has announced that - following another US policy readjustment - the African Lion excercise would resume on a limited scale.

Finally, Olmstead Scholars from the US Army, US Air Force, and the Marine Corps attended our Seminar, fresh from their classes at Moroccan universities and before rejoining their respective services.

Education & Culture

Dr. James Miller, Executive Secretary of the Fulbright Commission in Morocco (MACECE) provided an overview of the history of American-Moroccan cooperation in education, the bases of which started as early as the World War II Anfa (Casablanca) Conference and early postwar aid programs.  Even before Morocco regained its independence in 1956, Fulbright scholars were active in the country.

The state of higher education in Morocco is a concern to MACECE, and to TALIM (full disclosure: TALIM director Loftus is on the MACECE board, and TALIM is the AIMS research center in Morocco, home to Moroccan, American, and other scholars).  Fulbright scholars from the US come to Morocco, and Moroccans study in the United States.  One of the main problem areas is simply the resources devoted to education: the University of Fez, for example, has upwards of 96,000 students!

Dr. Miller's presentation was replete with such stupendous numbers (in another faculty, 23 professors deal with some 5,000 students).  A special type of French jargon has been developed to describe the "massification" of Moroccan universities, where students are piled on without classrooms, and classrooms without teachers; a "voluntary departure" program led to massive reductions in experienced teachers, and those that are left sometimes teach courses in things like COBOL, a computer programming language developed in the Fifties, simply because that's the last thing they themselves learned.

Much of the structural - literally - problems in universities have their roots in attitudes left over from the bad old days of distrust of intellectuals under King Hassan II, when they were automatically suspected of disloyalty.  Arts faculties (traditionally left wing) were physically separated from those of science, seen as more compliant.  Even now, while "autonomy" is seen as an end worthy of every institution and university faculty, the financial means to that end are nonexistent.

Economics

Dr. Kamal Tazi of Mohamed V University in Rabat, a regular visitor to Tangier as guest lecturer at business school HEM, gave a very fluid overview of the Moroccan economy, in light of the reforms recently undertaken by King Mohamed VI's government, and the still-necessary reforms to come.  Tazi was unique among Moroccan speakers scheduled for this Seminar: he showed up.  And we were lucky to have such a frank analyst of his country's economy, whose heartfelt plea for an open, humane society tempered the facts and figures usually a feature of "the dismal science."

On the American side, US Consul General Brian Shukan (Casablanca) spoke to the vibrant commercial relations between the two countries, something he sees on a daily basis as the chief US diplomat in Morocco's economic capital.  Brian also looked at economic integration in the region - or, in the case of inter-Maghreb flows, lack of integration - seeing potential advantages in a number of areas, including political stabilty.  The US-Morocco Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is a cornerstone of bilateral economic ties, and today some 120 American firms operate facilities in Morocco.

Political

In some way, the very fact of the Strategic Dialogue - and the apparent snub by Moroccan officials and some individual speakers of our proceedings - shows the essentially political nature of relations.

Dr. Jack Kalpakian of AUI, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, described his introduction to Morocco, which, as a state, is defined by the Makhzen, the ubiquitous term that includes the royal family and the state institutions.  It's often summed up on the whitewashed walls of beachside guard posts and in white-painted rocks on hillsides: Allah, al-Malik, al-Watan: God, King, and Country.

There's a related triumverate of Moroccan red lines: Islam, the monarchy, and the Sahara.  The latter, of course, was the issue which led to the current state of tetchiness so apparent in our empty seats at the table.  Why, asks Kalpakian, the extreme sensitivity in Morocco to the matter of the Sahara?  Simply legitimacy: any questioning of Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara is seen as a threat to national integrity.

Looking at the conundrum for Moroccans that the US represents, Kalpakian imagines how the decentralized, disparate nature of American government must present a quandary for Morocco, where you can just deal with the appropriate ministries.  The US isn't, like some of his students might think, a "Super France," and Morocco isn't like governed like Maryland.

So, down at the level of the citizenry, we had a Dialogue that, while perhaps not Strategic, was meaningful and certainly multidimensional.  Moroccans and Americans - and a good number of Europeans - from academia, government, private sector.  From lycée through troisième age.  A rich dialogue representing the potential for exchange going beyond what we like to harp on, our historic Moroccan-American ties.  As Hillary Clinton said, we want a relationship "that is dynamic, growing, looking toward the future."

Gerald Loftus

World Heritage Day: Morocco's Rural Treasures

18 April, World Heritage Day.  How serendipitous, then, that AIMS grantee Cloe Erickson presented her work on preserving Morocco's rural architectural heritage at TALIM.  Even though we at TALIM are housed in America's only National Historic Landmark located overseas, and Cloe too lives and breathes historic preservation, we were both blithely unaware of the coincidence in timing.

An audience which included architects, anthropologists, and just plain interested citizens got the benefit of Cloe's very humane approach to architecture, to community development, and to life in one of Morocco's most inaccessible villages.  Beautifully illustrated by husband Chris, a photographer and mountain guide, Cloe Erickson's work is truly inspiring, leading one prominent Tangier architect - herself an experienced restorer of historic monuments - to comment that Erickson's work should be taken as a model.

Cloe's Atlas Cultural Foundation is active in a number of areas, all of which have human development at their core.  Counterintuitively, it is Cloe the American who counsels urban Moroccan officialdom that slow is better, that time in Zawiya Ahansal cannot be measured in fiscal years or quarterly targets.  When it snows, roads (such as they are) are closed, and work stops.  Simple as that.  An architect's calculations might not translate to local workmen's ideas of quantity.

"Translation" is a concept that Cloe knows well, and it's not just language.  She often finds herself the third party in negotiations between Moroccan officialdom - often mistrusted and feared - and the untutored rural people among whom she, her husband, and little daughter live.  In fact, they are the only expatriates for miles around.

"It's too far away" is an objection that some officials have made to explain why development aid hasn't been forthcoming, though a road is being built to cut access time down from days to hours from the nearest city, Marrakesh.  Soon local children won't have to devote four hours daily for the "commute" to school.

So what are these structures, in Berber igherm, that Cloe and the ACF are helping restore?  Grain storage on the lower floors, and dormitories for pilgims on the upper levels.  The village is a zawiya or shrine to a local saint, with a charming back story:

Zawiya Ahansal was founded in the 13^th century by Sidi Said Ahansal, a traveling North African Islamic scholar.  Local legend states that Sidi Said Ahansal’s mentor told him to stop his travels and establish a religious school where his cat jumped off of his donkey.

So, thanks to a grant from AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Cloe Erickson is working to help mitigate the impact of breakneck development that has sometimes seen Morocco's urban built heritage fall under the bulldozer.  "Built heritage is a non-renewable resource," says Cloe Erickson, and she is doing her level best to ensure that these 500-year old rural structures live to see a few more centuries.

Gerald Loftus

Where Are the Maghrebi Artists?

"Converging Territories," Lalla Essaydi

Dr. Carol Solomon of Haverford College, Pennsylvania, in Morocco on a Fulbright grant, was intrigued by that very question: in many of the textbooks and survey courses of African art, the art of North Africa was always given the shortest chapter.  Odd, as the region's recorded history goes further back than much that is available on sub-Saharan Africa.  She set out to find out "where were the Maghrebi artists?" 

In Algiers a few years ago for the opening of MAMA, the national museum of contemporary art, Carol Solomon heard the lament of a number of artists about the general lack of galleries and facilities for artists.  In Morocco, only Tetouan (Beaux Arts) and Casablanca (Design) offer art schools.  "How do I survive as an artist in my country?"  Many choose to emigrate, and it was this vein which Dr. Solomon has mined.

For her presentation at TALIM yesterday, Dr. Solomon chose to focus on "Women Artists of the North African Diaspora," a subject rich in diversity.  Indeed, such descriptions as "third space," "limnal," "edge," and "hybridity" pepper Carol's vision of the art of the daughters of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia who not only fly back and forth between the Maghreb and Europe or North America, but whose art inhabits that in-between territory.  She shares Edward Said's view of the "plurality of vision" of these multi-state citizens.

Said, whose book "Orientalism" informed and shaped much study of West - MidEast cultural relations, might be surprised at the lingering popularity of much Orientalist art, and not just among European art collectors nostalgic for sepia-toned views of harems and fantasias.

No, as Solomon says, Orientalist works are the rage too in places like the Gulf, where wealthy sheikhs buy up art to populate new museums and galleries, and 19th century Orientalist paintings offer a measure of "topographic, ethnographic, and historic" accuracy, along with nostalgic appeal to buyers whose grandfathers were Bedouins with little contact with the Seraglio.

Carol Solomon presented the audience with the works of a hometown star, Yto Barrada, who might be better known in Tangier for her pioneering work in restoring the historic Cinema Rif and turning it into a respected and much-appreciated institution, the Cinémathèque Tanger.  But Yto Barrada is also a prize-winning photographer, and her "projects" like the "Strait Project" involve photography but also sculpture, often providing a biting commentary on the rampant over-development that not only wipes out historic vestiges of Tangier's rich architectural past, but endangers the unique flora and fauna of this zone that is Africa's closest point to Europe.

 

Les Femmes du Maroc, No. 14, Lalla Essaydi

Another Moroccan, who has settled in the United States, Lalla Essaydi, has been recognized as worthy of a Smithsonian exhibition, "Revisions."  Carol, who curated an exhibit in 2008 at Amherst College, introduced a work by Essaydi that received a review in her native Morocco.  Essaydi later told Carol Solomon that the picture of her work was the first time that any of her images was seen in Morocco.

TALIM - thanks to a grant from the Moroccan American Cultural Center (MACC) in Washington - will soon be mounting a new permanent exhibit at the Legation Pavilion, entitled "Moroccans in America," featuring talent from across the spectrum of the arts, literature, academia, and public service.  We will be featuring, thanks to Lalla Essaydi, one of her works from "Les Femmes du Maroc," currently exhibited at the Banque al-Maghrib.

Back to the Orientalists.  Today's women artists from the Maghreb will often do what Lalla Essaydi terms "neo-Orientalist" takes on works like that of Delacroix's "The Women of Algiers," even naming their works with more than a nod to the 19th century exoticists.  Franco-Algerian Zoulikha Bouabdellah, whose performance art "Dansons," or the Marseillaise, belly-dance version, turns Orientalism on its head, and would make both Front National and Front Islamique partisans equally livid with its cross-cultural identity-blurring juxtapostion of bleu-blanc-rouge "nationalism" and sequinned hip-swiveling.

But that's what the women artists of the Maghreb diaspora do best: challenge stereotypes, mix media, and generally get their native Maghreb on the stage of the world.  Carol Solomon gave us a taste of what is out there, and we appreciate the wisdom she imparted.

Gerald Loftus

Club Elixir, Then & Now

A couple of months back, we carried a post on our glass negative collection, and unveiled an undated - but probably early Twentieth century - photo of a long-gone medina institution, Club Elixir.

One of our neighbors in the medina thought he recognized the location, and took a little cell phone picture of it to show us.  It certainly bore all the hallmarks of the same location, Place Sakaaya.

So we sent Mohammed Jadidi of TALIM, fresh from his digital photography course, to take a "then and now" shot of the same square.  There might be a few more stories on some of the buildings, and a lot more in the way of street vendors, but here it is in April 2013:

It turns out that another TALIM staffer, Fatima Benguerch, who teaches Arabic literacy to the women of the medina, was born in the same building, during another one of its iterations after the demise of "Club Elixir."  There are almost no more elixirs of any sort in the medina, another vestige of International Naughty Zone Tangier that has gone by the wayside.

But we're glad to see that the square is as lively as ever.  We hope to provide more "then & now" photo pairs as we discover the treasures in our glass negative collection.

Gerald Loftus

Colloque à Tanger: Francophones Cut Up the Town

Tangier, since last Thursday, has been the haunt of people haunted by the spirits of The Beats, in particular Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, artists and writers who made Tangier their temporary home in the 1950s, fleeing an America - especially true for Burroughs - that was definitely not quite ready for their iconoclastic lifestyle.

 

Moussem à Sidi Ali Harazem, Brion Gysin, 1968, Tangier American Legation museum (loaned to the Galerie Delacroix Brion Gysin expo through 4 May 2013)

Organized by the Marseille Centre International de Poésie (CIPM), the colloque brought together poets, translators, scholars, and performance artists.  The latter included Americans Patti Smith and Anne Waldman, both connected with Beat artists and writers.  Anne Waldman makes a career of it at Naropa University's "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics." 

Obviously, these are people whose idea of the written, spoken, or sung word is not bound by things like punctuation - Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On The Road was written without such frills as "chapters" or even "pages."  Several of the sessions were devoted to the "Cut up" school of poetry of Brion Gysin fame, and it was fun to hear (though the Académie Française would cringe) such Frenchifications as the infinitive "cutupiser" - perhaps découpage is too American, too artsy-craftsy ("how to decoupage," for example).  Cut up appears to be to poetry - a random collage of words - what monkeys-with-darts is to investing in Wall Street.

Speaking of On the Road, Walter Salles' film was shown with the Cinémathèque's new Sony 4K digital cinema projector - wow.  The timing - on the eve of the Colloque - helped us learn a bit more about Beat lore, and especially William Burroughs' back story: Viggo Mortensen's enigmatic portrayal of the oddball character who represents Burroughs gives an eerie premonition of WB's "William Tell" shooting of his wife Joan.  Then again, as Burroughs tells it, had he not shot his wife, he wouldn't have started writing, and thanks to his writing, we now have the term Interzone, not only the title of a book but the best one-word summary of how to describe Tangier in its wild years as the International Zone bolt-hole for Beats.

Organizers felt it necessary to bring forth, for the n^th time, Tangier Beats/Bowles perennial Mohamed Mrabet, whose stories were told in translation, with the storyteller referring to himself in the third person - "Mrabet then said...".  Putting it kindly, it is not clear whether his meaning is lost in translation, or whether there is no there, there.  Like Chauncey Gardener in Being There, as Roger Ebert put it: "simplicity is mistaken for profundity." Mrabet continues to tell the same "stories" to polite applause, even though much of the audience - including those who share Mrabet's native Moroccan Arabic - is left utterly puzzled as to what he has just uttered.

But I digress.  The Colloque à Tanger was a worthy effort by people who wanted to recreate what Burroughs and Gysin did in their 1975 Colloque de Tanger, which was actually held in Geneva.  Books were published, concerts were held (we were happy to "discover" Patti Smith, a dynamo performer with a poet's sensibility), and works were read.

The Colloque provided us an impetus to mount a Gysin - Burroughs exhibit of art works and photos that we already had, scattered around TALIM's museum and library.  And like the little - just published for the Colloque - Khbar Bladna book of Gysin works, photos, and memorabilia, we leave you with Ira Cohen's photo of the artist in a mask, reproduced for the book from a photo at TALIM's museum.

Colloque Facebook page.

Gerald Loftus

Vanessa Paloma & the Spirit of Moroccan Jews

Vanessa Paloma is a singer, performer, scholar and writer specializing in Judeo-Spanish women’s songs and their role in Sephardic communities.  Internationally known for this repertoire, she has performed and lectured on five continents.  A current Research Associate of the Hadassah Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, Paloma was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar in Morocco during 2007-2008.

From her bio.  Official website, and blog.

You don't just get a solo concert, voice and harp, when Vanessa Paloma comes to Tangier.  Vanessa, who spent her Fulbright year here, just around the corner from the Legation, comes home to Tangier, and her loyal following in this city reciprocates by coming in numbers to her concert.  Last Thursday was no exception, despite several other competing cultural events.

 

Photo by Nathan Evans

Vanessa Paloma's homecoming is more than just revisting her old haunts.  It's a matter of roots: her mother's family, the Colombian side of this very international family, came to Latin America via Tetouan, Tangier's neighbor at the edge of the Rif Mountains.  In other words, Vanessa's work on the music of Morocco's Jewish diaspora is personal.  One of her stories, La Mantilla, traces the story of a shawl brought from Tetouan to Bogotà by her great-great-grandmother.

 

Her latest book, "The Mountain, the Desert, and the Pomegranate: Stories from Morocco and Beyond" (Gaon Books), provided material for her readings, which bracketed her renditions of often soulful Sephardic songs.  We see that an image of Drouj Merican (the American Steps leading up to the Legation) features in one of her Tangier-based stories.

Vanessa Paloma is not your typical academic, but she is nevertheless a serious scholar of the rich musical tradition of the Jews of Andalusia and the Sephardic diaspora, especially the centuries spent in Morocco, where Jews expelled from Reconquista Spain found refuge.  Here's her introduction to a 2009 paper on the Judeo-Spanish musical tradition in Morocco:

The Judeo-Spanish Romancero song tradition found a hospitable dwelling in
the Jewish communities of Northern Morocco.  The proximity between Spain and
Morocco led to a constant cultural, economic and political exchange across the Strait of Gibraltar.  This maritime frontier, which today is experienced as a formidable barrier for those Moroccans without a visa, was confronted with much more ease and openness in centuries past.  The very fact that each population establishes almost daily visual contact with the land across the Strait determines the continuous presence in the imaginary realm as well as the palpable reality of their contiguity.  A sustained exchange of music and ideas migrated along with commercial goods and diplomatic missions earlier than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  I like to think of this aqueous frontier as a fluid and live center of intercultural, interreligious and interlingual encounters.

Vanessa's family traversed this aqueous frontier on several occasions (fleeing Spain, emigrating to the New World, then her own "return" to Morocco for her studies and now, as the wife and mother of Jews born in Morocco).  She knows of what she writes - and sings.  It's hard to get more authentic scholarship than that.

Gerald Loftus

TALIMonth: CNN, Cartoons, Carnivals - a Cornucopia

February & March are supposed to be dead months, right?  It's still winter - inside and out - and marmots and groundhogs who know best stay tucked up in their dens.  Well, it looks like no one told us here in Tangier.  Here's a taste of what we've been up to over the past couple of months.

- - - - - - - - -

 

Anthony Bourdain (left) at the Grand Socco, Tangier

5 February: The team from CNN's new international travel show, Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" (photo from their Tangier sojourn above) shoots lots of film at the Legation, and - in a first for this epicurean - films yours truly having dinner with Anthony at a nice new local restaurant, El Morocco Club, a sort of "Rick's Cafe" without Nazis.  Anthony and his crew, in Tangier for several days, focused on food, but also a bit of culture (they might use some of our glass negatives to illustrate the show), and we are told the Tangier piece will air Sunday May 12.  Stay tuned.

9 February: TALIM stalwart (she designs our Movie Night posters) Serena Epstein - chief librarian at AST, the American School of Tangier - has many talents, one of which, we discover, is cartoonist.  Check out her great 'toon "My Invisibility Glasses: How to escape unwanted attention in Morocco," excerpt above.  We can't wait 'til Serena does the cartoon version of some of the Legation's wilder tales of the weird from two-plus centuries of diplomats, some of whom, shall we say, went off the deep end.

18 February: NATO & the Arab World: Dr. Florence Gaub of the NATO Defense College in Rome spoke to the students and faculty of the Euro-Mediterranean program of Abdelmalek Essaadi University, tracing the evolution of the North Atlantic Alliance, which has always had a Mediterranean dimension, not just since the Mediterranean Dialogue beginning in 1994.  Algerians recalling their struggle for independence sometimes say that "we fought NATO, with shotguns."  Italy's inclusion in NATO was thanks to French insistence on a Med dimension, which later saw Turkey, Greece, and then Spain, join the alliance.  Post Cold War, maritime security has risen in importance, and in recent years, concerns about the Sahel might stretch common definitions of "Mediterranean."

21 February: First visit to the Tangier Free Zone, home to some 40,000 workers.  See the American auto parts manufacturer Lear, where men and women work side-by-side on the assembly line, and where an impressive sense of organization means a factory that literally hums.  Tangier is home to other American car industry firms: another Lear factory, plus PolyDesign and Delphi. 

7 March: The Infinite Peace Process: Bichara Khader, professor at Belgium's UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain), originally from the West Bank, lauds the "resiliency" of his people, who persist in their efforts to create a Palestinian state despite decades of processing peace.  Khader, whose own family has suffered mightily from terrorism, remains committed to non-violence.  While he has no great enthusiasm for the two-state solution in an increasingly piecemeal Palestinian territory, he sees it as the logical outcome of the peace process.  TALIM director moderated this program, sponsored by the Rotary Club Tanger Détroit.

11 - 13 March: Fulbright Seminar, Rabat. Gathering American scholars from across the region, this is an opportunity to compare notes on research projects.  Dr. William Lawrence of ICG - International Crisis Group - made the keynote speech.  Lawrence, a polymath who is proud of producing the first Arabic rap song (!), is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, former State Department officer, and now produces analyses on the region for ICG.  Likening some aspects of the Arab Spring to 1848 Europe, Lawrence admits that with some 90,000 dead so far, "violence has played an important role."  Lawrence provided the Fulbrighters with useful research tips, including the value of open-ended questions.  MACECE, the Moroccan-US commission which administers Fulbright, put on a great show, and the student presentations were uniformly serious and original.

12 March: TALIM Director gives presentation on the Legation to people gathered at the American Club in Rabat, the watering hole for people from the US Embassy.  It's a good audience, and one of the fellow amateur historians sees that I'm a sucker for sepia photos.  He sends me a bunch, plus a great comic book (from the 70s?), "Il était une fois Hassan II," an homage to - and commissioned by - Morocco's late ruler.  Again, we'd like to see a budding cartoonist do something similar for the Legation - maybe just one page with 6 or so windows showing, say, the first American diplomat in Morocco, Thomas Barclay, meeting with Sultan Sidi Muhammad.  "Once upon a time..."

14 March: Sustainable Development: Held in the Tangier-Tetouan Regional Council (former US Consulate General Tangier building), and sponsored by AMED, a university-based sustainable development association.  Dr. Khalid Riffi Temsamani of the government-sponsored Observatory for Sustainable Development paints a picture of a region under multiple environmental stresses.  Illegal cutting damaging protective forests, and - in the most densely populated region in the country - open-air incineration of solid wastes...  "it can't go on."  The region, however, is the first in Morocco to perform an integrated development plan.  None too soon: wildcat development is eating up more and more greenfield sites, as the city sprawls across every potential building site.

16 March: Moroccan-American Friendship Foundation (MAFF) puts on a show at Borj El-Hajoui, the restored fortress which houses a number of Tangier community groups, including acrobats, gnawa singers, Andalusian musicians, and artists.  The Legation opened its doors for the day, and artists who have spent time in the US told of their experiences.  A chance to showcase a historic preservation project with a community development goal.  Moroccan TV news 2M carries an interview with TALIM director on Moroccan - American ties.

30 March: Lusko Gallery, a Tangier art auction house, puts together a collection of 19th century Orientalist works along with modern Moroccan paintings.  It draws a serious crowd, one with money to spend on art.  Our very unscientific talley indicates that hundreds of thousands of dollars were bid today, some for works by artists that we too have at the Legation museum.  Food for thought: if a for-profit gallery can bring in this kind of money, what might we do with a fund-raiser, à la "Paint the Legation" from 2011?  Makes you want to see if we have any duplicates that might get auctioned off - not oil paintings obviously, but maybe engravings, lithographs... books.

31 March: we eat a delicious omelette from farm-fresh eggs, a present from a friend with chickens.  Perfect Easter gift!

Gerald Loftus