Avuncular American

Libana Lights Up Tarab Tanger

Last night Tangier vibrated to the sound of seven American women performing music from the world over.  Libana, making their inaugural Moroccan tour (Tangier, Tetouan, Rabat), was a rousing success at the 5th annual Tarab Tanger festival.  From the very beginning, with a rendition of Yal Harbaan, an Algerian Berber song from the Aures mountains, the audience knew they were in for a special treat.

This all started last year at Tarab Tanger No. 4, when our annual AIMS conference participants attended a Berber music performance.  Anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodman of Indiana University, a former member of Libana and co-organizer of the conference, mentioned Libana's longstanding dream of performing in Morocco.  A year later, here they were at Tarab Tanger.  And the audience was not disappointed.

Thanks to Jane Goodman's double duty as both performer and - in French, Amazigh, and Arabic - presenter of the group's repertoire, the capacity audience got an even better appreciation for the group's mastery of the music of a variety of cultures.  Sung in languages as wide-ranging as Arabic and Quechua, the women of Libana have an uncanny ability to put themselves in the culture - and even the very register - of the women whose music they have learned through 35 years of performing across the world.

Close your eyes and you will be listening to enchanting music sung by women of India, of West Africa, of the Sephardic diaspora.  Open your eyes and you'll see seven Bostonians at home in the world - and dancing in the costumes of the culture whose music they perform.  Their enthusiasm for their art makes the audience move.

No more so than when they started ululating, their you-yous echoed by the Moroccan audience, young and old, and triggering the traditional wedding chant by women in the stands.  Talk about winning hearts...

But the finishing touch was all-American: "Woke Up This Morning," a spiritual adapted for the Civil Rights struggle, where waking up "with Jesus on my mind" is replaced by "freedom on my mind."  As Libana streamed off the stage to a standing ovation, the audience took up the "Hallelujah" refrain.  What an exit!

So, in one evening in Tangier, seven women from Boston helped to spread their joyous vision of links across continents, and the US as a repository of an incredible diversity of cultures.  Now that Libana has pioneered American participation in Tarab Tanger, the door is open to other performers from the US.

With the strains of "Woke Up This Morning" in his ears, we know that Tarab Tanger impresario Omar Metioui is already thinking about his dream for next year: an American gospel group.  The planning begins...

Gerald Loftus

Museum Studies in a Mask

Ayla Amon, graduate student in George Washington University's Museum Studies Program, is finishing up what is the inaugural internship for a pilot program funded by the US Embassy in Rabat.  As you can see, Ayla is of the "roll up your sleeves" school of interns.

We couldn't have asked for a better start for what we hope will be an ongoing program.  Ayla has been tireless in her efforts to put us on the right track.  One of her most lasting contributions will have been setting up a collections management system.  Over the years, many well-meaning people - interns, volunteers, donors - have begun or provided partial inventories of works in our museum.  These lists and descriptions have provided valuable raw material.

Now, thanks to Ayla and an off-the-shelf database program, we have the basis of a system that will allow us to meet standards and keep track of our works, which sometimes have had to be moved when renovation work beckons.

But what is equally impressive about Ayla's approach is her willingess to get her hands dirty.  Dressed in her lab coat and mask, Ayla has put order into our "conservatory," which has come to be a repository for valuable museum pieces not on display, but also as a last resort for junk that should have long ago been tossed.

So, now the challenge is to keep up Ayla's good example.  We want to have follow-on interns, and our own staff need to apply lessons learned from Ayla and other teachers of museum best practice.  We wish Ayla the best, and remain certain that she will be a great asset to the institution lucky enough to benefit from her enthusiasm, experience, training, and work ethic.

Gerald Loftus

The Man in the Bicorne

 

Diplomat in Tangier, no date. Glass negative collection, TALIM

The man in the bicorne is probably not an American.

We love to feature historic photos, and this is one from the Legation's collection of glass negatives from the Tangier of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  We've shown it to a few people who know the homes associated with Tangier's long diplomatic history, and here are a few of their comments:

"He certainly carries a lot of fruit salad on his chest."

"Yes, I agree, it must be a diplomat, maybe French or English. With the clothes he is wearing he must be one of these nationalities."

We haven't yet identified house, dates, or the identity of the man in the bicorne.

American diplomats were known to have worn bicorne or two cornered hats, but mostly were admonished to wear “the simple dress of an American citizen” (scroll down for a discussion of American diplomats and uniforms), and President Franklin Roosevelt put an end to use of uniforms in 1937.

Homburgs were another thing: I remember one of my fellow vice-consuls in the late Seventies finding wording in the Foreign Affairs Manual about Consuls "removing their homburgs and placing on their chest" when approaching a visiting naval vessel in port.  Neither homburgs or bicornes, I assure you, were ever a part of my wardrobe.

Gerald Loftus

Tarab Tanger 2013

Get ready for another Tangier first: next week, at Tarab Tanger 2013, the annual festival of world traditional music will feature a North American group for the first time - Libana, an all-women ensemble based in the US.

In part thanks to a grant from the cultural office at the American Embassy in Rabat, Libana will perform in Tangier, Tetouan, and Rabat, their first tour in Morocco.  Since 1979, Libana has performed in numerous venues throughout North America, and in a number of international concerts.

We are especially happy that Libana is coming to Tarab Tanger, which, among Moroccan music festivals, maintains a better sense of "traditional" in its mix of Moroccan and international performers.  That doesn't mean it is staid: we are also looking forward to another of next week's international acts: "Samurai-Flamenco," an intriguing fusion of Spanish dance with sword by a Japanese performer.

Tarab Tanger: 27 - 30 June, with Libana performing Saturday 29 June at 9:00 PM.

Gerald Loftus

ZohraLiza: A Painting Inspires a Novel

 

Photo by Mohammed Jadidi

It all started with a picture.  James McBey's "Zohra," Tangier, 1952. 

A report for an e-zine, a blog post, and the interviewer, journalist Abdelouahid Stitou (photo at right, with "Zohra"), was hooked.

He would write the first Facebook interactive novel, in Arabic: "ZohraLiza," inspired by "the Moroccan Mona Lisa."

As Stitou told us at a certain point in the story, the premise is that McBey's painting is stolen from the Legation (heaven forbid!) and is spirited away, to Brussels.  There's a man, and a woman.  The painting is recovered, and brought back to Tangier.  But is it a copy?  Where is the original "Zohra?"

The possibilities are limitless, especially if - and this is the interactive part - you allow online readers to suggest tangents to the plot line.  Over the course of the Facebook phase (we assume this is an endless process), comments, criticism, press coverage - everything was fit to print in "ZohraLiza."

And now it is in print too.  Congratulations to Tangier's own Abdelouahid Stitou for his imagination, his ingenuity in bringing a mid-Twentieth century oil painting to life in the Facebook age.

 Gerald Loftus

Paul Bowles' Living Legacy in Tangier

Belgium's francophone classical music FM station, Musiq3, has just aired an in-depth (hour and a half) special on Paul Bowles (click for podcast), and has provided us a photo of an interview at TALIM (courtesy producer Camille de Rijck), along with a vignettes of other Tangier cultural landmarks.

We're happy to be included among interviews with literary figures associated with Bowles: Claude Nathalie Thomas, his translator into French; Daniel Rondeau, until last month French ambassador to UNESCO and author of a book on Tangier; Mona Thomas, author of "Tanger 54;" and Simon-Pierre Hamelin, author and manager of Tangier's great bookstore, Librairie des Colonnes.

The interviews are nicely interspersed with Tangier soundscapes and a mix of Bowles compositions, his narration of excerpts from short stories, and selections from the Library of Congress Moroccan traditional music collection.  Just like the iPod loop playing in our Paul Bowles wing.

The program gave us a chance to talk about Bowles as a man of music, reflected in the "Music and Other Muses" theme of the broadcast, and very much a part of the Legation museum's approach to Bowles.

Bowles - his music as much as his writing - continues to be a draw for cultural broadcasting.  We've reported before on several European (German, British, and Swiss) programs, as well as Radio Tangier's special on Bowles' Moroccan recordings.  In Berlin, Swiss sound artist Gilles Aubry is preparing a exhibit on Bowles' work to preserve Morocco's musical heritage, and in the US, Rounder Records is working with the Library of Congress to publish selections from the 1959 recordings that TALIM had digitized during the Paul Bowles Centenary in 2010.

Gerald Loftus

Moroccans Got Rhythm?

"Arabs Got Talent," the Arabic-language show on MBC-TV, recently featured a Moroccan break dance group that definitely has talent, combining kinetic choreography of scenes reminiscent of Marrakesh's famous Jamaa El Fnaa and moves that would make Michael Jackson proud.  Morocco has its "break dance battles" too.

"Movement is a language," according to AIMS researcher Karima Abidine of Northwestern University, whose presentation yesterday at TALIM covered "Talk From the Body: Contemporary Dance and the Negotiation of Social Change in Urban Morocco."  What the audience lacked in quantity we made up for in quality; we had several people involved in performance and dance, including Leila Chellabi, author, lecturer, and jazz and classical dancer, and Natasha Pradhan, researcher in Moroccan music and performance from Brown University.

Karima Abidine showed us several clips of televised performances, but for most young Moroccan contemporary dancers, space is at a premium.  Modern dance, especially for young women, is caught up in a number of cultural taboos, making it more of a male domain.  And even for the young men, much of Moroccan modern dance is an outgrowth of athletics, acrobatics, and of course break dancing.

In Tangier, groups like Darna and shows like Chouf Ouchouf and Taoub have built on this acrobatic tradition, performing pageants depicting Tangier's long history, and using site-specific performance to link with the city's past.

But as Karima Abidine points out, much of what is performed is for Western audiences, whether resident expats or while on tour outside Morocco.  Moroccan publics might, as one audience member witnessed, smile on their daughters miming Rihanna during a recent appearance at the Mawazine Festival, but would never countenance them appearing on stage to dance in front of non-family members.  Dance, for many, is "elite," and in any case, "non-Moroccan."

Dance, Karima Abidine believes, "pushes boundaries, in order to collapse them."  Within the regional context of both the Arab Spring and the increasingly prevalent currents of religious conservatism, dancers are challenged on a number of fronts.  All this in an atmosphere of few resources, other than aid from largely European sources, devoted to dance.  The recent Morocco tour of Chicago's Hubbard Street Dance group gave a number of young dancers a taste of what they rarely have a chance to get - professional training.

Our thanks to Karima Abidine - and YouTube - for giving us a glimpse into the world of Moroccan dance.

Gerald Loftus

IBM's Cookie Class Road to Development

Photo of IBM Corporate Volunteers and Tangier NGO reps (Misha Santa Barbara)

For the past month, Tangier has been home to an international group of corporate social volunteers.  IBM's Corporate Service Corps has sent 9 volunteers - all from IBM's worldwide operations, from Rio to Tokyo - to Tangier, fanning out into three teams with three different non-profit associations.  Organized by the Morocco office of CDC Development Solutions, the teams have been working with AMED, a university-based group active in sustainable development, the TMSA Foundation, the corporate social responisbility arm of the Tangier-Med port, and FTAM (Fondation Tanger al-Medina), TALIM's partner in the Arabic literacy program for the women of Tangier's medina.

Though TALIM hosted the kickoff event for the entire IBM contingent (photo at top), we've been especially closely involved in the work of the FTAM team: Misha Santa Barbara from the Czech Republic (and IBM's Atlanta office); Lavinia Frota Flach from Brazil, and Ryosuke ("Ryo") Sawazaki from Japan (photo at right, with Mohammed Hammich of the Tangier acrobats, one of the community artistic groups at the FTAM-sponsored cultural center of Borj El Hajoui).

Painstakingly interviewing members of FTAM, the team came to form an accurate picture of the foundation and its challenges.  Through a series of facilitated workshops with the leadership of FTAM, IBM's corporate volunteers used their experience in management to stimulate frank discussion of impediments that have prevented the foundation from reaching its full potential.

FTAM's group has chronicled their work in blog posts, including two (Lavinia's and Misha's) on their work with the women of a spinoff cooperative from our Arabic literacy program. They unearthed a great Moroccan variant on MBWA, management by walking around - "work and you will be strong; sit and you will stink."  The women of the cooperative are certainly hard-working, though concepts like pricing to cover their costs sometimes elude them. The IBM team provided them with another idea to augment their income: offer cookie-baking classes to foreign visitors willing to pay to get hands-on training.  They tested out the concept in a fun cooking class.

Sometimes it takes an interested outside look to help spur a fresh approach, which has helped FTAM focus on its core values, and the strategy necessary over the medium to long term to achieve its objectives.  And we are happy to find an interested partner in IBM, which is looking at the possiblities of adapting its online literacy program for use in our literacy classes.

Gerald Loftus

 

Performing Tangier 2013

Once again, Tangier's International Center for Performance Studies brings off a well-attended conference, replete with book presentations, concerts, debates, and of course, performances.

TALIM was pleased to serve as the venue for the kick-off evening, which included our friend Dr. Carol Malt presenting her latest book, Moroccan Museums as Agents for Women's Empowerment: A Study of Museums in Thirty-Two Cities (2013, Mellen Press).

The evening continued with a concert under the arches off our courtyard, music courtesy Younes Fakhar, oud virtuoso, with his "Moroccan Mozart" repertoire.  It was good to have Younes Fakhar back - he performed at our 2011 Ramadan concert.  Photo courtesy Abdelaziz Khalili, ICPS member and publicist.

Every year, Dr. Khalid Amine of Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Founder and President of ICPS, pulls together this international gathering of theatre and performance experts - academics, writers, and performers - in a number of venues.  We are honored to be partners with ICPS.

Last year's ICPS-TALIM collaboration resulted in a great one-woman show dramatizing true WW II Legation stories, which we are pleased to say has had a US reprise at the University of Alabama.

Gerald Loftus

What Would the Sultan Think? Save the Legation

Legation Pavilion by Terry Connor

The following Letter to the Editor has just been published in the May issue of the Foreign Service Journal, and after a few "attaboys" from FSJ readers, we're sharing it.  Just like 19th century Consuls who wrote to the State Department about the "considerable diplapidation" and "ruinous" condition of the Legation, the response to our repeated warnings about the state of the crumbling Pavilion building must have been sent by clipper ship.  We're still waiting.

- - - - - - - - - - -

To the Editor:

The mail gets to us slowly here in the medina, so I am only now able to comment on the excellent December 2012 article by Dr. Jane Loeffler on "Beyond the Fortress Embassy."  As the director since summer 2010 of TALIM, the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies, I have come to appreciate what Ambassador Barbara Bodine, quoted in the article, calls "embassies integrated with their surroundings and culture."

You can't get more integrated than the American Legation, which is not only nestled in the medina's pedestrian streets, but actually bestrides "America Street" and is built over that same street.  That was the American way of diplomacy in Morocco from the 1790s to the early Sixties.  The Legation is the only US National Historic Landmark abroad, by virtue of the its status as the first American diplomatic property, a gift of the Sultan of Morocco in 1821.

The October 1932 issue of the Foreign Service Journal carried a story about the then brand new "Moorish Pavilion" annex of the Legation, which author Honor Bigelow described as "one of the most noteworthy" American diplomatic buildings of the era.  Photos of that same Pavilion grace OBO publications highlighting the Secretary of State's Register of Culturally Significant Properties, or the new public-private partnership, the Fund to Conserve United States Diplomatic Treasures Abroad.  It is a very photogenic building.  Until you look close.

More than eighty years after Congress appropriated $22,000 to build the Pavilion, this diplomatic treasure is at risk.  Major structural fissures, water damage from leaking roofs, rotting wood, etc. threaten what is a repository of the best that artisans from across the Maghreb could produce - mashrabiyya screens on the windows, intricately painted wooden ceilings, zellij floor tiles.

As a living embodiment of citizen public diplomacy, the Legation is also a symbol of America's engagement with the Arab, African, and Muslim worlds, dating back to the very beginning of our country (Sultan Sidi Abderrahman recognized "the Americans" as Moroccan partners in December 1777, when George Washington was hunkering down in Valley Forge).

OBO, the Fund to Conserve, and historic preservationists would do well to band together to "Save the Legation Pavilion," perhaps a rallying cry for 2013. What could be more important than to save this example of America's diplomatic heritage - from a time when "fortress embassy" meant a solid oak door and a deadbolt lock - in such a crucial region of the world.

Sultan Moulay Suleiman, our benefactor in 1821, would expect nothing less of the United States.

Gerald Loftus
Tangier, Morocco