Avuncular American

January in Black & White

Our just-concluded January series of four films, every Monday evening, on the theme of race relations, ended with a record turnout for "Prince Among Slaves," the award-winning PBS documentary about the African prince who, thanks to his Muslim faith and literacy in Arabic, was taken for a "Moorish" prince.

The case of mistaken identity led to his eventual freedom, because "his emancipation would greatly please the Emperor of Morocco."  It's a story we love to tell, because it involves Morocco, the United States, and the Tangier American Legation.

Earlier this month, we also showed feature films "Goodbye Bafana" (a worthy but perhaps factually flawed film about Nelson Mandela and his white jailer) and "The Defiant Ones," a 1958 Oscar-winner with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, chain-gang escapees in racist America.

And we couldn't let Martin Luther King's birthday pass without another showing of "Freedom Riders," always moving, about the struggle to integrate interstate buses in the American South in 1961.

We got an early start with African American History Month, in large part due to travel in February.  And we're glad that the Tangier public was more interested in content than in timing.

Gerald Loftus

UNE Tangier: 1st American University Campus in Morocco

In Morocco, I've come to learn of "soft openings," where, after years of construction or restoration, an institution - hotel, cultural center, university - just quietly opens its doors and starts business.

The University of New England (UNE) softly opened its doors earlier this month on the grounds of the American School of Tangier (AST).  Instead of years of construction, it's been more like months (a bare 18 months since the agreement between the two American institutions), and the place is beautiful.

Here's what the UNE website said:

On a breezy Tangier afternoon, 23 undergraduate students made their way onto the grounds of the first American university in Morocco, which was designed by the architect Anouar Amaoui (here in the blue suit, with Anouar Majid).

As the students walked through the thick iron gate, they looked on in awe of the chalky white exteriors juxtaposed against arabesque cobalt blue balconies. Undeterred by more than 20 hours of travel and the bulkiness of luggage, students clustered around tethered palm trees to snap photos outside of their new home for the semester.

This historic project - it is the first time that an American university has built a campus in Morocco - is the brainchild of Dr. Anouar Majid, the peripatetic professor who has brought UNE to his native Tangier.  Anouar Majid is also a polymath: he teaches, blogs, and is the author of a number of books on quite a wide range of topics touching on the Maghreb and Islam.  He has even written a novel.

We've met the UNE staff on the ground, and they are an impressive bunch with whom we look forward to working on a number of projects - conferences, volunteers from among the students, film showings.

Welcome to UNE Tangier, and may their soft opening set the stage for their big splash inauguration in April.

Gerald Loftus - text; Anouar Majid - photos

Sidi Bouarraquia's Back!

Seven days after the Aïd al-Mawlid (in the French transliteration used in Morocco, it's the Mouloud, a celebration of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed), Tangier usually honors its patron saint, Sidi Bouarraquia.  In the 1940s, during the Spanish occupation of the Tangier International Zone, the authorities banned the celebration because of its nationalist undertones.  We missed the cortège in previous years, and in 2011 the parade was cancelled: it was too close to the troubled date of February 20. 

So this year, we vowed to be there.  Maybe the folkloristic buildup to it had been hyped a bit too much, because at least one expat found the parade to be "overrated."  Personally, I had been expecting lots of sacrificial cows, but there was only one, and she (or maybe it was a bull) was so surrounded by the throng that I could only get a glimpse.  There are better pictures here.

After the festivities come the scissors: it's circumcision time!  Here's how "Ali Bey" (Spanish spy Domènec Badia Leblich) found Tangier on Mouloud in 1803:

A certain number of boys are assembled, followed by musick, consisting of two bag-pipes, which are played in unison, but not therefore less discordant... Though there were circumcisions every day during the festival of the Mouloud, yet I waited till the last, because I was assured that they would then be more numerous.  I found what may be called a real butchery...

I will spare the squeamish the details of what happens to "the little victims," but Ali Bey does describe a great diversionary trick at the moment of truth: a chorus of previous victims whose shouts distract the young circumcisee.

I'm not sure if the truck bringing up the rear of the parade was carrying goodies to soothe the little victims, but there were certainly hopes among the people in the parade to get one of its fruit baskets, if not a slab of the sacrificial cow.  As we say, saha - bon appétit!

    Text and photos: Gerald Loftus

Legation Guards: 2 and 4-Legged

Photo of G4S security guard Mohammed Saïd by Mohammed Taleb.

Nothing significant* in today's post, but we couldn't pass up this opportunity to share this photo of the cute little dog who wound up hitched to our entrance sign while his masters toured the Legation museum.

Normally we tout our "human security" approach, but here we got a boost from our four-legged friends.

* "Nothing significant," perhaps, except that this not-quite shaggy dog story makes our 300th TALIMblog post in some 3 and a half years.  Stay tuned for more!

Gerald Loftus

Josh Shoemake's Tangier: A Literary Guide For Travellers

Books with "Tangier" in their title - Amazon lists 1,226 of them, though some are about the namesake island in Chesapeake Bay - never stop appearing, and many of them are possibly in the forgettable category.

Not so with Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers, by Josh Shoemake.  A lover of maps, Josh has taken the innovative approach of leading his readers through the fabled city on the Strait street by street, quarter by author-associated quarter.

Shoemake, a former teacher at the American School of Tangier, must have dazzled the students with literary lore, though some of the content in his book - extensive quotes from the likes of William Burroughs, Joe Orton, and many others - was probably not fit for the curriculum in the 8th grade English class.

The Legation is mentioned several times, and Shoemake shares our fondness for Crazy Consul stories (perhaps hare-brained but not crazy, there was even mid-19th century Consul Samuel Collings' suggestion that "Moroccan camels would be ideal for service in the American west," which eventually did result in the creation of the US Camel Corps).

At some points Shoemake's technique of associating streets and neighborhoods with their former literary residents can seem a bit contrived, and you might tire of reading yet again about the Beats and other usual suspects and their proclivities (spare me the details of Burroughs and his various experiments with drugs).

But in the main, Josh Shoemake has hit the mark, and his chapter "San Francisco - Immeuble Itesa" - largely about Paul and Jane Bowles - is particularly enlightening.  If you want to get an appreciation for the two writers and what made them tick, Josh Shoemake's work is the best short summary I've ever seen.

Speaking of short summaries, Shoemake provides not only an extensive bibliography but a nice set of thumbnail "Author Profiles" of the writers he covers, from Ali Bey el-Abbassi (an 18th century traveler and spy, born Domingo Badia y Leblich) to Tennessee Williams, frequent Tangier visitor.

Book in hand, a literary traveler could revisit Dean's Bar, though other watering holes associated with legendary writers, like Café Porte, no longer serve alcohol.  And the Parade Bar and Brion Gysin's "1001 Nights" restaurant are long gone.

There are a couple of anachronisms or just plain mistakes: Truman Capote, born in 1924, comes to Tangier "just after the Great War," which generally means WW I, not World War II.  In fact, Capote came to Tangier - and was ambushed by his rival Gore Vidal, which Shoemake describes in his book - in 1949.  And then there was Emily Keene ("The British Bride of Tangier" who wedded a Moroccan aristocrat) who was "flown down to" Tangier... in 1872!  What about the Wright brothers and 1903?

But this is quibbling.  Josh Shoemake has made a real contribution to better understanding of the incredible concentration of literary talent that Tangier represented, especially in the twilight of its International Zone days.  It's full of fascinating detail, and written with a sense of you-are-there: there's Jack Kerouac, settling down to a beer at the Café de Paris...

And here's Paul Bowles, who must have wanted to strangle Allen Ginsberg, whose "declaiming" (he apparently couldn't shut up) ruins Bowles' recording of the last non-amplified call to prayer in Tangier, "leaving Bowles with a recording on which the only audible sound was a declaiming Allen Ginsberg."

Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers was on our Wish List, and thanks to one of our supporters, we've now added Josh Shoemake's book to our shelves of Tangier American writers.  He's in good company.

Gerald Loftus

Wish List Brings Results

Thanks to the generosity of donors Renee Payne, James Henkel, and Caitlyn Olsen, we have just received five of our eleven Amazon Wish List titles for our research library.  We now have:

- "The Reichmanns," which provides a wealth of information on Tangier during World War II as a haven for Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

- "Prince Among Slaves," involving a case of mistaken identity, where a Muslim prince is emancipated from slavery, thanks to the interest expressed by the Sultan of Morocco.

- "The Architecture and Memory of the Minority Quarter in the Muslim Mediterranean City," especially longtime Legation scholar Susan Gilson Miller's chapter on our neighborhood, Beni Ider.

- "The Time In Between" by Maria Duenas, which, hinting at its content, is entitled "L'Espionne de Tanger" in French.  Picture of Tangier during the interwar period.

- "Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers," Josh Shoemake's new look, street by street, quarter by quarter, at Tangier's rich literary past.

Though these five books are but a beginning - and we'll add more - they show that our community of researchers (Caitlyn Olsen conducted part of her Fulbright year at TALIM and wrote us a nice guest post on Moroccans in the Spanish Civil War, and we hope to carry another in the near future from Renee Payne, researching her uncle's story, a former Tangier schoolteacher shot by Germans as a Resistance fighter in wartime France) and visitors (James Henkel, who has a soft spot for books and for "storied port cities" - combined in his Valparaiso, Chile bookstore).

As always, TALIM is greatly appreciative of all the help given by our fan club, whether it is of books (former TALIM President Bill Zartman has just sent us another chunk of his voluminous North Africa-centered personal collection), of money, or of their time and effort.  Thanks to all and Happy New Year.

Gerald Loftus