Avuncular American

Can't Stop Curating

New "name cloud" exhibit of Paul Bowles and literary & artistic friends drawn to Tangier

Can't stop curating?

Well, I do have to stop - we're getting on the ferry to Spain Friday morning!  Friends have joked that I'll still be at it tomorrow morning, mounting yet more exhibits while my wife waits in the car.  Not true; I stopped this afternoon.

At the French Consulate's 14 Juillet reception after we arrived in 2010, a Moroccan friend introduced me as the "nouveau conservateur" in what people in Tangier only knew then as the "Musée de l'Ancienne Légation Américaine."  I joked that I was no conservative... I was a Democrat!

But the point is that conservateur or curator was the way people thought of this position in this city.  I thought that was a bit limiting - how about our research library?  Our seminars?  The Arabic literacy program?  Etc.  I also didn't like that ancienne thing - made it sound like we were closed.

Over the past four years, I've waged a branding campaign, using our award-winning logo on business cards and throughout the building, and our no-longer-new appelation of TALIM to convey the message that though we have a museum, we are much more than a museum.  Now, it's quite common to see references to "TALIM" in the press, and it always pleases me to hear us described as an institut.

That said, it has really been fun, that curating stuff.  In 2010, when we mounted what has become one of our biggest attractions, the Paul Bowles Wing, replete with musical soundtrack and illustrated story of Bowles' treks through Morocco for the Library of Congress, someone asked me who had curated the exhibit.  I replied, well, that I had.  That was the first time someone described what I had done as curation.  It felt pretty good.

A couple of years later, when we put on Dorothy Weems' one-woman show of her mother's stories during the Legation's wartime years, the actress referred to me as her "producer," just for organizing the venue and helping her with rehearsals.  Not to worry: I'm not about to embark on a Hollywood career at this stage.  But "producing" what was a very memorable recreation of a special period in the place where it all happened was a joy.  I learned later that it was called, in academic circles, "site-specific performance."  And how.

It's been quite a whirl, these past four years, and Marie Hélène (who has worked tirelessly, helping me in everything I do, plus teaching French in our women's literacy program and helping shepherd the other volunteers) and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.

So it's not adieu, but only إلـى الـلـقـاء.

Gerald Loftus

Morocco's Music: Archives to Archnet

His Majesty King Mohammed VI

Paul Bowles Library of Congress

Moroccan Music Collection

Tangier American Legation

Institute for Moroccan Studies

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It was the only way I could think of to get the opus of Morocco's traditional music, recorded in 1959 by Paul Bowles and digitized by TALIM in 2010, into the hands of King Mohammed VI: have a leather presentation case made, embossed with the TALIM logo and dedicated to His Majesty.

US Ambassador to Morocco Dwight Bush now has it, and will present it at an appropriate occasion.  Morocco's musical heritage will have been repatriated after more than fifty years in the vaults of the Library of Congress.

We hope that this will spur the Moroccan Ministry of Culture to action, so that this music - 250 selections from all across Morocco, what Paul Bowles called "as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India" - can get into the hands of Moroccans who treasure their musical heritage.

In the meantime, another avenue for the dissemination of the Bowles Moroccan music collection is being prepared by the Aga Khan Documentation Center in the MIT Libraries, which will make the files available in Archnet

a globally-accessible, scholarly resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues in Muslim societies.

Archnet is an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT..  While there are still certain technical details to be ironed out before the Bowles collection is online accessible, we are thrilled that soon scholars and traditional music enthusiasts worldwide will be able to listen to the entire 72 hours of music.

Archnet already has a Legation page, and we are also working with them to make another rich archive accessible, once it's fully digitized: the TALIM glass negative collection from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about which we have written on TALIMblog and part of which is now displayed in our museum.

So, researchers eager to see the pictures or listen to the music: hold your horses, please be patient, and we'll be sure to let you know when you can access the collections online.  In the meantime, do check out what Archnet already has in its extensive collections.

Gerald Loftus

Tangier: Guides and Gateways

Cover by Robert McDonald, Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

The following is a guest post by Emma Chubb, who made a presentation on her subject to a group of American, European, and Moroccan researchers and interested members of the public at TALIM on June 17.  Emma Chubb is a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois USA) and is a 2013-14 American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) fellow in Morocco.

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Guides and Gateways

I spent much of last fall reading through TALIM’s collection of guidebooks and tourism magazines published between the 1940s and 1970s. Perhaps it was because I too was a newcomer to Tangier, but these guides fascinated me. Some folded out like maps, mixing quirky tips for the European or American traveler to Tangier with black-and-white photographs and brightly colored illustrations.

Tanger, Porte du Maroc [Tanger, Door to Morocco] (Marseille: Syndicat d’initiative et de tourisme de Tanger, nd). Collection TALIM Research Library.

With others, it was the advertisements that drew me in. I was particularly struck by how, in the space of a half-page, they bore such efficient witness to the complexity of colonial Tangier when it was an International Zone.

Take, for example, the advertisement for a shop called Butterfly published in the 1952 American guide, Tangier: The Golden Gateway, in which the United States, France, and the so-called Far East come together in the space of a few inches. While both the shop’s name and ad content appear in English, its rue des Vignes address and accented “e” in the abbreviation “Tél” point to France. Yet despite being in Morocco, shoppers will find nary a babouche here. Instead, this Tangerine store sells “rare objects from the Far East,” including, perhaps, silk kimono-clad, paper parasol-wielding female figurines like the one pictured.

Advertisement in Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

Not surprisingly, many of the stereotypes and stock characters for which the city remains (in)famous appear throughout these guides. Frequent mentions of beaches, sunshine, modern hotels, and a favorable exchange rate promise various kinds of pleasure, while Moroccan handicrafts and produce sold by Rifi women in bright red-and-white striped foutas and pompom-adorned straw hats lend an “authentic,” “traditional,” and, yes, “exotic” ambiance.

Photograph in Hassan Dehbi, “En parcourant le Rif [Crossing the Rif],” in Maroc tourisme 59 (1970). Collection TALIM Research Library.

These clichés don’t only appear in guides from the colonial period, however, as TALIM’s collection of materials published by the Moroccan Ministry of Information and Tourism, such as Maroc Tourisme, makes clear. With its many examples from both before independence and after, TALIM’s guidebook collection raises important questions about the persistence of colonialist clichés in the postcolonial period.

These questions, like the guidebooks themselves, merit further study, particularly today as Tangier and the North take center stage in Morocco’s efforts to become a top global destination for tourists and in the many new guidebooks that they will undoubtedly bring with them.

Emma Chubb

A Virtual Tour for Ambassador Peck

TALIM logo and lettering at entrance to museum (installed June 2014)

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Pavilion cedar doors, re-sculpted 2013

This is a "guest post" by Ambassador Edward Peck, who returned to Tangier on May 1 on board a cruise ship, and had been hoping to show Mrs. Peck the place where he and several other future US ambassadors had studied Arabic over fifty years ago.

He found our doors closed.  Disappointment all around - we were so looking forward, as the Pecks were, to a trip down memory lane.  Since the visit unfortunately didn't happen, here's a virtual tour of the Legation in photos (featuring some Legation exhibits that have just been opened), along with Ambassador Peck's narrative of his return to Tangier.

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One of the first six students who attended FSI’s Arabic Language School in the old Legation building when it opened in 1961, I was both pleasantly surprised and extremely impressed by the view of Tangier from the sea as our ship arrived on May Day 2014.

The string of impressive, white high-rises all along the shoreline of the bay, and marching up the hills, were dramatic indications that there have been some very significant changes since I graduated in 1963.

Legation room: more than two centuries of diplomatic history

Although the newer parts of the city look very much like those in other countries, especially in terms of the modern shops, office buildings and condos that line the wide, clean streets, the old city, the medina/casbah, is very much like it was back then.  Using my rusty but still serviceable Arabic as needed, I was able to make my way through the winding, narrow alleys to what is now TALIM, but found it closed for May Day.

 

"Moroccans in America" exhibit, Pavilion staircase, opened June 2014

Director Jerry Loftus and I had been communicating about the visit, and he had left instructions with the guard to be on the lookout for me, but somehow that did not work and I did not get an opportunity to actually see what the inside looks like now.  Photographs are helpful, and I doubt I could find the rooms in which we studied and played ping-pong to relax, but I know it is quite different.

The dining room exhibit of Marguerite McBey's sketchbooks

It was pretty run down when I did the 22-month, 6 hour days, five days per week, and had been empty since the new Consulate General had been built farther up the hill.  An explorer by nature, in an empty cellar room I found three metal boxes containing about forty 78 rpm records from wartime Germany.  They included some heavily propagandist music: "We’re Sailing on England Tonight" and "Deutschland Uber Alles," played by the Hermann Goering Division band; "The Horst Wessel Song," by the Adolf Hitler SS Division band.  There were also many contemporary, folk song and classical records, all in excellent condition.  I donated them to the Library of Congress, since no one in the CG had any idea how the boxes got there.

Exhibit of glass negative images of Tangier International Zone (opened May 2014)

In 2014, I went looking for the little house we had lived in, and found it in a tiny island of similar houses totally surrounded by multi-storey buildings.  It is a pharmacy now, and I imagine that enclave of small homes will soon be a memory.

Legation courtyard: four orange trees in parterres of crushed seashells

What has not changed is the warm and outgoing population.  Moroccans are justifiably known for their open, welcoming and smiling personalities, especially those in Tangier, and it was a pleasure to be among them again.  The visit was brief, but wrapped in reliving very pleasant memories of a time long ago.

Ambassador Edward Peck; photos Gerald Loftus

Introducing the New Mudir - John Davison

Almost four years to the day, I wrote about my predecessor Thor Kuniholm and his long tenure at the Legation.  Next week, it will be my successor, John Davison, who will be coming in after Marie Hélène and I head off to greener pastures.

I was an early and strong supporter of John's candidacy, among a very competitive field of applicants for this job.  He had visited us at the Legation after learning of the job opening, and we were impressed with his enthusiasm, imagination, and his knowledge of Morocco.

John has known Morocco since his days in the 1980s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and has kept his links - and his knowledge of Moroccan Arabic - alive in the intervening decades, when his diplomatic career took him to other countries in the region (Tunisia, Egypt, Niger) and beyond.

This sentiment of leaving the Legation in good hands has only been reinforced by a period of overlap, where we had plenty of time to discuss the range of activities that is TALIM.  And John was able to witness first hand many of these in a particularly busy May and June, meeting many in our network of supporters in the bargain.  It's been optimum preparation for his taking the helm.

So this is not yet goodbye - we'll save that for the "last post" - but rather Welcome to the New Mudir (Arabic for Director).  I daresay John will fall in love with this venerable building as we have.  As those of us who know it best will appreciate, it deserves all the loving care we can give it.

Gerald Loftus

The Skeletons of Portuguese Tangier

The skeletons of Martin Malcolm Elbl's book are not in any closets, they're the very walls of Tangier's medina, its old walled city which was, for centuries, Tangier itself, before the city dared build outside the fortifications.

"Your library has been randomly selected..." was the explanation on the $0.00 invoice slip that accompanied Portuguese Tangier (1471-1662): Colonial Urban Fabric as Cross-Cultural Skeleton, by Martin Malcolm Elbl of Trent University in Ontario.  This 1,000 page tome is the first volume of a series published by the Baywolf Press for Portuguese Studies Review (PSR).

Here's how PSR describes the book:

The book offers a “virtual archaeology” of the Portuguese urban fabric heritage--both vanished and preserved--in Tangier's médina, the walled Old Town. Solidly grounded in archival sources and profoundly revisionist, Portuguese Tangier alters our image of the médina to an unexpected extent.

"Encyclopedic" is often overused, but in the case of Martin Malcolm Elbl storehouse of knowledge, it is an understatement; Elbl is as at home in Portuguese as in Arabic, as at ease with GIS modeling as he is with Wencelas Hollar engravings of British Tangier.

Oh yes, what is British Tangier doing in a book on the Portuguese era, the mere twenty years which came on the heels of the two long centuries of Portuguese rule?  Elbl says that the British conveniently renamed much of what was in fact Portuguese (our own neighbor, the wonderfully-named "Irish Battery," was originally the Portuguese Cubelo do Bispo).  Same stones, different colonists.

There's much useful background for understanding what Elbl calls the "prehistory" of the Legation's immediate surroundings.  The drouj merican or American steps, built into the medina wall in 1911 to allow more convenient access to the American Legation, had been predated by a Portuguese-era entrance further down what today is, appropriately, Rue du Portugal.

And then there's another long-gone neighbor: "the 'Sultan Steam Mill' (almost back to back with the Legation). This was in the 1880s -- one of the early waves of industrialization at Tangier."  And the nearby "Times of Morocco" offices... we have much to learn from Portuguese Tangier, which is an unexpected but important addition to our research library.

Thank you Martin Malcolm Elbl, the Portuguese Studies Review, Trent University, and the Baywolf Press.  We suspect that the "random selection" had a bit of human agency behind it!

Gerald Loftus

The First Farewell

Drawing by Lawrence Mynott, graphic design by Anthea Pender

The eagle - hats off to artist Lawrence Mynott and his American eagle balloon on our invitation cards - has taken off, or almost.  Actually, we're still here for a couple more weeks, so last night's farewell was the biggest but not the last farewell.

Thanks to the generosity of Madison Cox, we were sent off with full flying colors by our Tangier friends, a cross section of this multidimensional city, with donors, staff members, artists, artisans, academics... everyone who has helped us make this place a livelier, more open venue for our wide range of activities.

Four years seems like a brief snippet of time to many who have made Tangier their home, but we wanted to inject as much activity and innovation into those 48 months as possible, and then leave on a high note.

Speaking of notes, we were also graced by the presence of Gospel ensemble the Campbell Brothers, who joined us prior to their open air concert on the Grand Socco, Tangier's lively square which is the transition between medina and modern city.

"Amazing Grace," sung a capella to a hushed audience, was the perfect preview for what was a rousing performance post-party organized by the US Embassy and the American Language Center.

This is not "the last post," so stay tuned for a few more under this byline in the next couple of weeks.  And heartfelt thanks to Madison Cox for putting on a great party, and helping us celebrate this great institution and our brief moment helping more people get to know it.

Gerald Loftus

Global Voices, Chicago and Tangier

Tangier Global Voices group, plus ALC Tangier staff: IT wizard Rachid El Mziryahi,
teacher Rabia el Antaki, and Director Mark Holbrook

Their voices came wafting up over the Legation courtyard, a springtime Friday evening.  Intrigued, I paid a visit to our group of high school English students enrolled in the Global Voices Initiative program, thanks to our partnership with the American Language Center (ALC) Tangier.  You can watch the videos on the ALC website.

It was practice for their upcoming presentation of a set of three plays, which they developed, wrote in English, and then performed for their audience of American students in Chicago, via a Google + connection.

Meanwhile, the Chicago students were doing the same thing - in Arabic.  Here's how George Bajalia (he's smiling from the corner of the screen in the photo below), former Fulbright scholar in performance studies in Tangier, described the scene in Chicago:

Global Voices Initiative's Chicago end operates in public schools, with elementary, middle, and high schools all focusing on arts exchanges with partner schools across the world. With Morocco, students in Chicago write plays in Arabic, French, and English. Lindblom Math and Science Academy is a public school flagship Arabic program, drawing in students from across Chicago's south side. Lindblom students have two choices for their language learning: Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. GVI connects these students with partners in Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and China to practice their languages through playwriting exchanges.

A few of Lindblom's Arabic language students were chosen by the Qatar Foundation to travel to Doha to participate in an international Arabic language debate, and some will be heading back this summer for a language program. Another student in this year's senior class traveled to Morocco last year for a high school study abroad, spending 6 weeks traveling across the country. Though the focus of the program is Modern Standard Arabic, students get exposure to Arabic dialects in the video conferences and many start their university studies with a full four years of Arabic behind them.

 

Another one of GVI's programs in Chicago is at Kelly High School, where students of English as a foreign language practice their English with playwriting and exchange plays with students with a similar level of English at public schools in Casablanca. The Chicago classrooms are full of native Spanish and Mandarin speakers, and the play topics range from stories of forbidden love in Chicago high schools, to border-crossing travels based on the students' own family histories. Photos and videos of the student's performances are on GVI America's Google + account, located here.

GVI - the Global Voices Initiative - is another great idea coming out of the State Department's embrace of social networks and the need to stretch its cultural diplomacy dollars.

Although I didn't get a chance to see the American students in action - with the time difference, they had to go off to another class, while our Tangier students were doing this on Friday evenings - I was impressed with the level of English of our Moroccan students.

 

Not only did they work to get their English as natural as possible, but they chose subjects that hit home with their concerns about growing up: the play I saw, "The Perfect Bride," dealt with the role of a very assertive mother in the choice of potential marriage partners for her son.

 

How often was Mom initially taken in by a seemingly wholesome future daughter-in-law, only to be confronted by a critical young woman with thoughts of her own.  In the end, the son just marries for love, and Mom will just have to make the best of it.

 

Global Voices, as the State Department puts it rather ungraciously, is a "cheap way" to connect young people.  But that economic argument - probably necessary when dealing with Congressional budget cutters - only tells part of the story.  This is an ingenious idea, and one that is applicable wherever internet connections permit.

 

So TALIM was very happy to host this program - all for the price of a few hours of electricity.

 

Gerald Loftus

Ten Years of "Performing Tangier"

Several other intervening events prevented me from properly congratulating Dr. Khalid Amine and his circle in the International Center for Performance Studies on the tenth edition of "Performing Tangier."

Anyone who has put on one academic conference knows the preparation that goes into it.  Now think of that done on an international, multilingual scale, ten years in a row, and with publications to boot, all in Tangier.

The Legation's role in this for 2014 was limited to providing a venue for the launch party, and as you can see from the photo above, the participants got into the swing of things, even though the oud player was properly sedate.

Previous editions of "Performing Tangier" also featured a Legation role, our high point being in 2012 when we did a "site-specific" performance of daughter playing mother at the Legation during wartime Tangier.

And thanks to Khalid Amine and George Roberson for crediting the Legation in the latest edition of their "Performing Tangier" series.  But all congratulations go to them for persevering over the last decade, putting Tangier on the map for drama studies scholars and practitioners from Europe, North America, and Australia.  Happy Tenth, and may there be many more to come!

Gerald Loftus

TALIM Library Catalog Finds an Online Home

Grecia Álvarez has written the following guest post.

Grecia Álvarez (MLIS) is a librarian and an EFL instructor who specializes in Cataloging and Information Literacy Instruction. Her first encounter with Morocco was in 2010-2011, when she was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University in Tetouan. She has been working on various projects at the Legation since her arrival in Tangier last September, including volunteering as an English teacher in our Arabic literacy program for the women of the medina.

Her librarian work at the Legation has been possible thanks to a generous grant provided by the U.S. Embassy in Rabat.

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We librarians lead pretty exciting lives. We come into daily contact with objects of incalculable value, like books and papers that have played a role in furthering relations between peoples and nations.

Nowhere is this truer than at the Legation. Over the last few months, I have had the singular privilege of ruffling through a myriad of instrumental tomes, some dating back to the 1700s. These are books and original documents that have passed through the hands of local and international celebrities and are, miraculously, still available today for perusal.

Contemplating these collections is all a part of a day’s work for me, as I help to migrate the Legation’s paper-based catalog, that has served the library well since the 1970’s, to its new online home at LibraryThing. While there is still a lot of work to be done, especially in the way of classifying books into the Library of Congress classification system (which means labeling, one-by-one, close to 8,000 books!), my hope is that this new catalog will help researchers the world-over get a clearer picture of our unique holdings. Who knows, maybe with a more discoverable catalog the library will garner more visits from scholars and people interested in Morocco. Nothing makes a librarian’s heart happier than a well-used library.

While my time in Tangier is quickly coming to an end, I hope to continue perfecting our catalog remotely. I invite all of you to get involved too and play a part in enriching our collections. With just a few clicks through to our Amazon Wishlist, you can donate a book (or two!) to fill some of our information needs. Local and international researchers will benefit immensely from your gifts, now and for years to come.

Grecia Álvarez; photo Gerald Loftus