To help raise funds for the Morocco Library Project, I contributed a chapter to Our Morocco: Moroccans and Expats Share Their Lives, Hopes, Dreams, and Adventures.
Though I'd much prefer that people purchase the book and thereby help fund more English language and public libraries in Morocco, I'll provide you with a couple of excerpts from my humble contribution. Hey, I'm just thrilled to be in the same book with the likes of Tahir Shah and Alice Morrison! Excerpts:
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When people imagine an expat’s life in Morocco, what do they see? Luxuriating on beaches or strolling through the souks of Marrakesh. Romantic notions of arabesque refurbished riads abound, designer-perfect and easily available through AirBnB. But what is life like in America’s only National Historic Landmark located abroad, living upstairs from the museum that is the Tangier American Legation? Let me tell you.
Tangier, where Americans first set foot just after the Revolutionary War, and where we looked out over the flat rooftops of the ancient medina to Spain, as the very modern tankers and container ships plied the Strait of Gibraltar. But other than Night at the Museum, few people can imagine what it is like to live in the place you work, especially when that place is a museum. Like Ben Stiller’s museum guard, we too had Teddy Roosevelt to keep us company...
So there it is: “my Morocco” is also the Morocco of the 1830s American Consuls who had to deal with successive sultans’ gifts of Atlas lions destined for the President of the United States; of World War II skullduggery in the Rif mountains by secret agents of the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and of the quasi hippie Peace Corps volunteers in training at the Legation in the seventies, who turned an underground (and dried-up) water reservoir into a disco they named “the Cistern Chapel.” Living in the present — while imagining life there in the past — was a large part of the pleasure of my years in Tangier.
To really appreciate how unique the Tangier American Legation is, you might start by running that phrase through a search engine. You’ll learn that “legations” have all disappeared, replaced in the 1950s by embassies. All the Morocco tourist guidebooks, from Lonely Planet to the Guide du Routard, sing the praises of the Tangier American Legation museum, but you might need a good map to locate it, hidden as it is just inside the walled, mostly narrow pedestrian streets of the medina of Tangier.
So that’s “our Morocco,” in a nutshell. Like many foreigners, we’re smitten by the warmth and generosity of Moroccans and always feel at home when we return. But we have a few additional friends that no one else can see, and they’re also there to keep us company.
There’s Sidney Paley, the modern-day American pirate, tried at the Legation Consular Court in the early 1950s (he got a reduced sentence and said he’d go back to his original occupation — smuggling).
And then there’s Dean of Dean’s Bar, a wartime man of mystery who’d remind you of “Rick” and his café in Casablanca. There’s Raisuli, the bandit who kidnapped an American and was played by Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion.
There’s ... you know I could go on forever. “My Morocco” is in the present, and of the past. A bit of real-time traveling, thanks to living in a museum.
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