Avuncular American

My Morocco: Living in a museum in Tangier

President Theodore Roosevelt reacting to the kidnapping of American Ion Perdicaris by Moroccan chieftan Raisuli in Tangier in 1904. Illustration by Lawrence Mynott in Lions at the Legation & Other Tales: Two Centuries of American Diplomatic Life in Tangier, by Gerald Loftus

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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Anne Frank, essential reading in these times

In the wake of the November US election, we happened to spend several days in Amsterdam.  One of my must-sees was the Anne Frank House, where one of the world's most read authors hid with her family from the Nazis from 1942 until they were captured and sent to concentration camps in 1944.

So many millions of people around the world read Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl" as part of their school curriculum.  I hadn't, so I finally made up for it.  Since we know how the story ends, it's a heartbreaking glimpse into the hopes and fears of an aspiring teenage writer.  You dread that final diary entry.  And in the gift shop, I bought a diary with the same binding and plaid cover that Anne used.

Why? Because the story of this innocent girl, whose only "crime" that she was born a Jew, speaks volumes to our times.  I started my diary entries on the train back to Brussels, determined that I would write during these times that bode very ill for all that is decent and civilized.

Anne never got around to writing daily entries, and I'm even less diligent.  But we all should chronicle our reactions, and register our objections.  And not just in a diary.

As the assault on the weak gets fully underway by the bullies who are increasingly able to rise to power, people need to do everything they can to protect democracy.  Register to vote, and help others to do so too.  Contact elected representatives to ensure that the framework of a civilized democracy is not dismantled.

The Anne Frank Declaration, signed by world leaders from Nelson Mandela to Bill Clinton:

"Because prejudice and hatred harm us all, I declare that:

• I will stand up for what is right and speak out against what is unfair and wrong
• I will try to defend those who cannot defend themselves
• I will strive for a world in which our differences will make no difference - a world in which everyone is treated fairly and has an equal chance in life"

Today January 27 is Holocaust Memorial Day.  Anne Frank's father Otto was among those liberated by Soviet forces from Auschwitz death camp on this day in 1944.  He was the only survivor of those who hid in the "Secret Annex" in Amsterdam, and made his daughter's message his life's work.

Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, just a month or so before the camp's liberation.  We now know that her father had unsuccessfully attempted to gain entry into the United States for the Frank family.

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Update: The above post was written before we learned that the Trump White House declaration on the Holocaust specifically avoided stating that Jews were singled out for annihilation by the Nazis.  Many have seen "Holocaust Denial Lite" and the work of the far right in this omission.  On the same day, of course, Trump signed his Muslim Ban executive order, setting off a firestorm of protest worldwide and triggering unprecedented opposition from within his own executive branch, as well as judicial judgements deeming his actions unconstitutional.  What a way to honor the Anne Franks of 1945 and 2017.

The Longest Night

The book's yellowed cover is a testament to its longevity and continued relevance.  It was a textbook in my university history class, published in 1965 when the fall of Hitler was barely twenty years in the past.  It continues to be required reading in many classes, both in the US and Europe.

Author William Sheridan Allen chose to name the German town that was the focus of his research "Thalburg," his "Middletown, Germany" in the words of reviewer Walter Laqueur.  Just a typical town in 1930s Germany, which thanks to subsequent editions, we now know is Northeim.

I've been re-reading it in light of the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican Party candidate, and now after his victory in yesterday's 2016 Presidential election.  Here are some passages (in blue).

"This [book] is an attempt to understand one of the central political and moral problems of the twentieth century: how a civilized democracy could be plunged into a nihilistic dictatorship."

I have just spent most of election night and the day after speaking to groups here in Brussels - students at the main French-speaking university, and three hours on Belgian TV commenting live on the final returns leading up to Trump's speech - as a concerned expatriate voter.  I was well behaved, ever the diplomatic Avuncular American.

Now that the deed is done, I can share my deepest concerns with readers.  But I'll let William Sheridan Allen and The Nazi Seizure of Power do most of the talking.

"Nazi propaganda consists entirely of a perpetual appeal to whatever is swinish in man."  Dr. Kurt Schumacher, SPD, Reichstag speech February 1932.

"Swinish" is a good 20th century word that certainly describes what the world has been watching at Trump rallies.  Though it accurately reflects the bombastic, boorish content favored by President Elect Trump, it probably is unfair to the swines.

"There were two groups of Nazis in Thalburg," said a former civil servant, "the decent ones and the gutter type.  In the end, the gutter won out."

Last month I made a trip back to south Florida for a family bereavement.  We're talking suburban Fort Lauderdale, not the Everglades.  And yet, of all the political bumper stickers on display while waiting at traffic lights, not a single one was for Hillary Clinton.  It was all for Trump on those pickup trucks, along with assorted gun totin' homilies - "Marines kill people" (not a condemnation, on the contrary, just a proud statement of a state of mind).

"Most of those who joined the Nazis did so because they wanted a radical answer... people wanted a hard, sharp, clear leadership - they were disgusted with the eternal political strife of parliamentary party politics."

The only words that need to be replaced might be "Nazi" and "parliamentary" to update this to 2016.  Think "gridlock" and other ways to blame-share what has been Republican obstructionism over the eight years of President Obama.

"Anyone who went regularly to Nazi meetings, or read the pamphlets, or even slogans chalked on the walls, should have been able to discern the vulgar and violent aspects of the NSDAP (Nazi party)."

Who needs pamphlets these days when you have a multitude of Tweets straight from the man himself?  Trump's almost single-handed campaign and nonstop utterances are amply documented for all to see; no one can say they were duped by his charm.

"The failure of the middle class parties to withstand the Nazi electoral drive was caused by... the inadequacy of their followers' commitment to (or understanding of) democracy."

Early indications of voter turnout in the 2016 election show it hovering slightly above 50%.  Does that mean that almost half of the US voting population "lacked a commitment to democracy" by their failure to vote?  Trump was elected with 24% of the popular vote, meaning 76% of the electorate did not vote for Trump; here is a great graphic provided by Ryan McMaken of the libertarian think tank Mises Institute.  Historical footnote: in 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor after his Nazi party garnered 33% of the vote.

Back to Allen's The Nazi Seizure of Power:

"The Depression not only created the climate of fear in which the Nazis throve, it also embittered political processes.  The root of the problem was the division into two groups of absolute opponents, each of which meant to destroy the other..."

Fear - we have that in spades, as well as an embittered political process.  On the eve of the election, The Atlantic quoted Brookings Institution's Thomas Wright, who had Tweeted

Pretty clear this is the most important election anywhere in the world since the two German elections of 1932.  No other election has had the capacity to completely overturn the international order—the global economy, geopolitics, etc.

Well, we've had our election, and the world awakened today to find that perhaps after all things won't be the same again.  Will a future historian one day write about how, in 2016, a typical American suburb stood as a microcosm of the "movement" (as President Elect Trump termed it last night) that has swept all opposition before it?

Gerald Loftus

(First published November 9, 2016 - the day after the election of Donald J. Trump)

J. Rives Childs in Wartime Tangier

This post was originally published in 2014 on the Tangier American Legation blog.

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Soviet arrest of Raoul Wallenberg, the "Swedish Schindler," I republish three posts on a righteous American diplomat who helped more than a thousand Jews escape the Holocaust.

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The January-February 2014 issue of the Foreign Service Journal contains my article on the Legation's World War II Chargé d'Affaires, J. Rives Childs.  Alternatively, this link to the FSJ gives you an option for either PDF or "FlippingBook" versions of the entire issue, but I've repeated the text below for TALIMblog readers.

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On July 16, 1987, the New York Times noted the passing of J. Rives Childs, a “former American diplomat and authority on Casanova.”

Childs had led many lives: volunteer ambulance driver à la Hemingway and U.S. Army cryptographer in France during World War I (he later received the Medal of Freedom for cracking German codes); postwar White House correspondent; American Relief Administration official (one of “Hoover’s Boys”) in the famine-stricken USSR of the 1920s; and a Foreign Service officer whose 30-year career culminated with ambassadorships to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia after World War II.

Childs also wrote 14 books, ranging from definitive studies of Casanova and French writers of the 18th century (some written in French) to several works touching on his Foreign Service career. His final memoir, Let the Credit Go (1983), recounts his tenure as chargé d’affaires at the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, between 1941 and 1945.

Despite the wealth of material generated by and about Childs, he remains an enigma. Was it just luck that he came unscathed through the McCarthy-era witch hunts despite some unconventional views on the Soviet Union? Just how effective a diplomat was a man some called an “insufferable prig” for driving his staff up the wall--including agents from the wartime Office of Strategic Services who were just trying to do their job?

And is Childs an unsung hero of the Holocaust, whose name belongs among the “righteous gentiles” at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial? Or all of the above?

Franco’s Spain and Petain’s France Meet in Morocco

For sheer complexity and strategic importance, Childs’ four-plus years in Tangier as chargé d’affaires (1941-1945) overshadow his later assignments as ambassador.

Though he resided at the American Legation in the city’s International Zone, Childs was accredited to Morocco, which was divided into French and Spanish protectorates. The U.S. had never recognized the Spanish zone, and the situation was further complicated when the forces of General Francisco Franco, recently victorious in the Spanish Civil War, occupied the International Zone after France fell to German forces in June 1940.

The U.S. continued to recognize the Petain government in Vichy, and American policy was to cultivate relations with Vichy representatives in North Africa. Childs applied himself energetically to that task, cultivating officials favorable to the Allied cause and probing French and Spanish officials about their attitudes on a hypothetical Allied landing.

In particular, would Franco abandon his official neutrality and allow German forces to sweep down from Spain and through Morocco once American troops landed, as they did in November 1942 (Operation Torch)?  (Franco did maintain Spanish neutrality, angering Adolf Hitler.)

These concerns were shared by the new clandestine service set up in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Office of Strategic Services. This precursor to the CIA chose the American Legation in Tangier as its headquarters for Mediterranean operations, and recruited a Harvard anthropologist, Carleton Coon, who was given diplomatic cover as a vice consul.  Coon’s anthropological fieldwork in the northern Moroccan Rif Mountains in the 1920s and 1930s gave him an entrée with the Berber tribes who had rebelled against Spanish occupation.

The OSS plan was to furnish financial support and weapons so the Berbers would be ready to rise up in rebellion should Franco join the Axis and threaten the Allies (which he never did). Vice Consul Coon invented fanciful code names for his chief Moroccan contacts like “Tassels” and “Strings.” He later described his cloak-and-dagger work in North Africa Story, an entertaining compilation of his wartime reports.

Coon’s exploits did not amuse Childs, however. Though he didn’t name Coon, the chargé later wrote that one of his vice consuls had harbored delusions of becoming “a second Lawrence of Arabia.” 

For his part, Coon paints a damning picture of Childs as so out of touch about the nature of clandestine work that he had the OSS communication operation moved out of the legation because the tapping of the telegraph kept his wife awake at night. Retired Ambassador Carleton Coon Jr. recalls “This appeared treasonable to my father, and after I had started on my own diplomatic career, my father swore he would never allow his son to serve under ‘that SOB’.”

Whether this was “treasonable” conduct or just extreme micromanagement is a matter of opinion. What is less debatable is that many of Childs’ colleagues saw him as priggish. For instance, he proudly recounted his success in prohibiting female American dependents from wearing slacks and shorts within the residential compound in Addis Ababa, his last diplomatic posting, in the early 1950s. When the women protested this vestige of Puritanism, Childs threatened to have any offenders and their husbands transferred out of Ethiopia.

Fascist Visas Save Jewish Lives

During his time in Spanish-occupied Tangier of the 1940s, Chargé Childs had initially approached the Spanish authorities with circumspection, assuming that High Commissioner General Luis Orgaz was a Franco fascist.  But working contacts fostered warmer relations, which would lead to an important humanitarian action.

Tangier, like the Casablanca depicted in the film of that title, was an important hub for refugees fleeing both the war and the Holocaust. Renée Reichmann, herself a refugee from Hungary, was a key figure in relief efforts from Tangier, and was affiliated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Reichmann’s efforts in sending tons of food parcels to occupied Europe were herculean, and she even performed the unimaginable: a trip back through fascist Europe to Hungary in 1942 to see her parents for what proved to be the last time. By early 1944, the Jewish community of Hungary was targeted for the Final Solution, and Reichmann’s focus shifted from relief to rescue.

She approached Childs to enlist his help in extricating hundreds of Jews in Budapest from the clutches of the Nazis. Reichmann’s request came just after the Roosevelt administration created the War Refugee Board, a belated attempt to intervene on behalf of Jews and other threatened populations.  Childs was therefore able to add official U.S. government weight to what was initially a personal, humanitarian gesture.

It turns out that Spanish High Commissioner General Orgaz was not the fascist that Childs had assumed him to be. He issued several tranches of visas for Tangier, which was sufficient for the Nazis to consider the threatened Jews to be protected by a friendly power.  On the eve of Childs’ departure from Tangier in June 1945, Reichmann wrote him to express thanks “for your extremely noble and generous assistance in the affair of the entry visas for Tangier ... Thus, 1,200 innocent souls owe their survival to Your Excellency.”

At the Tangier American Legation’s museum, we display the full text of Reichmann’s letter, and note the fact that J. Rives Childs kept the letter in his pocket for years afterwards. For this action, worthy of Raoul Wallenberg and other World War II diplomats who saved Jews by the thousand, Childs--as in the title of his autobiography-- “let the credit go” to Reichmann for proposing the action and to Orgaz for issuing the visas.

An Arabist, but Not an Anti-Semite 

The operation, however, clearly left its mark on the seemingly stiff diplomat. Responding to Reichmann, he wrote: “I do not know of any work which I have done in my whole career which has given me greater personal satisfaction than the efforts made on behalf of these friendless persons."

 At the same time, Childs’ motivation for keeping Reichmann’s letter went beyond sentiment.  In his mind, it refuted any potential accusations that he was sympathetic to the cause of anti-Semitism.

His sensitivity to such charges presumably grew over the course of a succession of assignments in the Arab world. He served as consul in Jerusalem during the 1920s, and a desk officer for the Palestine Mandate and a mid-level diplomat in Cairo in the 1930s, followed by assignments to Tangier and Jeddah in the 1940s.  

“There is not the least doubt in my mind,” he commented in reflecting on his 30 years’ experience in the Middle East, “that so long as our unconditional support of Israel continues, there will be no peace in that area.” In 1952, in what he called his “swan song,” he sent a telegram responding to a question about Arab support for U.S. policy as follows: “United States support of Israel has undermined the confidence and trust which we once enjoyed in the Arab world.” He retired from the Foreign Service that same year.

Cane inscribed "J. Rives Childs," gift of Legation staff on Childs' departure from Tangier, 1945

Anti-Zionism, of course, does not equate to anti-Semitism, and there is no evidence at all that Childs was anti-Semitic. But we don’t have to take his own word for that. In his book, The Reichmanns, Anthony Bianco describes that family’s efforts to have Childs recognized at Yad Vashem as a “righteous Gentile.”

The Reichmanns launched that campaign even though they understood full well how unlikely they were to succeed. Not only was Israel loath to give any credit to Franco’s Spain for issuing the Tangier visas, but Childs’ years spent conducting diplomacy in the Middle East were enough to disqualify him from such recognition. It also did not help that Robert Satloff, who devotes his book, Among the Righteous, to the search for “Arab Schindlers” in North Africa in the 1940s, makes no mention of the American diplomat’s role in saving 1,200 Jews.

“Unduly Interested” in Soviet Russia?

Childs had cause to fear political attacks on another front, as well. As early as 1931, Childs recalled, “I received a letter from the State Department saying that attention had been drawn to me for being unduly interested in Soviet Russia.”

Presumably this criticism was based on the fact that Childs had spent two years in the Soviet Union as a relief worker a decade earlier, and had married a Russian woman. Even so, Childs always felt that his interest in the USSR was justified on an intellectual basis as well as for personal reasons. At one point he commented, “One of the quirks of [the] American character is the pathological reaction, bordering on mental disorder, toward anything touching the Russian Revolution or communism.”

In 1939, Childs learned that he had been recommended for promotion, but the move was later rescinded. He never learned exactly why, but assumed it was because “I was believed to entertain unorthodox opinions about Soviet Russia.” Of course, he went on to become chargé in Tangier and a two-time ambassador, so the episode was clearly not a career-ender. 

Jamie Cockfield, editor of Childs’ memoir of the Russian famine years, The Black Lebeda, saw him as a “limousine socialist.” Perhaps so. But in his intellectual embrace of Casanova and other 18th-century writers, Childs primarily seems a man from a bygone age, one who decried the end of the ancien régime in the wake of World War I. 

Writing in 1983, he saw many of the modern world’s troubles--World War II, the Arab-Israeli standoff—as rooted in that traumatic war in the trenches. “The end is not yet in sight, nor is it ever likely to be.”

J. Rives Childs may well have been a flawed hero. But then again, so was Oskar Schindler.

Gerald Loftus

(originally posted January 3, 2014)

Mideast Christians Beyond Christmas

Chances are that last week, as Christmas was being celebrated, your TV news included a segment on the Christians of the Middle East.  It's an annual staple, and provides jarring images like Santa confronting Israeli troops at a checkpoint near Bethlehem.

Throughout the Middle East, ancient Christian communities are being uprooted, if not extinguished.  Pope Francis, in a letter addressed to the Christians of the Middle East, wrote of their "leavening" effect:

You can help your Muslim fellow citizens to present with discernment a more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire, reiterating that Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and favours peaceful coexistence on the part of all.

William Dalrymple, the Scottish author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, in a recent Guardian article, sees the exodus of Christians as the end of secular Arab nationalism.  He quotes the late Lebanese AUB professor Kamal Salibi who detected a "fin de race" fatalism among eastern Christians, a net loss for the Arab world: "It is Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim'."

In his recent Foreign Policy report on Alexandria Egypt (my home for two years in the Eighties) "The Lighthouse Dims," James Traub sees the end of the cosmopolitan ideal:

North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria.

Recently I renewed ties with an old friend, a Palestinian Christian who was a fellow volunteer at a Boy Scout center in Ramallah in the early Seventies.  He and his family are now exiles from their home in Jerusalem, victims of what the Israelis call the "center of life" policy, which renders stateless Palestinians who have the temerity to go abroad on a work assignment.  His wife recounts their ordeal in this article.

Whether it's Israeli policies of harassment and land seizures (which of course affect all Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian), or flight in the face of ISIS terrorism (William Dalrymple refers to the ISIS "Christian-free zone"), Mideast Christians face what could be, in the very lands where Christianity was born, the end of their long history in an entire region.

The instability which has afflicted the region in recent years - the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian revolution and the ensuing ISIS onslaught - has meant the flight of Christians from countries where they had been protected minorities, with sizable populations.  The Arab world's loss - Christian Arabs were the intellectual founders of many of the modern nation-states - will likely be permanent.  As Professor Salibi said, "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place..."  

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

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

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

Gaetana Enders, Tangerina in New York

It was only last month that Gaetana Enders, née Marchegiano, was back in the Tangier of her youth.  We don't often have the pleasure of hosting eighty-something researchers in our library, and I regret that I don't have a photo of Gaetana poring over a stack of books on Tangier, International Zone.

Another regret: she was in the final, fact-checking stage of writing her autobiography, and I wish that I had had more than a tantalizing look at the draft, filled with detail on the war years, when Italian families in Tangier were divided between loyalties to Mussolini, or, in the case of Gaetana's father, to Italy's monarchy.

Gaetana Enders, widow of career Ambassador Thomas Enders, passed away in New York on May 21.

Her trip to Tangier in late April was to revisit the city where she was born and grew up, and where she met her husband.  Which was at the American Legation.

In 1951, when Minister John Carter Vincent - who, as a "China Hand" was in diplomatic purgatory in Tangier, prior to his departure from the US Foreign Service in the worst days of McCarthy - wanted to give a reception for the visiting Thomas Enders, then still a student, he thought of young Gaetana Marchegiano.  She would be the hostess, and invite her young friends.

Daughter of the International Zone's judicial administrator on the Commission of Control, Gaetana not only threw a great party for Thomas Enders but soon became his wife.  She recalled her marriage in Tangier a few years later: "I was paraded through the medina in my white wedding dress, to the accompanying you-yous of the Moroccan women."

 

Wedding in Tangier, courtesy Enders family

Thomas Enders joined the Foreign Service in the late Fifties, and made a meteoric rise through the ranks, serving in several ambassadorial posts, including Canada, Spain, and the European Union.  After his death, Gaetana presented a rare map to the Legation in his honor, in the place where the two had met.

Gaetana led an extremely active life, first as an ambassador's wife, then as International Editor of ¡Hola! magazine (or Hello in its English edition), interviewing a series of international figures and celebrities.

Her final visit to Tangier, though she was still recovering from serious medical problems, was especially touching, revisiting as she did places like the Legation that were so important in her life.  We feel honored that we were able to share this moment with her, and our hearts go out to her family.

Gerald Loftus