Avuncular American

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

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

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

Tangier Songbooks: Nahón & Cohen, Pomeroy & Paloma

Music image from the Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council

This is how we announced last Friday's event:

A handwritten songbook by Alia Isaac Cohen from 1934 Tangier and a recording from 1929 of two women from Tangier singing traditional ballads and speaking in Haketía will be at the core of the discussion between Dr. Hilary Pomeroy (University College London) and Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (INALCO – Sorbonne Paris Cité).

Eighty years ago Alia Isaac Cohen dated her songbook filled with Romances (Ballads) from the oral tradition. Dr. Pomeroy published an edition and commentary of her songbook in 2005, where she explores the connections that this Moroccan Tangerine matriarch had with the literary tradition from medieval and renaissance Europe.

In 1929, Zarita Nahón recorded Simi Nahón de Toledano in New York while a student of Franz Boas. This recording has been archived at Indiana University’s Archive of Traditional Music. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (who finished her graduate work in Indiana in 1996) discovered during her research of the Romances of Northern Morocco that her alma mater housed this historic archive and secured a copy to bring back to Morocco to form part of KHOYA: Sound Archive of Jewish Morocco. This recording has never been heard publicly in Morocco and is a rare glimpse into the musical sound of Jewish women from the early twentieth century.

These two scholars will present the written and recorded traces of the Ballads from Tangier and discuss their similarities and differences.

For an eclectic group of scholars and the culturally curious, Hilary Pomeroy on Alia Isaac Cohen and Vanessa Paloma on Zarita Nahón took us through this world of Jews uprooted from Christian Spain, finding refuge in Muslim Morocco, and handing down traditional songs that still evoke the ancient Sephardic homeland of Toledo and Granada.

Thanks to schools like the Alliance Israelite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, literate women like Cohen and Nahón took to transcribing the ballads or romances.  Even though many were Christian in origin, they told great stories: war, betrayal, adultery, and the accompanying human emotions.  Some were even sung as lullabies; the cadence was the thing, not the lyrics about adulterous, murderous women!

Surviving over the centuries thanks also to their use in specific religious ceremonies or festivals (though some rabbis tried to keep the more racy ballads out of the synagogue), transmission to the modern age was helped enormously by women like Cohen and Nahón.  Zarita Nahón, a Tangier native who studied philology at Columbia, had direct links to the Jewish intelligentsia of the city, whose education and knowledge of foreign languages had made them the ideal dragoman or interpreter/go-between for generations of diplomats in Morocco's diplomatic capital.

Using the metal tube recording technology of the time, Nahón's work resides at Indiana University.  The audience heard several examples.

Vanessa Paloma continues the work of safeguarding this oral tradition, citing her work with elderly women whose faulty memories are suddenly brought into clear focus on hearing Vanessa break into song.  Hilary Pomeroy cited another who recalled "there was always singing; we sang from dawn to dusk."

Making the link with our own lead soldier display from the Malcolm Forbes collection, Hilary Pomeroy spoke of the ballad by Moroccan Jews rejoicing at the death of Don Sebastian, King of Portugal in Morocco's Battle of the Three Kings.  His defeat and death meant that the Jews and Muslims in Morocco would not be forced to convert to Christianity.

Gerald Loftus, text; Mohammed Jadidi, photo

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

The Legation in ICOM News

Dr. Carol Malt, museologist and longtime friend of the Legation, has published the following article in ICOM News, the magazine of the International Council of Museums.  We are thrilled that Carol has brought our modest efforts to the attention of museum professionals worldwide, especially timely on the eve of International Museum Day.

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de Leth (H. and A.), Nieuwe Paskaert vant Naau van de Straat... 1726, hand-colored, 18" x 22", Amsterdam, c. 1740

The Tangier American Legation Museum (TALIM*) represents more than bricks and mortar, beauty and craftsmanship. Its multi-media, multidisciplinary collections focus on the history of the relationship between the United States and Morocco. Its collections visually reinforce the historical relationship between these two nations and reflect the history of Tangier, while its library holds important political, social and historical documents from both countries.

In 1777, Morocco was the first foreign country to recognise the US when it declared independence. The Legation building that houses the museum was a gift from Moroccan Sultan Moulay Suleiman in 1821. Located in the old medina of Tangier, Morocco, it is the first diplomatic mission acquired by the US, the oldest continually occupied American diplomatic property and the only US National Historic Landmark located outside the country.

The building housed US diplomats for 140 years. By 1976, however, the legation had fallen into disrepair and a group of former diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, US ambassadors to Morocco, historians and academics formed the Tangier American Legation Society to restore it. The Tangier American Museum opened its doors on 4 July, 1976 and now serves as a museum, historic house, research library, art gallery, classroom and conference centre.

The collection of paintings, drawings, graphics, maps, rare books and other artefacts focuses on artists who worked in or depicted Morocco and historical documents of Tangier. Over the years, many artists who lived in Tangier, including James and Marguerite McBey (Scotland and US, respectively), Claudio Bravo (Chile) and Elena Prentice (US) have added to Donald Angus’ (US) initial gift of over 300 maps, paintings, carpets, furniture and Moroccan memorabilia to TALIM’s permanent collection.

Connecting through art

The permanent collection is used in many ways. Tours are tailored to audiences of tourists, school children, residents, historians and special interest groups. Local women who participate in TALIM’s free literacy classes also benefit from it, as objects from the collection can be integrated into their lesson plans. The reference library, which contains approximately 8,000 volumes of literature, history and statistics about the region, is another major asset to the community.

Every work of art contains an interesting story, but among the hundreds of paintings in the collection, one by Ion Perdicaris reflects dramatic international connections. "Arab Groom and Horse" might be just another massive, competent genre painting were it not for the history of the artist. Perdicaris came to Tangier in 1872, having had some formal artistic training in Paris, when he was kidnapped by the Berber bandit Raisuli in 1904 and held ransom for USD 70,000. American president Theodore Roosevelt sent US battleships and the Marines into the Tangier harbour to secure his release, wrongly assuming that he was still an American citizen. A romantic version of this story was made into the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Thus, this 19th century painting, like many others in the collection, engages different audiences including contemporary movie-goers, art connoisseurs and historians.

Describing his efforts to enhance the museum’s programming and collections in a recent correspondence, TALIM Director Jerry Loftus wrote: “I have created crossovers from our collections and stories and images from the research library that feed museum exhibits and blog articles. Those in turn spark interest among researchers to delve further into our archives. We have amazing maps and works of art, so we find themes and bring them together on our walls, providing texts to explain the historical context.”

Through its collections and programmes, TALIM aims to connect with an array of different visitors, helping them gain insight into the historical, political and cultural relationship between the US and Morocco. In a 2013 interview, Associate Director Ytimad Bouziane said of this challenge: “ I want TALIM to be a light, a beacon of knowledge for the entire region. I want it not only for the intellectuals but also for everyone, and it should portray the real American culture, not the superficial one.”

* The museum recently changed its name to the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM) because of its association with the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). The acronym TALIM also means ‘education’ in Arabic.

Carol Malt

Legation on the Holocaust Remembrance Map

With the Association Mimouna and the UN Holocaust Office, TALIM hosted a special event on Jews in Tangier during the Second World War.

Mimouna is a group of young Moroccans who work to underscore the Jewish heritage of their country.  They explain their genesis and goals:

Traditionally celebrated at the end of Passover, “Mimouna” is a unique Moroccan Jewish celebration of liberty and community. Moroccan Jews would often invite their Muslim neighbors to join in the festivities associated with returning to eating leavened food once Passover ended.

We are a group of Moroccan Muslim students striving to preserve and promote the history of Morocco’s ancient Jewish community. Founded in 2007 at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), the MIMOUNA takes its name from the original “Mimouna,” a symbol of the heritage shared by all Moroccans. We seek to educate the Moroccan people about the Jewish culture that used to flourish in the country, and encourage harmony between Jews and Muslims.

Coming from all over Morocco to Saturday's event at the Legation, the members of Mimouna also arranged for Kimberly Mann of the UN Holocaust program to address the group.  One member of our audience, a Jewish woman who grew up in wartime Tangier, brought her own eyewitness testimony to bear.

Vanessa Paloma of Brandeis and the Sorbonne, who did her Fulbright research in Tangier, reported on her work on the archives of Tangier's dwindling Jewish community.  There were poignant passages from the community's proceedings, hopeful during the early part of the war before the fall of France in June 1940, and increasingly guarded after that.  "Pray, but not too loudly" the faithful were constantly admonished, as uncertainty reigned after Franco's occupation of Tangier, and Vichy took over in the nearby French Protectorate.

Paloma, who has begun an ambitious project to preserve the sound archives of Jewish Morocco (Khoya: Les Archives Sonores du Maroc Juif), even found a rare recording of Jewish children in Tangier singing a ditty on the death of Adolf Hitler (I could make out "hijo de puta" somewhere in the lines).  When the sound didn't carry through our conference room, Vanessa, equally at home in concert mode, treated us to a live impromtu rendition.

For many in the audience, we were able to introduce them to the story of the Legation's role in helping to save some 1,200 Hungarian Jews from the death camps, which we first covered in 2011 and then again this year in the Foreign Service Journal.  The story of Renée Reichmann, her relief packages for European Jews, the story of the Joint Distribution Committee's aid to Jewish refugees in Tangier (check the JDC's archival photos of wartime Tangier) were a prelude to the rescue effort in which the Legation Chargé d'Affaires took a major part.

Now this story has not only gotten wider coverage among young Moroccans, but it has also been brought to the attention of the UN Holocaust Remembrance office.  The Legation is on the Holocaust Remembrance map.

Gerald Loftus