Travels

by Paul Bowles

  To the European, Morocco, southern Morocco particularly, is a vast and forbidding place (it is officially called “The Zone of Insecurity” by the French military), while to the average American it is a sort of exotic Utah whose touristic value is greatly enhanced by the fact that its southern border is non-existent and that there are whole regions as yet unseen by tourists of any nationality. What with our new Moroccan air-bases and their large technical personnel, all this may change rapidly in the near future, so that after driving six days to get to some place like Tata or Tindouf one will find a party of one’s countrymen already there, complete with Coca Cola and light-meters.

  There is another sort of American whom one sees here nowadays with increasing frequency. He is usually in his early twenties, sometimes wears a beard, and often goes in for clothing which is almost belligerently informal. The new “lost generation” which America turned loose on the world after the recent war is so thoroughly lost that the generation which came before seems undeserving of the epithet. Paris is still their proving ground, but this time it is the Paris of the little Algerian joints behind the Bastille, incredibly sordid spots where they gather to study the preparation, use and effects of the drug called cannabis sativa, known in its various forms as hashish, kif, and majoun.

  Casbah at Ouarzazate in southern Morocco (PB)

  Although a good many members of this new elite are connected with the arts in one way or another, it is a matter of common agreement that the fundamental aim in life is not self-expression, but the attainment of an indescribable and very personal state of ecstasy which is not (and must not be) related in any way to intellectual or artistic endeavor. It is a phenomenon worth considering, this new generation of nihilist mystics living on Veterans’ Administration checks, Fulbright Fellowships, gifts from casual acquaintances, and occasional scraps from home. And it is of particular interest to us here because invariably they arrive in Tangier, which I suppose is the perfect place for them. Here they can get on their various kicks publicly and no one will object in the least; on the contrary, the quickest way to make friends in places where Moslems gather is to bring out your sebsi and light up.

  If your initiate has managed to achieve a state of illumination he can maintain it night and day, indefinitely, stretched out for hours in his favorite native café or lying on the beach in the sun. No one will register the slightest disapproval or surprise; after all, he is enjoying life the way the majority of people around him enjoy it. And since in general the members of the new lost generation are chronically low in funds (to work is an absurdity – almost a sacrilege), the extremely reasonable local prices of the drugs is a great drawing-card. For the equivalent of six cents they can buy enough majoun in the Calle Gzennaïa to transport them to an all-night nirvana.

  Each week more new faces haunt the native cafés behind the Zoco Chico; while a few may be French, most of them are Americans, and they are in passionate pursuit of one thing: an absolute detachment from what is ordinarily called reality. (Sex they consider a very “low-grade kick.”) Most of them are still faithful to be-bop as the most highly perfected musical expression of the desired spiritual state. For some reason (perhaps a purely physical one, since the drug, while it momentarily activates the mental faculties, is inclined to cause great bodily inertia), they seldom continue inland to other parts of Morocco, remaining instead indefinitely in Tangier. The adepts mind their own business, they talk very little, and they are not trying to prove anything. As cults go, it’s a rather sympathetic one.

  UNFORTUNATELY there is an increasing tendency, led by the Nationalists here in Morocco, to suppress, both by law and propaganda, all aspects of the native life which make the country picturesque to the visitor. It looks as if they hope to discourage tourists from coming, and, indeed, when one talks with them, one finds that this is perfectly true. For these Arab fanatics are firmly convinced that Westerners visit Morocco only to scoff at the customs and behavior of a backward people. It happens that the things which are of particular interest in Morocco are not of Arab importation, but indigenous to the country – that is, Berber. From the Nationalist point of view the Berbers are little better than animals, improperly Islamized and stubborn in their insistence upon clinging to their ancient rituals. Thus a great puritanical purge has been in progress for the past fifteen years or so, and will probably continue to go on, until every vestige of spontaneous pleasure in religious observances has been destroyed.

  This year for the first time the celebration of the festival of Mouloud, the anniversary of Mohammed’s birthday, was forbidden in Tangier. What always has been a three-day carnival with parades, fireworks, public dancing, music and crowds of native visitors from all parts of the country, was annihilated by one disapproving stroke of the pen. Reason (among the populace): the offerings of money carried by the celebrants to the mosques are appropriated by a few wealthy families -the Chorfa, or descendants of Mohammed. But since this has always been the case and no one has ever objected before, the argument does not hold water. Reason (among the informed): the Nationalists disapproved of the women in the festivities, because it encouraged immorality! Religious dancing, the principal means of spiritual expression among the Berbers, is forbidden all over Morocco now; the Nationalists saw to that several years ago.

  One wonders whether, if they were given free rein, they might not go as far as Ibn Saud in Arabia, who has carried his blue-nosed proclivities to the extent of prohibiting phonographs and radios (except for use in listening to news broadcasts) all over Arabia, because they play music. Music is evil. (One interesting clause in his code is that the police shall break the phonograph record over the head of the person who is found with it. If this seems merely amusing, let me add that the law is by no means benign. In the case of the person caught with a bottle of beer or any other alcoholic concoction, the punishment is the same: the offending bottle must be destroyed against the head of the miscreant.)

  The Moslem thinks of Communism about the way the city-dweller thinks of hoof-and-mouth disease: a dangerous malady, but not one by which he himself could possibly be affected. For him Communism is a disease peculiar to the Christian world; protected by the fortifications of his religion he feels secure from it.

  Here in Morocco, as everywhere else, there is a Communist Party, but its adherents are French, Spanish, Corsican. When you find a Moslem member, he is usually from Algeria. (Algerians, unlike Moroccans, are French citizens.) If you talk with a Mohammedan Communist, he will usually end up by telling you that his interest in the movement is purely opportunistic. Once the colonial regimes are extirpated, he says, the Communist Party will have done its work. Then the local Nationalists will take over, and all will be well.

  What is much more important is that a great many educated Moroccans, resenting the semi-colonial status of their country, unwittingly adopt an attitude which makes them singularly vulnerable to Stalinist propaganda. Le Petit Marocain, which has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Morocco, follows the party line closely, never lets an opportunity slip for pointing out both the real and imagined injustices suffered by the people under the present government. The Communists support the Nationalists because any Nationalist gain upsets the status quo; a Nationalist coup would delight them. They could count on ensuing chaos, first of all because there are three distinct Nationalist parties which would be sure to disagree more violently than they do at present, but particularly because the Berbers, who form the majority of the population, are antiNationalist on the grounds that the movement is purely pro-Arab, and not interested in the Berbers at all.

  It is always easy enough to induce the Berbers to form mass-demonstrations. The French did it a fortnight ago when they were trying to get the Sultan to remove certain members of the Istiqulal – the most powerful and radical of the three Nationalist parties – from among his advisors. Several thousand tribesmen riding their horses through the streets of Fez would seem to have made an impression. There was also the advice given
the Sultan by El Glaoui, Pacha of Marrakesh, who is the Berbers’ particular defender. In any case, the offending individuals were removed. But you can be sure the Nationalists will not take it lying down; their method is not that of passive resistance. To me the whole thing is just one more bit of madness in an already mad world.

  THESE POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS remind me of a ridiculous little adventure I had recently. I was walking along a country road several miles from Fez. Out of a dusty lane which led back into an olive grove came three Moroccans, one of whom I immediately recognized as an acquaintance. We exchanged greetings and I was presented to the others. Instead of continuing their walk, they pressed me to return with them to a house which was somewhere back in the grove, and have tea. The house, which belonged to a plump young man with thick glasses, was vast, ancient, and almost in ruins, but on an upper floor there proved to be one room that had been kept in comparative repairs, and there we sat, drank tea, and talked at great length.

  When we had exhausted America as a topic, we turned to Morocco. I had been reading several books of Moroccan history in French, and it was natural that I should bring up the subject of Bou Hamara, the rebel chieftain who dared defy two sultans, Abd el Aziz and Moulay Hafid, and who for seven years held all of eastern Morocco. It is a generally accepted fact that when Sultan Moulay Hafid seized Bou Hamara in 1909 he put him into a cage that was too small for him either to stand or sit in, had him carted about through the streets of Moroccan cities for two years, during which time he was constantly tortured by the populace, and finally fed him to his pet lions. I had seen Bou Hamara’s cage many time in the Batha, and I had also seen the empty lions’ cages in the courtyard of the Sultan’s palace. When I touched on the story, which everyone here knows by heart, I added that I thought it just as well that a sultan like Moulay Hafid should have been replaced by someone less blood-thirsty and savage. “He must have been a very peculiar man,” I said. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “A little,” replied my host, removing his glasses. “He was my father.”

  And while I attempted to stammer some sort of apology, the son of the former sultan delivered me a lengthy lecture on the inadvisability of believing anything I read in French histories of Morocco. The French, he said, always attempted to justify their occupation of the country by pointing out that the inhabitants were barbarians and incapable of governing themselves, all of which sounded perfectly logical. But three nights ago I told the story as a joke on myself to an Arab here in Tangier. When I had finished, instead of laughing, he said very seriously: “Oh, but you were perfectly right. Moulay Hafid did throw Bou Hamara to the lions. I know, because it was my father who was sent to Hagenbeck in Hamburg to buy the animals for the occasion. Only they were so tame and well-fed that they wouldn’t eat him.”

  So I am off for the south tomorrow; I can’t stand this rain any longer.

  Baptism of Solitude

  Holiday, January 1953; Their Heads Are Green, 1963

  IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU ARRIVE in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting it into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really grows dark.

  You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

  Before the war for independence in Algeria, under the rule of the French military, there was a remarkable feeling of friendly sympathy among Europeans in the Sahara. It is unnecessary to stress the fact that the corollary of this pleasant state of affairs was the exercise of the strictest sort of colonial control over the Algerians themselves, a regime which amounted to a reign of terror. But from the European viewpoint the place was ideal. The whole vast region was like a small unspoiled rural community where everyone respected the rights of everyone else. Each time you lived there for a while, and left it, you were struck with the indifference and the impersonality of the world outside. If during your travels in the Sahara you forgot something, you could be sure of finding it later on your way back; the idea of appropriating it would not have occurred to anyone. You could wander where you liked, out in the wilderness or in the darkest alleys of the towns; no one would molest you.

  At that time no members of the indigent, wandering, unwanted proletariat from northern Algeria had come down here, because there was nothing to attract them. Almost everyone owned a parcel of land in an oasis and lived by working it. In the shade of the date palms, wheat, barley and corn were grown, and those plants provided the staple items of diet. There were usually two or three Arab or Negro shopkeepers who sold things such as sugar, tea, candles, matches, carbide for fuel, and cheap European cotton goods. In the larger towns there was sometimes a shop kept by a European, but the merchandise was the same, because the customers were virtually all natives. Almost without exception, the only Europeans who lived in the Sahara were the military and the ecclesiastic.

  As a rule, the military and their aides were friendly men, agreeable to be with, interested in showing visitors everything worth seeing in their districts. This was fortunate, as the traveler was often completely at their mercy. He might have to depend on them for his food and lodging, since in the smaller places there were no hotels. Generally he had to depend on them for contact with the outside world, because anything he wanted, like cigarettes or wine, had to be brought by truck from the military post, and his mail was sent in care of the post, too. Furthermore, the decision as to whether he was to have permission to move about freely in the region rested with the military. The power to grant those privileges was vested in, let us say, one lonely lieutenant who lived two hundred miles from his nearest countryman, ate badly (a condition anathema to any Frenchman), and wished that neither camels, date palms, nor inquisitive foreigners had ever been created. Still, it was rare to find an indifferent or unhelpful comandante. He was likely to invite you for drinks and dinner, show you the curiosities he had collected during his years in the bled, ask you to accompany him on his tours of inspection, or even to spend a fortnight with him and his peloton of several dozen native meharistes when they went out into the desert to make topographical surveys. Then you would be given your own camel – not an ambling pack camel that had to be driven with a stick by someone walking beside it, but a swift, trained animal that obeyed the slightest tug of the reins.

  More extraordinary were the Pères Blancs, intelligent and well-educated. There was no element of resignation in their eagerness to spend the remainder of their lives in distant outposts, dressed as Moslems, speaking Arabic, living in the rigorous, comfortless manner of the desert inhabitants. They made no converts
and expected to make none. “We are here only to show the Moslem that the Christian can be worthy of respect,” they explained. One used to hear the Moslems say that although the Christians might be masters of the earth, the Moslems were the masters of heaven; for the military it was quite enough that the indigène recognize European supremacy here. Obviously the White Fathers could not be satisfied with that. They insisted upon proving to the inhabitants that the Nazarene was capable of leading as exemplary a life as the most ardent follower of Mohammed. It is true that the austerity of the Fathers’ mode of life inspired many Moslems with respect for them if not for the civilization they represented. And as a result of the years spent in the desert among the inhabitants, the Fathers acquired a certain healthy and unorthodox fatalism, an excellent adjunct to their spiritual equipment, and a highly necessary one in dealing with the men among whom they had chosen to live.

  Paul Bowles and his shadow – photographed in the Tafilalt area of the Sahara, 1963

  With an area considerably larger than that of the United States, the Sahara is a continent within a continent – a skeleton, if you like, but still a separate entity from the rest of Africa which surrounds it. It has its own mountain ranges, rivers, lakes and forests, but they are largely vestigial. The mountain ranges have been reduced to gigantic bouldery bumps that rise above the neighboring countryside like the mountains on the moon. Some of the rivers appear as such for perhaps one day a year – others much less often. The lakes are of solid salt, and the forests have long since petrified. But the physical contours of the landscape vary as much as they do anywhere else. There are plains, hills, valleys, gorges, rolling lands, rocky peaks and volcanic craters, all without vegetation or even soil. Yet, probably the only parts that are monotonous to the eye are regions like the Tanezrouft, south of Reggane, a stretch of about five hundred miles of absolutely flat, gravel-strewn terrain, without the slightest sign of life, or the smallest undulation in the land, nothing to vary the implacable line of the horizon on all sides. After being here for a while, the sight of even a rock awakens an emotion in the traveler; he feels like crying, “Land!”