Points in Time

by Paul Bowles

  If American obituaries told one story about Bowles’s life in Morocco, a different story was being told in Morocco. In both French- and Arabic-language newspapers, Bowles’s death was front-page news. A couple of papers ran multiple articles about it on the same day. There is more proximity in the Moroccan accounts and a greater sense that the death of Bowles matters somehow, immediately. If American accounts had Bowles fleeing to a curious and marginal place, Moroccan accounts invariably ask about the effects of his writing on the postcolonial nation. There is a greater diversity of opinion regarding Bowles in the Moroccan media than one finds in US criticism. Such a disparity reminds us that Arab interruptions to American accounts of the world extend to the realm of literary criticism.[9] Yet the Moroccan archive is silenced in criticism at large: Nexis search engines will not locate, Internet searches will not reach, MLA bibliographies do not list, and US libraries do not collect the Moroccan sources that discuss and debate the significance of Bowles’s passing. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has taught in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the hegemonic archive regularly silences the past.

  It is safe to say that the Bowles who lived in Tangier and Fez in 1931 and 1932 and who found himself dreaming of return after World War II did not imagine that Moroccans would eventually be reading his books. But on his return in 1947, and especially after autumn of that year, when he met Ahmed Yacoubi in Fez, the earlier Bowles quickly ceded to a Bowles who became involved (artistically, intellectually, professionally, socially, and sometimes romantically and/or sexually) with Maghrebi nationalists, intellectuals, artists, and, later, academics and students. He did not always approve of their positions (most notably on what he thought was the tendency of Arab nationalism to squelch Berber culture and to embrace the West’s worst aspects), but he could not and did not ignore the changing tide in the Maghreb. The public discussion of Bowles’s work by Moroccans did not register for a couple of decades—Abdallah Laroui critiqued him in 1967 and Tahar Ben Jelloun denounced him in Le Monde five years later—but as early as the 1950s, it was clear that Bowles’s work had a Moroccan audience. The nationalist hero ’Allai al-Fassi reportedly appreciated Bowles’s 1955 novel about the anticolonial uprising in Fez, The Spider’s House.[10] With the rise of postcolonial theory in Morocco, extended in Morocco by the work of Abdelkebir Khatibi and popularized by Moroccans returning home from the US with literature Ph.D.s, Bowles’s work gained an academic audience. His earlier writings made their way onto Moroccan syllabi in the early 1990s as Moroccan academics looked for ways to respond to the Gulf War, which had been controversial because of Moroccan participation in the US-led alliance. Moroccan students wrote theses on Bowles’s work and occasionally confronted him directly in interviews.

  A couple of years before Bowles’s death, Mohamed Choukri started a firestorm with the publication of a book—Paul Bowles wa’uzla Tanja—that criticized Bowles harshly as a homosexual, as someone whose Arabic was not as good as he claimed, as someone who, in Choukri’s construction, loved Morocco but hated Moroccans. For Choukri, who had collaborated with Bowles in the 1960s and 1970s, such retrograde attitudes demonstrated that Bowles had worn out his welcome. A Tangier weekly gave Bowles the opportunity to respond; Bowles accused Choukri of insanity and referred obliquely to Choukri’s well-known and much-frowned-upon alcoholism while asserting his own right to stay “as long as the government permits me.” In 1997, Muhammad Abu Talib suggested in a Rabat-based cultural journal that Moroccans stop giving an “unnecessary, excessive interest” in Bowles or his work, which he claimed denigrated the nationalist movement. Though Abu Talib admitted some respect for Bowles’s literary abilities, he ultimately viewed Bowles as yet another foreign writer afflicted with what the Moroccan poet and scholar archly called “Moroccanitis” (English in original). Abu Talib implicitly criticized Choukri for his involvement with Bowles and noted a “disturbing influence by English” on Choukri’s Arabic prose. Softer versions of this opinion appeared on Bowles’s death in the Moroccan daily Libération, which called the writer’s passing the completion of a circle of Tangier’s colonialist ghosts; in these accounts, Bowles’s death—which came shortly after the death of King Hassan II, who had ruled Morocco for almost four decades (1961-99)—was further confirmation of the arrival of a new more hopeful period.[11]

  A different tack was taken by Tariq as-Saidi, who remapped Bowles’s career in terms of its relationship to Moroccan culture: “the center of the world for him shifted from Paris to Tangier.” Writing for the daily al-Ahdath al-Maghribiya, as-Saidi makes a compelling case for Bowles’s embrace of the Moroccan imaginary as an escape from a more limited and limiting American understanding of daily life (one of the subheadings of the article translates as “Ordinary Moroccans Saved Bowles from American Stupidity”). The official obituary, which ran on the Maghreb Arabe Presse wire service (MAP), similarly emphasized Bowles’s embrace of Moroccan culture. MAP foregrounded Bowles’s translations of works by Moroccans and his recordings of an “inventory” of popular Moroccan music of the Atlas and Rif to the exclusion of most other facets of his career (“Décès”). The account by the national news agency thus offered a major interruption to US treatment of Bowles’s career, on the other pole of where, say, the Library of America’s Bowles edition stands. This is the Moroccan Bowles; Bowles, the archivist of Moroccan national culture; Bowles, the Anglophone African author.

  The accounts I have mentioned thus far interject aspects of Bowles’s life that are omitted from most US accounts. But in their projection of Moroccan desires and cultural concerns, they do not fully reorganize a reading of Bowles’s literary career. Such a possibility, however, does emerge from writing by Zubir Bin Bushta, who published two articles in the days following Bowles’s death: one in the influential al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki and the other in al-Mithaq al-Watani. Bin Bushta knew Bowles personally and writes movingly of conversations about him with the Moroccan concierge at Bowles’s building and with a Moroccan nurse at the hospital (“Nihaya ustura”). Well aware of Bowles’s international reputation, Bin Bushta points to his influence on Moroccan letters and calls him the leader or scout (ra’id) of al-adab at-Tanji, a phrase I translate as “Tangerian literature.” (“Tanji” is an unusual Arabic form; “Tanjawi” is the usual term that designates Arab residents of the city. “Tangerino” denotes expatriates.) Bin Bushta emphasizes that he is departing from national categories: “Paul Bowles is a writer categorized in the column of foreign literature in America. And he is esteemed as a foreign writer in Morocco. I firmly believe that he created a new literary movement/trend [tayyar] that can be called al-adab” (“Rahil ra’id”). The phrase al-adab at-Tanji is also used by Abdarrahim Huzal, who calls Bowles “one of its founders and one of its major representatives.” Writing in al-’Alam ath-Thaqafi, Huzal responds to what he calls “naïve” accusations about Bowles’s feelings for Morocco (he names Choukri) by arguing that writers have imaginary relations to nations and, therefore, may have multiple, apparently contradictory relationships to a nation. Bin Bushta’s and Huzal’s articles move beyond the nationalist framework of Abu Talib or MAP and organize their referent around extra-national affiliations.

  That both connect their understanding of Bowles’s relationship to the nation form to his residence in Tangier is important. A city with a long history of international coexistence, Tangier is understood within and without Morocco as exceptional. Legally an International Zone from 1925 to 1956, and multilingual and “multicultural” throughout the twentieth century, Tangier challenges the primacy of national identifications and resists any experience of monolingualism or unidirectional affiliation. An understanding of Bowles’s writing as “Tanji” (as opposed to Tanjawi or Tangerino) emphasizes this aspect of the city and disrupts the national framework organizing most understandings of his work. As I suggest in the conclusion of this essay, the categorization helps us to rethink Bowles’s important translations of the narratives of illiterate Moroccans and allows us t
o see them not in terms of bringing fame to otherwise underappreciated “writers” (MAP’s term) but rather as extranational collaborations with those marginalized by the Moroccan nation.

  2. Rereading The Sheltering Sky

  These analyses by Moroccan critics are a wedge with which we can pry open Bowles’s early writing. While his work matures and changes in response to his life in Morocco—never a home, always a tentative stop—and while the later work has been neglected, I want here to go back to Bowles’s earliest major representation of the Maghreb: The Sheltering Sky. A rereading of this novel is called for not only because it stands as the pillar in Bowles’s writing career, determining everything else that follows for readers, the first (and often only) book that Americans read by Bowles, but also for another reason: written in 1947-48, published in late 1949, and a bestseller in early 1950, the novel is intricately a part of that moment when the US was coming to terms with itself as a global power, a reckoning that was being played out in popular media as well as in classified State Department documents. As I have argued elsewhere, the Cold War must not be seen separately from the postcolonial period, the shifting of geopolitical and racial relations on a global scale (“Preposterous Encounters”). The Sheltering Sky is a novel that imagines—and stages—an American relationship to the foreign. As such, it engages deeply, by which I mean creatively and not programmatically, the problems and limits of the new world order that was emerging simultaneous to Bowles’s travels in Morocco and Algeria, as he wrote his novel. The novel’s ability to imagine and figure interruptions to its own narrative of “pioneering” opposes it to American narratives of a complete and transparent translation of the globe that were increasingly common. Bowles was writing in the wake of one of the most influential American narratives about the foreign, Henry Luce’s 1941 essay The American Century, in which what we might call an easy translation of the world was seen to be a prerogative of US global supremacy: the power to recreate the world environment “by imagination.” Luce’s conservative vision of a circular or tautological American understanding of the world—where US global positioning is imagined as supreme within an “imaginative” American recreation of global power relations—is something from which Bowles clearly excepted himself. We must thus be careful not to apply reading practices that unwittingly follow from Luce’s logic to our understanding of Bowles. To say that we must learn to reread The Sheltering Sky outside an American Century framework means also that we must learn to reread Bowles outside an Americanist framework.

  Set just after World War II in Algeria, The Sheltering Sky depicts three Americans in their thirties—Port and Kit Moresby and their friend Tunner. In this love triangle in the desert, the secondary triangles are especially compelling: Port, Kit, and the Sahara; errant Americans, stir-crazy French colonials, colonized Algerians. Port and Kit are fleeing the decadence of the West, attempting to escape the incursion of what the novel calls “the mechanistic age.” They are also attempting to bridge a gap in their marriage. To do both, they travel further and further “in” to the Sahara, ditching Tunner. (With his “Paramount” good looks, Tunner stands in for the America they have left behind; he also has seduced Kit.) Before Port and Kit reconcile or come to a decision about their feelings about life in Algeria, Port becomes ill and dies of typhoid in a remote French outpost, leaving Kit alone. Kit, plagued through the first half of the novel by omens and fears, hitches a ride with a passing caravan, leaving Tunner to bury Port. She becomes attached to a Touareg trader named Belqassim, who brings her across the desert to his home, has sex with her and stands by while his older companion does the same, disguises her as a boy, smuggles her past his three wives, then confines her. Kit doesn’t object; rather, she craves his sexual visits. When she decides to escape, she does so rather easily. Kit makes it back to the US consulate in Oran, but the novel suggests that she has strayed too far. Though she is located, she “CANNOT GET BACK” to some place familiar to the Americans and is lost in full view.

  Despite its explicit rejection of what it calls American “civilization”, the novel quickly became popular in the US. Later a cult novel, it has been continuously in print. Yet the novel is continually read within a framework it rejects: namely, that Americans have an innocent relationship to “the world.”[12] Bowles is complicit with this misreading, not only because he places American concerns at the center but also because he structures this misreading, as he is apparently ambivalent within the novel about the individual’s relationship to the nation. The characters set out to reorganize not only their relationship to each other but to their national culture itself through comparison: “another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. And the war was one facet of the mechanized age [Port] wanted to forget.” By proposing that an individual might “forget” aspects of his or her “civilization” and select others from contrasting formations in their place, Bowles initially demonstrates an understanding of national identity as one of selective memory, as some had theorized the concept of the “nation” in the nineteenth century. Yet the terms with which the project is expressed are decidedly American. The novel will later compare Port and Kit’s travel to the familiar American act of pioneering: Port thinks of his great-grandparents’ encounter with the American landscape; the Sahara is called a “wilderness.” Through such metaphors, Bowles imagines the translatability of the American frontier—the place where, according to Turner’s 1893 thesis, the American national character had been formed—to a new location and places his novel in the company of other postwar accounts of Americanness that engaged the frontier thesis.[13] During an “age of doubt,” with domestic morale low after the September 1949 news that the USSR had exploded its first atomic bomb and the fall of China to the communists in October, a climate that fed the imminent crisis of McCarthyism, the attractions to the American book-reading public of fleeing to a new frontier were tangible.

  As it proceeds, however, The Sheltering Sky exhibits a sense of the discontinuities of the world, the awkwardness of translating the foreign in American terms, and the inability of Algerians to experiment with national identity. The last highlights the contingency of national identity, which throws the American characters’ project into crisis. Bowles recognizes that the project of reordering one’s identity is authorized by a US passport, which, when Port loses his, removes more shelter than the novel’s existentialist framework might have led readers to expect. “‘It’s strange,’” Port reports to a French colonial administrator, “‘how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive. But it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this to have no proof of who you are’.” Port’s experience of the Algerian landscape previously viewed from dominating vistas is now made “senseless.” After falsely accusing an Algerian hotelier of the theft—a racialized assumption that the novel deconstructs in Poe-like fashion in a scene that elaborates and distinguishes French attitudes toward Algerians from American ones—Port loses the anchor that drove the first portion of the novel. He thereby discovers that the American project in the desert can only work while the travelers block out the Algerian population. Doing so would mean also to block out the visibility of the French colonials and the relationship of American projects (whether political or epistemological) to French ones. This becomes impossible. Port’s experiment in cultural comparison must now end in failure; his death is represented as a breakdown of meaning and language. It is in the shards of that shattered relationship to US national identity that the potentiality of the novel emerges.

  Before looking more carefully at how the novel figures this breakdown, I want to recover the geopolitical context of Bowles’s writing to show how his departure from a “national” framework matters. Despite the later implication that he was eccentric in his travel, Bowles was in fact one of many Americans who returned
to the Maghreb after the war. A few months before The Sheltering Sky was published, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article by Demaree Bess entitled “We’re Invading North Africa Again.” The reference was to US businessmen who, urged by Truman’s Point Four program (the so-called Marshall Plan for the Third World), were returning to the places that GIs had been during the war and doing their bit to stave off the spread of Soviet influence.[14] That there could be a second invasion emphasizes the cultural importance of the first one, the North African Campaign of November 1942-May 1943, the first major deployment of US ground forces during World War II, accompanied by a groundswell of attention by US journalists and Hollywood. If the North African campaign was successful in military terms—the “end of the beginning” as Churchill called it—it had different ramifications within the Maghreb itself. From the point of view of most postwar “invaders,” World War II represented the introduction of Americans and their products to the Maghrebi market and of the Maghrebi market to Americans. “Our GIs . . . demonstrated a new way of life to the local people,” wrote Edward Toledano in 1948. The title of his Harper’s essay, “Young Man, Go to Casablanca,” made reference to Horace Greeley’s injunction to “go west” in the previous century; it thus echoed Bowles’s association of the post-World War II Maghreb with the nineteenth-century American frontier. Toledano, however, embraced the metaphor: “By their relish for the small-big things of culture—Camel cigarettes, Hershey bars, Coca Cola—[the GIs] were unconscious but very effective salesmen for American products. Morocco didn’t realize it, but the Fuller brush man had been taken to the bosom of its family. Eventually it was bound to cherish and buy his line.”