http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091017/TRAVEL/710169885/1258/MAGAZINE
Faisal al Yafai
October 17. 2009
In a city at the end of the world, I am speaking about dead men.
"The last time I saw Mohammed Hamri was 1998. We used to come to this
cafe to drink. Paul Bowles I saw more, almost every month. I used to
take writers over to his Old City flat; he didn't go out much by then
and he spoke very slowly."
The words are from the Moroccan artist Abdel-Aziz Boufrakech and the
names are from history. Amid the brown leather seats and mirrored
interior of the Cafe de Paris in Tangiers, over mint tea, we are
talking about the Beat Generation, a group of writers and artists
working in the shadow of the Second World War. The cafe is unchanged
since then, the people and furniture is as it was in the 1950s.
Outside, the posters could be of King Mohammed V, rather than his
grandson Mohammed VI. The sounds of an oud float inside.
Tangiers is Morocco's forgotten city. Perched at the edge of the
African continent as it curves towards Europe, it was for four
decades orphaned from the rest of the country, declared an
international zone and carved up between nine western nations.
Morocco reclaimed it at independence in 1956, only to forget it. For
years, Tangiers languished.
But it was in those lost decades that Tangiers became known to the
West. In the shadowy world of the international zone, few laws
applied and much that was illicit elsewhere thrived. Writers and
artists from Europe and North America, men on the margins of their
homelands, exiled themselves here, anonymous amid the illegality that
flourished. Many of the Beat Generation, a group of American and
Moroccan writers and artists active in the 1950s, passed through
here. Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, William S Burroughs all worked here
Bowles spent the majority of his life in Tangiers, while others like
Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg just passed by.
The Tangiers of that time was immortalised as the debauched, violent
world of the Interzone in Burroughs' Naked Lunch, creating a
mythology that still stands.
Boufrakech is a living link to that time. One of the city's great
visual artists, he was born at the right time, the 1960s, to cross
paths with the Beat Generation and see the transformation the years
since have brought.
While the Cafe de Paris on Place de France has remained unchanged,
although less frequented by literary lions than it was, the Medina of
Tangiers, the city's old heart, is being chipped away by modernity.
Start with the Petit Socco, where I first met Boufrakech, and the
change is obvious. This bulge in the narrow streets of the medina is
dominated by Cafe Central, formerly the gathering place for a rakish
contingent of artists, the place to sip coffee and do deals of drugs
and flesh. The cafe remains, but it has been cleaned up: dark rattan
chairs, welcoming wood and suitably expensive prices.
The Petit Socco is now a big draw for the travellers and tourists who
disembark from European ferries and make the long walk through the
medina, past the shops that sell all the ornaments of the Maghreb, on
to the green and white minaret of the Grand Mosque, to end up at the
scenic lookout, staring east across the waves at the dim outline of Spain.
All around them, in gallabiyas and slippers or shirts and jeans, are
locals and expats, shouting and whispering, selling and buying. There
is an urgency to Tangiers now: the light that attracted painters like
Matisse remains, but the subjects are keen to keep up with their
entrepreneurial brothers in Casablanca and Marrakech.
The decadence and the undertones of danger that was so attractive
to artists of the past is fading: in its place is a cleaner cultural
renaissance. This summer the Tanjazz annual jazz festival celebrated
its first decade. The Grand Socco, at the entrance to the medina, has
been remade into a lush park. Standing over it is a revamped Cinema
Rif, an expanse of whitewashed walls that hints at the glamour of old
movies. Pastries, fruit cocktails and Wi-Fi have replaced alcohol and
drugs as fuel for the new creatives.
"That world is not gone," says Boufrakech, "But it doesn't exist in
the new parts of Tangiers. The lifestyle has gone. In those days we
used to meet and talk about art and go to parties. With Hamri, we
used to go to galleries or have a drink at the El Minzah. Now, we've
lost all that."
Perhaps no one embodies this change, this professionalisation, as
much as El Abdi, the stepson of Mohammed Hamri, the most famous of
Morocco's Beat Generation. Hamri was an author and painter, most
famous for his scenes of traditional Moroccan life. Hamri introduced
Brion Gysin, the British author, and later the Rolling Stones' Brian
Jones, to Arabic music from the village of Jajouka, which brought the
village's musicians worldwide fame. He called himself the "painter of
Morocco" and the name stuck; today, a decade after his death, his
work can be found in collections across Europe and the US.
El Abdi was born to Hamri's first wife, before they married. A
precocious painter, he had his first exhibition with Brion Gysin
at 20 and spent his formative years watching Hamri work. As we walk
through the medina, the walls curving up all around us, he talks
about the last remnants of the Beat Generation. "The places are still
there the Petit Socco is still there. But the people are different.
Their ideas are different. What has really changed is that the way
they used to live is gone. We still talk about them, so they had a
long influence. But it's not how we live now, to be stoned and sit in
the cafes all day." El Abdi still exhibits but makes his living in
that most modern of artistic professions: design and advertising.
We duck into the gallery of the Ibn Khaldoun cultural centre,
browsing the work on the white walls of some of Tangier's best
artists. "The art scene is better now," he says. "There are more
artists and more galleries. They sell more art and that promotes
young artists. But" he pauses "it is mainly for show, for
investment. They are not serious collectors." He is reluctant to talk
about his father's work I sense he is keen to be seen as an artist
in his own right.
Galleries like this one are popping up across Tangiers: in the short
time I am there, I am invited to the opening of four different shows.
At the Ibn Khaldoun gallery, topics range from stylised
representations of Moroccan women to Edvard Munch-like shadow
figures. I note a small painting by Boufrakech is the gallery's most
expensive, on offer for US$3,000 (Dh11,000). A cluster of three small
works in black ink draws my eye and I see the name beside them:
Mohamed Mrabet, one of the last living members of the Beat Generation.
In the early hours of the morning, I am on the wide terrace at the
top of Hotel El Muniria, being eaten alive by mosquitoes I cannot
see. The room I am sleeping in is oppressively hot and thick with
ghosts: this is where William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, the same
room where Jack Kerouac languished in the years before On the Road
was published. Downstairs is the Tanger Inn, a cramped bar painted
red, heavy with Beat history.
On the walls hang photos of the authors, above descriptions written
in Allen Ginsburg's dense scrawl. I think back to 1957. The year
after independence, the year after Ginsberg's Howl. Today,
backpacking teenagers whose parents were not yet born when Ginsberg
wrote those words stare at them earnestly and sip beers.
Below me in the steaming city, a woman's voice, mournful like Fairuz
but not Fairuz, calls out lamentations for love. The voices of young
men reply: not to her, but to each other, coming from clumps of three
and four shouting against the night sky in the maze of streets below.
This is the Ville Nouvelle, the new part of Tangiers, where wide
roads lined with boutiques and snack bars roll down to the sea. Faint
red trails of cars' rearlights snake along the coast road, the
holidaying mix of Europeans, expats and Arabs going to dance to
trance until the early hours at Club 555, or to lounge by the pool at
La Pasarela, with the models and the moneyed. In the distance, the
tourist ferries squat, their Christmas tree lights blinking, sentries
of the last way out.
The artists for whom the Tanger Inn was a gathering point have moved
on: don't bother looking for them. You could walk from here north
along Boulevard Pasteur and see only traditional cafes, small hotels
and fashion stores. You could eat French cuisine to jazz, drink
cocktails with free Spanish tapas and talk about the Asian economic
climate. But don't search for those old bohemians. One night, I am
taken to a gallery opening off Rue Belgique. The crowd sips champagne
and discusses the art, but there are no artists in attendance. The
artists have been edged out of the Ville Nouvelle.
On the terrace I am thinking about Mrabet. These days he is best
known as a painter but he was also a writer and storyteller. The
American writer Paul Bowles translated many of his works and
collaborated with him on several stories. Having lived the same
louche lifestyle as his peers, he has somehow outlived them all. When
he goes, I wonder, will the artistic history go with him? I need to
find Mrabet and ask him. I drag an old chair out of my room and lie
there in the darkness until the heat of the dawn wakes me up and the
clouds drip purple in the sky.
The next day, I call Boufrakech and he promises to do what he can,
but Mrabet is notoriously reclusive these days. We take a taxi to the
far west of the city, to an alleyway of tall houses perched on a
hill. And wait. Suddenly the phone rings and a woman in red emerges
from one of the nearby buildings, beckoning us inside.
Upstairs, sitting on his knees surrounded by painting supplies and
unfinished works is Mohamed Mrabet, a thin, gaunt man in his 70s with
a still-powerful voice. The walls are covered with images from the
past there is Tennessee Williams in black and white, Paul Bowles
unsmiling. But the figure that most often recurs is Mrabet himself,
portraits of the artist as a muscular young man.
This fascination with the self is a recurring theme. He refers to
himself in the third person. "Who will remember Tangiers after Mrabet
is gone?" He says. "It is because of Mrabet that Europe remembers
Tangiers. After, who will remember?" He speaks in a halting, dreamy
tone, often using his hands to bat away the question, then answering
a different one. "Everyone in Morocco thinks he is a painter.
Everyone thinks he is a storyteller. But they tell their story only.
Mrabet makes stories that are new and the whole world listens."
His stories range across literary figures and I feel swamped by their
proximity: he tells me how he met Tennessee Williams for the first
time in 1961 in the Cafe de Paris. The writer then reeling from the
death of his partner was staying at the El Muniria hotel. Half a
century on, the two places still stand, the places in which I eat and
sleep. He tells me stories of living with Williams in California, of
his days working with Bowles, while he puffs on a long thin pipe.
But it is clear, for all his memories, that he feels forgotten by the
city. "I don't go to see paintings now," he says. "It is all rubbish.
There are no good painters in Morocco." I see Boufrakech wince at
this, but he is too polite to interrupt the older man. "It is all for
money now, only for money."
After some time, I stop asking questions and just listen to
Boufrakech and Mrabet talk. Two generations of accomplished Moroccan
artists, talking about the people and the past that connects them.
Apart from the pipe and his colourful stories of writers, these days
there is not much corruption about Mrabet. He even talks about
religion, emphasising his Islamic faith and crediting God for his inspiration.
Mrabet talks and smokes. The daylight fades and the muezzin calls. He
is becoming forgetful, telling the same stories but mixing up names.
Soon Boufrakech and I say our goodbyes with much hand clasping and
laughing. To clear my head, back in the Ville Nouvelle, I walk down
the beach in the dark, crossing a wide expanse of sand before I reach
the water. There is a couple whispering, against the background hum
of voices from the cafes behind us. I am thinking about Mrabet, about
how a man so associated with Tangiers can feel so forgotten by it.
Cities at the end of the world have no memory: they forget our
trajectories through time. When you arrive in Tangiers, the past is
left behind, unable to follow you. This is the dark undercurrent to
the city and the reason so many came to the Interzone: to forget or
to be forgotten.
The bandit days of the Beats are being erased. Like a misspent youth,
the city is keen to forget its past until it is respectable enough to
reminisce. The city has moved on.
The old artists have become characters in a book, stories on the
wall. Tangiers, so long a crossroads to other places, is grasping for
an identity of its own. Only when it finds a surer footing, will it
reclaim its memories of the dead.
--
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