On Bowles, orientalism, sex tourism and myths - Hisham Aidi in NYRB:

'Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.

Bowles would settle in Tangier in 1947 and live there until his death in November 1999. It was where he felt most free, away from the constraints of American middle-class life and cold war hysteria. “Each day lived through on this side of the Atlantic,” he wrote in 1933, “was one more day spent outside of prison.”'

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'When Bowles returned to Tangier in July 1947, the zone was still at the center of Great Power machinations, but had also become a focal point for the anticolonial movement in Morocco. Moroccan nationalists were playing the United States and the Arab East off against each other, but leaning toward the Arab League. In his journalism, for The Nation and Harpers, among other publications, Bowles chronicled the final years of the International Zone, reporting on the infighting among Moroccan leaders, the impact of the Algerian war on Tangier, and how nationalism was shaping the musical culture. He argued against Morocco’s turn eastward, toward the Non-Aligned Movement, and called on the US to intervene. In his fiction, he probed America’s encounter with the “primitive mind,” as he described it for his readers.

His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.

The Sheltering Sky quickly gained cult status, particularly among a rising Beat movement that looked to the Near and Far East for inspiration. Bowles did not create the “myth of Tangier,” but he gave it a literary respectability and an American cast. New York poets and writers flocked to the “Interzone,” as Burroughs dubbed colonial Tangier, in search of a sex-and-drug-infused space of altered consciousness and release. In the early 1950s, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Bryon Gysin, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Susan Sontag all gravitated to this “portal to the unknown,” as one author christened Tangier. So did European writers like Genet, Juan Goytisolo, and Joe Orton, but Bowles’s influence was not limited to the literary community. In later decades, his recordings and promotion of Moroccan music would draw producers and recording artists from Patti Smith to the Rolling Stones.

A paradox of Paul Bowles’s legacy is that after the city became part of Morocco, in 1959, he stopped writing fiction. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he focused instead on recording and translating from darija (Moroccan Arabic dialect) the oral histories of men he met in Tangier’s cafés. By the time of his death, in 1999, the idea of Tangier as a place for self-discovery had become received wisdom in the West and the Arab world, and Bowles was established as a giant of American letters despite decades of silence.'

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'When I came to the United States, I made a point of reading the American authors who had written about Tangier’s Interzone. Besides Bowles, I was intrigued by the Beats, especially the Columbia University alums—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr—students of Lionel Trilling and fans of Arthur Rimbaud who had somehow mapped Greenwich Village onto Tangier, turning the Boulevard Pasteur into a “North African Bleecker Street.” But even as a college sophomore, I realized that their writings were more about the straitjacket of McCarthyite America that they were running from, rather than about Morocco as such.

The giddy, epicurean lifestyle these writers led—hopping from hashish-smoking session to masquerade parties—did not shock me. The extravagant soirées with dancers, acrobats, and snake charmers hosted by expats at homes on the hill on the outskirts of town known as the English Mountain are part of Tangier’s lore. These were the idling expats who described themselves as “Tangerines,” and referred to their maids as “La Fatima” and drivers as “El Mohamito.” It was even gratifying to see that Tangier, like Berlin, had played a significant role in launching a gay literary movement—in some ways ahead of the West, in having its finger on the “prognostic pulse of the world,” as Burroughs called it. But what was startling was that, while these writers basked in the city’s pleasures, they—with the exception of the Bowleses—didn’t really like Tangier. The Beats had a casual disdain for the natives, invariably describing Moroccans as “rakish” or “raffish.” Capote found Tangier too alien, describing the men as “noisy heathens” and the women as “anonymous bundles of laundry.” He warned friends in New York about the “smell of the arabe.” Burroughs referred to the locals as a “bunch of Ay-rabs,” and in 1958 he pronounced: “Tanger [sic] is finished. The Arab dogs are among us.”

Paul and Jane Bowles—in their genuine intellectual interest in Tangier’s history and folk culture—stood above the rest of the expat community. In essays written for the American press, Paul Bowles traced the history of the medina from the early 1930s to independence. He chronicled how the sultan’s crackdown on Sufi practices (“the great puritanical purging”) in central Morocco inched northward. The Istiqlal nationalists specifically targeted the Zoco Chico as a place of immorality. Bars near mosques were shut down, others were banned from serving Muslims. Women caught in bars had their heads and eyebrows shaved.'

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'The Moroccan reaction against Bowles began to take form in the early 1970s. His earliest critics were the philosopher Abdallah Laroui and Ben Jelloun, who both chided the American writer for promoting an image of the country as a land of primitivism, drugs, and unlimited sex. Laroui also lambasted the Moroccan bourgeoisie for buying into and reproducing Bowles’s “folkloric” portrayal of their country. Ben Jelloun, writing in 1972, accused the American of belittling the nation’s literary patrimony. Bowles, in the mid-1960s, had begun translating the memoirs and stories of down-and-out illiterate youth in Tangier. (While he could not read Arabic, Bowles did understand darija, the spoken dialect.) The most prominent of these were Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes (1966), about a petty thief and male prostitute and his experiences dodging police and servicing tourists (the book was made into a BBC film); Look and Move On (1967), the tales of Mohammed Mrabet, a hustler and golf caddie who worked for an American couple; and the best-known, Mohammed Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1972), an account of his migration from the Rif to Tangier, his life as a street kid in the International Zone, and his becoming a schoolteacher, which he recounted to Bowles in Spanish.

These books were marketed in the West as “Moroccan literature,” and for many in the Anglophone world, this was their introduction to it. To Bowles’s critics, the interviews with street hustlers and pimps in effect erased an earlier literary tradition that had seen Moroccan writers published in French and Spanish since the 1930s, let alone the preceding centuries of poetry and other writing in Arabic. There was some justice in holding Bowles accountable: he had no desire to learn to read Arabic (“I had neither the time nor the desire”) and was frankly dismissive of this patrimony. “In a land like [Morocco]…,” he wrote, “the production of written literature is of course negligible. On the other hand, the Moroccans have a magnificent and highly evolved sense of rhythm which manifests itself in the twin arts of music and dance.”

In Tangier, though, Laroui and Ben Jelloun were both regarded as outsiders with their own agendas. Laroui acted as an adviser to the king and was a strong proponent of Arabization. Tangierians saw his attack on Bowles as another attempt by the Arab nationalist elite to subdue the “sin city.” Ben Jelloun also had a complicated relationship to Tangier. The son of a merchant, a Fassi (a person from Fez) who settled in Tangier in the early 1960s, he had attended the French lycée and was seen as part of the new Francophone Fassi upper class—comprising the Alaoui, Alami, Ben Jelloun, Berrada, Omrani, and Tazi families—that had fanned out across the country as the French departed, assuming top government positions. Like Laroui, Ben Jelloun spoke neither of the two common local tongues of the north, Spanish and Tarifit (the Berber language). A paradox of Ben Jelloun’s work, in particular, was that it often featured the very tropes of mysticism, violence, and sexual deviancy he denounced in Bowles’s work. For his part, the American writer dismissed his Moroccan critics as “confirmed Marxists.”'

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'The more I lived in America, the more I saw how much Bowles had shaped people’s understanding of Morocco. I can’t recall how many social gatherings I attended where, upon learning I was from Tangier, someone would recite this dictum: “You tell me you are going to Fez. Now if you say you are going to Fez, that means you are not going to Fez. Why have you lied to me, you who are my friend?” This twaddle was supposedly based on a Moroccan proverb, but it was one that Bowles quoted often, for it ostensibly offered a window into the Moroccan mind. I began to realize that Bowles’s fondness for the Berbers and his animus toward Arabs was, in many ways, a reflection of French colonial policy. Although he was well aware of the violence of French imperialism, he enjoyed its amenities—“the old, easygoing, openly colonial life of Morocco”—and as early as the 1950s, Bowles began to lament the loss of “colonial Tangier.” Above all, he believed in the International Zone, seeing its “anarchy” and “freedom from bureaucratic intervention” as an extraordinary political experiment. But these liberties, which is what drew many of the Beats, were the privileges of Europeans and Americans—ones generally not enjoyed by the city’s Muslim and Jewish natives.

And what did it mean that Bowles refused to engage with Moroccan intellectuals, saying “thought is not a word one can use in connection with Morocco”? Street vagrants were often his only contact with Moroccan society—and provided fodder for his writing. “You need trouble, friction to write on a subject—otherwise no one will read it.” He often even admitted to deliberately fomenting “trouble” by juxtaposing a “primitive” native with a civilized setting. In 1931, for instance, Bowles purchased the freedom of Abdelkader (Cadour), a fifteen-year-old indentured to work at a French-owned motel in Marrakech; the proprietress agreed to the transaction, but warned Bowles not to attack the boy sexually. When Bowles then took him to Paris, the youth made one cultural faux pas after another, including thinking that the jelly on the brioches was congealed blood. Bowles, delighted by these missteps, would take Cadour to dine with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Bowles’s idol, André Gide, seduced the boy, wooing him to his apartment for 50 francs. “My poor Arab,” Bowles would write, “whom I soignéed all the way from Marrakech through Spain to here, met the scoundrel [Gide] the other day in the street, and was invited to his house, where he was given silk robes, djellabas, etc. Fortunately the naïf child forgot the gifts when he left. But the scandal is rampant!”'

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'Paul Bowles and King Hassan II died in 1999, a few months apart. The novelist and the tyrant who had towered over Tangier for generations had more in common than either would have admitted—and that in part explains the reverence Bowles still enjoys in official Morocco. To be sure, Bowles hated religion, while Hassan II claimed to be the “commander of the faithful” and mobilized political Islam to counter Berber movements. Bowles was a libertarian (more than, as often thought, an anarchist), while Hassan’s security services intruded into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. Yet both shared a disdain for leftist, Third-Worldist politics. Both hated pan-Arabism, and loved Berber culture as long as it was “folkloric” and apolitical. They each thought Moroccans were congenitally ill-suited for democracy. As Bowles put it, “Democracy is an empty word to the average Moroccan; indeed by his temperament and conditions, he is more inclined to totalitarianism.” And perhaps most significantly, both Bowles and the monarch celebrated a “primitive,” mystical, unlettered, unfree Morocco, sharing a special appetite for the intoxicating rhythms of the Berbers. No wonder King Hassan II, who expelled numerous critics—from Arab intellectuals to French journalists and American professors—never bothered Bowles.

Yet, two decades after his death, Bowles has become newly fashionable among Morocco’s political elite, which has embraced the version of the country depicted by the “sage of Tangier,” as The Washington Post called him. Hardly a music festival or conference takes place without a mention of Bowles and how he helped preserve Morocco’s musical treasures, and his writings and recordings are seen as validation of the country’s cultural prowess. The Ministry of Culture, which almost blocked his recording project in 1959, published a remarkable essay in 2009 on the tenth anniversary of his death defending Bowles against criticism from Moroccan nationalist intellectuals, underscoring how he presciently warned of the threats that modernization posed to Morocco’s cultural and physical landscape. Government mouthpieces such as Hespress run flattering pieces about “the American who loved Morocco.”

The Morocco that Bowles dubbed a “land of magic” is one the Ministry of Tourism sells to the West. Beyond that, his emphasis on Morocco’s “African” essence suits the country’s recent geopolitical turn and reentry into the Africa Union. In the waning days of colonialism, Bowles thought an independent Morocco would be caught between what he derisively called two “civilizations,” the Western and the Arab-Islamic, but for all his misgivings about Western modernity, he thought Morocco as an African country would be better off attaching itself to the West. This is now the position of a significant segment of Morocco’s ruling elite.

The opposition to Bowles’s rehabilitation nevertheless remains strong, seeing his influence as a symptom of Morocco’s corruption and cultural vassalage. That the regime celebrates Berber folklore and the oeuvre of a novelist who wanted an “independent Berber republic” even as it imprisons Berber activists across the country is evidence for many of the regime’s fraudulence and bad faith. In this respect, Bowles’s continuing eminence suggests how little has changed in the kingdom since the colonial era, with an authoritarian regime and repressive social order remaining largely intact.

In October 2000, Joseph McPhillips, a long-standing American resident of Tangier, executor of the Bowles estate, and my high school English teacher, invited me to a star-studded memorial for the writer at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. As much as I wanted to meet Debra Winger (of Sheltering Sky fame), I couldn’t bring myself to attend. I had stopped giving any tours of Tangier about a year earlier, more than a little embarrassed by my youthful defense of Bowles. In their modest way, my guided parties too had lent support to a repressive regime’s carefully curated image of the kingdom as tolerant and fun. Even a shift of focus toward the African-American and Latin American writers who had inhabited Tangier and may have been more sympathetic to my country and its peoples did not solve this problem—even their art was not immune to Orientalist distortions. More broadly, why the constant spotlight on the thought and experiences of expats in Morocco?

As for Bowles’s work, I had come to realize that it reflected poorly on Morocco and America. Yes, he had brought attention to the suppression of Berber history and made invaluable musical recordings, but decolonization was supposed to dismantle colonial representations, and instead, the Moroccan regime was validating and institutionalizing Bowles’s depictions of Morocco. For many years after his death, I decided that the best way for me not to feed the “myth of Tangier” was by not writing more about Paul Bowles. And so, as I observed some Western commentators in the post-September 11 years rediscover the novelist as some sort of guide to understanding Islam, I bit my tongue. Yet the myth lives on. And today, a new generation of Moroccan writers—among them secularists, Berber activists, music critics, and pan-Africanists—are claiming Bowles as an ally. And that is why I found myself writing about Bowles once more.'

Read the article here.

Aidi's verdict on Bowles is measured but it's not a literary verdict. Whether The Sheltering Sky can survive as a classic remains to be seen. And a sex tourist can be a good author. It cannot be repeated often enough: if we want the artist to be a saint we should get rid of art and literature first. This is not to say that his art should be an excuse for his sins, it's just so that the the desire to see only impeccable behavior is indistinguishable from the desire to punish.

But at least there is at least one lesson to be learned from this valuable article.
The author can be and maybe should be an outsider, but better not a privileged outsider, especially not a privileged outsider who refuses to learn the language of the locals. For a few months you can work with interpreters, but if you want to live there: learn the language. Assimilate.