Tag: Morocco

A review of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, Brian T. Edwards, Duke University Press, 2005.

There are two types of anthropologists: those who have done fieldwork and those who haven’t. Only the former can fully bear the title of anthropologist. They have been ordained through the same rites of passage: they have been there, seen places, and have come back with the field notes and observations they can subsequently transform into a book. This marks their full entry into the profession: they will no longer have to return to the field for extended periods, as they can revisit the same material from a distance or through occasional visits. Bearing the talisman of their ordination, they can bar entry to the profession to those who haven’t been through the same ordeal. It doesn’t matter that these outsiders may have acquired an extensive knowledge of the anthropology literature or mastered the ropes and codes of the discipline: they are kept outside the tent, and forced to find other disciplinary affiliations. Many find refuge in literature departments, or under the broad canvas of cultural studies. There they may pursue their work in relatively unhindered ways, developing a critical dialogue with other, more patrolled disciplines in the social sciences. They may borrow from the toolbox and writing techniques of anthropologists to develop a view from afar, which they often turn to their own environment and surroundings in a kind of reflexive engagement. For all practical purposes, they are anthropologists in all but name.

An anthropologist in all but name

Such is the case with the author of the book under review. At the time of its publication, Brian T. Edwards was Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He defines himself as an Americanist–not in the anthropological sense of the word, which designates an ethnographer who specializes in Indian-American societies–, but as a contributor to American studies, a broad discipline encompassing both American literature and cinema as well as the wider historical context of US society and politics. The author contributes to this discipline by discussing American cultural productions, and by illustrating the pregnancy of central tenets of American identity: the notion of the frontier, the issue of race, the ambivalent attitude towards colonization, and the peculiar way America engages with the world at large. His discussion is bound in space and time: it focusses on Morocco from World War II’s North African campaign to the hippies taking the “Marrakech Express” to escape conscription during the Vietnam war. It examines a variety of texts and media: novels, poetry, but also Hollywood movies, musical recordings, anthropology texts, and diplomatic archives.

The choice of the book’s title is a testimony to the author’s cultural deftness. In fact, he borrows it from a Bing Crosby comedy, in which the theme song, “We’re Morocco Bound,” puns on the two dictionary meanings of the word “Morocco”: the name of the country in northwest Africa and, with a small m, a fine leather used in bookbinding. “Like a set of Shakespeare, we’re Morocco bound”, sings Crosby. As the author comments, to be “Morocco bound”, that is, to be on one’s way to Morocco as an American, “suggests that Morocco itself is bound in webs of representations.” The subtitle, “Disorienting America’s Maghreb,” points towards Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, defined as “a long Western tradition of literary and scholarly representations of a region named (by the West) ‘the Orient’ that corresponds with Western political domination of the land to the South and East of the Mediterranean.” “Dis-orienting” America’s perception of the Maghreb means blurring the boundaries and unsetting the ethnocentrism at work in American perceptions of the Orient. It also means giving a twist or a sense of queerness to American identity by suggesting other forms of belonging not necessarily linked to the nation-state.

Unsetting the ethnocentrism at work in American perceptions of the Orient

As Edward Said pointed out, with global ascendency in World War II, the United States assumed the European mantle of thinking about the world. With a new sense of responsibility in world’s affairs, cultural and political discourse overlapped to project a worldview shaped by historical experience (the myth of the frontier, American Indians, the American century, racial discrimination) and Hollywood scripts. In the 1930s, a spate of popular movies, with titles like The Sheik, Prisoner of the Desert, Beau Geste, or Princesse Tam-Tam, portrayed the Maghreb as the Oriental other. Disembarking on Moroccan shores in November 1942, General Patton described Casablanca as “a city which combines Hollywood and the Bible”. Casablanca was of course the setting of the Warner Bros movie featuring Humphrey Bogart, which concluded with “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” between the United States and French colonialism. For Americans, the background presence of the French was an integral part of the foreignness of North Africa, as French language and viewpoints framed their perceptions of the Maghreb.

Edward Said also noted that American popular attention to regions of the world works in “spurts”–“great masses of rhetoric and huge resources, followed by virtual silence”. Before 1973, when American attention turned more decidedly toward the Middle East, representations of the Maghreb played a leading role in the formation of popular American ideas about the Arabs. Morocco occupied a peculiar place in this setting: with its openness to the foreign and political stability, it had long been a place of fascination and fantasy, attracting American tourists or Hollywood cinema crews. During the postwar period, it offered shelter to successive waves of cultural misfits and eccentrics, from artists in exile or Harlem Renaissance figures to hippies and beatniks.

A place of fascination and fantasy

But the Orient was not only a passive screen for American projections. It modified America’s self-perception–African-American soldiers came back emboldened with a new taste for freedom after World War II campaigns. Representations of the foreign played a special role in rethinking the meaning of American national identity. In particular, Tangier, which remained until 1960 a free port and a tax haven with its internationally administered zone and extraterritorial status, posed a challenge to the hegemony of the national(ist) vision. Hence its reputation of queerness among American journalists and critics. That such a location would be tolerant of homosexuality and the open use of cannabis added to the threat toward the dominant national narrative of the period. Edwards’s reading of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, written in 1959 while the poet was in residence in the city, emphasizes the sense of subversive potentiality in the international formations of Tangier. Rereading Naked Lunch in its Tangier context highlights its sense of immediacy and political potentiality.

Edwards’s ambition is to “imagine alternative possibilities for an American encounter with the world.” By following American representations of the Maghreb into Maghrebi cultural productions, and in examining moments of actual collaboration between Americans and Moroccans, he operates a rare gesture in American studies by performing the detour through the other. He is not only looking at us looking at them: he also looks at them looking back. Oriental actors are by no way passive subjects: they critically reinterpret American cultural productions, and “talk back” by returning to the sender the postcards and clichés projected on the North African screen. Edwards tracks the debates among Moroccan intellectuals triggered by American cultural productions. He attends to Moroccan recreations of the film Casablanca in touristic waterholes or local artsy movies; he comments the obituaries published in Arabic at the time of Paul Bowles’s death; and he gives voice to local reactions towards Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of cultures. He also describes precious occurrences of transcultural collaboration: Ornette Coleman’s project with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Paul Bowles’s joint works of fiction with the illiterate Moroccan artist Mohammed Mrabet, or the traces of the informant’s voice in the anthropologist’s discourse.

An anthropological playground

Morocco also occupies a key role in the development of U.S. cultural anthropology. The figure of the anthropologist was a common sight in the Moroccan landscape. He features as a character in several novels by Paul Bowles or his wife Jane. Mrabet, Bowles’s long time collaborator, had been an anthropologist’s informant, and the joint books published based on taped recordings of their conversations are close to ethnographic field notes. Morocco was firmly put on the map of American anthropology when Clifford Geertz set shop in Sefrou in the beginning of the sixties. This, too, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship: Geertz not only revisited the place regularly, he sent there scores of graduate students, who recorded their passage in photographs, books, and articles. In academia, the work of Geertz’s group influenced American anthropology and cultural studies deeply. Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco became mandatory reading in PhD programs, and his theorization of the comprehension of the self via the detour of comprehension of the other became a central tenet in comparative studies.

In the book’s last chapter, “Hippie Orientalism: The Interpretation of Countercultures”, Edwards takes on the anthropologist at his own game. He draws a parallel between the group of anthropologists working around Sefrou and the hippies who took the “Marrakech Express” and praised Morocco as “a hashhead’s delight.” Of course, Geertz and Rabinow are not quite Orientalists in the Saidian sense, nor did they indulge in the vagabond lifestyle of hippie drifters. But while living independently of each other, both communities’ interpretation of Moroccan culture was “a direction of energies away from another more troubling Orient, that of Southeast Asia.” Despite their avowed radicalism, both groups were blind to the riots and student strikes which hit Moroccan cities in 1965-66 and were harshly repressed by the Moroccan police state, with several hundreds of students killed. The impulse, shared by the hippie and the anthropologist, to gravitate toward the “traditional,” the rural, and the fragmented because it was somehow more “real” or “authentic” than urban Morocco must therefore be seen in the context of domestic political strife and U.S. engagement in Vietnam.

Catching the anthropologist with his pants down

Taking the anthropologist at his word, and through close readings of texts, Edwards even detects hints of ethnocentrism and racial prejudice in Rabinow’s and Geertz’s essays. The detachment of the participant observer is a turn away from more pressing concerns, and the idea that culture is a text that needs to be interpreted rests on the premise that this text first be made stable and detached from political realities. Geertz’s taste for literary references makes him blind to the inherited preconceptions and tainted Orientalism of the authors he quotes in abundance. And he is caught with his pants down in some descriptive paragraphs where he compares the Moroccan landscape to Hollywood movie sceneries and American frontier images. Anthropology, too, needs to be dis-oriented and decentered from the natural tendency toward ethnocentrism.