Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition

Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature

Michael K. Walonen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134787944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In his study of the Tangier expatriate community, Michael K. Walonen analyzes the representations of French and Spanish Colonial North Africa by Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Alfred Chester during the end of the colonial era and the earliest days of post-independence. The conceptualizations of space in these authors' descriptions of Tangier, Walonen shows, share common components: an attention to the transformative potential of the conflict sweeping the region; a record of the power relations that divided space along lines of gender and ethnicity, including the spatial impact of the widespread sexual commerce between Westerners and natives; a vision of the Maghreb as a land that can be dominated or imposed on as a kind of frontier space; an expression of anxieties about the specters of Cold War antagonisms; and an embrace of the underlying logic of the market to the culture of the Maghreb. Counterbalancing the depictions of Tangier by Westerners who sought to reconcile their nostalgia for the colonial order with their support of native demands for independent governance is Walonen's extended analysis of the contrasting sense of place found in the writings of native Moroccan authors such as Mohammed Choukri, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Anouar Majid. In its focus on Tangier and the larger Maghreb as a lived environment situated at a particular spatial and temporal crossroads, Walonen's study makes an important contribution to the fields of urban, transatlantic, and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Space and place are socially produced entities. This is to say that space is neither an emptiness or potentiality filled with objects, nor is it simply a context for events and actions occurring in time, nor is it, as in Kantian philosophy, a mental filter through which external reality becomes intelligible. In the words of Henri Lefebvre, who more than any other theorist has opened up the way for critical analyses of space considered socially: “social space is constituted neither by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data, nor by a void packed like a parcel with various contents, and […] is irreducible to a ‘form’ imposed upon phenomena, upon things, upon physical materiality” (27). Rather, any given social space is the totality of the uses to which it is put and the affective responses that it engenders—or, put another way, it is the sum total of the human “energies” put into it.¹ This is a matter of projection—human beings in concert with one another altering and developing a dynamic apprehension of given landscape features that comes to define how these features can and will be experienced by posterity—and the fact that culture both creates the possibility of the experience of spatiality and fills this space. There is, of course, another commonly employed sense of the term “space,” that used in the virtual reckoning of distance, but “space” as used throughout this study refers to the experiential, phenomenological, and hence social entity described here.

“Place,” as I will use it throughout this study, is a specific social space, social space in its instantiation; therefore, one can speak of the social space of the market in either general terms or as it exists within a given culture and in its particular manifestation in, say, the place of the Grand Socco in Tangier or the French Market in New Orleans. To take this distinction further, space is experiential; as Michel de Certeau puts it, “space is a practiced place” (117). That is, while place is a matter of what elements are “proper” to a “distinct location, a location it defines,” and is thus to a large degree conceptual, a matter of how those who interact with that place understand it in its particularity, space is the phenomenological experience of situatedness as it is negotiated or “actuated” (117). Place is space that is defined, that is differentiated and claimed, through the act of naming; it takes on a kind of social concreteness through this act, through this exercise of power and attempted control that allows places to be known and claimed. Accordingly, place names can constitute a site of contestation between different cultures laying claim to a given place and/or map historical changes in the control of a place, as, for instance, in the cases of Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, Mumbai/Bombay, and Istanbul/Constantinople.

The organization of space is both a product and shaper of social relations; spatiality is both the medium of social production and the outcome of this production; that is, social production both forms space and is contingent upon the preexistent space that it confronts at any moment in time (Soja 57, 127–9).² For example, the current inhabitants of San Francisco’s Chinatown are responsible for giving shape to their social space, drawing on both American and Chinese institutions in this construction, but in doing so they don’t work with a tabula rasa, but rather must negotiate the preexistent spaces put in place by past Chinatown residents and the traditional orientation of Chinatown towards and within the larger city surrounding it. Space and place are both actual and a set of potentialities— both what is and what can be done there, what is and what can be brought into being there (Lefebvre 191). In addition, space and place, as socially produced entities, consist of sets of prohibitions and allowances inscribed on them; zones of differential access along lines of class, race, and gender. For example, in City of Quartz, his excellent cultural history of Los Angeles, Mike Davis notes the various ways in which the application of soft power denies the poor, marginalized ethnic minorities whose neighborhoods surround it access to downtown Los Angeles. These zones fragment space, making any appearance of greater unity effectively illusory. As Walter Benjamin writes:

The city is only apparently homogenous. Even its name takes on a different sound from one district to the next. Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void—as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs. (88)

These divisions can be byproducts of the historically contingent needs and desires of a people that produce a given space over time, but just as often they stem from the power dynamic that is at play in spatial evolution, with controlling rulers and institutions exerting a domineering and delimiting influence on people through the shaping and policing of places.

Within and across these divisions, aesthetic codes and the ambiances they create are equally a defining aspect of how space and place are experienced. This is most obvious in the case of places whose design was carefully planned, as in the carefully managed layout of St. Petersburg that Peter the Great’s architects and artisans contrived for him, but even the most haphazardly developed human environments have their own defining aesthetic and ambiance. These ambiances determine the “feel” of a place, people’s immediate affective responses to them— San Francisco has an ambiance of calm, scenic geniality due to its rolling hills and profusion of Victorian houses, while Detroit’s general state of disrepair creates an ambiance of decrepitude and general neglect.

Finally, the residue of the spatial formulations of successive past social orders leaves a defining mark on space and place. Paris circa 2010 is a stage in the development of a space defined by the social relations of successive generations of inhabitants dating back likely to the fourth millennium BCE and the physical structures and changes to the environment produced by these inhabitants. The haphazard collection of surviving structures and urban development patterns of past eras, from Notre Dame Cathedral to Baron Haussmann’s grands boulevards, both testify to the lived relations of prior Parisian social orders and continue to flavor and condition the possibilities of experiencing the city.

Space, this socially produced entity, is governed by what Lefebvre refers to as “spatial codes,” which should be understood not simply as ways to interpret space, but also as codes that dictate how space is lived in, understood, and produced (47). Each society produces its own space and those not native to this space must, in the act of trying to make this space intelligible, read and negotiate these spatial codes. When these outsiders choose to re-present this place, they must draw upon their knowledge of and competence in these spatial codes and translate them through the modes of representation available in their cultural tradition, affectively shading them in the process.³ It is this act which lies at the heart of the encounter with nonnative space, and the effort to make sense of it is endemic to the literature of travel and of expatriation. This act often involves translating the alien into the familiar, with the distortion or transformation of original significance attendant on any act of translation. For example, when Robert Louis Stevenson describes his arrival in New York City in The Amateur Emigrant (1895), he understands the weather in terms of Liverpool, the behavior of American money-changers in terms of that of the French commissary, and the nation’s perceived potential and freshness in terms of a trope dating back to the earliest days of English colonization of the New World: America as Eden (100–104).

French literary critic Jean-Marc Moura considers this situation of representing space which has been constituted according to foreign, alien spatial codes, of translating this space into intelligibly familiar terms, at length in his L’Europe littéraire et l’ailleurs [European Literature and the Elsewhere], arguing that the experience of foreignness is elemental to literature and that the term “Elsewhere” (“ailleurs”) can be used to designate the alterity imagined for place—the “spatial Other.”⁴ For Moura, an author creates this Elsewhere in the face of the dominant images existing in the social imaginary, which are to some degree acceded to and in some degree contested (1, 44–5). Moura notes that:

Elsewhere can in effect designate two things: a domain of experience, actual or imaginary, already inhabited by others and into which a person can penetrate; a phenomenon of horizon, a transcendental appearance according to which the consciousness that proves limited is fated to project into this space the recovery of this absence of limits that it feels in itself. The second sense [of “Elsewhere”] upholds the Gnostic attitude that although it is in the world, it believes that it isn’t of the world and that it doesn’t belong to it because it comes from elsewhere. (1, translation mine)

Moura further posits, following Paul Ricoeur, that an author formulates a sense of the Elsewhere according to a dialectic between the qualities a group attributes to itself (“the idealized interpretation across which the group represents its existence and by which it reinforces its identity”) and that which questions social reality along the lines of what else is understood as possible (49–50, 54, translation mine). The latter, which Ricoeur and Moura term “the utopian,” is a sense of a desirable alternative social order, be it constituted of ideal qualities (such as absolute social equality), traits drawn from other past or present societies, notions of pure difference (such as the exotic), or some mixture of these. In other words, a sense of the Elsewhere emerges out of the dialectic between points of commonality perceived as shared by the foreign and the native and an imagined sense of what other social possibilities exist.⁵

In representing places that are confronted and portrayed as foreign rather than native or familiar, authors construct a sense of the Elsewhere through the formal means available to them. This is a matter of setting, the selected locations which come collectively to stand for the place where the work is set, and the selected sensory impressions through which the contours of these locations are established; but “setting” should be understood here as something more dynamic than the kind of backdrop it is conceptually relegated to by too much literary criticism. Place, as represented in works of both fiction and non-fiction, constitutes the broadly encompassing environments navigated by characters and/or narrators; this is more than a collection of ambiances, props, and décors: place, in the sense proposed above, sets the basic horizon of the possible by which characters and plots are both constrained and enabled, set into being and motion. Place as Elsewhere, then, is both what is imagined to be there and what is imagined as possible there. Moreover, there are multiple degrees of immediacy versus abstractness of place: “Place,” social geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observes, “exists at different scales”— one’s immediate physical surroundings, the enclosure or small-scale demarcated outside space (city park, shopping district, etc.) within which one is situated, geographically designated areas (neighborhood, city, state forest, lake, etc.), administrative or ethnically defined regions within a country, countries, transnational regions (for example, Scandinavia, Latin America, the Caribbean), to name just the more prominent or obvious. A proper analysis of representations of place will take into account as many of these different scales or registers of place as are manifested in a given work or body of work—from its representation of the street-level experience of place to its conceptualizations of city, country, and region. These should be considered both in and of themselves and as they inflect each other—that is, for instance, how an overall preconception of the broader scale, more abstract registers of place (such as city, country, and region) may inflect the immediate experience of a given set of surroundings and then in turn be qualified and enriched by this first-hand experience of place.

This book analyzes the formulations of the Elsewhere—the dynamics of imagined alterity of socially produced space—in the works of the expatriate authors who lived in Tangier and wrote about the Maghreb⁶ during the period in which Morocco was transitioning from being a colonial possession of France and Spain to an independent nation (1945–69), particularly Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Alfred Chester. This is a question of cultural encounter, which, like all cultural encounters, plays itself out spatially. It is the spatial character of this encounter that is at the heart of this study of a set of representations, of performative recreations of this encounter.

The period during which the writers in question lived and wrote in the Maghreb was marked by dramatic political and social change as the countries of the region struggled to move out from under colonial control and then adjust to the different realities of postcolonial existence. European colonial interest in the Maghreb dates back to the earliest days of the modern era, but its characteristic form during the period with which this study is concerned was a product of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. France invaded and began settling Algeria in 1830, and pressured the Bey of Tunisia to accept a protectorate in 1881 and a more broadly encompassing protectorate in 1883 (Abun-Nasr 236–9, 276–9). At the 1906 Algeciras Conference the European powers decided that the French and the Spanish would assume administrative control of Morocco; in 1912 the French pressured the sultan to sign the Treaty of Fez, which established a protectorate, placing all executive power in the country outside of the Spanish zones to the north and southwest⁷ in the hands of the French (Pennell 131–6). European colonial rule in the Maghreb chiefly impacted the overall spatiality of the region in setting aside some urban spaces as European Quarters, from which natives, other than those belonging to the servant class, were largely excluded. In Algeria, where a large settler colony built up over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this phenomenon extended out into the countryside as well, as pieds noirs set up large farms often worked by poorly paid native laborers. But in Tunisia and Morocco the French colonial presence consisted mostly of military personnel and city-dwelling administrators, though in urban northern Morocco a large population of poor working-class Spaniards, not to be confused with the more affluent Western colonials and expatriates, took root. In each case this colonial presence set up a rupture in the space that it occupied. The Maghreb, like any region, already contained a number of divisions structured along lines of social class and ethnicity—for instance, most of its cities contained mellahs, Jewish quarters long woven into the fabric of the region, whose spaces were distinctly inflected by the practices and customs of their inhabitants. But the European presence in the Maghreb, which by 1930 was manifested in an estimated 1,300,000 inhabitants of European descent (Laroui 101), introduced a different, sometimes jarring element in the spatiality of the region—European habits, European levels of material affluence, European urbanism, and other European structures and institutions (apartment buildings, cafés, hotels, and so forth). This introduced a rupture into these urban spaces, which could no longer be experienced seamlessly and holistically by the majority of their inhabitants. It also served as a constant spatial reminder of the exercise of foreign influence and power which upheld the colonial order, thus producing a resentment which would eventually result in the overthrowing of this order. Moreover, these structures and institutions were transplants—they did not develop organically as a product of the succession of negotiations made by the successive waves of inhabitants of the Maghreb with the land. Thus, while at times these grafts took well, as in the case of café culture, which was not an entirely alien institution to the region, often a note of disharmony was struck by these spatial impositions. This note was functional in some cases, as in the European dwellings Bowles mentions in The Spider’s House, which are not situated so as to take advantage of the mountain breeze and consequently are insufferably hot; in other cases, such as that of the drab and functional European-style concrete buildings almost universally bemoaned by Tangier’s expatriate writers, this false note was aesthetic in nature.

This colonial presence took on a particularly forceful and idiosyncratic form in Tangier, which had a unique political status, population demographic, and also (and hence) spatiality. Since the nineteenth century an international administration had been in place in Tangier, initially to manage public works; “In 1924 the Statute of Tangier gave virtually every European state, and the USA, a role in administering the city” (Pennell 154). This set up the International Zone of Tangier, a legal space outside of the Moroccan zones of French and Spanish colonial control with neither taxation nor financial regulation of any kind, where criminal acts were adjudicated by courts of the accused’s nationality, given the absence of any zonewide legal authority. A longtime center for diplomatic relations between Morocco and the nations of Europe, Tangier had for some time been home to an eclectic international population; a port city and a border town on the frontier of a more wealthy region to the north, Tangier had also for some time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Cultural Dynamics of Expatriate Tangier
• 3 Paul Bowles, Approaching the Maghreb
• 4 Always on the Outside: Jane Bowles’s Vision of Spatial Impenetrability
• 5 “Don’t ever fall for this inscrutable oriental shit like Bowles puts down”: Demystifying and Remystifying the Maghreb in William Burroughs’s Tangier Writings
• 6 Brion Gysin’s Conflictive Maghreb
• 7 Alfred Chester: In Search of Belonging Through Mapping and Sex
• 8 A Counter-Discourse of Tangerian Space in the Works of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Anouar Majid
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index