Points in Time Read online

When the peasant arrived at Mdiq the following day, he found that no one could tell him where Si Mohammed Tsuli lived. He wandered back and forth through every street in the town, searching and inquiring. When evening came, he went to the gendarmerie and asked if he might leave the mule there. But they questioned him and accused him of having stolen the animal. His story was ridiculous, they said, and they locked him into a cell.

  Not many days later Hadj Abdallah, having finished his business in Tetuán, went back to Khemiss dl Anjra to get his mule and ride her home. When he heard that she had disappeared directly after he had taken the bus, he remembered Hattash, and was certain that he was the culprit. The theft had to be reported in Tetuán, and much against his will he returned there.

  Your mule is in Mdiq, the police told him.

  Hadj Abdallah took another bus up to Mdiq.

  Papers, said the gendarmes. Proof of ownership.

  The Hadj had no documents of that sort. They told him to go to Tetuán and apply for the forms.

  During the days while he waited for the papers to be drawn up, signed and stamped, Hadj Abdallah grew constantly angrier. He went twice a day to talk with the police. I know who took her! he would shout. I know the son of a whore.

  If you ever catch sight of him, hold on to him, they told him. We’ll take care of him.

  Although Tetuán is a big place with many crowded quarters, the unlikely occurred. In a narrow passageway near the Souq el Fouqi late one evening Hadj Abdallah and Hattash came face to face.

  The surprise was so great that Hattash remained frozen to the spot, merely staring into Hadj Abdallah’s eyes. Then he heard a grunt of rage, and felt himself seized by the other man’s strong arm.

  Police! Police! roared Hadj Abdallah. Hattash squirmed, but was unable to free himself.

  One policeman arrived, and then another. Hadj Abdallah did not release his grip of Hattash for an instant while he delivered his denunciation. Then with an oath he struck his prisoner, knocking him flat on the sidewalk. Hattash lay there in the dark without moving.

  Why did you do that? the policemen cried. Now you’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.

  Hadj Abdallah was already frightened. I know. I ought not to have hit him.

  It’s very bad, said one policeman, bending over Hattash, who lay completely still. You see, there’s blood coming out of his head.

  A small crowd was collecting in the passageway.

  There were only a few drops of blood, but the policeman had seen Hattash open one eye and had heard him whisper: Listen.

  He bent over still farther, so that his ear was close to Hattash’s lips.

  He’s got money, Hattash whispered.

  The policeman rose and went over to Hadj Abdallah. We’ll have to call an ambulance, he said, and you’ll have to come to the police station. You had no right to hit him.

  At that moment Hattash began to groan.

  He’s alive, at least! cried Hadj Abdallah. Hamdul’lah!

  Then the policemen began to speak with him in low tones, advising him to settle the affair immediately by paying cash to the injured man.

  Hadj Abdallah was willing. How much do you think? he whispered.

  It’s a bad cut he has on his head, the same policeman said, going back to Hattash. Come and look.

  Hadj Abdallah remained where he was, and Hattash groaned as the man bent over him again. Then he murmured: Twenty thousand. Five for each of you.

  When the policeman rejoined Hadj Abdallah, he told him the amount. You’re lucky to be out of it.

  Hadj Abdallah gave the money to the policeman, who took it over to Hattash and prodded him. Can you hear me? he shouted.

  Ouakha, groaned Hattash.

  Here. Take this. He held out the banknotes in such a way that Hadj Abdallah and the crowd watching could see them clearly. Hattash stretched up his hand and took them, slipping them into his pocket.

  Hadj Abdallah glared at the crowd and pushed his way through, eager to get away from the spot.

  After he had gone, Hattash slowly sat up and rubbed his head. The onlookers still stood there watching. This bothered the two policemen, who were intent on getting their share of the money. The recent disclosures of corruption, however, had made the public all too attentive at such moments. The crowd was waiting to see them speak to Hattash or, if he should move, follow him.

  Hattash saw the situation and understood. He rose to his feet and quickly walked up the alley.

  The policemen looked at each other, waited for a few seconds, and then began to saunter casually in the same direction. Once they were out of sight of the group of onlookers they hurried along, flashing their lights up each alley in their search. But Hattash knew the quarter as well as they, and got safely to the house of his friends.

  He decided, however, that with the two policemen on the lookout for him Tetuán was no longer the right place for him, and that his own tchar in the Anjra would be preferable.

  Once he was back there, he made discreet inquiries about the state of the road to Ksar es Seghir. The repairs were finished, his neighbors told him, and the soldiers had been sent to some other part of the country.

  The river runs fast at the mouth where the shore is made of the sky, and the wavelets curl inward fanwise from the sea. For the swimmer there is no warning posted against the sharks that enter and patrol the channel. Some time before sunset birds come to stalk or scurry along the sandbar, but before dark they are gone.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  I

  Topographical features mentioned by Hanno the Carthaginian are no longer in existence. The Atlantic coastline of Morocco has greatly altered in the past twenty-four centuries.

  II

  A fondouq is a caravanserai where travellers may find accommodation for themselves and stabling for their horses, donkeys or mules.

  Mention of a King Mohammed VIII in the early sixteenth century may cause surprise to those who remember that King Mohammed V died in 1961. Altogether thirteen monarchs bore the name before the establishment of the present dynasty in 1649, at which point the enumeration was begun afresh.

  Passio gloriosi martyr is beati fratris Andreae de Spole to, ordinis minorum regularis observantiae p. catholico fidei veritate passi in Affrica civitate Fez, Anno 1532, Tolosoae (in verse).

  (Translation into Spanish published at Medina del Campo in 1543, entitled Tesauro de virtudes copilado por un religioso portuguez, Sigue el Martyro de Fr. Andres de Espoleto en Fez.)

  IV

  The incident is mentioned in The Empire of Morocco by James Grey Jackson (William Bulmer & Co., London, 1809).

  V

  Djenoun (singular djinn) are fearsome spirits capable of assuming human or animal form.

  VI

  The ulema constitute a council of men versed theoretically and practically in the laws of Islam, holding government appointments in a Moslem state.

  Mokhaznia are military guards.

  El Martino de la joven Hachuel, la Heroina Hebrea by Eugenio Maria Romero (Gibraltar, 1837).

  Reference is made to the occurrence in the Times of Morocco, 25 September, 1888. Also in Archives Israelites, Vol. XLI, Nos. 22-24, 1880.

  A play based on the case, by Antonio Calle, was published in Seville in 1852.

  VII

  The tale appears in Morocco by Edmondo de Amicis (Henry T. Coates & Co., Philadelphia, 1897).

  VIII

  A literal translation of the lyrics of a popular song in Moghrebi Arabic of the 1950s.

  IX

  Spanish rule in Morocco terminated with Independence, in 1956. The difficulties recounted took place during the ’sixties and ’seventies.

  X

  A fondaq is a hotel. During the French occupation, fondouq and fondaq were used interchangeably to mean ‘hostelry’; present-day usage distinguishes between a fondouq—a caravanserai where animals are accommodated—and a fondaq—a hotel.

  This episode occurred in 1980.

  AFTERWORD

&n
bsp; Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations

  By Brian T. Edwards

  1. Interrupting the American Archive

  When Paul Bowles died in Tangier on 18 November 1999, the story was covered widely in the US press. US obituaries portrayed Bowles, with remarkable consistency, as an American expatriate connected, in spite of self-imposed exile in North Africa, to many of the most intriguing writers and artists of Euro-American Modernism. The omissions in the portrait—especially the importance of Bowles’s Maghrebi context—are endemic to a narrow conceptualization of the author’s career and indicate the resistance to thinking about US literary and cultural production in its global context. After 1941, provoked by a more immediate and massive engagement in global affairs, Americans reorganized their thinking about the foreign. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Bowles played a significant part in imagining the relationship of Americans to the foreign in general and to Europe’s former colonies in particular. Bowles’s career challenged the circumscribed sense of what counts as American literature as well as the perceived chasm separating cultural production from international politics. His residence in Tangier, beginning in 1947, corresponds with a deep involvement in Moroccan affairs by the US government during which Bowles wrote frequently about North African politics and culture. After Morocco attained independence in 1956, Bowles was the most prominent US citizen living in Morocco, someone whose statements were widely circulated and frequently disparaged by Moroccans. His work was not free of its own limitations, nor were his politics liberating. But his writing emerged from a crucial moment before US supremacist attitudes were consolidated. Most US accounts of Bowles have perpetuated the Cold War tendency to translate the foreign within the logic of exceptionalism. Yet Bowles himself had long since taken a path diverging from such a nationalist or even nation-based logic.

  Since 9/11, Bowles’s name has reemerged in the US media as a prescient and missed American writer.[1] With the posthumous publication of a major collection in late 2001 and a two-volume Library of America edition of his works in 2002, Bowles’s place in the American canon seems yet more assured because of an implicit connection of recent history with his alleged “prediction” of a world gone terribly wrong in the encounter of Americans and Arabs.[2] Despite a shelf of biographies and studies, however, the scholarly record reflects little more than a smattering of information on his longtime Moroccan artistic collaborators, friends, and lovers.[3] The absence of such material may encourage critics merely to spin the established version of Bowles’s career—a writer separated by a Modernist scrim from engagement with his geopolitical context—and discourage others from seeing Bowles as deeply involved in the complex interplay of cultural and geopolitical concerns that animated the US presence in the region.[4]

  If there is to be a twenty-first century rediscovery of Bowles, the pedagogical and critical danger is that readers will continue to view him through the Cold War lenses that focused his earlier reception. Namely, having long repressed the question of empire that lies at the foundation of American studies approaches to reading literature, when readers reread Bowles in the context of US empire, it will be difficult to evade what Paul Giles has derided as “the magic circle between text and context.” Critical readings of Bowles that simply extrapolate his texts as Orientalist are caught within a similar circle. This essay is interested in interrupting those frames by offering a Moroccan archive on Bowles’s Moroccan context and by attending to the various forms of disruption that Bowles’s work includes and produces. One strand emerging from the Moroccan archive seems to affirm—and extend—what has been called a “postnational” approach, namely one that sees the nation form and the related question of national literature as elaborate and influential but also historically delimited constructions. In the US, those constructions reemerge with new ferocity in the early Cold War, during which Bowles was writing narratives of Americans who depart from the various “cages” that have held them in the US. As Bowles’s case demonstrates, there are American authors of the 1940s through the 1970s whose work sits uneasily within the hypernational framework of the period.[5] Not only does this work require a comparative, multisited approach to be read properly, but also its departure from the national episteme helps rethink the relationship between cultural production and foreign relations. Bowles’s relationship to Tangier is to a place with a historically fraught relationship to the nation form, a space at once extranational and international, and a place of diasporic convergences. Bowles’s early work refuses the neocolonialist/anti-imperialist polarity that has emerged as the choice critics must make about his writing and exhibits a potentiality for an alternative engagement across national boundaries, literatures, and subjectivities. This potentiality, emerging from his early work and developed later, offers an important counterpoint to the forms of containment being consolidated on the home front while he wrote.

  In what follows, I first examine US and Moroccan portrayals of Bowles in media and scholarship. Reading through Moroccan critical responses, I derive a manner of reading Bowles through an inter- or extranational formation I call Tangerian literature. Then I use this category to reread Bowles’s best-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, to pursue the novel’s relation to its geopolitical context and the potentiality Bowles explores and figures within the novel for identifications that exceed national identification. By doing so, and by contrasting diplomatic representations by the US State Department apparatus, I reconsider the space between literary representations of the foreign and foreign relations. Bowles’s attitude toward that space is complex and forces Americanists to reconsider easy invocations of the international or the political in discussions of post-1941 American literature.

  Thirty-six years old when he set sail for Casablanca in 1947 with a contract for an as-yet-unwritten novel he called The Sheltering Sky (he had lived in Morocco in the early 1930s and in Mexico for a year during World War II), Bowles made a departure that was a definitive rupture and that at times bothered reviewers of his novels and has constrained the parameters for interpretations of his work ever since. Nearly all of his writing was set either in North Africa or Central America and took as its recurring subject the encounter of Anglo-Americans with these places and the people, both “foreign” and “native,” who live there. During the 1940s and 1950s, when Bowles first made a name for himself as a writer—having achieved a degree of fame earlier as a composer—his dedication to representing life outside of the US alternatively worried Cold Warriors and titillated the counterculture. In 1950, for example, Charles Jackson reviewed Bowles’s second book negatively in the New York Times Book Review and suggested that Bowles would do better to return to “his native scene” and take up “everyday” American concerns.

  Upon Bowles’s death, journalists could not help but express judgment on his decision to have stayed “away” until the end. In Mel Gussow’s account in The New York Times, Bowles’s choice to spend his life abroad demonstrated something approaching a moral failing. “In many ways his career was one of avoidance,” Gussow put it. “[He] retreated to Tangier . . . and moved farther away from the worlds of publishing and society toward an unknown destination.” The tone of Adam Bernstein’s obituary for the Washington Post recalls Jackson’s comments half a century earlier: “Since the late 1940s, he had all but renounced the US, embracing what he considered the sexually, socially and culturally liberating environment of Morocco.” Writers from the major papers efface Bowles’s oft-repeated critique of the decadence of US consumer and political culture. The invention of an attitude that Bowles did not express about Morocco (that it was liberating) emerges from the journalists’ fabrication of his renunciation of the US. The decision to remain outside leads to extreme and polarized responses from those whose careers have relied on remaining within.

  Despite the interpretive weight of Bowles’s choice of residence on the meaning of his life, however, not one of the US obituaries and tributes considered his half-century in Tangier in the context of the m
ajor political and social transformations in the city, in Morocco, or in the greater Maghreb, which moved from colonialism to independence through various intense struggles in the postcolonial period. In his full-page obituary, Gussow writes off all of Moroccan history in a sentence: “Eventually his dream city of Tangier was invaded by tourists and became something of a nightmare.”[6] The excuse for the omission would seem to be the US media’s firm distinction between realms of cultural production and political history. Yet Bowles’s career challenges that binarism throughout: he published a novel about the Moroccan independence movement; wrote articles about politics in Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Morocco and Portugal for the Nation and other publications during the 1950s; feared returning to the US because of prior membership in the Communist Party; composed the score for a Belgian documentary about the Congo on the verge of decolonization; and saw his own extensive recording of Moroccan music in the postcolonial period as a response to the cultural program of Moroccan nationalists.

  Critics must reexamine the relationship of post-1941 US literature and foreign relations. By foreign relations, I mean both US international politics and the ways in which, through cultural production, Americans are taught to imagine the foreign; the interplay between these two meanings of the term must not be collapsed, as has become routine. In Bowles criticism published in the US, for example, Bowles’s relations with foreigners are either a point of prurient interest (what sorts of “relations” did he have with Moroccans?) or ignored. Bowles’s intriguing life was made familiar via many interviews, profiles, and accounts of visits to the errant author himself in situ. In themselves, these accounts of Bowles among the Arabs (to paraphrase a recent one), along with the obituaries, constitute an archive, stock with frequent repetitions, stereotypes, and regurgitations of colonial banalities about the Maghreb. Its predictability, however, does not diminish the power of this archive to frame readings of Bowles’s work and American understandings of the Maghreb. The unchecked interpretation of Morocco that emerges implies and constructs a contrasting setting from which readers read the articles. They repeatedly construct the binarism, then, that Edward Said has argued marks Orientalism, and challenge the recent argument that American representations of the Arab world since World War II move us beyond Said’s formulation.[7] Bowles is distanced from what is imagined as “normal” in the US: he is suspect insofar as his relationship to Morocco is seen not as an engagement with the foreign but as a prolonged lost weekend, as Jackson implied, an irresponsible bender. As a result, he became not only the conduit to the purportedly “liberating environment,” its translator, but also a tourist site himself. By the 1990s, Bowles had entered the travel guidebooks as something like required reading and as a part of the scenery.[8]