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Travelling Morocco in the 19th and 20th Centuries: History or Historical Fictionalising?

Najah Mahmi

Abstract Representation stands as one of the most intrinsic issues through which racial and cultural differences get insinuated, dividing the human experience into two main polarities, much defended in terms of ‘x’ and ‘y’, stressing the factor ≠ as their main congregating yet ironically dissociating agent. Accordingly, the formula ‘West ≠ Orient’ becomes much relevant in energizing clichés and prejudices through standard binary oppositions that can be summarized in one maxim: West/Rest, emphasized through a large colonial corpus, a main instance of which are 19th and 20th century European travel narratives. I defend in this essay the idea that though highly formulaic and over-romanticizing of the ‘orient,’ (re)establishing and stressing cultural boundaries between the metropolis and the subjugated, 19th and 20th centuries European travel narratives stand as an important cultural and historical archive for both the East, especially Morocco as a case study, and the West. Thus, it would be more effective not to dismiss them as mere stereotypical representations of the ‘Orient,’ with a total lack of self-criticism, implying here the dynamics of reception and responses to correct such (mis)representations. I base the discussion in this essay on the assumption that though their hegemonic discursive formations, travel narratives seem not to be totally deviated from reality, for though no representation is authentic, not all representations are fully and by fatality misrepresentations; if reality gets distorted, then the very act of distortion can trace some of its patterns. This essay provides a comparative critical reading of Travels through the Empire of Morocco (1810), Seventy-One Days Camping in Morocco (1902), Fès ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam (Fes or Islam’s Bourgeois) (1930), and The Voices of Marrakesh (1967).

Keywords Morocco, Travels through the Empire of Morocco, Seventy-One Days Camping in Morocco, Fès ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam, Discourse, The Voices of Marrakesh, Representation, Romanticization, Cultural and Historical validity, Fictionalized history

The International Quarterly of Travelogy Read this and other works at <<http://www.coldnoon.com>> ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650

CTPIJTW JAN ’15 | 4(1)

 

 

Recommended Citation Mahmi, Najah. “Travelling Morocco in the 19th and 20th Centuries: History or Historical Fictionalising?,” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, International Journal of Travel Writing 4.1 (2015): 82-107. Available at: <<http://coldnoon.com/41xii/>>

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Travelling Morocco in the 19th and 20th Centuries: History or Historical Fictionalising?

Najah Mahmi

The aim of this essay is to discuss the legacy of European (English and French) 19th and 20th century travel accounts on the Orient. It argues that though formulaic and culturally biased, they stand as culturally and historically relevant. It debates thus the question of whether to dismiss them as merely biased and stereotypical texts, or consider them as vital historical documents.

I emphasise that travel narratives are an elastic genre which oscillate between the evidences of reality and imagination. This positions them in a state of in-betweeness, being quite hybrid and interdisciplinary, and mainly affiliated to the narrator/traveller’s ideological assumptions, perceptions and personal reflections that stand to be quite associated with political and socio-cultural contexts. I also discuss English and French travel narratives written mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries and their relation to the ‘Orient,’ scrutinizing them as articulations of colonial discourse and as documents that belong to the cultural and historical archive of both the East (the ‘Orient’) and the West (Britain and France).

As an illustration, I suggest a postcolonial comparative study of four travel narratives written during, after and prior to the Moroccan colonial period to trace discursive similarities and differences, and generate the development of Morocco’s image through time as well as across the European continent. The travel narratives are: Travels

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Through the Empire of Morocco (Buffa, 1810), Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco (Grove, 1902), FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam (Tharaud, 1930), and The Voices of Marrakesh (Canetti, 1967).

TRAVEL NARRATIVES: A PRODUCT OF THE COLONIAL ENTERPRISE WITH

SOME HISTORICAL/CULTURAL LEGACY

In Europe of the18th and particularly 19th century, travel, the “grand tour,” was but a privileged medium of knowledge and training of young people (Gannier 47; translation mine).

The quote above defines travel in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries as a merely innocent act, thus travel writing as a series of harmless didactic texts. This vision affirms Marco Polo’s statement in Devisement du Monde (1298) which stresses that the objective of travel is “to know the different races of human beings, and the variety of diverse regions of the world, and to be informed of their habits and customs” (39; translation mine).

Gannier’s neglect of the colonialist/ imperialist tendencies of European travellers seems to be striking, as they reached their climax in the 19th century to be widely extended in the 20th and then in the 21st century through travel guides, popular romance, movies and cartoons. Travel explorations have played a major role in the European colonial enterprise, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, providing information and appropriating non-European geographies through discourses of difference and binary oppositions, forging an oriental ‘inferior’ other as ‘antagonistic to’ a ‘superior’ self.

In Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (1988), Rana Kabbani provides a historical sketch on travel narratives that are, as she argues, not exclusive to one civilisation. According to her, travel narratives immerged widely in the Islamic world in the period

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between the 7th and 14th centuries. They have been used as major sources of geographical, social, economic and political information about the “Arabs own Dominions” by “missionaries and explorers” (1-13). This shows that the field of travel narratives has not been inaugurated and exclusively dominated by western travellers. It stresses also that being based on the desire to discover and explore different lands and peoples, travel narratives have always been related to power and politics. Then, fabrications, exaggerations and intertextuality are not newly born with Western travel narratives, from the 17th through the 20th centuries; yet, cases differ from one spatiotemporal context to another.

As an example of exaggerations and intertextuality in Arab travel narratives, Kabbani provides the example of the “mythical” theme of “Waq waq” in Islamic Arab travel writings and states some figures about the different conceptualisations yet interconnected use of such a theme from one writer/ traveller to another, as with Mas’udi, al-Sirafi, Idrissi, Ibn Khurdadbih and Al-Maqdisi. In this regard, she depicts their descriptions as

Often depending on hearsay or on their own creative suppositions […] referring to a country just beyond their reach in the general direction of the East. And as they explored new ground, Waq wad slowly receded, always to be the last unexpected island just over the eastern horizon (3).

In Europe, travel narratives are claimed to have emerged, according to Gannier (6) and the same two previous sources, in the medieval period, with Le Devisement du Monde by Marco Polo (1298) and Le Livre de Jean de Mandeville (1356), the main motives of which had been “to depict voyages of a deliberate and self-conscious strangeness” for audiences “desiring expectations of the extraordinary” in “alien cultures” (Kabbani 3).

The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a large European interest in travel narratives as mediums of information about other lands. In

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France for instance, such writings acquired a special status, especially in the years between 1591 and 1634 with Les Grand Voyages (The Grand Travels) by De Bry which reproduced and summarised previous descriptions and images edited by writers like Staden and John White, and that would be considered a major reference till the first half of the 18th century by L’histoire Générale des Voyages ( The General History of Travels) in 1744 and L’histoire des Navigations au Terres Australes (The History of Voyages to Austral Lands) in 1756 which compiled travels to the Pacific and centred upon historical and political issues, motivated by French imperial attitudes.

In Britain, as in France, the interest in travel narratives dates back to the medieval period, yet it had become much more articulated starting from the 15th century, as a result of the rise of imperial imagination, though their main attribute was mainly historical and economic. In the 18th century, the interest in travel and travel narratives had widened their scope, but still not reached a high colonial taste till the 19th century, as it was the case with French and other European travelogues written by male as well as female writers. Thus, in the context of the European imperial expansion, travel narratives gained in the 19th century a major colonial legacy, forging an imperial European identity through creating a ‘sovereign’ European agent and ‘ inferior’ other subjects from the rest of the world.

In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, as a result of the expansion of the direct confrontation between the ‘West’ (Europe) and the ‘East’ (the Orient) and as an intensified continuity of a past tradition, a large colonial corpus was initiated to describe and narrate non-European territories, assuring and re-assuring cultural boundaries between the ‘civilised’ coloniser and the ‘savage’ colonised, therefore legitimising the ‘civilising mission.’ As part of such a colonial network, travel narratives had a major contribution to paving the way for imperial expansion, through mapping and ‘knowing’ non-European geographies: Africa, Asia,

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and colonial America. The orient is but an institutionalised idea formed to serve a political ideology, and endowed with a physical reality meant to deepen the difference between the ‘occident’ and the ‘non-occident’ situated namely outside the boundaries of Europe.

Such polarisation is intended to guarantee the White man’s racial supremacy through a network of prejudices and stereotypes often stressed throughout the traveller’s tendency to compare ‘home’ to lands visited ‘abroad,’ in a way that not only over-orientalises them but also homogenises them as one entity, despite their differences, and beyond the spatiotemporal variables. The reader can trace, for example, almost no differences between West Africa in Travels in West Africa ( Mary,1867) and North Africa ( Morocco) in Marrakech ou les Seigneures de l’Atlas ( Tharaud, 1920), nor can they be traced between early 19th century Morocco as in Travels through the Empire of Morocco (Buffa, 1810) and 20th century Morocco as in Peeps at Many Lands: Morocco (Finnemore, 1910) and Morocco that Was (Harris, 1970), in the way that all the journeys have been considered as travels to the ‘primitive savage Levant.’ Since the Victorian age, the Orient has been often caricatured in European representations as one homogenous unit with unique specificities which define it as odd and against another central normal one: the West. The main assumption in this respect is “A is an X because he is not Y” (Devreux 1975:67).

Then, racial and cultural differences through which established the formula ‘West ≠ Orient’ or rather ‘West> Orient’ are the main design and ideology that have resulted a stereotyped image of the Orient as fanatic, villainous, savage, primitive, erotic, exotic, in addition to many other dehumanising attributes, the main aim of which is to legitimise the White man’s burden to civilise the Oriental “sullen peoples, half devil and half child” (Kipling, 1899: 7-8). According to what has hitherto been argued, travel narratives in general, and particularly in the 19th and 20th century British and French travel narratives on the Orient, seem to be highly formulaic

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and based in their essence on 1) exaggerations, 2) hasty judgments 3) and intertextualities which strengthen and aggravate the biased position of the narrator and her/ his legacies of power and hegemony insinuated through the texture’s rhetoric.

In Le Maroc: Relations de la France avec cet Empire (1859) (Morocco: Relations of France with the Empire) Raymond Thomassy argues that the knowledge of Moroccan history is one of the main effective weapons through which France can achieve total dominance of the Moroccan territory, with the minimum of bloodshed and acts of resistance. Such imperial ideology centred upon the philosophy of knowing the other’s roots and past to trace the specificities of her current situation has been shared by many other 19th and 20th centuries French travel writers, politicians and historians such as Charles de Foucault who disguised himself in Morocco to be able to collect the maximum of historical and diplomatic information, and who wrote Reconnaissance au Maroc en 1883-84 (1888). La Martinière and Le Chatelier assumed the same task, in addition to Eugene Etienne and Michaux Bellaire who developed their research in the Moroccan historical archives into La Mission Scientific du Maroc (The Scientific Mission of Morocco), giving it a much more serious and official status, as well as many other contemporary travel narrators such as Andre Julien, the author of Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord: Tunisie-Algérie-Maroc (1956) (History of North Africa: Tunisia-Algeria-Morocco). The same emphasis on History was shown by English writers such as John Buffa in Travels through the Empire of Morocco (1810), Philip Durham Trotter in Our Mission to the Court of Morocco in 1880 ( 1881), and Robin Briyan in Morocco: Land of the Farthest West (1965).

Then, the inclusion of historical ‘facts’ can be considered as a discursive strategy that aims to assure the narrative’s authenticity and authorise the narrator’s power and reliability. However, the relevance of history in travel narratives is a controversial issue that raises many debates, for two main considerations: 1) The nature of

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the genre of travel narratives which stands to be highly elastic for it includes empirical incidents as well as a whole range of fictitious details, exaggerations, and fantasies as translations of the narrator’s conscious or unconscious subjectivity; 2) The intrinsic nature of history itself, as a field of research not framed by a firm set of rules and centred upon individual narrations, with their various inclusions and exclusions much shaped by ideology. Thus, history and historical fictionalising get quite intermingled in a way that makes it often difficult to decode the narratives’ discursive formations, and trace out the triangular questions: What happened? What seems to have happened? And what has been written/ narrated?

Assuming the idea that as narratives that usually result from an empirical travel and then an empirical experience resulted in its turn from a cultural contact, and being instances of cultural representations through which the Other’s identity gets portrayed — either the identity of the represented or that of the agent of representation — travel narratives revolve around the politics of reception and perception. They mirror, no matter how distorted the reflected image might be, the self’s representation of itself as well as the other’s perception of that self. Then, though the image might deviate from reality, its very empirical framework makes it a trace of a certain degree of reality. Accordingly, though history might get deviated and fictionalised to serve a certain ideology of the narrator, the act of deviation itself can be utilised as a trace for a historical stream of thought that has ever shaped the relationship between the occidental and the oriental. In this regard, the travel narrative enterprise stands as highly relevant in tracing history, assuming the argument that though a representation might be a misrepresentation and thus deviate from reality, degrees of reality can be often traced.

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TRAVELS THROUGH THE EMPIRE OF MOROCCO, SEVENTY-ONE DAYS’ CAMPING IN MOROCCO, FÈS OU LES BOURGEOIS DE L’ISLAM, AND

THE VOICES OF MARRAKESH: A COLONIAL DISCOURSE As said previously, the orient has always fascinated the European subjects, stimulated their curiosity and raised their appetite for exploration. It had been considered as the most mysterious, mystic and magnificent space: a zone that needs to be discovered, unveiled and defined through a certain imperial eye/ I, and within a highly exclusive frame of mind. It had been the Westerners’ dreamland, yet turned to be attainable mainly in the 19th century, thus exploited, marginalised, deformed and misrepresented through orientalist representations, colonial expeditions and formulaic colonial discourse(s).

Exoticism and the mysteries of the orient had constituted the core of travel writing. This implies the maxims upon which the act of representation is based, stressing the narrator’s dissociativeness and forging cultural difference through standard binary oppositions, such as the self’s superiority v. the other’s inferiority, freedom v. slavery, knowledge v. ignorance, and in general self-glorification v. the deformation and dehumanisation of the other in extreme acts of exoticisation and eroticisation. Then, space, race and gender constitute the main pillars of the construction of cultural otherness in travel writing and travel narratives.

Though history occupies a large space in Travels through the Empire of Morocco, the issue of race is strikingly omnipresent in a way that does not diverge so much from previous conventional racial representations, the main aim of which has been the glorification of the self (the European agent), while on the other hand belittling and negating the other to legitimise the colonial interference, as in Lemprière’s Voyage dans l’Empire de Maroc et le Royaume de Fez (1801). This would be developed into a tradition, characterised by fossilising the other — Moroccans in this context

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— and considering inferiority and primitiveness as their exclusive miserable fate. Such a tradition can be then noticed in travel narratives written before as well as after Travels through the Empire of Morocco, such as The Innocents Abroad (Twain, 1869) and Reconnaissance au Maroc (Foucault, 1888) and other more recent travel accounts such as Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco (1902), A Ride in Morocco: Among Traders and Believers, written in the same year, FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam (1930), and The Voices of Marrakesh (1967).

Formulaic representation of Moroccans as the inferior other in Travels through the Empire of Morocco is but an incarnation of the British national pride and a continuation of an imperial imagination, the roots of which date back to more than seven centuries and expand till the present day, through not only printed representations such as travel guide books that can be claimed as the best current counterpart of travel narratives, but also through media, especially TV and the internet.

Since the beginning, Travels through the Empire of Morocco establishes two different spaces: the first is European, well defined by its aspects of civilisation and modernity, while the second is Moroccan, implied as an area of darkness, doomed to barbarism and profound ignorance. Such imagery is preserved throughout the majority of letters, though in ambivalent discursive formations that oscillate between attraction and repulsion: a narrative strategy that characterises the majority of travel narratives. In the majority of letters, Morocco is described as a beautiful fertile land with a pure nature inhabited by “indolent bad creatures.” The topographical space tends to be purified and idealised through the emphasis on “beautiful gardens” implied to be “Eden on Earth,” while Moroccans are reduced to a destructive agent that ruins such an immense pretty tableau vivant, through their corrupted socio-political institutions. The destructive idealisation that portrays savages in paradise gets much more stressed in Letters III, IV, XIV and XVI, through exposing to the reader beautiful green landscapes, yet

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inhabited by “wretched victims” of either ignorance, dirt, hypocrisy, and lack of manners, or of a despotic system, and in all cases: extreme chaos. This is achieved through a strategy of negation, concretised mainly through reducing the other to an invisible creature with no production or knowledge, and then very much restricted by the politics of death in life. The same strategy as well as thematic interests can be traced in FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam.

Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco, like Travels through the Empire of Morocco emphasises the same chaotic and inferior status of Morocco, but in a more explicit tone, referring even to the notion of the protectorate in some of its parts to dismiss Moroccans as “creatures” who cannot take care of their own internal affairs and need the “land of hope and glory’s” help and protection. Racial issues are a major constituent of Seventy-One Day’s Camping in Morocco’s narrative lines, through which the narrator asserts the supremacy and sovereignty of the European race in general, and the English in particular, while emphasising the invalidity of the ‘Oriental’ Moroccan race and stressing her luck of comfort within the Moroccan “suffocating” space, governed by “savage,” “primitive,” “ignorant,” “passive,” “stupid” and “dirty” natives who can barely fit as “servants,” “beggars,” “sorcerers” or “prisoners,” remote from any aspects of refinement and civilisation.

The first explicit initiation to racial differences is while mentioning the narrator’s maid’s reaction towards Bella Vista the house on the mountain in which the narrator has first resided:

[…] as to what she thought of it, said in a surly way, “je connais ces maisons arabes, c’est bien triste!” Now this particular “maison arabe” was built first of all as a European hotel; secondly, added to and embellished by an American artist. So this answer, I am sorry to say, quite dispelled the friendliness that had prompted my inquiry. (5)

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The fact of being erected by the European race and “embellished” by an American necessitates, according to the narrator, the house’s high taste and beauty already attributed to it through the name “Bella vista” (nice view), so that “Arab” would be a derogatory adjective which puts the latter into crisis. This shows the negative insinuations of the Arab race which is, from the narrator’s point of view, but a substitute for primitiveness and ugliness incarnated through the following sentence: “We went over a typical Moorish house, which I should think must be a very depressing sort of house to live in” (4).

Another stressed feature that seems to be typically ‘Oriental’ is stagnation and timelessness, mightily epitomised in the chapter “Shopping in Morocco.” While the development of time in Europe is implied to be linear to make change and progress, it is claimed to be circular in Morocco and therefore producing a race that rejects any aspect of change, as mentioned before in Travels through the Empire of Morocco, mainly in “Letter IV” as well as in the majority of other travel narratives about ‘The Orient’ and particularly Morocco, such as Voyage dans l’Empire du Maroc et le Royaume de Fez, written by G. Lemprière in 1801, In Morocco, by Edith Wharton in 1920, Le Maroc (Morocco), by Pierre Dumas in 1928, FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam, by Jerôme and Jean Tharaud in 1930, and The Voices of Marrakesh, by Elias Canetti in 1967.

Seventy-One Day’s Camping in Morocco represents a formulaic biased image of Morocco and its natives through an imperial imagination much featured by exaggerations and generalisations that tend to humiliate and dehumanise the Other, while assuming the supremacy and sovereignty of the Self due to the British national pride as well as belonging to the colonial enterprise for which the ‘inferior’ Morocco is but a source of benefit. The same tendency can be noticed in FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam as well as The Voices of Marrakesh, though with difference in the historical context and shaping motives. Though it seems to focus on historical facts, and even if the narrator claims objectivity in the

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opening chapter, FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam seems to be highly subjective and based on cultural iconicity, emphasising degeneration as a main defining trait of Moroccan culture and civilisation. Such a conventional vision gets widely stressed since the narrator’s description of his first contact with Fez and his initial impressions on its atmosphere which tend to be preserved all along the narrative and that can be summarised in ignorance, lethargy, backwardness, uniformity, timelessness, and death in life.

After introducing the history of Fez and the conditions of its foundation, the narrator shifts to explain the circumstances of his visit to Morocco, and stresses the fact that he had been invited by general Lyautey, as already mentioned in the preface by Lahjomri. Then, the visit to Morocco has an official setting and the background of the narrator is purely colonial, and this affects the act of representation. While initiating the conditions and motives of his visit, the narrator states: “I came, ten years ago, for the first time, to the city of Mr. Idriss” (13; translation mine). The distance between the travel and its narrative is quite large: ten years; thus the narration is carried out through memories. This would be another factor that affects the act of representation and aggravates the omnipresence of fictitious formations and prejudiced discourse.

As it is the case in Travels through the Empire of Morocco and Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco, the description of the setting starts by establishing two unequal spaces: the narrator and Lyautey’s European ‘civilised’ space v. the non-European space: Fez which lacks any aspect of civilisation: “while the car had carried us away in a road encumbered with beasts and people.” (13; translation mine). The word “car” is repeated a number of times in the narrative to stress the developed and prosperous world led by the French, while Fez, the “shabby” non-Western sphere, is portrayed as drown in an ocean of “dust” where “camels,” “donkeys,” “goats” and “sheep” are disorderly overcrowded all along with human beings: “This high door engulfs camels, sheep, donkeys and people.” (14; translation mine). The terms “people”

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and “beasts” are used in the narrative contiguously, which implies a negative generalising tone that reduces the difference between both creatures in its minimum. Then, according to the narrator, the distinguishing lines between the animals and people living in Fez seem to be almost absent, for both share the same features of disorder and simplistic behaviour described through portraying aspects of primitiveness and passivity. This overloads Lyautey of bringing civilisation and refinement to such a “graveyard of the living” (Agnes 15; translation mine).

The same image of the natives’ astonishment at the car that manifests in their gazes and laughs is portrayed in the movie entitled Marruecos (Morocco; Von Sternberg, 1930). The movie raises the issue of race, so that racial prejudice and clichés would be omnipresent throughout its main takes, one of the most striking of which is the portrayal of natives gazing at Monsieur La Bessiere’s Volkswagen and responding to it in a totally primitive way, which implies the wide distance between the “old” world: Morocco, and the “new modern” one: France. This evinces a major overlap between travel narratives and Hollywood movies, and the role assumed by both of them in disseminating formulaic images on Morocco as well as the entire non Western world in general. The image of the car is used also in Seventy One Day’s Camping in Morocco to stress the shift from civilisation to primitiveness: “You do not drive about, but you ride on horses, mules, or donkeys.” (3)

While providing the reader, in the chapter entitled “The City of Mr. Idris” (translation mine), with a historical survey about Idris I, Idris II and the foundation of Fez, a major emphasis has been put on the dead like aspect of Oualili and its surroundings in the 8th and 9th centuries. The same lifelessness is attributed to Fez during its description after the narrator’s visit, in the 20th century. This denies any possibility of progress and change in Morocco for 12 centuries, hence perpetuating extreme timelessness and passivity. Such attitudes reveal the narrator’s high subjectivity as well as his colonial affiliation and idealisation of the colonial enterprise which

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get clearly highlighted, for instance, through his identification with Lyautey and his role in building Morocco:

Lyautey had set foot on a ground close to a small Kasbah kept by some Senegalese, and carrying me in a quick footstep (this footstep, if we want to say, is what has made Morocco) (15; translation mine).

After investigating the landscape from outside, the narrator’s eye moves to the inside sphere of Fez and shows since its first gazes negative impressions which tend to be kept in the whole process of observation and description; yet, sometimes, disguised through ambivalent discourse.

In the two travel narratives discussed before, and mainly in Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco, the Moroccan space is described as extremely poor, while Fez in FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam is described as a rich place, yet inhabited by ignorant creatures: “much luxury, no invention” (19; translation mine). This makes it, on the part of the narrator “the primitive page” in “an overloaded manuscript” (17; translation mine).

Thirty seven years after the publication of FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam, another representation of Morocco would be published entitled The Voices of Marrakesh, and it seems that nothing has changed but the form and title. The Voices of Marrakesh seems to be even much more directly oriented in its formulaic representation of Morocco, strengthening the passive and stagnant image attributed to Moroccans in a way that deprives Morocco of the slightest development. The country’s political, socio-cultural and economic status are represented as the same before, during, and after colonisation, so that Morocco in 1810 would stay the same in 1902, and no change would be traced in 1930 or in 1967.

Even before reading The Voices of Marrakesh, the reader can trace the negative attitude of the narrator towards Morocco in the way the chapters’ titles that portray Moroccan people as the

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‘wretched of the earth’ are arranged and chosen. They oscillate between laziness, stupidity, ignorance and extreme poverty as in “The Souks,” “The Cries of the Blind,” “The Marabout’s Saliva” and “The Calumny,” and exoticism and eroticism as in “Sheherazade” and “The Donkey’s Concupiscence.” The Voices of Marrakesh opens by the scene of suffering camels in the souk, and then shifts to “miserable donkeys” to stress the despotic and violent nature of ‘villain’ natives:

With brisk movements of his arm he was drawing a rope through a hole he had bored in the animal’s septum. Nose and rope were red with blood. The camel flinched and shrieked […] Of all the city’s miserable donkeys, this was the most pitiful […] one wanders how his legs still held him up (15-88).

The personification of the suffering donkey referred to as “he” in “one wanders how his legs still held him up” implies the narrator’s identification with animals, while native humans tend to be dehumanised in the main parts of the narrative. A striking example is the dehumanising description of the children who have been begging in front of the Kutubiya restaurant in which the narrator used to have his meals:

I liked their lively gestures, the tiny fingers they pointed into their mouths when with pitiful expressions they whined ‘Manger! Manger!’ (83).

This description can be added to many other dramatic ones centred upon many beggars of different natures, whose most striking instance is the marabout described in chapter four, through which the narrator opts to provide the image of the orient.

Morocco, in the four travel narratives, is represented through cultural iconographical units that polarise and differentiate the ‘inferior’ orient from the ‘superior’ occident, through strategies

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which do not much differ and tones that wave from intensive implicitly to an extreme explicitly, as a result of high national pride and the political contexts of each narrative which frame the stereotypical and biased attitudes of the narrator. In the four travel narratives, Morocco is represented as a primitive exotic land, framed and re-framed by timelessness, lethargy, poverty, and social hypocrisy.

TRAVELS THROUGH THE EMPIRE OF MOROCCO, SEVENTY-ONE DAYS’ CAMPING IN MOROCCO, FÈS OU LES BOURGEOIS DE L’ISLAM, AND

THE VOICES OF MARRAKESH: HISTORICAL/CULTURAL TEXTS In the light of what has been argued thus far, the main aim of this section is to debate the relevance of Western (European) travel narratives on Morocco as historical and cultural texts. My scrutiny is based on two main assumptions: the first is that not all representations are misrepresentations, or fully misrepresentations, then not each single historical detail included in the narratives is fabricated and prejudiced, though biased portrayals often prevail, while the second is that even historical fabrications can outline traces of orient/ occident relations. This strengthens the relevance of travel narratives as historical documents for both the East (Morocco in this context) and the West, and their relationship. Thus, this section attempts to trace out instances of historical distortions and biases, and highlight some historical dimensions that might raise the natives’ consciousness about some cultural instances to which they might have never paid attention. As the two travel narratives Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco and The Voices of Marrakesh seem to be basically literally oriented, holding a direct negative tone, the main aim of which is to fossilise the natives in a state of inferiority and neglect any possibilities of cultural dialogue between Oriental and occidental civilisations, and as they do not

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emphasise any historical incidents, the main focus in this section would be on Travels through the Empire of Morocco and FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam for their frequent insinuations of historical details, especially Travels through the Empire of Morocco.

As argued before, Travels through the Empire of Morocco opens by establishing too different spaces: one European defined through its ‘ shining’ present, and another Moroccan defined through its past defined in its turn through the Europeans’ existence and settlement in the Moroccan territories, as if Morocco had no existence outside the borders of Europe. In this regard, Tangiers is introduced as a witness to the ‘great’ European civilisation, rejoicing the Romans’ triumphs, and, at the same time, used as a proof on the current “insignificance” of the country.

This demonstrates the Eurocentric tone of the narrator and his frequent biased use of history, which gets summarised in the following quote:

I cannot discover anything further remarkable of Tangiers from the time it became a Roman colony, and during the period it was possessed by the Saracens, till the latter end of the fourteenth century, when it was taken by the Portuguese, who erected fortifications and other public works [...] Since that event, it seems to have been gradually dwindling into present insignificance (20).

Thus, through the use of historical details, in this quote as well as in the major parts of the narrative, the reader can generate the main tone of the whole narrative governed by a superior eye/I that tends to deny the civilisation of the orient and imprisons it in a state of “insignificance.” Such a denial is epitomised through the narrator’s recurrent inclusion of Europe as a main agent which has ever shaped the Moroccan identity, while neglecting the Arab dynasties that have reigned over Morocco and traced its culture and civilisation for more than twelve centuries-or ten centuries, considering the date of publication of the narrative: 1810. Hence,

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Moroccan sovereigns and their history are belated in the narrative until letter XII; after 115 pages dedicated to the celebration of Europeans, and the representation of Morocco as a trace of their achievements.

This tendency explains the narrator’s main focus on polishing the European image, while immersing Moors in the darkness of a long history of “oppressive caliphs and emperors” who have inherited the “Saracens’ ferocious and warlike” (28) nature and propensities. A major instance of the narrator’s biased tone is his frequent use of “the Moroccan emperor” which sounds intrinsic, referring to Sultan Moulay Soliman, as well as all Moroccan sultans without paying attention to the specificities of each historical context.

The same strategic use of history can be traced in FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam. The first part of FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam’s opening chapter is devoted to the exposition of the history of the foundation of Fez, all along with historical information about Idris I and Idris II. As a strategy to claim authenticity and objectivity to the historical survey offered in the beginning of the travel narrative, the narrator mentions the reference used as a source of information: Roudh El Kartas1 (The Garden of Ply):

                                                           1 Roudh El Kartas is a book of history, compiled and written in Arabic in the court of Fez by Imam Abou Mohammed Salah ben Abd-el Halim, in 1326. It treats the history of five Moroccan dynasties: the Idrissids (788-990), the Zenetas (990-1069), the Almoravids (1038-1145), the Almohads (1130-1269), and the Merinides (1213-1326). The book opens, just the way FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam opens, by accounting the escape of Idriss I to Morocco in the year 172 after the hegira, 788 A.D, the propagation of Islam and the foundation of Fez and the Idrissid dynasty which reigned for two centuries. I have been unable to trace a copy of the Arabic edition of Roudh El Kartas, for it dates back to 1326 and its editions are so restricted; however, I could find its French version. The book was translated into French by Beaumier, A., a vice-council of France in Rabat and Sale, and edited in Paris by l’Imprimerie Impériale, in 1860. See Salah ben Abd-el Halim, Abou Mohammed. Roudh El Kartas : Histoire des Souverains du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc) et Annales de la Ville de Fès. Trans. Beaumier, A. (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1860).

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And all this is documented in Roudh El Kartas […] composed by Abu Salah Ben Abd Halim from Grenade, who knew about it from Ali Ben Omar El Youssi, who had received it, himself, from El Kouykiri, inspector of Fez in the reign of Naceur d’Almohade, three centuries after the events I have reported below (13; translation mine).

FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam opens by providing historical information about the circumstances of the escape of Idris I towards Morocco, “Moghreb el Aksa,” then the establishment of the Edrissid dynasty. However, though the major reference is the Moroccan historical document Roudh El Kartas, as claimed explicitly on page 13, the narrator includes and excludes many facts and events, which distorts Moroccan history. This shows the subjectivity of the narrative and refutes the claim of objective scrutiny, as implied by the narrator. For instance, the narrator includes personal judgements and views about Idris I in the first paragraph, through descriptive details about the latter and Rachid during their escape:

The coat made of stout heavy wool, put on the stout legs to facilitate the act of walking, gives to all the people there the same appearance of nobility and a natural layout of race makes the servant having naturally his master’s manners (9; translation mine).

Nevertheless, such a description cannot be traced in Roudh El Kartas. The description provided seems to be quite biased as the issue of race is emphasised in a homogenous and negative way, implying the darkness of the Arab race through the repetitive use of the word “brown” throughout the narrative, and conformity through the expressions “all the people there” and “the same appearance of nobility,” noting that the narrator ironically empties “nobility” of its

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meaning though comparing the master’s manners with those of the servant.

In addition, Tharaud’s narrative does not include dates and does not refer to the name of the place from which Idris I had escaped, nor does it mention the battle of Fadj that forced his flee to Morocco. This gives the narrative a vague tone and emphasises the narrator’s disinterestedness and the large distance between him and Morocco as well as its history. This is quite incarnated in the use of expressions like “there,” “around,” and “they came from a far place” which reinforce the impression of mystery initiated in the opening of the first chapter by “once upon a time.” The book taken as a source, Roudh El Kartas (the Garden of Ply), includes a positive description of Oualili:

They arrived at Oualili […] Oualili is a city surrounded by superb antique walls and situated in the centre of beautiful mounds, abundantly watered and covered by olive trees and plantations (10; translation mine).

Conversely, in FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam such a positive description gets totally reversed in a destructive way:

The travellers got near from Oualili. It was a large village surrounded by walls, build on a hill’s side near a large dead city […]. In the past, the Romans had established there a city which they had called Volubilis, but it had been for a long time but a mass of ruins in the grass. Everything is occasional, there is but God who is eternal. (9; translation mine).

While the book claimed to be the narrator’s source of information describes Oualili as a green place full of life and with historical significance, the main emphasis of FÈS ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam is on the dead like aspect of the place and its surroundings, and the “great” role of the Romans in building such a city and civilising it.

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From the narrator’s point of view, civilisation has been erased after the Romans’ departure. This is explicitly claimed through the expressions “near a large dead city,” “the Romans had established there a city,” and “there is but God who is eternal.”

Shifting his interest to Idris II, the son of Idris I, the narrator includes a detail about his mother Kenza: “One of his wives, Kenza, was pregnant in seven months.” The expression “one of his wives” bears two possible interpretations: polygamy and/or concubinage, but no description of Idris II as a polygamous man and no reference to concubines were included neither in Roudh El Kartas, nor in other books of history which document the Idrissid dynasty, such as El Maghreb Abra El Tarikh (Morocco through History; Harakat, 1994) and Histoire du Maroc (History of Morocco; Brignon, 1967).

The only narrative about Idris’s marital life and Kenza in Roudh El Kartas is the following:

The Imam Idriss […] has died and left no child, but Kenza, his wife, was pregnant in five months, […] Kenza, a woman that Idriss has received as a present, and married on the third day of the month of Radjeb of the year 177 (15-16; translation mine).

Then, it becomes obvious now that the expression “one of his wives” is subjectively added by the narrator to affirm polygamy, concubinage and eroticism as main features of ‘The Arabian’ life. This highlights the many distortions of historical incidents due to a colonial ideology meant to immerse the natives in a state of inferiority and chaos. Yet, such distortions as well as those prevailing in Seventy-One Days’ Camping in Morocco and The Voices of Marrakesh provide the reader with a view about the prevailing imperial European frame of mind of the 19th and 20th centuries, and serve as a major reference that opens many horizons of research, tracing the development of the European imperial

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imagination through the image given by the European agent, and questioning the dynamics of such a dual relationship. This confirms the relevance of such narratives as historical and cultural documents which provide through their distortions an image of a long biased and unequal Western/ Eastern relationship. On the other hand, in the case of Travels through the Empire of Morocco for instance, the journey’s circumstances are much shaped by Anglo-Moroccan relations, which make the narrative very significant as a historical document.

In an attempt to foreground the travel’s conditions and atmosphere, the narrator states:

In 1805, I was serving in the capacity of Physician to His Majesty’s Force, at the Depot Hospital in the Isle of Wight; whence, by dexterous management of the Army Medical Board, I was removed and placed upon half-pay in June of that year. At this period, it occurred to Mr. Turnbull, Chairman of the Committee of Merchants trading to the Levant, that it would be of Advantage to the public, were the offices of Garrison Surgeon of Gibraltar, and inspecting Medical Officers of the ships doing quarantine […], I should be a proper person to fill the latter of these offices […] I received a communication from Mr. Mattra […] and attend his Excellency the Governor of Larache, […] then labouring under a dangerous illness. (III-V)

The narrative historicises a critical period in the Moroccan historical archive, under the reign of Sultan Moulay Soliman (1792-1822), much characterised by social as well as political instability. Besides, the narrative provides an idea about Anglo-Moroccan trade exchanges, as well as the Moroccan supplies and provisions for Gibraltar-from which France used to observe English sheep-stressed in the majority of the epistolary narrative’s letters and highlighted mainly in the letters included in the appendix, especially letter VI, and VII, sent by English lords and officials.

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A chief emphasis is made also on the friendly relationships between Morocco and England, through many letters exchanged between the Moroccan Sultan and the English king and others between English and Moroccan governors and officials. This gives an idea about ‘stable’ Anglo-Moroccan relations, though proved to be biased and centred upon benefit in many occasions. In the major parts of the narrative, Dr. Buffa stresses explicitly the ‘friendly’ Anglo-Moroccan relations in the reign of Moulay Soliman:

The principal design of publishing this account of my journey to the Barbary States is to show the good policy, on the part of this country, of keeping upon terms of strict amity with the government of Morocco (VIII).

To conclude, I would say that though highly prejudiced, travel

narratives stand as major cultural/ historical documents. For instance, many historical and cultural incidents are traced in Travels through the Empire of Morocco that might raise the native’s attention to some details in Anglo-Moroccan relations s/he didn’t have the chance to think about. Furthermore, though their cultural distortions and biased discourse-due to their affiliation(s) to the colonial enterprise-the four scrutinised travel narratives prove to be quite relevant in tracing the way the orient has been perceived throughout history — in the period between 1810 and 1967 — from Western (English and French) eyes/I(s).

This corroborates, anew, the cultural and historical dimension of such writings, in the way that misrepresentation with all its fantasies and fabrications becomes itself highly representative of a certain pattern of reality that demands rational and self-criticising responses rather than merely emotional reactions which tend to over-victimise the ‘self’ while over-claiming the ‘other’ as the solo responsible for such a cultural and racial distance and segregations. Accordingly, the main emphasis is to be put on how Moroccans (Orientals) react towards the issue of (mis)representation and the

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way they contribute to polish their image. This shifts the responsibility from the agent of representation to the represented subject.

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