Lord Patten has been on a journey to Fez and used The Spider's House by Paul Bowles as his guide. It makes fascinating reading. The original article appeared in The Financial Times.
Chronicle of terrorism foretold
By Chris Patten
As we advance with creaking joints through late middle age, my wife and I like to pretend that we are more adventurous on holiday than we were in our prime. So we reacted with initial scorn to the idea that we should employ an official guide to introduce us to medieval Fes.
Fortunately, I had begun reading on the outward flight Paul Bowles’s mid-1950s novel The Spider’s House, in which Fes has the starring role. The prologue records the return journey to his hotel across the Medina, guided by a barefooted Berber, of the book’s central character, an American writer called John Stenham; he is pretty contemptuous of the notion that he should be led home through the dark tunnels of the city. But the description of this nocturnal adventure was sufficiently dramatic to convince me to listen to advice. So we took a guide, a round-faced, dignified, orthodox Muslim school teacher, who introduced us to only one carpet seller. And, yes, we did buy a carpet.
Maybe it was Bowles who tipped the scales on a holiday to Fes over Marrakech. I had not read him before and certainly The Spider’s House is as good a political novel as, say, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. So exploring Fes was even more interesting than Marrakech. It is not remotely a restful city and it lacks some of the elegant and louche charms of Marrakech.
In a way, we recovered from Fes in the Mamounia gardens, where in January the orange trees were in both fruit and blossom, squared off like Grenadiers at Waterloo by alleys of olive trees and iceberg roses. The Mamounia hotel itself, awaiting a face-lift that will not do irreparable damage I hope to its fading art deco, has a concierge with the authoritative touch of a very experienced foreign minister and a barman in the over-the-top Churchill bar who mixes cocktails that probably infringe the non-proliferation treaties.
Sipping mint tea at dusk on the roof terrace of one of the cafés surrounding the Jemaa El Fna in Marrakech provides a great theatrical experience. Smoke rises from the fires of the open-air cafes; Berber dancers whirl; acrobats tumble; snake charmers scare the tourists. January was clearly too cold for the young male hustlers, who are reckoned by Time Out to do business by credit card in these days of all sorts of package tourism.
We ate extremely well at Tobsil and not badly at the Marrakchi – despite the belly dancers – with great views over the Jemaa El Fna. Yves Saint Laurent’s gardens, the Majorelle, with their backdrop of cobalt blue buildings and walls, are a daring challenge to the more conventional gardeners among us, who regard a bit of colour in the herbaceous border as the furthest we are prepared to go.
We were driven on a cold and snowy day up into the High Atlas mountains to the crumbling Kasbah of Thami El Glaoui, a local warlord who used to rule the south of Morocco for the French protectorate. There were no other visitors but we shared his tajine with the owner of a local café, the Lion d’Or, watching French league football thanks to his satellite dish.
Fes, which duelled with Marrakech for centuries for primacy in the Arabic Morocco state, is less comfortable than its rival, which is not to say that our stay there was bereft of modest luxury. We put up in a splendid riad called La Maison Bleue in rooms hardly changed since the owner’s grandmother lived in them.
Dinner was served in the covered courtyard to the accompaniment of live Moroccan music. A dozen dishes of delicious cooked vegetables were typically followed by pastilla (the fish one even better than the pigeon) or couscous and then the ubiquitous tajine.
The local Moroccan wines were part of the deal: a drinkable Semillon and a better Cabernet du President; which president I never discovered.
In hotter weather this riad’s sister establishment, Maison Bleue Le Riad, may be a better bet; it has a spa and swimming pool and a great view over the walls of the old city up to the Merenid Tombs.
It is worth scrambling up to this landmark, or taking a taxi, to get a clear idea of the lie of the land in Fes. The medieval “citadel of fanaticism” (as it was called) is in front of you in the pear-shaped bowl of the Sebou valley; off to the right is the new quarter built by the French and beyond that the road to Casablanca where the young Arab Amar in Bowles’s novel is finally abandoned by the Americans who had discovered him with all his quaint and savage cultural traits.
Much of The Spider’s House follows Amar through the labyrinthine Fes as he hunts and is, in his turn, hunted.
That the city has been preserved owes much to the French resident- general Louis-Hurbert Lyautey in the last days of colonial rule there and subsequently to Unesco. Fes was saved from the fate of so many cities in developing countries where, in a paradoxical gesture of national independence, so much local architecture is demolished to be replaced by pastiche Western.
Exploring the narrow streets of Fes leaves lingering memories – the stink of horse and donkey piss, the perfect pyramids of ground spices (yellow, red, orange and blue), the butchers’ shops with lines of sheep heads giving you an understandably doleful look, the tanneries and leather shops with piles of yellow babouches, the occasional visit to a medersa – the colleges of the ancient university – with their intricate wood carvings and blue tiles, and the evening roost of storks and alpine swifts on their rooftops.
Fes is not dangerous but it does seem alien, and in January the cultural difference is enhanced by the sheep being led into the city to have their throats cut by every family that can afford to buy one for the feast of Aid El Kabir, commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac.
Bowles captures all this in a novel set in the dying days of French colonialism. Gertrude Stein described him as “a manufactured savage”.
Dwelling himself on the frontier between sophistication and barbarism, Bowles is the perfect eye-witness to the Hobbesian world that he believes we all inhabit whatever our imagined civilised superiority. As Francine Prose observes in her excellent introduction to the edition of The Spider’s House published by Ecco, Bowles’s fiction is “the last place you would go for hope, or even for faint reassurance that the world is anything but a horror show, a barbaric Darwinian battlefield.”
Bowles is far more relevant to today’s discussions about clashing civilisations and the roots of terrorism than others regularly cited, such as Joseph Conrad. One activist in the novel notes the efficiency of violence in gaining American attention. Amar himself contemplates the difference between political Islam and jihadism – “they saw . . . factories and power plants rising from the fields . . . he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction”.
He understands the terrorist’s grim compensations not of accomplishing a specific political aim but “of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying . . . If you could not have freedom, you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now”.
Bowles clearly believed that we all – not just non-Moslems – live in the frail surroundings of a spider’s house and what others may take as his great insights into different cultures he clearly regards as so much nothingness. He presages the first part of his novel with the ‘Song of the Owl’ from The Thousand and One Nights: “I have understood that the world is a vast emptiness built upon emptiness . . . And so they call me the master of wisdom. Alas! Does anyone know what wisdom is?”
They think they do in Fes. And in Tehran, Rome and Washington. Maybe someone somewhere really does. But the answer seems to be pretty well disguised for the time being.
Lord Patten is chancellor of Oxford University and was the last British governor of Hong Kong. He is the author of “Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs” and “East and West”
Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news
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