Tangier: From the Romans to the Rolling Stones - review

A new book by Richard Hamilton tells the story of Tangier though the stories of its best known residents - historical figures; writers; artists and musicians 

Some cities have names that evoke much more than the sum of their everyday realities. Mention "Casablanca", and those unfamiliar with Morocco will wax lyrical about the Humphrey Bogart movie. Say "Tangier" and response is likely to be the Beat Poets, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs - all foreigners who produced some of their best work there.

Yet, Tangier is much culturally richer than this, as can be discovered through the pages of Richard Hamilton's latest book, Tangier: From the Romans to the Rolling Stones.

"Much of Tangier's history is a chronology of foreigners and exiles." Hamilton writes.

"Nearly 3,000 years ago the Phoenicians set up trading colonies on the coast and ever since, the local inhabitants have, much to their bemusement seen waves of successive civilizations come and go, imposing their lifestyles upon them. Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Portuguese, British, Spanish and French have all occupied the region in their time."

Tangier: From the Romans to the Rolling Stones is impeccably researched, erudite, and with flashes of humour. Hamilton weaves the history of the city and its antecedents into a complex carpet; managing to capture the atmosphere of faded glory; of a history little regarded by the present day occupants.

He quotes Moroccan novelist, Lofti Akalay, "Tangier is a town where people talk of elsewhere. There is a local saying: Tangerines have one eye on the sea, one ear on the news, and one buttock on the rocks."

"We are separated from Europe by 14 kilometres and as many centuries."

The chapters of the book are replete with entertaining stories about the likes of the Roman god Hercules, Roman statesman and general Quintus Sertorius, independant ruler of Spain and the defacto governor of Tangier; Arab explorer Ibn Battuta; diarist Samuel Pepys; journalist and fabulist Walter Harris; artist Henri Matisse; writers Paul Bowles and William Burroughs; poet and painter Brion Gysin; painter Francis Bacon; playwright Joe Orton; writer Mohamed Mrabet and musician Brian Jones.

However, that isn't where the cast of characters ends. Renowned names who have also played a part in Tangier's history also get a look in - among them,  Samuel Beckett; Barbara Hutton; WH Auden and Rita Hayworth.

Despite brief sojourns by female authors such as Edith Wharton and Patricia Highsmith, and a longer one by Jane Bowles, the major writers and artists associated with Tangier are overwhelmingly male, and Hamilton's book reflects this.

Pepys's take on seventeenth century Tangier was far from flattering: "Nothing but vice in the whole place of all sorts for swearing, cursing, drinking and whoring," he wrote.

Matisse's visit in 1912 was in another dimension entirely. On a journey to Tetouan, he wrote, "We rode in among this sea of flowers as if no human being had ever set foot there before."

For Paul Bowles, who first travelled to Tangier in 1931 the city became synonymous with his work. "Back in New York, Bowles achieved success as a composer, but pined for Tangier. 'I tried to drown my melancholy in my work,' he said, 'but I was obsessed by memories of the air and light in North Africa.' He moved there in 1947, and went on to develop his skills as a writer, and create his most famous works such as The Sheltering Sky and The Spider's House. He also made extensive recordings of traditional Moroccan music for posterity.

Richard Hamilton is a professional broadcast journalist who has worked for the BBC World Service. He has spent time reporting from Morocco, South Africa and Madagascar. While in Morocco he co-authored the Time Out Guide to Marrakech and has written throughout his career for various newspapers and magazines.

That Hamilton has a huge affection and deep fascination for Morocco is clearly evident. The country has a long history of storytelling, as he recounted in his earlier book, The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco. That was a collection of stories, as told by five storytellers from Marrakech's famous square - the Jemaa el Fna. "...Marrakech's marketplace, sacred space, cultural crucible, melting pot and meeting point for centuries." His book on Tangier, too, is composed of a series of stories, of lives which intersect through space but not time, to give an impressionistic portrait of the city.

"Tangier seems to be suspended in unreality," he writes. "It escapes definition and defies categorization...Tangier has been hailed as a paradigm for international cooperation and a cradle of creativity, but it is also a kind of museum of failure, a graveyard of ambition."

"Maybe the city that has survived waves of invasions by Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Portuguese, British, Spanish and French can now endure a new wave of development?" he asks.

Of the economic impact of the port of Tangier Med; of the proposed Chinese funded technopolis, of empty houses inhabited by a multitude of squatters waiting for their chance to jump on a boat to Europe, undercover of darkness, there is little sign in this book.

Tangier: From the Romans to the Rolling Stones is an unashamedly nostalgic look at the inspiration, and occasional despair of which the city has long been a source.

"Perhaps in the end Tangier is us," Hamilton writes. "It reflects humanity itself."

Review by Suzanna Clarke

Tangier: From the Romans to the Rolling Stones by Richard Hamilton is published by Tauris Parke 2019. 

In Fez, Morocco, it is available from the ALC-ALIF Bookstore, CLICK HERE. 

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The Gnawa Lions by Christopher Witulski - Review

Christopher Witulski's book, The Gnawa Lions is the result of extensive research and immersion in the the world of Morocco's gnawa culture. It should be essential reading for ethnomusicologists. At the same time the style and content is such that it is easily accessible to a wider audience - especially those with a desire to delve deeper into Moroccan culture

In the book the balance between the academic discourse and vignettes of Witulski's experiences sit happily together.  Witulski was fortunate to be invited into the inner circles of both gnawa and Sufi brotherhoods, not just as a researcher, but also as a performer. The resulting book is a fine contribution that explores a world not readily available to a casual visitor to Morocco.

Traditionally gnawa musicians in Morocco played for all-night ceremonies where communities gathered to invite spirits to heal mental, physical, and social ills untreatable by other means. Now gnawa music can be heard on the streets of Marrakech, at festivals in Essaouira, in Fez’s cafes, in Casablanca’s nightclubs, and in the bars of Rabat. As it moves further and further from its origins as ritual music and listeners seek new opportunities to hear performances, musicians are challenged to adapt to new tastes while competing for potential clients and performance engagements.

Christopher Witulski explores how gnawa musicians straddle popular and ritual boundaries to assert, negotiate, and perform their authenticity in this rich ethnography of Moroccan music. Witulski introduces readers to gnawa performers, their friends, the places where they play, and the people they play for. He emphasises the specific strategies performers use to define themselves and their multiple identities as Muslims, Moroccans, and traditional musicians. The Gnawa Lions reveals a shifting terrain of music, ritual, and belief that follows the negotiation of musical authenticity, popular demand, and economic opportunity.

“Christopher Witulski’s focus on musicians’ lives, including their multiple musical, interpersonal, and ideological interactions and encounters, provides a welcome and important perspective that captures the reality of lived experience, complete with its complexities and contradictions. It is a highly perceptive account that never strays far from the ethnographic experience.” — Richard Jankowsky, author of Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia.

The Gnawa Lions can be purchased online HERE

Christopher Witulski is an instructor of ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. In the past he has been a correspondent for The View From Fez.

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Through The Peacock Gate Now Available In Fez

Good news for those readers waiting for a copy of Through The Peacock Gate. It is now available, not just on line, but from the bookshop at the American Language Center in Fez.

Through the Peacock Gate

The novel is a rare example of contemporary English fiction drawing on traditional Moroccan folklore. Written in gripping English prose fused with Arabic words, the novel gives an authentic insight into a Westerner’s experience of modern Moroccan society, whilst simultaneously exposing the reader to the country’s rich cultural history by weaving classic Moroccan folk takes and the mysteries of Sufism into its fabric. The book not only explores the point where East and West merge but the collision of the human world with the world of the djinns – mysterious shape-shifting creatures of an unseen realm.

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interleaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerizing, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph's House

Ken Haley Review: Through the Peacock Gate – one of the best books to come my way this year (and I’ve notched up nearly fifty with a third of the year gone, so this is not stinting praise) – is just the book for you if that long-planned escape from an Antipodean winter to Mediterranean climes isn’t going to eventuate this year. The purchase price of getting Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel shipped from Britain is far less than the cost of sending yourself in the opposite direction, even in the age of the discount airfare.

What’s that you say? You’re not an armchair traveller? Pity. Maybe I could interest you in a tale of spirituality in the so-called 21st century? Of how the present is haunted by the past, of how everything you see and do is not everything there is, not the half of it? Of how the wisdom of the Sufi, a sect that has fascinated and scandalised mainstream Islam for centuries, can inhabit a man transplanted from traditionally Catholic Ireland? …

All right, I can tell a choosy reader when I come across one. I see you’re not interested in romances that rhyme moon and majoun (edible cannabis – aha, now I have your attention!) any more than you revel in tales of djinns and Madonnas (living in the materialist world, as you do). If it’s the delightful tickle of lust you’re after, don’t soil your hands with the postmodern equivalent of a penny dreadful: come hither behind the latticework of traditional Moroccan houses in the medina of Fez (where paradoxically you can be high in the Middle Atlas), and not only will you find yourself entranced by a maiden worthy of Nabokov’s pen, you will find the unlikeliest devotee of the Russian-American master waiting to conduct you on a literary tour when your passion for the physical is sated.

While on passions Nabokovian, this is also a work that no lepidopterist’s library should be without.

Ah, but you don’t order books on the wing! Fair enough. Perhaps political thrillers with overtones of 20th-century revolutionary zeal are more to your taste. When painting a tantalisingly foreshadowed encounter with the Shining Path guerrilla movement in the jungles of Peru, McCutcheon’s prose is as pellucid and gripping as Greene’s (think Our Man in Havana).

Then again, if psychology’s your thing, you should dive into these pages for the sensation of losing touch with (or should that be discovering?) reality, sanity and such states so reduced to the conventional in everyday discourse that they’re taken for granted even when least understood.

Or find enough food for thought here to underwrite a philosophical banquet.

On yet another tack, if you’re looking for the last Beat novel to make it into print, this may be it – William S. Burroughs without the drugs.

Lauren Crabbe's Review: McCutcheon has penned a literary equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat, and done so with alternating wry efficiency and achingly beautiful prose that’s engaging to read as it is mind-bending to comprehend. As I’m lucky enough to be in Fez at the time of reading, it was all I could do not to take off down the Medina in the middle of the night in search of the supernatural – threat of possession by djinns be damned.

The onset of mystery is slow, veiled by a deceptively simple premise: the main character, Richard (an alias), returns to Fez to find his house (or dar) robbed and gutted. After a brief detour into the vaults of his former life, he tentatively enlists the help of a local writer, Yazami, to find the men to repair it. From there, corners of a grander plot are meticulously doled out like sips of nus-nus left to cool down. Sometimes, they take the ghostly form of A’isha, a djinniya with a curious grudge who haunts Richard’s dar. Others appear as innocently as butterflies flapping their wings (Richard is a lepidopterist) before sudden twists blow through and flatten your sense of shrewdness. All orchestrate his gradual descent into madness – an intimidating portrayal, masterfully executed.

Through The Peacock Gate is available at the American Language Center Bookshop in Fez.
Amazon (USA,AUST,UK)
Beacon Books (Publisher) UK

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Review of Through The Peacock Gate - Lauren Crabbe

Review by photojournalist Lauren Crabbe

Deliberating an opening for my review of Sandy McCutcheon’s Through the Peacock Gate, I opened the book at random and re-read whatever passage first caught my eye. It tied in quite nicely with a theory I’ve been developing about Fez, where the book is set: that its real truth lies in what defies superficial explanation; in negative space; in dichotomies. The passage, beginning modestly with, “Let me describe the indescribable”, unravels a series of concepts that not only challenge one another, but nearly cancel each other out. Incomprehensible magic that can’t be substantiated through folklore; thoughts constructing a realm where thought is unknown; a character completely devoured by space that transcends measurement, and yet becomes one with it. The kind of inversions that crack fragile Western minds with their immunity to paradox, that only someone who’s spent extended time in spiritual regions of the world can navigate.

McCutcheon has penned a literary equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat, and done so with alternating wry efficiency and achingly beautiful prose that’s engaging to read as it is mind-bending to comprehend. As I’m lucky enough to be in Fez at the time of reading, it was all I could do not to take off down the Medina in the middle of the night in search of the supernatural – threat of possession by djinns be damned.

The onset of mystery is slow, veiled by a deceptively simple premise: the main character, Richard (an alias), returns to Fez to find his house (or dar) robbed and gutted. After a brief detour into the vaults of his former life, he tentatively enlists the help of a local writer, Yazami, to find the men to repair it. From there, corners of a grander plot are meticulously doled out like sips of nus-nus left to cool down. Sometimes, they take the ghostly form of A’isha, a djinniya with a curious grudge who haunts Richard’s dar. Others appear as innocently as butterflies flapping their wings (Richard is a lepidopterist) before sudden twists blow through and flatten your sense of shrewdness. All orchestrate his gradual descent into madness – an intimidating portrayal, masterfully executed.

Embroidered through the suspense are tactful, sincere cultural observations that could only be garnered by someone who’s spent a decade weaving through Morocco’s ornate cultural fabric, as McCutcheon has. He opens a window into the local mindset that dispels any illusion we hold that we might know a thing or two they don’t. Spice shop owners quoting James Joyce and Yazami’s metaphysical mic-drops are contrasted with religious rubbernecking and vapid squabbles of expats and tourists; a prudent reminder we can strive to understand these foreign realms but never presume to know. Nothing is as it seems – a notion that will shock, delight, and humble you throughout the book as tools from McCutcheon’s thriller kit come into play.

Through Richard’s attempts to bridge his own shortcomings, we circle back again and again to this prominent theme of dichotomy. “My endeavours to cross this divide proved futile – each fragment of understanding opening up even bigger differences in our perception”. Yet this is what McCutcheon attempts, and succeeds, to do. Through the Peacock Gate deftly illustrates the process of the ordinary becoming extraordinary, and vice versa. Gently appreciating the subtle magic of the unknown, while revering the masochistic divine. It feeds you intimacy from a distance, and will leave you hungry like a djinniya for blood.

Lauren Crabbe: www.theworldplease.com

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NOT FISSA, NOT FUSSY: MORE FASSI AND FIZZY

A review of Through The Peacock Gate by Australian author, journalist and academic, Ken Haley

NOT FISSA, NOT FUSSY: MORE FASSI AND FIZZY

By Ken Haley

Unlike the jailbird who refuses the governor’s offer of conjugal relations with his wife because he doesn’t want to end his sentence with a proposition, I’ll kick off with one: the best of books are several books coexisting under the same cover.

Two cases in point: To Kill a Mockingbird scintillates because it is about family relations (with particular emphasis on the father-daughter bond) and about racial justice. A Tale of Two Cities succeeds by being simultaneously a Dickensian fable and a social history tract on the French Revolution that would have had Edmund Burke nodding (in approval, not off).

Through the Peacock Gate – one of the best books to come my way this year (and I’ve notched up nearly fifty with a third of the year gone, so this is not stinting praise) – is just the book for you if that long-planned escape from an Antipodean winter to Mediterranean climes isn’t going to eventuate this year. The purchase price of getting Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel shipped from Britain is far less than the cost of sending yourself in the opposite direction, even in the age of the discount airfare.

What’s that you say? You’re not an armchair traveller? Pity. Maybe I could interest you in a tale of spirituality in the so-called 21st century? Of how the present is haunted by the past, of how everything you see and do is not everything there is, not the half of it? Of how the wisdom of the Sufi, a sect that has fascinated and scandalised mainstream Islam for centuries, can inhabit a man transplanted from traditionally Catholic Ireland? …

All right, I can tell a choosy reader when I come across one. I see you’re not interested in romances that rhyme moon and majoun (edible cannabis – aha, now I have your attention!) any more than you revel in tales of djinns and madonnas (living in the materialist world, as you do). If it’s the delightful tickle of lust you’re after, don’t soil your hands with the postmodern equivalent of a penny dreadful: come hither behind the latticework of traditional Moroccan houses in the medina of Fez (where paradoxically you can be high in the Middle Atlas), and not only will you find yourself entranced by a maiden worthy of Nabokov’s pen, you will find the unlikeliest devotee of the Russian-American master waiting to conduct you on a literary tour when your passion for the physical is sated.

While on passions Nabokovian, this is also a work that no lepidopterist’s library should be without.

Ah, but you don’t order books on the wing! Fair enough. Perhaps political thrillers with overtones of 20th-century revolutionary zeal are more to your taste. When painting a tantalisingly foreshadowed encounter with the Shining Path guerrilla movement in the jungles of Peru, McCutcheon’s prose is as pellucid and gripping as Greene’s (think Our Man in Havana).

Then again, if psychology’s your thing, you should dive into these pages for the sensation of losing touch with (or should that be discovering?) reality, sanity and such states so reduced to the conventional in everyday discourse that they’re taken for granted even when least understood.

Or find enough food for thought here to underwrite a philosophical banquet.

On yet another tack, if you’re looking for the last Beat novel to make it into print, this may be it – William S. Burroughs without the drugs.

Surely it’s this mixture of themes and perspectives that give McCutcheon’s new novel its sense of rounded solidity. The worlds you enter here are palpable, with an aura of undeniable credibility generated by the ethereal touches the author has added with all the assuredness and generosity of a lexicographical Titian.

The djinni – printers used to call them gremlins – aren’t always so benign. One that got into the inkpot and drank its fill kept on misspelling “led” (past tense of “to lead”) as if it were the substance they used to put in petrol. (So if you’re into heavy metal this novel has something for you too.) These are blemishes that should be ironed out in the second (lead-free) edition this book so richly deserves.

An enthusiasm for stylistic innovation and blending has been a hallmark of McCutcheon’s previous work as well. In Black Widow, published in the mid-2000s, the author of The Magician’s Son – in which he had written movingly of discovering in middle age that he had a living brother of whose existence he had been oblivious all his life – turned in an account of Russia’s grisly Beslan school massacre as vivid as any breaking-news report from the crime scene itself.

The newest member of McCutcheon’s literary brood shares certain traits you might call family resemblances – never a dull sentence, exquisitely timed plot development, human empathy writ large. If there is one theme he mines better than any this time around, it’s that of square-peg expatriates in the round-hole Maghreb.

When your Irishman, Marcus Brennan (now motoring under the alias of Richard), holds a revealing discussion with his local camel butcher, the artisan’s observations on Western and Japanese tourists as seen through Arab eyes – insightful as they are witty – would be worthy of Mahfouz.

As McCutcheon has lived in Fez for over a decade now, his pen pictures of the expat community there – replete with the odd unappealing Canadian or image-obsessed American – are no doubt drawn from the life and are bound, in at least a few cases, to earn him the café-table solitude he must sometimes covet.

Serious though its themes frequently are, humour lives here too: when Richard meets Jonathan, an American visiting Fez, our hero spots that he’s a student at Fuller Theological Seminary. Momentarily convinced he’s in the presence of a mind reader, Jonathan blurts out: ‘How did you …?’ to which Richard replies, deadpan: ‘It’s on your cap, Jonathan.’

The novel’s cover design, full of swirling and whirling kinetics instantly enticing the reader into a world of Islamic and pre-Islamic figures, is the work of Bryan Dawe, whose role as straight guy to another gifted Kiwi, the late John Clarke, immortalised them both in the Australian TV-viewing public’s mind – the part of it that has a mind, at any rate.

With the technology we have literally at our fingertips these days, I suppose it would be easier to scroll up, delete the first line of this review’s third paragraph and type it out afresh. But that would be to reckon without this reviewer’s love of laziness. So let me instead stop here and issue a correction: like the city in which it is set, Through the Peacock Gate, with its multiple avenues of significance, is not simply one of the best books to come my way this year. It’s several.

The reviewer Ken Haley

Ken Haley is a twice-published author and Walkley Award winner whose first career as a journalist introduced him to many newsdesks, from the famous Dimboola Banner to the also quite well-known Times, Sunday Times, Independent and Observer in London, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, Johannesburg's Star (guess where!) and the Gulf Daily News of Bahrain. Now six years into his second career as a part-time academic, he is currently teaching Master's students in a course of his own device at the Centre for Advancing Journalism in the University of Melbourne. Ken, whose travels have taken him to 134 countries, harbours fond memories of Morocco where, in palmier days, he appeared in Casablanca. (As well as Marrakech, Rabat and Fez.)

Where to buy a copy:
The Arabic Language Institute in Fez,
2 Rue Ahmed Hiba, Fes, Ville Nouvelle 30000
Beacon Books (UK)
Amazon (USA)
Amazon (AUS)


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Latest Moroccan Novel - On Sale Now

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerising, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

Read First Review Here
Where to Buy a copy:
The Arabic Language Institute in Fez,
2 Rue Ahmed Hiba, Fes, Ville Nouvelle 30000
Beacon Books
Amazon (USA)
Amazon (AUS)

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Through the Peacock Gate - Now Available

The long awaited new novel from Sandy McCutcheon is now on sale. In Fez Through the Peacock Gate is available from the American Language Center Bookshop. On line it can be purchased direct from the publisher, Beacon Books

Through the Peacock Gate is also available from Amazon

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerising, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

Read review here
Where to Buy a copy:
The Arabic Language Institute in Fez,
2 Rue Ahmed Hiba, Fes, Ville Nouvelle 30000
Beacon Books
Amazon (USA)
Amazon (AUS)

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Tangier: The Book Fair launches its 22nd edition

The Book and Arts Fair Tangier starts from April 19 to 22, its 22nd edition. It takes the theme of "the meeting of the other with oneself" 

The Book Fair includes the participation of illustrious names of the world of letters and music such as Gilles Leroy, Ali Benmakhlouf and Mahi Binebine.

Among the artists who will perform there are rapper Tangier Muslim, Gnawa Diffusion and Marek Halter.

Pierre Bergé

The event will also pay tribute to Pierre Bergé, a French businessman and patron who had close ties with Tangier.

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Monday 18:00 at ALIF Riad - Book Launch

Please join us for the launch of Sandy McCutcheon’s new novel, Through the Peacock Gate

Monday, April 16th at 6 PM
ALIF Riad, 6 Derb Drissi, Batha

The launch will be conducted by Australian satirist and artist, Bryan Dawe

This is a chance to purchase a signed, first edition of the novel.

“Through the Peacock Gate” takes you on the journey of a foreigner in Morocco, whose unexpected infatuation leads him into the very heart of the Sufi mystical experience. His descent into madness is exacerbated by his guilt over a tragedy in his past. As he recovers, he is forced to confront a female djinn during a Sufi ceremony in an encounter that could once again tip him back into insanity.

The novel is a rare example of contemporary English fiction drawing on traditional Moroccan folklore. Written in gripping English prose fused with Arabic words, the novel gives an authentic insight into a Westerner’s experience of modern Moroccan society, whilst simultaneously exposing the reader to the country’s rich cultural history by weaving classic Moroccan folk takes and the mysteries of Sufism into its fabric. The book not only explores the point where East and West merge, but the collision of the human world with the world of the djinns – mysterious shape-shifting creatures of an unseen realm.

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerising, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

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Book Launch in Fez

The official launch of Sandy McCutcheon's new novel, Through the Peacock Gate will be held on Monday April 16th at the ALIF Riad in the Medina. The launch will be conducted by Australian satirist and artist, Bryan Dawe. Everyone is welcome. This is a chance to purchase a signed, first edition of the novel

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerising, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

Everyone is welcome! 

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Tangier: Books and art to celebrate the return of spring

More than a book fair, a real artistic and literary festival with concerts, workshops for children, theatre. This year, the Book and Arts Fair in Tangier has chosen to put on its spring clothes and renew its program for the summer season. For its 22nd edition, it becomes the "Spring of the Book and Arts of Tangier" and is more inclusive by diversifying the proposed activities, from April 19 to 22, at the Palace of the Italian Institutions and other places in Tangier

"An event, whatever it is, must be renewed since it decreases after a certain number of years. We wanted to give it a new birth hence the choice of 'spring', a symbol of regeneration," explains Jerome Migayrou, director of the French Institute of Tangier who organises the show in partnership with the Tangier Region Cultural Action Association.

This change will not only be aesthetic, since it also accompanies a new approach and a more varied program that includes concerts, workshops for children, screenings or theater. "Thanks to the abundance of activities and disciplines offered, everyone will be able to choose their activity in relation to what interests them the most."

The Palace of Italian Institutions will bring together the stands of different publishing houses and bookstores in the city, but other parts of the city will also host the many events of this event. The show will be held in schools, colleges and high schools, as well as at the Cinémathèque de Tangier, where Moroccan and French films and documentaries such as "Braguino" (2017) by Clément Cogitore will be screened.

For this new format, the show launches the first edition of "Tangier Arts Tour", a circuit that art lovers can follow to visit all the galleries of the city, which have set up 12 exhibitions under the theme of The Encounter. Visitors will find the abstract works of Nourredine Lahrech and Mhamed Cherifi at the Mohamed Drissi Gallery, the architectural photographs of Hicham Gardaf at the Delacroix Gallery, the anonymous portraits of Jaimal Odera at the American Legation, or the surprising paintings of Abdelkader Melehi at the Dar art gallery.

The Photoloft, Mahal art space, Conil, Artingis, Ibn Khaldoun, Conil Volubilis, Medina Art galleries and the Les insolites bookshop will exhibit the works of artists from Morocco and elsewhere throughout the Salon.

After celebrating youth in 2017 , the show chose this year to focus on "The Meeting - the other's own". This theme will be explored through the many round tables animated by one of the mainly Moroccan authors and experts, notably Driss Ksikes, Jalil Bennani, Abdessamad Dialmy, Fouad Laroui, Sana El Aji or Abdelfattah Kilito.

"We wanted to explore the importance of the other, of those who are different from us to show that this difference is fundamental in our society and that as long as we try to standardize behavior, cultural proposals ... we are impoverishing the world," explains Migayrou.

Always in this festival spirit, several concerts and musical readings are planned during this show in the Palace of the Italian Institutions. Rapper Muslim and singer Hamid Elhadri will ignite the palace scene on April 20, after a musical reading of Eric Reinhardt's "The Room of the Spouses" and Melodie Richard.

The next day, the evening will begin with a recital of poetry with Abdellatif Laâbi, followed by the concert of the mythical group Gnawa Diffusion. Finally, the classical music will close the show with the meeting of the Ukrainian pianist Nathalia Romanenko and the French writer Marek Halter who will tell the story of the fate of three women in Islam.

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New Moroccan Novel - Available to Pre-order

Sandy McCutcheon's latest novel, Through the Peacock Gate, is "a rare example of contemporary English fiction drawing on traditional Moroccan folklore." Set in contemporary times in the Medina of Fez, it plunges the reader into the fabric of Moroccan society. The book will be launched in Fez in April and is now available to pre-order

What the publisher says...

Through the Peacock Gate takes you on the journey of a foreigner in Morocco, whose unexpected infatuation leads him into the very heart of the Sufi mystical experience. His descent into madness is exacerbated by his guilt over a tragedy in his past. As he recovers, he is forced to confront a female djinn during a Sufi ceremony in an encounter that could once again tip him back into insanity.

The novel is a rare example of contemporary English fiction drawing on traditional Moroccan folklore. Written in gripping English prose fused with Arabic words, the novel gives an authentic insight into a Westerner’s experience of modern Moroccan society, whilst simultaneously exposing the reader to the country’s rich cultural history by weaving classic Moroccan folk takes and the mysteries of Sufism into its fabric. The book not only explores the point where East and West merge, but the collision of the human world with the world of the djinns – mysterious shape-shifting creatures of an unseen realm.

“Sandy McCutcheon’s latest novel Through the Peacock Gate is the kind of book those of us who live between Occident and Orient have waited an entire lifetime to read. The interweaving layers, the quality of the prose and, most of all, the raw bedrock of cultural knowledge on which it is founded, makes this an invaluable handbook to the mysteries and complexities of Eastern lore. Its pages conjure the mesmerising, magical heart of secret Morocco.” - Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

SANDY McCUTCHEON is a New Zealander but lived most of his adult life in Australia as an author, playwright, actor, broadcaster and journalist. He has written twenty plays and a number of novels, including Black Widow (2006) which won the Christina Stead Award for Literature, and The Magician’s Son (2005), an autobiographical work on the true nature of his ancestry. He lives in Morocco where he has close ties with a Sufi brotherhood.

Pre order Through the Peacock Gate - http://tinyurl.com/y99ggenx

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Casablanca Book Fair - A Literary Feast

More than 300 writers, poets and researchers from different continents will take part in the 24th edition of the Casablanca International Book and Publishing Fair (SIEL), scheduled for February 8-18

In addition to the Moroccan writers and the delegation that will represent Egypt, guest of honor of this edition, will also be present Palestinians Ghayath Al Madhoun (poet), Ibrahim Nasrallah (novelist), Abderrahmane Bsissou (literary critic), Mohamed Diab Abu Saleh (researcher), Najeh Bekirate (head of manuscripts division at Al-Aqsa Mosque) and Khalil Tafekji (researcher and director of the cartography division of Orient House in Al-Quds).

Also attending will be the Saudi novelist Mohamed Hassan Alouane who was awarded the Booker Prize for the Arab novel for  A Little Death, a fiction depicting the life of the great Andalusian figure of Sufism, Ibn Arabi, from his birth in Spain to his death in Damascus. The novel traces Ibn Arabi's travels from Andalusia to Azerbaijan, via Morocco, Egypt, Hijaz (now Saudi Arabia), Syria, Iraq and Turkey.

Mohamed Hassan Alouane

Other guests include: Omani poet Hassan El Matrouchi, the Iraqi poet living in London Fawzi Karim, the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud and his compatriot the poet Bouzid Harzallah, the Lebanese Ali Nassar (novelist) and Aissa Makhlouf (poet and literary critic), the Mauritanian researcher Si Ahmed Ouled al-Amir and the Jordanian writer Rachaal-Khatib.

Syria will be represented by Nouri al-Jarrah (poet and director of the Arab Center for Geographic Literature - Exploration of horizons), literary critic Khaldoun Chemâa, novelist Moufid Najm, visual artist Âssim Bacha and novelist Tayssir Khalaf, and By translators Salah Hilal and Amina Masri, film critic Amir al-Omari and writer Walid Alaa Eddine, in addition to the official delegation.

Mohamadine Khawad

From outside the Arab world, the SIEL will welcome the Senegalese poet Amadou Lamine Sall, the Chinese translator Cheng Cheng and the Tuareg poet Mohamadine Khawad (Niger), laureate of the International Poetry Prize the 12th Argana International Poetry Prize in 2017. Khawad was awarded the prize in recognition of the constant concern of his poems for four decades, to preserve the knowledge they feed on and to make nomadism a poetic and intellectual space for the production of meaning and the renewal of vision to oneself and to the world." Born in 1950 in the Aïr region of Niger, the Tuareg poet currently lives in France where he published a series of poems and literary works, almost all translated into several languages, including Nomadic Testament, translated into Arabic by the Poet Adonis.

Guests from France will include the jurist Michel Rousset, novelist Gilbert Sinoué, poet Julien Balaine and the researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, Catherine Taine-Sheikh.

Other SIEL foreign guests include the Italian poet and translator Giuseppe Conte, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, her compatriot author of children's books, Eva Muggenthaler, and the American poet and translator Guy Bennett.

Spain will be represented by writers Vanessa Paloma El Baz, Esther Bendahan, Rosa de Madariaga, Juan José Millás and José María Izquierdo. From Latin America, this year's edition will include the Mexican novelist and poet Myriam Moscona, her compatriot novelist Cristina Pineda, the Argentine novelist Santiago De Luca, the poet and novelist Giovanna Benedetti, her compatriot the novelist Pedro Crenes Castro, both Colombian writers Berta Lucía Estrada and Héctor Abad Faciolince, as well as Chilean researcher Patricio Gonzalez.

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Fez Gathering - Final Roundtable Discussions

The 3rd International Artists Gathering  hosted its final day of discussions with a highly appreciative audience braving the very cold conditions. The provision of coffee, tea and small snacks, assisted in boosting the energy levels of those a little tired from the previous night's Slide Luck presentation

The first round table discussion on contemporary art in Africa was well attended, but got off to a late start on a particularly cold morning of around 7 degrees Celsius.

Moderator Neil van der Linden

The individual contributions were well received. Aurelie Lierman, a composer based in The Hague, pointed out the domination of the contemporary art scene over the years by 'middle-aged male Europeans". Originally from Rwanda, Aurelie, an engaging speaker, was one of a strong contingent from the Netherlands that included Neil Van der Linden, and singer,  Shishani Vranckx.

Aurelie Lierman

The two second speakers explained they were doing a joint project, but their contribution were plagued by technical problems and a rather chaotic attempt to rectify the situation turned into an unintended piece of performance art. Eventually, Yassine Balbzioui, from Rabat and Matteo Rubbi, from Italy, informed the audience that the project was a 'paper plane making" competition. Inexplicably, the presentation ended up with a large painting being carried around the streets and an attempt to destroy it by kicking a football through it.

This was followed by a video presentation filmed in Dakar, entitled "You are the shade of my Heart" by Mohammed Arejdal from Rabat. In the video, the audience follows a man dressed in Moroccan clothes, carrying a large red umbrella through the streets. The reaction of local people makes for an interesting cross-cultural discussion. The carrying of an umbrella was the job of a slave - and Mohammed explained his motivation as being political.

The session however, suffered from having too many speakers, technical problems and an overlong introduction from the moderator who, to the bemusement of many in the audience, appeared to cast himself as a contributor rather than facilitator.

Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

The final session was preceded by an unannounced but interesting input from Syrian American author, Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, whose first novel, The Map of Salt and Stars, is to be published in a couple of months. Jennifer explained that her novel had two main threads - the story of modern-day refugees and that of a famous make-maker some eight hundred years earlier. The introduction of the art of the written word made for a seamless transition to the topic that followed

The final round table discussion switched direction from art, performance and photography to the realm of language. Titled  looking at the history and tensions between Anglophone and Francophone communities.

Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar's first novel

In Africa, English is spoken by around 130 million people, while French speakers number 115 million.

As one of the panelists commented, "Africa needs an African language". However, while Swahili might be an obvious candidate, the chances of a consensus is highly improbable.

Linguistic dominance comes at a price and is an issue that should be considered seriously. With the increase in so-called world languages comes the erosion of local languages and dialects. Language is the mother of culture - it is part of the cultural DNA and needs to be respected and protected..

The total number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 to 2,100. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages - one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.

Several speakers suggested that the future will include Cantonese and Mandarin. The growing importance of China in trade, development, investment and tourism will provide employment possibilities for those who can speak Chinese.

Omar Chennafi, Meryem Lahrichi and the team deserve congratulations for their vision of the 3rd Fez Gathering and having turned that vision into a stimulating few days in Fez.

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Moha Ennaji's Important New Book Published

"Alliance of Cultures and Religions for Peace" is the title of the new collective work that has just been published under the direction of Moroccan researcher Moha Ennaji

Moha Ennaji

Published by the South-North Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Migration Studies in Fez, it includes 12 chapters in French, English and Arabic.

The book deals with the means to strengthen the role of cultural and religious dialogue in the consolidation of modernity and democratic culture while emphasising the human and social dimension and proposes to open new avenues for reflection and other perspectives for the debate on the necessity of the alliance of cultures and religions for a global peace.

The new publication focuses on several areas including " insights into the aspects of the mixing of cultures and religions", "Amazigh heritage in Maghreb civilisation and culture", "culture", "religion and the state", "identities culture and globalisation, "the role of intercultural and inter-religious dialogue" and "the alliance of cultures and religions".

The book includes the proceedings of the Amazigh international forum organised from 24 to 26 July 2015 in Fez by the Fez-Sais Association, the South North Center, and the Spirit of Fez Foundation in partnership with the Fez-Meknes Region, the BMCE Foundation and the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture.

The South-North Center, the collective responsible for the book, focuses on intercultural and inter-religious dialogue and the role of culture in the process of democratisation and peace building. It integrates in its approach the social, economic, cultural, religious and political dimensions and dissects the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of multiculturalism.

Moha Ennaji (موحى الناجي); is a Moroccan linguist, author, political critic, and civil society activist. He is a university professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fes, where he has worked for over 30 years. In addition to his publications in linguistics, he has written on language, education, migration, politics, and gender, and is the author or editor of over 20 books.

At the Middle East Institute Ennaji's research has included gender issues, language and migration. His works include Multilingualism, Cultural Identity and Education in Morocco (Springer, New York, 2005), "Language and Gender in the Mediterranean Region", International Journal of the Sociology of Language issue 190, editor (The Hague, 2008), Migration and Gender in Morocco, co-authored (Red Sea Press, 2008), Women Writing Africa, the Northern Region, co-edited (The Feminist Press, 2009). Women in the Middle East, co-edited (Routledge, 2010), Gender and Violence in the Middle East (Routledge, 2011).

Moha Ennaji is a professor at Fès University and a visiting professor at Rutgers University. He is the president of the South North Center for Intercultural Dialogue and a founding president of the International Institute for Languages and Cultures at Fès, Morocco. His writing has also appeared in international publications including Common Ground News, Project Syndicate, Al-Safir, Al-Ahram, Khaleej Times, Japan Times, The Boston Globe and in many Arabic newspapers.


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LE MARIAGE DE PLAISIR - Tahar Ben Jelloun - Review

The first of two recitals of Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun's work this evening at Dar Adiyel was an extract from his novel "Le Mariage de Plaisir" (The Happy Marriage)

Tahar Ben Jelloun

The work explores the loves and lives of three generations of the same family and tonight's extract came from the first part of the book. In the style of a Middle Eastern fable, Ben Jelloun recounts the tale of Amir, a wealthy Fassi merchant during the Protectorate years, who takes a temporary wife during his business trips to Senegal. Falling in love with Nabou, Amir decides to take her to Fez to be his second wife. This decision sets off a chain of events which have a profound impact on the lives of Amir, Nabou and their descendants.

Ben Jelloun says he was motivated to write the book, which was published in 2016, by two key observations: racism towards family members of African origin when he was a child, and the indifference shown towards sub-Saharan Africans who pass through Morocco to reach Europe and frequently end up as statistics of those lost at sea. It is, he suggests, a novel of love and of denunciation.

Nicolas Pignon

Tonight's reciter was Nicolas Pignon, French cinema, TV and theatre actor. As one might expect of an actor of such great experience, his diction was clear and his reading dramatic (although his collection of dog-eared pages from which he read were a little off-putting). He was accompanied by celebrated Moroccan oud player, Driss el Maloumi, no stranger to the Fes Festival, and two percussionists. The music alternated between the role of backing music and being the spectacle itself. Like the text, the musicians brought drama, joy and comedy to the story. At one point, the musicians competed to see who could hit their percussion instrument with the least sound - the oud included!

Driss el Maloumi

Unfortunately the two percussionists were not introduced and we were not told whether the composition was an original by el Maloumi, although one presumes so. In places the musical style seemed a little incongruous to the story, for example rather too jolly when we learned of a death, but the talent of these three musicians was beyond doubt. This is a new and interesting format to bring to the Fes Festival - broadening the audience experience from music and dance into the literary sphere. As Ben Jelloun, who was present, commented himself at the end of the performance, the combination of reading and music had been a "happy and joyful marriage."

Tonight's second set of readings were from various Ben Jelloun works, all related to the central Festival theme of water.

Review and photographs: Lynn Houmdi

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The Olive Tree of Wisdom ~ New book by Moha Ennaji

The prestigious French publishing house Karthala has just published the latest book by Moha Ennaji  The Olive Tree of Wisdom (l'olivier de la sagesse) sheds light on the situation of ancient Morocco through the life of the author’s father, a hero of the resistance, a Sufi and an adept of a tolerant Islam

Ennaji argues that the Maghreb countries, especially the elites, would do better to know and appreciate the social and popular history as well as the ancestral traditions of their country

The book describes the life of an Amazigh (Berber) family in Timoulilt, a Middle Atlas village. The author speaks nostalgically of a rural world that no longer exists. The book is a narrative of the past that leads directly to the future with a spirit of tolerance and openness, in short, a great lesson in life that should interest all those who remain curious about Morocco, its history and culture

Ennaji portrays Morocco as a country that has always been characterised by dialogue between cultures, by its diversity, tolerance and openness to the modern world.

The multiple perspectives (anthropological, historical and cultural) of the narrative make this book very important to understand the life of Moroccans during the French protectorate and at the dawn of independence.

Its 165 pages, the sixteen chapters are organised around six major themes: the history of the struggle for independence in the Middle Atlas in particular and in Morocco in general, the harsh living conditions of Imazighen (Berbers) under the protectorate, their tolerant Islam and Sufism, the linguistic question and the impact of the education system, the situation of rural Moroccan women and the challenges of the multiple identities, as well as their impact on the integration of Imazighen in modernity as well as the participation of the rural population in the struggle for independence and the Imazighen's contribution to the economic, political, social and cultural development after independence.

Highlighting topics previously little studied and analyzed, the book highlights the importance of respecting cultural specificities in any debate on diversity and social justice in Morocco.

The book describes the Moroccan Imazighen as serious workers whose main objective is to improve their standard of living. It shows that rural people in general and Amazigh people in particular are actors of socio-economic development in view of their various immense contributions and their achievements at several levels. They fight every day for a better future for themselves and their children and deserve recognition and respect. Their Islam, which is both modern and moderate, is considered a basis for stability and social peace for Morocco.

Ennaji argues that the Maghreb countries, especially the elites, would do better to know and appreciate the social and popular history as well as the ancestral traditions of their countries, and to protect their tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Similarly, young men and women must recognise the generous culture of their country and be more tolerant and respectful of political and religious pluralism.

Moha Ennaji is a prominent Moroccan academic with research interests in culture and society, migration, gender issues, and linguistics. He is co-founder and president of the International Institute for Languages and Cultures at Fez. He is the author of several books, among which  are: "Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco" (Springer New York, 2005), " Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa"  (Routledge, London 2014) and “Muslim Moroccan Migrants in Europe and North American” (Palgrave, 2015). He has published many articles in Moroccan, American and European journals and newspapers.

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Writers Assist the Medina Children's Library

This week the Medina Children's Library received a generous donation from the participants in this year's Deep Travel Writing Workshop

The View from Fez headquarters at Riad Zany was the venue for the fundraising dinner on Wednesday night. Among the 25 guests were Deep Travel organisers, Christina Ammon and Anna Elkins, photographer, Omar Chennafi, and renowned travel writer, Tim Cahill.

The evening included the launch of a superb new anthology and readings from writers represented in the book, Vignettes & Postcards From Morocco, edited by Erin Byrne. Erin was unable to attend this years workshops but was present as a cardboard cut out of her face!

Suzanna Clarke, Christina Ammon, ( rin Byrne), Tim Cahill, Sandy McCutcheon, Anna Elkins

The feast, cooked up by Rachida El Jokh and her mother, included salads, lamb with apricots, chicken with preserved lemon and a kiwifruit, mint and strawberry yogurt dessert - delicious.

The money raised goes towards supporting the Medina Children's Library, which provides a child-friendly space with hundreds of books, storytelling and art workshops and receives a thousand visits from Medina children every month.

Our thanks to organiser and chef, Rachida El Jokh

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