Casablanca
These photos have very little of what might be considered as "artistic". In Casa, I was in no position to display ostentatiously my visual interests. I was actually living on the medinah, being one with it, while I was doing my research on Morocco. I was shy just to show off with my sticky cam, taking pictures of people or even places. In Casa there is nothing to justify it, no great mosques, no historical sites. There are nicer places for richer people. But I was living on the medinah, between the port and the royal mosque, and even Habous seemed far, because a taxi was needed to reach it.
I was there for a book fair, and to reach it on foot, I was crossing the whole medinah every day, greeting and being greeted by people, sometimes eating with other women. I used to bring fruits or sodas, and a banana was cut in four, to get a part of it for each of us. But mostly I ate with men, till the day a police commissionaire tried to offer me sadaka, and I decided it's time to pack my stuff and move to Rabat...
Yet in no other place across the Muslim world I have ever been as much at home as in this greasy post-colonial city, where a lot of the best of Morocco is undoubtedly concentrated.
I was there for a book fair, and to reach it on foot, I was crossing the whole medinah every day, greeting and being greeted by people, sometimes eating with other women. I used to bring fruits or sodas, and a banana was cut in four, to get a part of it for each of us. But mostly I ate with men, till the day a police commissionaire tried to offer me sadaka, and I decided it's time to pack my stuff and move to Rabat...
Yet in no other place across the Muslim world I have ever been as much at home as in this greasy post-colonial city, where a lot of the best of Morocco is undoubtedly concentrated.
Rabat
Rabat was a completely different story already. Technically speaking, I was still living in the medinah, not far from the Casbah, but completely different quality. It was a nice riyad owned by a French, where the guests were elderly Moroccan Jews, well established on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean, very normal looking, and surprising me by speaking such an Arabic to the service boy. Me too, I was someone else in Rabat, a European, perhaps a European convert. In the Casbah, it happened to me once to meet a freshly converted "sister". She jumped to hug me with exaltation, as if I were her kin or friend or whoever. The Moroccan man accompanying her, red with shame, pledged me to forgiveness. Wasn't the land still bearing the trace of Titus Burckhardt's own feet?...
Strangely, even if Casablanca seems uncontested as the capital of creative Morocco, it is in Rabat that the museums are, and such things. Life is different, or perhaps a mere accident inscribed me differently in space and community. In Rabat, I didn't eat neither with men nor with women. I ate in the restaurant "La Libération", the famous Mat'am al-Hurriyya rendered immortal in Goytisolo's Makbara. Indeed, I couldn't read Makbara otherwise than remembering this city, even if there is also Marrakech, Jemaa al-Fna, perhaps places in superposition, neither here nor there, Rabat, Fès and Marrakech at the same time.
In the Mat'am al-Hurriyya everything was woefully cheap, and miserable, and plastic, yet the food was served ritualistically, in the European way, with a strange touch of colonial elegance. For sure nobody would expect to see me eating with my fingers.
Strangely, even if Casablanca seems uncontested as the capital of creative Morocco, it is in Rabat that the museums are, and such things. Life is different, or perhaps a mere accident inscribed me differently in space and community. In Rabat, I didn't eat neither with men nor with women. I ate in the restaurant "La Libération", the famous Mat'am al-Hurriyya rendered immortal in Goytisolo's Makbara. Indeed, I couldn't read Makbara otherwise than remembering this city, even if there is also Marrakech, Jemaa al-Fna, perhaps places in superposition, neither here nor there, Rabat, Fès and Marrakech at the same time.
In the Mat'am al-Hurriyya everything was woefully cheap, and miserable, and plastic, yet the food was served ritualistically, in the European way, with a strange touch of colonial elegance. For sure nobody would expect to see me eating with my fingers.
Marrakesh
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Fes
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Meknes
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Essaouira & Al-Jadida
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Volubilis
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