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A travers le Maroc

Et en entendant dans le calme des nuits lumineuses et parfumées ces sons étranges, ces mélopées primitives, ces mille bruits divers, si particulièrement caractéristiques, des villes de l'Orient; en respirant cette atmosphère arabe si voluptueusement troublante, où les senteurs suaves et pénétrantes des grandes étendues vierges viennent se mêler et se fondre avec l'odeur âcre des aromates, la puanteur des charognes laissées sur les chemins, les émanations fortes des bêtes, tout notre être tressaille, surpris par toutes ces choses inaccutumées, se détend, amolli et comme engourdi par les subtiles effluves. On se sent envahi par une sorte de torpeur irrésistible, de grande lassitude de l'esprit où tous les sentiments, assouplis, effacés, éteints, sombrent en une sensation intense de repos complet, de bien-être absolu. (p. 100)

A facsimile edition of the travel book of Georges Montbard, or Charles Auguste Loye (1841-1905) who chose this pseudonym for his artistic life, takes me back to one of the countries I love most. Even if the book is shallow, superficial, ordinary, both in its verbosity and the quality of the sketches illustrating it. Montbard did not pretend much in his artistic destiny; he was an illustrator and caricaturist working with various journals and newspapers of his time, in France and Great Britain. Apparently, his Moroccan volume recently brought back to the readers by the Editions Frontispice, was not a very well known one; he seems to be remembered in the first place for his Egyptian travels; anyway, those things are available nowadays in the digital archives.
I would say that Montbard brings us back to the 19th-century beginnings of tourism, and makes us muse on the superficiality inscribed in the European concept of pleasure travel since its beginnings, two centuries ago. His journey is not a grand tour; he does not travel in order to learn and does not pretend to know much about the world he describes and depicts, although one of his English compagnons already carries a camera, cet espion maudit, à la fois myope et presbyte, voyant faux à travers l'arragement compliqué de ses lentilles concaves et convexes (p. 168); there is a curious deprecation that he launches, over a coupe of pages, against this new medium that would have such a glorious future.
During his peregrination in the northern part of Morocco, started and finished in the port of Tangier, the picturesque is what Montbard is after, both in the landscape and in the people he encounters: Moors, countryside girls, the black population that seems over-represented in his depiction. Even as he reaches the Roman ruins of Volubilis, he finds little place for historical or erudite digressions. He is a sensationalist, to put it this way, an empty subject carrying no knowledge, aspiring to no insight, and open to perception through all his senses. The book is full of things he saw, landscapes, vegetation, weather, but also sounds and smells, calls of muezzins, stinking dogs and donkeys. He travels through the land inebriated in perception, reasoning little, and bringing little of what might eventually have an influence on the views of his readers.
Undoubtedly, it is a piece of colonial literature, with few compliments paid to the subaltern who occasionally let their lice fall right onto immaculate pages of the artist's sketchbook. There is no political correctness in the way he treats the Jews, the Negroes and, last but not least, the Moors themselves. The traveller is intrusive and ready to make a good use from his influence and dominant position, appealing for more than just the hospitality of the inhabitants; if sometimes he pays for the food he eats and the service he recieves, it is just as a way of being kind and polite; for the rest, he takes the country as something that is due to him and his companions: nous avons une lettre de recommandation de Si-Torrès, le ministre des Affaires étrangères du Maroc, résidant à Tanger. Nous possédons aussi une lettre du Sultan, laquelle nous donne droit à la "mouna" et aux égards des pachas, sheiks, kaids et autres fonctionnaires de l'empire, qui répondent de nos existences sur leur tête. Nous préférons, toutefois, payer les vivres que les habitants nous apportent et notre kaid est chargé de leur en régler le montant (p. 141). Meanwhile, this intruding subject has little comprehension, and no respect, to whatever might be hold sacred in the local eyes. Holiness is yet another part of the picturesque, and as such, everything has similar value: the graves of local saints, as well as the storcks, are sacred because of some ancient superstition (leurs corps contiennent les âmes de leurs ancêtres, lesquels vivaient autrefois dans de grandes îles par delà l'Océan, et qui sous cette forme reviennent pour les protéger; p. 80). For the rest, the travellers suffer from spleen, and they find in hunting whatever they miss in cultural perspicacity (on a fait des hécatombes de perdrix; p. 139).
Montbard finds everything in the convenient state of dilapidation and disrepair; poverty and ruins are picturesque; they occupy the eye of this early tourist. He would like to add more cruelty and pathos to his Oriental vision; this is why he is keen to visit prisons wherever he goes. But for a long time it seems that the only result of his search for shock, abjection and delight would be pieces of meat oozing blood on the souk. Till finally, in the kasba of Meknes (written Méquinez in the book), he encounters the very thing he came for: Au-dessus de l'entrée, des crocs en fer sont solidement fixés. Après chaque révolte de tribus, les chefs des rebelles précipités du haut des créneaux, avec une adresse cruelle, s'enganchent sur ces pointes sinistres, où ils restent exposés comme un example terrible de la tout-puissante justice du Sultan, et les oiseaux du ciel, tandis qu'ils respirent encore, viennent arracher les yeux de leurs orbites et déchirent leurs membres pantelants. Leurs cadavres restent suspendus là et les chairs putréfiées se détachent et tombent en lambeaux dégoûtants que les chiens dévorent le jour et les chacals viennent leur disputer la nuit (p. 162).
But there are also some sights that truly charm them; perhaps the contrast makes them even more precious. There is a profusion of flowers (des lauriers-cerises; des amandiers; des cactus; des orangers; des grenadiers; des figuiers; des rosiers; des liserons; des loriots; des pinsons; des fauvettes; des mésanges; des glaieuls; des iris; des des fougères; des nénufars; all of them p. 167); there is also a profusion of multicoloured cloths, jewels, precious metals, carpets that make gardens over gardens: On a étalé devant nous de superbes tapis à nuances amorties, aux dessins délicieux; on a retiré de recoins ténébreux des vêtements de soie et de velours brodés d'or, des étoffes tissées d'or et lamées d'argent, des étriers niellés d'or, des armes rares, des sabres à lames damasquinées, et nous sommes partis éblouis de toutes ces richesses datant la plupart d'époques lointaines, que sortaient de leurs trous noirs ces marchands graves, polis, glissant silencieusement comme des ombres, enveloppés de leurs linceuls de mousseline (p. 168). This is what Orient is supposed to be: contrast, profusion, vertigo.


G. Montbard, A Travers le Maroc. Notes et Croquis d'un Artiste, une reprise de 1886, Casablanca, Ed. Frontispice, 2013.

Leiden, 26.03.2019
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Casablanca

March - April 2013.


My travel to Morocco in 2013 had strictly academic porpose. In Casablanca, I was to participate in the Salon International de l'Édition et du Livre (30.03-7.04.2013), and I went there ever day, searching for fresh material for my research, listening to intellectuals, talking to Amazigh activists. I had little time for photography, and these photos have very little of what might be considered as "artistic". Also, I was in no position to display ostentatiously my visual interests; I wouldn't like to be taken for a tourist. I was living on the medinah, being one with it, while I was doing my research on Morocco; some religious people were congratulating me in the quality of a scholar travelling in search of knowledge. This is why I was shy to show my sticky cam, taking pictures of people or even places. Apparently, in Casablanca there is nothing to justify it, no great mosques, no historical sites. There are nicer, more photogenic places. I was living between the port and the royal mosque, and even Habous seemed far, I needed to take a taxi to reach it. Everywhere else, I was going on foot.
I was there for the book fair, and to reach it, I was crossing the whole medinah every day, greeting and being greeted by people, sometimes invited to eat with other women. I used to bring fruits or sodas, and a single banana was to be cut in four, to get a part of it for each of us. But for the most of time, I was eating with men, till the day a police commissionaire tried to offer me sadaka, and I decided it was time to pack my stuff and move to Rabat...
I keep a cordial record of Casablanca; in no other place across the Muslim world have I ever been as much at home as in this greasy post-colonial city, where a lot of the best of Morocco is concentrated.
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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. 

Marrakesh

Fes

Meknes

Essaouira & Al-Jadida

Volubilis