Tangier

A Literary Guide For Travellers

Josh Shoemake

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780762760
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa but just nine miles from Europe, Tangier is more than a destination, it is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts and writers for centuries – men and women breaking through artistic borders. The results were some of the most incendiary and influential books of our time and the list of outlaw originals is long, stretching from Ibn Battuta and Alexandre Dumas to Twain and Wharton and from the darkly brilliant Beats of Bowles, Kerouac, Gysin and Ginsberg to the great Moroccan novelists: Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

Josh Shoemake read English at Columbia. He has lived in Morocco since 1996. He spent three years in Tangier, where he taught literature and formed close friendships with Paul Bowles, Mohamed Choukri and other local artists and writers. He then served for five years as headmaster of The American School of Marrakech and has published stories about Tangier in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere.

‘Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travellers is a truly dazzling and extraordinary book. A work of literature in its own right, it’s the perfect companion for an exotic journey or an armchair afternoon. The kind of book that educates, amuses, and charms with every page, it’s one that reveals the magical underbelly of Tangier like nothing else.’

Tahir Shah

author of The Caliph’s House

‘Brilliant.’ – Guardian

‘Indispensable.’ – New York Times

‘Josh Shoemake spent three years in Tangier, hanging out with some of the finest writers resident there, including Paul Bowles. His literary companion is a work of passion and of experience... a fascinating guide.’

Anthony Sattin

Sunday Times

‘A wonderfully elegant account of the people and places that have contributed to the exotic allure of Morocco’s most exciting city.’

Giles Foden

Condé Nast Traveller

‘A sure-footed guide to the lore and literature of an enigmatic city.’

Iain Finlayson

The Times

‘An excellent book.’ – Robert Irwin, TLS

‘Engaging.. .takes the form of a diverting stroll through the city’s labyrinthine streets... it is as much about the writers who lived, wrote and looked for love as it is about the streets themselves.’

Thomas Hodgkinson

Spectator

‘I’ve rarely read a guidebook that had a more powerful effect on me.’

Good Book Guide

‘This book is a fantasia of stories and quotes by and about the astonishing number of writers who made their homes there... It’s a heady mix of tolerance and vice and is often very funny too... this multi-layered city is brought alive in a marvellously odd, gossipy romp of a book.’

Robin Hanbury Tenison

Country Life

Tangier

a literary guide for travellers

Josh Shoemake

New paperback edition published in 2018 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London • New York

www.ibtauris.com

First published in hardback in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Copyright © 2013, 2018 Josh Shoemake

The right of Josh Shoemake to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

ISBN: 978 1 78831 283 7

eISBN: 978 0 85773 376 4

ePDF: 978 1 78673 935 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk

Contents

List of Illustrations

Map

1 Introduction: The Edge of the Known World

2 The Port

3 Tanger Plage – Malabata

4 The Kasbah

5 The Medina

6 The Petit Socco

7 The Grand Socco

8 Dean’s Bar – Hotel Minzah

9 Gran Café de Paris – New Town

10 Boulevard Pasteur

11 Hotel Rembrandt – Villa Muniria

12 The Marshan

13 To Merkala Beach

14 The Old Mountain

15 San Francisco – Immeuble Itesa

16 Iberia

17 The New Mountain

18 Cap Spartel – Caves of Hercules – Sidi Kacem

19 Asilah and Larache

Author Profiles

Chronology

Select Bibliography

Illustrations

1 English Tangier (1661–84) as portrayed by the Flemish etcher J. Peeters. The view is from Tangier Bay

2 Cover of the pulpy Two Tickets for Tangier by F. Van Wyck Mason, featuring the indomitable spy Colonel Hugh North (New York, Pocket Books, 1956)

3 Eclectic literary crowd (from left to right): Mohamed Choukri, Jean Genet, Hassan Ouakrim and Mohamed Zerrad (Genet’s friend) at Café de France, Tangier, 1969

4 The Grand Socco surrounded by the bustle of twenty-first-century life

5 St Andrew’s Church, where Walter Harris, among others, is buried

6 From left to right: Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman and William Burroughs at Villa Muniria, where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, Tangier, 1961

7 William Burroughs with Brion Gysin and his Dream Machine

8 Café Hafa, legendary hangout for Beats, artists, expats and locals dreaming of exile

Photo 1: ACR Edition, Courbevoie/Paris; photos 3 and 6 © The Paul Bowles Photographic Archive, Tangier; photo 7 reproduced courtesy of Charles Gatewood.

Central Tangier

For a more complete digital map, please visit www.joshshoemake.com/maps

1

Introduction

The Edge of the Known World

You can be anyone in Tangier. You can remake yourself, rewrite your backstory, reform or deform, indulge your subconscious, cultivate nemeses or simply start anew. Tingis, Tanja, Tanger, Tangiers, Tangier – even the city takes pseudonyms. It is an edge city, caught between worlds, at the border between east and west, between north and south. Stand at the walls of the Kasbah atop the medina, and you are at the northernmost tip of Africa, just 15 kilometres from Europe across the Strait of Gibraltar. You overlook both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and in the distance rise the Pillars of Hercules – Gibraltar and Jebel Musa – which Plato, in his Timaeus, called the edge of the known world, beyond which was the lost kingdom of Atlantis.

You could also call it Babel, the city God cursed for building its tower too close to heaven. His punishment doomed its inhabitants to dozens of mutually incomprehensible languages, and walking down the Boulevard Pasteur on a sunny day, with light fracturing through the air and the bay curving into the distance, you can imagine that Tangier was once, a long time ago, too close to heaven. Over the centuries, however, its fallen residents have learned to understand one another. The borders between languages have blurred, and a waiter will welcome you in perfect French, a cry in Arabic will ring out down a street, a taxi driver will speak a formal English worthy of Henry James, and everywhere men shout in Spanish at the futbol on café televisions.

Founded in the fifth century bc, Tangier has always been a crossroads of cultures, ruled by Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, English, Spaniards, and then in the mid-twentieth century by European powers as a loosely policed International Zone. Each wave of foreigners has added layers to the city, and as you walk through its winding streets today, you will often come upon a place where the layers have been peeled back, or have rotted away, and you may encounter a sheep herder from Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth century, or a mischievous beggar boy straight out of Genet, or an anachronistic gentleman in a seersucker suit who has surely wandered off from a story by Paul Bowles. Luminous sea light glances off the city’s white walls, and it is not unusual to imagine that you have slipped into a fiction. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called the place, has always attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts and, well, writers, working out at the edge of literary forms and blurring artistic borders.

Tangier’s literary history is unlike any the world has known, or may ever know again. What can be said of the city’s historically eccentric inhabitants can also be said of its literature: it escapes from rules, assumptions, conventions and morality. The city’s main artistic figures cut ties with any notion of ‘home’ and challenged themselves to create new kinds of fictions that they might step into and actually inhabit. They made experiments of themselves and travelled out to the edges of their own interior limits, using drugs, drink and unconventional sexuality as creative tools. The list of ‘...

Table of contents

• Author bio
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Map
• 1 Introduction: The Edge of the Known World
• 2 The Port
• 3 Tanger Plage – Malabata
• 4 The Kasbah
• 5 The Medina
• 6 The Petit Socco
• 7 The Grand Socco
• 8 Dean’s Bar – Hotel Minzah
• 9 Grand Café de Paris – New Town
• 10 Boulevard Pasteur
• 11 Hotel Rembrandt – Villa Muniria
• 12 The Marshan
• 13 To Merkala Beach
• 14 The Old Mountain
• 15 San Francisco – Immeuble Itesa
• 16 Iberia
• 17 The New Mountain
• 18 Cap Spartel – Caves of Hercules – Sidi Kacem
• 19 Asilah and Larache
• Author Profiles
• Chronology
• Select Bibliography