You must remember this: Myth-making in Morocco
In 1969, Jimi Hendrix visited Essaouira, Morocco, a blue-and-white-washed village on the country’s Atlantic coast. Tales have been told of his visit ever since: that he ate here and stayed there, that he nearly bought the nearby town of Diabat, that he wrote Castles Made of Sand here, inspired by the ruins of a former fortress out on the water, visible from the dunes.
Aside from the date of Hendrix’s visit, which is accurate enough, all of the above is patently untrue: most of the places he ate and stayed at opened many years after his visit, and the album he was said to have written here was released nearly two years before it. Indeed, a whole sub-genre of travel article has arisen online, writers setting out to debunk Essaouira’s Hendrix myths. But still, we are told, the tourists come, lured by the city’s connection to the man who once set his guitar alight at Monterrey Pop.
I am keen to meet such tourists, to ask them whether they know the truth, and indeed whether they care. And so it is that, one sweltering spring day, bikini-clad Westerners and locals in full niqab enjoying the beach in equal measure, I set out on foot for Diabat myself, to meet them at the famed Jimi Hendrix Café.
Myths have long been central to Moroccan life: lore and folktale, once largely conveyed orally, remain integral to the country’s conception of its national identity. A lot of what we know about these myths we know thanks to the work of Paul Bowles, the American author and composer who lived here from 1947 until his death in 1999. Bowles was truly engaged with Moroccan culture. In 1959, armed only with a VW Beetle and an Ampex 601 tape recorder, the author of The Sheltering Sky travelled the country recording its Berber, Arabic, Andalusian, and Jewish music for the Library of Congress. (Music of Morocco was released in a handsome box set by Dust to Digital in 2016. You can get a taste on YouTube.) He also made a point of recording its stories, though not, in this case, with the Ampex. Rather, he transcribed and translated the oral work of storytellers like Mohammed Mrabet, for most of his life. His 1982 book, Points in Time, is his personal contribution to this tradition.
But at least since the 1940s and 50s, when Western writers started following Bowles’s lead and flocked to Tangier, the literary capital of the Maghreb, contemporary Western myths — the myths of celebrity — have slowly become central to Moroccan life as well, which is to say to the Moroccan tourist industry. One can today read countless articles about literary Tangier: articles, published with ever-greater regularity, that touch upon William S. Burroughs’ favoured bar, and the hotel where he wrote The Naked Lunch, and on the cafés that everyone from Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal to Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote called home.
“Of course,” says Simon-Pierre Hamelin, the current director of Tangier’s Librairie des colonnes, which such writers once considered a home away from home, “Kerouac was only here for a couple of days. Vidal didn’t visit for more than a week.”
“The way some people write, you would think they lived here for most of their lives.”
In fact, he says, much of Tangier’s literary cachet at that time has largely been mythologised, and not only by Westerners.
“The Moroccans want to play up the literary connection for tourism reasons,” he says. “What they don’t want to do is admit why those writers actually came here: because it was easy to get cheap drugs and have sex with boys.”
But the Western obsession with American and European writers — whose numbers also included Wharton and Genet — runs a similar risk of ignoring what is currently happening in the city’s literary circles, he says.
“I would say there are more writers living here now than there were in the 1950s,” he tells me at a café on Avenue Pasteur near the bookstore, which he has run since moving to the city fifteen years ago. “We have writers from all over Morocco and Europe now. They write in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, and they’re much more politically engaged with contemporary Morocco than any of the Westerners who lived here seventy years ago, except maybe Bowles, whose connection with the country was real.”
“But we have women, immigrants — including some West Africans writing in French — and others, who are, in my view, much more interesting than, say, Burroughs is, at least as far as Moroccan literature is concerned.” He publishes some of these writers in La Revue Nejma, which he has run out of the bookstore since 2006, and which can be read both ways, the Arabic pieces running, naturally, right-to-left.
Aside from the Paul Bowles Wing of the American Legation building in the old medina, where the work of Bowles and his wife Jane — one of the overlooked geniuses of the period — is duly celebrated, Hamelin says the only “literary tourism hot-spot” that remains of relevance today is the Grand Café de Paris, where, he says, writers still sit plying their trade.
“Everything else is a bit of an invention,” he says. “I mean, no one ever goes to the Café Hafa any more. They didn’t even really go to it then. Bowles only took journalists there when they asked him to take him.”
But to see Morocco’s myth-making machine at its most inventive, one must visit Rick’s Café in Casablanca. Here, tourists pour in for a brush with Bogart, or perhaps with Bergman, and ‘As Time Goes By’ is played several times a night.
Of course, Rick’s Café — known as Rick’s Café Americain in the 1942 film — didn’t exist until 2004, when it was established by Kathy Kriger, a former American diplomat who saw an opportunity and took it. The real model for Rick’s — though one suspects this might be a myth as well — was Tangier’s Dean’s Bar, which has been closed since at least 2015. Upon Kriger’s death in July at the age of 72, the US Embassy in Morocco described her as “a larger-than-life figure in the community,” not unlike Bogart’s Rick.
The logic is so convoluted as to be almost attractive: a fictional Casablanca institution, possibly but not necessarily inspired by an actual Tangier institution, becomes so inextricably linked with the city that gave the movie its name that someone decides to actually establish it, and then becomes so popular among tourists, who don’t realise that it post-dates the movie, that it becomes a Casablanca institution.
“We wanted to make it everything it was in the movie, and then some,” Kriger told The New York Times a few weeks before her death. One wonders what she’d make of it now: whether out of of respect, or, perhaps worse, for moral reasons — TripAdvisor reviewers are undecided, and in any case are complaining about it — the bar has been dry ever since. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, I had to walk into the one that wasn’t actually a gin joint.
But it’s an even weirder experience walking into Diabat, the town Jimi Hendrix “almost bought”.
It isn’t exactly a one-horse town: there are several at the ranch on the road coming into town, and several more camels than that. But the Jimi Hendrix Café — the ostensible cornerstone in the area’s cottage Hendrix industry — is as dead as the rest of the town looks. The paint is fading, the place is overrun with cats, and I actually have to wake someone up in the back room in order to order myself a drink.
As I’m sitting there having it, dust piling up around me and getting into my Kindle, a rental car drives up, slows, and the tourists inside it decide to turn around and head back. They probably think I’m helping myself to my Sprite.
And so even the Hendrix cottage industry turns out to be a kind of myth as well: one created, in the manner of some great online ouroboros, by the people who set out to debunk the Hendrix myths in the first place.
As I leave, the owner arrives. At least he says he’s the owner. At this point, it’s rather difficult to tell. He takes my money, shakes my hand. He asks if I’ve enjoyed myself. I brush the sand out of my eyes and say yes. He tells me he met Hendrix himself, though this can’t possibly be true, unless Hendrix isn’t really dead, or unless the man is a whole lot older than he looks. Which, in these parts, is also possible.
I ask him whether he likes Hendrix’s music. He gives me a look. He doesn’t want to say no, but shakes his head anyway.
“It’s not really my thing,” he says.
This much, at least, finally, seems true.
A shorter version of this piece was published in The Australian on November 9, 2018, under the same title.
