Almost two years ago, a close friend enthusiastically recommended Paul Bowles’s 1955 novel The Spider’s House — set in Morocco during the struggle for independence from France — as a prescient commentary on Muslim attitudes toward the west (and vice versa), the quagmire in Iraq and so forth. Eager to read it on my recent return from Fes, I was amazed to find that Bowles’s story takes place in that very city, and includes descriptions of places I’d just been.
“[Fes] is no longer the intellectual and cultural center of North Africa; it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World,” Bowles wrote in a 1981 preface to the book. This accorded well with my first impression of Morocco, although the Festival of World Sacred Music certainly has done something to restore Fes’s historic position.
To reach Fes, I took the train from Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport, a journey of well over five hours that involved a change of trains early on. Processing my reserved ticket at the airport train depot was a farce I can laugh about only now. Suffice to say it involved my nonexistent foreign language skills, a pink booklet of blank receipts and a crumpled slip of carbon paper, an impatient line of customers forming behind me, and two clerks who acted as though they were being asked to split the atom.
With the tickets finally in hand, I scrambled to the first train, a rusted iron hulk with windows you could barely see through. We began to pass shantytowns on the airport’s periphery, a picture of appalling squalor: temporary cinderblock dwellings with tin roofs covered by tarps, held in place with rocks or tires. Some had no roof at all; forget plumbing and electricity. These depressing, dust-choked settlements popped up in many spots during the trip, often on just the other side of the tracks from relatively developed urban areas. At one point I watched a man graze his herd of goats on an expanse of garbage.
Getting off to change trains at Casa Voyageurs, I began noticing men in business suits and a level of general prosperity. The station was modern, with polished brick flooring and digital signs announcing departures and arrivals — nicer, in fact, than a typical Metro North station in suburban New York. I bought a mango soda and a bag of paprika potato chips and waited for my connecting train, which was in far better shape than the first but had no air-conditioning. Despite the scorching midday sun, people were ordering coffee from the drink carts that occasionally passed through. A teenage girl across from me was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, a collared shirt over that, and finally a v-neck sweater — three layers in the choking, miserable heat.
A man in his mid 40s to early 50s sat near me at one point and said something lighthearted in Arabic. Seeing my confusion, he began to suss out where I was from. We were soon speaking English, and though I was still carefully gauging folks’ feelings toward Americans, this man shook my hand warmly when he heard I was covering the Fes Festival (he was born in Fes). He talked to me about Morocco’s Arab and Berber communities and told me I really must visit the Mellah (he called it “Jewish town”). Without any prompting from me, he seemed to take a certain pride in Morocco’s Jewish heritage, and I realized he reminded me very much of my wife’s Israeli stepfather.
Arriving in Fes at last, I was greeted by a driver and taken to a new black Mercedes with black leather interior — embarrassing luxury in this setting. The parking lot was tiny, sheer chaos, cars backing up and turning around in every possible direction. Somehow the driver extricated us, but then took me to the wrong hotel. We sorted the problem out, and before long I was showered and sitting at the evening concert at Bab El Makina: flamenco music and dancing from the Compagnie Belen Maya of Spain. After 26 hours on the road, there was a real chance of me nodding off and falling from my chair. I had to get up and circulate. But somehow I made it to 11pm to hear the Tijania Sufi Brotherhood, the first of the brotherhoods I’d hear perform at the open-air venue Dar Tazi, tucked away inside the Fes Medina (the medieval walled city).
In The Spider’s House, Paul Bowles portrays a teenage boy named Amar, who clings to a doctrinaire Islam in the midst of the colonialist-nationalist clashes going on around him. Late in the book, Amar finds himself at a Sufi gathering in a place called Sidi Bou Chta. Recalling the experience, he says:
And then we watched the Aïssaoua and the Haddaoua and the Jilala and the Hamacha and the Derqaoua and the Guennaoua and all that filth, because the Nazarene [protagonist John Stenham] liked to see the dancing … It makes you sick to your stomach to look at it, all those people jumping up and down like monkeys.
Thus does Bowles capture fundamentalist loathing of the mystical, ecumenical Sufis, who were a major attraction at the Fes Festival. While there I was able to hear three of the brotherhoods — Aïssawa, Darkaouiya and Hamadcha — specifically condemned by Amar. The fourth, the Tijania, was purely vocal, no drums, no dancing. The following clip is a bit indistinct, but gives you a sense of the hypnotic power of the chanting and the strange, almost random quality of the harmonization:
Days later, on a guided tour of the Medina, I was told that Sidi Ahmed Tijani, the namesake of this brotherhood, was responsible for bringing Islam to Senegal some thousand years ago. As we neared his shrine in the Medina, I began to notice groups of black Africans milling about, talking. These were Senegalese pilgrims who make regular trips to Fes to honor their forebear Tijani.
Senegal is of course another former French colony, one I learned a bit about during my February trip to Dakar, where I and many other colleagues were briefed on Youssou N’Dour’s microfinance project Birima. N’Dour, an extraordinary singer and songwriter, came to the Fes Festival several years ago to premiere his Egypt project, one of the most subtle political salvos of the post-9/11 era, an album that highlighted a tolerant face of Islam, something “that in recent times has come to be both misunderstood and misinterpreted by many commentators and adherents alike.” To recall N’Dour’s work and my Senegal trip, and to be in the midst of these Senegalese as they journeyed to the birthplace of their Sufi heritage in Fes, was something visceral, something I may never be able to describe.
As for the experience of walking through the Medina, I’ll leave that to Paul Bowles:
Eleven hundred years ago the city had been begun at the bottom of a concavity in the hills, a formation which had the contours of a slightly tilted bowl; through the centuries as it grew, a vast, eternally spreading construction of cedar wood, marble, earth and tiles, it had climbed up the sides and over the rim of the bowl. Since the center was also the lowest part, all the passageways led to it; one had to go down first, and then choose the direction in which one wanted to climb. Except the paths which followed the river’s course out into the orchards, all ways led upward from the heart of the city. The long climb through the noonday heat was tiring.
Heck yes. It’s a dizzying place, but just incredible. Mules, not cars, are the mode of transport. I have many pictures up, but here’s a commanding rooftop view (click to enlarge):
My travel companion Derek Beres has pics up as well. I’ve already directed you to my take on the festival itself, as published in the Forward; also see these interesting reports from the BBC and the Guardian.
More than most musical events, the Fes Festival is virtually impossible to separate from politics. By spearheading this call for global and interfaith dialogue through the arts, Morocco positions itself as a progressive force in the Arab and Muslim world. And still it has to contend with the fact that Moroccans are very heavily present in the ranks of jihadist movements, including Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, about which the NY Times has just reported in vivid detail. These tensions were very much in mind as I sat with friends on the top floor of the Kasbah restaurant. Looking over the balcony at a house painter hard at work, I tried to make out the English words on the back of his t-shirt. Away from the sun’s glare, they came into focus:
“Uncle Sam Wants You.”
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