Eye For Eye?

A Reading in the Travel accounts of P. Bowles and A. Akbib

This paper aims at drawing a brief contrast between two travel books by two

different writers: Their Heads Are Green by the American Paul Bowles and

Tangier’s Eyes on America by the Moroccan Abdellatif Akbib.

i This juxtaposition is justified, in my opinion, by at least one important reason.

Regardless of their respective close personal relations to Tangier, ii these two

writers can, to a large extent, be regarded as representing two opposite trends

in the field of cultural studies and discourse. For while Bowles was undeniably

one of the most conspicuous American Orientalists, whose diverse literary

texts place him squarely at the centre of what is known as hegemonic colonial

discourse, Akbib is certainly one of the emerging post-colonial voices or figures

that have just started to ‘write back’ to the metropolitan Centre. The difference

between

these trends can be well illustrated by the way each of the two writers

‘appropriates’, so to speak, the city of Tangier to articulate symbolic meanings

that are inextricably associated with the cross-cultural relation between the

Western metropolis and its peripheries. In Bowles’ case, Tangier was for a long

time the object of his Orientalist gaze and the site of his representations of

cultural Otherness. Not only did it serve as the indispensable source of

inspiration without which he could not become a creative writer, as he himself

once confessed, it was also itself deployed as a rich material for many of his

discursive products like his famous novel Let It Come Down. In addition to this,

Tangier also served him, metaphorically speaking, as a private Panopticon or

look-out from which he as systematically observed and represented Morocco

as well as the rest of North Africa and the Moslem world. Conversely, while

Tangier is for Akbib also an important source of literary inspiration, iii his travel

book has unequivocally declared and advocated for this strategic city the

active role of a subject rather than merely an object of representation. The

book’s title itself, as it will be soon clarified, endows Tangier with eyesight and,

by implication, with insight and agency by means of which it has started to

resist and subvert the West’s hegemonic constructions.

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To support the argument that Akbib’s discourse in Tangier’s Eyes on

America is antithetical and oppositional to Bowles’ discourse in Their Heads

Are Green, it must be first shown how the latter book is in effect part and

parcel of the Western Orientalist tradition. But as a way of broaching this

crucial subject, it may be very expedient to start with a brief look at an

interesting short story by Bowles, significantly entitled ‘The Eye’ and set in

Tangier. This story is about a ‘Nazarene’ (i.e., Christian) young man called

Duncan Marsh, who has been living in Tangier for a dozen of years but gets

finally poisoned by Meriam, one of his Moroccan servants. The problem starts

with Meriam’s superstitious belief that this Nazarene has cast his evil eye on

her little daughter after deliberately scowling at her so that she might be less

noisy. So in an attempt to remove the spell from her child, the mother is

induced by the local ‘fqihs’ to dose that man some strange concoctions, which

inadvertently lead to his death. The scene of Marsh’s innocuous intimidation of

the child is described in the following words:

One day he went quietly around the outside of the house

and down to the patio. He got on all fours, put his face

close to the little girl’s face, and frowned at her so fiercely

that she began to scream (…). The little girl continued to

scream and wail in a corner of the kitchen, until Meriam

took her home. That night, still sobbing, she came down

with a high fever. For several weeks she hovered between

life and death, and when she was finally out of danger

she could no longer walk.

Meriam, who was earning relatively high wages,

consulted one fqih after another. They agreed that ‘the

eye’ had been put on the child; it was equally clear that

the Nazarene for whom she worked had done it. What

they told her she must do (…) was to administer certain

substances to Marsh which eventually would make it

possible to counteract the spell. This was absolutely

necessary…iv

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If the Nazarene’s ‘Eye’ —with its presumed harmful effect on the innocent

native child—is taken symbolically as a metaphor for what has come to be

known as the imperial/Western gaze,v the above passage can certainly yield a

number of insightful remarks that are deeply pertinent to the topic under

discussion. In the first place, this quotation suggests that the

colonizer’s/Orientalist’s eye or gaze on the native people and landscapes is far

from being neutral or innocent. This is because this gaze is usually a sign of

bad omen for the colonized people, given that it is often the real source of

their cultural subordination and ultimate deterritorialization. Indeed, such

“gaze”, as David Spurr has rightly pointed out, “is never innocent or pure,

never free of mediation by motives which may be judged noble or otherwise.

The writer’s eye is always in some sense colonizing the landscape, mastering

and portioning, fixing zones and poles, arranging and deepening the scene as

the object of desire.”vi. For in the context of colonial relationships, the power to

gaze and survey is always hardly separable from the power to appropriate and

to exercise hegemonic mastery over the cultural Other. In the second place,

because this Other is systematically positioned as a victim and as the object of

the Westerner’s surveillance, he frequently finds himself compelled to react

against that act of subjugation, no matter how powerless he might be. This

reaction often comes in the form of either an open resistance or a rather

covert subversion of the authority inherent in the Westerner’s ethnocentric

practices. In the case of Meriam, for instance, one can say that her secret

manipulation of the Nazarene is symbolically counter-hegemonic in the sense

that she has been actively looking for an antidote to the accursed plight that

has been imposed on her by this Western ‘master’. Finally, the third important

idea that is suggested by Bowles’ above passage has to do with the ideological

question of Othering, or what Edward Said calls: ‘Orientalizing’ the Orientals.

This point is of course related to the first one, but much more emphasis is laid

now on Bowles’ own discursive practice —construed here as part of an

Orientalizing process that reveals this author’s deep affiliation to the Western

hegemonic ideology. In this respect, the above passage itself (and the whole

story, as a matter of fact) provides a good example of how Bowles’ own eyes

are keen on capturing the signs of the Moroccans’ Otherness in an attempt to

amuse his Western audience. Indeed, by emphasizing Meriam’s ignorance and

the fqihs’ queer and fatal prescription, the author is clearly aiming at

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foregrounding the exoticism and the sense of radical difference that

characterize the Moroccan universe. But in the process of such discursive

representation Moroccans are ideologically othered and constructed negatively

as being culturally backward, if not fact helplessly primitive. The idea of

primitiveness is indeed what the ending of this short story seems to stress, as

the narrator closes his account by commenting that the mysterious death of

Marsh has been unwittingly perpetrated by “a mother moving in the darkness

of ancient ignorance.”vii

This “darkness of ancient ignorance’, which Bowles has certainly meant

to stand as a strong sign or marker of cultural difference between the Orient

and the Occident, is in effect what Bowles’ eyes often sought to capture and to

re-present in many of his fictional and non-fictional narratives. In his travel

account ‘The Rif, To Music’, for instance, he elaborates on the Oriental

phenomenon of poisoning, or what he frequently refers to as ‘tseuheur’, by

confirming that in Morocco:

The poisons are provided by professionals; Larache is said

to be a good place to go if you are interested in working

magic on somebody. You are certain to come back with

something efficacious. Every Moroccan male has a horror

of tseuheur. Many of them, like Mohammed Larbi, will not

eat any food to which a Moslem woman has had access

beforehand, unless it be his mother or sister, or, if he

really trusts her, his wife. But too often it is the wife of

whom he must be the most careful. She uses tseuheur to

make him malleable and suggestible (109).

His case in point is Mohammed Larbi himself, his travel companion who resides

in Tangier and who has been once exposed to such devilish manipulation by

his father’s fourth wife. In what resembles a marvelous and fantastic tale from

The Arabian Nights, Bowles recounts how Mohammed has been served a tajine

with a morsel of meat within which he discovers a sewn pocket full of diverse

powders and drugs such as: “powdered finger-nails and finely cut hair—pubic

hair (…) along with bits of excrement from various small creatures (…) like

bats, mice, lizards, owls…”(109). That is why Mohammed has grown suspicious

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of any food made by a Moslem woman, and that is why he does not trust even

his wife, whom he rather beats up regularly lest she should think of

manipulating him: “She’ll never try to give me tseuheur, he boasts. I’d kill her

before she had it half made”(110).

By thus foregrounding the signifiers of strangeness, incivility and social

disharmony, which he apparently regards as being typical of Moroccan society,

Bowles is actually Orientalizing his objects of representation and emphasizing

their state of cultural difference and irretrievable backwardness. His concern is

not so much with any accurate or objective portrayal of this society and its

culture as in fact with the sense of exoticism and mystery that he wishes to

communicate to his Western readers.viii For he knows very well what these

readers expect of him, and he is only too pleased to cater for their desires,

regardless of any generalization, exaggeration or distortion which he might

make in the process of his cultural representation.

In ‘Africa Minor’, Bowles asserts that when he asks the Americans who

visit North Africa about what they have expected to find in it, their answer is

unanimously: “a sense of mystery”(68-9). And in effect, as he explains, they

usually find it, among other things, in:

the unexpected turnings and tunnels of the narrow

streets, in the women whose features still go hidden

beneath the litham, in the secretiveness of the

architecture, which is such that even if the front door of a

house is open, it is impossible to see inside (69).

What must be first noted here is that Bowles’ inquiry about the preconceived

expectations of his compatriots is itself expressive of his great attentiveness to

the tastes and the preferences of his Western audience. But the unanimous

answer he gets is equally revealing of how much this interest in the

‘mysterious’ Orient is in reality a mere “mediated desire.” ix Which means that

even before reaching their destinations these visitors are already mentally

conditioned by what they have read or heard about the Orient so that their

experience of this region seems to be performed at second hand and their

emotional response is often predictable and pre-established. For it is quite

true, as Heather Henderson has confirmed, that there are travelers who go just

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“to reread an already written landscape”, and whose “imaginations are so fired

by what they have read that their entire journey attempts to follow in the

footsteps of another traveler, real or fictional.”x And while it is beyond question

that Bowles usually sought to ‘fire’ his readers’ imaginations by means of his

strange Oriental accounts, he himself was in effect a traveler whose desire for

the East was hugely mediated by the discourses of his Orientalist

predecessors. As a matter of fact, despite the apparent uniqueness of his exilic

experience in Morocco, his whole outlook and discursive practice have been, in

a way or another, strongly influenced by the examples of these former

Orientalists. Indeed, even the notable association of his name with the city of

Tangier is far from being an incontestable proof of the exceptionality and

originality of his Oriental experience. This is because more than forty years

before Bowles saw the light in 1910, his compatriot Mark Twain had already

expressed the view that: “Tangier is the spot we have been looking for all the

time… We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign… and

lo! In Tangier we have found it.”xi And since this significant statement is an

outright expression of the Orientalist desire of not only M. Twain but also of

several Western visitors—especially the artists, as the pronoun ‘we’ tacitly

hints at—Bowles’ adherence or affiliation to the Western tradition of

Orientalism is a question that seems hardly debatable.

In a memorable description of his favourite city, Bowles has written:

If I said that Tangier struck me as a dream city, I should

mean it in the strict sense. Its topography was rich in

prototypal dream scenes: covered streets like corridors

with doors opening into rooms on each side, hidden

terraces high above the sea, streets consisting only of

steps, dark impasses, small squares built on sloping

terrain (…) with alleys leading off in several directions; as

well as the classical dream equipment of tunnels,

ramparts, ruins, dungeons, and cliffs.xii

Apart from its obviously intentional emphasis on the dreamlike topographical

make-up of Tangier, this statement is striking in its echoing of the previously-

quoted passage that cites the elements which make Morocco and North Africa

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mysteriously appealing to Bowles’ fellow Americans. In both statements indeed

one can see clear indications that there is something enigmatic about this

region of the globe and that the visitor’s ‘Western eyes’ are sorely desirous to

penetrate this secret of the East, but in vain. All such matters as “the

unexpected turnings and tunnels”, the female faces ‘hidden beneath the

litham”, the open but inaccessible homes, the “covered streets”, the “hidden

terraces” and the “dark impasses” combine to constitute the chief sites of

desire which ignite the Westerner’s curiosity and fill him with an overwhelming

sense of wonder and exotic mystery. And, in fact, any Westerner who

cherishes such a desire vis-à-vis the Orient—whether he is Bowles himself or

any other American of European outsider—can well be stigmatized as an

Orientalist since both his ‘vision’ and discourse construe this region in terms of

its cultural Otherness and radical opposition to the Occident.xiii

i

? Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green (London: Sphere Books Ltd, 1990); and Abdellatif Akbib, Tangier’s Eyes On America ( Imp. ADO Maroc s.a.r.l, 2001). The references to these source books are indicated by the direct inclusion of their respective page-numbers at the end of the quotations.ii While Akbib is a native of Tangier, Bowles chose this city as his exilic ‘home’, where he lived for more than fifty-two years.iii It is significant to mention here that Akbib found it impossible to write creatively while he was in America. “I was not able to write a word,” he confessed, because “ I was away from my source of inspiration.” ‘ Home Sweet Home’, 78-9.iv Paul Bowles, ‘ The Eye’, Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 275.v ‘Imperial Eyes’ is the main title of Mary Louise Pratt’s famous book: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation ( London: Routledge, 1992). David Spurr also speaks of the imperial “ ideology of the gaze” and of “the penetrating inspection of the Western eye” in The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration ( Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993), see pages 15 and 21 respectively.vi D. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 27.vii P. Bowles, ‘The Eye,’ 276.viii Edward Said has noted, in this connection, that the Orientalists and Africanists usually write “with an exclusively Western audience in mind,” Culture and Imperialism ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996),66. ix Heather Henderson, ‘ The Travel Writer and the Text: “My Giant Goes With Me Wherever I go”,’ New Orleans Review, 31.x H. Henderson, 30-1.xi Quoted in ‘Nineteenth Century Tangier: Its American Visitors: Who They Were, Why They Came, What They Wrote,’ Priscilla H. Roberts, Tanger 1800-1956: Contribution à l’histoire récente du Maroc ( Rabat: Les Editions Arabo-Africaines, 1991), 138.xii P. Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography ( New York: The Eco Press, 1985), 128.xiii See Edward Said’s Orientalism, 2-3.

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In the above description of Tangier, Bowles has used the ‘past’ rather

than the ‘present’ tense as he wants to focus on how this city first impressed

him during his earliest visit there in 1931. According to him, the glorious and

romantic aspect of that early colonial period has started to lose much of its

lustre ever since the independence of Morocco on account of the growing tide

of nationalistic change and Westernizing modernism. For him, this natural

socio-historical evolution of Tangier and Morocco as whole is a regrettable and

undesirable thing because, from his biased and nostalgic Orientalist

perspective, any change is detrimental to that ‘virgin’ and ideal state that has

originally enthralled him. Even if this change might mean progress and

prosperity for both Morocco and the Moroccans, it remains quite damnable, in

his opinion, because, as he himself confessed in the introduction of his travel

book: “the visitor to a place whose charm is a result of its backwardness is

inclined to hope it will remain that way regardless of how those who live in it

may feel” (7). Needless to say, such a view is not only nostalgic and egoistic

but utterly ethnocentric and reactionary too. In his appropriative Orientalist

approach to Morocco and its culture, Bowles seems ready to sacrifice anything

and wishfully freeze the flow of time and stop historical progress so that he

could keep intact his visionary image of this country and thus achieve a better

and ideal gratification of his romantic self.xiv This attitude is suggestive of how

much the self-centredness of the West renders it imperialistically mindless of

the fate and the rights of the marginalized Rest.

In spite of what he perceives as a gradual eclipse of that platonic

colonial picture of Morocco, Bowles never completely lost his faith in the charm

and the exotic richness of this Oriental country. For he was still able to find

much wonder and fascination in some residual ‘primitive’ features, not only in

Moroccan culture but also in the overall social and topographical context of

North Africa. Hence his primitivistic interest, for instance, in the occult

practices of such native brotherhoods as “the Derqaoua, the Aissaoua, the

xiv Bowles expresses the same idea fictionally in his novel The Spider’s House (London: Sphere Books Ltd,1955) through his protagonist John Stenham, who is obsessed- on the eve of Morocco’ independence– with the fear that if Fez, “the great medieval city,” falls in the hands of the nationalists,“it would cease for all time being what it was.(...). When this city fell, the past would be finished. The thousand-year gap would be bridged in a split second...”(167). Before this impending change, Stenham used to give the French colonizers credit since “ they’ve at least managed to preserve Fez intact” (168).

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Haddaoua, the Hamatcha, the Jilala [and] the Guenaoua”, whose quaint rituals

involve “self torture, the inducing of trances, ordeal by fire and the sword, the

eating of broken glass and scorpions” (72). In his view, the ‘ cult-worship’ of

these groups has its roots in some ancient native religion which the “Arab

conquerors” supplanted through what he considers as a regrettable imposition

of Islam on the indigenous Berbers. But luckily for him, some vestiges of that

primitive religion are still present in those marvelous rituals, which he finds

particularly fascinating and inspiring:

To me these spectacles are filled with great beauty,

because their obvious purpose is to prove the power of

the spirit over the flesh. The sight of ten or twenty

thousand people actively declaring their faith,

demonstrating en masse the power of that faith, can

scarcely be anything but inspiring. You lie in the fire, I

gash my legs and arms with a knife, he pounds a

sharpened bone into his thigh with a rock –then, together,

covered with ashes and blood, we sing and dance in

joyous praise of the saint and the god who make it

possible for us to triumph over pain, and by extension,

over death itself (72).

One may be surprised at Bowles’ insistence on the ‘great beauty’ and the

‘inspiring’ quality of these paranormal ritualistic sights. More surprising still is

his obvious inclination to identify with those native ‘worshippers’, as is

implicitly indicated by his rhetorical use of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’. It is as if

the mere observation of such fantastic scenes plunges him instinctively in a

deep and active participation, whose delight and queer exhilaration are akin to

those of a mystical experience. Yet Bowles’ case is not so much that of a

mystic as that of an Orientalist, who ideologically believes in the possibility of

deriving his aesthetic inspiration from a certain contact or identification with

the elements of a culture or society which he assumes to be primitive or

strongly related with the early stages of human civilization. Such ideology is

basically racial and Orientalist since it conceives of the East not only as a mere

‘primitive’ site where the ‘civilized’ Westerner can metaphorically descend to

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see aspects of his low origins and remote ancestral past but also as a locus of

romantic desire where he can egoistically give full vent to his wild and

fantastic projections.

Doris Lessing has noted that all the Western writers who have—like

herself—written on Africa are guilty of using it as a mere peg on which they

could hang their egos.xv This observation is aptly applicable to Bowles, who

actually made of Morocco and North Africa the main field of his narcissistic

desire and romantic self-identification. This pragmatic attitude—besides being

deeply Orientalist and Africanist, in the sense that it is predicated on the

othering of the sites and the people that are classified ideologically as

belonging to the margins or the Rest—is paradoxically symptomatic of the

presence of atavistic and primitive forces within the deeper self of the

Westerner himself. In other words, when an Orientalist like Bowles is attracted

by a ‘primitive’ culture or when he feels an irresistible urge to get identified

with his ‘barbarous’ Others (as in the earlier description of the cult practices of

the native Berbers), this means that there is a huge correspondence between

the presumed wild and savage character of the latter and his own supposedly

‘civilized’ self. The ironic implication of this resides in the notion that

primitiveness is not exclusively restricted to the other; it is also a positive force

that inheres in the Westerner’s self as well as in his civilization.

At times, Bowles’ discourse tends to be less obviously Orientalist and the

viewpoint he adopts seems generally objective and ideologically neutral. In

‘Baptism of Solitude’, for instance, he even appears to be portraying North

Africa in positive and laudatory terms. Indeed, his evocative description of the

charming beauty of the North African Sahara amounts to a frank lyrical

idealization of this particular setting, which he equates with something

paradisiacal. Despite his tacit recognition of the hardships that are usually

associated with the life of the Sahara, Bowles cannot help vizualizing this latter

as the embodiment of what he poetically terms “the absolute”. To his own

question about the reason for going to such an alien place, he rhetorically

states:

The answer is that once you have been under the spell of

the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite

xv See David Ward, Chronicles of Darkness (London: Routledge, 1989), 1.

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strong enough, no other surroundings can provide the

supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of

something that is absolute. The traveler will return,

whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute

has no price (131).

On the one hand, such a capacity for perceiving and savouring the pleasurable

sense of ‘the absolute’ in the barren landscape of North Africa might be

construed as a clear evidence of Bowles’ authentic infatuation and positive

identification with this Oriental region. Yet, on the other hand, this same

sensibility is equally suggestive of the rather romantic quality of his

Orientalism. This implies that in spite of his unmistakable idealization of this

setting, Bowles is still discursively operating—perhaps unwittingly— within the

vast framework of the Western Orientalist tradition. In this sense, his idealistic

vision of the Sahara as the locus of the absolute is no more than a form of

aestheticization that is intrinsically related to the Orientalist ideology of

appropriating Otherness. On realizing that the alien and exotic North African

Sahara is a potential source of his creative inspiration, Bowles does not

hesitate to appropriate it for his proper use and to idealize it as one might

idealize a real human lover. But without its exotic Otherness and its

association with the naturalness of a primeval landscape, Bowles could never

pay any attention to it.

In ‘A Man Must Not Be Very Moslem’ Bowles presents another instance of

his attempt to appropriate and to Orientalize the Other through his account of

his journey to Turkey, accompanied by his Moroccan friend: Abdeslam. From

the outset, this illiterate Moslem is portrayed in a rather negative light as he is

constructed as a mere puppet in the hands of his Western master. While

explaining the reason behind taking Abdeslam to Turkey, Bowles says that he

wants him to serve as a guide for him— “a kind of pass-key to the place. He

knows how to deal with Moslems (…). He can lie so well that he convinces

himself straitway, and he is a master of bargaining” (48). By contrast, Bowles

himself “can read signs, but can’t lie or bargain effectively” (48). From this

short piece of characterization one can see the cultural bias implicit in Bowles’

representation of both himself and Abdeslam. While he stands here for an

educated Westerner who “can read signs” and who is morally superior as he

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“can’t lie”, Abdeslam is both illiterate and devoid of scruples, despite his being

“very Moslem”. Furthermore, since Abdeslam is presented here as only one

typical Moslem, Bowles’ underlying implication is that all the Moslems are

corrupt and unscrupulous, and that is why he needs a man of their calibre to

function as his ‘key’ to his dealings with them. But in addition to this

essentialist generalization about the Moslem morality, Bowles is clearly

reproducing the Orientalist ethnocentric myth or assumption that the Moslem

world is so mysterious, irrational and dark that it is hard for the ‘civilized’

Westerner to penetrate and comprehend it adequately.

To illustrate further how Bowles’ stance is inherently Orientalist, it may

be worth adding here that ‘Abdeslam’ is only the pseudonym of Bowles’ actual

friend Ahmed Yacoubi, who in effect went with him to Turkey and was really

subjected to the scrutiny of Bowles’ masterful gaze. While referring in his

autobiography to a similar trip which both made to India, Bowles significantly

exposes his Orientalist intention as he states bluntly: “I would drop Ahmed

Yacoubi, from the Medina of Fez, into the middle of India and see what

happened” (311). Thus in both cases, whether in Turkey or in India, a

Moroccan Other is appropriated like a mere object to be “drop[ped]” in an alien

environment so that Bowles could “see” this Other’s awkward reactions. This

implies that Bowles’ ‘Western eyes’ are, from the very beginning, prepared to

capture any sign that might allow him to Orientalize his Moroccan friend, who

is thus systematically doomed to stand as no more than a mindless object of

Bowles’ cultural representation.

All in all, one cannot but conclude that the discourse of Bowles’ travel

accounts is in effect basically Orientalist. Though there is evidently some

variation in their representational strategies, it is quite clear that in all of them

Bowles has assumed the role of a viewer who, from his privileged position of a

subject, surveys the objects of his representation with some vested and

appropriative interest. From this commanding position, Bowles has accordingly

operated as the monologic enunciator of an ethnocentric discourse that is

certainly intended not only to gratify his own romantic ego but also to quench

the Western readers’ thirst for the exotic and the quasi-archaic. Bowles’ overall

discursive practice thus attests to his profound complicity in the Orientalist

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ideology and reflects— albeit somehow opaquely and ambivalently—his

hegemonic views about

the centrality and the superiority of the West as opposed to the marginality

and the cultural backwardness of the East and the Rest.xvi

* * * * * * *

Unlike Bowles’ Their Heads Are Green, which is composed almost

entirely of completely independent accounts, most of which are set distantly

from each other in both space and time, Akbib’s Tangier’s Eyes on America

lends itself readily to perusal and classification as both a unified travelogue

and a collection of independent travel narratives. On the one hand, given the

fact that it relates the events of a single and specific travel experience in the

States during a period of no more than three months, and given the fact that

its accounts are generally ordered in what seems a strict chronological

sequence starting with the author’s departure from his homeland and

developing to end with his return to it, these seemingly separate accounts are

fairly readable as interconnected chapters or episodes in a closely-knit

travelogue. On the other hand, since each of the included accounts enjoys a

xvi One has to be alert to the misleading ambivalence of Bowles discourse and ideological position. Some might even argue that he is not an Orientalist but rather an anti-Orientalist since he even repudiated his Western civilization and fell in love with Morocco, where he became a sort of ‘insider’. He himself once stated that “Each day lived through on this side of the Atlantic was one more day spent outside prison. I was aware of the paranoia in my attitude and that each succeeding month of absence from the United States I was augmenting it,” (Without Stopping: An Autobiography, 165). Yet when asked in a 1990 interview—after more than forty years of residence in Morocco—whether he still felt to be an American, he did not hesitate to confirm: “I am an American,”( See Soledad Alameda, ‘Paul Bowles: Touched by Magic,” Conversations With Paul Bowles, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 218). Also when asked about the possibility of his getting integrated in the Moroccan society, he confesses in a way that well exposes his Orientalist vision: “there is no such thing as going backwards, really. You can’t identify with a culture that is several centuries behind what you know (...). If a Westerner encounters an archaic culture with the idea of learning from it, I think he can succeed. He wants to absorb the alien for his own benefit. But to lose oneself in it is not a normal desire. A romantic desire, yes, but actually to try and do it is disastrous,” (See Michael Rogers, ‘Conversations in Morocco: The Rolling Stone Interview’, Conversations With Paul Bowles, 77).

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great deal of autonomy and can be thus read quite independently and nearly

without any reference to the other ones, the whole book is equally readable in

the way a collection of autonomous short stories is read, as Mohamed Laâmiri

has noted while stressing the aesthetic distinctiveness of this travelogue.xvii

But if Akbib has succeeded in producing a highly competent travel book,

one thing is certain: he himself is not a real traveler —at least in the sense in

which P. Bowles and classical travel writers have been. According to Bowles’

own definition, Akbib seems to be more a tourist than a traveler. In his famous

novel The Sheltering Sky, Bowles writes the following about his protagonist

Port Moresby, who is also a writer:

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler.

The difference is partly one of time, he would explain.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the

end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no

more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over

periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the

many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had

felt most at home.xviii

What Bowles wants to suggest here is that the traveler seems to be always

homeless and constantly on the move through different regions of the world.

By comparison the tourist is always attached to his country and can never pass

a very long time away from it. This is precisely the case of Akbib, who not only

entitles his last account ‘Home Sweet Home’ but also goes on to confess that

his three-month absence from home is too much for him and that: “I had never

been away from home for so long! (…) And the countdown actually began the

moment I left my home that early August morning” (76).

Nevertheless, my contention is that if Akbib is not a traveler, he

certainly is not a tourist either. What he actually is is a promising post-colonial xvii In his introduction to Akbib’s Tangier’s Eyes On America, Mohamed Laàmiri wrote that: “this is not a travel account in the classical sense of the term. [ These] pieces are a collection of impressions and recollections of the author’s three-month visit to America in 1999. The very structure and organization of the pieces remind one of collections of short stories” (1-2).xviii P. Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: Flamingo, 1949), 13.

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intellectual, who has self-consciously taken advantage of his academic visit to

America, to inaugurate (at a national level) a counter-hegemonic discourse

whose main objective is the interrogation of the West’s cultural stereotypes

against its ‘marginal’ Others. What the author of Tangier’s Eyes On America

has wanted to do is, in other words, to “write back” to the centre so as to

contest and even subvert its imperialist and ethnocentric ideology. In fact, the

very title of the book bespeaks this subversive intention as Tangier, which

stands here for the whole Orient and the rest of the marginal and formerly

colonized world, is endowed with agency by dint of which it is forcing the West

—symbolized by America—to assume the role of the object of its observation

and surveillance. If Tangier (and the world it stands for) has for so long been

subjected to the systematic mis-representation of Western hegemony, now it

is its turn to be both a viewer and a representer, just as it is her duty to show

that it is quite capable of declaring its revenge if a more balanced and

cosmopolitan dialogue is not substituted for the West’s denigrating discourse

of power and Otherness.

As a matter of fact, the entire book is informed by this counter-

hegemonic spirit, and most of its accounts can be read as a series of

confrontations that combine to dramatize the author’s conviction that a more

rational alternative discourse is much needed. The book seems to be generally

structured in such a way as to reflect the author’s growing disillusionment and

awareness that it is his duty and that of all post-colonial subjects/intellectuals

to engage in an open criticism and challenge of Western ethnocentrism so that

a real decolonization could be attained. In the following pages, I discuss very

briefly how the author has waged his criticism and how he has attempted to

proclaim implicitly the need for overcoming such ideological binaries as

Occident/Orient or Centre/margins.

In ‘An Early Flight-of Imagination’, the author attempts from the very

beginning to create the impression that he is about to cross the threshold of a

universe that seems somehow fantastic and incomparably different from the

one he is accustomed to. Though he has already visited the States a dozen

of years earlier, he is quite sure that a great civilizational transformation has

taken place there; his only curiosity now is to see the nature of this

metamorphosis and to assess its inevitable great “impact on the American

people in terms of attitudes and lifestyle”(11).

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So it is important to notice here how the author is already positioning

himself as an ‘observer’, who is very interested in discovering and broadening

his knowledge about America and its people. More important than this is the

fact that he is going to look at America with critical eyes, rather than with any

sense of amazement or exotic wonder. For this introductory account is really

full of significant details which not only help to set the ironical tone of the

whole book but also reveal that the author has already started his criticism of

America and its civilization. In fact, his allusions to such diverse matters as

Nagasaki, Hiroshima, cowboys, and Depleted-Uranium are clearly meant to

condemn, from an early stage, the violence—if not in reality the barbarism—

inherent in this civilization. Such other references as Hollywood, Dolly, and

unnatural procreation point out, on the other hand, to the shallowness and

artificiality that inform the life and culture of Uncle Sam’s dream-like world. So

when the author ends this opening account with his tongue-in-cheek

statement: “Patience. America was now only a flight away”(11), the reader

must construe its implicit irony as a warning that America will not be spared

the pungent criticism and the uncompromising post-colonial gaze of its

prospective visitor.

In his next account, the author describes his transatlantic flight and

arrival at the New York airport metaphorically as a crossing of the cultural

boundaries that separate the metropolitan West from its under-developed

margins. ‘Marocain à New York’, with its displaced French title, is in effect a

splendid evocation of the author’s sense of displacement and cultural

alienation as soon as he sets foot on the first American airport. For his eye is

quick to discover that he and all the other non-natives are ill-treated and

discriminated against. While still queuing up to have his passport checked, he

cannot help feeling immensely overwhelmed with unease and estrangement

as a result of what could observe:

I looked about me and realized that though theoretically I

was on American soil, practically I was not. This feeling

was engendered by the architecture of the place: the

sinuous queue was checked by a line of demarcation that

no one had the right to cross without permission, and

between this line and the immigration services (…) there

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was a no man’s land, symbolically significant although only

about a couple of yards wide(13-4).

In this highly symbolic passage, the author depicts in microcosm the great

unbridgeable gap—indeed, the absurd “no man’s land”—that seems to have

been created intently to demarcate the borderline between the Centre and its

peripheries. As an Oriental subject, who has just begun to tread in the New

World, the author seems to be faced from the outset with the invisible

catchword inscribed on the thick walls of that magical borderline echoing again

and again: “Eat is East, West is West” (according to the memorable opening

words of Kipling’s poem ‘The Ballad of East and West’).xix Nonetheless, being

intent on letting no such clichés pass unchallenged, he soon starts his series of

defying confrontations. The first duel is with the very airport officer who has

been fumbling with his passport in a haughty and snobbishly provoking

manner. When the officer asks him: “What do you do in your country?” he

replies not with a direct answer but with his own question:

“Do you speak Arabic?” I asked.

“No.”

“French?”

“Only English.”

“Pity. It’s written there. In both Arabic and French” (16).

Here, instead of being put on the defensive, the author is tactfully turning the

tables on his apparently racist interlocutor, who is significantly obliged to

recognize his ignorance of all languages except his own. The author’s last

expression of ‘pity’ is thus an eloquent subversive comment that is aptly

directed to destabilize the complacent hegemonic stance of that American.

When finally released by that officer to have his “share [of] the

American dream”, as he sarcastically puts it (17), much of what he finds is, as

a matter of fact, something of a ghastly American nightmare. First comes the

prehistoric gift—a rotten, inedible meal, offered to him exclusively as ‘a

distinguished dinner’ by a shameless stewardess. Not only does he respond by xix R. Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 111. See also E.M. Forster’s dramatization of the same idea in A Passage To India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1952), 322.

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promptly remonstrating with that Havishamian lady; the incident itself is

strategically set against a background that is counter-discursively impregnated

with the loud ironic echoes of the pompous, ethnocentric phrase: “This is

America.” This idiomatic epithet is implicitly subverted in such a way as to

mean: “This is only America,” and not a paradise of freedom, justice and

equality; so if you meet with any act of racism, discrimination or violence, you

have but to accept it as a matter of course, especially if you are a mere

‘trespasser’ from the peripheries.

Immediately after this shocking incident, the author finds himself face to

face with the nightmare incarnate, during that ‘midnight duel’, when his whole

life is put at stake by the careless mistake of a hotel receptionist. As he

trespasses innocently on the room of a ‘cow-boyish’ man, the latter mercilessly

aims his weapon at him and cries out menacingly: ‘Hands up, son of a bitch.

Move an inch, and I’ll blow up your brains” (28). The author has but to attempt

some narrow escape, for no explanations or apologies could avail in a moral

jungle where “the survival [is] for the quickest” (30), and where “weapons

[are] sold like a gastronomic commodity”(31). The author’s implicit question

here is: Does not barbarism, after all, lurk just beneath the polished surface of

the ‘civilized’ West?

At any rate, if an armed duel is the last thing an academic visitor to the

States can conceive of implicating himself in, now in both ‘A Dogtail Party’ and

‘Camels to the university’ the atmosphere is ripe for engaging in open—but

fruitful—contests with his fellow intellectuals. In the former account, the author

is disconcerted by the request of having to describe to the Americans present

in that party what Moroccan people are like. Sensing that the question is not

free of racial and ethnocentric implications, he cannot help thinking that the

man who has asked it is a “professor of Natural History”, who “wanted to

check my description with Darwin’s theory of the origin of species in case

there was a new evolution” (41). His temptation at first is to reply that man

simply by saying: “You should go and see them yourself!” but he finally faces

him with the more tactful answer: “look at me” (42).

This defiant reply is highly strategic indeed as its implicit ideological

import is equivalent to asking: “Do you really believe that you are better or

more human than me and the rest of your cultural Others?” In evoking

Darwin’s evolutionary theory the author is in effect aiming at taking issue not

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only with that man’s stereotypical attitude but also with the Western textual

archives that have nurtured the racial assumption that the Westerners occupy

a higher (nay, the highest) stage in the scale of humankind’s evolution from

lower species, and hence the apex of human civilization. He wants to show

precisely that such concepts as progress, culture and civilization are quite

relative issues and that human beings are not to be judged collectively in

terms of their racial or geographical origins. That is why when the same

questioner notes irrelevantly that people in Tunisia eat dogs in their birthdays,

the author comments that even if such an allegation is supposed to be true,

then it must be only “a matter of taste” (43). For what on earth makes dog-

eaters in any marginal country less human or less civilized than their pig- and

frog-eater counterparts in the metropolitan West?

In ‘Camels to the University’ the author likewise launches a vehement

challenge at the same ethnocentric attitude he has observed in his audience

while discussing a video presentation on Morocco. All of them seem to have

expected to find in Morocco no more than an exotic field where the semi-

primitive residents are engaged in eccentric practices like riding ‘camels to the

university’. What seems striking is that even though that audience has been

constituted of academics from different Western countries, they all seem to

share the same denigrating view of whatever is culturally Other. This has

prompted the author to realize that “the ‘camels to the university’ expression

was not restricted to American students; it was a universal expression —

reflected in, and confirmed by, the universal questions asked after the video

show” (46).

What is shocking for the author here is the way groundless cultural

prejudices can be so unquestioningly elevated to the status of eternal and

universal truths. Still more shocking is the amount of those people’s ignorance

and misunderstanding of their Others’ culture and social reality in spite of their

own academic background. One of the things he discovers, for instance, is that

“Everything they knew about Islam was either exaggerated, distorted, or

altogether wrong” (46-7).

Yet the author does not lay the blame for such distortion and

misrepresentation on the Westerners alone; indeed the subaltern intellectuals

have the greatest share of responsibility for the Othering ideology that is

hegemonically perpetrated against their nations:

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Of course it is our duty to see to it that the other should

receive the correct image of ourselves and ours. Are we

doing this? I asked myself. And if we are, are we doing it

the way it ought to be done? (47).

Such awareness of his role and responsibility later drives the author to engage

in a series of polemical duels with those Westerners in an attempt to correct

their biased attitudes and to prompt them to adopt a “cosmopolitan outlook”

(47). The result seems to be promising, since he succeeds at least

in challenging what they had hitherto considered universal

truths. In the course of subsequent meetings, I could

descry on their faces signs of internal debates deliberating

the ethics of the stereotypes and prejudices they had so far

held as sacred and definite (48).

After these climactic assertions, in which there is a powerful message to

all post-colonial intellectuals, the author’s narrative strategy alters noticeably

from a dramatization of duels and polemical contests to the portrayal of some

aspects of the American socio-political life and civilizational achievement.

These descriptions attempt significantly to capture both positive and negative

features. Thus without generalizing on the American character, he shows in

such a piece as ‘A Poe-tic Invitation’ how an American can be as vulgarly

snobbish and incredibly uncivil as ‘the quarter-muffin lady’, or else as

admirably generous and decently ‘poe-tic’ as El. Hartman. In ‘The Speakers’

Corner’ he also shows that Americans can be so consciously committed as to

defend such a noble cause as anti-abortion; yet what about their reaction to

more urgent and frequent crimes like those related to drug, sex and racism?

And what about the imperialistic crimes perpetrated internationally against

America’s cultural Others like the notorious case—mentioned in ‘Home Sweet

Home—of the Egyptian plane, whose catastrophic crash is patently attributable

to political reasons?

In ‘The Road to Missoula’, the author holds in high esteem the

practicality of the Americans and the efficiency of their ‘team-work’. In

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‘Dreamland’, however, he launches a sweeping attack on the racism, injustice

and inequality that still bulk large on the face of the presumed civilized

American life. Neither the Red Indians nor the black Afro-Americans have yet

been treated fairly according to the ideal advocations of “the declaration of

Independence, which solemnly declares that all men are created equal!” (72).

The author himself cannot conceal his great frustration and disappointment at

finding that he is likewise not fully entitled to share, even for a while, the

American Dream given that he is a mere intruder from the West’s margins. But

his shock does not seem to be unexpected because he knows beforehand that

his Otherness may not let him fare quite freely and enjoyably in Uncle Sam’s

dream world. Yet in punning on the word ‘dream’, the underlying suggestion is

that the ‘American Dream’ is nothing more than a big lie and a fantastic

mirage which no scrutinizing eyes—especially Tangier’s eyes—can fail to

detect in that actual dream-world.

From the foregoing discussion then, it becomes obvious that A. Akbib

has attempted to kill two birds with one stone, as the saying goes. On the one

hand, he has deliberately aimed at levelling a deep criticism of the American

society and civilization. This is clear from the way he systematically pokes fun

at the American Dream by revealing both implicitly and explicitly how the

American’s idealism is profoundly violated by the spread of violence and the

reign of injustice and inequality among all the citizens of the United States.

More than this, through his depiction of such people as the ‘quarter-muffin

lady’, the professor with the swelling “bags under his light green eyes” (42),

and the woman who is so helplessly illiterate that she asks: “whereabout is

Morocco in the United States?” (37), the author wants to warn that an

American as well can be ‘othered’ and subjected to cultural stereotyping. On

the other hand, from this latter warning he strategically intends to show to the

Westerners that their former victims are quite capable of striking back and

resisting or subverting their hegemonic ideology. But instead of lapsing to such

policy of tit for tit, Akbib seems to say, let us rather engage in a more fruitful

and alternative discourse —an edifying dialogue whose key resides in the

adoption of an enlightened cosmopolitan worldview. This is what the author

himself has tried to underscore towards the end of his book when he succinctly

states in the ‘Afterworld’ that

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it is a misconception to suppose that only the West is

capable of nourishing stereotypes vis à vis the East, we

are capable of that, too. But as it is our duty to stem the

tide of such negative attitudes, we can’t afford to deal with

the other by adopting what we want him to get rid of (85).

This suggests, in the last analysis, that Tangier’s Eyes on America is a warning

and an invitation at the same time. Its author seems to spell out his message

to the Centre in the following words: the borderline between such constructed

binaries as Self/Other and Centre/Margins is not difficult to cross or subvert. So

if it must be ‘eye for eye’, we are quite capable of it. Yet, is it not better for all

of us to dispense altogether with all discourses of Orientalism and

Occidentalism so that we could create and establish a more rational and

edifying inter-cultural dialogue?

In conclusion, it may be said that this paper as a whole has

strategically placed Bowles and Akbib ‘eye to eye’ so as to probe the extent to

which the latter author has opted for a post-colonial politics of ‘eye for eye’

vis-à-vis the cultural constructions of Bowles and his likes. In the first section,

the argument has been mostly concerned with the delineation of how Bowles’

travel accounts are actually enmeshed in the ideological labyrinth and the

discursive structures of Orientalism. The fact that these accounts generally

reproduce the Western hegemonic assumptions about the cultural marginality

and the radical Otherness of the Orient has logically led to the verdict that

Bowles can be justifiably stigmatized as Orientalist. By contrast, the second

section has examined the discourse of Akbib’s travel book in such a way as to

highlight its underlying counter-Orientalist meanings and strategies. At first

sight, one may note that the counter-hegemonic reverberations of this

discourse are so strong and vehement that the author could easily be taken for

an ‘Occidentalist’. Indeed, he himself has made use, both implicitly and

explicitly, of a number of ideological binary oppositions (like self/other,

East/West, and periphery/center) in a manner that has enabled him

subversively to counteract the hegemonic discourse of Orientalism with what

might be justifiably termed Occidentalism. Yet when one reads closely

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between the lines, one soon realizes that Akbib has not only ‘used’ these

discursive categories but he has also ‘abused’xx them so that he could drive

home his message about the urgent need for a more rational and enlightened

discourse. His ‘tit for tat’ strategy is therefore only a means to a mutually

profitable end: the creation of a cosmopolitan inter-cultural dialogue which is

fit to make us all transcend the ethnocentric ideology inherent in such binary

categories as Occident/Orient, West/Rest, or Centre/ peripheries.

xx I have borrowed here the terms of Linda Hutcheon, who notes that “postmodern culture uses and abuses the conventions of discourse. It knows it cannot escape implication in the economic(...) and ideological(...) dominants of its time. There is no outside. All it can do is question from within. It can only problematize what Barthes has called the ‘given’ or ‘what goes without saying’ in our culture.” A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction ( London: Routledge, 1988), XIII. Regardless of any similarity that may exist between the ‘poetics’ as well as the politics of postmodernism and post-colonialism, it might be said that this quotation is highly suggestive of the problematics which most post-colonial writers are faced with: like the question of writing in a foreign (colonial) language and the use of narrative tools and discursive structures that originally belong to the Western culture. But since there seems to be “no outside” from which they can produce their private discourses, these authors can well “use” and “abuse” the representational conventions of the West to “problematize” the latter’s cultural assumptions and “question from within” those authority and hegemonic ideology by means of which it has traditionally managed to control and denigrate its marginalized cultural Others. (It may be worth adding, in this connection, that J.M. Coetzee’s novel: Foe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986) provides a good illustration of a text that consciously deploys postmodernist techniques to articulate post-colonial concerns – mainly that of writing back to the metropolitan Centre).

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Notes

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