Marrakesh Journal
Travel/Memoir by Trevor Carolan
I’d been thinking about the Sahara for a while.
A book on my shelf kept reminding me — Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh. We found it thirty years ago in the Himalayas near Pokhara and I’ve always attributed my recovery from paratyphoid fever there to clean well-water, that book, and the village barber’s superb red opium. It was costly, but for fifty Nepali rupees and my copy of Kerouac’s The Town and the City the Gurkha shopkeeper took in trade, it was a fair deal and left me enough for a last visit to the barber.
I read Mayne’s account in the dreamy cloud you get from long, recuperative days on the O, half-asleep, half-awake. An Englishman, he departed India after partition and repaired to Morocco in 1950. His portrait of the red desert city is enticing, written from another vantage of the world that Paul Bowles wrote about for decades after taking Gertrude Stein’s advice that he settle there. Bowles fixed on Tangier’s “international zone,” an out-of-time, autonomous city-state that William Burroughs fled to, seeking hashish, Arab rent boys, cheap living, and the stinging solitude that creeps in from the bled, the arid world beyond. Mayne mastered the language, got thick with the locals, and found his story in the crowded souks of Marrakesh, with its almost medieval medina quarters on the edge of the Sahara.
A French translation opportunity arose for a book I’d done on one of the Beats and I had reason to cross the Atlantic with my wife. The Pompidou in Paris had recently featured a major exhibition: Beat Paris, Beat LA, Beat Art, you name it. Nobody does these things quite like the French. They’re invested in the Beats: Ferlinghetti has his doctorate from the Sorbonne; Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs all holed up in Paris to write and live there on the cheap at Rue Git-le-Coeur, across from Nôtre-Dame; Kerouac stayed long enough to crank out a draft of his Satori In Paris; and always there is the occult creativity of Brion Gysin, that odd surrealist painter savant whom Canada has never really claimed as its own.
“You’re coming to France for the Ginsberg?” Justine, our painter friend in the 6th arrond asked. “Then why not go to Maroc? I tell you where to stay...”
We packed for Morocco through the morning in Lisbon, drinking coffee and munching custard natas. It’s good to get your sea-legs back here after long flights. The architecture is memorable; people are friendly, the food is excellent. You tram to Alfama, the hilly old Moorish quarter to hear the Fado singers. B.B. King said once in an interview that he loved playing in Lisbon, that people there really understand the blues. He knew the fado clubs, the women wailing their saudade in black shawls, musicians playing on metabolic scales, the chilled green wine he liked, pork and clams, octopus.
In Marrakesh you can stay in backpack dives for chump-change, or chill out upscale for $60 per night in Gueliz district hotels in the nouvelle ville beyond the historic medina walls. French artists have loved Marrakesh since the painter Jacques Majorelle settled here in the 1920s to build his grand botanical garden. Mayne’s book remains a serviceable guide; he wrote daily at the Café de France a few minutes from Katoubia Mosque and both are central landmarks. All that’s required is a free city map from the airport, which is modern, efficient and feels secure. Women workers wear head scarves like my mother used to wear to Sunday mass, and there are photographs of the king, Mohammed VI, on the walls. Regarded as a reformer, he’s usually smiling and people are affectionate towards him. Morocco is unexpectedly contemporary; young women outside are remarkably stylish in leggings, smart sandals, and nijab hair scarves in strikingly attractive colours; others simply go uncovered. you’re not far from Europe after all. The oasis greenery is surprisingly rich, like its desert birdlife.
You’re in North Africa now: the minarets, the call to prayer. Hamdullilah. On the boulevards outside it feels as if you haven’t shaved for a couple of days; always there’s a little grit under your nails.
This is a place of curious dreams. Coffee and clouds of strong tobacco everywhere. We adopt the diamant Vert off Rue Ibn Hamza as our breakfast place. At our first visit I switch to drinking thé du menthe without rock sugar. The coffee is short and bitter.
The Medina is the old, foreign legion-style city with pockmarked walls of red brick. We hire a horse-cart taxi and the cabbie relates the holes are for nesting birds—migrating sparrows, pigeons, blackbirds: “We Marrakeshis love our birds” he chuckles. I recall that pigeon pie is a specialty here: in the desert, there is no superfluity; every last thing has a purpose.
In the dry lands a melodious yellow warbler arcs past, followed by a precise swerve of white, speedy terns. Playing Tai Chi in the garden at 6 a.m., I see mottled finches flit down and jostle each other aggressively to drink from a pool. Soaring above us, a fine, dark hawk.
In the bled, where the countryside morphs to stony desert, lines of camels amble down hard baked trails. A few have riding saddles. Grey, fuzzy newborns pronk stiff-legged like wonky gazelles, leaning in at water groves among olive trees, palms, and thorny bush. Nearby, the men look on in their djellabas. Every compact village crammed in a shady canyon has its pair of mosques; most now seem to use recorded calls. The chunter of grazing sheep, crickets, desert songbirds carries on the bone-dry air.
A friend sends a letter. I write in reply,
“. . . Marrakech is a red city, ochre adobe covered baked-brick walls; convivial, bustling. Early mornings are pleasantly cool. Djemma el Fna, a great public square, is frantic at night with throngs of people milling about, fires blazing around the edges near restaurants and the bazaar stalls that sell delicious sheep’s head stew. Wild gnoussa mountain drummers and horn men who wail on shams — those that Brion Gysin alleged in the Fifties are the vestigial Pan-pipers of ancient Hellas — arrive at dusk when the snake-charmers leave.
It’s still all here. Last night, a blue-black desert man flayed hypnotic trance notes, over and over on his two-stringed goatskin gurmi with drummers and cymbalists circled around him, same note after plangent note, building wave on wave of repetitive desert sounds in the dark as old village men and even slick-dressed young, hipster dudes broke down and danced uncontrollably. I said, ‘This is wilder than Jimi Hendrix in ‘68’, then flashed that he’d been here too, immersing himself in the trance after Brian Jones from The Stones had pointed the way, and after crazy Gysin from Edmonton before him had turned on the London intelligensia to the desert vibration. Crowds gathered round called out “Sa-har, Sa-har . . .” Later, we wandered through the Mellah, the dwindling Jewish quarter; still a few Star of Davids set in the walls. Thought of you and your family.”
We hire a Jeep to take us into the Atlas mountains. South of the city where things turn dry quickly, Ali our Berber driver veers off the road and pounds across rugged country. “I will take you where no tourist ever goes,” he says, hammering the motor along a terrifying precipice cut above a sheer-drop gorge of great height. We are in a mystic landscape, white with fear. Ali relishes our terror. Finally, we emerge from the chasm and surge higher yet into the Atlas with a massive white range of peaks behind us.
In the mountains Berber men leave to work in the cities; women stay at home harvesting wild foods, weaving rugs from their sheep’s wool, and harvest healing argan oil from the berries of a tree in the olive family. At a women’s cooperative we buy a pot of their unguent mixed with red thyme. There’s a comforting herbal buzz when I rub it in at evening time. Argan grows only in this place in southern Morocco and the King encourages villagers to plant trees against desertification.
A day later we mount camels. The males are bad-tempered beasts with an attitude. you roll along, wobbly with the flow, seated on a hard platform. you’re higher than you’d expect and had better not fall; steadily, the appalling smell of camel seeps into every rag you own. But it’s a simple life, the desert. The nomads say in French that they live in paradise.
Driving on, we aim for the caravan trails across the dunes. Ali takes us out to an oasis hamlet with its herds of sheep, donkeys, tough quiet shepherds, nomad tents, the lot.
I ask in a scrabble of French, “What does ‘Sahara’ mean in your language?”
Ali looks at the endless rolling hills and dunes, laughs with a Berber friend, and responds: “Emptiness . . .”
“He sounds like the Dalai Lama,” my wife says in agreement.
Moving south we hail upon a cluster of black, home-spun woolen tents stretched horizontally with ropes five or six feet above ground on wooden poles, the ubiquitous dwellings of semi-nomadic herders. The tents are well-used and you sit on knotted, brightly dyed carpets. For a few dirhams the locals serve hot mint tea in thimble-glasses with a little pot of argan honey and torn bits of flat-bread. With a local man as guide, we set off trekking across the undulating dunes. Within fifteen minutes we lose track of every landmark but the distant mountains. After another hour in the heat and flying desert bugs, we come upon an abandoned riad, a walled family compound of stone and adobe. We rest in its shade. “Do you like it?” Ali asks.
“Why is it abandoned? No water?”
“You can buy this riad. You and me can make a business,” he tells us. “With two hectares of land, 35,000 Euro.”
Fifty grand for a ruin with a marginal blip of the Sahara desert? Ridiculous. So why am I thinking it over? We haven’t seen a deal like this in Vancouver since Christy Clark and the condo kings sold out the city to Big Time Operators. “Europeans buy them,” Ali continues. “We can fix it up for a spa hotel.” I wonder where Ali got his training as a wilderness guide, the Chamber of Commerce?
Another day we sight a line of white polythene structures on the horizon. Greenhouses? “No,” Ali explains. “Modern tents for tourists to experience a night in the desert. They build fires, sing and dance, gaze at the stars.”
Another version of the authentic experience. Then a second letter, this from a young writer: “Sitting in a coffeeshop in Tofino, snaking some WIFI. Came up to rest from the city. The sun came out today; squads of Aussie and German back-packers are arriving. I’ve been hiking the rainforest figuring out my next moves and taking in the west coast’s natural beauty. This is a tourist town. Pretty girls tell you how ‘they’d hate to see you disappointed if you didn’t make a deposit on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see grizzly bears in their natural habitat.’ White dreadocked guys talk about how they’re ‘living for the surf’ and huck their empty beer cans.”
You can find or lose yourself along the Sahara’s edge, no problem. I’ve seen now what Gysin, Bowles and the Beat innovators were intrigued by here. Morocco is a bumpy, fascinating land. Hopefully, it won’t be invaded by the usual suspects whenever an Arab nation starts to get ahead. We meet didier, a Frenchman in the trucking business, hauling produce and leather goods to Europe. He confirms the economy is thriving, is cheerful too about the new French President, Macron. “He’s well educated and loves poetry,” he claims. “You’d be surprised. From memory he can recite fifty lines of Baudelaire.”
I ask if he knows those writers who travelled between Maroc and Paris in the Fifties, but the American names mean nothing to him. “However,” he says, “there are still Europeans coming down here to go crazy . . .”
Some things never change. One morning we say au revoir to the waiters at diamond Vert, to the grocery boys down Avenue Abdelkarim who never cheat you. Everyone smiles, a little sad to say goodbye. Only after we return home and watch Lawrence of Arabia on Netflix, do I realize the bedouin tents in the film are precisely like those we stayed in beneath the Atlas. Truly, the way is endless . . . »