stenio solinas

N. 2/2000


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	*Stenio Solinas*

The plenty to choose from. The American colony, for example.
Paul Bowles, at the head, got there as a musician to stay there for only a summer, became instead a writer and did not leave the place anymore. He's buried now there, at Tangier. Those of the "beat generation", Ginsberg, Orlowsky and Corso practically set up their houses there, also thanks to William Burroughs who was a lodger of the El Muniria hotel.

They used to meet at the Tanger'inn café that still exist: they took drugs, they dredged, they took baths, they drunk, the pined away, they quarrelled. Kerouac that joined them endured hardly two months: he missed America. Borroughs, the doyen of the group, dropped first in 1954, he was forty and was drug addict, and did not know where to go.

He got till 60 dosis of morphine a day, after what he exchanged the last cheque he had with a ticket for England. He landed at London, he detoxified and wrote the "The naked lunch" and then he got back to Tangier.

The French colony. There where overseas and beyond the Channel writers that were searching a freedom in morals to opposite to the Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, but they got there with the manias and taboos, jealousies and envies of the intellectual society they belonged to, the sons of the old continent searched there the sense of glory and the deepness of degradation.
Henry de Montherland writes "La rose de sable", an anti-colonial novel centred over the "indigenous issue, the sole attracting me in North Africa ". Brion Gysin opens the "1001 Nuits", a restaurant with music and that was a meeting point of the "gay generation", Paul Morand shut up his "Hècate et ses chiens", where the Oriental "art of making oneself living " turns into the descent to the underworld of fleshes, and a young bored woman, Clothilde, turns into an ogress chasing for sexual preys all the time. Morand writes it when he is sixty, but he goes on living as he were twenty, he has rented at Tangier an enormous house with five terraces from where contemplate "a sky dotted with stars ".
"L'appel du Maroc".

This is the title of the extraordinary exhibition that at the Institut du monde arabe has gathered for the first time the images and writings of whom was enchanted by this land, today a nation, yesterday a place, a symbol, an initiation.
Divided into four sections (L'appel de Tanger, L'appel de médinas, L'appel du désert, L'appel de l'oubli) it gathers an unbelievable repertoire of stocks, braveries, fatigues, languor, shames, exaltations, camouflages and feigning.
Here it is Pierre Loti in Moroccan costume, with the pasha scimitar with rhinoceros horn hilt, a present of the sultan, and Isabelle Eberhardt with Moslem dresses before the last travel from which she wouldn't return. Here it is Charles de Foucauld, not touched by pardon, that goes two thousands kilometres feigning to be a rabbi in a land that does not like Europeans, and here it is Pierre Mac Orlan, a reporter enchanted by uniforms and that in "La bandera" tales the myth of the Legion: Jean Gabin will represent him at the cinema.

A plea for which one can die. When two years ago Jean Marie Le Clézio arrived at Smara, he found "the mystic town turned into a garrison and a shopping centre".

Sixty years before, Michel Vieuchange, student of the linguist Emile Bienveniste, would die on this travel. Before him at Smara, the holy city of the Moor, none white man has never entered, any white man would have been killed. He entered hiddenly inside a sugar sack, buried his message in front of the kasbah, inside a bottle, measured and drew the map of the town, took pictures to the arches and walls, and gave life to the ghosts of a cooled off glory. Then the Arabian guides that trembling accompanied him, shut up him in the sack. When they brought him back to Agadir, he passed away in the arms of his brother, dried by the dysentery, devoured by the gangrene, eaten by the desert. "Once at Smara, I feel it, our youths will achieve their accomplishment, and we will start another age ".

Ernst Junger chooses to go to Morocco when he was sixteen "to escape the most dangerous peril there is: watching at life becoming the daily grind. Jean Genet gets there at twenty "to forget " and lose himself: thefts, violence a burned out life.
When he gets back, he is already a renowned writer, he arrives to the Mourah and the Hilton: "Because I love seeing those elegant waiters attending on a dirty dog as I am ". They will bury him at Larnaca, in a graveyard near the sea and not far from a jail.
On the coffin getting him back to France it was written "immigrate worker ".

Junger is less bitter as regard his past. In the sun old age he lives he has became for a ten-year period a habitué of those places: "Stable walks through the Moor landscape, between the sea and the mountains with their trees and animals, and inside me, a dead calm ". Agardir inspires him the topography of Eumeswil, the novel of his eighties, in the square of the market the snake-charmers give him a hearty welcome as if he were one of them.
Walking through the Kasbah, he raises stones and under them he finds "the same black scorpion " the count Potocki saw and described two centuries before in his Voyage dans l'Empire du Maroc.
Africa seems to him eternal and uncertain.