Modernity at the Margins: Paul Bowles’ Let It Come Down,The Spider’s House,and Moroccan Collaborations

Paul Bowles’ work provides a valuable lens for critics working on colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial literatures, and associated fields such as travel and expatriate writing. ¹ However, such critics must grapple with the ambivalent status of an author profoundly engaged with non-Western epistemology and experience, yet nevertheless capable of producing prototypically Orientalist imagery. In recent attempts at reframing the Bowles corpus within a cross-cultural frame, ² John Maier proposes that the journeys of Bowles’ protagonists toward comprehension of the self necessarily detour via knowledge of the cultural other (1996: 212); Marilyn Papayanis, grouping Bowles with Lawrence Durrell and D. H. Lawrence (as well as later writers) under an expatriate rubric, demonstrates forms of self-dismantling necessitated by heterogeneity, polyphony, and incommensurability in late colonial contact zones (2005: xii, 7); Brian T. Edwards locates his work in the extra-national category of Tangerian literature (2005: 80); ³ and Timothy Weiss champions Bowles’ exotopic lens on both North African and Euro-American cultures and his translational and transformational ethos (2004: 46; 51). Taking my cue from Papayanis, for whom Bowles’ work urges recognition of a complex relationship between history, ideology, and literary texts that demonstrate a “self-interrogating density of verbal texture” (2005: 243), from Edward Said’s contrapuntal methodology, and from Mark Currie’s emphasis on the temporal structure of “teleological retrospect” (2007: 21), ⁴ this article focuses on Bowles’ Moroccan novels Let It Come Down (2000/1952) and The Spider’s House (1986/1955), and then on ways in which Bowles might be seen to have contributed to the emergence of a modern Moroccan canon.

In contrapuntal music, harmonic “vertical” features are subordinated to melodic interaction, polyphony, and repetition. ⁵ The analogy allows us to remap the “horizontal movement” of literary history in terms of “a labyrinth of intertextual and experiential relations” (Weiss, 2004: 6). One aim of a contrapuntal reading method is to re-affiliate the English literary canon with its occluded engagements and attachments, thereby rendering transparent “structures of attitude and reference” (Said, 1994: 61) and producing “newly activated, reinformed” histories (1994: 62; 71). Said argues that colonial historiography similarly has two timeframes, “one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and often nomadic” (1994: xxix). As a result, reading requires sensitivity to the worldliness of a text and to the contingency of its worldview. This reminds us of the anticipatory as well as retrospective mode of writing in the sense that “the archive produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida, 1998: 17). From a narratological point of view, Currie calls for attention to ways in which the textual present is “experienced in a mode of anticipation”, yet is also a future past, hence the object of potential reinterpretation.

Let It Come Down, Bowles’ second novel, is set in the International Zone of Tangier and more briefly in Spanish Morocco, in the years preceding national independence (gained in 1956). ⁶ Nelson Dyar is a disaffected bank teller who leaves the States to take up a job in Tangier that offers little in the way of advancement. Instead, he learns to negotiate semi-legal systems of exchange involving paper currency, a Tanjawi prostitute, and diplomatic secrets. Morocco initially functions as an exotic lure (a common trope enhanced by its threshold location between Europe and Africa [Papayanis, 2005: 144]), but is swiftly revealed as an aporia – “a constitutional absence at the heart of what had been projected as a possible alternative to modernity… a space of absence, a dream already given over to the past” (Bongie, 1991: 22) – in the face of which Dyar’s quest remains suspended between desire and disillusionment. The modernist characteristics of Let It Come Down – protagonists who leave home because they refuse the imperatives of productive and reproductive labour; a privileging of experience over reason; an exploration of the limits of language; identification with marginality and Otherness (Papayanis, 2005: 14) – can here be viewed as an extension of imperialist romance concerns. However, in Bowles’ work, encounters with North African culture do not result either in recuperation by Western norms or in a return “home”, two elements that provide the closure characteristic of that genre. Chris Bongie reminds us of the difference between an adventure which, as its etymology suggests (from the Latin adventura, about to happen) is future-oriented, and a quest – the structure most applicable here – “where it is a given that the object one desires can never fully be experienced. The object is never present, or is only present at an insuperable distance” (1991: 21-2).

The first three sections of the novel use shifting focalization to crosscut the experiences of Dyar, a flamboyant American lesbian named Eunice Goode, and Thami, a Tanjawi. ⁷ While all three characters are able to exercise only limited agency, Dyar’s spontaneous theft of a briefcase of illegally exchanged currency in the third section serves as the exemplary manifestation of mauvaise foi. ⁸ Dyar co-opts Thami and the boat around which the Moroccan’s own project of self-determination depends in an ill-conceived escape from the International Zone. The motive for Dyar’s crime is his hazily conceived need both to “lose himself” and to “discover the way out of the fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself which would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him from a victim into a winner” (Bowles, 2000: 179). ⁹ But he fails to realize that human freedom is inevitably tempered by interpersonal ties (Patteson, 1987: 48). Dyar’s limited self-understanding leads to his instrumental treatment of Thami. For this reason, the novel appears to remain focused on the crisis of a North American subject even though “the liminal consciousness of a fading Western subject” is presented as barely habitable (Papayanis, 2005: 139). But note Bowles’ own response to Morocco: “Here for the first time I was made aware that a human being is not an entity and that his interpretation of exterior phenomena is meaningless unless it is shared by other members of his cultural group” (cited in White, 2006: xiii). After his escape from Tangier, Dyar witnesses a violent jilali (Sufi brotherhood) ritual and temporarily inhabits a community of men, moving away from detached spectatorship to “a kind of participation”: ¹⁰

With each gesture the man made…he felt a sympathetic desire to cry out in triumph. The mutilation was being done for him, to him; it was his own blood that spattered onto the drums and made the floor slippery. In a world which had not yet been muddied by the discovery of thought, there was this certainty, as solid as a boulder, as real as the beating of his heart, that the man was dancing to purify all who watched. (294)

This possibility of identification and promise of epiphany prove unrealizable. Dyar leaves the venue, wanders in a kif-induced daze back to the hut he shares with Thami, and murders his accomplice. Raging against a rattling door – a paranoid delusion and a metaphor – he hammers a nail into Thami’s brain.

Despite this bloody dénouement, it is possible to argue that Let It Come Down reflects attempts – failed ones – to open out to something beyond the Heimlich of Western identity (something which Papayanis believes only starts to happen in his subsequent novel [2005: 142]). North Africans make demands on Bowles’ expatriate protagonists and further destabilize their eroded cultural certitudes (2005: 32). Prior to the jilali scene, Dyar, wandering in the countryside, perceives that

the configuration of the land seemed to be the expression of a hidden dramatic situation whose enigma it was imperative he should understand. It was like a photograph of a scene from some play in which the attitudes and countenances of the players, while normal enough at first glance, struck one as equivocal a moment later. And the longer he considered the mysterious ensemble, the more undecipherable the meaning of the whole became. (274)

This resonates with Bowles’ notion of Moroccan culture as essentially performative (2006d: 127), a point to which I will return. More pertinent at this stage is the temporal framing of this scene and its allegorical implications. I am thinking here of Bongie’s interpretation of allegory (from the Greek allos, “other” and agoria, “speaking”) as “talk of the Other” (1991: 22). Upon returning to the hut, Dyar fixates, as I have suggested, on a door that assumes mythical proportions:

[B]etween him and it a tortuous corridor made of pure time interposed itself… And a host of invisible people was lined up along its walls, but on the other side of the walls, mutely waiting for him to go by – an impassive chorus, mute and without pity. “Waiting for me”, he thought. The sides of his mind, indistinguishable from the walls of the corridor, were lined with words in Arabic script. All the time, directly before his eyes was the knobless door sending out its whispered message. It was not sure, it could not be trusted. If it opened when he did not want it to open, by itself, all the horror of existence could crowd in upon him. (307, my emphasis)

Echoing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2007/1903), Bowles exposes the inhumane outworkings of “civilization” (historical time) as well as a more diffuse existential horror (“pure time”). The passage hints at a future-oriented time/talk “of the Other” (to recall Bongie) – a host of invisible people, Arabic speakers, Thami – that has its own, for Dyar, indecipherable logic. Refusing to (remain) open to this counter-narrative, Dyar with unwitting irony crucifies Thami by the ear. ¹¹

Bowles draws attention to the fact that Let It Come Down was published “at the very moment of the [1952] riots which presaged the end of the International Zone”. ¹² In this sense, it sits on a historical cusp, reflecting what was about to become a “bygone era” of imperial exceptionalism in Tangier and colonialism in the rest of Morocco. He goes on: “like a photograph, the tale is a document relating to a specific place at a given point in time, illumined by the light of that particular moment” (vii). In the passage cited above, however, the landscape “photograph” that Dyar perceives indicates transient mastery overtaken by indigenous drama. ¹³ The textual image of a photograph within a play unfolds into a self-reflexive statement on the novel, marking its limits of engagement with the Moroccan scene.

The passage is also metonymical in that the narrative moves inexorably towards a showdown between two “players”: Dyar and Thami. Patteson suggests that Dyar’s drift into anomie requires the foreshortening of the early plot involving Eunice as rival (1987: 100-1). She is, though, replaced by another rival, who is in many senses Dyar’s double. ¹⁴ Thami, too, is determined to be a winner rather than a victim, and disavows social connection in his impetus toward self-determination. The juxtaposed stories of the two men and their disastrous collaboration suggest an agonistic situation with historical implications in broadly decolonizing terms. ¹⁵ If we consider reading in terms of “teleological retrospect”, so that events assume significance in the light of outcomes (Currie, 2007: 21) – a method encouraged by Bowles’ comment on the time of publication – Let It Come Down anticipates a crisis in colonial relations. This reading connects Bowles’ formal conception of the double temporal structure of this novel – from a scene where Dyar looks out at the Strait of Gibraltar (marking his liminal location), “the book grew in both directions – backward as cause and forward as effect” (Bowles, 2006d: 296) – to the historical moment of its emergence.

One of Dyar’s defining problems is that he is “not a reader” (15). The reader of the novel, however, is able to exceed his limited vision. Thus, for example, we know that until Thami meets Dyar, the latter sympathizes – if opportunistically – with Moroccan nationalists and that he participates in smuggling activities with a distinctly anti-colonial cast (37-9). When Dyar and Thami first meet there is the potential for a non-exploitative relation – “[t]he two men looked at each other. It was the moment when they were ready to feel sympathy for one another” (42) – but the context militates against it. Colonial bad faith infects the entire cross-cultural interface of the novel; hence the ironic portrayal of both expatriates and Moroccans. Mirrored misrecognition is clearly evoked at the Beidaoui house of Thami’s estranged family, where

gatherings were held in order to entertain those few Moslem guests, to whom the unaccountable behaviour of Europeans never ceased to be a fascinating spectacle. Most of the Europeans, of course, thought the Moslem gentleman were invited to add local colour, and praised the Beidaoui brothers for their cleverness in knowing so well just what sort of Arab could mix properly with foreigners. (117)

Disowned by his aristocratic relatives and equally scornful of acquisitive Europeans and “the mass of Moroccans”, Thami “hated himself most of all. But fortunately he was unaware of that” (40).

We can already see in Let It Come Down that “the encountered Other is…cut adrift in the liminality of his or her own unresolved cultural or historical trajectory”. As such, Thami can be read as “an Other-in-process that disperses rather than consolidates the ‘subject of modernity’” (Papayanis, 2005: 140, my emphasis). This “subject” implies not only the Western individual, but also a teleological and colonialist construction of history. Bowles was “persuaded that our life is predicated upon violence; that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we’ve built up over the millennia, can collapse at any moment” (1981: 80). Symbolically, Dyar hammers the nail that brings the façade down.

The Spider’s House, Bowles’ next novel, opens in Fez, the seat of nationalist resistance to colonialism, in 1954, the year after Sidi Mohammed (later King Mohammed V) was sent into exile. The novel juxtaposes two stories: the Bildungsroman of a young Fassi named Amar and the progressive unhoming of an American amateur ethnographer, John Stenham. Whereas Dyar represents a Bowles type that we might call the nomad (Port in The Sheltering Sky [1949] is a further example), Stenham exemplifies another that I would name the archivist (the minor character of Richard Holland in Let It Come Down is a caricature of the author in similar vein [xi]). The nomad can be identified by his centrifugal and ultimately entropic errance; the archivist by a putative openness to difference exposed as limited, sometimes fatally so. ¹⁶

Stenham’s point of view is qualified from the Prologue, which serves to locate the narrative perspective at one ironic remove and also suggests self-parody on Bowles’ part:

[U]naccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him, and he always forgave it, because, as he said no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it. “They’re far, far away from us”, he would say. “We haven’t an inkling of the things that motivate them”. There was a certain amount of hypocrisy in this attitude of his; the truth was that he hoped principally to convince others of the existence of this almost unbridgeable gulf. The mere fact that he could then even begin to hint at the beliefs and purposes that lay on the far side made him feel sure in his own attempts at analyzing them and gave him a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. (Bowles, 1986: 6, original emphasis) ¹⁷

Stenham is, however, fluent in darija (Moroccan Arabic) and sufficiently immersed in the environment to be able to traverse the madina (old city) blindfolded. A musical motif consolidates the link to Bowles (a composer) and structures place as contrapuntal form:

There were places where his footfalls were almost silent, places where the sound was strong, single and compact, died straightaway, or where, as he advanced along the deserted galleries, each succeeding step produced a sound of almost imperceptibly higher pitch, so that his passage was like a finely graded ascending scale, until all at once a jutting wall or a sudden tunnel dispersed the pattern and began another section in the long nocturne which in turn would slowly disclose its own design. (7)

The central dramatic situation is then introduced via a metaphor of disorientation, suggesting that Stenham’s orchestration of his relationship to the city is becoming impossible: “now it was all different, and he realized that what he knew was only one line, one certain sequence whose parts became unrecognizable once they were presented out of their accustomed context” (8). A tenacious trope – the Arab city as labyrinth (see Laamiri, 2004) – is recast as cognitive limit. If, in predictably Orientalist terms, “Fez is the place where nothing is direct”, there is a specific historical resonance here that relates to my foregoing argument: for Stenham, entering the madina is “like becoming a participant in a situation where meaning is withheld” (8).

Stenham reassures himself that the sudden unhomeliness of Fez is the result of “a political thing, and politics exist only on paper; certainly the politics of 1954 had no true connection with the mysterious medieval city he knew and loved” (10). The madina is a projection of Stenham’s hermetic mindset: conceptualizing it as a monument extracts it from the ongoing messiness of life. Exoticization involves divergence from the temporal structure of modernity (Bongie, 1991: 23) with its cast towards the future. Stenham is opposed to Istiqlal, “those renegades who prated of education and progress, who had forsaken the concept of a static world to embrace that of a dynamic one” (216). ¹⁸ His championing of heritage is in line with French colonial policy in Morocco, which aimed at preservation and containment. ¹⁹ Some Moroccans, by contrast, are portrayed as resenting the poverty that comes with the madina’s introverted aspect; they aspire toward the ville nouvelle that resembles cities seen at the cinema (168).

The Prologue ends just before the disclosure of some information from Stenham’s English friend, Moss (who appears to be a spy): something is about to change. In order to grasp what this might entail, the novel takes a lengthy detour via fifteen-year-old Amar. It thus brings together two genres that Bongie interprets as bifurcated responses to Western modernity: the Bildungsroman that works toward conciliation between protagonist and a changing social context; and the imperial romance and récits de voyage that project nostalgia as exoticism (1991: 12-15). As a Chorfa (descendant of the Prophet), Amar is nominally located outside systems of knowledge, technology, and exchange controlled by the “Nazarenes”. ²⁰ In reality, though, life on an historical threshold makes him susceptible to competing loyalties and lures:

When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting…where anything at all might happen. (29)

When Amar goes out to work he starts to participate in a proto-capitalist economy – aspiring, significantly, towards the purchase of a pair of sandals – and his employer tells him about the political struggles in the city. While Stenham champions archaic time, Amar negotiates potential futures irreducible to traditional formulae. Turning adult on the cusp of Moroccan independence means becoming “truly aware of the passage of time” (53):

Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. (47)

The cyclical temporal framework of tradition and “the numberless infinitesimal natural things that announced the slow seasonal change” (48) is bisected by historicity. Amar is drawn into a collective narrative and a linear economy of cause and effect.

This subordination to the forward march of history of both the cyclical time of Amar’s childhood and Stenham’s “authentic” (that is, nostalgic) Moroccan time is built into the form of The Spider’s House. At the end of Book II, Amar watches an “incomprehensible” foreign couple in a café by the madina walls (138). Book III then revisits the time period elapsed in the Amar narrative, this time from the perspective of Stenham, moving towards his recognition of imminent change (in the scene relayed – proleptically, we now realize – in the Prologue). The Spider’s House thus tells and retells the build-up to a crisis and a significant meeting from different perspectives; that is, contrapuntally. At the midway point of the novel, we are once again in the café, but now Stenham is looking at Amar “sipping his tea with the customary Muslim noisiness…he was a bit of native decoration” (249). When public demonstrations escalate in the madina and the French army brings in Berber mercenaries to surround the walled city, ²¹ our two protagonists are assimilated into a single plot line: Stenham is reliant on Amar to explain what is happening outside and Amar needs Stenham to smuggle him back through the city gates. Both assume that Lee, Stenham’s white female companion, must be protected. ²²

The relationship that develops consists of tentative connections but crucial misunderstandings. With reference to their disagreement over non-literacy, which Amar sees as a handicap and Stenham as a boon, the Moroccan thinks:

If a Nazarene with so much good will and such a knowledge of Arabic was unable to grasp even the basic facts of such a simple state of affairs, then was there any hope that any Nazarene would ever aid any Moslem? And yet a part of his mind kept repeating to him that the man could be counted on, that he could be a true friend and protector if only he would let himself be shown how. (279, my emphasis)

Amar’s fragile optimism is negated because Stenham, like Dyar, closes the door on difference. Finally accepting that events constitute a drama in which he has no part (291) and beginning “to doubt the correctness of his whole theoretical edifice” (336), Stenham leaves Fez. The final scene shows Amar running after his car in his newly acquired sandals:

He could never catch [the car], but he ran because there was nothing else to do. And as he ran, his sandals made a terrible flapping noise on the hard surface of the highway, and he kicked them off, and ran silently and with freedom… It would surely stop. He could see the two heads in the window’s rectangle, and it seemed to him that they were looking back.

The car had reached a curve in the road; it passed out of sight. He ran on. When he got to the curve the road was empty. (405-6)

This scene conflates a cruel desertion and Amar’s theoretically open-ended but now sandal-less future, (not) concluding a sustained engagement with the perspective of a young Moroccan on the eve of decolonization. Despite its critical framing of Stenham, The Spider’s House is equivocal about the personal and collective self-determination that independence promises. ²³

The late capitalist subordination of cultural heterogeneity to global monoculture has been critiqued from Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). Bongie reminds us, however, that nineteenth-century fin de siècle exoticism foregrounded a melancholy story of transition from tradition to modernity, orality to textuality, and primitivism to colonization, leaving a privileged but unexamined residue of “authenticity”. He critiques appeals to the “outside” of Western reason in terms of a “pure” counter-discourse. Subaltern voices, according to this perspective, are less recuperable as traces (1991: 6; 24; 25; 31). Such an approach complicates postcolonial counter-representations, as opposed to worldviews perceptible “between the lines” of the canon. Patrick McGee provides a way to move beyond what seems an impossible choice – between uncritical investment in an alternative field and irremediable subalterneity – when he suggests that it is through a conception of language as Other that the possibility of symbolic exchanges emerge. Language, McGee argues, is the quite-other (Derrida’s tout-autre), as opposed to the self-consolidating other that underpins Orientalist discourse. He recommends “allowing the material dimension of language to emerge so as to reveal the emplacement of [any] speaking subject in a social process that inevitably fractures the unity of the ego”. One may then “find in the symbolic, viewed from the side of the Other, the intersubjective ground that ties subject to subject through the wall of language” (1992: 123-5, original emphasis). By extension, a text is opened up to differently positioned readings: as Gayatri Spivak puts it, “[y]ou take positions in terms not of the discovery of historical or philosophical grounds [for identity], but in terms of reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding” (1990: 228).

The two novels discussed foreground just such a “wall of language” – literalized in Let It Come Down – that unsettles presence. These novels therefore destabilize in advance the idea of “writing back” to colonial history, whilst simultaneously highlighting other experiences and (latent) narratives in other languages. ²⁴ Let It Come Down metaphorically foregrounds (failed) exchanges, which become a major structuring principle in The Spider’s House. In this manner, Bowles’ Moroccan novels, whilst not explicitly oriented towards a postcolonial re-presentation of the past, anticipate such a rereading.

Like Lévi-Strauss, Bowles defines writing as civilization’s most repressive apparatus (Caponi, 1994: 214), though we recall Amar’s impassioned corrective to Stenham’s dismissal of the benefits of literacy – from the bastion of an advanced education that enables his expatriate leisure – in The Spider’s House. Bowles also unapologetically aligns Moroccan culture with the unconscious and irrational. He explains that he settled in Tangier because it was “rich in prototypical dream scenes”:

I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison running its course; souls are being dispossessed of parasitic pseudo-consciousnesses that lurk in the unguarded recesses of the mind. (Bowles 2006d: 366)

A Freudian homology between primitivism and the unconscious is writ large here and sits uncomfortably with the aspirations of an independent nation, although Bowles’ depiction of a culture in which rationality is merely one layer of reality resonates with some Moroccan representations. ²⁵

In the travel essay “Mustapha and his Friends”, a problematic piece on a first reading, the eponymous character is based on a generalized “illiterate city-dweller” (Bowles, 2006b: 55). Mustapha has recourse to a religious framework that abrogates a sense of personal responsibility; his moral system is “unrecognizable” to the Western observer; his attitude to the private property of others is unreliable; he is concerned only with ritual performance and appearance; and he is illogical and unpredictable. However, Mustapha’s behaviour partly reflects tactical resistance to “hav[ing] been subjected to the rule of a foreign nation” (2006b: 59). The author’s complicity with a Western audience is also pronominally undercut: “they will remind you [that] everything you have really belongs to them in any case, since you are in their country uninvited by them. There is no viable reply to this argument” (2006b: 57). In a later Foreword to the collection, Bowles argues that any set of norms is subject to ceaseless modification. He condemns a touristic perspective that in its desire for “charm”, “backwardness”, and “the picturesque” is inevitably at odds with “how its inhabitants may feel” (2006a: xxiii). However, desires and feelings are, of course, constructed things. Bowles condemns the interpellative effects of late capitalism on “alien cultures…ravaged…by the irrational longing of the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners. The various gadget-forms of our ‘garbage’ make convenient fetishes to assist in achieving the magic transformation”. He calls instead for the organic transformation of traditional cultures “into viable substitute patterns” which, he insists, “can be done only…by the people themselves (2006a: xxiii). ²⁶

Edwards calls for increased attention to “the Moroccan Bowles…the archivist of Moroccan national culture [and] the anglophone African author”, emphasizing his “intense collaboration” with Moroccan orators from the late 1950s (2005: 86; 114). Gena Caponi agrees that Bowles “has been instrumental in creating what Edward Said has longingly described as a cultural counterpoint” (1994: 215). It is thus to the contrapuntal implications of the wider Bowles corpus that I now turn. Bowles’ recording of and transmission into English text of stories told by Moroccans – often non-literate and narrating in a kif-induced state (m’hashish) – began with Ahmed Yacoubi (painter, storyteller, and model for Amar in The Spider’s House [Rogerson, 2009: np]) in the early 1960s and continued with Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi), and several others (Bowles, 1979: 7). In the same period, Bowles drew upon oral techniques and experimented with kif as structuring motif in his own writing, notably the collection A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962). The international success of Charhadi’s A Life Full of Holes (1964) attracted Mohamed Mrabet, who worked with Bowles from the late 1960s to 1980: the collaboration produced two novels and several short story collections, combining invention and material sourced from dreams, true incidents, and folk tales. Bowles’ work of “cultural counterpoint” also – and most controversially – includes his translation into English of Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1973). The net result was, as Maier puts it, a series of “strange bicultural hybrids” (1991: np), or as Tahar Ben Jelloun would have it more critically, “bastard literature” (Edward, 2005: 235), produced in Arabic and published in English (and sometimes also in French). ²⁷ In what follows, I will focus selectively on a “novella” by Mrabet and on Choukri’s classic text.

Speaking about Mustapha (in the travel essay discussed above), Bowles claims that his “words make…a two-dimensional decoration to cover the wall of time, with little concern for representation and none at all for giving the illusion of depth… He is a genius at forging the most involved, and sometimes even briefly plausible, chains of improbabilities” (Bowles, 2006b: 60). The association made here between speech and dissimulation anticipates Bowles’ depiction of Mrabet as “a showman” whose “principal interest is in his own performance as virtuoso story-teller” (Bowles, 1979: 8). If Walter Ong (1982) characterizes orature as aggregative, embedded in the life-world of its audience, agonistically toned, participatory, and situational, and given Bowles’ depiction of Mrabet, we would expect to find emblematic rather than multifaceted characters, picaresque plot rather than complex structure, action rather than psychology, and broad moral statements in the Moroccan collaborations. This is not, however, the case. I will point to final line: destiny, and more “literary” aspects of Mrabet’s work, emphasizing emplotment from innocence to experience, the privileging of an individually determined if precarious destiny and, once again, the foregrounding of a cross-cultural politics of exchange. ²⁸

Mrabet’s Love with a Few Hairs (1967) features a young male Tanjawi who moves from one situation to another without explicitly articulating an objective beyond survival. A linear trajectory and a maturation process, enabling critical retrospect, are nevertheless embedded. A late scene has the protagonist Mohammed revisiting the scenes of his recent past sequentially and projecting a possible future:

[H]e drank and thought about his life, and he began to sob as he remembered that he had had a wife and a child, and that he had left her and she had taken the child away. And he saw her married again, with the father not loving the boy, and the boy unhappy. He might not even be sent to school, so that when he grew up he would never have any work, and then he would become a criminal. (Mrabet, 1967: 164-5) ²⁹

The epigraph that gives the novel its title – “There’s nothing wrong with a world where you can get love with a few hairs” – is an ironic foil: it refers to a procured magic spell that enables a temporary suspension of reality. Conjugal happiness, grounded in magic and deception, proves too fragile to survive.

At the end of the tale, when “a country woman in a dirty haik” (174) appears and turns out to be his erstwhile wife Mina, Mohammed gives her money but returns alone to his father’s house. ³⁰ One possible moral of the politics of exchange subtending Bowles’ Let It Come Down. One possible moral of the story is that the marriage fails because it is based on economic transaction: Mohammed procures a charm to ensure Mina’s love and seduces her with a house, Western clothes, luxury food items, and a watch; Mina then purchases the magic tool of her revenge. However, Mina loses everything, whereas Mohammed is able to continue the life he had before meeting her, as bartender and lover of Mr David, an English expatriate. This disparity in the characters’ range of options is linked partly to constructions of gender: women are portrayed as unreliable, dishonest, and deceptively in league, while Mohammed’s relationship with Mr David is characterized by generosity, loyalty, and tacit understanding (and is free of embarrassment or guilt). Nevertheless, the plot highlights the constrained choices available to many Moroccans in the early postcolonial period.

Maier contends that Moroccan Muslim characters in the Bowles collaborations do not reflect on their hybrid (postcolonial) context (1991: np), but Love with a Few Hairs challenges this claim. The first line sets a seemingly idyllic scene: “Mohammed lived with Mr David, an Englishman who owned a small hotel near the beach” (7). However, the fact that Mr David bribes Mohammed’s father with gifts, which he sells (7-8), indicates pragmatic resignation to the structuring inequities of global capital. Mohammed is dependent on Mr David’s finances and on the alcoholic release that he discovers in a Westernized milieu and he becomes increasingly isolated from the indigenous social world. A scene in which Mohammed and Mina picnic on the beach with tourists, drinking Coca-Cola and beer (23), foregrounds a carapace constructed out of the fetish objects of capitalist modernity. Mohammed’s insistence on a Western-style wedding photograph (66) similarly implies a reflexive framing of imitative identity.

While the text in English is obviously oriented towards a Western audience, as an explanation of Muslim drinking customs reinforces (154), it also reveals awareness of the limits of that audience’s perceptions: Mr David delights in the spectacle of “a real Arab wedding” that is, as the Moroccan characters know, an imitative travesty (71). Mohammed’s decision to stay with Mr David, however, signals the triumph of Western values. After Mr David convinces him to “look into the mirror” and eschew his former life, Mohammed comes back to the hotel freshly barbered and dressed: “Mr David sat with an American at the bar. Look at that! he cried as Mohammed came in. He followed Mohammed with his eyes as he walked around the room watching himself in the mirror” (172-3). Mohammed’s reconstruction in the eyes of the (English) other is complete, and narrative tension is superficially – that is, tragically – resolved.

Bowles expressed “relief” at the “smooth-rolling” translations of Mrabet’s tales, claiming that he “has no thesis to propound, no grievances to air” (1979: 8). Having shown that Love with a Few Hairs can, in fact, be read as an exposé of dilemmas faced by postcolonial Moroccans, I turn finally to the author implicated, by contrast, in Bowles’ statement: Mohamed Choukri. Al Khubz al Hafi was written in Arabic in 1972, translated by Bowles into English in 1973 as For Bread Alone and by Tahar Ben Jelloun into French (as Le Pain nu) in 1980. The Arabic version was finally published in 1982 by Choukri with the proceeds of the translations (Choukri, 2008: np). ³¹

This collaboration was a turbulent one, culminating in a publication, of a harshly critical book on Bowles by Choukri. ³² A particular issue is highlighted by Nirvana Tanoukhi, who identifies a bias toward the oral, irrational, and “primitive” in Bowles’ translation, at the expense of Choukri’s “investment in a literate, rational, and modern nation”. Tanoukhi argues that the collaboration should be seen as more akin to an ideological clash involving contestation over narrative meaning and flags up the different horizons of expectation of intended audiences: Arabophone – who would interpret the text within a social realist tradition – and Anglophone, for whom the relevant horizon is primitivist (2003: 127; 131; 129). Leaving aside the fact that, in the Moroccan context, French has overwhelmingly been chosen as the literary language, Tanoukhi’s is an important critique. Indubitably, Bowles’ prefatory framing of the text is problematic: in elevating the author’s memory processes to that of the non-literate sublime, Bowles implicitly links Choukri’s work to that of Mrabet et al., but rather unconscionably dismisses the centrality of literacy to individual and collective emancipation. Choukri himself has insisted that the narrative “was not invented, or an oral work” and that it is committed to “a history we have lost or which the colonialists have stolen from us” and “the search for a social identity” (2008: np).

Tanoukhi identifies sections of the original text, elided in the translation, which foreground the nationalist struggle, notably a dream in which the colonial police render Moroccan men impotent and unable to protect their female compatriots (2003: 140). But I would argue that the build-up to independence remains clearly visible in translation. The midpoint of the narrative signals the 1952 Tangier riots, followed by Mohamed’s commitment to “a new phase” and sense of “feel[ing] like a man”: “part of my life is ending, and another part will begin”, he says (Choukri, 2003: 116; 124). ³³ This developmental threshold is linked to other aspects of the plot, notably a spell in prison, where he begins to learn Arabic script. A poem by Abou el Qacem Chabbi, recited by his cellmate and praising Allah’s support of “man or country [that] is enslaved and decides to try and get free” (142), provides the thematic hinge between individual and collective emancipation. This is reinforced when Mohamed is unable to read his own release document – “I wondered what they had written about me on this piece of paper. They can write whatever they want, since I have no idea what the ink marks mean” – and reiterates that “I must find a new way to live” (147), “a new pattern in my life, this one being finished”’ (160). In the early phases of his transition, he would still rather fight because “it involves no thinking of any kind” (162). Aged twenty, however, the opportunity to start school presents itself and he buys his first book “that explained the essentials of writing and reading Arabic” (167). This represents the end of a major developmental phase in the narrator’s life and of the first instalment of the autobiography.

It is difficult, in fact, to miss the paralleling of personal and national trajectories of self-emancipation, implanted from the earliest phase of Mohamed’s life narrative in his resistance – at first violent and sexual, then criminal – to “feel[ing] myself overcome” by others (21) and his hatred of “everyone who used others” (25). Despite its expurgations, the translated text dissects the structural components – political, economic, and gendered – of social inequity in the mid-twentieth century. The hunger that haunts Mohamed, drives the people of the Rif into internal exile and affects other poor Moroccans, is established on the first page of the text, as is Mohamed’s insistence on the need to testify to it:

One afternoon I could not stop crying. I was hungry… My little brother Abdelqader was too sick to cry as I did. Look at your brother, [my mother] told me. See how he is. Why can’t you be like him?

I stare at his pallid face and his sunken eyes and stop crying. But after a few moments I forget to be inspired by his silence, and begin once more to cry.

When my father came in I was sobbing, and repeating the word bread over and over. Bread. Bread. Bread. Bread. (9, original emphasis)

In a move typical of early Moroccan (and other North African) semi-autobiographical fiction, ³⁴ the patriarch is the primary object of resistance, indeed patricidal fantasy, in the first half of this text. He later fades from view, while the police, formerly anonymous persecutors of the poor (14), become specified as colonial agents and native informers. The overarching theme, though, is that literacy, political awareness, and employment provide superior solutions to fantasies of violently seizing the place of the oppressor (16; 43; 66).

The narrator’s attitude toward women, whilst manifesting elements of misogyny, can also be seen as symptomatic. Mohamed feels “tired and depressed” by a fantasy in which he rapes a female character, Sallafa, and his own sexual vulnerability on the streets provokes empathy with her: “She has let something go inside her, and now it is lost…The world is sad and decayed” (122). His response to a prostitute called Naima also gropes toward a critique of structural conditions that position the marginalized as objects: “I hate to live with a girl who never works. All she ever has to do is open her legs, to me or someone else” (149). Although this underplays the interlocking frameworks of sexism and poverty that constrain women such as Naima, the narrator is obviously critiquing sex as a site of iniquitous exchange, rather than foregrounding it as index of social rebellion, as Tanoukhi claims (2003: 136). The narrator does highlight his adolescent desire for “everything that’s wrong” (54) – when he attempts to have sex with a boy – but this is linked to his premature transformation into someone “hard [and] sad” (20). ³⁵

Both aspects of Said’s contrapuntality – a critical counterpoint that might adhere in a decolonizing body of writing and a critical rereading of the colonial canon – are vivified in the Bowles corpus and his collaborations. I have argued that Bowles’ own novels anticipate a critical rereading of Western history, with reference to plot structures, settings, and themes that foreground a Moroccan postcolonial cusp, but also to the repeated representation and enactment of the difficulty of “telling the other”. Bowles’ Moroccan fictions produce supplementary effects linked to a (qualified) postcolonial self-determination to come. Dyar’s partial apprehension of an unfolding future beyond the expatriate enclave provokes his defensive termination of Thami’s life. Amar remains problematically suspended on the road to capitalist modernity, in the place that for Stenham, an archivist with a chronic case of belated exoticism, is no longer habitable. The work I have discussed is nevertheless thematically, structurally, and philosophically invested in the challenges of transcoding, translation, and transvaluation. It is in this context that Bowles’ lengthy commitment to collaboration with Moroccan storytellers should be interpreted.