Tangier - Culture

Culture

The multicultural placement of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities and the foreign immigrants attracted writer and composer Paul Bowles, playwright Tennessee Williams, the beat writers William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the painter Brion Gysin and the music group the Rolling Stones, who all lived in or visited Tangier during different periods of the 20th century.

The writer George Orwell and his wife (travelling as Mr. & Mrs. Blair) visited Tangier in September, 1938. Orwell reported newspapers on sale: "La Press Morocain, strongly pro-Franco; Le Petite Morocain, impartial; La Dépêche Morocain, somewhat pro-Franco; Le Journal De Tanger (sic), seemingly non-political; Tangier Gazette & Morocco Mail, an English weekly, slightly antifascist and strongly anti-Japanese." He also noted "There are four post offices, one French, one British, and two Spanish - Franco and government. Stamps are British surcharged Tangier. Coinage as in French Morocco."

It was after Delacroix that Tangier became an obligatory stop for artists seeking to experience the colors and light he spoke of for themselves—with varying results. Matisse made several sojourns in Tangier, always staying at the Grand Hotel Villa de France. "I have found landscapes in Morocco," he claimed, "exactly as they are described in Delacroix's paintings." The Californian artist Richard Diebenkorn was directly influenced by the haunting colors and rhythmic patterns of Matisse's Morocco paintings.

Antonio Fuentes was born in Tangier in 1905 from a Spanish family. An article in La Gazette du Maroc described Antonio Fuentes as the Picasso of Tangier, and he died in the city 90 years later.

In the 1940s and until 1956 when the city was an International Zone, the city served as a playground for eccentric millionaires, a meeting place for secret agents and all kinds of crooks, and a mecca for speculators and gamblers, an Eldorado for the fun-loving "Haute Volée". During World War II the Office of Strategic Services operated out of Tangier for various operations in North Africa.

Around the same time, a circle of writers emerged which was to have a profound and lasting literary influence. This included Paul Bowles, who lived and wrote for over half a century in the city, Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet as well as Mohamed Choukri (one of North Africa's most controversial and widely read authors), Abdeslam Boulaich, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet and Ahmed Yacoubi. Among the best known works from this period is Choukri's For Bread Alone. Originally written in Classical Arabic, the English edition was the result of close collaboration with Bowles (who worked with Choukri to provide the translation and supplied the introduction). Tennessee Williams described it as "a true document of human desperation, shattering in its impact." Independently, William S. Burroughs lived in Tangier for four years and wrote Naked Lunch, whose locale of Interzone is an allusion to the city.

After several years of gradual disentanglement from Spanish and French colonial control, Morocco reintegrated the city of Tangier at the signing of the Tangier Protocol on October 29, 1956. Tangier remains a very popular tourist destination for cruise ships and day visitors from Spain and Gibraltar.