Fez is a drug. It enmeshes you.

The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide.

I loved the racial nobility of the Arabs, the pride, the love of sweets instead of alcohol, the gentleness, the peace, the hospitality, the reserve, pride. Love of turquoise and coral colours, dignity of bearing, their silences. I love the way the men embrace in the street, proudly and nobly. I love the expression in their eyes, brooding, or fiery, but deep.

The last vestiges of my past were lost in the ancient city if Fez, which was built so much like my own life, with its tortuous streets, its silences, secrecies, its labyrinths and its covered faces.

Woman's role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don't mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams.

Anaïs Nin. April 1936, August 1937. The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Two: 1934-1939.

Anaïs Nin leaves Marseilles with her husband on 15th April 1936 (via Algiers and from there by train to Fez), bound for the Palais Jamaï that bordered the old part of the historic city whose narrow streets ‘like intestines’ she wanders through. The people so close that their elbows touch and they breathe in your face, the men hold hands as they walk together talking (some of the streets are only a yard and a half wide). Nin backs into a dark dooryard as a roughly-beaten donkey who is bleeding passes by carrying kindling wool, an overpowering smell of excrement hits her (she would soon spot a man ‘shitting carefully, conscientiously’), mixed with saffron, the ‘strong pungent smell’ of leather being cured (this is done in a square with giant vats holding cement-coloured liquid by semi-clad workmen with long hooks), sandalwood, the oil of olives (street-pressed under large wood wheels for centuries and used in cooking or rubbing on the body), incense, muskrat – The stench is so strong and nauseating that one can only swallow food with difficulty. She writes about it to Henry Miller from Fez who expresses his surprise in reply at her ‘delicate nostrils’ not recoiling at the smells and asks if it is so because her eyes are so delighted. She admits that is the case, that the ‘spectacle of life’ is so vivid and speculates if a simple change of culture would ‘put an end to our restlessness, our dissatisfaction, our need to create what is not there?’ He is glad that she is not disappointed because Fez is supposed to be the most intact of all the old cities of the world.

In the published diary entries of this visit she does not mention her husband at all although they had gone together. She did not take her diary with her so her first impressions are found in the letters she dispatched from Morocco. She writes to Miller about seeing her first woman with her face veiled with only her eyes showing

The short trip is recounted in great detail in retrospect in journal entries written upon return and her memories and experiences are evoked and can be traced in characters and events in her novels and short stories. In this way she was able to stem the immediacy and introspective flow of recording everything that just happened in exchange of remembering with the benefit of hindsight and with the detachment of saints, retrospectively recording her experiences in a trance still ‘inhabiting and caressing Fez and my mysterious sorrows. I sit on the tip of minarets.’ The tips have five golden balls that shine like the sun to indicate the five prescribed times of daily prayer in Islam.

On her first night she dreams that her suitcase is full of birds, each containing a pair of stockings so she has to kill the birds to retrieve her stockings. She says she would rather do without and opened the suitcase to release the birds. On 19th she has a vivid dream of Miller, as if he had been there with her all night. She dreams that he kisses her in street in full view of the public and says he is ‘tired of mystery.’ They then are sitting at a huge banquet and she gets up to get something. He follows her and they walk together as if they were ‘soldered like twins.’

In the Diary, Nin described Fez as being an image of her inner city that she falls in love with and later in 1948 as her favourite city representing ‘Peace. Dignity. Humility.’ The peace she sees reflected in the abysmal deep, dark, coal-black or mossy-green eyes of its sienna-skinned dwellers. A city ‘shaped like the brain, … externally like the cities of the soul’. She would never forget the hypnotic and ‘unbearably eloquent’ eyes of its people, contrasting them with the ‘nondescript’ eyes of Europeans – ‘One could write a book solely on eyes. Even the old eyes do not lose their light or depth.’ When she returned many years later, she wrote:

Having seen the eyes of Morocco many years ago, I never forgot them. I found them again in the men and in the women. The men’s are like darts, daggers, the women’s like burning coals. I love best the countries in which virility and tenderness coexist.

It is in here Fez she realises that her depression, the ‘little demon’ that had been devouring her ever since her teenage years has stopped eating her ‘I was at peace, walking through the streets of Fez, absorbed in a world outside of myself, a past which was not my past, by sickness one could touch and name, leprosy and syphilis.’ She walks, sings and prays with the Arabs all the while remaining acutely aware of her otherness, of being with them yet not one of them. She ‘fused with the city, the people, melted into the colours, textures’.

The silence of the streets ‘of my desires’, ‘of my own labyrinth’ contrasting with the cries of the children, their laughter and their running about with heads shaved but for one tuft of hair. The barbers (one shop has four gigantic chairs, pointing out that in older times the barbers also performed circumcisions on the infants as well as other surgical procedures) and the bakers with their ovens built in the ground (outside one bakery, stood a beggar displaying open wounds), the tutors, the tailors, the jewellers, potters, rug-makers and all others sit on the ground in the street sewing, repairing knives, making guns, the scribes writing legal documents and ‘dying wool in vast cauldrons’ before dipping the silks in orange buckets, their hands green, violet or blue from the dyes. The guide tells her not to worry, as her shoes would return dyed in wonderful colours. Nin goes to great lengths to describe this experience in her chapter on Fez in In Favour of the Sensitive Man. Another street is all a coppersmith’s workshop with young boys beating designs with small hammers into copper trays they hold between their legs. She writes to Miller of all this going on in uncanny silence she finds. He reassures her that it is the silence of patient and loving labour ‘because the hand moves silently.’ As she watches, the carpenters pass down the art of working mother-of-pearl ‘encrustations’ ⅛ of an inch to their children and fitting them onto sculpted boxes of rosewood, thereby teaching them the lesson of ‘patience, timelessness, care, devotion.’ In her chapter on Fez, she describes the laborious process in minute detail. Some of the shops are only eight by eight feet wide!

The herbalist prays over his rosary beads while selling herbs, a spice merchant sleeps atop his sack of saffron. The rich and poor live together holding fast by the religion of ‘Silence and quietism. Contemplation and chanting. Trays with perfume bottles. Trays with almond cakes covered by a silk handkerchief or copper painted lids.’

Nin walks across a bridge built by the Portuguese. Some of the streets have bridges, lattices or Andalusian trellises covered in rose vines connecting the sienna-red houses with iron doors (a few of which are whitewashed and their walls garlanded or covered with flowers) that cast shadows. True to its Sufism, in Fez there is little or no distinction between inner and outer like there is in the Occident and it is here in Fez that she accomplishes (in Koranic terms) a merging of the two mystical seas, the esoteric and the exoteric or of inner and outer space. It marks a discovery which takes place simultaneously inside and outside of her psyche. In her novel Children of the Albatross (the second of five in the Cities of the Interior series) she writes ‘The cities of the interior were like the city of Fez, intricate, endless, secret and unchartable.’

She recalls standing on the balcony taking in the Adhan call for Maghrib (evening prayer, the Islamic equivalent to Vespers in the Canonical Hours of Christianity) as it rises over the pretty white city. She writes of ‘the fundamental beauty’ in the simplicity of the lives lived by the Arabs – ‘Fez lies very still. It is a city of silence, which makes it appear more and more like an illustration from the Bible.’ As the call to prayer is heard, Nin recounts seeing the men performing the ritual ablutions at the fountain by rinsing their mouths and leprous noses and washing their pockmarked faces and the forearms at least three times (or five or seven or nine, always an odd number of times), passing their wet hands from the front to the back of the head, running the forefingers through their ears and finally washing the feet three times each before donning muddy burnouses and heading for the mosque. The women who are veiled, enter the mosque through their own entrance and kiss the mosque wall as they pass through. Everybody removes their sandals before they enter – ‘Some of the old men and old women never leave the mosque. They squat there forever until death overtakes them.’

A deaf queen has arranged that a black flag be hung outside the mosque at the time of prayer and a white flag for when it had finished. The poor and destitute dress in sackcloth, simple sheets or bath towels and sleep on mats in the square in front of the mosque - ‘The birds do not chatter as they do in Paris, they chant, trill with operatic and tropical fervour’ she would describe to Miller as gargarising. The cicadas buzz continuously.

Wives of the wild, mountain-dwelling Berber (the warriors) are unveiled and tatooed. One Arab had five wives sitting on a divan ‘like mountains of flesh, enormous, with several chins and several stomachs, and diamonds set in their foreheads.’ The wealthy women often dress in silks and muslins. The Jews are recognisable from their black burnouses. She sends a postcard to Miller from the Jewish quarter, reporting that the Jews are given the task of salting the heads of criminals to be hung on the ramparts.

Nin has come bearing letters of introduction – First to Si Boubekertazi who is sitting on pillows in his patio and has a concubine bring in a copper tray laden with delicacies of rock sugar. Tea is served in small cups without handles. Then to the house of Mokri Mohtasseb with another letter of introduction where seven fat wives sit around a low table scoffing sweets and dates. They ask Nin about her pearly nail polish which they want. In turn they reveal how they bought kohl dust from the market to paint their eyes thickly which stings cand causes them to water, giving them the thick black edges around the eyes. This is later reworked into A Spy in the House of Love, the third of five volumes in the Cities of the Interior series of novels.

Next, she visits the Pasha of Marrakesh, Thami El Glaoui, who insisted she visit the city and signals a sentry to escort her, he would not leave her except when she went to sleep in her orange-coloured bedroom. Some of the wealthier houses have two to six guards posted outside.

De Sidi Hassan Benani also receives her under ‘fine spun-gold colonnades’ smiling in silence while observing a forty-day fast and praying. He acknowledges her presence by occasional nods of the head.

Within the medieval walls lies the Quartier Réservé which Nin visits with a guide. There are French soldiers with a set of giant keys positioned at each of its six gates. Nin noted that the houses of ill repute here, are only visited by the poor Arabs, negroes and beggars as the well-to-do have enough wives to satisfy themselves with. The streets are ‘dark, dramatic, tortuous’. The cafés in the cellars (their doors covered in muslin curtains or beaded doorways one parts to enter) serve mint tea and beer, there is no wine but enough drugs exchanging hands. Men sit in the bar watching musicians play ‘The back room is for prostitutes.’ Nin parts the curtained doorway and enters upon Fatima – Queen of Prostitutes.

In the Diary, Nin describes her ‘straight patrician nose,’ her big ‘black velvet eyes,’ accentuated by a rim of kohl, ‘smooth skin, full but firm, and the usual Arabian attributes of several folds of stomach, several chins.’ Her legs are like pillars on which she could only struggle to move. She sits dressed like a bride in a pink chiffon dress with embroidered gold sequins over layers of chiffon petticoats, a ‘heavy gold belt, bracelets, rings, a gold band across her forehead, enormous dangling gold earrings.’ Whisps of black curls shone through a coloured turban. Four gold teeth (which Arabs consider a sign of beauty). Seated in the middle of the chamber looking ‘both queenly and magnificent, opulent, and voluptuous’ surrounded by pillows and accompanied by a bodyguard clad in a white burnous, blue military uniform and a white turban. Low divans line the walls and more pillows are strewn across the rugs on the floor, on one of which an Arab soldier is resting. Nin notes that the homes of the wealthier people are tiled but still have brass beds there too. Fatima has lots of them and one of the walls is full of Swiss cuckoo clocks, all telling different times. The other walls are covered with flowered cretonne – ‘The atmosphere was heavy with perfume, enclosed and voluptuous,’ like the womb itself ‘with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquillity and mystery. My self, woman, womb, with grilled windows, veiled eyes. Tortuous streets, secret cells, labyrinths and more labyrinths.’ She would write in The Novel of the Future:

Sometimes one must pursue one’s attractions. The concept of the labyrinth attracted me. It represented, first of all, mystery. One was lost in a maze. The unconscious is a maze. One does not know with the conscious mind, clearly, where one is going. There are many detours. When I saw the city of Fez, I saw in its design a huge, life-sized labyrinth. The whole city was a labyrinth. Later on, this fascination found not only confirmation in myths and legends, but in scientific images of the brain. The mind is a labyrinth. I saw at the Museum of Natural History models a million times enlarged of both the brain, and the cells of our blood.

I combined all the mysteries of the Oriental city with the mysteries of human nature, the human mind, with dreams, timelessness, memory. Memory makes a tremendous voyage. But we never lose the child in us.

Later she would frequently return to this analogy of Fez with the womb. In the Diary she lists six names of people in whom she seeks the extraordinary things of life without shame, the seventh is Fez. One of these is Jean Carteret with whom she had a brief fling whose beautiful but pockmarked face reminds her of faces she encountered in Fez that though ‘bitten away by disease’ are yet beautiful ‘like ancient fragments of the Parthenon.’ In France, she could never stand the sight of ‘a worm-eaten hag in the street’ referring to them as ‘market women’. The headgear of the market women here includes a bunch of keys with braided beads in their hair.

A young girl enters carrying an atomiser, lifts up Nin’s skirt and sprays rose water on her undergarments, a little later she re-enters to scatter rose petals at her feet, a short while later she brings tea which she pours from a samovar into small glasses with coloured tops in thin copper sheaths and handles. Nin sits cross-legged on giant pillows as two blind cripples are invited in to play a drab melody ‘with such a beat that my excitement grew as if I had taken wine.’ Fatima poured the tea as the others passed around a bottle of rose water with which to sanitise their hands, there are twelve of these bottles placed in the middle of the room. She then lights a brazier with sandalwood and places it before Nin. The bodyguard translates the conversation between Nin and Fatima, Nin compliments her on her beauty and she asks about her nail polish which Nin promised she would send her along with turquoise eye-shadow. As they are talking, Nin hears a fight going on outside when suddenly a young Arab rushes in, bleeding and crying “Aii, Aii, Aii.” Fatima calmly dispatches her maid to find out what happened, the musicians sense a commotion and play louder so as not to spoil the mood. Nin spends two hours with Fatima in a ‘propitious, dreamy, meditative, contemplative’ atmosphere. Her escort makes a short speech as they part, showing a pass giving special permission to roam at night to each soldier at the gates. Frogs croak and crickets chirp, the smell of roses dampens offensive odours. Miller writes in reply to her letter ‘You don’t mention the musk and the spices. There must be some of that along with the manure and whatnot.’ She did return to those spices in her chapter on Fez in In Favour of the Sensitive Man written many years later, describing them in great detail – The pepper, cinnamon, ginger, curry leaves and various other herbs she notes that would re-emerge in the culinary delights she is offered.

Suddenly, an old lady thrusts open a window above where Nin is walking, cursing loudly, she throws out a large rat that falls at her feet. A dead Arab is carried on a stretcher wrapped in bandages like an Egyptian mummy with a red rug over his feet. He is being carried to cemetery on plain stretcher to be buried thus, not in a coffin. Arabs go to the cemetery for walks and to talk together. They carry a prayer rug and a bird cage. Familiarity with death is encouraged. The tombs have no inscriptions on them except some which have lines from the Koran.

Her husband has sent money to her cousin Eduardo, she writes to Eduardo immediately instructing him to give however much of it is needed to Miller. In December 1940, she would dream of people imprisoned in the heat in Morocco – ‘They are inwardly consumed. They look burnt, ashy. I cannot bear it.’

Gone midnight now. The emptiness of Fez contrasts with its hustle and bustle during the day. Nin spots a nightwatchman asleep on a doorstep. She crosses a bridge over a foul-smelling river heading for the communal hammam where the veiled women are heading in groups, laughing together with their servants or children as they carry baskets with a clean change of clothes on their heads. Only their eyes are visible and their hennaed fingertips holding the veils across their faces. They wear long white skirts held by belts of lavish embroidery, matching the embroidery on their mules, their bodies heavy from a diet of sweets and passive watching from behind grilled windows. Nin recognises this is one of the very few moments of their liberty. She follows them entering a building near the mosque covered in mosaics. They go into a room of stone with stone benches and rugs on the floor. The women put their baskets down and begin to undress. Removing several skirts and blouses, unrolling, folding and unfolding so much muslin, linen, cotton is a tedious ‘ceremony’. Then they remove their bracelets, earrings, anklets and unwind the ribbons tying their hair. The white cotton dumped on the floor in ‘a field of white petals, leaves, lace,’ they are clad in so much that Nin feels they can never be truly naked. Nin herself already stands naked as she does not fancy sitting on the cold stone bench. African maids undress their children before undressing themselves. There is a wrinkled old woman with one eye dressed in sackcloth at the waist - Her breasts are ‘two long empty gourds hanging almost to the middle of her stomach.’ She pats Nin on the shoulder and smiles approvingly, making some remark pointing to her nail polish that she cannot understand so she just smiles back. She opens the door to the huge steam room constructed of grey stone with no benches in it so that all the women sit on the floor, scrubbing the children held between their knees as the old lady pours water intermittently over the heads of the women and children once they have finished soaping – Sitting ‘in rivulets of soapy, dirty water’ that the women reuse then exfoliate themselves with pumice stones before using gigantic depilatories to remove unwanted hair with minute care and precision – ‘The flesh billowed, curved, folded in tremendous heavy waves.’ She sits observing the meaty arms of the women as they comb their hair and admires the statuesque beauty of their pale, moon faces with their ‘enormous, jewelled eyes, straight noble noses with wide spaces between the eyes, full and voluptuous mouths, flawless skins, and always a royal bearing.’ Suddenly realising that they sit grouped in circles with their children, looking and smiling at her, they are signalling her to wash her hair and face but she tried to convey to them her dislike of sitting in the darkening water. She cannot bring herself to wash her face with the same soap they have just used on their feet and armpits. They offer her the already well-used pumice stone which scratches her face. They laugh at her reluctance to extract stray eyebrows, remove the hair under her armpits or to shave her pubic hair [1]. She escapes back to the room where pails of cold water are poured over her as she imagines the women when they would come out cleansed and clothe themselves again ‘in yards of white cotton’ but the scene that she witnesses is far removed from her vision:

… Heads rose from formless masses of flesh, heaving like plants in the sea, swelling, swaying, falling, the breasts like sea anemones, floating, the stomachs of perpetually pregnant women, the legs like pillows, the backs like cushions, the hips with furrows like a mattress.

They ask her age by counting on their fingers and point out that she has no fat on her body, comparing their skin colours with hers they express amazement at being able to encircle her waist between their two hands. They talk quickly among themselves as they feel her and soap her face and convey they would like to wash her hair. The old lady returned and poured two pails of water over her. The women ‘transmitted messages of all kinds with their eyes, smiles, talk.’ The old lady leads her to an antechamber which is much cooler and pours cold water over her before leading her back to the dressing room where the fire is fuelled by bundles of eucalyptus.

In the diary entry (written after her return) she ruminates about the places she could not visit and things she could not do – ‘Life passed in Fez as I passed, leaving no trace or shreds.’ Tristine Rainer writes:

In Fez, Nin seems to travel back in time, a journey which allows her to understand her own part in woman’s historic situation as well as the pain of her personal past.

Nin describes the reality of the situation simply, but the reader cannot avoid its deep symbolism, given the recurring themes of time and water in Diary 2. The flowing water suggests Nin’s sense of woman’s ancient rhythmic relationship to the sea, while its contamination implies an historic stagnation.

In the Diary, Nin writes that she has returned from the holiday full of health and ‘plump’. She had bought soft white wool rugs for her apartment and candles ‘I am like a pregnant woman. Full and rich. Blossoming. My body too.’ When she meets Miller, she tells him about finding a condom in her husband’s pocket and they both laugh about it - ‘I’m coming back fat and peaceful, physically speaking! Very gay and contented. Enriched by all I have seen. New York wiped out, as if I had bathed in the Mosque fountains.’

In a letter to her father dated 8th November 1936, Nin described Morocco as one of the wonderful countries, ‘full of sun and softness.’ Months later, she is still writing about the streets of Fez and dreaming of it as in her dream of 27th December in which she saw small birds flying out of a little black boy’s mouth in Fez. They cover her face and she is frightened lest they peck her eyes with their beaks – ‘I got lost in Fez.’ In another letter to him from 1937, she wrote:

Fez possesses a very grand symbolic charm. It is the city where one forgets oneself—where one abandons oneself, gets lost, gives oneself. There is something eternal, religious. The poverty is vast, but so is the greatness of the soul. I would like you to see it. It is A Thousand and One Nights.

In the summer of 1955 when she was editing the second volume of her diary, she waxes lyrical about the nature of her record:

… pure images without political undercurrents—the poetry and the music and the realism of it—this floating, beautiful, mysterious image is now superimposed upon the harsh, nasal voice of the radio commentator: “Riots in Morocco. 30 persons killed. Arabs kill Jews and French,” and in the newspaper, images only of the dead and wounded lying in the streets.

[1] Nin was evidently not in the habit of removing her pubic hair, a new-fangled twenty-first century fad and on occasion did not wear any undergarments:

The new adult feminine: physically hairless, breastless, and detached from her young – in herself, purposeless. A proto-human or unfinished model, available for modification by the masculine - Antonella Gambotto-Burke. Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood & the Recovery of the Feminine.

Today, the feminine, like the masculine, is given a very rigid narrative of what type of physical presentation and behavior is culturally acceptable. Women are expected to starve themselves into the shape of prepubescent girls, shave their pubic and underarm hair, hide their nipples under padded bras. The passivity of depression and sorrow is encouraged over the dynamism of angry problem-solving - Sophie Strand. The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.

In the diary entry for 2nd November 1934, during a night of intense, passionate and ‘frenzied’ lovemaking, Henry Miller
refers to her ‘burning cunt’ and ‘electric bush’. In the entry for 7th July 1943, she records words addressed to her by her Negro lover, the actor and Boxer Canada Lee, referring to the “lovely red hair on your pussy”. Inside the cover of one of the original volumes of the diaries kept at the University of California, Los Angeles are two pubic hairs entwined from Nin and her lover Gonzalo Moré that have been ‘carefully taped’ together.