ANAÏS IN MOROCCO: 1969 & 1973
Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 7: 1966-1974.
Anaïs Nin returned to Morocco in the summer of 1969, after her first trip thirty-three years earlier. In volume six of the Diary, Nin writes of the Swedish writer and poet Artur Lundkvist, who, while interviewing her for radio informed her of how he and his wife were staying in a hotel in Agadir at the time of the devastating earthquake in 1960, having decided to separate when the earthquake destroyed the entire face of the hotel leaving them standing on the fourth floor so shocked and scared that the mutual experience served to reunite them.
Nin arrives in the city of Agadir, newly reconstructed in ‘bridal white’ to find being in the Club Méditerranée like being in a French pension with no Arabs invited. The stairs are lined with a rug and French girls bring in refreshments of dates and figs in copper trays. French waiters wear Moroccan clothes, they do not talk or smile.
The Anais Nin Foundation ©
The French rock and roll music resounding everywhere is a ‘curse’ and ‘spoils the meals’. Other than the architecture, nothing seems Moroccan, the sea is freezing cold and when she takes a swim, Nin can hear the rock and roll music booming out and Rupert Pole caught bronchitis. The young female factory workers flock to the beach and enter the sea naked except for their veils which they do not take off, she can make out their breasts in the fog.
The furniture in the Jamai Palace hotel smells of cedarwood as do the streets in the souk (marketplace) ‘comparable only to that of fresh-baked bread.’ Their guide, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman called François Camus (a descendant of George Sand) who is a college student with a Land Rover warns her not to offend the women by photographing them. He dresses in a brown wool jellaba and canary yellow babouches. He takes her to Tafraoute in the Atlas Mountains in the south through mountain towns and sand dunes. There are not many roads in these places and Nin writes that the water from the fountains which she drinks tastes ‘a hundred times fresher’ after the extreme heat and thirst she experiences in the desert and she knows ‘the deep beauty of an oasis.’ There is a clear stream in which she and François both dip their feet from which a frog leaps out – ‘To feel its delight one has to have traveled over rocky roads, walked in the dust, in the sun, be tired, thirsty, with dusty feet and cracking lips.’ The 130º heat is unbearable – ‘The whole body is thirsty—skin, hair, eyes. The gourds and goatskins the Arabs carry do not hold enough water for the extent and depth of one’s thirst. It seems unquenchable.’ The chergui blowing in from the desert is like fire, scorching rocks to black.
The green trees seem ‘a hundred times greener’ after having experienced the flat sepia landscape of the desert where there is only the occasional tamarisk or palm. The minarets of around 300 mosques are also a bright, vibrant green.
Lunch is served at an oasis next to a castle by the name of Agadir (which itself means ‘fortress’) beside an oasis, under trees trellised with bamboo, the tables are made from mother-of-pearl laid with copper trays. Water is bought to wash hands and faces. Then, a whole spitted lamb which they eat with their bare hands with ‘delightful’ golden couscous, vegetables and raisins followed by abundant free-flowing red wine. Pieces of chicken are often served too with ‘intensely piquant sauce’. Figs are served as desert with sweet tea. On her way back to the hotel, she feels her legs weak from the heat and is unable even lift herself onto the mule. An old man with bare feet, holds her hand and leads her back over the stones.
En route to Ouarzazate they halt at the fortress village of Aït Benhaddou. In Ouarzazate, she fancies a hotel and spots a castle. A large, tall fountain falls from a wall into a pool. A baby antelope emerges from its bed of straw in an open fireplace before retreating. They dine in a room beneath the pool that the fountain falls in, people swim in it ‘like fish in an aquarium’. The is rooms are named after precious stones and minerals ‘a museum of stones’: Azurite, Malachite, Hematite, Serpentine, Tourmaline, Quartz, Onyx, Hematite, Alabaster, Calcite – ‘This is the land of minerals.’ A never-ending desert is her view from the bedroom:
The hotel of the Club Méditerranée in Ouarzazate, a most beautiful architecture inspired by native adobe—with towers—the modern adaptation not visible outside. Decorated windows of Moroccan woodwork frame a view of the village. Cool tiles, fountains. A swimming pool. Dedicated to the semiprecious stones found in the desert. A baby gazelle came to greet the dusty, weary explorers. Dinner out of doors. Torches, charcoal grills, shishkebab.
The guttural chant of the women, in a circle, is started by one and followed and developed by the rest. The men play the drums. Cries, like American Indian cries. Bird cries.
In front of the hotel are the high walls of a film studio. Nin describes the mystery of the native women she loves who spend their days veiled in black and their evenings dancing, clad in pastel chiffon and heavily bejewelled. They ride side saddle in their veils on donkeys.
She has only words of praise and love for the children whose eyes ‘burn like sun reflected on onyx’ and the men whose faces seem carved and ordered by strict codes of noble conduct, courage and tradition. She laments the Western culture which brings disintegration and discord, the complete opposite end of the grace and dignified calm of the natives. Describing the eyes of the children, she writes:
Their eyes stun you. They are so charged with messages it is electrifying. They express the continuity of time. Religion gives them this unframed, unlimited cosmic flow—no beginning, no end. Their eyes hold all of the past, and we are not accustomed to eyes holding so much. At three or four years of age the children look at you as men, women, ageless, cosmic, ancient, powerful. The whole richness of the race is in them. The heat of the sun, the blackness of their nights, the concentration of their life has enriched their eyes as compression creates the precious stone.
I love the Arabs, their faces, the men’s steely qualities, the women’s secretiveness, but all this is lost to us forever.
We cannot recapture it. We are denied their faith in Allah, their tranquillity, their contemplation, their harmony with the pattern, the peace they have achieved with God, with nature, with themselves. Their bodies are alive. I love their silences, which are alive too.
The Arab man is a great beauty. Tall, very dark, with regular features, the face always firm, set. Eyes bold. There is a style to his gestures.
One is reminded of the verse by the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir describing the courtyards of his beloved Old Delhi as an artist’s canvas where every face that can be seen is picturesque and like the canvas of an artist. One of the homes Nin visits belongs to a cripple, it is built into a hill ‘like a prehistoric cave.’ The donkey sits in a ditch to the left and the baby sleeps on sheepskin in a dugout to the right. A passageway leads up to the bedroom with a rug, a dress hanging from a nail in the wall, one necklace, a picture of Koranic writing she has also seen on sale in the market. A cauldron sits atop a fireplace set in the corner. The bare walls and small windows ensure that the place remains cool and refreshing. Outside, goats climb the argan trees to eat the leaves, berries and a bitter orange fruit that grows on them. There can be up to five or six goats up a tree at one time, some others chewing on their hind legs. The natives use the oil from the argan trees as beauty lotion.
The near primitive lifestyle of the women who have fetched water in earthenware jars from the communal town fountains for generations reminds Nin of the Native Indian villages of Arizona and New Mexico – Each quarter is designated a mosque, a fountain, a school, its own hammam (communal baths) and a communal oven towards which young boys are often seen to be rushing with trays of dough - Girls of five or six carry their infant brother or sister in shawls tied on their backs - A timeless scene - ‘We are living in Biblical times. There is no change.’ In her chapter on Fez, Nin she tells us the legend of the foundation of the city. However, she is concerned that the French female tourists who laze about on the beaches in skimpy bikinis would corrupt the children.
The Anais Nin Foundation ©
The men thresh wheat with their feet and the horses with their hooves ‘as Mexicans do’, throwing the wheat in the air with pitchforks, clapping their hands as they sing. There are other small fields of corn or clover, fields of daisies, lilies, apple blossom. One morning, they wake at five in the morning and drive to a camel market in Guelmim in Oued Noun, often referred to as the Gateway to the Desert where the sand is grey, the teeth of the camels are carefully examined to determine their age, the young ones still suckling. In her diary, Nin records the various types of clothes people wear in different places.
The smell of oud pervades to the sounds of a small flute playing in the distance, the jingle of bells on an animal, religious chanting. People themselves are largely silent in a manner unknown to dwellers of ‘our ugly cities’ in which multitudes of people are packed like sardines. Nin is annoyed by the incessant chatter of the French tourists that she calls diarrhoea. She prefers the silence over their childish and noisy games.
One night when Nin is unable to sleep, she climbs the stairs of her hotel to the roof terrace to hear the Adhan as it rebounds from the nearest mosque and notices the stars that seem more numerous and nearer ‘as in Me
That someone was praying for us while all were asleep made one feel mysteriously protected. Morocco spellbinds me again, as once before. It is a deep and undefinable attraction. I once thought it was the labyrinthine shape of its cities, but now I love the desert.
In Marrakesh, Nin visits the food stalls and sits on a terrace watching ‘the whole glittering spectacle’ of acrobats performing, water-carriers dressed in red clothes that glitter with bells that jingle on their hats (carrying water in bags of goatskin and poured for the thirsty into copper cups), sword-swallowers, fire-swallowers, snake charmers (who have a love-hate relationship with their snakes who hiss at them as they touch their noses, eyes, even put the heads in their mouths, slip them down their trousers making the people scream in horror), one has two horrendous bites, merchants selling rugs, beggars, even hippies who come here just for the hashish and beg from the poor Arabs. She loves admiring the people sleeping on doorsteps in their grey, sky-blue or black burnouses in the intensity of the afternoon heat. The colours, smells and sounds so spectacular ‘that one’s hair tingles from the passionate intensity.’
Late one night while leaving a restaurant where women danced dressed in brocades and see-through muslin with gold beads, it reminds her of the Spanish flamenco dancers. Their hands shine against the dark sky as they clap the small cymbals they hold like castanets
To get to her awaiting carriage in the square Nin has to pass through ‘infernal’ streets where beggars ambush her. Some of them without legs, others with no arms, some in wheelchairs, some blind or hunchbacked. The whole scene is ‘Dantesque and terrifying’ in the dark – The extreme form of their begging stifles any compassion in her. There are too many of them – ‘The subterranean life of Morocco is tragic and gruesome.’ A cunning little boy of seven or eight sat at all the tables in a café offers to be a guide, or the service of his sisters, or drugs.
Nin visits the grand Bahia Palace where she sees four rooms dedicated to the four ‘legitimate’ wives (which most sects in Islam believe is the limit placed in the Koran on the number of wives one may take provided they are treated fairly and equally), the room of the favourite wife is situated in the garden and decorated all in deep rose reds with red doors and red bedposts ‘encrusted with copper and mother-of-pearl’, low divans, red rugs ‘like a carpet of flowers from Persian fairy tales,’ the pillows are of damask and silk. There is a cabinet made from cedarwood for the jewels. The whole room smells of cedarwood.
The king’s birthday on 9th July is a day of national celebration. From the pier, Nin observes the Arabs on white horses shooting muskets in the air on the beach that sound ‘dry and sharp’ and louder than a gunshot, hypnotic fantasias danced by men in satins and silks in transparent, spangled overcoats of muslin with orange tassels and carrying daggers, stamping their feet while dancing in the manner of Spanish dancers. The female dancers are dressed in thin, vivid green, gold, blue and wearing jewels and muslin turbans. The tents erected for the occasion are black and white outside but red inside. Inside, the public sit cross-legged, a lamb is bought in on a large copper plate that they eat with their bare hands. Then figs are served them with sweet mint tea. It is served everywhere – ‘at wayside cafés, in the home, at the market. The merchant offers it. The nomads make it over fires. You see fields of mint—children carrying armfuls.’
Their feverish hospitality makes Nin weep. The ladies are seated at the back. Moroccan flags can be seen flapping in the wind. She writes in the diary that she is not only living her own life in Morocco, witnessing the ‘wild beauty of the night by the beach’, but also reliving that of other women travel writers. Travellers from the West who have succeeded in ingratiating themselves with the climate such as Isabelle Eberhardt. She notes that whenever a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (known locally as a Marabout, often a scholar of the Koran or a cleric, sometimes even a Sufi minstrel) dies, they place his body on a camel and let the camel roam freely, wherever it stops, they construct a mausoleum and lay the body to rest facing Mecca. When she passed by a school, she could hear the children reciting the Koran which they learn to do from an early age. The school windows are hidden behind wood trellises but sometimes the children would come out and smile at her. The women have no schools to attend, instead they are taught by the skilled craftsmen and are, nevertheless, experts in dressmaking, embroidery, painting, pottery and weaving. In days of yore they also excelled at poetry, philosophy and music.
It is François’ birthday on 13th so they have a celebratory drink at the hotel. His birthday present is a long and heavy white cape with grey stripes and a hood.
At Mogador (the modern-day port city of Essaouira) on the way back from Agadir they see Julian Beck (founder of the Living Theatre in New York) from their tour bus, driving a van. Nin calls out to them and his wife Judith disembarks with their one-year-old daughter Isha to exchange pleasantries.
In a 1970 letter to Lili Bita (whose book of poems Nin had written an introduction to the previous year) she reported how she went through every scene of her trip to Morocco during the six minutes of radiation treatment she received for a tumour:
You and Robert are the only ones I would like to see or imagine in Morocco. No one else fits, or belongs. We could buy a white house in Marrakech one day, with a courtyard, pool, patio and fountain.
In another letter written the same year, she remembered a moment in Fez ‘when the external life matches or harmonizes with the inner one … It matched the dreams, so I was able to unite them.’ Nin would interpret this phenomenon in mystical terms at a later date, describing the floor-bed as ‘Bohemian’ and an aphrodisiac:
Escaping from the elevation seemed also to bring one closer to the earth, to flesh, and there was no fear of rolling away from the bed, falling. It suggested a lair, closer to primitive life, Oriental life, closer to the senses, travel and camping in the deserts, closer to human and animal nature. It reminded me of Fatima in Morocco, of harems, tents of A Thousand and One Nights.
*
Towards the end of 1972, Nin writes to the French author Marcel Moreau and to Felix Pollack to let them know she is to spend ten days in Morocco on assignment for an article she has been asked to write on a subject of her choice by the editor of Travel & Leisure magazine. She was paid $1750 (with expenses paid) – In the Diary, she regrets how late in her life this had come.
She arrives to the fragrance of perfumes, the smells of fruits, of leather and moist wool, walking between the walls of terraces draped in dyed skins, golden bedspreads and cherry-red rugs of wool or blankets which Nin mistakenly thinks is bougainvillea. She would see them later being shaped into babouches of various colours. The markets are full of people wearing sky-blue robes with black face veils or pearl-grey with a yellow veil, a black robe with a red veil, a pink one with a purple veil!
In her chapter on Fez in In Favour of the Sensitive Man, Nin describes in great detail the various styles and colours of the loose-swinging robes. It begins: ‘Fez was created for the delight of our five senses’ and she goes on to describe how all five senses are teased and delighted by the city. As a merchant invites her into his antiques shop, she informs him she is not shopping but writing an article on Fez. He bows to her and invites her in anyway in French for “le plaisir des yeux.”
The rug merchants invite Nin to look at the rugs as they serve her mint tea. She is able to distinguish between the local, more intricate designs and those of the Berber which resemble the simplicity of American Indian designs.
She passes by a stand selling Indonesian and Philippine sandalwood in huge round baskets. Small bottles containing extractions of rose essence. Jasmine, honeysuckle and other flowers line the walls. There are also bottles of rose water that is sprinkled or sprayed on guests from a decanter. Also on sale is antinomy for the eyes of coquettes giving them ‘such a soft, iridescent, smoky radiance’, and henna leaves in the same type of baskets that contain the sandalwood, also available in liquid form at a higher price.
The skies are the bluest she has ever seen against which the mountain peaks are shrouded in mist. The guide here is a Berber called Ibrahim who is dressed in a blue caftan over a white high-collared shirt and a white turban. He demonstrates his agility by climbing a tree and cutting down a coconut without spoiling his clothes which remain uncrumpled, untorn and not caked in dust. Nin says that blue is the symbolic colour of Fez. She describes the various hues of the blue of Fez. The azure long-forgotten but beloved of poets ‘Fez is azure. You rediscover the word “azure.” ’ Two women pass by on their way to a wedding or a party dressed in gold and silver caftans. She misses seeing the ‘handsome’ and elegantly dressed cavaliers from her previous trip ‘in their full regalia’ of white burnouses and gold daggers tucked into their belts and their horses trimmed in red. They are no longer there now, instead of them there are donkeys and mules carrying wood, skins, furniture, fruits, garbage, building materials, bricks or potato sacks.
As before, she still has to squeeze herself against the walls of the narrow streets, to let them through. The fondouks (inns) are still full of storytellers as they were in the Middle Ages (she watches one animatedly tell the story of Ali Baba) but some have been repurposed as warehouses. Nin finds the markets ‘enchanting’ but is bothered by the constant ‘pestering’ of boys either offering to guide you on your journey or quarrelling among themselves. Once, when such a quarrel breaks out, the guide Mustafa separates them and insists they make up and kiss each other on the head. This is how the grown-up men greet each other when they meet in the cafés – A ‘fraternal tenderness’ spreads over their whole lifestyle.
In Fez, Nin visits the thousand-year-old Al Qarawiyyin University library. This was one of the leading religious and educational institutes of the Islamic Golden Age. Her guide is a tall dark and handsome man called Ali who speaks fluent French ‘with beautiful diction.’ He wears a brown robe and yellow pointed slippers. He recites the Koran for her as well as verses from Omar Khayyam and his own poetry in praise of Fez and its araucaria, bamboo, date, monkey puzzle trees, its ginger plants, its fruits and flowers.
The Anais Nin Foundation ©
Ali is deeply zealous for upholding the customs and traditions of Fez. She is shown the students quarters reconstructed by the Beaux Arts and those that lie neglected and dilapidated, she is shown the fountain with some of its tiles eroded. He tells her that through ‘carelessness and indifference’ this vision of the past might soon vanish ‘like a dream of A Thousand and One Nights’. He wishes that ‘bountiful America’ would intervene and come to the rescue as it did in rebuilding the palace of Versailles. His information is peppered with the quatrains of Khayyam as he explains:
Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.
His emphasis on the ephemeral mutability of Fez strikes Nin and she holds the experience as a dream before it vanishes. As such, Nin is conscious of experiencing and sensing the city and its customs and artisans before they are all gone for good. She laments at the decay and mourns for the decapitated fig tree in the square outside the library where the students would once gather and pin their poems to the tree for passers-by. Her prose turns poetical and we get a long, intensely felt, highly emotive description of ‘the secret essence of Fez’ most evident in the ‘serenity’ of the dawn call to prayer given by the Muezzins which are ‘a lament and an invocation, a consolation and a lyrical thanksgiving’.
She accepts an invitation extended to her by Mr. Lahlou, a waiter at the Jamai Palace whose wife wanted to cook real couscous for her. They live in a tiny house and as they climb the small stairs, they see her cooking in a small kitchen on the terrace. Her mother is there too, her hands are dyed with henna. Neither of them can speak French and Nin does not know their language. Nevertheless, they are able to communicate and Nin expresses her delight at how delicious she finds the couscous. She is also served ‘a mound of millet’ with vegetables, chicken and raisins which they both eat from the same dish. The mother is not eating and Mr. Lahlou explains that it is because she cannot eat with a spoon and fork. Nin says that they are the ones who cannot eat with their hands. When the mother does eat, she does so skilfully by making little balls of the millet. Then they serve peeled oranges and mint tea. As she is about to leave, Mr. Lahlou takes down some pottery dishes from the wall and gives them to Nin as a gift – ‘Hospitality is sacred among the people of Islam.’
CODA: TURKEY
By contrast, Nin was bored by Turkey which she found ‘dull’, ‘infintely boring’ and stuck with living in an imaginary past ‘with so little of the past visible. And the present shabby’, ‘all rubble, stones’ as compared to Morocco where she experienced history as ‘presence.’ She could not leave soon enough and devotes a mere few paragraphs to it in her diary. The Club Méditerranée in Izmir (Smyrna) is just like the one in Morocco where the locals were not admitted and the atmosphere was French with no Turkish music is to be heard – ‘The only Turkish corner was the patio, with rugs and pillows, the copper samovar, and the big copper trays piled with fruit.’ The bungalows had loudspeakers one could not avoid ‘which blared the same loud rock music we had in Agadir’:
Izmir was cold, the sea icy cold. So cold that a woman who taught Yoga exercises and breathing for the club and who insisted on meditating while floating in the sea (though she had been warned of the effects of the cold water) finally drowned while meditating.
The women are all clad in black and the men look as if they have spent their entire lives on the high seas ‘I took a dislike to the Turks. Their dark eyes, dark hair and very tight belts gave them an air of conquistadors, which did not appeal to me.’ She has to rush back on 2nd August, in time for her husband’s cataract operation and regrets being unable to visit Istanbul (Constantinople) which one is sure would have appealed to her more than the few days she spent in Izmir but she remembers the ‘perfect, incredible’ taste of a fresh fig she had there!
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