PalmPilot versionQuestion:What books should I read or take with me?
A few years ago, the Rough Guide (formerly sold as the Real Guide in North America) was the only good source of practical on the ground advice for independent Morocco travel. Since then, the old Lonely Planet North Africa - A Travel Survival Kit guide has been replaced with much improved separate Morocco and Tunisia guides. In addition, excellent new guidebooks, well laid out and researched, have been published by Cadogan and Footprint. For francophones there is Hachette's annually revised Le Guide du Routard - Maroc. If you buy the Rough Guide make sure it is the 2001 Edition - the previous 1998 Edition was disappointing - hotel prices and bus times were very outdated, and some of the locations didn't appear to have been re-visited in years. The latest edition is much improved, with lots of updates and is the current best buy for Morocco. It is already available in the UK, and is released on May 31st 2001 in North America.
All the guides have their strengths and weaknesses - unless you've a generous luggage arrangement, find a good non-virtual bookseller, and find the one that suits you, your budget and destination best.
Whichever book you pick, check the edition - things do change and some of the information gets out of date pretty quickly - if the Rough Guide recommends somewhere as quiet and unspoiled, this is a self-unfulfilling prophecy: very likely it'll be full of RoughGuiders and their attendant hustlers. Also consider supplementing the practical guide with a cultural one - and there is none better than the sumptously illustrated French guide Edition Galliard, translated and sold as Knopf and Everyman in the UK & US respectively. It is not a book to buy for hotel or restaurant advice, but provides pictorial guides to the flora, fauna, landscape, art and architecture of the country - especially useful are the birds-eye perspective 3-d maps of major towns. A good up-to-date guide to customs and etiquette for travellers to Morocco is Culture Shock! Morocco published by Kuperard of London.
Read the literature of the country - long time maghrebophile and Tangiers resident (until his death in late 1999) Paul Bowles was best known for his novel of the death throes of French colonialism in Fez, The Spider's House and his first novel (1949), the existential The Sheltering Sky, since produced as a film by Bertolucci with the aid of Bowles; a soundtrack including tracks by Beat composer Richard Horowitz and traditional North & West African music is available on the Virgin label (CDV 2652); a glossy the making of book has also been produced for the film. Other novels of Bowles include The Delicate Prey and Let It Come Down, an autobiography Without Stopping, diary Days, Tangier Journal 1987-89, many short stories, the collection of essays Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, and translated tales of traditional Moroccan story-tellers. A recommended collection of photographs by the artist Owen Logan is presented with short stories by Bowles in Al Maghrib from Polygon, Scotland. An account of a visit to Bowles in late 1995, and more pointers to his work can be found on Annette Solyst's site.
The most famous native Moroccan writer is probably Leo
Africanus - many more recent writers are now available
in English with the help of the translation and promotion of
Bowles - the stories of Mohammed Mrabet are
recommended, as is the autobiography
Look And Move On, with its moving account of a childhood
spent as an impoverished Moroccan,
For Bread Alone by Mohammed Choukri. There
is also a tradition of
Francophone Maghrebri Writing. Expatriate Berbers have their own
literary magazine, the
Amazigh Voice.
| "The Sheltering Sky is an adventure story in which the adventure takes place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert, and in the inner desert of the spirit. The occasional oasis provides relief from the natural desert, but the sexual adventures fail to provide relief. The shade is insufficient, the glare is always brighter as the journey continues. And the journey must continue - there is no oasis in which one can remain " |
| Paul Bowles |
Tangiers from the time of the Beats to the Forbes megabash of 1989 is described, complete with all the literary gossip, in Ian Finlayson's City of the Dream: Tangiers - an earlier scene is found in Edith Wharton's In Morocco. For some impressions of the desert there are Albert Camus' short Algerian stories Exile and the Kingdom, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the Italian journalist Attilio Gaudio's The Western Sahara and the classic travel tale of Cunninghame Graham's Mogreb-El-Acksa:A Journey in Morocco. One traveller recommends the locally-sited mystery Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish by Dorothy Gillman. Two accounts of trying to live as a local are Peter Mayne's A Year In Marrakesh and Elizabeth Fernea's A Street in Marrakech.
Question:What recordings of Moroccan music can I find
Paul Bowles was also a composer and evangelizer for Magrhebi music - Sub Rosa have 2 good CDs: traditional musicians recorded in situ (with tracks recorded in the street by Bowles himself) on Moroccan Trance Music (Sub Rosa, SUB CD013-36) together with in situ recordings of jilala and gnaoua music, and Dark Star At The Point of Darkness (Sub Rosa, SUB CD014-37) which contains Bowles' own work, including reading of his poetry (the title is taken from the death scene in The Sheltering Sky). More Bowles music is to be found on Baptism of Solitude.
Appearing in the works of William Burroughs (Face To
Face With the Goat God) is the music since recorded in
Apocalypse Across The Sky by
The Master Musicians of Jajouka
(Axiom, 314-510 857-2) which has since stirred up some
genuine-vs-commercialized
controversy;
see also The Pipes of Pan by Brion Gysin,
Richard Sutherland's biography
Jajouka Rolling Stone,
An Introduction to the Master Musicians of Jajouka and the work
of other Beat writers, artists and
film-makers. Prominent
Moroccan musicians include Nass el Ghiwan, Najat Aatabou, Mahmoud
Guinia, Hassan Hakmoun and Le Malhun De Meknes.
Question:Out of all the books, which do you recommend?
