American patrons in the interzone of Tangier
Written: Feb 26 '03 (Updated Jan 10 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Interesting material, insightful analyses
Cons: Overgeneralization and loose notion of "colonialism"
The Bottom Line: A long and somewhat academic discourse on a short and academic book about (homo)sexuality of western men and younger Arabs in Tangier (expanded to consider Chester)
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Greg A. Mullins - Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burrou... |
In a revision of his 1997 Berkeley dissertation, Greg Mullins analyze writings about the patronage of young Morrocan males by Europeans and Americans as represented in writings by Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Alfred Chester (Mullins gives each his own chapter) and three Moroccans whom Bowles translated and sponsored: Mohammed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, and Mohammed Mrabet (discussed together in a single chapter). Tangier, a free port in which Americans enjoyed extraterrioriality from 1787 until 1956, was a place where postwar (World War II) Americans could live well on small incomes from America: "Living precariously at the margins of American society at home, Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester sought another kind of marginal space abroad, a space where they could live and write comfortably" (p. 16). They also sought another kind of freedom at the margins of Europe and Africa: enjoying relatively easy access to sex with exoticized/eroticized young and masculine Morrocan males—"easy" so long as the youths were paid or gained other benefits from relationship with First World patrons, and "easy" in contrast to the policing of male-male sexual contacts back in the USA and the more general "repressive atmosphere of the culture of conformity in postwar America" (p. 5).
The Long-Term Residents and Natives
Five of the six writers (the exception being Choukri) have manifested little interest in nationalism, colonialism, or neocolonialism at a conceptual or macro level. Bowles and his Moroccan protégés have provided coolly unsentimental accounts of intercultural relations between the desiring Europeans and Americans and the desired Moroccan males who are far more interested in obtaining wives, starting and maintaining families, and attaining economic security than they are in the exotic (but not for them eroticized) visitors who show an interest in them and whom they sometimes sexually penetrate. Especially Mrabet and Layachi present Western tourists and expatriates as "easily taken advantage of because they are wealthy and effeminate" (p. 128); in writings published in his own name, Bowles also shows Westerners who seem gullible and are exploited by Moroccans. The gay-identified Westerners accept that the males whom they bed do not have a sexual identity and sleep with females when they have the chance to do so (chances which are very rare without money and position, two requisites that foreign patronage can enhance).
In part because Paul Bowles considered discussing his own sexual desires as unseemly, it is not obvious that what he sought in his own life was a racialized otherness. It seems that he was in love with one early protégé, Ahmed Yacoubi, who managed to establish independence in part through connections he made from associating with Bowles, but that what Bowles most sought was not dark skin or Muslim exoticism, but plenitude of anonymous sex partners. Mullins quotes a 1933 letter from Bowles to Aaron Copland in which Bowles posed the rhetorical question "Where in this country can I have thirty-five or forty different people a week, and never risk seeing them again? Yet, in Algeria, it actually was the mean rate" (p. 45). I entertain doubts about the absence of the "risk" of ever seeing former tricks again in Algiers of the early 1930s, though an obliviousness of their individuality and even their names could make not recognizing them more probable.
"Anonymous sex with racially and culturally other men provide[d] Bowles with pleasure unencumbered with intimacy or emotional attachments," Mullins writes (p. 45). Given Bowles's long residence and intense interest in Moroccan "folk" culture, as well as long-running relationships with some protégés he transformed into published writers, he had to have at least ideas about the reactions of those with whom he had sex. At least he imagined Moroccan subjectivities in many of his works of fiction. I also wonder how anonymous Bowles was in cruising the city where he long resided. Although Mullins's formulation is surely descriptive, could it be that the qualification "with racially and culturally other" is inessential, that it was anonymous sex was where Bowles found pleasure, pleasure that was unencumbered with intimacy or emotional attachments?
Bowles made racialized desire (or, at least, eroticized alienness) a part of various characters — many of them women — in his fiction. Perhaps this was autobiographical projection rather than observation of others or imaginative creation. Bowles told an interviewer that "all relationships I ever had, from the beginning, had to do with paying" (quoted p. 44). But patron-client relationships are not only economic transactions. There are rights and obligations for both roles that differ from buying and selling labor, including sexual labor. As Pierre Bourdieu, writing of (intracultural) clientage in Algeria, put it
"A man who wants to be treated as a 'master' must show he has the virtues corresponding to his status and the first of these is generosity and dignity in his relations with his 'clients.' The compact uniting the master and his khammes is an arrangement between one man and another guaranteed by nothing beyond the 'loyalty' that honour demands.... The 'great' are expected to show that they are worthy of their rank by affording material and symbolic 'protection' to those dependent upon them." (Outline of a Theory of Practice., p. 190; Bourdieu went on to mention the patron arranging marriage for his client; for a system of expectations of even greater obligations on the part of patrons)
Bowles showed transactions freighted with expectations — often with conflicting expectations—in intercutural encounters and relationships, and I think Mullins too quickly concludes that Bowles could purchase anonymity along with sexual gratification(s). This is especially surprising because the Bowles text central to Mullins's analysis, The Spider's House, shows an American with more than a few resemblances to Bowles realizing that the 15-year-old Arab, Amar, is a distinct individual. The novel provides access to Amar's subjectivity and the Amar on the pages of Bowles's novel seeks friendship with his foreign patrons: John Stenham (the male one of a pair not unlike Paul and Jane Bowles) in Amar's view "had been a friend; perhaps with time they could even have understood one another's hearts" (quoted, p. 38).
In the texts Mullins considers, "Layachi, Mrabet, and Choukri narrate realistic stories that emphasize the economic dimension of sexuality in Tangier. Specifically, their texts represent sexual relations with foreign men" (p. 111). The Moroccans (mediated by Bowles's editing and translating) do not claim to have been exploited. If anything, they portray themselves as savvily using the money they obtain from foreigners to enhance their positions within traditional Moroccan hierarchies, in particular having the resources to marry and, thereby (in the local understanding), becoming a man.
The ways and wants of the foreigners are hard for the Arab youths to understand, but they have ongoing relationships with the foreigners and amass modicums of wealth through anonymous one-night (or one-afternoon) stands. Mullins characterizes the way in which Mohammed in Mrabet's Love with a Few Hairs and Omar in Layachi's A Life Full of Holes obtain the resources to become married men as "prostitution" (p. 130), but this is not Mohammed's or Omar's view of their long-lasting relationships with foreign patrons.
I'd characterize Mohammed and Omar as expensive male concubines who also have (/get) wives. What they offer their foreign patrons is more than sex. Some of their allure is companionship and connection to the Moroccan world in the midst of which the foreigners live but generally do not much participate. I can see an argument that the last is "colonial desire," but I think that "colonial desire" has to involve a will to dominate, whereas the American (and European) men are content to be dominated (in and out of bed) and to pay rather than to profit from raw human materials they extract in the interzone of Tangier.
From a western perspective, the rate of payment may seem low, though Omar drains all of François's assets in Love with a Few Hairs (I will resist the temptation to speculate about the extent to which "love" in the title is meant ironically, since the title is likely Bowles's rather than Layachi's.)
The pattern of poor Moroccan males being able to afford to marry on the basis of patronage by westerners extends beyond what is represented in the books with the bylines of these Moroccans. Sales of the books in the west (in forms shaped by Paul Bowles) enabled Layachi to marry even though he had refused to engage in relationships including sex with foreign men like the one of Omar and François that he chronicled in his autobiography. (Mrabet also showed an exchange of words for money in his 1992 novel Chocolate Creams and Dollars).
Who (if anyone!) is trying to "fix sexual differences" (that is, to make differences between western sexual identity and proletarian/lumpenproletarian Morrocan behavioral bisexuality without sexual identity absolute and invariable) or to "consolidate masculinity and adult male subjectivity for [the] narrators" is not clear. As with the "life histories" published in the name of the elicitor and translator (e.g., Marjorie Shostak's 1981 book Nisa), the market is for "authentic native voice," but the extent of shaping by questioning, editing, and translating is elided in the books by Choukri, Layachi, and Mrabet: "the way the texts were produced calls authenticity and originality into question" (p. 132) not least in that the cool narrative voice cannot easily be distinguished from that in Bowles's writings.
"Pretended to enable self-representation" (p. 133) seems to me overly harsh in the absence of evidence that Bowles did more than tighten Mrabet's oral narratives into conventional written form, and texts that are published as books are generally edited, not the unmediated product of immaculately isolated authors. Moreover, Choukri's works translated by Bowles were written in standard Arabic. There is still a longing in some for "authenticity" of "native" representations of worlds without western influence (what Mullins considers "colonial nostalgia," but which I consider impossible prelapsarian fantasy). "Authenticity" could be dismissed because these writers have told stories about relationships with westerners instead of writing about some imaginary "pure" tradition and entirely intraethnic relationships.
However, as Mullins points out, "the tension between Arabic and Berber dates to the invasion of Arab armies in the seventh centuries" (p. 123); hybridity and intercultural/interlingual conflicts are part of the reality of Morocco and the rest of the world and were so before there was a USA or American expatriates in Tangier. "Moroccan 'reality' is a multilingual fluidity in which life unfolds within the stream of constant translation, a constant negotiation between languages," as Mullins writes (p. 122—specifically of Mrabet's representation of it). Bowles, to some degree, valorized the vernacular Magrebi Arabic against the locally approved literary language of conquerors from the east, classical Arabic, and, ironically, Choukri became an established writer publishing in classical Arabic by way of publication in English (of his own translation of his classical Arabic text into Spanish that was then translated into English by Bowles: the linguistic codes in Tangier are multifarious and complex, indeed!)
The Sex Tourism of William S. Burroughs
In the canon of twentieth century American literature, William S. Burroughs looms larger than Paul Bowles, primarily for druggy experimental writing and association with drugs and with other "beat" writers, rather than for representing the international zone that was Tangier. Mullins argues that Burroughs's "postmodern vision arises in relation to the dispersal of power in the global system and to his dislocation from the United States" (p. 18). Though Burroughs eventually settled into the middle of the US (Lawrence, Kansas), "travel is frequently accompanied in Burrough's work by sexual adventures involving young male partners of various 'third world' origins" (p. 50), and an often-expressed, panicky fear of effeminacy (seeming to be a "fairy") as he enjoyed being penetrated by masculine youths.
Burroughs sought to be not only outside the law (police interference with how he chose to live) but outside society (and its morality). This quest, one very caught up with young, darker-skinned, "straight," male sexual partners, took Burroughs to Mexico, Ecuador and Peru in the late-1940s and early-50s, before moving to Tangier in 1954. Enjoying being topped by young Arabs and Spaniards, Burroughs wrote Allen Ginsberg that he felt "no weight of disapproving 'others,' no 'they,' no Society" (quoted, p. 69). After Tangier was absorbed in the newly independent Morocco in 1956, the freedom Burroughs felt to associate with (not just have sex with) hustlers narrowed to fellow infidels: "So long as I go with Spanish boys... no one disapproves or says anything. Whereas to walk around town with an Arab boy would be unthinkable at this point.... No one cares what the unbelievers do among themselves" (quoted, p. 70). Mullins stresses the delights of anonymity, but I find it interesting that Burroughs wrote about "walking around with" the boys he desired, which is to say association beyond anonymous sexual encounters. He did not want his relations and relationships to be censured or interfered with by those with authority to imprison him or to make his live difficult, but Burroughs certainly fell in love with men, even if he did not learn enough about some of his sexual partners to be sure he could distinguish whether they had already had him or were "fresh meat." I am suggesting a difference between taking pleasure in anonymity in and for itself and pleasures enjoyed anonymously, whereas Mullins seems to me to leap too quickly to attributing the former to Burroughs as to Bowles. Another way to put my distinction is between tricking being one's goal and tricks who are within the parameters of one's "type" being one's goal.
Burroughs's biography is that of someone who loved males who did not love him (and someone who felt feminized in "submitting" to penetration by the males he desired). "In the guise of Lee, Burroughs parodically described himself as someone who desperately wanted to love but could not and so pursued lovers 'who could not reciprocate, so that he was able to shift the burden of not loving, of being unable to love, onto the partner'" (p. 74). Like Mullins, I think this is an analysis of Burroughs by Burroughs. However, I think "could not" is an obfuscation of "I knew would not" (in both iterations). Love was, in Burroughs's view, an addiction, one to which he was very susceptible.
Tangier, even the phantasmagoriphical Interzone version of it he created in The Naked Lunch failed Burroughs, and he "came to accept the idea that the sort of paradise he sought is not available in a mysterious eastern city but rather has to be dreamed—or written—into existence" (p. 80). Burroughs did this with less exclusively racialized (i.e., dark-skinned) others in the kind of postnational manifestos of The Wild Boysand Port of Saints, hallucinatory tales of world domination by boys who, like the street kids Burroughs desired in Tangier, Lima, and Mexico City are
"young, masculine, rough, uneducated, and emotionally distant from their many sexual partners with whom they perform intercourse at every opportunity.... The wild boys are radically independent—free not only from discursive control but also from social and political structures such as family, church, and state. The demise of heterosexual institutions comes about after the wild boys develop cloning technologies that allow them to reproduce without women." (pp. 82-83)
Burrough's road to imaging a "world of perpetually aroused queer boys stripped down to jock straps and rocketing through the desert on roller skates with weapons drawn" (p. 85) passed through Tangier, but — except to some degree for parts of The Naked Lunch — Tangier is not represented in Burrough's fiction. The Naked Lunch may tell readers a bit about Burrough's acceptance of neocolonial privilege in Tangier of the mid-1950s and a lot about his fantasies and their frequent focus on a generalized "Oriental" other (who was more often Mexican or Spanish than Arab), but very little about any real world, even about the "interzone" of pre-1956 Tangier in which Burroughs tricked and yearned.
A Fetishist Who Fell Off the World Altogether
Burroughs was a deranged major writer, Bowles a very skilled minor writer with a coterie of admirers (and canonization in the Library of America series shortly after his death). Both lived in Tangier when it was juridically distinct from Morocco. Critic and would-be fiction writer Alfred Chester whose writings had been forgotten before his suicide in 1971, "lived in Morocco from 1963 to 1965, and, while early signs of mental illness appear in letters and fiction written prior to this expatriation, it was in Morocco that Chester experienced his first two major psychotic breakdown" (p. 87), as well as a love affair with a man named Dris. "Beginning in The Exquisite Corpse but especially in [the fragment included in the posthumous collection Head of a Sad Angel] The Foot, Chester attempted to write a new kind of subjectivity, one in which identity and desire become disconnected from the field of social relations" (p. 90).
Mullins uses Chester to posit a continuum of homosexual Americans having sex and feeling alienated in Tangier and writing about these in variously coded "fictional" guises. Chester exceeded even Burroughs in fetishizing a dark-skinned Other, though he was considerably more interested in who Dris was than Burroughs was in who his tricks were. Still, as Gore Vidal remarked in his foreword to Head of a Sad Angel, many of Chester's autobiographical stories "deal with the quest for Love though Cock is often settled for with unseemly haste" (p. 7). Also like Burroughs, Chester fetishized Latino others before landing in Tangier and wanted to be colonized (taken) more than to colonize the Other, whether the other was gypsy, Puerto Rican, or Arab ("I want to make love in seven hundred languages to seven million Africans—South Americans and Asians too," Chester wrote in "The Foot", desired numbers exceeding even Bowles's).
I also find it hard to accept that there is significant difference in abjection, in campiness, or in surrealism between Burroughs and Chester. If anything, The Naked Lunch seems more surrealist than The Foot does. Campiness and wallowing in abject surrender to arbitrary masculine youths run through both Burroughs's and Chester's writings set in Tangier. I don't read Chester's writing about homosexuality as being "joyful" as Mullins oddly characterizes it (p. 109): mutual love appears every bit as hopeless in Chester's writings as in those of Bowles or Burroughs. Chester's expressed greater passion for the impossible objects of his lust, but "enjoyment" of or with them? The views (both locals' and visitors') aired in "Glory hole" are as cynical as any represented in Bowles's writings. It is perhaps Bowles himself who is the model for Henry, who exclaims: "These savages can't love; they can only exploit" (Head, p. 220), but it is Chester's essaying narrator who notes that "it is always correct to go to bed with one's inferiors" (p. 224) and his journal jottings that recognizes the local view that a good way to earn money is to penetrate homosexual aliens (p. 257). "I would do anything to please any of my lovers. I can almost vomit at the thought of it, but only because they haven't done anything to please me back" (p. 262) is far from an ode to joy, especially by someone describing himself as "starving for love" (p. 263), even if there were moments of "holiday from suffering" (p. 265) and moments of believing that "it was myself he was f___ing" (p. 285).
Conclusion
In that Tangier was not an American colony and there was no strong American tradition of pining for or fetishizing Arabs when Bowles arrived or when Burroughs and Chester followed, and in that their homoeroticism was anything but sublimated to imperial projects of dominating North Africa, the question of "colonialism" seems to me somewhat begged—only "somewhat" in that Mullins shows a continuity in the sexual tourism in Latin America (where American power has been more significant) and in Tangier of the three American expatriates. At the end of a fascinated engagement with Mullins's analyses and the materials on which he deploys postmodernist/queer methods, I do not see how the sexual "adventures" of a few American writers structured colonialism in general or the distinctive masterless neocolonialism of Tangier in particular, though some degree of freedom from police interference enabled the American writers to attain some gratifications and realize they were still far from Utopia at the northern edge of Africa in a far-from globalized sexual setting.
Mullins's book is disappointing in the lack of a conclusion (beyond a paragraph at the end of the chapter on the Bowles-mediated Moroccan writers) and the failure to consider the Africanness of the desired other in these writers or in "structuring sexuality" in the larger canon of American literature, but Mullins provides a stimulating analysis of homo-eros in the lives and writings of Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Alfred Chester; and into the kinds of freedom homosexual Americans sought in exile to the interzone of Tangier after World War II. Mullins also provides a very interesting discussion of the language politics and the politics of representation in the "native voices" of those Bowles introduced in translation (a translation involving more than finding the most equivalent words for what the Moroccan men wrote or spoke into tape-recorders).
Recommended:
Yes
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