{"id":11399,"date":"2014-01-07T14:06:09","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T18:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11399"},"modified":"2014-01-07T14:06:09","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T18:06:09","slug":"warm-dusklands-on-a-very-cold-new-york-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/warm-dusklands-on-a-very-cold-new-york-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Warm Dusklands on a Very Cold New York Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the coldest day (so far!) of the year here in New York, why not warm up by reading Robin Yassin-Kassab<\/a>‘s account of his trip through Morocco \u2014 which ends up on summer afternoon in Marrakesh where it is 47 degrees Celsius \u2014 or 116 degrees Fahrenheit! Of course, if you have my Poems for the Millennium vol. 4 (North African Literature)<\/a> handy, you can read up & extend the visit via poems, texts & commentaries on many of the people & places encountered (Also check on the Critical Muslim issue RYK mentions below, Robert Irwin’s piece linking the great Ibn Khaldun \u2014 whose comments on poetics we reproduce in the anthology \u2014 to Sufi mysticism). Below, the opening paras of his\u00a0Reiseerz\u00e4hlung<\/em>, or\u00a0rihla<\/em>; you can read the whole piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Dusklands<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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\"maghreb\"<\/a>Last summer I travelled in Morocco (where I used to live) in order to write an essay for\u00a0the Maghreb issue of the Critical Muslim<\/a>, which I also edited. This essay is available\u00a0in full online<\/a>\u00a0(for free). To read the other essays, stories and poems (and there are some truly brilliant ones) you\u2019ll have to buy the issue (available on Amazon) or subscribe. Please support the journal\/ magazine by encouraging your local library\/ college to subscribe.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Morocco\u2019s Arabic name, \u2018al-Maghreb\u2019, emerges from the root gh-r-b, which denotes concepts including the west, distance, and alienation. \u2018Ghareeb\u2019 means strange. \u2018Ightirab\u2019 means living outside the Arab world, whether in the west or the east. \u2018Maghreb\u2019 also means sunset, dusk, the evening prayer, the time at which the daily fast is broken. Al-Maghreb al-Arabi refers to the entire Arab west \u2013 Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, the Western Sahara \u2013 but Morocco has no other name. It is al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, the furthest west, the strangest.<\/p>\n

The ancient Egyptians believed they spent the afterlife wandering \u2018the Western Lands\u2019. William Burroughs, who lived in Tangier, wrote a novel inspired by the notion. When I lived in Morocco, teaching English at the turn of the century, a Syrian woman of my acquaintance used to play on the word like this:\u00a0la tustughreb, anta fil-maghreb\u00a0<\/em>or, Don\u2019t be shocked, you\u2019re in Morocco! On this return visit I heard the same phrase from the mouth of a Moroccan man in a train.<\/p>\n

But shocked I was, a little bit, twelve years ago.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been living in the\u00a0mashreq<\/em>, the Arab east, before I arrived, and (foolishly) I expected the maghreb to be similar. I found a much more liberal place, one much less subject to taboo. For instance, depending on class and region, a Moroccan girl with a boyfriend is not quite the social catastrophe it would be further east. Moroccan sleaze is not hidden away (which is perhaps, overall, a good thing). I once almost pushed my son in his pushchair past men engaged in a sexual act, not in a dark basement but among the trees at the side of a main road. Several times I walked past the same exhibitionist in central Rabat. There were police nearby but they ignored him. And I frequently saw ragged street children sniffing glue-soaked rags, more of a South American scene than an Arab one. (I didn\u2019t see that on this recent trip). In addition to public taboos, Moroccans lack the softness and eloquence, the courtliness, of the eastern Arabs. But they also lack the airs and graces, the intense class resentments, the hypocrisies. You don\u2019t feel everyone is judging everyone else as you can do in the east, at least not in the same way, not to the same extent.<\/p>\n

[continued…]<\/a><\/p>\n

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On the coldest day (so far!) of the year here in New York, why not warm up by reading Robin Yassin-Kassab‘s account of his trip through Morocco \u2014 which ends up on summer afternoon...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1367,498,71,104],"tags":[1467],"class_list":["post-11399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-berber-literature","category-maghreb","category-middle-east","category-travel","tag-robin-yassin-kassab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11399"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11405,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions\/11405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}