When I travelled to Marrakech a year ago, I never imagined that I would return. Yet, back in New York City, something about the Marrakshi way of life kept summoning me. Even my writing and research turned towards Moroccan culture. This morning, at the beginning of my third visit in twelve months, I made my way to Marrakech’s bustling central square. As I exited the taxicab, my senses were unexpectedly aroused. It wasn’t the menagerie of sights and the cacophony of sounds that struck me this sunny January day. For I had become accustomed to them. It was, instead, Jemaa el-Fnaa’s pungent scents — humans and horses, juices and tagines — that overcame me. And, thus, began another stay in the Red City.
Later I strolled from Jemaa el-Fnaa towards the kasbah, a walled neighbourhood that formerly functioned as the citadel and still encompasses the ruined Badi Palace. I headed south on Rue Riad Zitoun el Kdim. Across multiple visits, I had learned the relative ease of taking routes along a north-south axis. My discovery wasn’t baseless. Mounia Bennani, Morocco-based landscape architect and scholar, explained that two logics governed the planning of the medina’s major streets. In a book on the development of Morocco’s public gardens and parks during the French Protectorate, she noted a radio-centric logic in relation to Marrakech’s earliest mosque and a hydrologic one predicated on water flow from south to north. The latter accounts for the somewhat systematic configuration of major arteries, [i] including the one on which I now travelled.
French philosopher Frédéric Gros inspired my afternoon promenade. In a recent book on walking, he contends that, while placing one foot in front of the other, we can leave behind our obligations and worries as well as the histories and identities that restrict us at every turn. In so doing, we can enjoy that rare freedom of losing rather than finding the self. [ii] Whatever success I had on that front was compromised by my attire. In an effort to blend into the fabric of this ancient city, I had donned a djellaba before leaving the apartment. When I later received my first compliment, “jolie djellaba,” I smiled and took it kindly. But after the fifth remark, I realised that, far from concealing my identity, my North African garb ironically drew attention to it. Indeed, I stood in for any other Westerner who, having doled out some dirhams for a djellaba, “went native.”
As I walked, I tried not to scurry, as I’m wont to do. Only by treading slowly, argued Moroccan philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi, can one assume a medina’s rhythm and witness its events. As he explained in a 1984 letter to Jacques Hassoun, one must adopt that speed “to neutralise the cramped space, its promiscuity, the entangled situations too close, sometimes suffocating” [iii] — the circumstances that, on earlier trips, impeded my trajectory as I passed shoppers, stumbled over cats, and sidestepped mule-drawn carts and speeding motorcycles. Today, a more experienced pedestrian, I eased my pace and moved to the side so that I could absorb my surroundings without being overwhelmed by them.
Khatibi called his strategy a “psychology of detour.” [iv] I took my own detour as I made my way down the thoroughfare. Already hot in my djellaba and weary of the crowd, I stepped into a small alleyway, a picturesque wall having caught my attention. The wall had been painted the town’s ubiquitous red ochre but, over time, had started to fade and crumble. Beneath the top layer, I spied grey bricks, their surface likewise disintegrating. When human construction succumbs to natural forces, explained Georg Simmel, a new entity emerges. The German philosopher called it a “ruin” in his early-twentieth-century ruminations on the matter. Strictly speaking, only structures abandoned to nature rather than destroyed or neglected by humans qualify as such. [v] Yet, these everyday walls, still fully in use, deserve the designation.
A medina offers any number of clues — doors, pathways, and the like — to reorient the pedestrian.
After taking a photo, I exited the alley. Back on the main street, I searched for an archway, a stall, or even a face, any sign to help me get my bearings again. According to Khatibi, visitors who lose their way in a medina fault it for following “no logical spatial order, no hierarchy, no topography.” Yet, he contended, a medina offers any number of clues — doors, pathways, and the like — to reorient the pedestrian. “Everything is coded, if not programmed by an ideal model, that of the city of God of the Middle Ages.” Thus, Khatibi insisted, the medina is not a “labyrinth.” “[I]t is,” instead, “a simple path of reading.” [vi]
If their paths had ever crossed, Khatibi could have given Peter Mayne a much-needed reading lesson. Early during his mid-century residence in Marrakech, the Englishman related in his memoir, “I am losing all sense of direction and all sense of the hour in this city.” [vii] To find his way, Mayne considered a number of reading strategies, some that Westerners have historically used to comprehend and rationalise foreign spaces. Yet, all of his efforts were in vain. For example, Mayne attempted to orient his compass in relation to the shadows, thereby aiming to subject the natural environment to a directional calculus. “[B]ut [the shadows] fall in such an obviously haphazard fashion,” he claimed, “that it is not safe to rely on them.” [viii] Presumably, the buildings and other physical features cast those random shadows. Thus, it was the town that his comment indicted for a disorderly arrangement. When Mayne implied that the mosques’ relationship to Mecca couldn’t come to his aid, [ix] he further criticised the ancient town for deficient urban planning. Mayne owned a Michelin, a guide whose city map could have accurately plotted his trajectories. But he refrained from consulting it. After all, he prided himself on an innate sense of direction. In the end, he declared, “Marrakech lies outside the operation of normal rules.” [x]
Mayne’s frustration notwithstanding, the medina obeys rules. They’re simply different from those of other cities. As Morocco-based academic Hassan Radoine explained, a medina’s planning evolved in a complex dynamic of humans, spaces, and resources. It was divided into residential, commercial, and other districts with designated public and private uses. Residents apprehended that urban plan by reading street sizes and other indicators. If a medina was simply a haphazard collection of neighbourhoods, it wouldn’t have survived. [xi]
Any visitor can witness the vibrancy of Marrakech’s medina by ambling down one of the kasbah’s side streets, as I did this afternoon. The lane curved and twisted, little alleys tucked here and there. Makeshift stalls of fresh produce and fish lined the road. Men from late youth to old age manned their wares while women with large handbaskets strolled down the street. Attuned to the district’s layout, these merchants and shoppers went about their daily routines. In contrast, I worried that if I walked too far, I might get lost.
Retracing my path, I walked towards the Mellah, the Jewish Quarter. The neighbourhood’s spice market was on my list to visit. No longer able to rely on familiar routes, I soon lost my way. Thus, I did what any other intrepid Occidental traveller would do: I consulted the map on my cell phone. The modern-day equivalent of Mayne’s compass and Michelin, a digital map charts a clear path from one point to the next. Like those other technologies, it, too, orders and manages an otherwise puzzling space. Yet, the medina often resists Western cartological goals. Although I found the blue dot that corresponded to my location, I couldn’t locate the souk. Relying instead on intuition, my least refined attribute, I turned westward and, steps later, found the spice market.
Once my nose caught up with my eyes, I breathed deeply. Slowing my pace, I aspired to a “floating attention,” [xii] a phrase used by Roland Barthes, the eminent collector of incidents, including ones from his Moroccan travels in the late 60s. Keeping our attention available but ever moving, the French theorist suggested, we can note passing events. Yet, we mustn’t incite happenings, dwell on side occurrences, or retrieve our pad and pen at every turn. Not easy to do, Barthes confessed. Nevertheless, more than anything else, he wanted to jot down notations while walking. [xiii]
As I wended my way through the souk, I made a Barthesian misstep, lingering before a shop whose merchandise had caught my attention. As soon as I paused, the merchant approached. I wasn’t in the market for spices, but I didn’t mind listening to his sales pitch. Reaching into one of the barrels, he scooped up a handful of fine leaves and placed them in my hands. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. When I shook my head, he said, “Green tea.” After taking a whiff, I returned the leaves to the barrel. Setting my attention back in motion, I rambled towards the Jewish Cemetery.
The next day, I left the old town for the new or, as Elizabeth Warnock Fernea would have it, the roots for the topiary. When the American author and filmmaker first settled in Marrakech in the 1970s, the medina, with its “twisted, narrow streets that did not come out fair and square,” “bewildered and antagonized” her. She called it a “labyrinth.” After a while, however, she “began to wonder whether the medina did not have its own logic, its own structure, apparent only to those who lived within it and who had learned their own private ways of traversing it.” [xiv] Unlike Mayne, Fernea at least acknowledged, albeit tentatively, the medina’s urban logic. To make the city intelligible to herself, both its ancient and modern parts, she conjured an image: Gueliz was a topiary tree; Boulevard Mohammed V, its trunk; the medina, its roots, “the thousands of tiny, tendril-shaped streets and alleys and zankas and sibhas and darbs.” [xv] The metaphor, derived from Fernea’s imagination and not from the local culture, served as yet another Western imposition on this former French Protectorate. Even her comparison of Gueliz to Versailles’ topiaries recalled the country’s colonial history. [xvi]
This morning, as I walked from Koutoubia Mosque to Gueliz along Avenue Mohammed V, I noted my ease of navigation. Unlike the medina, whose winding lanes often befuddle a Western traveller, this area is comprised of wide thoroughfares intersecting with smaller streets, their predictable corners and abundant signage somehow strangely familiar. As I made a beeline up this monotonous avenue of red buildings and palm trees, my forward motion suggested a preference, however unintentional, for the new town’s “preestablished paths” over the old town’s “multiple entryways and exits.” [xvii]
The medina can be plausibly described as both fascicular root and rhizome. It all depends on your approach to navigation.
The two trajectories characterise the difference between, respectively, a tree and a rhizome. While a tree is a binary, unified, hierarchical structure, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explained in their powerhouse of French poststructuralist theory, a rhizome is a multiple, decentred, connective network. [xviii] Arguably, their tree is like Fernea’s topiary, but their rhizome is not the same as her root system. The latter resembles their “fascicular root,” an entity comprised of “an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots.” [xix] The medina can be plausibly described as both fascicular root and rhizome. It all depends on your approach to navigation. If you consult a map of the old city, you might be baffled by all of the winding paths. The Occidental mind can easily reckon with the maze by tracing the roots, as did Fernea, back into the trunk and the tree. [xx] The structure’s multiplicity is thereby absorbed into a unity. [xxi] If, however, you discard your map, you’ll experience the medina as rhizome. Simply take one step and, by “a logic of the AND,” link it to another. [xxii] Pondering this insight, I made a left onto Rue de la Liberté and entered Habib Kibari Art Gallery.
This afternoon, back in the medina, I took my first step towards a rhizomatic approach to navigation. When I alerted local artist Mohamed Najahi that I would pay him a visit, he inquired by text whether I could find my way. I assured him that I could locate Souk des Teinturiers, but whether I could find his stall in that market remained to be seen. Arriving at Mouassine Fountain, a neighbourhood landmark, I saw the souk’s entrance before me. As I entered the tangle of serpentine passages, something told me that I should take a left. Inching my way down the pathway, I eventually came to a fork in the road. Cautiously, I took a left and added to it another left. The “logic of the AND” eventually succeeded, for I soon spied my friend, a sixties-something Marrakshi native. After a brief greeting, I milled about the tiny gallery while Mohamed gathered a table and chairs. While admiring the large canvases on the walls and flipping through the small pieces on the floor, I found a canvas to purchase. It featured five men in brown or grey against a terracotta and grey background. After Mohamed wrapped it, we sat down for conversation over mint tea.
The next morning, I took the jaunt towards Bab Doukkala, a gate in the medina’s northwest corner. As I moved deeper into the neighbourhood, I passed men working, women shopping, and tourists plodding with luggage in hand. Now and again, I paused to marvel at olives, fish, and other goods on display. Reversing my course, I soon entered an art exhibit. Immediately drawn to some small paintings with Arabic calligraphy, I introduced myself to the artist. He demonstrated his craft by writing my name. Minutes later, I ducked into a local hammam. After a forties-something man led me to the innermost chamber, I stretched out on a mat and admired the two handsome Spaniards to my right.
Marrakech is better known for heat than for rain, but rainfall I saw this afternoon. Without an umbrella, I engaged in some of the problem-solving that travel affords while testing another literary travel praxis. Like Khatibi, Michel de Certeau found literature an apt metaphor for navigating an urban space. In his late twentieth-century book on quotidian practices, the French theorist called a walk in the city a “long poem.” [xxiii] A pedestrian is always partially constrained, he explained, by bureaucratic efforts to organise and totalise the city. Yet, those efforts cannot fully suppress a walker’s idiosyncratic trajectories, spontaneous decisions, and minor resistances. One literary device employed during a poetic promenade is the asyndeton, a locution without connectors. Drafting a poem in that fashion, the urban wanderer breaks up the space, taking some pathways while hopping over others. Indeed, the asyndetic walker obeys the logic of ellipsis. [xxiv]
This afternoon I added the asyndeton to my navigational repertoire. Adverse to walking in the rain, I charted an unconventional pathway through the medina. Instead of taking the most direct path to my apartment, I dashed from one market to another, their tarps and cloths providing welcome protection from the occasional downpours. Linking one souk to another, I applied “a logic of the AND.” Minutes after the early afternoon call to prayer, I encountered rows of devout Muslim men kneeling across a passageway. Respectfully abandoning that path for an unconnected one, I created an ellipsis. Slightly damp, I finally reached my apartment door.
As I bring this “long poem” to a close, I acknowledge that I rarely found the proper pace for the medina. But after I left Marrakech for Rabat, I witnessed a scene that offered future inspiration. One morning I sat in an outdoor café in the kasbah. As I sipped coffee, I watched three cats move about. The first trotted in one direction and then another. The second leapt on a table, next on a chair, finally landing on the ground. The third started down one path only to jump sideways and take a different route. As I pondered this ubiquitous Moroccan scene, I was tempted to detect in their improvised style Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive logic or Certeau’s elliptical one. Yet, as a long-time cat lover, I knew better than to project human thoughts on feline ways. Instead, I recognized in their movements an organic integration with their surroundings rather than an imposition from without. If only I could imitate them, I mused as I raised the cup to my lips, I might abandon the Western epistemology that has colonised my steps for a clearer path through Marrakech’s medina.
Endnotes
[i] See Mounia Bennani’s Villes-paysages du Maroc: Rabat, Marrakech, Meknès, Fès, Casablanca (Paris: Carré, 2017), 179.
[ii] See Frédéric Gros’s Marcher, une Philosophie (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 11-19.
[iii] See Abdelkebir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun’s Le Même Livre (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1985), 131. My translation of the original: “pour neutraliser l’exiguïté de l’espace, sa promiscuité, l’entrelacs de situations trop proches, parfois étouffantes.”
[iv] Ibid. My translation of the original: “psychologie du détour.”
[v] See Georg Simmel’s ‘Two Essays’, The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 371-85, especially 379-82, http://doi.org/10.2307/3848614.
[vi] See Khatibi and Hassoun’s Le Même Livre, 130. My translations of the originals: “aucun ordre logique spatial, . . . aucune hiérarchie, . . . aucune topographie”; “Tout est codé, sinon programmé par un modèle idéel, celui de la cité de Dieu du Moyen Age”; “labyrinthe”; “il est simple chemin de lecture.”
[vii] See Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakech (London: Eland, 1990), 23, http://archive.org/details/yearinmarrakesh0000mayn.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid., 23-24.
[x] Ibid., 24.
[xi] See Hassan Radoine’s ‘Planning Paradigm in the Madina: Order in Randomness’, Planning Perspectives 26, no. 4 (October 2011): 527-49, especially 527-32, 539-46, http://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2011.601607.
[xii] See Roland Barthes’s La Préparation du Roman, Cours au Collège de France (1978-1979 et 1979-1980) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015), 256. My translation of the original: “attention flottante.”
[xiii] Ibid., 256-58.
[xiv] See Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A Street in Marrakech: A Personal View of Urban Women in Morocco (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1988), 206, http://archive.org/details/streetinmarrakec00eliz.
[xv] Ibid. What Fernea calls “Boulevard Mohammed Cinq” is presumably the same thoroughfare as what I know as Avenue Mohammed V, mentioned in the next paragraph.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 21.
[xviii] Ibid., 5-25.
[xix] Ibid., 5.
[xx] See Fernea’s A Street in Marrakech, 206.
[xxi] See Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 5-6.
[xxii] Ibid., 25.
[xxiii] See Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 101.
[xxiv] Ibid., 93-102.
