Edith Wharton's "Morocco" ...and Mine

"Passing under the gate of Chella, with its richly carved corbels and lofty crenellated towers, one feels one's self thus completely reabsorbed into the past...Below the gate the ground slopes away, bare and blazing, to a hollow where a little blue-green minaret gleams through fig-trees, and fragments of arch and vaulting reveal the outline of a ruined mosque."

Above: The citadel of Chella in Rabat (2014) ...photographed by me today.

In 1920 Edith Wharton, the American author of The Age of Innocence, toured Morocco on the invitation of General Hubert Lyautey. France was keen to promote a benign image of its activities in its overseas "Protectorate" at the time and politically conservative Wharton, a self professed "French Imperialist", was keen to be of service.

My other antiquated travel guide during this journey is Life in Morocco and Glimpses Beyond (1905) by Budgett Meakin. The whole last section of his book is a dedicated attack on the French. The idea of a protectorate, warns Meakin, a good deal more sceptical of European motives than Wharton, would have grim repercussions for Moroccans. And he was right.

Unlike other North African and Arab nations, Morocco had proudly managed to maintain independence from foreign powers throughout the 19th century. In 1912, the Treaty of Fez was signed, effectively dividing Morocco into a French and Spanish protectorate.

It took Moroccans until 1956 to regain their independence from France with a significant loss of life and decades of ensuing economic and social dislocation that French and Spanish domination had created.

Today Spain continues its occupation of Moroccan territory in its "enclaves" of Ceuta and Melilla.

Above: Wharton's itinerary, from "Morocco" (1920)

Wharton's travel loge is nonetheless fascinating. It has personally been a valuable textual and visual touch stone for comparing what has changed and what has stayed the same in the last ninety-four years.

In the next few posts I will compare some of what Wharton wrote and saw in 1917 with my own observations and photos of the same locations in Rabat, Meknes and Fez.

Above: The citadel of Chella in Rabat (1917) ...from Wharton's "Morocco"

After my own experience of a vehicle breakdown in the desert - well, minor radiator leak- I was amused to read a similar event taking place at the beginning of Wharton's journey to Rabat, where we are today. 

I agree with Edith, a "mishap" early in a journey helps develop a certain kind of "fatalism" necessary to successful travel.

"The chauffeur turns the crank, but there is no responding quiver. Something has gone wrong; we can't move, and it is not much comfort to remember that, if we could, we should not know where to go. At least we should be cooler in motion than sitting still under the blinding sky.

Such an adventure initiates one at the outset into the stern facts of desert motoring. Every detail of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been carefully planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization. We were to "tub" in one European hotel, and to dine in another, with just enough picnicking between to give a touch of local colour. But let one little cog slip and the whole plan falls to bits, and we are alone in the old untamed Moghreb, as remote from Europe as any mediaeval adventurer. If one lose one's way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn.

It is a good thing to begin with such a mishap, not only because it develops the fatalism necessary to the enjoyment of Africa, but because it lets one at once into the mysterious heart of the country, a country so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied wilderness that until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the cities."

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