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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Through a reading of Moroccan writer Abdelkrim Jouiti's 1999 short story "Medina Al-Nuhhas" (The City of Brass), this essay seeks to understand how imagined global cities of the past function as imprisoning architectures of memory and how narrative space can be cleared to creatively imagine a new future. The essay argues that in re-telling multiple stories of the City of Brass, Jouiti's text works to expose multiple layers of nostalgia in dominant discourses of modernity, memory and identity in order to critique the processes of industrialization, urbanization and the drive for modernity in contemporary Morocco. By unearthing and questioning intertextual literary traces, rumors and ruins from Arabic and modernist traditions, the text destabilizes the monumental and monolithic nature of cultural narratives that imagine the greatness of the past so as to dissimulate the lack and inequality of the present.
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Cars zigzag and collide on the slippery streets of Casablanca at night. It is raining, and intoxicated men and women circle the peripheries of the city searching to prolong the evening high. As fog rolls in from the Atlantic, they lose sight of their destinations, and the city streets become the site of accidents and their accidentals: chance encounters, injuries, broken bodies, death. This is the modern Moroccan city as described in Mohamed Zafzaf's 1999 short story "Une nuit a Casablanca" (A Night in Casablanca): during the day, its arteries open to social and economic mobility; at night, the avenues serve as vehicles of destitution for marginalized peoples seeking to escape reality. Human interaction and intimacy take the form of shared whisky, rolled joints, robberies and car crashes; no true or meaningful communication is possible. And thus for Zafzaf, the city at night is where the drive for modernity takes a wrong turn, where history veers off-track.
In many respects this literary image of Casablanca as a spiritual wasteland corresponds to a general depiction of the city in late twentieth-century Arabic literature. As numerous scholars have shown, the Arabic novel's aesthetic response to the rapid transformation of reality is the figure of the city as a site of alienation, fragmentation, and conflict associated with modernization and capitalist urbanization of the region. Critics such as Hafez Sabry have argued that where the city was once figured in literatures of various colonial periods as a site of community, social cohesion, and resistance, in the rapidly industrializing postcolonial 1960s, the city began to appear as the site of instability and disillusion with the unfulfilled promises of modernity. R. C. Ostle expresses it this way: "The New City in the Near and Middle East in the nineteenth century and beyond was a proud symbol of belief in the type of progress and modernity enjoyed by more privileged areas of the world. Today much of the fabric of these cities is decayed and crumbling as the hopes which once inspired them" (202).
One need only look at the extensive shantytowns that are scattered throughout Casablanca to see how the city fabric has failed many of its inhabitants and how urban planning builds upon and renders concrete the unequal development that has accompanied Morocco's modernization process. In homage to its namesake, one of the newest Casablanca neighborhoods, Haj Californie, is resplendent with large gated villas, watered gardens and manicured lawns. This utopist image of "Western" industrialized society contrasts starkly with the proliferation of neighboring shantytowns, tented communities or empty lots with small trash piles that seem to be persistently burning. For the "citizens" in these communities, there is often no running water and sparse electricity. As the city builds up and outwards, these are the people left behind.
The way in which Casablanca is constantly morphing is not new-in fact, one can say that the city has always resisted a fixed and homogenous spatial identity. As Susan Ossman remarks in her book on the city, Casablanca is a "chantier" 'construction-site city: a work in progress without memory (21). Within the commercial city center of high-rise offices and glass-paneled corporations, even the street names defy memory. After independence, streets named after French political, historical, and literary figures were renamed after Moroccans in an attempt to reconfigure Casablanca as a Moroccan city and not the essentially colonial one it once was, for Casablanca was but a small town before the Protectorate. While signs have changed, street names still contain their colonial marker and are referred to by residents as "Rue Lieutenant Mahroud, Ex-Chevalier Bayard" and the like. Like precolonial Arab and Berber memory, new and imaginative English-language signifiers in Casablanca's lexicon of identity, such as Haj Californie, seemingly stand apart from a colonial past, but are profoundly linked to global capitalist expansion and do not exist independently from past narratives of colonial modernization. Casablanca is a palimpsest in the true meaning of the word: it is a cityscape that continues to be written upon the many layers of its existence. While such writing wishes the erasure of certain pasts, stubborn traces remain and are carried in its text.
The attempted Arabization and rewriting of modern Moroccan cities such as Casablanca has taken the form of state--hence monarchical--directed urban renewal. The construction of the $500-800 million mosque complex named after King Hassan 11 on the site of a formerly poor neighborhood between 1986 and 1993 attempted to rein in the identity of the sprawling international megacity gone awry under the mark of monarchical sovereignty. More recently, in the summer of 2005, King Mohammed VI was constantly featured on the Moroccan nightly news looking at architectural plans for Casablanca and other urban areas. His gestures and words, translated into Moroccan Arabic, two Berber languages, Spanish and French, performed his commitment to provide appropriate housing for all urban Moroccans in a massive campaign that would raze the rambling shantytowns that stubbornly abut some of the more prestigious housing developments under the directive of "urban renewal" and the eradication of "insalubrious living." This reference to hygiene and filth, and modern monarchical Morocco's desire to cleanse itself is not surprising. William Cohen writes that filth is "wholly unregenerate, contaminating, even toxic, and demands to be rejected and denied" (x), for it is a marker of unacceptable alterity and marginalization, and thus can pose a threat to authority and power. The urban renewal project guided by the royal family seeks to reintegrate its subjects into a community defined by romanticized common national principles, character and history. As the late King Hassan II remarked: "['f he classic form of the Moroccan Islamic city, the flower of our cultural greatness, is in the process of disappearing into a nameless and indescribable magma. [...] In the midst of modernization, we must preserve that which is beautiful and authentic, conserve spiritual identity, which is both Moroccan and Islamic, of architecture and urban formation" (qtd. in Geertz 287).
If the state refuses to locate national identity in the filth and memory-vacant magma of urban Casablanca and its shantytowns, in what architectures can it situate collective memory? In reaction to the instability of the modern global city--unstable in its imaginative mutations and unequal development--we find the state attempting to fix Moroccan memory through a stabilized history: the establishment of monuments to the royal family, UNESCO-protected buildings, museum narratives focused on continuity, and the King's resurrection of the "Islamic city," a concept that has been adeptly deconstructed and criticized by architectural historians as a mythical and romanticized construction. (1) For the Moroccan state, the idea of a global city firmly under the aegis of an Arab, Islamic or royal identity, would relocate power and prestige--lost through weakening empire, colonialism and capitalist globalization--back to the Kingdom. And yet, unlike Dubai and other wealthy Gulf states that have successfully fabricated new global Arab cities based on local heritage, international industry, and oil, Morocco does not have the material wealth or technology to create a great Arab global city of the present. For now, it can only create memories of its past. As a consolation to its inhabitants, its dynastic medieval cities are invoked as substitutes for the lack of present greatness--memories to feed those who wait for their prosperity and to consume the empty spaces that invite thoughts of elsewhere. And so, in the Moroccan context, can the Arab global city only be a thing of the past? Is the very idea of a great global city impossible in its present?
It is precisely these questions that Moroccan writer Abdelkrim Jouiti tackles in his 1999 short story "Medina Al-Nuhhas" (The City of Brass). As R. C. Ostle has eloquently written, the short story in Arabic literature is "the medium of the quietist, free of illusions, who describes the hidden lives of powerless people. It has shown a capacity for development and experimentation not yet equaled by the novel or...
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