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ABSTRACT
This study attempts to explore one of the less-studied works in Paul Bowles-Mohamed Mrabet's intellectual and translational collaborations, Chocolate Creams and Dollars, a semi-autobiographical novel illustrated by Philip Taaffe's photographs and found objects. The story presents Driss, a young Moroccan entangled within the shifts and twists of encounter with Westerners in a Northern Moroccan coastal city. By virtue of the three different interventions – Mrabet's story, Bowles's translation and Taaffe's art – the novel is contrapuntal, since each creator presents a different – and often conflicting – point of view. The three of them are observers who record Morocco's ‘Interzone’ from different angles and cultural agendas. This paper seeks to understand these networks of collaborative connections as they pertain to transcultural contacts, exploring the sexual, cross-cultural, textual and visual discourses running through the narrative fabrics. It analyses Bowles's slippages in authority and in authorship and Taaffe's objectifying and exotifying gaze, and how Driss, Mrabet's protagonist, turns his ethnographic gaze back upon the Westerners. It finally argues that Mrabet's novel, through the symbolic appropriation of experiences with Westerners, articulates intricate discourses on the construction of a cultural identity at the crossroads of neocolonial ventures and postcolonial anxieties.
Acknowledgement
This article has benefited from the rigorous reading of the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of North African Studies. We would like to thank them for their constructive comments and suggestions. The merits of this work are derived from their insightful remarks; its shortcomings are entirely our own responsibility. Immense debts of gratitude go to Professor Andrea Martínez Celis for reviewing the writing style and for correcting the spelling mistakes and the grammar errors of the final draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 al-Mirīkān [The Americans] is a song written and performed by the Moroccan folksinger Lhoucine Slaoui (1918–1951) after the 1942 American landings in Morocco. The song is one of the foundational texts in the Moroccan-American history of encounters. it documents the entry of American into Morocco and the experience of Moroccans with American soldiers.
2 See a brief reading of Homi Bhabha offered by Catherine Hall (Citation1996, 65–77).
3 His text disavows one of the most popular beliefs among young Moroccans who are convinced that the key to success is through interracial marriage; a catalyst for better life away from a home country that offers nothing except aborted promises and false expectations.
4 This emblematic character is further discussed in the next section given the intricate inconsistencies it offers to Mrabet's work.
5 Virginia Spencer Carr, Bowles's official authorised biographer, points in the same direction: ‘Bowles took no small pleasure in manipulating two or more players upon a platform of his own construction, then watching the ensuing action. Later he insisted that he had never considered himself a catalyst for other peoples’ actions’ (Spencer Carr Citation2004, 272).
6 Not only local kif, but also ‘dexedrine, liquor, and occasional LSD and opium’ (Field Citation2005, 150).
7 When asked in an interview whether he had ever met Moroccan with whom he could have a ‘Western-style relationship’ in terms of depth and reciprocity, Bowles replied: ‘No, no. That's an absurd concept, like expecting a boulder to spread its wings and fly away’ (Caponi Citation1993, 130).
8 ‘I am a man who – always I’m seeking. Always I search. I work here, I do something here. I could never waste my time in the bars, in the discotheques, no, no, no. That means nothing to me’ (Gullette Citation2009).
9 See Mrabet, Mohammed (Citation2011). With Much Fire in the Heart: The Letters of Mohammed Mrabet to Irving Stettner. Edited by J. Ronald Papandrea (La Verge, TN: Lightning Source, 2011). In a letter, Bowles referred to this correspondence as a process in which he did not intervene: ‘“I don't ‘ghostwrite’ them; I merely translate them as he dictates’” (Bowles Citation1994, 517).
10 For instance, Abdeslam, the main character in The Lemon (Citation1969).
11 To know more on timelessness as an Orientalist device, see Said, Orientalism, 55, 167.
12 Mullins does not mention the name of Mrabet's son.
13 A term coined by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno in his biography An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles (Citation1989).
14 See also Vásquez, ‘By the Book’ (Citation2016).