Modernity is often associated with industrialism, technology and the loss of pastoral ways of life. Nostalgia is the sentiment that modernity yields—a structure of feeling characterized by a mourning for the authentic. Serematakis tells us that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostalghia, a composite word that corresponds to “a desire or longing with burning pain to journey” (1994: 4). But nostalgia is not just any journey, but a journey to the past, a journey home. Indeed, in ancient Latin it literally meant a return home, and in European history the word connoted a medical condition of homesickness, exemplified by an “acute longing for familiar surroundings” (OED). Loss is integral to the affective state of nostalgia.
Given the material conditions of life in Morocco since independence—mass urbanization, agricultural mechanization and a resulting loss of peasantry (though not a loss of poverty—it is not surprising that nostalgia permeates much modern Moroccan poetry. Indeed, nostalgia emerges as a major theme in the poetry of post-colonial writers, coloring the oeuvre with a tone of longing and melancholy. While emigration and diaspora have cultivated a nostalgia for home and for a homeland, new consumption practices and the media have transformed daily Moroccan ways of life to such an extent that intense nostalgia emerges for traditional practices, architectures and artisanship, as well as for their corresponding temporalities. Gendered practices have also transformed radically. As an emotion thought to be produced by a longing for what is no longer, nostalgia can fix upon many things.
Nostalgia for the old city
Nostalgia for the traditional medina, or old city, is particularly prominent in the writings of Moroccan poets. The medina has become a literary as well as a geographical topos. During the protectorate the French built their own cities to avoid the labyrinthine alleys that threatened anarchy and resistance from their shadows. For Moroccan poets, the medina contains all the contradictions of post-colonial existence — it is a place that is uncomfortable and sometimes even unsanitary, yet one that holds the nostalgia of childhood, hearth and home. In Scenes of the City, for example, poet Mohammed Bennis writes…
I went out to the old city, at night as usual.
The silence of the street surrounding me.
And the lights of streetlamps
pouring sleep into the eyes of the alley, showering me
with their yellow pallor, as I fill up my palm
with the flowers of the wilting wind.
Then I look once more.
I gaze into the emptiness, to see you
You, my old city, I forever see you:
Dust of the storms of ages
Covers the balconies of your houses, the colors of paint,
clothing the plaster, whose carvings repeat the song of sadness.
Dust of the storms of ages
Gathering on the bricks of minarets, and on green-roofed mausoleums
on the entrances of markets, rising
Above the front of branches (1)
In this poem the city is alive — its alleys have eyes, its body is covered with the dust of ancient storms. It is old and tattered, bleeding with shadows, obscure and bemoaned. The city is a perpetual vision whose plaster “carvings repeat the song of sadness” in their arabesques. Nostalgia for the bricks and balconies, the architecture that has not yet succumbed fully to dust, seethes from these words, as Bennis both mourns the aging city, and celebrates its persistence.
The precise name of the city is not named in the poem by Bennis, though as a Fessi he may well be talking about Fes. For Mohammed Serghini, on the other hand, the city of Fes is the explicit topic, this excerpt taken from the poem, “Assembly of Dreams” in his book, Fes, from the Highest Peak of Cunning (Fes de la Plus Haute Cime des Ruses 2003):
I.
Four neighborhoods recount the soul of the city. Utopian melody in four/four time; the birth cry of the disadvantaged, waking in an unattractive body. Reaction of libidinal chastity and the race of life’s routine. Outside these four neighborhoods there are only nests of straw to shelter the old eagles at the summit of the mountains, only bramble reeds to nourish the stray goats in the plains. Evasion assures the survival of chaos. (No plenitude escapes emptiness.) What will the hanging gardens say when their rotations are paralyzed, when water no longer flows under the norias, and under the grindstones of the mills.? Energy will be in a state of absolute grace. The wind yielding before the capricious pressure of the spheres. Blowing against the wishes of sailboats no longer.
…
II.
The taste of the city is strange. A mix of kif, tobacco and mint. Only these drugs can braid the strands of insomnia. Time passes inexplicably. The wax of candles illuminating only their own circles. Logics crack under the weight of heretical slander. The militias of grammarians, of lawyers and illustrious engineers sharpen their theoretical arms. Ancestors in intensive care (revived, we imagine, with cooking gas mixed with fish manure).
…
III
At dawn the alleys and footpaths of the
Kingdom are deserted. The red of daybreak
No longer infects the ruins’
facades, receiving only a mute
Light from this red. (We fly over history
With red wings) Taken with fire, a thief
Has taught the phoenix to fill
The attics with onions, garlic, coconut,
Dry figs, black pepper
And raisins. (This dosage an
Effective remedy for unrequited
Love.) Reviving the burnt
ashes, the same thief demands
that the genealogical tree blessed by the
City drug itself only with its own
Unripe fruits.
Who dares hope for the withering of this
Tree? Who dares refute the crime
Of its secular age.
From closed to open,
The shutters of the door
Reaffirm the nostalgia of two beings separated.
Reaffirm that return is nothing but union.
Reaffirm that leaving is nothing but divorce.
We carry our dreams to the next sleep
Where the bed, inert and shivering with cold,
Hides its insomnia under the sheets. (2)
…
For Serghini, the city—its neighborhoods, its smells and tastes—comes to signify a home that is difficult to inhabit and yet provides one’s only dwelling. It is a place of insomnia where ancestors are infirm and history itself is nourished only with fruits gathered before their time. There is a modernist tone of the wasteland here, the city both decrepit and seething, barren yet continuing.
Nostalgia for the countryside
Cities are not the only site of nostalgia in the Moroccan poetic oeuvre. Poet Abdellah Moussaoui gives us an example of nostalgia for a more pastoral scene, in this excerpt from the poem Jungle of Letters.
From the ornaments on the walls
fresh details burst forth
And I see the threshing floor…over there
And my dead father
Jumps in the midst of dust and wheat
in his hands a mule groans from the whip’s anger
Over there a bird races straying stones
…
…
I will disappear in the jungle of letters
Searching for my father
To direct him to the labyrinth…meandering…
To tell him:
I walked so long in your shouting voice
I saw your palms cracked with labor
More eloquent than the hills of books I read
But the question that – in my childhood –bothered you
Cut its teeth in my chest, oh father
Like the scythe in your fields! (3)
In this poem Moussaoui expresses the contradictions of modernity, including generational rifts created by literacy and urbanization. The poet leads his father into the city and its labyrinth (rather than away from it), even as the poet’s very body transforms into the harvesting field of his youth.
Yassine Adnan continues the theme of the harvest, though his nostalgia is a double one: the nostalgia for a lost peasantry, and the nostalgia for the port, the fisherman’s trade, and the community it affords:
Fishermen in Harvesting Clothes
(Asfi, September 1997)
Sailors with earthen temperaments
emigrated here years ago
burying the butts of their destinies
in the waves
they never forget
their fathers were peasants.
They don’t often think about God. But
they fear death
and so memorize the shortest holy verses
You know their customs well.
You are familiar with their secrets and the winds
of their twists and turns
their drunken friendships
from all that wine,
and their straw hats.
You were among them
when they gathered in a circle at night
around their cold
lethargic light.
You’ve memorized their sad songs
– the ones that don’t sound like
shepherds’ songs –
and their tall tales about big fish
even though they catch only small.
When the weather is a dog
they run like squirrels
to their warm tree trunk
at the gates of the port,
and chat for hours
as if words were the lungs of the world
and their gatherings the breath of life.
The fishermen…
are not always sane.
Once they threw their bodies one after another into the sea
under God’s sky
empty of stars.
No one paid attention to that.
No one ever pays attention to their misery,
or their little joys.
The fishermen…
are the ocean’s wide-open eyes
over the world’s harbors
the eternal keepers of the shrine of wakefulness
(when do they ever sleep?)
when they return home
at the end of the night – their wives
slumbering —
they plant themselves within them
haphazardly
and because the women are used to it
they sleep without underpants.
In the port
they forget they have wives and children
and talk only about big fish,
they also forget that only small fish
await them
but they talk incessantly
and chug their wine out to sea.
You see them roaring like waves
exchanging greetings
and obscene insults as they smoke.
Their large lungs breathe out clouds,
like the smoke of ships fleeing the fog,
and the friendship of Korean sailors
on the high sea.
Even when they head back to their homes
at the end of the night
they soon return.
With the reflexes of thieves
they pull out of their women
turn the key twice behind them
and go back to the arms of their immense
azure sea.
Those fishermen…
surely exaggerate
when they talk about themselves
as if fierce mainland ghouls
daily invade the sea
to punish the deeps.
Of course they exaggerate
because when they, separately, come back home
at night from the port
each one of them looks afraid and nervous
like a frail young tree
grown naked in the wilderness.
But they are brave when they are together
good-looking like children in their folly
and their straw hats. (4)
In this poem there is no return to the land, even if the fishermen never forget that “their fathers were peasants”. The return is to a new home, as the fisherman seek the “the arms of their immense azure sea.” But return depends on numbers, “because when they, separately, come back home / at night from the port / each one of them looks afraid and nervous / like a frail young tree / grown naked in the wilderness. / But they are brave when they are together…” In this poem there is a nostalgia for a vocational community, one that is highly gender specific, and not a little pathetic. And yet, this community has an important charge, as the fishermen “are the ocean’s wide-open eyes / over the world’s harbors / the eternal keepers of the shrine of wakefulness / (when do they ever sleep?)” As in Serghini’s oeuvre, the theme of insomnia surfaces, though the sleepless city is a specific one here — that of the port and the harbor, the entry-way to the social body. It is a masculine body, a frail body, one that is naked in the landed wilderness. Yet the fishermen are the guardians of the thresholds, “as if words were the lungs of the world / and their gatherings the breath of life.” The poet both pities this homo-social community (portrayed as like fish out of water among women and family) and is nostalgic for the fraternity it affords.
Nostalgia for the past
If the life-ways of fishermen are romanticized by Yassine Adnan, practices and somatic ways of being from previous centuries are thematized in the work of Fessi poet, Rachid Moumni. The poems in his volume, The Cradle of Descent, are replete with allusions to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam (as befits a book whose subject is the city of Fes, the spiritual center of Morocco and home to many Sufi groups). They also return the reader to a time before the printing press, when books were written by hand. Moumni adopts an old form of Arabic script, a style of calligraphy that dates from at least the eighteenth century. What’s more, his poems are also accompanied by paintings done in ink – each poem has its correspondent image. For Moumni, these elements are all part of an integral and inter-dependent poetic expression.
Calligraphy is a highly developed art form in the Islamic world, as well as a spiritual discipline. Yet writing is only a substitute for the voice in the Islamic tradition, the voice considered to be the unmediated link to the soul. Because it is written by hand, however, calligraphy is closer to the soul than other forms of print. Calligraphy represents the “autograph” or “signature” of the author (Messick 1992).
There are many styles of Arabic calligraphy, each indexing a particular historical moment and school. Moumni employs a particularly Moroccan script (khat) that was popular several centuries ago in both scholarly and religious texts. The calligraphers of the period did not “erase” the inked text, but added notes, additions, titles in the margins, leaving a trail of their thought processes. Moumni evokes this presence of history by writing his titles perpendicular to the text, requiring readers to actually turn the page in their hands in order to read the poem. Readers are thus involved in the tactile dance of body and text. The script Moumni employs is one that enlarges some letters in relation to others and that fluctuates in the thickness of the line. The density of line and the inconsistency of letter size make its reproduction in type virtually impossible. In the tension and flair of the lines, it expresses the personality of the artist. The form of both the word and the poem on the page contributes to the meaning of the poem as a whole, like gesticulation adds to language.
What’s more, each of Moumni’s poems is accompanied by a painting; indeed, he often inscribes his words on the ink painting itself. For Moumni, the poem is already a translation of a feeling that finds its first (abstract and architectural) form in the image. His poem-paintings are a materialization of the imaginal world of barzakh, an intermediary realm between flesh and spirit in Sufi ideology, where the imagination begins to condense into material form and where material forms are spiritualized, understood as symbols on the path to gnosis.
In the poem The Key to Absence, for example, we find that the ink painting that accompanies the poem brings the gaze into the twisting lanes of the old city. There is a doorway in the center of the painting, archways are visible, and the chiaroscuro that distinguishes the streets from the walls reflects the absence and presence that thematize the poem. In the text itself Moumni stresses the word “EFFECTS”, imbuing the inked lines with the weight of history. Although the sediment of time is swept clean with light, it still lives in the hidden melodies, the shadows. Much like Bennis’ “dust of the storms of ages,” the traces of history are inscribed in the earth:
The Key of Absence
what hidden melodies
ayyu muwalin agh-ghamidin
nearly awaken the twisting lanes
yushiku an yuqiza al-mun‘atafa
the doors
al-abwaba
and the slumbering roofs
wa al-astuha al-ghafiyah
what EFFECTS will be written on the earthen stairs
ayyu ATHARIN sa yankatibu ‘ala ad-draji ath-thurabiyya
swept clean
al-majluwati
with a broom of light?
bi maknasati ad-du’i
what returner does that balcony hasten home
wa ayyu ‘aidin tast‘ajilu tilka ash-shurfatu
hanging for a thousand nights
al-mu‘allaqatu mundhu alafi layali
like a key to absence?
WA ash-shabihatu bi miftahi al-ghaybi? (6)
Moumni draws heavily upon Sufi symbolism and metaphor: the concept of absence as a destination being particularly salient. Absence is the home of the seeker. It is a residence whose balcony beckons. Absence lives behind the doors of the labyrinthine streets of the Fes medina (the labyrinth was also present in Moussaoui). Moumni is explicit about the allusions. “In my poems,” he says, “woman is the city and the city is Fes,” his first “cradle.” His poems contain images of paths, streets, balconies, roofs; in short, the architecture of the medieval city of his birth.
