BALEK! BALEK! IMAG(IN)ING FEZ IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
Jamal BAHMAD
Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre
University of Fez, Morocco.
Email: jamal_bahmad@yahoo.com
Abstract.
In this paper, my aim is to unsettle the twentieth-century visual and written
representations of Fez Medina in the pages of The National Geographic Magazine, as a
prime vehicle of Euro-American culture's representation of Other cultures, and show how
heavily they demonstrate the persistence of Eurocentric depictions of this space as
Oriental, exotic, and backward. In its portrayal of Fez, the Geographic has been
representing its object almost through the same discourses of representation. This,
however, does not mean that this portrayal has been a stagnant one. For it has been
subject to different shifting emphases in the relations between the West and the rest of
the world, in general, and between the United States and Morocco, in particular. My
central argument here is that, under the controlling and classifying gaze of the National
Geographic, Fez Medina materializes in verbal and visual narrative as a metaphor for the
exotic, mysterious, and backward Other. First, I will outline the main tropes in the
representation of Fez and Morocco in the pre-1942 articles and argue that they envision
this space through the lenses of colonial discourse. I will then go on to demonstrate the
persistence of the othering modalities of this discourse in a 1986 article about Fez Medina.
Keywords: Fez Medina, National Geographic, Orientalism, exoticism, development.
I. INTRIODUCTION
In trying to substantiate the above point, I would like to focus initially on this
magazine's representation of Morocco at large. While this is obviously beyond the scope of
the present paper, a summary of the main argument of my previous work on the
representation of this country in this American publication of record will be of particular
interest to our assessment of the portrayal of Fez. Adopting a comparative approach to
the long and storied history of the National geographic, my previous paper tried to
illustrate the manifold ways the editors of the Geographic have sought to portray Morocco
to an American, and ultimately, a worldwide audience. Exoticism is the umbrella theme in
the articles published about this corner of the world prior to 1942. Thus, the different
rhetorics of empire, outlined by David Spurr in his 1993 book The Rhetoric of Empire:
Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, are
strategically deployed on the pages of this magazine in order to celebrate Morocco as
exotic. It is worth noting that this discourse is worldly. For it is partly meant to legitimate
Western colonialism.
Strategically, Morocco became important for the U.S. in the two decades following the
army landing in Casablanca on November 1942. The emphasis in the Geographic's texts
and photographs coming from this period is on the project of "the American Century". The
major concern for this magazine's authors and photographers is double: to advertise "the
American Century" by showing why it was so important for America to come out of its
isolationism, on the one hand, and, on the other, to highlight Morocco's need for US
support in order to prosper. Therefore, a favorite topic in the articles dating from this
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period is to accentuate the sharp contrast between modernity and backwardness in
Morocco.
By the 1960s, the focus on this project had largely disappeared; it was replaced by
images of a backward, underdeveloped society which was sinking back to its pre-colonial
status after the departure of the French. In this respect, as the voice of Moroccan Berbers
became heard worldwide and as American interests in the Maghreb increased, it fell on
the Geographic to validate this rising geopolitical awareness by portraying these people as
exotic and underdeveloped. They are in desperate need for Western modernization in its
American version. It is worth mentioning that the Geographic's portrayal of Moroccan
Berbers has a lot of affinities with its representation of other First Nations the world over,
especially the American Indians.
II. FEZ THE EXOTIC
It is beyond dispute that the major effect of exoticism, as a Eurocentric construction, is to
create otherness. Exoticism is never an inherent quality to be found in people or places,
but an aesthetic perception that effectively manifests mystery, strangeness and
otherness. 'Exoticism' is understood here as a strategy through which the 'strange' and
culturally different is domesticated so that it becomes comprehensible. However, the
'exotic' is always kept at arms length; it is never completely integrated in the familiar
because that would deny its capacity to entertain. Over the years the lands of 'the East'
have been a source of the exotic for the general public in 'the West.' This is because they
were looked at mainly through the lens of the Arabian Nights, with their Orient of
pleasures and fantasy. Thus, a textual presence is substituted for a real human presence.
Simply put, Orientalism is an exotic Western representation of the East.
In his Orientalism, Said explains how the exotic plays a fundamental role in the
colonial project, as it reveals the attitude of the Euro-American colonizer meeting the
indigenous. The discourse of the exotic reveals a fascination with the unknown and
foreign Other that embodies primitive, painteresque and highly erotic connotations,
projecting the distant fears and vision of the colonizer’s self on the colonized others. As
noted earlier, the Western construction of the Orient is a projection of everything the
colonizer considers negative and has repressed. By placing all these forms of otherness on
the Orient, Said argues, the West can construct itself as positive.
As a matter of fact, the United States did not invent Orientalism and Eurocentrism; it
only fine-tuned what it inherited from mother Europe. In this sense, then, American
Orientalism as a discourse for representing the Oriental Other is partly imported and
partly homegrown. Little Douglass introduces his seminal study, American Orientalism:
The United States and the Middle East since 1945, with a cultural overview of eighteenthand nineteenth-century American popular culture that viewed Muslims, Jews, and other
peoples of the Orient as backward, decadent, and untrustworthy. He argues that this
popular view was shaped in the early days of the republic when American statesmen
employed it after their encounter with the Barbary pirates. This Orientalist construction
was further advanced by popular publications such as the Geographic magazine with their
depictions of the "exotic" Muslim Other. Another founding reference of American
Orientalism is Mark Twain's influential memoir, The Innocents Abroad, "a scathing
account of his calamitous errand among the Arabs that sold over 100,000 copies in 1869"
(Douglass, "The Sphinx" par 1). Small wonder that it greatly fuelled the American
stereotypical perception of Muslims as "a people by nature and training filthy, brutish,
ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious" (qtd. in Douglass, American par 8).
Moreover, the Barbay wars during the first three decades of the nineteenth century
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reinforced these Orientalist images in the collective mind of America through captivity
accounts such as Caleb Bingharn's Slaves in Barbary and plays like Susanna Rowson's
Slaves in Algiers (par 6).
During the early decades of the twentieth century, what Douglass has called
"orientalism American style" (par 13) became a staple of American popular media, such
as the Geographic and Hollywood. The Oriental theme was a concoction of exoticism,
eroticism, abduction, banditry, revenge and slavery. Capitalizing on the topos of the
harem, The Sheik (1921), for example, was a successful box office and catapulted
Rudolph Valentino into stardom. The Orient and everything related to it was expressed by
means of hackneyed generalizations that emanated from age-old Orientalist fantasies
with their "triumphalist discourse of Plato-to-NATO Eurocentrism" (Shohat & Stam 14).
These conceptions of the Orient were grounded in a Social Darwinistic belief in the
racial inferiority of the people of the Orient. According to Michael Hunt, this Eurocentric
belief in 'the hierarchy of human races' thoroughly shaped the mental map of Americans
in the early twentieth century. It was based on the evolutionary premise that EuroAmericans -- that is, the United States and Western Europe -- were racially superior to
the rest of the world. Arabs and Muslims were placed nearer the bottom of this hierarchy
of civilization (Douglass par 2). Small wonder that race became an organizing principle of
narratives told about these Oriental peoples.
Rooted in these racist popular attitudes toward the Orient, the Geographic's authors
and photographers traveled to these 'exotic' lands such as Morocco only to reinforce these
conceptions back home. No wonder that this part of the world has been one of "the most
familiar locations of the American exotic" (Edwards 1). By means of photographs and
texts, the traveled people were portrayed mostly as colorful, tribal, childlike,
irresponsible, decadent and superstitious, and their lands as exotic, derelict and biblical.
The Geographic's ethnographic covering of Morocco and Moroccans in this period has
exoticism as its thematic focus. In its continuous endeavor to highlight the racial,
temporal and spatial differences between Morocco and the Western world, this magazine
celebrated what it perceived as the exotic. In so doing, its pages are replete with all the
rhetorical tropes typical of mainstream colonial texts. What lies ahead is therefore a
deconstructive analysis of the most spectacular manifestations of these tropes deployed
by the Geographic's texts and photographs about Fez Medina and Morocco prior to 1942.
The Eurocentric worldview of the Geographic, which exclusively attributes to itself the
paradigm of rationality and progress, defines Fez as remote from modernity. Unlike the
West, which is dynamic, civilized and modern, this part of the Oriental world is
constructed as static and traditional, if not primitive. Moroccans are still living the life of
Biblical times or that of a medieval romanticized Orient. Examples of portraying Morocco
and its inhabitants as timeless abound in the Geographic. A July 1911 article gives this
description of a pastoral scene:
As one observes these agricultural scenes from a little distance, the sower slowly
scattering the seed, and the plowman clad in short shirt, which leaves his bronzed
legs and arms completely bare, following the primitive plow behind his oxen, one is
strongly reminded of the scenes depicted on Egyptian ruins. The women at the
wells by the wayside, with huge water jars upon their heads, or working the soil
with infants astride their backs, securely bound on by a cloth which completely
covers them when the sun is warm, or men entirely naked with the exception of a
cloth about the loins, washing clothes upon slabs of stone by treading upon the
articles with their feet -- these and many other scenes too numerous to mention
carry the mind back nearly two thousand years to a succession of biblical pictures.
(Blayney 765; my emphases)
The assumption here is that this land and its inhabitants have not changed much, if ever,
since Biblical times. This makes them stand in stark contrast with the implied image of
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the West as modern and civilized. To reinforce the timelessness of this scene, the article
relies on the present tense, or the "ethnographic present" (Fabian qtd. in Mills 112), to
describe the activities of the natives. In the same vein, the accompanying eye-catching
photographs avidly focus on ancient buildings, tents, clothes, donkeys, mules, and
camels, in an attempt to substantiate the claims of the texts. Any traces of modernity are
purposely downplayed or left out.
Capitalizing on the popularity of Biblical and Orientalist imagery in the West, another
article about Morocco, published apparently in the late twenties, significantly concludes on
this note: "In safety and comparative comfort we journeyed across old Morocco, seeing,
as through the veil of centuries, country life as it was three thousand years ago, [and]
cities which are perfect settings for Arabian Nights' tales" (Adams 356). The same author
emphasizes that "little changed since prehistoric days, were the ancient Berber people"
(331-2). A Moroccan Jew is described as "one of the Old Testament type" (332). Morocco
and its people are thus set in the distant past. Needless to say, this portrayal propagated
the Western general public's manifest and latent conceptions of Morocco as a backward
land. It is there for readers of the exotic to savor.
In parallel with this colonial rhetoric of setting the non-Western lands and peoples in
the distant past is another one which defines their spaces as spectacles of exotic
otherness. In their reading of the Geographic's representation of the Third World, Lutz
and Collins argue that this magazine has been known for its evocative portrayal of a
"world brightly different" (qtd. in Hyndman par 2). In an article significantly titled "A
Journey in Morocco: 'The Land of the Moors,'" Thomas Lindsey Blayney writes that this
Moorish land "has preserved almost inviolate the manners, customs, and racial
appearance of the East of ancient days" (750). This description capitalizes on the
memories of the swashbuckling Barbary pirates in the Western imagination to fix the
identity of this land -- and, ultimately of its people -- as one of colorfulness and exotica.
This point is reiterated in a 1932 article: "Half of the population of this country lives on in
the ways of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (O'Connor 663). Said demonstrates that part of
the appeal of the Orient is that it represents - or is represented to be - "an unchanging"
human and physical geography (Orientalism 96).
In his groundbreaking Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object,
Johannes Fabian observes that, in Eurocentric ethnography, the non-Western space is
made to reflect the sequence of time as evolutionism (Hyndman par 6). This perfectly
applies to the Geographic's portrayal of Morocco. V. C. Scott O'Connor, for example,
assures his readership that Moroccan cities like Fez "belong to the Arabian Nights" (663).
The carefully crafted photographs of the magazine locate Moroccan geography in an
exotic, timeless past of harems, palaces, souks, and so on. This gives one the impression
that this land is straight out of the spaces of The One Thousand and One Nights or King
James's Bible.
This image of Morocco and Moroccans as exotic is further strengthened by another
rhetorical strategy: endowing them with an aura of mystery. Writing in the late twenties,
Harriet Chalmers Adams describes Morocco as a "land of [...] mystery" (327). Within the
framework of Orientalism, the Orient and its peoples have served as metaphors for the
exotic, different, mysterious Other. The quintessence of their mysterious nature resides in
the lack of rationality in almost everything they do. In accordance with this tradition, the
Geographic often presents the reader with a series of things done for no logical end that
the Western mind can rationally see. In "Fez, Heart of Morocco," Gordon Casserly gives
this description of the festival of Aisawa: "Nowadays such celebrations have lost some of
the frenzy of earlier years, when whiterobed devotees danced for hours to the throb of
drums and pipes" (666). The purposes of such festivities are not explained so as not to
deny them their exotic mystery. However, the Geographic's authors sometimes show
contempt for such 'mysterious' practices, which defy the Manichean logic of Eurocentrism.
A case in point is the photographs of Moroccan children with shaved heads, except for one
small round spot where the hair is let to grow long. To note is that this kind of photograph
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is repeated on the pages of the magazine at least twice in the last century: 1935 and
1955. The uniform explanation given every time is that this child will be raised up to
Paradise by "this convenient handle" (Casserly 669).
Anonymity is an other spectacular rhetoric conventionally deployed on the pages of this
magazine in order to reinforce its image of the cultural Other as exotic. Thumbing through
the pages of the Geographic in this period, one is astonished by the prevalence of
anonymous scenes and people. The absence of references to exact time and place render
these scenes and humans as abstractions. They are exemplars of specific categories
named in the captions as such. Examples of this rhetorical strategy in photographs, with
all of their attendant authority as accurate representations, include the following: "The
Upper Story of A Moroccan House" (Adams 330); "A Moroccan city gate" (Blayney 753),
"A Moroccan repast" (755), "A Minstrel of the Orient" (760). Photographs of Moroccans
not looking at the camera abound on the pages of this magazine; accompanying the
aforementioned 1911 travel account is a picture of a huge number of Moroccan men,
veiled women, and children photographed from the back (765): none has a face -- they
are denied identity. In the texts of the articles, anonymity is prevalent; it is rare to come
across the names of ordinary Moroccans. Adams and his sister were traveling in Morocco
in an automobile with a group of Moroccan Jews and Berbers. About the latter, he writes
"They were Berbers and looked and dressed alike. Their skin was swarthy, features rather
flat, eyes small and brown. They wore black pointed beards, in the Moslem fashion"
(332). These examples demonstrate how anonymity serves up the exotic.
As a rhetorical convention, surveillance is "based on the sweeping visual mastery"
(Spurr 17) of the object of the gaze. The observer derives his or her authority from
assuming that position. Examples of what Mary Louise Pratt calls "the monarch-of-all-Isurvey scene[s]" (213) are not hard to find in the Geographic's covering of Fez Medina in
the pre-1942 period. A photograph of the Karouine Mosque is anchored by this telling
caption: "Looking down into the courtyard of the Karouine Mosque" (Casserly 668;
emphasis mine); the significance of this surveying shot is plainly explained below the
photograph in a self-congratulatory tone: "This is the largest and most important religious
edifice in Fez. [...] No Christian may enter" (668). It is obvious that surveillance, as a
strategy of penetration, stands for possession and authority. The same article, "Fez, Heart
of Morocco," written at a time when Moroccan resistance to the colonial project was at its
apogee -- that is, the end of the twenties of the last century, features another photograph
from the air of the Royal Palace at Fez; the caption reads: "The aerial camera peeps into a
sultan's private grounds" (Casserly 665). The topos of the harem haunts the caption; the
surveying Euroamerican gaze seeks the appropriation of the surveyed space. Besides, one
notices how complicit the Geographic is with the Euro-American colonial project.
Inspired by Michel Foucault's conceptualization of the Panopticon, David Spurr argues
that, "Like the supervisor in the Panopticon, the writer who engages this view relies for
authority on the analytic arrangement of space from a position of visual advantage" (16).
Applying this theory to the Geographic, Steet contends that its writers employ
surveillance as a strategy "to lay claim to all below and to construct knowledge" (104).
One of the lenses through which this knowledge is constructed by the authors of this
magazine is the exotic. A self-explaining textual example comes from Blayney's pathbreaking "A Journey in Morocco":
Having refreshed ourselves and taking one of our muleteers as a guard, we
climbed to the top of a high, rocky hill dominating the plain and lower foothills
toward Tangier.
Pastoral indeed was the scene at our feet. [...] Near the foot of the hill
stretched a rambling village, the thatched roofs of the huts giving a dash of
dark brown to the green of the plain. Here and there a Moorish doorway of
horseshoe form stood out at that late hour like a black geometrical figure on the
white walls. Just outside the village lay our camp, the tents glistening white in
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the last rays of the sun, while in and out among them moved the picturesque
figures of our Arabs. [...] Near our camp a caravan of some twenty camels was
being relieved of their loads. (761-2)
Classification constitutes one of the rhetorics of empire inherited from the tradition of
natural history in the eighteenth century (Pratt 28; Spurr 63). Thus, colonial texts exhibit
the impulse to classify everything into types according to Eurocentric paradigms. On the
pages of the Geographic, we find an essential, ethnocentric classification of Moroccans,
their mentality, culture, and religion - but also of the West as a categorical contrast to the
Others. Informed by the generalizing logics of natural history, this classification is
basically superficial and dogmatic. Photography is adept at illustrating the imagined
'typical' physical characteristics of Moroccans in a way reminiscent of the taxonomic
projects of natural historians. The article "Across French and Spanish Morocco" is replete
with photographs of anthropologized bodies of national types taken as quintessential
representations of specific categories: examples include "Jewish women of Fez," and "A
Moroccan daughter of Israel" (Adams 333-4). Models had obviously posed for these
photographs. Besides, by having these 'anthropological types' wear specific clothes and
take particular postures, the attempt is made to exoticize them to quench the thirst of the
Western audience for the culturally different. The gaze is distinctly colonial and the
Westerner views the Other as an exotic object. Notions of Jewish women as beautiful and
happy, and Muslim women as unattractive, downtrodden and subordinated are also
present in the Geographic. The caption of the photograph of a beautiful Moroccan Jewess
makes this idea clear: "Dark-eyed Rebecca of Erfoud dons Sabbath finery" (O'Connor III);
this is immediately followed by this comment: "Though this Jewish woman drapes herself
with yards of fine cloth, she does not veil her face as the Moslems do" (III). It is obvious
that this classification of Jewish as racially higher than Muslim women was typically
sustained by claims that the latter were racially closer to the bottom of the racial
hierarchy.
In the text of this twenty-nine-page article, we find a good instance of classifying the
traveled people according to the paradigm of modernization: "On the front seat, next to
the French-Algerian driver, sat a commercial traveler, a modern Jew from Oran, with
whom we spoke in Spanish. [...] Next to him sat an altogether different sort of Jew, one
of the Old Testament type" (Adams 332). This last example shows how the complicity of
the Geographic with Western colonialism undermines its self-defined principle of "absolute
accuracy" (qtd. in Steet 17). Just like the Indians in the western (Shohat & Stam 67), the
degree of the acceptance of colonialism is another binary paradigm according to which
Moroccans are classified by the authors of the magazine. Those who have accepted it are
'good' while those who have stood against it are 'bad.' Two descriptions of Moroccan
Berbers substantiate my point: a caption to a photograph of a group of men from the
Atlas Mountains reads "Stalwart leaders who have accepted French rule in the Atlas"
(O'Connor 293); however, those Berbers who were still fighting against the French
invasion are described as "treacherous and arrogant, the strong bullying the weak. They
are cruel and oppressive and full of guile" (290). The essence of the Geographic's politics
of classifying the natives is best acoounted for by Homi Bhabha's idea that
The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of
degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establsh
system s of administration and instruction. (70)
As a rhetorical mode of colonial discourse, naturalization "identifies a colonized or
primitive people as part of the natural world [...] and presents this identification as
entirely 'natural,' as a simple state of what is" (Spurr 157). Moroccans are naturalized by
the Geographic through their remote landscapes, and through their cultural practices. One
of the underlying meanings of their portrayal as 'natural' lies in denying them humanity
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and the possibility of change. Examples of naturalization can be culled from the numerous
photographs and texts of the magazine. O'Connor describes Berber warriors in the
Southeast of the country as an "ant heap of men" (298). A photograph accompanying this
article says that "The national emblem of Morocco should be the stork" while the
accompanying note reads: "In the foreground note the child wearing a 'pigtail,' by which,
according to Moroccan tradition, it may be lifted to Paradise" (301). Notice how
naturalization and the exotic join together to objectify Moroccans. In another article,
Blayney compares his Moroccan servant to "a faithful dog" (760). A spectacular way of
naturalizing Moroccans in this period is by having them photographed hundreds of times
doing menial work; Moroccans, the peoples of wild nature, share its attributes. Unable to
master it, they lack all culture and history. Thus, Western intervention is legitimated by
the Geographic. Naturalized as they are, these people, as an element of the surrounding
land and resources, are as much in need of discipline and control as the wild landscape
itself.
The Geographic magazine has long embraced a romanticized and aesthecized vision of
Morocco as an Oriental land. This vision exoticizes the Moroccan Other and masks the
West’s involvement with processes of domination. According to Spurr, this rhetorical
strategy depends on "a certain detachment from the real conditions that constitute the
object of representation" (44). The display of Moroccans in indigenous dress provides a
spectacle of exotic otherness for the Western audience. This can have some erotic
connotations when it comes to women. Describing the costume of a group of Moroccan
women attending a wedding in Fez, Blayney focuses his lavish attention on the female
bodies: "Around their huge waists (a sign of great beauty) they wore heavy-colored belts
a foot wide, in some cases studded with jewels" (771). A good example of how
aesthecization serves up both the exotic and the erotic is provided by the photograph of
an unveiled young Moroccan woman; the meaning is anchored by this terse caption: "An
Arabian-Nights type in Morocco" (Adams 39).
In typical colonial texts, the cultural Other is often debased, that is, assigned abject
qualities. The latter are no more than constructions of the Eurocentric mind in its
encounter with an Other whose very existence and values challenge its discursive and
political power (White cited in Spurr 76). Constituted as an (un)declared enemy charged
with backwardness and all manners of violence, Islam has always provided such a
challenge to Western imaginings of the Orient since the Crusades, or even before
(Kabbani 14). 'The New World,' founded by the Puritan Founding Fathers, inherited this
fear of Islam from Europe. Small wonder that the founding works of the American images
of the Oriental Other incessantly defame Islam and Muslims. As noted earlier, the
Geographic has probably been the most important "window on the world" available to
Americans since the last decade of the nineteenth century. No wonder than that its
debasements are performances of an 'agreed cultural paradigm' which strategically
denudes the Muslim Other of its richly textured cultural attributes. Writing about the
Muslim customs of marriage in Fez, Blayney resorts to the rhetorical trope of debasement:
"If not pleased with her, the groom has the right to return her to her father within three
months, paying again the price originally paid for her" (771). In the same 1911 article, a
one-paragraph romanticizing vision of the sights of Fez with their "teeming streets,
bazaars, and markets" is immediately followed by two relatively long paragraphs of
utmost debasing, the first of which deserves to be quoted at length here:
But all is not poetry in Fez. Revolting are the horrible diseases to be seen on every hand.
Men, women, and children in all stages of suffering, with nose, lips, eyes, and even limbs
eaten away. In the narrow streets before some of the mosques we had actually to pick our
way on certain days among the disease-covering bodies of those placed there by relatives
or friends to beg. So near death's door were some of them that they could only beckon for
alms with a finger. At times we saw dead bodies lying there, for those dying in the night
are not removed till late the next day. (769)
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At second thought, one can see that beneath the surface of this passage lurks the
dogmatic assumption that Islam is the source of these horrendous scenes. Four years
before the appearance of this article, President Roosevelt confessed privately that "it is
impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism
is supreme" (qtd. in Douglass par 10; emphasis added). In 1869, Mark Twain made a
similar comment about the Muslim Orient in his The Innocents Abroad: "Rags,
wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of
Moslem rule more surely than the crescent flag itself, abound," (qtd. in Douglass, "The
Spinx" par 1).
All in all, here is Fez Medina Geographicalized, even as its plural culture is exoticized,
in a stereotypical nutshell: an Orient caught between a present out of step with
twentieth-century realities and a bright future in the hands of the Western colonizers.
During this pre-1942 episode in the Geographic's covering of Fez, the articles constantly
reproduce notions of native backwardness and 'the white man's burden' to administer
control, government and instruction to these peoples. As I hope the above discussion has
made clear, there is an important set of themes that run through all this magazine's
renderings of this part of the world. Fez Medina and its inhabitants are portrayed through
the lenses of the different rhetorics of empire typical of colonial writings. Yet the
overarching theme remains exoticism.
III. FEZ THE UNDERDEVELOPED
In this section I am going to unsettle the continuities and discontinuities in the onedimensional representation of Fez and its inhabitants in the Geographic. As we shall see,
in the last decades of the twentieth century, this magazine moved away from the theme
of economic modernization, and focused on this space as emblematic of an
underdeveloped country. Fez Medina is framed to the readers within the discourse of
development as one of "the palimpsestic transnationalisms left in colonialism's wake"
(Shohat & Stam 15); it has been imag(in)ed to be "in the grip of unnecessarily archaic
and static 'traditional' modes of life" (Said, Covering 29).
In order to understand the kinds of images the magazine has presented of Morocco
since the 1960s, it is important to note at the outset that the short-lived era of 'a
beautiful friendship' was evidently over as Morocco's strategic role in the project of "the
American century" diminished after its political independence from France. In his Culture
and Imperialism, Said rightly argues that American imagination works in "spurts" -- that
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is, "great masses of rhetoric and huge resources ... followed by virtual silence" (qtd. in
Edwards 9). After two decades of intense public political and economic interest, as
exemplified by the Geographic's worldly interest, the U.S. attention to Morocco decreased
dramatically.
In the eyes of the Geographic's authors and editors, post-independence Morocco was
sinking back into its pre-colonial condition of backwardness. Both text and photograph
show the continuity of the Eurocentric paradigm of representation in this magazine. In her
Veils and Daggers, Steet argues that, "By the magazine's portrayal, colonialism would
seem to be a series of altruistic projects aimed at improving the living standards of the
non-Western world" (118). Not surprisingly, the portrayal of post-independence Morocco
lacked the optimism and energy conveyed by the images of the precedent period.
Yet in general, the kind of 'geography' promoted in the pages of the magazine
continues to revolve around the themes of exoticism and backwardness. According to Lutz
and Collins's study of the representation of the third world societies, the Geographic has
been concerned that these societies come across mostly as different, but not so exotic as
to be too different. The editors of the magazine have determined that images of 'the
Other' should be just sufficiently exotic, and aesthetically pleasing, so as to appeal to
American audiences' tastes of the exotic. In the light of this approach, a Third World
country like Morocco is continuously envisioned as an exotic, safe land, where backward,
hard-working poor people lived simple but satisfying lives. The authors of Reading
National Geographic, however, contend that "as the Third World became more threatening
to Americans during the Reagan years, the Geographic changed its depictions from places
where technology and tradition live side by side to ones where technology has tainted
once pristine places because backward people are simply not ready for its advantages"
(Iezza par 12).
Adapting text to fit the pictures, rather than pictures to the text, a March 1986 article
about the Fez Medina stresses its underdevelopment. This discourse of representation is
often masked by another one: the exotic. In this connection, it is my assumption that, on
the pages of the Geographic, this exoticism has shifted from a privileged mode of
perception to an increasingly global mode of mass-consumption. In this global age, this
magazine continuously tries to solidify its status as one of the giants of the global media
by catering to the growing needs for the exotic among the Western readership.
The aforementioned article about the old Medina of Fez substantiates my argument
that the exotic and underdevelopment are strategically merged to create images of
Morocco, as an example the non-Western Other. The article or photoessay casts this city
as backward and exotic. It starts with six photographs, four of which are two-page
spreads. The first is a medium shot of a middle-aged man in traditional costume selling
babouches, or pointed slip-ons. The second shows two veiled Moroccan women; the
caption anchors its meaning in the conventional Orientalist idiom: "Deep-dyed tradition,
unfaded since medieval days, persists in the Islamic holy city of Fez el Bali" (Arden 331).
Note how Islam is held responsible for the persistence of 'backward' traditions.
The following picture of a cemetery, a mosque, and drying skins in the Old Medina is a
two-page spread. In the foreground, we see a man spreading dyed skins in the sun to
dry; a mosque and a cemetery occupy the background of the photograph. What is more
significant is how all these elements are brought together in the caption to draw an image
of utmost debasing for Morocco: "The living and the dead share a hillside outside Fez,
where newly dyed goat- and sheepskins dry in the sun amid whitewashed tombs" (3323). This construction of Fez Medina as backward is intended not only to exoticize it but
also to reify the modernity of the Western world.
The fourth spread exemplifies the rhetoric of "the monarch-of-all-I-survey" scene. It is
an aerial photograph of the Old Medina. The caption again anchors the meaning of the
picture in intended ways: "In cramped Fez el Bali, houses press so tightly upon each other
that only donkeys and pedestrians can thread most of the city's passageways. [...] The
green-roofed Qarawiyin Mosque at upper right, largest in northwestern Africa, was
9
founded in the ninth century" (334-5; my emphases). Besides naturalizing the inhabitants
by associating them with animals, the author implies that the religion of Islam is the
cause of the underdevelopment of the (Fezzi) people. From the outset, we notice how this
faith is a source of anxiety for both the author and the photographer. Exercising
surveillance is an attempt at containing its danger.
In the next two-page photograph, we are shown a Fezzi bride on a mida, or ceremonial
tray, carried on the shoulders of ngagef, or wedding arrangers. It is a picture of the exotic
to the liking of the Western audience. One of the implied meanings is that ages-old
Oriental traditions persist in this corner of the world. That is why any possible signs of
modernity have been purposely left out. The caption sentence "a many-splendored Fezzi
bride rides a mida" objectifies the ngagef. Therefore, the readers are encouraged to
construct this tradition (and culture) as dehumanizing.
The last of the photographs at the beginning of the twenty-three page article is not
different from the previous ones in its construction of Fezzi people as an underdeveloped,
exotic people. It is a picture of half a dozen Moroccan old people taking some rest outside
the shrine of Moulay Idris II. Again, it is the caption which orients the readers to interpret
the photograph from the dimension of the discourse of development. It reads: "Citizens
pause to gossip outside the shrine of Moulay Idriss II, who established the capital at Fez.
Passersby may drop donations into the slot of the copper plaque, left center, to receive
the blessing of the venerated Idriss" (339; my emphases). In a sweeping generalization,
the inhabitants are thus cast as a backward and superstitious people. Moreover, by taking
this picture of very old people against the background of a shrine known for its
"breathtaking artistry" (339), the Geographic strikes a sharp contrast between Morocco's
present decadence and its past grandeur.
At last, the article's text starts. The very first sentence, which usually has the function
of setting the context for what is to follow, constructs Fez as a Moroccan 'heart of
darkness': "Night doesn't fall in Fez. It rises" (Arden 340; emphasis in the original). It is a
"medieval world" (340). This point is reiterated at least three times in the first page of the
article. It is a reality that author Harvey Arden wants his readers to take as a lens through
which to look at what is to come. What is more is that the author encapsulates his
stereotypical construction for his readers so that it can be memorized easily: "Elsewhere it
is still the 20th century; in Fez it is still the Middle Ages" (340). What can be sharper than
this note?
When the Geographic's traveler arrived at his hotel (the Palais Jamai), "Night had
already risen" (340). He does not miss the opportunity to exotically establish the link
between past and present in the touristically-commodified traditional dress of the man
who saw him to the door of the hotel:
A paradigm of Moroccan traditinal dress, he sported a long, curving, silver-sheated
dagger, pointed yellow slip-ons, or babouches, and a black-tasseled fez--the cylindrical
Islamic headgear whose distinctive bright color (today simulated with chemicals) in
ancient times derived from natural dyes now lost to memory. (340)
Extensive comment is surely unnecessary. It should suffice to note that right from the
start the author doesn’t mention that this colorful dress is part of a touristic
infrastructure, especially set up for Euroamerican tourists.
After dinner, he went out to have a look at the sights that the Old Medina had to offer
to the eyes a Westerner hungry for exoticism, but careful enough to attribute their
persistence to Morocco's present condition of underdevelopment. He describes his entry in
the streets of the ancient city as an entry into "the 14th century" (340).
While taking their tour of the Medina, he and Abdellatif, his constant companion in Fez,
came out on a plaza at the center of the medina, the old city. It was crowded with people-little girls carrying wooden trays of oven-bound bread dough on their heads, veiled
10
women doing the family wash at an exquisitely tiled public fountain, a bearded old man
selling caged birds, old Berber ladies with tattooed chins squatting on the curbs with their
hands held out in supplication, ragged porters lashing slow-moving donkeys loaded with
ice and sheep-skins and Pepsi-Cola cases. (341)
Apart from the obvious attention paid to the exotic, an alarmingly striking element of this
passage is its reduction of the humanity of a wide range of people -- variant in age, sex,
and race -- into a few lines. The Geographic's privileged approach of exteriority in
reporting the cultural Other all but dehumanizes the Fezzi people.
Following on the steps of scores of Western travelers to this Fezzi space, Arden goes to
great pains to stress its allegedly Oriental character. As we have seen earlier, resorting to
different rhetorics of empire is an efficient strategy to reinforce this character. One such
rhetorical trope utilized by Arden is debasement; during his tour with Abdellatif, he notes
that there are "freshly baked bread and ugly-smelling animal hides--all simmering
together, as it were, in the warm night air" (341). He also writes that "Moroccan
cemeteries aren't shunned" (344).
In accordance with the Eurocentric tradition, the trope of mystery is also called upon to
demonstrate the resilient nature of the Orient even at the end of the twentieth century:
"Fez has never been preserved. It has persisted" (342). Another illustrative example is
provided by his account of his first night at the hotel: "That night, a little after 4 a.m., a
voice woke me as if in a dream. I stumbled out of the balcony. It was the muezzin of a
nearby mosque" (242). This last example of the mysterious Orient constructs it as fanatic.
This Orient is also cruel and exotic; the author gives this description of the slaughtering of
sheep in the feast of Aid el-Kebir: "Four sheep were killed for four families. Menfolk did
the killing and the butchering, women hosed down the caracasses, children squealed and
ran about, blowing up the lungs like balloons" (343-4; emphases added).
In her Imperial Eyes, Pratt observes with much insight that, "In contemporary travel
accounts, the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene gets repeated, only now from the balconies
of hotels in big third-world cities" (216). In his turn, Spurr provides an illuminating
comment on the modern practice of surveillance: "The commanding view still reflects the
writer's authority over the scene surveyed, but the perceptual appetite is more likely to
find itself unsatisfied, and the writer's tone to be one of disappointment or
disillusionment" (18). This perfectly applies to this 1986 article. Arden writes,
The view from the balcony was magical--as if I were peeking over the leading edge of a
flying carpet. Seen from above, Fez el Bali looks like a cubist vision. It's as if some
mischievous genie had swept a flat city off the nearby plateau and dumped it helterskelter into this valley. (242)
At first glance, we might interpret the recourse to Arabian Nights' imagery as an
indication of the surveyor's mastery over the scene. At closer inspection, however, we can
see that he is overwhelmed by the magic of the scenery. As his Manichean mindset
cannot understand how the native mind works, Arden is not able to penetrate into the
mystery of the Old Medina. He is disappointed, and the appeal to Orientalist imagery acts
as a smokescreen to cover this mishap.
A pair of two-page spreads reveal more than anything else the organizing ideologies of
the portrayal of Morocco in this period. The first photograph shows a scene of fantasia; a
group of Berber horsemen are celebrating the wedding of King Hassan II's daughter. The
importance of this photograph is that it provides the colorful exotic that the Geographic
has been looking for. The second picture epitomizes the worldly exotic in the sense that it
gives substance to the magazine's organizing idea that Morocco's modernity is only
superficial. At a deeper level, it is almost as backward as it was hundreds of years ago.
The photograph features a donkey loaded with a TV set; in front of it are two old men in
their jellabas.
11
The article concludes on a note that recapitulates the main idea/message of the text and
the photographs. Fez belongs to another world -- "the 14th century" (353). It is an
indication that Morocco is still, and is likely to remain, an underdeveloped country as long
as it holds to its traditions, chief among which is Islam.
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