The American Scholar - The Living and the Dead

8/14/2019 The American Scholar - The Living and the Dead

1/5

7

Eleven years after co-authoring the Com-munist Manifesto with Karl Marx,Friedrich Engels supposedly traveled to

Tetouan, Morocco, to report on the progress of

Spains War of Africa (18591860) for HoraceGreeleys New York Daily Tribune. Engelss pieceson the War of Africahe called it The Moor-ish Warread as if he wrote them from Eng-land based on reports sent from the field. Nev-ertheless, Muhammad Benaboud, the leadingauthority on Tetouanihistory, believes thatEngels met with localMoroccan leaders ina certain caf in PlaceEl Ouessaa, a haven

that Engels trans-formed into hismakeshift office. Thecaf is still there, nowa place where unem-ployed young menspend long days bum-ming cigarettes offeach other and nurs-ing espressos. Accord-ing to local lore,Engels also lived on

the same square, in ahouse that is now astorefront cluttered

with light bulbs, deodorant, and Ace bandages.I asked the shopkeeper if he knew that Engelslived and worked where we were standing, buthe couldnt distinguish the War of Africa fromany other war, and Engels was unknown to him.In fact, the German socialist philosopher hasbeen long forgotten in Place El Ouessaa.

The economic stagnation that drivesTetouans young men to the sad caf has alsodriven some of their peers to jihadist violence.

All of the terrorists behind the devastating

Madrid train bombings in March 2004 werefrom one small area of this city of about 320,000souls. Young men from this neighborhood havealso fought as Islamic militants in Iraq. The few

Western media outlets that cover Tetouan haveemphasized the citys connections with the

Madrid train bomb-ings and with inter-national terrorismnetworks, but suchcoverage tends todiminish the citys

history of long-stand-ing conflicts withChristian Europe.

A violent rela-tionship with Spain ishardly a recent phe-nomenon. Strate-gically positionednear the mouth ofthe Mediterranean,Tetouan (pronouncedTi-TWAN) has been at

the center of a clashbetween ChristianEurope and Muslim

North Africa for centuries. Around the timeColumbus sailed west toward the New World,a band of exiles from the Muslim kingdom ofGranada (which had just fallen to the Catholicmonarchs of Spain) founded the city. As Spainand Portugal fought to control Moroccos coastthroughout the 16th century, piracy providedTetouan with steady streams of Christian cap-tives, who joined black Africans in the citysbustling slave market.

The Living and the Dead

Letter from Morocco

-

By Eric Calderwood

}

Eric Calderwood is pursuing a Ph.D. inRomance Languages and Literatures at Harvard.

Place El Ouessaa in Tetouan, the native city of someIraqi militants and the Madrid bombers

ERI

CCALDERWOOD

Calderwood_Live:LetterTemp2.Final.qxd 8/25/2009 10:27 AM Page 7


2/5

8

T H E A M E R I C A N S C H O L A R

Vestiges of the slave trade provided my firstclues for understanding Tetouans buried his-tory. I lived in Place El Ouessaa during thesprings of 2008 and 2009, doing doctoralresearch on Hispano-Moroccan relations. Strug-gling to grasp the citys history and make senseof its current malaise, I started looking under-ground and learned that the hidden remains ofone of the most notorious prisons in Mediter-ranean history spread underneath a street thatruns out of Place El Ouessaa. The streets name,al-Mutamir, refers to the tunnels below. Accord-ing to contemporaneous 16th-century accounts,

as many as 5,000 Christians were held as slavelaborers in these tunnels. Just up from Place ElOuessaa, past a juice stand and a coffee shop, ametal hatch covers barelya square meter of ground.Five meters below thehatch are the remains ofan underground church

where Spanish monks,who occasionally came toTetouan to negotiate theChristian captives free-

dom, celebrated Mass forthe prisoners. As such,Tetouan is perhaps theonly place where youcould visit a 16th-century church buried under-neath the streets of a medieval Islamic city. Butthe site is closed to the public, and no one seemsto know it is there. Like the shopkeeper inEngelss old building, the owners of the adja-cent juice and coffee shops are oblivious to thischapter in their history.

Soon I discovered that the prison wasnt the

only subterranean approach to Tetouans his-tory. Tetouans three major cemeteriestheMuslim, Jewish, and Christian ruins of a for-gotten pastserve as a silent synecdoche forthis poor city and its uncertain future. Eachcemetery evokes Tetouans violent past andillustrates its attempts to establish a vibrant mul-tireligious identity in the face of this past. Asmetaphors for the struggles between culturalexchange and interfaith strife, the cemeterieshighlight the current and future challengesthat the city faces. Tetouans medina(old city)is a UNESCOWorld Heritage site, yet Tetouan

barely figures in the major tourist guides toMorocco. Likewise, its burial grounds teeterbetween remembrance and oblivion.

The Muslim cemetery straddles a road outbeyond Bab al-Maqabar, the gate through which a Spanish occupying force enteredTetouan on February 6, 1860. All Muslim ceme-teries, like mosques, are considered rituallypure and thus are closed to non-Muslims. ButTetouans Muslim cemetery is effectively offlimits to most Muslims as well. The municipalauthorities have abandoned the place, allowing

it to become the fiefdom of gangs, vagrants,stray dogs, and grazing flocks of sheep andgoats. Most Tetouanis will tell you not to go

there alone. The tomb-stones are supposed toface the qiblah, the direc-tion (Mecca) Muslimsface during prayer, butinstead they are haphaz-ardly positioned, likebodies thrown into amass grave. Here and

there, the homeless whoinhabit the cemeteryhang their wet laundryon tombstones to dry.

The most significant topographical featureof the Muslim cemetery is the large mau-soleum built for al-Mandari, the citys founder.

Al-Mandari left his native Spain in 1485 witha band of 100 followers and settled in the val-ley where Tetouan is today. His original smalltomb surrounded by low walls was replaced inthe 1970s with a two-story mausoleum, one

floor for al-Mandaris tomb and another forthe tomb of the 20th-century nationalist leader

Abd al-Khalaq Torres. The monument is apalimpsest that weaves together the history ofthe Moroccan nationalist movement with thehistory of Tetouans foundation. In this ver-sion of Moroccan history, the long period ofEuropean domination is a mere parenthesisbetween the two.

The cemetery blankets a steep hill punc-tuated by smaller mausoleums made of porousgray stones. These cubical structures sur-mounted by cupolas were built for the Iber-

Tetouans three majorcemeteriesthe Muslim,Jewish, and Christian

ruins of a forgottenpastserve as a silent synec-

doche for this poor city andits uncertain future.



3/5

Letter from Morocco

9

ian mujahideen who accompanied al-Mandariacross the Strait of Gibraltar, built the initialmilitary core of the city, and fought off theoccasional raids from the neighboring Berbertribes. The mausoleums once bore inscrip-tions detailing the names and feats of thedead, but time has effaced them, leaving themausoleums as mute monuments of a cele-brated but barely understood past. Unlike al-Mandaris mausoleum, which is locked with akey, these are open in the front. Cemeterydwellers have converted them into makeshiftshelters and trash receptacles. Inside, young

men sleep amidst food wrappers, empty winebottles, and discarded syringes. Here theunemployed, desperate young men ofTetouans present occupy the resting place ofthe warriors of Tetouans past.

C ontinue down the road from Bab al-Maqabar and youll come upon the largeiron gate of Tetouans Jewish cemetery. Herein one square kilometer you can explore thelife and death of a community. Tetouans Jew-ish population, one of the largest and most

vibrant in North Africa, earned Tetouan thesobriquet Little Jerusalem among Sephardic

Jews. This fame lasted until the Sephardic exo-dus, which began with the foundation of Israel(1948) and escalated after Moroccan inde-pendence (1956). A stroll in the cemetery illus-trates this demographic decline.

Like the Muslims, Tetouans first Jews werethe children of a violent exile. The oldest partof the cemetery is called the Cementerio deCastilla, where that generation of Tetouani

Jews were buried after being thrown out of their

native Sefarad (Spain) in 1492. Few of the tombsin this sectionand, indeed, in the whole ceme-teryhave an epigraph. The Jews of Tetouanbelieved that the duty of remembering the deadand where they were buried fell to each suc-ceeding generation, a custom that sowed theseeds for oblivion. Toward the end of theSpanish Protectorate (19121956), the Jews ofTetouan must have realized their mistakebecause most of the 20th-century tombs haveinscriptionsin Spanish, Hebrew, or both.

The nascent state of Israel didnt extend itsgenerous immigrant assimilation policies to

Jews too old to work, and so Moroccan Jewswere stuck with a dilemma: leave their oldbehind and head for the Promised Land, orremain in a state of increasing isolation. Manydecided to stay, but only until the older gen-eration died off. The Jewish cemetery thereforehas a concentration of tombs from the 1950sand 1960s, as the last generation of Jews to beborn and make a life in Tetouan passed away.Only a handful of tombs date from the past 50

years, the most recent bearing a bilingualHebrew-Spanish inscription from 2006:

Estrella Botbul Hachuel, daughter of Elias,died on the 9th day of Nissan, 5766 (April 7,2006), at the age of 79 years. Estrella came ofage during the Spanish Civil War and lived tosee the dawn of Moroccan independence andthe slow fading of the Moroccan-Jewish expe-rience. What compelled her to stay, when somany others had left? I couldnt find any of herliving relatives to ask them.

During its heyday, the Mellah(the Jewishneighborhood) had 16 synagogues. Today,Tetouans Jews number fewer than 50, and onlyone synagogue remains. Once a year, the mem-

An elderly homeless man in the Muslim cemetery; cubical,

gray-stone mujahideen tombs are in the background.

ERI

CCALDERWOOD



4/5

10

T H E A M E R I C A N S C H O L A R

bers of the Jewish-Moroccan Cultural Patri-mony Foundation, based in Casablanca, cometo celebrate Shabbat services and visit the tombof Rabbi Isaac Ben Walid, for whom the syna-gogue is named. For the rest of the year, it is ashining and empty building that serves mostlyas a reminder that Jews werehere. Meanwhile,the Mellah is inhabited by destitute peasantfamilies who immigrated from the Rif Moun-tains in the mid-20th century. The adolescentboys who work at the tailor shops lining the syn-agogues street dont know what the buildingis, but, for a tip, they can give you the cell phone

number of a Hebrew woman who has thekey. The impeccable synagogue and the gatedJewish cemetery provide a sharp contrast tothe chaos of Tetouans Muslim cemetery.

The Christian cemetery is in the best condi-tion of the three, and thats courtesy of theSpanish Ministry of Defense, which paid to reha-bilitate it in 1999. Unlike the Muslim and Jew-ish cemeteries, which lie outside the gates of theold city, the Christian cemetery stands high ona hill that overlooks the early-20th century

Spanish-colonial annex (the Ensanche). Thecemetery is adjacent to a state-run mental hos-pital called Mallorca(after the Balearic island),

which the locals refer to as Maryoca. Since mostTetouanis no longer know where the Christiancemetery is, and there are hardly any Christiansto visit it, its easiest to find by asking people

where Maryoca is. En route to the cemetery,you see hospital patients bare their teeth andrattle their window frames, as if they were wildanimals caught in a zoo. In contrast to thepatients distressing confinement, the Christian

cemetery spreads out in spacious, orderly rowslined with pruned cypress trees.

The Muslim cemetery rewrites local historyas the triumphant marriage of the citys Andalu-sian roots (al-Mandari) and its nationalist pride(Abd al-Khalaq Torres), but the Christian ceme-tery presents another narrative: the slow butinevitable triumph of Christian Spain over theMoors to the south. The inscription on a small,anonymous stone dedicates the entire cemeteryto the memory of the soldiers who gave theirlife for the fatherland in the campaigns of18591860, 19131915, and 19151927. Thus,

the cemeterys purview is, at first glance, local:devoted to Spains armed struggle to pacifynorthern Morocco. But the inscriptions on thetombs make it clear that the stakes of this localhistory transcend these three campaigns. Adopt-ing the language of the Spanish Reconquest ofMuslim Spain, the tombstones praise soldiers

who died in combatcontra los moros (againstthe Moors).

Paradoxically, the cemetery juxtaposes thislanguage of interreligious strife with a more con-ciliatory tone of brotherhood. The massive tombfor General Felipe Alfau Mendoza, the first high

commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate, illus-trates this tension. Its inscription reads:

Here lies . . . don Felipe Alfau Mendoza,who, on 19 February 1913, made the glo-rious troops of Spain and the noble Moroc-can people embrace each other with lovein Tetouan. . . . His policies had as theirfoundation . . . the cordial embrace andfecund and amorous action of the twocountries. He loved Morocco with the samelove with which he loved Spain, and hedied in Tetouan, on 26 September 1937, at

the age of 89, with the same passion of hisyouth, spurred on by seeing it incarnatedin the action of the Caudillo of Spain [i.e.,Franco] in his glorious national uprising.

The inscription encapsulates the ambiva-lent relationship behind Spains cordialembrace of Morocco. Francos national upris-ing, which led to the Spanish Civil War(19361939), began in Africa and relied onthe significant participation of Moroccan sol-diers. By the time Alfau Mendoza died in Sep-tember 1937, more than 50,000 Moroccans had

gone to Spain to fight alongside Francosnationalist troops.

The cemetery is a monument to Francosidea of a Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood anda stunning example of the ideas hypocrisies.The Spanish and the Moroccans are brothersbrought together in a cordial embrace, and yetthere are no Moroccans buried in this cemetery.Furthermore, the cemeterys location high ona hill exemplifies a larger policy to limit con-tact between the colonizer and the colonized.Under the guise of modernization, the Protec-torate created a two-tier city: a ghettoized Old



5/5

City for the Muslim natives and a modernannex for the Protectorate officials and the localaristocracy that worked with them.

Indeed, this Spanish Christian cemetery, vis-ible and yet inaccessible, might remindTetouanis of Spain itself, which is visible on aclear day from many points on the nearby coast.But the citizens of Tetouan dont have to crossthe Strait of Gibraltar to visit Spain. They havespecial permission to work in the nearbySpanish enclave of Ceuta without a visa.Every morning, hundreds of them board

collective taxis, each tightly packed withseven passengers, to travel the 39 kilo-meters that separate Tetouan from thislittle piece of Spain on the African coast.The daily flux of workers supplies cheaplabor for Ceutas service industry. Many

young men also end up working assmugglers of goods, both legal and ille-gal, between Ceuta and Tetouan.

The smugglers display their wareson blankets and card tables that lineTetouans main pedestrian walkway until

it reaches the palace gate in Place Has-san II, popularly known as al-Feddan.This square also features the mausoleumof Sidi Abd Allah al-Baqqal, which theSpanish army temporarily transformedinto a church, Our Lady of the Victories, whileoccupying Tetouan after the War of Africa.Despite the fact that al-Feddan is officiallynamed after Hassan II, the current kings father,the eponymous monarch had a notorious con-tempt for the north of Morocco, and he neveronce visited Tetouan during his 38-year reign.

Upon his fathers death, the current king,Muhammad VI, sought to remedy his fathersneglect of the north by turning the royal palacein Tetouan into his summer residence.

While Tetouanis appreciate the symbolismof this gesture, many grumble about the pres-sures the kings presence has put on the cen-ter of the city. Al-Feddan Square is the meet-ing place of the medina, the Mellah, and the

Ensanche. After independence and through the1990s, the square was Tetouans beating heart,a place where Muslims and Christians, politi-cians and peddlers, tourists and locals came

into contact. In the middle of al-Feddan, therewas a gazebo where orchestras would play onFriday and Saturday nights for large crowds.

Since Muhammad VI reoccupied thepalace, however, al-Feddan has been roped offfrom public use. The palaces ring of securityhas left a narrow passageway, three metersacross, for people to traverse the square. Theadjacent cafs, which once enjoyed primelocation over al-Feddan, eat up the sidewalk

with their extended terrace seating. Smugglers

sell their bootybackpacks, batteries, andblendersamid the caf chairs. At busy timesof day, the resulting chaos creates a bottleneckthat can keep a pedestrian at a standstill forminutes on end. As you stand there, stuck be-tween the unemployed young men readingnewspapers in the cafs and the barely

employed young men hawking smuggled goodsfrom Ceuta, you look out at al-Feddan andimagine what the square must have looked likebefore Muhammad VI decided to graceTetouan with his presence. You imagine thegroups of families listening to Andalusian musicon a Friday night. And then you consider the

young men who crowd the passageway andthink about how trapped they are: trapped ina city with few prospects, trapped in sight of aprosperous neighbor who only wants them fortheir cheap labor, trapped in the very streetsof their forgotten city. O

Letter from Morocco

1 1

ERI

CCALDERWOOD

Tetouani historian Muhammad Benaboud

in the underground church


The American Scholar - The Living and the Dead

Documents

Transcript of The American Scholar - The Living and the Dead