The Tangier of today

To be born in a city like Tangier is not easy, and even less to grow up in it and feel part of it, it harbours contradictory feelings and sensations, let's say similar to the character of its people. Going from an old medina, fully deserved in its definition, to an insulting modernity in a matter of meters, is at least disconcerting but also, at an intimate level, to identify ourselves as inhabitants from Tangier. What are we, or rather, who have let us be Tangerines? 

My humble opinion comes after a long and meditated reflection that, although it is full of tenderness, is also full of mistrust. It is not a self-imposed reflection, but a necessary reflective parenthesis that has given me life after 4 years away from my city.  

There is an irremediable part of all Tangerines linked to its past history, as if this was a city of smoke and curtains that dissipate depending on the eye of the beholder.

I am not capable of thinking about Tangier, without my memory fictitiously recreating international scenarios I have not even experienced, of which I have simply been told, of which I have read, of whose streets I will walk again. That international Tangier, which is no longer, however much we may want it to be, but which was, and perhaps we have never finished letting it go in peace, with enough memory to know that it is an exceptional past but that nevertheless "the past was not always better".  

That is why, even knowing the immense cultural and intellectual baggage that Matisse's stay in a hotel implied, Paul Bowles and his thousand adventures, Virginia Woolf, and other characters, I feel a deep rage for them to still occupy the front pages of my city, the names of its new cultural places, thus perpetuating a fictitious international city that was once governed by 10 countries and that today, however, is a Moroccan city, and belongs to Morocco.  

Is colonial memory important? Of course, but it is never fair. It is not fair to those who were born Moroccans in a protectorate and in a city status where equality was conspicuous by its absence, where Tangier was more a city of foreigners than of its own natives. The colonial memory of my Tangier is not fair, because I know more about Virginia and Jane than about Aisha or Fatima, or else it is Virginia and Jane who speak of Aisha or Fatima, and they too are part of that international Tangier of which they are not only secondary characters but erased from their own history. It was not their moment, although it was their home that was the setting for the film, the book, the story, the anecdote.  

Tangier's colonial memory is not fair, it doesn't tell us about the reality that meant that two people of different origins, religions or social classes could fall in love. It does not tell us about the educational classism that was established and differentiated the children from those more integrated in the protectorate from the "less" ones. It does not tell us about the racism that later triggered serious social complexes in the native society between more whites and less whites.

We don't know in detail what such a multicultural and therefore multi-impositional colonization implied, nor what was engraved in the society of all that, we just keep on seeing works, paintings, and books that are that dream of cannabis, sex and red phone that ended up becoming the phrase of the city. Many insultingly expensive parties, many familiar faces with scary pasts in most cases. 

Nobody asks us those who lived in Tangier 4 generations later what was the history of our grandparents, because they had native names and surnames. Our identity has been erased from our memory in a forced effort to boast of a history that is not that of our city, but of its foreign elite. We have been forced to believe in the eternal myth of wonders, so much so that we cannot understand why it was so uncomfortable for many of us to live this "non-internationalization of Tangier". 

Tangier International was not only reached by a wonderful light, but it was also a legal pond, a breeding ground for any fugitive or form of debauchery. And that is also part of our history.  

From my point of view, those of us who are still alive need to reinvent the Tangier we need today; and why not, the Tangier of the present, that of Islamisation, social inequality and its problems could be the focus of change in the covers, in the books, which it is maybe not as attractive as the new seafront, the Hilton or its multiple franchises for the rich. However, that is the Tangier we owe ourselves now, it is the only one we can judge, work, analyze, recreate, invent and value.

The Tangier of today has also actors, actresses, painters, writers, young and adult professionals with a wonderful job to expose to the world, people full of light, desire and ambition, who are not Bowles, or Woolf, or Capote, and thank goodness, but are artists, and today must be Sara, Amin, MohamMed or Salma. They are also Tangier; they are the Tangier of today. 

Links to consult: http://onorient.com/think-tanger-repenser-la-ville-par-le-prisme-de-lart-et-de-la-culture-21741-20171009