The Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies, TALIM, is a museum, cultural and conference center, and is the only US National Historic Landmark located in a foreign country. TALIM is the research center in Morocco of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies - AIMS, part of CAORC, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
The blog is an informal way of keeping up with TALIM's interests and activities. Comments welcome!
We conclude our introduction of our TALIM team by sharing the stories of five more of our colleagues. As you can see, we accomplish amazing feats with a permanent staff of only eight (Rabha El Haymar, who just joined TALIM this month to help with cleaning, will bring us up to nine).
Fatima Ben Guerch has worked at the Legation since 2005, when she began teaching Arabic literacy classes to women from the medina along with our NGO partner, La Fondation Tanger Al Medina (FTAM). Fatima had previously studied history at university in Fes.
In 2012 Fatima joined our TALIM team as a permanent employee, and in addition to her teaching responsibilities, she now helps organize “vocational literacy” courses in sewing. She also helps to coordinate scheduling of our TALIM volunteer French and Spanish teachers. Fatima even serves as our back-up cashier working at our ticket window in the Museum.
Latifa Samadi, started work at TALIM in 2011 as volunteer, and we subsequently hired her as our administrative assistant. She obtained professional certification in bookkeeping before joining TALIM, and continues to study English part time after work hours. Latifa brings her enthusiasm and rigor to support many tasks that are essential to our smooth functioning, including:
Fatima and Latifa chose their photograph together in front of our painting by Ion Perdicaris, because to them the horse symbolizes force and strength.
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Brothers from the nearby fishing village of Djibila. Abdellah, Ahmed and Mustapha Temlli have a combined 55 years of work experience with the Legation! Abdellah (with us since 1991) works on the never-ending work of maintaining our masonry, painting and helping with plumbing and electrical repairs. Abdellah just became a father for the fifth time last month – and all of his children are sons!
Ahmed (with us since 1997) helps with heavy cleaning and carpentry, and especially landscaping and gardening. When visitors admire our jasmine-filled courtyard or our Andalucian window boxes, it’s thanks to Ahmed.
Mustapha (with TALIM since 1999), helps with painting, electrical repairs and events organizing, but he is increasingly taking on more responsibilities that include framing the many new items we receive into our collection, as well as the critical work of restoring damaged or mold-tainted paintings, prints, maps and other rare documents.
Ahmed, Ahmed and Mustapha chose to be photographed in front of one of the restored doors off the courtyard, beneath the logo of the old legation.
John Davison
We invite readers to get to know some of our colleagues who make up our TALIM family. Today, our Associate Director, Yhtimad Bouziane, and Curator, Mohammed Jadidi, introduce themselves to blog readers and friends on Facebook. We’ll include their biographies and others on our revised webpage, which we hope to launch in September.
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My name is Yhtimad Bouziane, and I am Associate Director, coordinating academic research and community outreach activities. I joined TALIM in 2000 and am from Tangier.
I studied at university in France, and I am preparing my PhD in Tangier on the « Universality of Human Rights. » From a very young age I have been attracted by the museum world, the world of art, culture and heritage. I feel fortunate to work at the Legation.
TALIM is a cultural mosaic where the Museum, the Research Center, the Library and our literacy classes function alongside each other daily. Upon entering the Museum, American and Moroccan flags welcome us and invite us to discover the history of the Morocco – American relationship along with the history of Tangier, its artists, its writers and their love for this city. TALIM is a place rich in knowledge where the architecture of the building itself reminds us of the cosmopolitanism of the Medina tracing both the history of Tangier and the coexistence of cultures and religions that promote respect and tolerance.
It is here, at the Legation where you can experience the eternal myth of Tangier.
I chose this picture because it is the heart of the Museum where we host concerts, plays and seminars. The mirrors reflect images, voices and sounds, and tell us that TALIM is a place that lives. From here you can hear the beating of the Legation’s heart.
Associdirector.talimATgmail.com
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I’m Mohammed Jadidi. I’ve worked at TALIM for over 14 years as the Curator of the museum collection, and I am in the final phase of my MA in Communications and Journalism. I like languages and speak Arabic, French, Spanish and English.
I enjoy introducing the Legation to student groups from Morocco and the U.S. and participating in or organizing different activities held at the center, especially those related to the museum.
I have chosen to take my picture near the American flag, which represents the Legation being on American soil. The flag welcomes guests to the Museum as they enter the rooms dedicated to Moroccan-American diplomatic history.
E-mail address: curator.talimATgmail.com
Thirty-one years ago last month, a group of sixty-plus Peace Corps trainees arrived in Rabat, following a nearly 24-hour trip from Philadelphia via Paris. It was already night as we drove in from the airport, and it was Ramadan. The streets were packed, but our bus eventually made its way to the Balima Hotel in the center of Rabat. Unable to sleep, I wandered down Blvd Mohammed V to the medina, and entered a new world of sights, sounds and smells. Thus began my own “beautiful friendship” with Morocco.
After spending two years teaching English at Lycée Laymoune in Berkane (and also visiting the American Legation in 1984), I began a diplomatic career that took me from Guinea-Bissau to Singapore, Madagascar to Tunisia, Cairo to New York City, and finally Niger and New Delhi. Working subsequently for the United Nations also allowed me to work in lovely, lyrical Cape Verde. Now I’ve come full circle and will begin a new adventure as Director of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies.
The changes at the Legation between 1984 and today are breathtaking. Our Research Library has grown exponentially and is now world class. Our Museum not only is bigger, it is also more coherent, and we offer visitors a journey through U.S.-Moroccan diplomatic history, showing through both art and vintage photographs how history and culture in Tangier are intertwined. In our Moroccan Pavilion, the eclectic literary and musical world of Paul Bowles and his circle of friends – American and Moroccan – comes alive. Finally, we promote literacy for women of the medina and exchanges between Moroccan and American students.
This transformation was only possible thanks to the vision and leadership of former TALIM directors and boards, and with more than a little help from our many friends in Tangier, the United States and Europe.
Now I’ve been selected to follow in the very deep footsteps of the men and women who have led TALIM. Along with continuing their efforts to meet the unending challenge of collecting, preserving, and sharing the American Legation’s unique diplomatic and cultural history, I hope to deepen TALIM activities to broaden outreach efforts to our own circle of friends -- residents of Tangier, Moroccan and local government leaders, the Embassy in Rabat, members of civil society, and our neighbors in the medina. In particular, I’d like to expand programming for women’s and girls’ education and to welcome more Moroccan youth to the Legation, in part through creating greater opportunities for U.S.-Moroccan academic research and exchanges.
Legation contractor Carlos Hadad & team, with Director Davison at new museum entrance
In the coming days, we’ll introduce our TALIM team on this blog and website. As we begin to prepare to celebrate the Legation’s bicentennial in 2021, please join us in honoring our past and creating our future. Thank you.
John Davison
New "name cloud" exhibit of Paul Bowles and literary & artistic friends drawn to Tangier
Can't stop curating?
Well, I do have to stop - we're getting on the ferry to Spain Friday morning! Friends have joked that I'll still be at it tomorrow morning, mounting yet more exhibits while my wife waits in the car. Not true; I stopped this afternoon.
At the French Consulate's 14 Juillet reception after we arrived in 2010, a Moroccan friend introduced me as the "nouveau conservateur" in what people in Tangier only knew then as the "Musée de l'Ancienne Légation Américaine." I joked that I was no conservative... I was a Democrat!
But the point is that conservateur or curator was the way people thought of this position in this city. I thought that was a bit limiting - how about our research library? Our seminars? The Arabic literacy program? Etc. I also didn't like that ancienne thing - made it sound like we were closed.
Over the past four years, I've waged a branding campaign, using our award-winning logo on business cards and throughout the building, and our no-longer-new appelation of TALIM to convey the message that though we have a museum, we are much more than a museum. Now, it's quite common to see references to "TALIM" in the press, and it always pleases me to hear us described as an institut.
That said, it has really been fun, that curating stuff. In 2010, when we mounted what has become one of our biggest attractions, the Paul Bowles Wing, replete with musical soundtrack and illustrated story of Bowles' treks through Morocco for the Library of Congress, someone asked me who had curated the exhibit. I replied, well, that I had. That was the first time someone described what I had done as curation. It felt pretty good.
A couple of years later, when we put on Dorothy Weems' one-woman show of her mother's stories during the Legation's wartime years, the actress referred to me as her "producer," just for organizing the venue and helping her with rehearsals. Not to worry: I'm not about to embark on a Hollywood career at this stage. But "producing" what was a very memorable recreation of a special period in the place where it all happened was a joy. I learned later that it was called, in academic circles, "site-specific performance." And how.
It's been quite a whirl, these past four years, and Marie Hélène (who has worked tirelessly, helping me in everything I do, plus teaching French in our women's literacy program and helping shepherd the other volunteers) and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
So it's not adieu, but only إلـى الـلـقـاء.
Gerald Loftus
His Majesty King Mohammed VI
Paul Bowles Library of Congress
Moroccan Music Collection
Tangier American Legation
Institute for Moroccan Studies
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It was the only way I could think of to get the opus of Morocco's traditional music, recorded in 1959 by Paul Bowles and digitized by TALIM in 2010, into the hands of King Mohammed VI: have a leather presentation case made, embossed with the TALIM logo and dedicated to His Majesty.
US Ambassador to Morocco Dwight Bush now has it, and will present it at an appropriate occasion. Morocco's musical heritage will have been repatriated after more than fifty years in the vaults of the Library of Congress.
We hope that this will spur the Moroccan Ministry of Culture to action, so that this music - 250 selections from all across Morocco, what Paul Bowles called "as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India" - can get into the hands of Moroccans who treasure their musical heritage.
In the meantime, another avenue for the dissemination of the Bowles Moroccan music collection is being prepared by the Aga Khan Documentation Center in the MIT Libraries, which will make the files available in Archnet
a globally-accessible, scholarly resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues in Muslim societies.
Archnet is an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT.. While there are still certain technical details to be ironed out before the Bowles collection is online accessible, we are thrilled that soon scholars and traditional music enthusiasts worldwide will be able to listen to the entire 72 hours of music.
Archnet already has a Legation page, and we are also working with them to make another rich archive accessible, once it's fully digitized: the TALIM glass negative collection from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about which we have written on TALIMblog and part of which is now displayed in our museum.
So, researchers eager to see the pictures or listen to the music: hold your horses, please be patient, and we'll be sure to let you know when you can access the collections online. In the meantime, do check out what Archnet already has in its extensive collections.
Gerald Loftus
The following is a guest post by Emma Chubb, who made a presentation on her subject to a group of American, European, and Moroccan researchers and interested members of the public at TALIM on June 17. Emma Chubb is a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois USA) and is a 2013-14 American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) fellow in Morocco.
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Guides and Gateways
I spent much of last fall reading through TALIM’s collection of guidebooks and tourism magazines published between the 1940s and 1970s. Perhaps it was because I too was a newcomer to Tangier, but these guides fascinated me. Some folded out like maps, mixing quirky tips for the European or American traveler to Tangier with black-and-white photographs and brightly colored illustrations.
With others, it was the advertisements that drew me in. I was particularly struck by how, in the space of a half-page, they bore such efficient witness to the complexity of colonial Tangier when it was an International Zone.
Take, for example, the advertisement for a shop called Butterfly published in the 1952 American guide, Tangier: The Golden Gateway, in which the United States, France, and the so-called Far East come together in the space of a few inches. While both the shop’s name and ad content appear in English, its rue des Vignes address and accented “e” in the abbreviation “Tél” point to France. Yet despite being in Morocco, shoppers will find nary a babouche here. Instead, this Tangerine store sells “rare objects from the Far East,” including, perhaps, silk kimono-clad, paper parasol-wielding female figurines like the one pictured.
Not surprisingly, many of the stereotypes and stock characters for which the city remains (in)famous appear throughout these guides. Frequent mentions of beaches, sunshine, modern hotels, and a favorable exchange rate promise various kinds of pleasure, while Moroccan handicrafts and produce sold by Rifi women in bright red-and-white striped foutas and pompom-adorned straw hats lend an “authentic,” “traditional,” and, yes, “exotic” ambiance.
These clichés don’t only appear in guides from the colonial period, however, as TALIM’s collection of materials published by the Moroccan Ministry of Information and Tourism, such as Maroc Tourisme, makes clear. With its many examples from both before independence and after, TALIM’s guidebook collection raises important questions about the persistence of colonialist clichés in the postcolonial period.
These questions, like the guidebooks themselves, merit further study, particularly today as Tangier and the North take center stage in Morocco’s efforts to become a top global destination for tourists and in the many new guidebooks that they will undoubtedly bring with them.
Emma Chubb
TALIM logo and lettering at entrance to museum (installed June 2014)
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This is a "guest post" by Ambassador Edward Peck, who returned to Tangier on May 1 on board a cruise ship, and had been hoping to show Mrs. Peck the place where he and several other future US ambassadors had studied Arabic over fifty years ago.
He found our doors closed. Disappointment all around - we were so looking forward, as the Pecks were, to a trip down memory lane. Since the visit unfortunately didn't happen, here's a virtual tour of the Legation in photos (featuring some Legation exhibits that have just been opened), along with Ambassador Peck's narrative of his return to Tangier.
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One of the first six students who attended FSI’s Arabic Language School in the old Legation building when it opened in 1961, I was both pleasantly surprised and extremely impressed by the view of Tangier from the sea as our ship arrived on May Day 2014.
The string of impressive, white high-rises all along the shoreline of the bay, and marching up the hills, were dramatic indications that there have been some very significant changes since I graduated in 1963.
Legation room: more than two centuries of diplomatic history
Although the newer parts of the city look very much like those in other countries, especially in terms of the modern shops, office buildings and condos that line the wide, clean streets, the old city, the medina/casbah, is very much like it was back then. Using my rusty but still serviceable Arabic as needed, I was able to make my way through the winding, narrow alleys to what is now TALIM, but found it closed for May Day.
"Moroccans in America" exhibit, Pavilion staircase, opened June 2014
Director Jerry Loftus and I had been communicating about the visit, and he had left instructions with the guard to be on the lookout for me, but somehow that did not work and I did not get an opportunity to actually see what the inside looks like now. Photographs are helpful, and I doubt I could find the rooms in which we studied and played ping-pong to relax, but I know it is quite different.
The dining room exhibit of Marguerite McBey's sketchbooks
It was pretty run down when I did the 22-month, 6 hour days, five days per week, and had been empty since the new Consulate General had been built farther up the hill. An explorer by nature, in an empty cellar room I found three metal boxes containing about forty 78 rpm records from wartime Germany. They included some heavily propagandist music: "We’re Sailing on England Tonight" and "Deutschland Uber Alles," played by the Hermann Goering Division band; "The Horst Wessel Song," by the Adolf Hitler SS Division band. There were also many contemporary, folk song and classical records, all in excellent condition. I donated them to the Library of Congress, since no one in the CG had any idea how the boxes got there.
Exhibit of glass negative images of Tangier International Zone (opened May 2014)
In 2014, I went looking for the little house we had lived in, and found it in a tiny island of similar houses totally surrounded by multi-storey buildings. It is a pharmacy now, and I imagine that enclave of small homes will soon be a memory.
Legation courtyard: four orange trees in parterres of crushed seashells
What has not changed is the warm and outgoing population. Moroccans are justifiably known for their open, welcoming and smiling personalities, especially those in Tangier, and it was a pleasure to be among them again. The visit was brief, but wrapped in reliving very pleasant memories of a time long ago.
Ambassador Edward Peck; photos Gerald Loftus
Almost four years to the day, I wrote about my predecessor Thor Kuniholm and his long tenure at the Legation. Next week, it will be my successor, John Davison, who will be coming in after Marie Hélène and I head off to greener pastures.
I was an early and strong supporter of John's candidacy, among a very competitive field of applicants for this job. He had visited us at the Legation after learning of the job opening, and we were impressed with his enthusiasm, imagination, and his knowledge of Morocco.
John has known Morocco since his days in the 1980s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and has kept his links - and his knowledge of Moroccan Arabic - alive in the intervening decades, when his diplomatic career took him to other countries in the region (Tunisia, Egypt, Niger) and beyond.
This sentiment of leaving the Legation in good hands has only been reinforced by a period of overlap, where we had plenty of time to discuss the range of activities that is TALIM. And John was able to witness first hand many of these in a particularly busy May and June, meeting many in our network of supporters in the bargain. It's been optimum preparation for his taking the helm.
So this is not yet goodbye - we'll save that for the "last post" - but rather Welcome to the New Mudir (Arabic for Director). I daresay John will fall in love with this venerable building as we have. As those of us who know it best will appreciate, it deserves all the loving care we can give it.
Gerald Loftus
The skeletons of Martin Malcolm Elbl's book are not in any closets, they're the very walls of Tangier's medina, its old walled city which was, for centuries, Tangier itself, before the city dared build outside the fortifications.
"Your library has been randomly selected..." was the explanation on the $0.00 invoice slip that accompanied Portuguese Tangier (1471-1662): Colonial Urban Fabric as Cross-Cultural Skeleton, by Martin Malcolm Elbl of Trent University in Ontario. This 1,000 page tome is the first volume of a series published by the Baywolf Press for Portuguese Studies Review (PSR).
Here's how PSR describes the book:
The book offers a “virtual archaeology” of the Portuguese urban fabric heritage--both vanished and preserved--in Tangier's médina, the walled Old Town. Solidly grounded in archival sources and profoundly revisionist, Portuguese Tangier alters our image of the médina to an unexpected extent.
"Encyclopedic" is often overused, but in the case of Martin Malcolm Elbl storehouse of knowledge, it is an understatement; Elbl is as at home in Portuguese as in Arabic, as at ease with GIS modeling as he is with Wencelas Hollar engravings of British Tangier.
Oh yes, what is British Tangier doing in a book on the Portuguese era, the mere twenty years which came on the heels of the two long centuries of Portuguese rule? Elbl says that the British conveniently renamed much of what was in fact Portuguese (our own neighbor, the wonderfully-named "Irish Battery," was originally the Portuguese Cubelo do Bispo). Same stones, different colonists.
There's much useful background for understanding what Elbl calls the "prehistory" of the Legation's immediate surroundings. The drouj merican or American steps, built into the medina wall in 1911 to allow more convenient access to the American Legation, had been predated by a Portuguese-era entrance further down what today is, appropriately, Rue du Portugal.
And then there's another long-gone neighbor: "the 'Sultan Steam Mill' (almost back to back with the Legation). This was in the 1880s -- one of the early waves of industrialization at Tangier." And the nearby "Times of Morocco" offices... we have much to learn from Portuguese Tangier, which is an unexpected but important addition to our research library.
Thank you Martin Malcolm Elbl, the Portuguese Studies Review, Trent University, and the Baywolf Press. We suspect that the "random selection" had a bit of human agency behind it!
Gerald Loftus
Drawing by Lawrence Mynott, graphic design by Anthea Pender
The eagle - hats off to artist Lawrence Mynott and his American eagle balloon on our invitation cards - has taken off, or almost. Actually, we're still here for a couple more weeks, so last night's farewell was the biggest but not the last farewell.
Thanks to the generosity of Madison Cox, we were sent off with full flying colors by our Tangier friends, a cross section of this multidimensional city, with donors, staff members, artists, artisans, academics... everyone who has helped us make this place a livelier, more open venue for our wide range of activities.
Four years seems like a brief snippet of time to many who have made Tangier their home, but we wanted to inject as much activity and innovation into those 48 months as possible, and then leave on a high note.
Speaking of notes, we were also graced by the presence of Gospel ensemble the Campbell Brothers, who joined us prior to their open air concert on the Grand Socco, Tangier's lively square which is the transition between medina and modern city.
"Amazing Grace," sung a capella to a hushed audience, was the perfect preview for what was a rousing performance post-party organized by the US Embassy and the American Language Center.
This is not "the last post," so stay tuned for a few more under this byline in the next couple of weeks. And heartfelt thanks to Madison Cox for putting on a great party, and helping us celebrate this great institution and our brief moment helping more people get to know it.
Gerald Loftus