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Studies in Travel Writing

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AGENCY RELOCATED:
HYBRIDITY AND RESISTANCE
IN SOME BRITISH TRAVEL
ACCOUNTS ON MOROCCO
Sadik Rddad
Published online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Sadik Rddad (1999) AGENCY RELOCATED: HYBRIDITY AND
RESISTANCE IN SOME BRITISH TRAVEL ACCOUNTS ON MOROCCO, Studies in Travel
Writing, 3:1, 113-130, DOI: 10.1080/13645145.1999.9634890

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.1999.9634890

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 AGENCY RELOCATED: HYBRlDlTY AND RESISTANCE I N SOME
BRITISH TRAVEL ACCOUNTS ON MOROCCO

Sadlk Rddad

[A] doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once which
makes it impossible for the devalued, insatiable evolu6... to accept the
coloniser’s invitation to identity: ‘You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re
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different, you’re one of us.’ It is precisely in that ambivalent use of ‘different’--

to be different from those that are different makes you the Same -- that the
Unconscious speaks of the form of Otherness, the tethered shadow of
deferral and displacement. It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised
Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of the
colonial otherness -- the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s
body. It is in relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal
problem of colonial identity.1

By considering some twentieth-century British travel accounts on Morocco, this

paper attempts to question the notion of cultural identity based on ‘manichean
binarisms’ and ‘dual narcissisms’. I shall argue that the notion of the Other should
be Seen in the light of the shift from abstract identifications to subjectification. This
critical shift, which emanates from post-modern theory and post-colonial
reconsideration of representation, presupposes the ‘return of the subject’ and the
relocation of agency. The shifting enunciative position of the colonial subject shows
internal indeterminacy, plurality and complexity. Western reinscription of the native
brings to the surface a wide range of ‘copresent’, asymmetrical and mutually
subversive discursive practices. Ali Behdad traces in the colonial discourse “a
complex network of diasporic conjunctures, conflicted histories, hybrid identities”.2
Unlike Frank Fanon’s logic of manicheanism that he detailed mainly in his seminal
study, Black Skin, White Masks, and Edward Said’s rigid and monolithic binary
discursive division: OccidentlOrient, particularly in Orientalism, James Clifford, Lisa
Lowe, Mary Louise Pratt, Dennis Porter, and Roland Barthes, to name but a few
prominent critics, reject the conventional Western apparatus of binary aesthetic and
cultural representation. James Clifford, for example, is concerned less with pure
identities and theoretical paradigms that stress teleological relations between
imperial/global and nativenocat cultures than with borders and relational articulation

113
 between cultures. Like Pratt, he opts for a ‘contact approach’ to the question of
repre~entation.~ In what seems to be one of the strongest criticisms of the fixed
binary approach to travel discourse, Lisa Lowe wrote:

When we maintain a static dualism of identity and difference, and uphold the
logic of the dualism as the means of explaining how a discourse expresses
domination and subordination, we fail to account for the differences inherent
in each term ... the binary opposition of Occident and Orient is thus a
misleading perceptionwhich serves to suppress the specific heterogeneities,
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inconsistencies and ~llppages.~

It is, in fact, such discursive ‘heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages’ of

colonial authority, and travel as an interactive and negotiated practice between
traveller and travellee that this paper addresses. Although travel literature is
strongly manipulated and oriented by the dictatorial authorial eye4 yet the
reconsideration of the ‘subtext‘, ‘third space’, the unconscious, or the non-said of a
travel narrative reveals that it is informed by a dialogic and hybrid process caused
by negotiated and mutually negating positions and cultural oppositions. The
corollary unconscious effect of which is the subversion of Western hegemony and
authority in a problematic condition of hybrid cultural negotiation and attempted
negation. For Pierre Macherey, it is what the text does not say, or even what it does
not know that is held of critical importance. The focus on the silence of the text
offers a discursive space for the marginalised voice, and for the subaltern, or ‘silent
interlocutor’ to speak. A Macherean reading would show how travel accounts on
Morocco are replete with discursive situations where the colonial discourse is
disturbed and fractured by its own silences, gaps and contradictions. One of the
major disturbing elements in these travel narratives is undoubtedly the hybrid.
Through the hybrid, the colonial discourse, argues Homi Bhabha, articulates “a
process by which objectifiedothers may be turned into subjects of their history and
experience”.6 Thus, the native, as hybrid, is a site of productive power, both
‘subservient and subversive’, subjectivised and subjectified. For although the
Moroccan in British travelogues is coercively (dis)placed and relegated to a
subservient position, he/she is engaged with agency and power, resists forms of
hegemony and is able to achieve a considerable control over narration and
representation. This is done by dint of a counter-politics of exclusion, auto-
ethnographic and “creole self-fashioning”, to use the terms of Mary Louise Pratt.’
The sharing of narrative command between the native subjects and Western
subjects and authors creates a site of disjunctive and hybrid enunciation. My view

114
 is clearly an argument against Michel Foucault's 'panoptic principle'. In his
discussion of the relation between power and surveillance, Foucault alludes to the
Panopticon, the eighteenth-century design for a prison divided into cells, all of
which could be observed from the single vantage point central tower (in our case a
central eyell: the traveller-narrator). He notes that what "guarantees control in the
Panopticon is the analytical arrangement of space ... the power exercised over [the
prisoners] ... depends on spatial configuration rather than on the use of force ... the
observer remains invisible to those who are the objects of surveillance".' This
physical, visual and architectural distantiation and hierarchical relation between
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observer and observed is manifest in a wide variety of British travel narratives on

Morocco, such as Eleanor Elsner's The Magic of Morocco (1928), Wyndham
Lewis's A Journey into Barbaty (1931), C. V. Usborne, First Moroccan Journey
(1938), and George Otwell's Marrakesh (1939). Yet although the Panoptic vision
governs a great proportion of these narratives, the counter-discursive practices,
guaranteed, among other things, by hybrid narrative enunciation and hybrid
subjects, offer a situation within the colonial text itself whereby the Western traveller-
narrator is at times subject to the native gaze and surveillance. As Foucault argues
elsewhere, resistance is contained, written Into the notion of power. He views that
where there is power there is resistance. In contrast to the freedom-limiting and
disciplining architectural construction of space, Foucault refers to another image of
space which he calls heterotopia. As Syed Manzurul Islam puts it:

If panopticon is the space of power, rigid boundary and non-travel,

Heterotopia is the space that slips through the net of power: it is of supple
boundary, and offers perilous voyages beyond threshold. It is the ethical
counterpoint to the logic of panopti~on.~

One of the aims of this paper is to examine how the native slips into the narrative
space of heterotopia, which enables him to go beyond the boundaries and
threshold of colonial power.
The native, therefore, punctures even as it problematises the whole notion and
strategies of representation. The inscription of the colonised in the colonial
discourse disturbs the latter by doubling it, for the presence of the colonised "mimes
the forms of authorny at the point at which it deauthorizes them."'o Hence the
paradoxical nature of the colonial discourse, which produces an 'Other' that
dismantles, fractures and threatens it. Again Homi Bhabha states that: "hybridity
represents that ambivalent turn of the discriminated subject into the terrifjhg,
exorbitant object of paranoid classification-- a disturbing questioning of the images

115
 of and presences of authority ... Hybridity is a problematic of colonial
representation... that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other
‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of
’’
its authority“.
Accordingly ‘disavowed knowledges’ and voices return to be acknowledged as
alternative authorities. By doubling the self it becomes unrecognised, as the
repetition of authority and of the self as ‘origin’ creates a split subject, deauthorises
the coloniser and produces the Other as a ‘neither-nor’ being, a hyphenated,
translated identity. This hyphenated condition is due to the complex aspect of
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representation, which resets and recreates the colonised through the process of
recognition (almost the same) and disavowal (always different). As such, Otherness
is a site of intersubjective cultural difference whereby identity is in a constant
process of negotiated overlapping and oscillation between different races, cultures
and discourses. The post-colonial condition of the individual interrogates the
conception of a unitary unfragmented subject. Its reinscription of plurality and
shared agency is undoubtedly a recognition of the historical, geographical and
cultural bases of the Other who is reinterpreted and reinserted in the boundaries of
hybrid and fragmented spaces, time, historyhs and culture(s) (i.e. Native and
Western histories, cultures and spaces). As such the consideration of the post-
colonial condition of the native is a thinly veiled argument against the modern
condition which “conceives of humanity as a unitary subject striving towards the
goal of perfect coherence”.’*
In what follows, I will try to look at a few instances which show that British travel
literature on Morocco is very often a hybrid mode of writing and that the natives
often participate in the narrative act, normally oriented by the traveller-narratorand
traditionally attributed to him or her. To begin with, Frances Macnab’s A Ride in
Morocco (1902) is a travel narrative written under the influence of the 1860s
Spanish Moroccan war which was the second serious check of Moroccan military
power after the war of lsly in 1844. This war ended with the defeat of Moroccan
troops by Spain, opening the country to the colonial greedy expansionism of the
European countries, especially Spain, France, Britain and Germany. This historical
event indeed explains the strong Moroccan hatred of the Spanish in A Ride in
Morocco and justifies the natives’ excessive glorification of the B r i t i ~ h . ’ This
~ book
is also written on the eve of French colonialism and a few years before the signing
of the Franco-British Cambon-Lansdown Declaration, known as the ‘entente
cordiale’ , in 1904, which put Moroccan destiny in the hands of France and Spain
and allowed Britain to have a free hand in Egypt.

116
 Equipped with a camera (not the tourist’s) and a tent reminiscent of the modern
anthropologist’s material, Frances Macnab sets off to Morocco in the first evening of
the Twentieth century. Her narrative records her observations and remarks about
her encounter with Moroccan religious and metaphysical practices, mysterious
confraternity rituals, commercial prospects, and shows her attempt to decode the
hieroglyphics of Moorish culture. Her journey, started in Tangier, Tetuan, Azila and
the Riff, and went through Rabat, Casablanca, Mazagan and Marrakech to Safi.
This geographical journey is undertakenin parallel with a retrospective journey into
the history of Morocco and an exploration of social activities, festivities, ceremonies,
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beliefs, the Harem, the ‘savage’ confraternity practices of the Aissaouas and
Gnaoua, the metaphysical world and architecture.
A Ride in Morocco consists of two distinct voices, reinforcing the
recognition/disavowaIdichotomy I referred to earlier. While one discourse attempts
to relegate Moroccan culture, history and identity to archival sites, the other resets it
as a signifier of resistance and opposition. A significant corollary of this hybrid
enunciative narration and discourse is the recognition of a disjunctive voice in
command of narrative and authority. Let us first consider a native voice which,
being oriented and manipulated by the traveller-narrator, lauds and validates the
introduction of modernity and the Western modern modes of production. The voice
says in broken English:

‘This poor country1 It never get no chance. India get railways; its people they
come to England and enjoy the Jubilee. China, she get a chance some day.
But this country never get nothing -- no railway -- no 14
-I.

Here, it is hard to recognise the enunciative and ideological identity and position of
the speaker. The identification of the identity of the ‘native’ seems to be
problematic, since this call to ‘goWestern’, like the process of ‘going native’, is a
situation where the native or the Westerner is in a continuous process of becoming
as it entails departure from one’s cultural identity and involves the impossibility of
full identificationwith the target culture, its technology and its modes of production.
The supposedly ‘native’ discursive position of the above quotation can be easily
identified with the colonial voice of the British traveller-narrator, Frances Macnab.
She would claim later in the narrative that:

Many Moors were ready to accept any terms from Great Britain,... because
her Moslem subjects in India were contented with her rule. ‘Morocco is a

117
 finer country than India; why doesn't England take Morocco, and do with it
whatever she will, for the English are a merciful people'. (p.263)

In the same vein, Macnab would claim, in a panegyric and patriotic tone so
reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe's imperialisticpredilectionof the British nation, that
the English are the embodiment of moral, intellectual and physical prowess. She
says:

I asked one of them [the Moors] once why it was they used this term 'English
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word'. And he explained to me that the English were a very strong people
and were not afraid of anything. When an Englishman said a thing the Moor
found it came true; and he added: 'it is good for Moors to have to do with
English people' (p.81).

The denial of native agency and oppositional positionality is a common rhetorical

strategy espoused by most British travel-writers who came to and/or wrote about
Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Justifying the Western presence
in Morocco, Lady Agnes Grove, who visited this country in 1902, states that:

Merchants who carry on their trade with European countries are most
anxious to come under European protection, and to effect this they enroll
themselves as partners to the particular firm with whom they have dealings.
The Government of the country then demands that these traders shall be
considered under their particular protection, and thus become either British-
protected, French-protected and so on.'

That Macnab and Lady Agnes, as female travellers, are engaged in the colonial
enterprise is unquestionable. Both male and female travel writing, which is certainly
informed by different discursive frameworks pertaining to conditions of production
and reception, are vehicles of colonial expansion, perpetuating the hierarchised
relation between coloniser and colonised, and reinforcing administrative rule. The
recognition of female travel writers' affiliation with the colonial project, and their
insertion in the 'Great Tradition' of travel literature has recently been discussed by
travel critics such as Louise Pratt, Sara Mills, Lisa Lowe, Rana Kabbani and Billie
Melman. In her illuminatingbook, Discourses of Difference,Sara Mills sets women
travellers in the context of colonialism. She argues that:

118
 [Mlost writers on this subject have represented them [women] as individuals
struggling against the social conventions of the Victorian society, who were
exceptional in managing to escape the system of chaperonage. Their role
within the colonial period was often strenuously avoided ... women as
individuals and as writers are always seen to be marginal to the process of
colonialism.l6

However, colonial discursive practice is informed, even as it is subverted by a

counter discourse, which can be traced in the subtext. Earlier in A Ride in Morocco,
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Macnab admits the impenetrability and resistance of Morocco.” “Tetuan”, she

wrote, “is on the borders of the forbidden; and the valley on which I am looking out
would lead ... to the wildest and most anti-European part of the Empire -- the country
of the Riffs” (p.85). Again, she says: “Fez is anti-European, and practically Moslem”
(p. 48). In the same vein, Macnab goes on to explain that “the Moors’ hatred of
Spaniards ... goes back to the time when the Moors were driven out of Spain. They
left with the determination to return and brought with them the keys of their houses
in Granada” (p. 48). This makes of the Moors potential reconquerors of Europe
through Spain. The relocationof agency and power is of extreme importance in the
overall discursive and cultural conflicts between Morocco and Europe.
While the ‘Moors’ as presented by Macnab seem to be fascinated and captivated
by the prospects of Western modes of production and modernity traced in the native
desire to ‘go Western’, the author’s experiencing of Morocco reverses the colonial
relation with it. Like Crapanzano’s relation with Tuhami, Macnab seems to be
subject and captive of the enchanting powers of the Orient. The coioniser becomes
colonised, just as Tuhami captivated Crapanzano by the Sheherazad-like
fascinating force of telling stories.’* In a romantic and Sufist desire for Morocco,
she says “I wished I could find some hermit’s cave in the rocks and live there”
(p.243). This artistic wish fulfilment seems to have emanated more from convention
than from a personal cult of a life near to nature and far away from the boring
artificiality of the mechanised llfe of bourgeois British society. The romantic and
pastoral tradition and its idealisation and fantasisation of the Orient has a visible
impact on the representation of Morocco in British travelogues. Macnab’s romantic
desire to ‘go native’ dismantles her colonial discourse, even as it blurs the
boundaries between the subject and the object, between Western and native
identities, and subsequently problematises the very notion of difference. By
desiring to be Other and be in an ‘other’ place, Macnab attempts to disavow her
identity and be a ‘translated and a reinvented being’, to use the words of Trinh T.
Minh-ha.Ig

119
 The economy of pleasure and desire, which informs Western travel literature, is
also manifest in Walter Harris’s famous narrative, Morocco that Was (1921). Like A
Ride in Morocco, this account is revelatory of the author’s double identity, hybrid self
and insider-outsider vision, which complicates positionality and attitude. The
process of ‘going native’ is imposed on Harris as it serves as a protective device,
especially in a Moslem society depicted as a fanatic anti-Christiancommunity. By
donning a Moorish dress, which he highly enjoys, Harris crosses cultural bridges,
violates national barriers, and denies difference by becoming artificially Other. He
writes:
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But there were other journeys when, with half a dozen mules of my own, and
my own men with me, a few good horses, and tents of less pretensions and
native in character, I wandered through the country alone and in native
clothes, for months and months together. Those were the great days: long
almost objectlessjourneys, wandering whither the desire led me.*’

By “wandering whither the desire led [him]”, Harris momentarily casts away his
colonial garment to enjoy the captivating charm provided by Morocco’s ‘state of
nature’. The enjoyment of and identification with native cultures emanates from the
Western belief that ‘primitive’societies represent, in an absurd logic of assimilation,
an early phase in the developmental evolution of European civilisation. These
societies offer a belated site of artificial nostalgic wish fulfilment, for ‘primitive’
communities artificially reproduce and presence Europe’s past. It should be noted,
however, that the encounter with Morocco is confined to the geographical and
metaphorical dimension of the Orient as past of the West. It rarely develops into
inter-human and inter-racial relationships. Although ’going native’ seems to violate
the basic principle of the ‘purist’ and indifferent attitude towards Moroccans, yet its
partiality and confinement to the country rather than people maintains post-
Darwinian racist race theory. Accordingly, the notion of hybridity is put into
question. In contrast to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to
India, for example, ‘going native’ in travel writings on Morocco reveals a different
difference and a different rendition of hybridity, since the latter does by no means
shake the foundations of Western pure identity and its principal principle, racist and
hierarchised relation with Morocco.
The point about the ideological position and rhetoric of such a text as Harris‘s
Morocco that Was is that it paradoxically reinforces native agency and geography,
which it tries to negate or relegate to the imaginary and phantasms of the legendary
world of the Arabian Nights. The native rhetorics of resistance and emancipatory

120
 tendency undermines and disengages itself from the totalising and universalising
dynamics of colonialism.
The questions, thus, are who tells the story? From what position? Who is the
subject? Where is agency located? Who produces power? Can the Other produce
power? And can the subaltern speak? It seems that looking at writings as
hybridised practice and the Other as hybrid reveals the problematic situation of the
subject, representation, difference and positionality.
Positionality is reversed the moment the native voice is freed from the
commanding surveillance of the narrator. The native world view and ideology are
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voiced in an asymmetrical and hierarchised relation with the Other (paradoxically

Europe is Othered), as the centre is relegated to a peripheral position. Macnab’s
discourse reinforces a native reconceptualising classificatory basis of nations.
According to the Moorish voice

The world is divided like this -- the Moors are men, and their right place is on
the top of the world. They are the faithful and the elect of God. But there are
Christian dogs and Jews. The Christian dogs are divided into many sorts, but
the kind which the Moors object to least is the English ... (p.196).

It should be useful to note that the native classification of nations is an explicit

critique of Eurocentric discursive principles and criteria of classification. Placing
Morocco at the top of nations is an ideological attitude which aims at shaking the
hierarchised European bases of humanism, by interrogating the Eurocentered
binary relation between Europe and its Others. It is a denial of the pseudo-scientific
norms of racial taxonomy imposed by the West.21 Indeed, it refutes the nineteenth-
century philosophical views, more particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution and
Gobineau’s race theory, which he outlines in his Essai sur I’ininegalit6 des races
humaines.22 The British travellers to Morocco found in the ‘Great Chain of Being’ a
ready pattern of nation ramlfication. Such racist philosophical beliefs are certainly
adopted and adapted by colonial administrations and were highly popularised by
literary production, especially travel literature, romance and the novel. These
literary forms were becoming more accessible to a wider readership thanks to the
spread of cheaper editions. Their accessibility made them play a major role in the
dissemination and popularisationof the colonial stereotypical representation of the
non-European as backward, dangerously barbarous, and subsequently in dire
need of the intervention of Western civilisation through colonialism.
The last travel narrative I will examine is G. H. Selous’s Appointment to Fez
(1954). This account is an indispensable historical document of a crucial period in

121
 the history of Morocco and provides a detailed and brilliant evaluation of the
‘notable travellers in Morocco’. Appointment to f e z is both a personal, imaginary
and realistic reconstruction of the author’s diplomatic experience in the consular
service in Fez in 1911-2. He was an eye-witness of the upheavals and mutinies of
the people of Fez and the surrounding tribes, and the arrival of Marechal Lyautey,
the first French Resident General in Morocco.
The embassy in charge of the signing of the Protectorate treaty arrived in Fez
(then capital of Morocco) on 24 March 1912. Although they were warmly received
by official members of the Moroccan government (the Makhzen), by the city nobility
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in favour of the Protectorate and by a horde of prostitutes hired by the local

authorities to give the impression of a spontaneous welcoming manifestation of the
women of Fez,23 yet they were surrounded by a very hostile and ‘fanatic’ anti-
Christian and anti-Makhzen population. Indeed the Moroccans felt humiliated to
see their country disgracefully surrendering to the will of ‘the heathens’ after
centuries of unique resistance to foreign invasion. Selous succeeds to a great
extent in rendering the horrible atmosphere of the bloody days of 17, 18, and 19
April 1912 following the signing and sealing of the treaty of Fez between King
Moulay Hafid of Morocco and France on March 30. This treaty allowed France to
administer Moroccan foreign affairs and introduce various reforms. She was
constrained however to “safeguard the religious status, the respect and traditional
prestige of the Sultan, the exercise of Mohammedan religion and of all religious
institutions, in particular those of the habous [charitable foundations or
Emphasis on the safeguard of religious practices and the prestige of the king was
actually meant to abate native resistance and fanaticism, yet French occupation led
to division and friction among the people, and more heterogeneity of the nation. To
my mind, this historical event contributed to the complexity of the Moroccan social
fabric and is an argument against the allegation that the Orientalist reconstruction
and representation of this reality is monolithic. The point I am trying to make here is
that native agency is both historical and textual; poetic and political, for it is situated
both in and outside the text.
Like the majority of travelogues of the time, Appointment to fez takes the
reader into the ‘mysterious’ world of Moroccan harems, political tyranny, religious
fanaticism, the oppression of Moroccan Jews, the unpracticality of religious
institutions, especially the Habous, and military and administrative backwardness.
Although the narrative is replete with positive and passionate descriptions of the
beauty and charms of Fez, yet a more cautious reading shows that Selous’s
discourse is actually meant to legitimise bourgeois colonial authority and
delegitimise native subsistent life-ways and traditional modes of production.

122
 According to him, the Moroccan state necessitates economic, political, military
administrative and educational reforms to launch the country into the orbit of
Western modernity and into the advanced capitalistic modes of production through
colonialism.
Reviewing the circumstances which attended the training and development of
the Moroccan army under the French military mission from November 1910 to
March 1912, Selous highly praises the French Instructors and explicitly shows his
admiration and support of the modernising effort of colonialism. He says: "they had
forged a good fighting weapon and had tempered it in a very thorough baptism of
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fire. They desewed much praise for their excellent work, and no blame whatever for
the unrest and discontent which had later sprung up in the ranks of the units they
had tralr~ed".*~Later on, he speaks of "the outbreak of the mutiny at Fez as a
bombshell in Paris, ruining the legitimate satisfaction following the successful
negotiation of the Protectorate treaty" (p.149). Earlier in the narrative, Selous
launches a strong critical attack against the obsolete machinery used by the
Moroccan army. He writes:

The troops' idea of drill and military movements was little above kindergarten
level; their weapons the old Martini or 600 Hafra..., some Nordenfieldt
quickfires, and a few guns the firing of which was as dangerous to the
gunners as to the enemy..." (p.126)

Accordingly, it is undeniable that Appointment to Fez in particular and travel

literature in general are instruments of colonial expansion as they validate colonial
rule and convey its ideology. The ideological partisanshipof the author with French
colonialism, which breaks the illusion of objective and neutral representation of
Morocco, is also manifest in his biased (mis)interpretation of the Moorish reaction to
the winds of change and modernisation. The native 'blind' massive massacres of
the Europeans, no matter what their religion was, is rot construed as a natural and
legitimate reaction to foreign occupation. It is rather considered within a wider
context of metaphoric CrescenKross conflict inflamed by the 'barbarous' religious
call for the Jihad (holy war) not against a specific nation, but against all Christians.
As Selous puts it:

The French were no better than the Makhzen... and they have not even the
merit of being Moslems. And it will be understood that, in a backward and
fanatic Moslem country such as Morocco, the risk of transition from hostility
towards a particular foreign country into fanatical, anti-Christian hatred

123
 susceptible of leading to an outbreak of Jihad or Holy War was ever present
and, if the transition occurred, would be liable to do so with devastating,
whirlwind swiftness (p.136).

Following the spirit of this religiously inflamed xenophobic tradition, Selous

recounts the incidents relating to the massacre of innocent European civilians in the
Hotel de France, where there were eighteen Europeans including the proprietress
and a Spanish Franciscan friar. The mob of mutineers, scouring Old Fez for
Christians to slaughter, flowed down the narrow alley. Before they were prevented,
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the proprietress and the friar foolishly went to the door to parley from behind it and
were killed on the spot. Stressing, further, the bloodthirsty and abominable nature
of the Jihad, the author pretends to have witnessed a ghastly scene that he reports
as follows:

The Basha of Fez Jedeed... was himself escorting the pack-mules to the
military hospital as their panniers were laden with a ghastly burden, mutilated
and decapitated remains of certain French instructors. (p.144)

The authorial pro-colonial discourse, which lauds the French 'mission civilisatrice',
is counterbalanced by an Oriental discourse and agency. While some Moroccans
collaborated with France to reinforce its hegemonic rule on the country, pacify its
people and assimilate them, the embryonic origins of nationalism came to the
surface. The nascent nationalistic groups constituted the basis of native resistance
and counter-discursivity. It is indeed the coexistence of these conflicting voices that
problematises the colonialist discourse in Appointment to Fez. I shall briefly
consider three instances of native resistance in Selous's narrative. The first is from
the opening paragraph of chapter 5:

The greatest walls of Fez had been an impressive spectacle. We had been
seeing them from a distance for two or three hours -- gradually growing more
imposing, and the nearer we had drawn the more I had realised and exulted
in the thought that, if the first sight of Tangier four months before had been a
disappointment for me, this was now being made up to me in good measure
by the capital city of Fez. I was immensely and happily impressed and I felt
steeped in the enchantment of the place as we penetrated into the city...(p.
107).

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 This passage reverses Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘the monarch-of-all-I-survey’scene, in
which the traveller stands up on a high place ... and describes the panorama below,
and his description of landscape is a manifestation of domination and embodies a
‘discourse of empire’.26 In Selous’s case, the effect of Moroccan sightskites
reveals a situation whereby the seer is dominated and subjugated by the
landscape. As he penetrated in the ramparts of the city, he loses power and
agency. The native space becomes more imposing and the Western traveller is
‘steeped in the enchantment of the place”. Such relocation of power destabilises
the hierarchical conventions between traveller and travellee, observer and
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observed.
Another aspect of native discourse of resistance resides in Moorish refusal of
assimilation and the prospects of modernity ushered in by the French. Their
insistence on preserving Moroccan fighting techniques and traditions is indicative
of their rejectionof the military reforms the French administration wanted to impose
as a partial but basic requirement for the achievement of the colonial project.
Selous writes:

The first of these [reforms] was to be the carrying of a pack behind the
shoulders like French troops. This prospect caused great discontent for it
struck directly at a basic custom of the country ... Lieutenant Metzinger told
me that during a long cross-country march his men ... chanted aloud to him
in chorus from the ranks: “Oh harrab, you will never allow us to become
beasts of burden and carry packs. We are not mules”. (p. 129)

The last example of native resistance I shall look at is the attitude of Moorish women
to French occupation. As soon as the mutiny of Fez broke out, women joined the
ever-growing numbers of the ‘nationalists’. In a telling passage, Selous’s narrative
reveals a shift of domination and agency from the coloniser to the colonised. The
latter are producers of power as they momentarily dominate action and narration.
The conventional representation of the Harem in travel literature recedes in favour
of a more active and powerful one.

In these terrible happenings the Moorish womenfolk lent dastardly aid, for
from their flat roof-tops they not only urged on the fanatical groups in the
streets ... but climbed up on their parapets and helped the mobs below to
track down their prey by calling out to them the movements -- such as, ‘round
that next corner to the left’, -- of escaping Christians. In yet other cases the
furies revealed to the murdering packs the houses in which instructors or

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 other Europeans lived. In yet one other horrible case the women themselves
battered a fleeing instructor-captainto death. (pp.144-5)

The ‘denial of coevalness’ between ‘Europe and its Others’, a common genealogy
of ‘colonial encounters’ is subverted and challenged in this passage. Like Malek
Alloula’s postcard Algerian women,27 Moroccan women resist Western modes of
colonial representation and its poetics and politics of absence, effacement and
objectification. It is useful to note, however, that the acknowledgement of native
agency does by no means deny that it is still manipulated by a dominant white
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voice. My intention is rather to “multiply the hands and discourses“ involved in

voicing and (re)presenting native culture. This attempts not to “assert a native
democracy of plural authorship, but to loosen at least somewhat the monological
control of the executive writer” and to open for discussion travel’s “hierarchy and
negotiationof discourses in power-charged, unequal situations”.2e The Moroccans
speak and act, the British traveller writes and controls narration, but not discourse.
To conclude, “the rhetorical strategy of negation by which Western writing
conceives of the other as absence, emptiness”29 is checked by the native as hybrid
through the process of de-authorisationof the Self, repositioning of power, sharing
narrative command and relocating agency. Counter hegemonic voices can be
traced in the seemingly apolitical travel narratives. In this respect, my essay is a
critique of Edward Said’s claim that

a still more implicit and powerful difference posited by the Orientalist as

against the Oriental is that the former writes about, whereas the latter is
written about. For the latter, passivity is the presumed role; for the former, the
power to observe, study and so forth; as Roland Barthes has said, a myth
(and its perpetuators) can invent itself (themselves) ceaselessly. The
Oriental is given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, in need even of
knowledge about himself...30

The acknowledgement of the hybrid condition of the native reshapes the

coloniser/colonised relationship. It is a recognition that she is not a mere ‘silent
interlocutor’, but rather an agent engaged in a process of disengagement from
Western essentialism, and liberation from oppressive domination, dispossession
and possession. The redistributionof power and narrative command fractures the
colonial discourse, for it breaks authorial dictatorship, white ‘purity’, and native
absence.

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 Notes

1. Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition”
in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman (eds)(New York: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 112-23.
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2. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p.1.

3. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).

4. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991), p. 7. See also Dennis Porter’s “Orientalism and its
Problems” which argues that Orientalism is not, as Said alleges, monolithic and
unified, but rather heterogeneous and intersected by conflicting discursive forms
and alternatives.

5. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, tran. Geoffrey Wall

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989); Khalid Bekkaoui, Signs of Spectacular
Resistance: The Spanish Moor and British Orientalism (Casablanca: Najah El
Jadida, 1998), and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994).

6. Homi K. Bhabha, op.cit., p. 178.

7. See particularly the Introduction of Mary Louise Pratt’s influential book, lmperial
Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturetion(London: Routledge, 1992).

8. Quoted from David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993) p.16.

9. Syed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel: From Marc0 Polo to Kafka
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 30. Italics in the original.

127
 10. Homi K. Bhabha, “Ofmimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse”,
in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.91.

11. Homi K. Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
‘I

Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817 In Europe and its Others
Francis Barker et al., eds ( Essex: Essex University Press, 1984) pp.89-107.

12. As quoted by Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear, Counternarratives, Henry A.

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Giroux et al., eds (London: Routledge, 1996) p.8.

13. During the serious crises of Morocco with various European countries,
especially France and Spain, Britain played a major role in the presewation of its
territorial integrity, winning the love and respect of the Moors. The occupation of the
city of Tetuan represented a serious threat to British interests in Morocco and to its
strategic presence in Gibraltar. This pushed Britain to introduce several reforms,
aiming at strengthening the Makhzen and the sovereignty of the king of Morocco.
Such steps were meant to control the moves of other European countries in the
country. No matter what were the causes for the help of the Moroccan government
were, the natives considered Britain as a reliable and helpful friend. For more
clarification and detail, see Abdellah Laroui’s book, Les origines sociales et
culturelles du nationalisme marocain (1830-1912). (Casablanca: Centre Culture1
Arabe, [1977] 1993), and J. L. Miege’s Le Maroc et /’Europe (1830-1894) (Rabat:
Editions la Porte, 1989).

14. Frances Macnab, A Ride in Morocco: Among Traders and Believers (London:
Edward Arnold, 1902), p.242. Henceforward, all subsequent reference to this book
is from this edition and will appear in the text.

10. Agnes Grove, Seventy One Days’ Camping in Morocco (London: Longmans,
1902), p.98.

16. Sara Mills, Discourses of difference (London: Routledge, 1991), p.3.

17. Emphasis on the impenetrability and resistance of Morocco is a common trope

in British travel writings on Morocco. In his book, A Journey into Barbary, for
example, Wyndham Lewis leads his reader to the “untrodden” and “dangerous”
Berber “bled”. He insists that the “bled” is indeterminate, for it resists definition and

128
 asserts its sense of difference and thus resists the totalising process of the colonial
discourse. Lewis states, “you cannot translate bled champagn or countryside, nor
yet quite wilderness”. The lack of linguistic equivalence makes Moroccan bled
outside the reach of the English language, unknowable, undefinable and
untranslatable. Again its description as “a mud-concrete fortress” is metaphorical of
impenetrability.

18. In his book, Tuhami, Crapanzano’s attempt to translate Moroccan culture ends
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up with an unexpected process of identification with it. Crapanzano falls victim of a

culture to which he is superior and dominant. He confesses that

there was always something captivating about Tuhami’s discourse. It was as

though he wanted to entrap me, to enslave me through the power of the word
in an intricate web of fantasy and reality -- to reverse, if you will, the colonial
relationship that I as a foreigner, a nasrani, must have suggested to him. See
Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Poftrait of a Moroccan (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980), p.140.

19. See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Other than myselflmy other self, in Travellers’ Tales:
Narratives of Home and Displacement , George Robertson et el. eds (London:
Routledge, 1994), pp.9-29.

20. Walter B. Harris, Morocco that Was (19211 (Westerport: Negro Universities Press,
1970), p.234.

21. Walter Harris, for example, uses race as a classifying criterion to reinforce the
Eurocentric basis of taxonomy by dismissing the native to the bottom of the “Chain
of Being” and to confirm the supremacy of the white race. The ascription of a
privileged position for the European shares a common genealogy with post-
Darwinian anthropological and historical writings. Stressing the base and inferior
qualities of the Moor, Harris states:

In all my dealings with the Moors I have found this, that the intelligent
European, provided he has a complete and absolute knowledge of the
language, holds a very distinct advantage over the Moor. He has, in fact, two
advantages -- hereditary training of thought, and education. The Moor is
generally, by his environment and isolation, a slow thinker, and in the many

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 difficult situations in which I at times found myself I have always confidence in
my own mental superiority. (p.193)

22. See David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1993), p.65.

23. See Mohammed Kenbib, “Du Protectorat a I’lndependance (1912-1956) ” in La

Grand8 Encyclopedie du Maroc V d . 7 (1987), pp. 136-218.
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24. John P. Halstead. Rebirth of a Nation: the Origins and Rise of Moroccan
Nationalism, 7972-7944 (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), p.24.

25. G. H. Selous, Appointment to Fez (London: The Richard Press, 1954), p.130.
Henceforward, all reference to this book is from this edition and will appear in the
text.

26. Mary Louise Pratt, “Conventions of Representation”, in The Taming of the Text,
Willie van Peer, ed (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.15-34.

27. In his excellent book, The colonial Harem. tran. Myrna Gozdich and Wlad
Gozdich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), Malek Alloula examines
French postcards on Algerian women between 1900 and 1930. He demonstrates
how veiled Algerian women resist the photographer’s voyeuristic gaze and
“conquest”. They rather put him under their gaze and power through their lens-like
view through the veil.

28. See James Clifford, Routes, p.23.

29. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, p.65

30. Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (Peregrine Books, 1985), p.308.

Studies in Travel Writing, Number 3 (1999)

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