Wyndham Lewis’s Morocco Writings

Lewis's voyage to Morocco from May to July 1931

Mar 12, 2022

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada to an American civil war veteran father, Charles Lewis, and a British mother, Anna Prickett, from Upper Norwood, south London. In 1888 the family moved to England but by 1892 his parents had separated.[1] After travelling in Europe from 1902-1908, Lewis returned to London where he was heavily involved in the avant garde literary and art scene but by 1931 his reputation was at a low ebb following the publication of Hitler based on his visit to Germany in 1930. Lewis left London for Morocco in May 1931 accompanied by his wife Gladys Anne, whom he had married in 1930. They stayed in Morocco until July 1931.

Thoroughly unanchored, all trim in the rear, ready for anything (even slander after demise) with a loup’, water and oil colours, wood and clay palettes, razors for pencils, inks, insecticide, an Arabic Without Tears, a Berber for the British, and a Fool-Proof Tifinar, a map of the Sahara and one of the High, Middle and Anti-Atlas – Stovarsel against dysentery, a Kodak (an unfortunate purchase) - unaccompanied, I set out. (Lewis 24)

Lewis did not refer to his wife in his Morocco writings.

His claim that he travelled “unaccompanied” is false, as his wife Gladys Anne was with him for the entire trip. Lewis conceals this fact in order to highlight the dramatic gesture of solitary leave-taking, emerging as a kind of innocent abroad, who has casually prepared at the last minute for a difficult journey. (Aammari 241-42)

The voyage provided inspiration for a number of Lewis’s pictorial works, many of which were exhibited at Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) held at the Fundacíon Juan March from 5 February to 16 May 2010: Desert Soukh (1931) (Cat. 136), Berber Horseman (1931) (Cat. 137), Boats in a Port or A Spanish Harbour (1933) (Cat. 150), and Group of Three Veiled Figures (1933) (Cat. 1953).

Lewis was fascinated by all aspects of life he saw in Morocco, including the “soukhs,” or markets, which in Cat. 136 is a desert one providing many extraordinary shapes for him to work with. The Atlas Mountains and the desert provided Lewis with imagery that he transformed into imaginative settings for many works in the 1930s and 1940s. (Fundación Juan March, “Between Metaphysics and History” 228).

Lewis published an account of his travels in Filibusters in Barbary, published in London in 1932 but withdrawn following a libel action (Fox xiv-xvi). Lewis also wrote Kasbahs and Souks, an ethnographic study of the Berbers and their customs, which was unpublished in his lifetime and survives in an incomplete manuscript in Cornell University (Fox 188-89).

This bled is the signifier of the Moroccan other that is associated with the above epithets. In attempting to differentiate among the various cities he visits and in the interest of driving his polemic home, Lewis finds himself struggling to contain the very notion of history that has been let loose in the modern world. In his journey from Tlemcen to Casablanca to Marrakech to Agadir to the coast of the Rio de Oro, we see Lewis struggling to accommodate the pictorial and the historical, as the “experimental form of his modernist satire comes into conflict with the political impurity of his polemic […].” To exemplify, while in the city of Casablanca, Wyndham Lewis remarks that “the pseudo-Paleface is far outnumbered by the dark faces come out of bled. Casa is swarming with nomads, just as half its soi-disant permanent population are nomads of some kind as well: it was built by nomads: perhaps one day it will be destroyed by nomads.” While in Morocco, Lewis portrays the cities he visits – Casablanca, Marrakech, Agadir and Rio de Oro – in terms of their relative stability or their resistance to the overweening influence of the European presence and to various forces of dissolution. (Aammari 244-45)

Lewis’s first experience of a souk was in the Algerian city of Tlemcen, having travelled by packet boat from Marseilles via Alicante to Oran.

It was at Tlemcen that I saw my first Souk: and Souk is “market,” or, in this case, “bazaar”. In a city like Tlemcen “souk” means Bazaar, also the daily and weekly food and live-stock markets. The Souks, or the Bazaars, a chaplet of fly-blown shops are, as elsewhere in the Orient, the main feature of Berber or Arab life. … The combination of lethargy and incessant movement is the first thing that strikes the traveller in these Moroccan Bazaars, should he be as I was a novice in the Oriental picturesque. They are narrow cobbled lanes, often steep as well as winding, meandering in all directions, ending in covered markets; or they are open-air workshops doubling upon themselves, disappearing into tunnels or losing themselves within the lofty walls of private gardens. People swarm in them and winged insects, especially where there are food stalls: mules, camels and asses, with sacks of salt or flour, pass up and down them, or sometimes a merchant on horseback, with the great peaked saddle of the Berber, so different to the Arab one (although the horse must be Syrian, and not a “Barbe,” if the rider is to be pleased with himself). The shops generally are cupboards in a mud wall. They start two or three feet from the ground. In these the merchant squats or crouches, often asleep or dropping to sleep, or if awake majestically resigned as regards the customer-question. The customer-question had been solved by Islam. That is left in the hands of Providence. The shop-keeper appears to have climbed up into his shop and sat down there, rather because it had been the Will of God that he should play his brief part upon life’s scene as a merchant in a Bazaar, then animated by any feverish desire to sell something. (Lewis 54-55)

In Tlemcen Lewis also first entered a fondouk.

But now for some important interiors – for in the Mohammedan East you must contrive to enter behind the rebarbative walls or battlements. The fondouks, they are the most important interiors. You must get into these interiors. A fondouk is an inn (the Spanish fonda must be the same word). There is a large gate and massive arched entrance, in the shadows of which, in the poorer fondouks, men slept wrapped up in their hooded cloaks. An Arab coffee-shop is installed there too. Within it is a courtyard that is in fact a stable: generally, full of animals, mostly asses and mules. A stairway leads to a balcony: that is above the court – it runs all around. As there is no roof, and no walls above the well of the courtyard, this balcony is what would be the passage: the bedchambers of the guests open upon it. There are of course rows of unlit boxes, crowded with visitors from the bled. For the Berber never ceases to move up and down, and a fondouk is a profitable concern I should say. Eight and nine people sleep in a room, bringing their own rugs for bedclothes. … My second night in Tlemcen I went into a fondouk that was full of Riff tribesmen: they were singing upstairs in a largish room. But there was a great commotion when I entered, sleepers swathed in white rose out of the shadows like the medieval dead in their shrouds, and approached me in surprise. There was a great deal of unnecessary hurrying about. The song stopped, and so I left. I felt a few words of Berber were necessary and I knew none. That was a failure. There are fondouks of all grades, but the average costs a few sous a night. You must get into a fondouk; the morning is the best time, when it is comparatively empty. The Moorish Bath – that is an extremely important interior, you must at all costs find out where it is and enter. People spend the night there as they do in the fondouk – it is both a Bath and a fondouk. The atrium, a square block of blueish gloom, of this bathing and sleeping-house, decidedly offers one of the short-cuts to the secrets of Barbary. - It is of critical importance to get into the Bath. Only Muslims are supposed to enter, in the stricter Morocco. (Lewis 58-59)

Lewis then described his journey southwards from Tlemcen to Fez.

From Tlemcen, the passenger bus goes no further than Oujda. After that you must proceed by motorbus to Fez. The road lies through stony tufa-steppes - salt, sand and rock - system after system of barren mountains. The Minerva set out at 2 o’clock, and reached Fez about 8. All the afternoon we went on at top speed (to keep the lead of other buses) always through desert plains, flanked by the mountain of the Moulouya and those closing the Riff in the South. … Fez, where I stopped some days, is a mass of Souks. Tlemcen or Fez, in the matter of Souks, is much the same, though Fez is larger and less altered by the European then Tlemcen, and so better from the point of view of the Souks. (62-64)

From Fez, Lewis continued on to Casablanca.

Casablanca is a huge marine outpost of Europe. It is the last city of the coast to have a railway this side of Senegal - beyond it, travelling south, you must go by car. It is the Queen of the Atlantic for the Vieux Marocain, it is Casa-la-Blanche - or so its corps of journalists invariably refer to it. Is a hell of a stink-fein city in fact, and deserves more than a passing mention. Casablanca was the first town of the French Protectorate: the Moroccan conquest started there. As it appears today, it is pointed to as the city Lyautey built – it is the last place he saw when he left Morocco for good in the Anfa - it is “the pearl of the French Renaissance,” emblematic of the precarious post-war power of France. It is perhaps the place that holds the secret of the destiny of this astonishing latter-day colonial conquest. (65) … In Casablanca, for instance, there is a vast settlement that the French have named “Bidonville.” It is a city within the city, in fact. It consists of small huts mainly composed of petrol tins. “Petrol-tin Town” (a blemish in Casa-la-Blanche) is again a mushroom settlement of nomads, attracted by the dollars to be picked up in this Babylon of the Nazarene half-finished. Thousands of these petrol-tin dwellings already exist, day by day they are added to: they have streets and squares. Bidonville is quite “sedentary.” It lies in a hollow. Above it tower the dazzling white palaces of the Quartier Réservé - which could be called “Brothel-town” or, to make a joke to show you the idea, “Strumpet-ville.” Let us call it “Strumpetville” to match “Bidonville.”’ (Lewis 71)

Part Two of Journey into Barbary, entitled Rio de Oro, starts at Marrakesh.

All that can be said, upon the lines laid down in the last chapter, of Casa can be said - indeed very often has been said - of the Capital of the South, Marrakech. It stands in a fifty-mile-wide stony tufa steppe, and is in fact nothing but a huge walled oasis, supporting a multitude of palms with the waters that come to it from the wall of the Atlas, at its back. The most populous city in Morocco, larger than Fez or Rabat, Marrakech is yet a vast rendezvous rather than a capital. It is a walled-in converging-point of nomads or of extremely restless peasants. … So the great Almoravid, the first and greatest of the Saharan princes who galvanised the Berber world with their desert energy, and held it together for a spell, lies buried under an apricot tree, beneath a few bricks in the wild oasis-city he founded almost a millennium ago: and the city is the image of the man and of Berber life as well, in short of Barbary. (Lewis 79-80) … Even if you like the Hispano-Mauresque, however, there is not much to see in Marrakech. There is the famous Koutoubia, whose silhouette dominates everything; there is the palace of Ba Ahmed – it is a vulgar descendant of the Alhambra, there is nothing in it that is not coarse and summary in workmanship. But this huge peach-coloured adobe town must not be judged by its few Andalusian remains. It must be judged, on its own merits, as something like an immense human personality. Marrakech is indeed “the mouth of the Sahara”, as it is described by Graham. It is a huge, red, windy metropolis of mud and sand. In the centre of it is “The Place of Destruction” (Djemaa el Fna) which is a small desert in the midst of a city (as a “square” it is vast) full of the vigorous African crowds – acrobats, potters, Chleu boy-dancers (like bands of depraved but still strictly-disciplined surpliced acolytes) – many sorcerers and palmists (before whom squats some silent mountaineer, drinking in the words of fate, while the prophetic quack holds fast the tell-tale hand, mesmerizing his victim as he whispers to him the secrets of the future) with, at the busy hours, a city of fantastic tents. … There are no magnificoes, in this huge adobe Souk, who hold as heirlooms the monster keys of the houses in Granada unwillingly vacated by their ancestors five hundred years ago. Marrakech belongs more to the Soudan than to Spain. (82-83)

Lewis’s voyage next took him to Agadir.

Agadir is cut off from the world by mountain, ocean and desert. A hundred kilometres south of Agadir is the desert city of Tiznit. In appearance Tiznit is much like Marrakech, though of course a tenth the size: the same massive gates, gardens of date-palms, and outside a more complete tufa-strewn sandy wilderness than the “Plain of Morocco.” The Anti-Atlas is upon its eastern flank. They are very wild and barren mountains indeed. Tiznit is the extreme southern limit of the French power in Morocco. At its gates almost begins the great desert of the Rio de Oro. There are a thousand miles of desert between it and the Soudan. To the north Agadir is blocked with mountains, the road to Mogador, the nearest town, being much of it a coast-road. Inland, the Valley of the Sous is enclosed by giant mountains. Agadir is therefore particularly isolated from the civilized world. (Lewis, Journey 111) … So, in the very teeth of one obstructive filibuster, the Union Jack one, with the sham-farm, in an atmosphere rank with “capitulations” and with veiled Verbots, I went across the Ikounka country, I saw their communal fortresses. But I did not visit these embattled “shops” of the Ikounka, as things turned out, but went further along the Atlas instead. (Lewis 126)

Lewis described the conditions in which prostitutes are forced to work in Agadir.

At the foot of the mountain, in a wild disordered gully, is the brothel, the bousbir, the quartier réservé (the whore-shop, the lupanar, the mud-nests of official love). Sitting on a stone, upon the opposite hill, looking down into the brothel, I could see all its alfresco mud cubby-holes. A weather-rotted curtain was fixed over the openings to the miserable dens of the females of this sad menagerie. “Deep-throated” German chanting came from a mud-cell stuck onto the nearer wall. So I could not see this choir of the Legion. The queen of the colony – a girl of about fifteen – was holding a reception at the opposite end. One brothel inland which I met with was more peculiar even than this: it was like a large mud-built pig-sty; or like the empty many celled Souks you come upon in the bled, only made of adobe instead of stone. It was quite open, or seemed so. Each cell contained a woman - I saw it about noon, I walked down this repulsive tropical lane, full of fierce houseflies: a stout snore came from each sty. This was in the mountains. The stable for loose women in Agadir was scarcely fit for mules, but it was better than the Tenderloin of the bled. To the bousbir, the love-Souk of Agadir, I went one night, in the company of three Italians – it was the day after that I drew it. There was a tent at the gate, with an armed policeman in it. He let us in, and we found ourselves in a large empty court of mud. This was unlighted, but there were lamps behind the curtains of the women’s cells, occupying three sides of it. There must have been thirty women in it. Each cell was about seven foot every way, except from roof to floor, which was under six foot. Against the inner wall was the bed. We all crept in at the hole or door on all fours. We sat on the floor of beaten mud, with our backs against the mud-wall. We were visiting the queen of the brothel. She was a bright Berber girl, with good features, with eyes like a squirrel’s, good teeth and a little chin. Her face was painted and tattooed. (There was a row of vertical spots where in a man the chin-cleft would be.) As she was so young probably her eyes had less kohl than those of her older mates, whose eyes oozed ink; they kept crawling in and out (she usually drove them away with a harsh indignant shout). … We all crawled out into the pitch-black-yard. There were a few white figures moving down the sides of the cells. Several Foreign Legion privates moved listlessly up and down, smoking. The other women we had seen were savage blousy bundles of grey rags – battered old flowers of the bled, a fat Jewess, with beady eyes in a mask of pallid dough. “She is the best!” one of the Italians said, meaning the one we had been with. “She is the only one here.” The senior Italian remained inside; the curtain fell violently over the hole by which we had issued on all fours. We went out of the gate, bon-soired off the premises by the police-guard in the tent outside. (Lewis 112-14)

From Agadir, Lewis travelled by car into the Anti-Atlas.

At seven in the morning the car must be there. We arranged. It was a long journey inland into the Anti-Atlas. Most of the journey was by way of tracks or pistes, not roads. It was not only the Zone of Insecurity, it was on the edge everywhere of the line of “dissidence”. None of the available chauffeurs in the town were familiar with the tracks, they had never been at all to some of the places I was to visit. (128) … Between Agadir and the Anti-Atlas it is mostly steppe. There is an argan wood, perhaps a kilometre across. Entering this, there is a cactus hedge fifteen feet high: at night beneath the car lamps the giant pods of steel-blue are cut out in a fascinating sculpture. It is a submarine world: in old woodcuts it could have been used for the lair of the sea-serpent. All the flooring of this scenery is sand, it must be understood, sprinkled with large stones usually – a pierraille. There is nothing resembling grass. It is a land phenomenally waterless: in the interior of the Great Atlas you get clear torrents, very cold in the Saharan heat, reminiscent of Gavarnie [In the Pyrenees, 134, n.1]. Otherwise when a stream occurs, which is not often, it is the colour of the sand and earth – tan or ruddy. The desert begins here in any case: beyond Biougra there is a small village or two, but they are forts, and have no food-gardens to speak of – a few date-palms, great blue screens of cactus (figuier de Barbarie), black goats, camels and asses. (135) … We had now entered the territory of the Ikounka. Their fortified villages and agadirs were visible from time to time. (136) … Preparations were required for a visit to the Ikounka fortresses it seemed – the Sheiks had to be warned. We got into the car. I was to go for a tour of inspection with Captain La Croix, who had to pay a visit to an outlying Post. Striking south, we were soon level with the walls of the Atlas. The inside mountains here rise to about 12,000 feet; they are very barren and sun-dried masses. We were to visit two Kasbahs – the first was the Dar Lahoussine. (147) … We returned through the territory of the Ikounka, then – instead of turning south towards Biougra, turned north, and followed the dir. It was track, or piste, all the way. At last, we reached the hills, of a paler, more silvery sand, spotted with palmetto or cactus as usual. … After another hour we turned in towards the mountains and began to go up out of the plain. We now entered a sandy valley full of palms. It was very fertile. The corn-gardens were rich and closely planted, we passed at some distance a very large Souk, and next came in sight of a great village, whereupon we stopped. … In the valley beneath us there was a stream, with plenty of water, and high date-palms crowded the bottom; upon either side of the stream, in terraces, the food-gardens were packed. The village opened with quite imposing (always fortified) houses. We ascended and upon our left and right chains of asses and mules were treading the corn upon large circular platforms, and beyond that was a large white castle. This was not the castle of the Sheikh, however, but of his brother. Not above a few hundred yards beyond was a second castle. This was our destination. (149-50) … Above our heads, upon the summit of a steep hill, was the famous agadir, which the Colonel from whom I had received my permit had assured me was the finest in the whole of the Anti-Atlas. (154) … The last view we had of them was of this mounted group in the open space in front of the first of two castles, lying upon their mounts as they politely waited for our car to disappear, or wheeling in a lightning right-about, to disappear with the abruptness of a Djinn, flashing behind a cactus-wall. (157)

Lewis devotes the final chapters of Part Two of Filibusters in Barbary, to the Sous and the “Blue Men” of the Rio de Oro.

The administrative district of the Sous, under the “Makhzen,” comprises much more than the mere valley of the Oued Sous. When you are speaking of the “Sous” you can, and people often do, understand only the plain of Taroudant and the neighbourhood of the river in its lower course. But the more general significance of the term “Sous” is all those purely Berber and Chleu-speaking mountain territories reaching from Telouet, the Glaoua headquarters, in the High Atlas, as far as to the Atlantic, and from Marrakech to the Oued Noun. This is the region in which the dialect termed “Tachelhait” is spoken. (Lewis, Journey 158) … The “Blue Men of the South” occupy the territory from the Sous to Senegal, if by “Blue” is meant the wearing of blue garments, and generally it is. The peasants of the Sous wear clothes that are blue and no other Moroccan are distinguished by costumes of that colour. But the consistent and deliberate staining of the skin with the blue dye from imported cotton is peculiar to the Mauritanian nomad, “the Blue Man” of the Rio de Oro. (180)

Lewis refers to the Western Sahara as the Rio de Oro. “But Tiznit, and Ifni (the “Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeňa” of the Spaniard) on the coast, are in what is usually called “The Spanish Sahara.” and the airmen (and usually also the filibusters, who take their cue from the airmen) call everything indiscriminately “Rio de Oro” that is south of the Sous, and North of Podor, in Senegal” (Lewis Journey 160). Unable to enter the Rio de Oro, Lewis gleaned his information about the region from pilots of the French Aérospatial service based at Cap Juby, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944). He quotes admiringly from Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit (1931) and, more circumspectly, from Vent de Sable (1929) by Joseph Kessell (1898-1979), a description of his flight across the Spanish Sahara from Tarfaya (Cap Juby) to Ad Dakhla (Villa Cisneros) (170-76).

Since 1884 Spain had been the colonial ruler of the Rio de Oro. Lewis stressed the strategic importance of the Rio de Oro for the colonial powers.

Some years ago the Spanish government was on the point of ceding Rio de Oro to France. Then suddenly the French Aéropostale Service was established. From Toulouse to Dakar this service is bound to pass over the Occidental Sahara – the “Spanish Sahara” as it is called; and the only intermediate hallway stop between Casa and Dakar is Cap Juby. The Rio de Oro had to be survolé – there is no alternative. But thereupon a new situation arose. The Rio de Oro, as an aeroplane route acquired a value that it had not possessed as a mere desert, one evidently irreclaimable by man. (164)

Lewis documented the ongoing revolt against French colonial rule in Morocco, in particular in the area known as the Sous.

Merebbi Rebbo, the “Blue Sultan” may or may not be plotting a rising: what is certain is that he is recognized as “Sultan” and as spiritual suzerain by a number of dissident tribes, unfriendly to the French – for instance the Aït ba Amran and the Ida Oultit. The Blue Belt begins roughly at Tiznit. The Aït ba Amran, a very powerful “Blue” unit, outside the French imperium, a coast tribe, would be an important unit, of shock troops, in any thorough going “Blue” revolt. (180)

Merebbi Rebbo, whose brother was the freedom fighter Ahmed al-Hiba (1876-1919), led resistance to French rule in southern Morocco which was to be subdued in a massive French offensive in 1934 (Gershovich 160).

Lewis’s Moroccan writings were informed by his study of political theory, anthropology, and philosophy from 1926 onwards expounded in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot (1929) and, infamously, Hitler (1931). In a letter of 10 February 1934 to his London publisher, who had withdrawn Filibusters in Barbary following a libel suit, Lewis explained his message.

In general the Moroccan scene as described in Filibusters in Barbary reveals the existence of a conflict between the colonizing, the Roman, impulses of the French nation – of which impulses Lyautey is the archetype – and the irresponsible, commercial and capitalistic, interests. It is the old cleavage between the French army and the more honourable of the French professorial classes, upon the one hand, the crooked radical lawyer politicians of the Third Republic upon the other – the ephemeral instruments of irresponsible finance about whose doings I daresay you have recently been reading in the papers. Stavisky, it appears had amongst other things, interested himself in contraband activities in Morocco. I mentioned all this because those are in fact the backgrounds – sociologic and political – of any account of Morocco that is more than a mere tourist’s guide book. (Cited by Fox xvi)

Aammari sees Lewis as ultimately siding with the French colonial enterprise.

For Lewis, modernity in the shape of tourists, colonialists, and/or what he dubs filibusters, is about to sweep away the picturesque customs and mesmerizing landscapes he has come to seek. He lucidly underpins Lyautey’s colonizing enterprise in Morocco as a “genius,” who managed to “modernize” a barbaric and historyless people and land. Lewis’s Journey into Barbary is indeed a contribution to the French Documents and renseignments de la Direction Générale des Affaires Indigènes and to the French colonial archive. (261)

As with many of Lewis’s literary and artistic projects, his Morocco writings suffered from legal and commercial obstacles that gravely diminished their impact, reflected in the fact that only with the publication of Journey into Barbary in 1983 has it been possible to read his Moroccan writings in their full extent. However, these writings provide an invaluable historical record of Morocco under French colonial rule and despite Lewis’s ambivalence to the French colonialist project they reveal an individual deeply fascinated by the history and peoples of Morocco.

Turfwall

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