The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

Over New Year's Eve, my wife and I spent a week in Morocco with our two children.

Before we left, my mother told me she'd been to Morocco too with my father in the mid-1970s. And lo and behold, it turns out he wrote about it in his autobiography.

Although I've mixed feelings about it, I've translated his memories of Morocco below.

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The unfriendly bleating of a camel, almost as if it were offended

Ouled Yaaakoub in Marrakech-Safi, Morocco, by Francois Grivel via Pexels

It’s the summer of 1975. Africa greets me with a hot wind. The horizon is enclosed by scorched hills and palm trees gesturing dramatically.

We're herded into a waiting area, just like any other place in the world. "Tangier," I read, before admiring the sweeping beauty of Arabic calligraphy. In Arabic, "Tangier" looks like the slash of a sabre.

On the outskirts of the empty airport, a field of wild oats sways in the wind. The oats rustle. I bend down and, deep in thought, stroke their sharp ends as they sting my hand. But yes, of course, I remind myself, after all northern Africa was Rome’s granary. The Roman legions conquered the world using oats — oats for their horses and porridge for their soldiers.

The sun sinks behind the hills and the sky reddens. Memories of the ancient world fade away. The palm trees remain — black against an orange backdrop. Morocco is splendidly kitsch.

The mighty chain of the Atlas Mountains is not like other ranges, which only emphasises the alienness of everything you see here. Architecture without windows and without roofs. Newly-built villages look the same as deserted ruins — whether there really are no people or they’ve simply hidden themselves in the shadows from the fearsome sun, it’s hard to tell.

The shadows are black here, not blue as in Europe. The houses are all fawn or russet, and the land is all fawn or red, stripped of its skin by erosion, exposing ribs made of rock on which nothing grows, intersected by deep canyons in which there is no water.

Folk festivals and fairs in vast dusty squares outside endlessly long city walls made of crumbling sun-scorched clay. Figures in white burnouses gallop wildly in crooked squadrons like something from Lawrence’s era, firing uneven salvos from long antique muskets with encrusted stocks. And then a son et lumière — the pathos of Arabic declamations repeated in exquisite French. Time slows down. You don’t know what will come next. Sweat trickles down our backs. They serve us sweet tea with mint.

A souk in Marrakesh, Morocco, photo by Max Brown on Unsplash

Meanwhile in the Atlas Mountains, in the stunning Ourika Valley, Berbers live in cave-like conditions. The ancient indigenes of Morocco live in nests made of sticks, plastered with clay around a central courtyard-pen where they keep goats. They are born and die unchanged, without a sense of time, without hope. They beg.

Many centuries before the Arabs arrived, the Romans knew this people and called them Barbari — as they called everyone who didn’t speak Latin. But the name stuck to them. Where these barbarians came from, who don’t even have their own alphabet and thus no literature, is unknown. Their children are often fair-haired and blue-eyed, with flat non-Semitic faces. In their speech, they repeat Slavic sounds like tata or tyczka , and — strangest of all — beyond the Lesser Atlas, on the very edge of the Sahara, where the roads end and the camel trails begin, lies a Berber town called Zagora [there are several places in Slavic countries also called Zagora - ed.].

Hiding beneath fantastically shaped hills — sluggish, suffocating, covered with dust. There’s no air to breathe — you can feel the sand on your lips — the bottom of the hotel pool is also full of sand. It’s constantly being cleaned by half-naked boys with slender bodies, enticing tourists. Men walk here arm-in-arm or talk while holding hands. Older women with veiled faces, wrapped from head to toe in blue burnouses, slip by furtively. Young girls can't be seen anywhere.

On a sultry, gasping night illuminated by a crooked crescent moon, boyish voices echo between the dunes — and from time to time the unfriendly bleating of a camel, almost as if it were offended.

I can’t breathe. I slip out. Just outside the hotel gate, some boys descend upon me. One in particular won’t leave my side, driving the others away with unintelligible shouts. He has long black lashes and is smooth like a girl — his swarthy skin gleams through the holes in his tattered shirt. Beneath the picturesque rags, I can feel his erection. For a twelve-year-old brat, it’s actually impressive. I feel unexpectedly aroused.

In the morning, on the rubble, white vultures shuffle from one leg to another.

On the road to Agadir, life returns to normal. Ouarzazate, then Tazenakht near the highest peak of the Lesser Atlas, Siroua, which we hurriedly pass. It towers impossibly above the rubble of lifeless rocks, without a single blade of grass, distant from human settlements, barren and alien (who would want to climb here?). On to Taliouine for the night.

A marvellous hotel built into an old kasbah, the fruit of Arabic functionalism and French architectural refinement. In the morning, we head out through Aoulouz, where at a fantastical market, there’s a clownish anti-Spanish demonstration about the Sahara. Straight out of a Dubuffet painting.

Lunch in Taroudant, in an elegant caliph’s palace turned into a hotel for foreigners who swim desperately in the crowded pool, not looking once at the orange trees with their enormous flowers as stiff as boots, nor at the turtles shaded amongst the nooks.

In the souks, barefoot boys sell whatever people want, driving customers deeper into the bazaars. One argued with impudent charm that I must be very rich if the girl accompanying me wasn’t my daughter — a fact he confirmed in advance. He asked me just three questions and somehow knew everything about me. A psychologist! I wanted to buy Marylka saffron-yellow slippers but ended up with a leather hat that stank of cow turds. I can't stand shopping in souks — I always overpay just to end the humiliating ritual of haggling born out of poverty.

Finally, Agadir. The Les Almachades Hotel. Opulence in perfect taste. Lots of space, gardens, patios, fountains, pools, cafés, bars, restaurants — everything is in place. A complete fiction that has nothing in common with this unfortunate country deprived of plumbing and sewage systems. The Atlantic roars — we disembark.

And then, in three powerful Land Rovers, we head south. The roadless desolate Lesser Atlas is marked like a green rash with lone argan trees, onto which black goats leap up and graze among the leaves, an incredible gymnastic feat.

A déjeuner berbère in a massive tent. The background scenery is red mountains: Tafraout.

This must have been the site of the final battle between the Olympian gods and the Titans. They hurled boulders at one another. Scattered loosely, some as large as houses, strewn all around or heaped into colossal piles — these rocks bore witness to Zeus’ victory, who sentenced one of his foes to the eternal burden of holding up the sky on his shoulders.

The defeated Titan was named Atlas, and here in the mountains that bear his name, Zeus’ sentence was carried out.

And once again, my thoughts drift to Greece... Without Greek myths, nothing — not even landscapes — can be understood.

Tafraout Valley in Morocco, photo by Yevgeny Popov via Pexels

Having visited in winter, I thought the Atlas Mountains were spectacular and were great fun to explore. I didn't experience the oppressive heat my father kept complaining about.

Also, he wrote that the Berber people don't have an alphabet, but that's not true at all. It's actually visible all over the place - maybe it wasn't 50 years ago and there's been some sort of push for it since. But it has been around for 2600 years. More on it here.

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How to make a good YouTube video about art

Although the channel this video on Jean-Michel Basquiat comes from is called Make Art Not Content, their videos tick all the boxes demanded by the online content gods.

It is truly excellent - in 8 minutes it shows how to make sense of a cult artist that seemed to make wild and baffling art, all the while giving you practical lessons to consider adopting into your own life.

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That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

👉 Help fund the translation of Studium do autoportretu via Paypal 👈

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