The Official Mohammed Mrabet Website Biography of Mohammed Mrabet by Simon-Pierre HAMELIN Mohammed Mrabet, though revelling in his Rif origins, was born in Tangier near to M’Salah, at a time when the international town was in full flow, a modern Babel like no other, like a handful of confetti made up every liberty granted across the map of the World. We are in 1936 and not 1940 as was thought for a long time. The author’s birth was a mystery, others were to follow; there was even confusion surrounding his name. Mrabet, the grandfather, was two metres tall, his complexion marking him out as someone from the Rif with brown hair and lightly-coloured eyes. He abandoned the Rif in 1910, drawn by the lights of the stone mirage at dusk, down there clinging to the bay. It was in Tangier that he would live from then on. An anonymous kid amongst a host of twenty-four brothers and sisters, Mohammed Mrabet would be the old man’s faithful companion, a staunch and discreet member of the Resistance during the Rif war. The old man would teach him how to fish, most certainly providing him with a colourful imagination, the ideal breeding-ground for future stories: on Sundays, they would swim together to Spain... As expected, he would attend the koranic school; he would not stay more than a single day in a school in which the grey-bearded, skinny teachers of the Third Republic, quick to use the cane, taught in a foreign language the names of unfamiliar plants and those of heroes who seemed so far-off that it was impossible to admire them. And the mocking Mrabet's reaction to the cane would be to escape out of a third-floor window, free to scour the countryside, the steep ins and outs of the Medina, the shores of both seas stretching out as far as the eye could see. On cafe terraces, he listened to old men telling stories, the great Exploit which came from these same seas, of the Rif whose distant outline could be made out from the deepest recesses of their memory and which the author would take up again at a later date, combining memory with the spirit of the time and place, with this Tangier, colourful and blended by as many influences as it is a place of civilisation, a stumbling block, a meeting place between the East, Old Europe, the New World and with Africa in its back. Aged fifteen, Mrabet was a real Goliath; and that’s how he was meant to be; a muscular body, sculpted by the waves, a picture of revenge, proof that one was really alive and that one could be someone in this Age in which one was nothing if one didn't have a penny or was not born into a family of standing, and that if one wanted to, one could be in the company of the angels. He would do a thousand jobs including waiter, night-watchman and caddy at the Tangier Golf Club but would always come back to his fishing… and so many others before becoming famous for a duel with a French or Spanish soldier who had failed to show respect to an old man from the mountains. Mrabet was a ball of nerves; insolent in victory, he would fail to kill the offender. The affair was serious; it was 1952 and the Nations of Tangier, in the twilight of their reign, sensing that they would soon have to let go of the Pearl of the Strait, did not show any leniency. The tension was high in this quiet town and Mrabet was obliged to go underground, to hide from everybody. He would spend nearly a year in the reassuring hollow of a cave, not far from Cap Spartel, perched between hill and sea. The retreat would be an initiation in living in almost total self-sufficiency, from fishing and gathering food like hermits in ancient times, sought out by princes and powerful men who crossed entire Empires where the sun never set for their wisdom and company. The long-haired man, almost wild, was face to face with himself and the roar of this sea which spoke, which never stopped speaking to him, or did not speak; but it didn’t matter that he heard this muffled cry by means of a fish which became famous for sharing with him (who knows?) the secrets of the Strait, the hidden meaning of things, the outline of a work in gestation. He returned to the Century by the back door, kept company with the Nazarenes of Tangier, some of whom would become mythical figures, at the Muneria hotel where he would work for a few seasons, on the beaches, in the town. How strange these people were; life seemed to be a never-ending party. He made friends with a couple of beaming Americans, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed and somewhat lost in this land that was so "exotic". And that touch of apologetic superiority which never left their eternally young faces and those customs of theirs which occasionally lost all sense of morality; but really, what joie de vivre, what a laugh, to utter exhaustion. Between escaping and the desire for boundless horizons, all three crossed the ocean for New York on one of those cruisers which sail slowly against the wind. Mrabet remained in the fresh air to breathe more easily, to see better, following the sharp lines of the buildings towards a cut-out sky. It is not known whether he got the full measure of this illusion of America, whether he was able to qualify the excesses of those ever-smiling big kids who slapped him on the back in a friendly way. There exists a text, Look and Move On, published in 1976 which resembles a biography but in reality, isn’t, since Bowles had had to romanticise what Mrabet had confided in him to satisfy the requirements of publishers and a certain readership yearning for something fantastic and spicy. It must be admitted that not everything is known of this voyage to the New World, except for the fact that the young man from Tangier must have felt intoxicated by those open spaces as far as the eye could see, those white beaches lining another ocean, those roads along which one rambles for days on end between anonymous motels and cafes which resemble each other along the whole route, those tall, slender women with purple lips bursting into laughter, and, appearing as if my magic, huge empty villas where everything is clean and in which one quickly gets bored between an infinite number of walls. What is known, on the other hand, for when he stills occasionally talks about it his face suddenly mists over, was the visit to New York’s Guggenheim Museum where he could clearly be seen taking a simple childlike pleasure in a canvas, plunging into it without fear, shimmering in front of a colour which only seems to speak to oneself. It was time perhaps, for here nobody really spoke to him about what he wanted to hear, what he had come in search of… an even vague reply to as yet imprecise questions. His guides, lying in wait for his slightest reaction, were delighted, for the setting was incredibly beautiful; just imagine, a boy, almost wild, in a museum; they hurried him on and spoke to him with a great many adjectives of the monetary value of each work exhibited. Perhaps, they were enjoying themselves a little. At that very moment, however, Mrabet knew that something was happening outside of his control, within him, against his own will and miraculously in harmony with it. It was as though he was the object of a more serious game in which he must never cheat, must tell the meaning unreservedly, without modesty and with a courage that he did not suspect that he had. And in these series of huge halls bathed in subdued lighting, it was as if he had had a religious experience, as if he had finally caught a glimpse of the invisible. And hell as well, which is this world of art; the image of Yacoubi on all fours gathering the jewels which Peggy Guggenheim, even her, occasionally liked to throw behind her in a moment of alcoholic mania. It is said that he got lost looking for a Dali painting which would haunt him for a long time, a canvas which told a terrible story, similar to this one, to all those which were already buzzing in his head, and which must be discharged one day, to pass on to those, blessed, who do not yet know, to cry out to all four corners of the earth in expectation of a visionary ear, on a completely white canvas, on a fresh new page of a Book; that at last his silence was over. The same boat, or another vessel, a steamer which was making its last voyage, brought him back to Tangier one spring morning. From the open sea, the town was radiant in the sun. Mrabet was home. He embraced the bay, with a tear in his eye. It was from this universe that he would cry out. No, he would not scour the whole surface of the globe, nor would he travel the World like Ibn Battuta; this World would come to him. And the entire World was here in Tangier, wasn’t it? For a start, there was Jane with her withered look lost in the distance, her sadness when the party crowd around her shouted itself hoarse with the same joyous cry, her sorrowful smile framed by a cigarette and glass of whisky. She seemed all alone in the world, withdrawn to a dark corner of a garden on the Vieille Montagne where she avoided her peers, carried away in their drunken state for the umpteenth time. Then, Mrabet, touched by her serenity in despair, came to sit beside her, removed her cigarette and the glass from her hand, talking to her in a soft and reassuring voice. That would be the first story, told with the sole aim of consoling this woman-child, followed by a second which would finally give her back her smile. A few weeks later, the encounter, which has since become legendary, took place between Paul and Mrabet on Merkala beach two steps away from the Café de la Plage. Bowles was accompanied by William Burroughs, whom the boys here nicknamed "the invisible man" and Jane who softly proclaimed that Mrabet was a genius. This founding moment bound the two men for nearly forty years. Very quickly, it was a matter of words, dreamy expressions which Bowles put down on paper, acting as translator, interpreter, enlightener of Mrabet’s words. The paper became a book and the book, meaning, a new meaning for the storyteller whose voice then carried it – what exaltation – beyond the ocean. It’s hard to believe but such is the testimony given by the plethora of peers with names as famous as Capote or Kerouac, who came to visit Bowles in search of something that cannot be mentioned. Editors in a hurry appeared from nowhere, made him sign meaningless contracts, talked a mumbo jumbo which left him definitively silent and talked only of dollars which piled up in a flash. Mrabet was out of his depth but happy; he could buy this apartment in which he installed thousands of birds, provide for his mother and wife, feed his children, live simply and proudly from fishing and from conscientiously attending to the needs of the flighty and wayfaring writer and his sick wife who was soon to die in Malaga. Mrabet was cook, chauffeur, nurse, body guard and odd-job man, but did much more when, with his pen he started to draw his mysterious gesture, made up of convulsive signs resulting in a magnificent bestiary of radiant hands, each with a bewitching eye, magic fish, contorted and laughing faces. The hand’s gesture gave rhythm to his voice which he recorded, crafted and transmitted to Paul in Spanish with hints of Moroccan dialect. There was much talk, real or not, about each plagiarising the other’s work. Let’s talk instead of collaboration. That’s how Mrabet still sees it. Collaboration between two artists where one was the hand of the other, the other his eye wide-open, his muse delivering the work on a silver plate. Today there remains ten or so anthologies, novels translated into thirteen languages, the invention of a literary genre between the tale and the short story in which the oral tradition blends harmoniously with the contemporary imagination. There remains a man, very much alive whose spirit is overflowing, the soul of a town, of this civilisation between two seas of which Tangier is the pearl. There remains a voice that must be heard before it is stifled by the winds of the Strait and disappears forever. In 1999, Paul Bowles chose to leave this earth, leaving it to myths to make up their own minds about the legend which he himself created. His entourage, made up of few friends and a growing number of harpies, swooped down on a heritage that each wanted to believe was gleaming. Mrabet, excluded from the pack for unjust reasons, would lose more than just a master. In this despicable battle concerning Bowles’ heritage, his sound archives, considered as useless without the hand of Paul, would be taken away from him, kilometres of track would be for ever silent, the majority of which were lost, so too his books, some drawings claimed by others heaping insult on injury. Bowles had gone and it was Mrabet who was disappearing little by little. Here and there, in the press in New York, in Paris, in London, it was said that he was dead. A book was published which, in its foreword, stated that he had died in 2001. This premature burial was highly convenient for everybody, especially dyed-in-the-wool editors who were able to get out of authorisations and royalty payments, some authors lacking inspiration, collectors claiming fat margins, shameless since the poor man couldn't even read a contract; a fistful of dollars would buy his silence. And some of his peers, kow-towing prize-winning writers, local and foreign, occasionally boasted in public or on radio that in Tangier they knew a second-rate writer, nameless, a usurper, a sorry soul who dishonoured "the profession"… One wonders why the old man attracted so much indignation. It was said that it was pure jealousy, or that Mrabet was perhaps this impostor (why not?) that so many managed to portray in that way. But it would be too simple to think that, without qualifying somewhat the portrait of an artist – not to mention a man – made of contradictions imparted with the flame of creation. He said it himself laughing that he was nothing and still less a painter or writer; a simple man, a good Muslim looking after his one-hundred-year-old mother and her numerous descendants. But he also said that the strength he had in past times, beyond illness and old age which he talked about a lot, was Herculean: epic tales of brawls, in which one against ten safeguarded moral standards, in which giants were sent flying for the honour of a beautiful girl or a rose. He talked of this fire which worked away at his very inners, everything that he still wanted to cry out to the World and with hindsight that comes with age, everything which the fish had confided in him. Of course, there have been other fishers of dreams since Bowles; a bookseller in Tangier, a sort of matriarch of the arts in the town of the Strait, who struggled to bring Mrabet out of the oblivion of the Century, a young actor who, for a time, replaced Paul and in other manner – listening more attentively to the author, to the music of his word – another bookseller who could almost be considered a visionary by endeavouring to promote the words of Mrabet, the coloured illustrations of those same words, all the crimson of a golden age in which Tangier created its mythology from one day to the next. Is it sinful to love the image of a World in which fish are on familiar terms with men and mermaids turn the hearts of men upside down? Biography of Mohammed Mrabet by Simon-Pierre HAMELIN Tangier, Morocco, 2007 Home The Official Mohammed Mrabet Website Copyright Notice This page and all related linked pages is the work of The Official Mohammed Mrabet Website and is copyright to Mohammed Mrabet, Simon Hamelin, Josie and David Farmer and contributors This website is online by the personal request and permission of Mohammed Mrabet The Official Mohammed Mrabet Website, ©2008