Nostalgia and the New Cosmopolitan: Literary and Artistic Interventions in the City of Casablanca

In the past ten years, groups of local artists, architects, writers and activists have become concerned not only with the changing material conditions of Casablanca, but also with the city’s memory. This essay is concerned with two projects that reveal how nostalgic modes of recollection expose and limit geographies of cosmopolitan identity in the city. The first project, a collection of twelve booklets written by prominent novelists and poets with well-known photographers, is entitled Casablanca, fragments d’imaginaire. This collection argues that nostalgia and phantasm are key organizing concepts through which the city should be recollected, claiming that these modes of representation produce multiple, plural and heterogeneous forms and imaginations that allow the “soul” of the city to emerge. The second project is a participatory urban archeology art project started by the art collective La Source du lion. The collective practices a non-nostalgic curation of memory that moves cosmopolitanism in the city beyond a historical category into a contemporary practice and ethos. Read comparatively, these projects shed light on two post-colonial generations of writers and artists, their claims to the colonial past, identity politics about cosmopolitanism in the present, and struggles over cultural capital for the future. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss1/4 Nostalgia and the New Cosmopolitan: Literary and Artistic Interventions in the City of Casablanca Katarzyna Pieprzak Williams College In the tourist imagination, the name Casablanca usually first conjures up Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, and the foggy airport where they must say their good-byes. Only subsequently does it evoke a large and dense metropolis of almost four million people. Summarily noted in guidebooks, Casablanca remains systematically left out of the larger Moroccan romance that they sell. For despite having existed in various forms since prehistoric times, it appears as though Casablanca has none of the veneered claims of national history, cultural depth or exotic difference that the imperial cities, Fez, Marrakech, or Meknes routinely make. At first, it seems as though there is little to extol or commit to memory. Too similar to other modern chaotic cities around the world, Casablanca shares their common vocabulary of over-crowded populations, notorious traffic, endless apartments and serious pollution. The Moroccan difference, or the exotic Morocco that tourists pay to see and that the Moroccan economy capitalizes on, appears nowhere in sight. In fact, in order to preserve the sanctity of the Tourist Bureau’s images of riads, palm trees, and snake charmers, the city is veiled from (and for) tourists making their way in and out of the international airport. As Brian Edwards argues, “Rather than resisting these stereotypes [that fuel tourist fantasies], the Moroccan tourism industry has generally adopted the strategy of performing the stereotypes and profiting off their performance” (73). The train tracks to the airport are literally walled in, while shantytowns and working-class apartments remain out of sight. In the Moroccan national imaginary, Casablanca is seen as 1 Pieprzak: Nostalgia and the New Cosmopolitan: Literary and Artistic Interve Published by New Prairie Press 48 STT only later can they sit down to tell and retell tales of how they got to where they are now” (28). The tale is not a national history of the city, but rather a personal narrative of movement, migration and possibilities. History, in fact, is deliberately left behind. Zakya Daoud tells us: “It is they, the bidaouis [Casablancans] who make the city. ... Hybrid, having arrived (with some rare exceptions) from other regions of Morocco, they have left their past behind them to integrate into the violent and cruel universe of this immense city” (21-22). For these inhabitants and their families, Casablanca is the city to which they come with the desire to establish a new life. They are not nostalgic for the Casablanca that once was. The Casablanca that matters is the one of the present and the future. Despite the amnesia or disregard that has dominated the nar2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 33, Iss. 1 [2009], Art. 4 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss1/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1691