Getting Souked Back In part two
يتم إرجاعه مرة أخرى
الجزء الثاني
Visiting the Maison de la Photographie earlier, it had struck me how the photographic history of Morocco was constructed not by Moroccans, but by European photographers (aristocrats and military men that arrived during the 19th Century colonial period).
They depicted Morocco using a photographic language of exoticism, orientalism, and, in most cases, a superiority-complex instilled within them by, among many things, their ability to relate to North Africans as mere subjects (to be photographed).
In their photographs these Europeans identified what it is that they found so alluring and mystifying about Morocco. Today, one could argue, the Marrakesh Medina is a zone that has been strategically maintained, in order to give the visitor precisely that—a sense of timeless exoticism, catering to the visitor’s yearning to travel back in time, away from the modern lives they feel they live, just like the “great” European explorers and photographers of yore.
“You should go back that way, to the Medina,” urges the oldest and most aggressive-looking of the five.
On the one hand, allowing visitors to step outside this curated zone shatters their illusion, as they are confronted with the residential areas in which the locals retreat and live their lives as fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, attend the universities, work in the modern hospitals and office buildings and commute in luxury cars.
On the other hand, the visitor has historically proven to be scrupulously obsessed with photographing those elements of Morocco that adhere to (and conform) their preconceived sense of orientalist aesthetics. Perhaps a historically rooted aversion to being photographed by visitors has inspired this vanguard of young men, protecting the borders between the zones. We give you what you seek out there, but you stay out of who we really are in here!
The five young men cover their muscular stomachs and relax their tensed arm muscles as they see me off in the right direction—back to where me and my camera belong…