THE JANE AND PAUL BOWLES SOCIETY

Rather than effect a series of deconstructive moves upon Tangier’s semiotic systems, the conference will address the city’s morphology as a place individuals realize through spatial practices. As a crossroads city between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, traveling to and through Tangier continuously constructs imaginative worlds in the tourist’s gaze that are fueled by memories, images, and stories of the historically renowned “Inter-Zone.” These outside views are functional within the endless process of place-making, as it provides access to the tourist cultures because words, images, and actions all have the ability to build, sustain, or destroy. The ongoing practice of place-making includes visitors’ stories, Tanjawi sense of place, and artistic works that sustain the mythical proportions that have been historically attributed to Tangier. As cultural geographer Yi-Fu Juan tells us, “a great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone.” Our main concern in this third annual conference is to critique the dialectical oscillation between words and stone and between physical places and imagined places as we focus on the city as an archaeological or forensic site of investigation.

Space is open and undefined; when humans attach meaning to space it becomes place. Place is therefore highly individualized, but it is also a recognizable cultural construct of symbolic exchanges and interpretative conventions. It is construed in complex relationships between gaze and object within cultural expectations. Space and place, however, are kaleidoscopic, elusive, and difficult to define for they reflect the surging, shifting, and inchoate character of life itself as a dynamic performative experience. Our journey from “Writing Tangier” and “Voices of Tangier” to “Performing and Picturing Tangier” leads us to approach the city as a palimpsest, by acting out various forms of arché-writing over sites already written upon. The spatio-temporal continuum of Tangier is beyond the dialectics of colonial encounter. Our endeavors to track the traces of Mohamed Choukri, Paul Bowles, Henri Matisse, John Hopkins, William Burroughs, Mohammed Mrabet, Jillali Farhati, Farida Benlyazid, Ahmed Berouho, Zobier Benbouchta, and others are part of the performance and picturing of place that contribute powerfully to the place-making of the city.

Dr. Allen E. Hibbard presented papers at the "Voices of Tangier" conference in January 2006, as did Jeffrey Miller.

Dr. Hibbard, professor of modern American literature, criticism, and Middle Eastern literature and culture at Middle Tennessee State University, also attended the literary conference—"Writing Tangier"—held in Morocco from November 26-28, 2004. He has written and lectured extensively on Paul Bowles and is the author of Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne Publishers/Macmillan, 1993). His most recent book, Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco, was published by Cadmus Editions in 2004. From 1992 to 1994, Hibbard was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Damascus, Syria, and he taught and lectured at the American University of Cairo, Egypt from 1985 to 1989.

Also in attendance was Jeffrey Miller, founder and director of Cadmus Editions, the author of Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography and editor of In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. Cadmus Editions has published several books by John Hopkins, and The Pelcari Project (Cárcel de Árboles) by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from Spanish by Bowles. Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the literary heir of the estate of Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles. Cadmus has also published Mohamed Choukri's Tennessee Williams in Tangier, with an introduction by Gavin Lambert.

This conference, in honor of Mohamed Choukri, brought together scholars from Morocco, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and featured panel discussions and lively talks on various literary figures who have lived and worked in Tangier: Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Rachid Mimoun, Ángel Vázquez, Walter Harris, Samuel Pepys and Juan Goytisolo. Dr. Andrew Hussey, Senior Lecturer in French, Department of European Languages at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and the Moroccan playwright Khalid Amine, of the English Department at l'Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi in Tétouan organized this conference in Tangier—a unique multicultural and multilingual city in North Africa. The 2002 conference was held at l'École Supérieure Roi Fahd de Traduction in Tangier, considered one of the most prestigious translation schools in the Arabic-speaking world, in cooperation with the British Council of Morocco.

Board member Virginia Spencer Carr's biography, Paul Bowles: a Life, was published in the United States by Scribner, Simon & Schuster in November 2004. Peter Owen Publishers released the British edition of Paul Bowles: a Life in September 2005 in the United Kingdom.

The Jane and Paul Bowles Society held two panels at the American Literature Association's conference in San Francisco, California from May 27-30, 2004.

On Wednesday, December 29, 2004, the Jane and Paul Bowles Society presented papers by Allen Hibbard, Greg Mullins, David Racker, and Brian Edwards of Northwestern University, at the Modern Language Association's (MLA) Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The panel was entitled "American–Maghrebi Space: From Paul Bowles to Mohammed Mrabet".

PAST HOMAGES TO PAUL BOWLES

The Centro Cultural de Belém―CCB―presented a six-day homage to Paul Bowles in Lisbon, Portugal, from March 26 through March 31, 2007. Fernando Luís Sampaio was the curator of the event which included various readings from Bowles' works, a photo exhibition by Daniel Blaufuks, and screenings of Bernardo Bertolucci's adaptation of Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky (in Portuguese: Um Chá no Deserto). Two documentaries were shown: Jennifer Baichwal's Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles, and Owsley Brown III's Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles, with comments by Irene Herrmann, Paul Bowles' musical heir, who played Paul Bowles' Six Preludes for Piano and several of his songs set from texts by Tennessee Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca. The singer was Mário Redondo. At the conclusion there were performances of "Secret Words" by Paul Bowles, and traditional Moroccan music by the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar. This special event in Lisboa, Portugal was entitled Um Abrigo na Terra (A Shelter on Earth).

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David Racker is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Temple University.  He has published essays on modern French and American literature, Anglophone Indian writers, and literary theory.  He is currently at work on a book examining American expatriate writers.  One of his essays entitled "The Awareness of Domination in the Work of Paul Bowles" appeared in Bowles Notes 1.