Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

7. Intangible Heritage in Transit: Goytisolo’s Rescue and Moroccan Cultural Rights

C h a p t e r 7 Intangible Heritage in Transit: Goytisolo’s Rescue and Moroccan Cultural Rights Deborah Kapchan The proverbial difficulty of listing all the things that space engenders knickknacks, miscellaneous utensils, odds and ends swept along narrow streets and main arteries by a violent maelstrom: countless objects of every sort and description wherever the eye happens to land: an utterly mad proliferation of useless goods: advertisements and images of consumer products to entice the possible buyer patiently setting down nouns, adjectives one after the other, parts of speech fighting a losing battle with the perfect simultaneity of the photograph: chasing after the same effect in vain, like a traveler who misses the train and stands on the platform panting grotesquely till he runs out of breath artifacts, gadgets, products filling the vacuum, materially occupying the entire urban landscape, pouring out in a cloying stream from bazaars and stalls, overwhelming the visual field to the point of nausea pyramids of almonds and walnuts, dried henna leaves, Moorish shish kebabs, steaming caldrons of harira, sacks of broad beans, mountains of sticky, filthy dates, carpets, water jugs, mirrors, teakettles, trinkets and baubles, plastic sandals, woolen caps, gaudy lengths of cloth, embroidered sashes, rings, watches with colored dials, faded postcards, magazines, calendars, cheap paperbacks, fat sausages . . . the conception of wearing apparel as symbol, reference, disguise: the variety and the splendor of the dress permitted in the brief parenthesis of a holiday 178 Deborah Kapchan celebration: the temporary shedding of one’s ordinary garments and social personality: changing one’s clothes so as to change one’s skin: being, for a few short hours, a nabob, a world traveler, a king: staging a performance for oneself and others (elderly men dressed in white from head to foot, girls with silver earrings and bracelets, delicate, transparent almaizales, a profusion of new sashes and slippers, turbans like gracefully coiled serpents) a theatrical spectacle: the calls of muezzins in the minarets of the mosques as an accompaniment in the background: shoddy footlights, stage sets, backdrops: joining in the rejoicing of the chorus bidding farewell to the fast of Ramadan the fierce rivalry of the halca: multiple, simultaneous attractions: the frank abandonment of this or that spectacle by a crowd continually in search of novelty, the infectious excitement of the knot of onlookers gathered together a few steps farther along: the need to raise the voice, argue, polish up the come-on, perfect the gesture, exaggerate the grimace that will capture the attention of the passerby or irresistibly unleash his laughter: capering clowns, agile tumblers, Gnaua drummers and dancers, shrieking monkeys, the pitches of healers and herb-sellers, the sudden bursts of sound from flutes and tambourines as the hat is passed: immobilizing, entertaining, seducing an eternally drifting audience seeking only to be diverted, magnetizing it little by little and attracting it to one’s particular territory, wooing it away from a rival’s siren song, and finally extracting from it the shiny dirham that will be the reward for physical strength, perseverance, cleverness, virtuosity. —Juan Goytisolo, Makbara, 2008 This is Juan Goytisolo’s list of things observed in Jma‘ al-Fna square in Marrakech . I begin with this length of tangible heritage to illustrate the porous membrane between language and object, between ether and solid in his project of “listing all the things that space engenders.” But I also use this literary endeavor to illustrate the ways imagination flows between the personal and the public, permeating and deeply affecting both. Juan Goytisolo is celebrated as Spain’s most famous living writer. He does not live in Spain, however, but splits his time between Paris and Marrakech— where this, my story, unfolds. In particular, I tell part of the story of Goytisolo ’s rescue—his intervention (as told by him to me) in the saving of the Jma‘ Intangible Heritage in Transit 179 al-Fna square. It is a story about cultural and fictional imaginations, and how they intertwine and determine each other. It is also the story of how personal biographies determine regional, national, and, ultimately, international landscapes. Jma‘ al-Fna In 1999, Goytisolo wrote a letter to UNESCO requesting special status for Jma‘ al-Fna square in Marrakech. Goytisolo, who has lived in Marrakech for decades, sits in the Café de France almost everyday around four o’clock. From his chair (and it is reserved for him), he can observe many...