LETTER FROM TANGIER: 6/19/25

Hans Christian Andersen, the Green Sisters, Alfred Chester, Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Warmongers, Cafe Baba, Moshin's Smile, and the Melding of a Bonded Me.

1.

I wandered into the Galerie Delacroix the other day next to the Institut Français de Tanger to take in the exhibition by Amina Rezki, an artist who was born in Tangier and now resides part of the year here as well as in Brussels, which became her home when she was still a child. There is a surrealist element to her art as there is so often to my life now as a pilgrim who this summer once again finds myself finding myself in the place where she was born. Morocco is her Mississippi, each the locus of longing in our respective artistic lives which need the longing but also the absence that must abut it for the two to be kneaded into something more than need. Maybe that is what art finally is - that something more, that abstraction framed by the reality of it, its realization.

I stood staring at that charcoal portrait above of a wolf-headed figure holding (and not holding) this one-word semblance of a scratched-together sign as he fingered it in a way that made him meld with it even as it, in turn, was disappearing into the word itself and I, peering into the image, thought of the scratched-together world in which we are now living no matter where we each find ourselves. That melding. A mosaic of religions and geopolitics and Mossad agents and ginned-up hatreds and bunker busting bombs and sloganeering and slaughtered children and preening presidents melding into prime ministers all melding into ayatollahs, an omnium gatherum, ominous, Netanyahu-driven, the constant war footing that sidesteps side-taking until it all takes hold and all that is left is that one word emblazoned on us all. We are but its sign. We hold each other, and we don’t.

I will in some way always be a little southern sissy who was raised in a Mississippi right-wing version of religion and its fairytale-like stories of redemption and retribution as much as a little writer aborning burying my nose in the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen anchored in different ways by using those same narrative elements. All the warmongering in the Middle East which has threatened to climax this week has therefore the feel of Armageddon to me because it is where such a scene in the story I was told as a boy is supposed to be set. The theocrats who are the most cultish members of America’s fascist regime have always longed for such a battle not to be an abstract fairytale foretold but a reality - its realization their One Narrative’s climax - because religion is art’s replacement in the lives of those who believe in its inerrancy. I stood there in Tangier the other day staring into that charcoal portrait - the gallery’s website describes the Rezki work as depicting “the border between strangeness and wonder” - and thought of the evangelical Christianist atmosphere in which I grew up and its crusade to create such a world in which the other two religions in the regions of the Middle East destroy each other so such Christianity can rise in their stead. It’s Biblical - and also anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, not enough is made of that - in its kneading of the Quran and the Torah into its need first for utter destruction so that a Second Coming can occur there on the land being fought over that will then end up being ruled by the Christ they have created in their own image, one who is neither sheeplike nor shepherd but lupine, hungry, savage in an aggressive final grasp for salvation as they through him feed on what is left: the unheard herd. It is surreal, or I wish it were.

After thinking about all that, I walked on down the hill from the Galerie Delacroix to Cinema Rif and its cafe atop the Grand Socco. My friend Moshin was sitting at a table. He is one of the owners of the Dar Gara hostel where I stayed last summer and will again for a week in July when the apartment in which I am staying is needed by another friend who is so kindly letting me stay there. Moshin and I talked about this melded-together world. Iran. Israel. America. The day-in-day-out danger of it all we have been experiencing this past week.

“I think we are sitting here in the safest place in the world,” I told him. “Morocco in this moment just feels like a safe haven. Maybe in some way it’s always been.”

Moshin smiled.

Knowingly.

Either in agreement or disagreement.

I wasn’t sure.

But I am sure what I felt when I woke this morning in the apartment in the kasbah and looked out at this view below from one of its terraces.

I didn’t feel safe exactly. I don’t think I ever have felt really safe. But I did long for it this morning after a life longing for a bit more danger, a taste of it, its test.

I sat sipping my first cup of coffee. Said a prayer of gratitude. Said a prayer for the Middle East from here in Morocco. And watching the sun continue to rise on such a strange and wondrous place, I contemplated the knowingness in Moshin’s smile.

2.

Hans Christian Andersen was a sissy himself but never a little one. He was always gangly and lanky and large. And at the same time strikingly, shockingly effeminate. I wonder if in his strangeness he - himself an ugly duckling - longed for safety anywhere else in the world where he in such a state always felt in danger. Like the duckling he wrote about, he was often teased and humiliated as a child, especially for his effeminacy which he could not disguise and others considered an affront in his inability to do so. The other children at the Danish factory where he worked as a boy found him to be so girlish that they forcibly stripped his clothes from him to see if he were actually, in fact, female. When he grew up he had a close, diva-worshipping infatuation/friendship with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind who became his “Judy Garland.” The two most intense and important relationships in his life were with Danish ballet dancer and actor, Harald Scharff, and reportedly Karl Alexander, Grand Duke of Weimar.

Tangier is known for other queer writers who washed ashore here but before Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote and William Burroughs and that lot, ours, Andersen arrived here in November of 1862 after an extended trip to Spain and Gibraltar. He stayed here for a week with the Danish Consul, Drummond Hay, and was received by the Pasha of Tangier. Andersen wrote in his travel journals of camel caravans and orange gardens and porcupines. Indeed, he wrote in the journal using one of the large porcupine quills he found “which serves me as a fountain pen.” He, a storyteller, was fascinated by “a crowd of Moors that sat listening in a circle around a storyteller, who, as he told his tale, continually hit his tambourine.”

On Sunday, a worship service was arranged at Hay’s home. “The population of Tangier consists of Moors and Jews,” Andersen wrote. “The scattered Catholics and Protestants here, of course, have neither church nor chapel. The Sunday service has to be celebrated in the family parlor and in the heart of each and every one present. Downstairs, in a room opening onto the garden, a rug was spread out over the table and a Bible and songbook were placed on it. Drummond Hay read some Psalms out loud, followed by the gospel passage of the day. A perfect feeling of devotion prevailed throughout this quiet, unostentatious church service."

On the Friday night of his weeklong visit, most of the Muslims were at prayer and Andersen wandered the almost empty Medina He wrote of being approached by a young Jewish man who asked him to follow him down an alleyway. He hesitated but I assume the man was attractive because Andersen did follow him down the dead-end street where his house was seemingly located. "I considered whether I should trust the man, as I was also carrying with me a not inconsiderable sum of gold,” he wrote in that journal. “ Yet, in his poverty, he appeared trustworthy and honest, and the whole situation bode of adventure." The man fatefully just wanted to welcome Andersen to his home and Tangier and introduce him to his child. "I then had to give the child a present," wrote Andersen although he doesn’t tell us what that present was. Perhaps he told the child a story in a language they did not share about a mermaid or an ugly duckling or an emperor who wore no clothes but which the child - maybe even a strange little sissy one - could somehow understand sensing its own strangeness and its wonder.

3.

And then there is the strange wonder of Alfred Chester - novelist, critic, short story writer who displayed most of all a mastery of correspondance épistolaire. He was traumatized too during his queer childhood not only because of his effeminacy but also because of his having lost all his hair as the result of the radiation treatment for a disease, or maybe the disease itself. He then wore an obvious wig for a long while but no one wondered if it were one even though they never mentioned that it was. It was ignored as was how difficult he was to deal with until his madness made that impossible to ignore as well. Cynthia Ozick, an early friend and acolyte of his work, even titled her essay about him in The New Yorker “Alfred Chester’s Wig.” There is a lot of shame in that essay, the inability to let go of it. Susan Sontag was also an acolyte during her own youth - “My library is an archive of longings,” she would later write - and could often be found sitting at Chester’s feet taking him in, and all he said as he held forth. Editor and publisher Diana Athill was his champion and is videoed reminiscing about him and Morocco and his mental illness here and here. Paul Bowles was also a fan and insisted he come to Tangier. They met when Bowles was in New York scoring Tennessee Williams’s play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Bowles even offered to pay for his passage. In 1963, Chester took him up on his offer and fell in love with the place - and a local boy he met on the beach with a bit of stagecraft from Bowles. Chester, like Andersen, is seldom included now in the Tangier queer diaspora. A drug addict who insisted on having wild dogs as pets, he was a surrealist who led a surreal life that ended in disrepute, despair, and a suicide at the age of 42 while later living in Jerusalem. But oh for a time …

There is a great essay about him in grandjournal.net written by Ben Shields as a review of Chester’s collected Moroccan letters, Voyage to Destruction. That’s Chester in his wig below on the cover having a laugh with Paul Bowles.

Here is something Ozick wrote as quoted by Edward Field in his own remarkable essay, “Among the Tangerinos: The Life, Madness and Death of Alfred Chester,” which appeared in The New York Times. The time frame and setting is 1947 when Ozick and Chester were teenagers. It begins ironically with a strand of hair. The longing is speckled.

Ozick:

“Here, one afternoon, is Alfred Chester, holding up a hair, a single strand, before a crowd. (He will one day write stories and novels. He will die young.) 'What is that hair?' I innocently ask, having come late on the scene. 'A pubic hair,' he replies, and I feel as Virgina Woolf did when she declared human nature to have 'changed in or about December 1910' - soon after her sister Vanessa explained away a spot on her dress as 'semen.' . . . Chester at sixteen is a whole year younger than I; he has transparent eyes and a rosebud mouth, and is in love with a poet named Diana. He has already found his way to the Village bars, and keeps in his wallet Truman Capote's secret telephone number. We tie our scarves tight against the cold and walk up and down 4th Avenue, winding in and out of the rows of second-hand bookshops crammed one against the other. The proprietors sit reading their wares and never look up. The books in all their thousands smell sleepily of cellar. Our envy of them is speckled with longing; our longing is sick with envy. We are the sorrowful literary young."

4.

I am on a more mundane voyage of reconstruction myself. When I was in Casablanca last week, I noticed the many dental offices there. One night I googled “dental tourism Morocco” and discovered that the country is a dental destination - much more inviting than Orban’s Hungary which is also one.

So this week I made an appointment here in Tangier with a beautiful young dentist for a consultation. “You look like a model,” I told her. “I hope that’s okay to say. I don’t want to objectify you, although I think I just did.”

We laughed.

And then I climbed into the chair.

“I have gotten rid of all the shame in my life except for my teeth,” I said. “I am quite ashamed of them. It’s why I never really smile in photos. I am ashamed of my smile. I was an active meth addict about 14 years ago. I have the meth teeth to prove it.” I sighed. “Help me get rid of my shame.”

I also don’t have my bottom two molars on each side of my mouth because I couldn’t afford implants when those teeth had to be pulled. There is a hole where a crown should be on the upper left side. I’m tired of biting my tongue when I chew.

After discovering that Morocco is a dental tourism destination, I began to check the prices. I still can’t afford veneers even at the reduced prices here, but I looked into the price of bonding and that seemed doable. So I am taking the money I am saving by staying in my friend’s apartment in the kasbah this summer and putting it into my dental work. I am having 13 teeth bonded and a crown placed in the hole. I still can’t afford the four implants needed but the dentist and I have figured out a bridge-like solution for that as well. It will all be about a fifth of what the cost would be in America or the UK.

That dental office this week was one of the stops where I did not expect to arrive along this pilgrimage’s path.

It is finally time I guess to put my money where my mouth is.

I had no idea it was such time.

But Morocco did.

5.

My pairing of these two photos is a bit … well … shameless, but I couldn’t resist. That’s Keith Richards photographed by Michael Cooper smoking kif at Cafe Baba in 1967 when Keith and some of the other Stones headed to Tangier and Marrakesh to escape drug charges back in Britain. Cecil Beaton who loved Morocco hung out with the boys and took lots of photos of them, too. I often write sitting at Baba. I don’t smoke the kif that is still smoked there. The staff was happy to see me the other day upon my return this summer. “This is your also home,” I was told.

Beaton’s buddy, Truman Capote, wrote an article for the April 1950 issue of Vogue about his time here for which Beaton took photos as well. Capote was succinct in his title: “Tangier.” He later included it in his collection of essays, Portraits and Observations. A lot of the characters seemed made up in the Vogue article, but he did write about the Green trio of ladies who once held court here. That’s Ada Green photographed by Beaton for the article. Vogue’s Editor Edna Chase gave the portrait a full page.

Here is what British socialite and memoirist David Herbert - who lived in Tangier for 50 years before his death in 1995 and was known for his “ruthless snobbery” - wrote about the Green ladies for The Spectator in 1992:

“Tangier was nothing more than a seaside village in those early days. The British community was the most influential: they ran the country club, the polo, the golf course, pig-sticking expeditions — and so on. Colonel Sinclair was the doyen, followed by the Green family, primarily consisting of three formidable ladies, Feridah, Ada and Jessie. Feridah was the daughter of the British minister at the Legation, Sir George Kirby Green; Ada was her sister-in-law and Jessie her first cousin. They were great characters, spoke fluent Arabic and were respected and loved by the Moroccans. Feridah, as the older woman, was forced, through lack of money, to sell the family house, but she kept half the garden and built a two-roomed house adjoining the old one. On her writing paper was printed, 'Miss Feridah Green, The Wart, Tangier.’

“Ada had spent much of her life as the wife of the governor of one of the regions in Nyasaland. When they retired they came to Tangier and built a house which was the replica of the one they had lived in for so many years. She also brought with her Putti, her black servant. The lobes of his ‘I wonder if there's a correct way to turn this rubbish off?’ ears were a good inch and a half long, stretched by the heavy gold earrings that he wore. Ada had a peacock named Omar that she loved dearly. He would lie on her bed with his tail spread out like a counterpane. Meanwhile, Putti would fan Ada while talking to the green parrot perched on his shoulder. I remember at a certain party, where there were acrobats and snake-charmers, Ada rising to her feet, removing the snake from its owner and charming it herself. Jessie said, 'Ada, you never told me you could do that.' Ada replied, 'You never asked me.'

“Jessie was the most modern of the three, wore wonderful hats and was immaculately turned out. Feridah was an only child, so Lady Kirby Green wrote to her sister-in- law asking if she could spare one of her daughters to come and live in Tangier to keep Feridah company. I asked Jessie why she was asked to fill the post. She replied, 'Because I was the youngest, unwanted so much so that I was named after one of my mother's horses.’”

6.

Above: Beaton and Capote akimbo in Tangier. I decided to mimic their tied-in-a-bow shirttails this afternoon at Cinema Rif when I, akimbo, took a break from writing this column.

From Capote’s 1950 Vogue article:

“Tangier? It is two days by boat from Marseille, a charming trip that takes you along the coast of Spain, and if you are someone escaping from the police, or merely someone escaping, then by all means come here: hemmed with hills, confronted by the sea, and looking like a white cape draped on the shores of Africa, it is an international city with an excellent climate eight months of the year, roughly March to November. There are magnificent beaches, really extraordinary stretches of sugar-soft sand and surf; and if you have a mind for that sort of thing, the nightlife, though neither particularly innocent nor especially varied, is dark to dawn, which, when you consider that most people nap all afternoon, and that very few dine before ten or eleven, is not too unusual.

“Almost everything else in Tangier is unusual, however, and before coming here you should do three things: be inoculated for typhoid, withdraw your savings from the bank, say good-bye to your friends - heaven knows you may never see them again. This advice is quite serious, for it is alarming, the number of travelers who have landed here on a brief holiday, then settled down and let the years go by.

“Because Tangier is a basin that holds you, a timeless place; the days slide by less noticed than foam in a waterfall; this, I imagine, is the way time passes in a monastery, unobtrusive and on slippered feet; for that matter, these two institutions, a monastery and Tangier, have another common denominator: self-containment. The average Arab, for example, thinks Europe and America are the same thing and in the same place, wherever that may be - in any event, he doesn’t care; and frequently Europeans, hypnotized by the tinkling of an oud and the swarming drama around them, come to agree.”

Capote, then 25, had announced he was on his way to Morocco when he was doing press in Paris in 1949 for his first book Other Voices, Other Rooms. His buddy, Jane Bowles, was with him in Paris and she was taking him home to Tangier for the summer. Gore Vidal, also 25 and already Capote’s nemesis, had read about his travel plans and secretly arrived in Tangier to be there on the docks to be seen by Capote when he got off the boat from Marseille. Vidal and Paul Bowles, who shared a naughty streak with Gore that bordered on nasty, had a friendship that competed with Truman and Jane’s. "Truman Capote fell apart when he spotted Gore Vidal,” Paul Bowles once recalled. “His face looked like a soufflé that had suddenly been put in the freezer. He even broke down for a few seconds and went behind the bulwark to regain his composure." Vidal made Capote think that he too was in Tangier for the whole summer but less than a week later, bored by his own mischief, he departed Morocco.

Their envy of each other - Capote and Vidal - was speckled with longing.

Their longing was sick with envy.

They were the literary young back then. But sorrowful? They were too busy avoiding ever saying sorry to one another to be sorrowful.

Sorrow has always been my sissy bivouac.

Still is.

I am too bonded to it.

Melded.

But now that I am no longer young - now that I am old - I am at least attempting to let go of shame.

I long to smile, knowingly.

Like a Moroccan.

Onward …