Generation Maghrib: The Maghrib's Central Place in Postcolonial Networks

Upon independence, the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian governments, intent on emerging as world leaders and unable to leverage power in the Middle East, turned south and, in an attempt to dominate the Pan-African field, offered military and financial aid to ongoing liberation struggles throughout Africa and the Americas. This official support of Black liberation struggles inspired militant artists to travel and even move to the Maghrib. Eager to escape American white supremacy, Black Americans and Caribbeans, such as beat poet Ted Joans or Haitian poet René Depestre, moved to Tangiers and Algiers, forsaking the European metropoles that had so enthralled their forefathers. Aided by the Moroccan government, Andrade and his Luso-African comrades made Rabat their home base, attracting young freedom fighters from Angola and Mozambique, and training them in military camps across Morocco. Starting in 1966, Tunis drew a host of young African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, distributing prizes to Sarah Maldoror for her movie denouncing Portuguese colonialism, Sambizanga (1972). In July 1969, the Algerian government threw a Pan-African fête in the streets of Algiers, inviting Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba to sing to the glory of postcolonial Algeria and Africa.Footnote ⁵

While many of these artists were originally enthusiastic supporters of their young nations’ first leaders, they quickly realized that these politicians were usurping the true revolution. Like Sénac who warned against the “swollen monkeys nibbling” away at their future, the Maghribian and foreign artists were not duped by their governments’ supposed commitment to artistic freedom. They rapidly realized that political independence was not enough, that decolonization was a longue-durée enterprise and that the nation-state was ill fitted to lead the charge. And so, using government funds when possible, but rejecting political alliances that went against their ideals, these artists made the Maghrib a bastion for the struggle against neocolonialism and the tyranny of a state over its people. Parallel to the Maghribian states’ various Pan-African projects (such as the Pan-African Festival of Algiers or the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage), Sénac, Laâbi, Andrade, Depestre, Joans, and their peers created alternative spaces of encounter—moving away from governmental institutions, they politicized personal spaces. They met in bars, cafes, in each other's bedrooms, they published pamphlets and journals, like the Moroccan literary journal Souffles (Figure 1), they interviewed each other on radio shows, like Sénac's Poésie sur tous les fronts, and filmed low-budget movies.Footnote ⁶

FIGURE 1.

Souffles – Revue Culturelle Arabe du Maghreb (property of author).

From Racial Solidarity to an Ideology of Relentless Revolutionary Poetics

The encounters in North Africa between Black and Maghribian artists challenged the foundations on which many believed postcolonial solidarities were based. Before traveling to the Maghrib, poets such as Andrade, Depestre and Joans articulated their ideals along the lines of racial and national solidarity. They were inspired by the poetry of the négritude movement; they read Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas, and throughout the 1950s, they searched for their own blackness.Footnote ⁷ Often this involved the pursuit of a nationally-specific négritude, an Angolan, Haitian or American Black identity. But as the 1950s turned to the 1960s and the leaders of the new Black nations became increasingly autocratic, the négritude-rendered-policy of Senghor in Senegal and Pap Doc Duvalier in Haiti became repulsive to these militant poets. As Depestre, Joans, and Andrade traveled in the Maghrib, they met Maghribian poets, such as Laâbi and Sénac, who were equally disenchanted with the new leaders of the postcolonial world. From Tangiers, Algiers, Rabat, and Tunis, they started declaring, in quasi-unison, that rigid racial solidarity was obsolete. In 1966, Depestre published an essay in Souffles, arguing that “separated from the historical context of the revolution in the Third-World, négritude became an unacceptable ‘black Zionism’ which kept the Black people away from their duty to do the revolution.”Footnote ⁸ Joans, who by 1966 had been living in the Maghrib for six years, wrote to his friend, poet André Breton, that he would not go to Dakar for what he called “Senghor's merde noire” (Senghor's Black shit), otherwise known as the First World Festival of Negro Arts, because he did not want to participate in an event where artists and poets would be “held up (financially)…by Senghor's black bourgeoisie gangsters assisted by the U.S.A fat-black-pussy-cat officials.”Footnote ⁹ He boycotted Dakar in his “own sweet way,” he continued, by “crossing the Sahara” to Oran.Footnote ¹⁰

The Maghrib thus reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Moving away from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, these poets argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, transracial and defied the new nation-states. This new ideology, articulated primarily through the arts, romanticized paramilitary action, at times even encouraging its advocates to drop the pen and to shoulder the gun. But perhaps more surprising than the devotion to violence, was the equal dedication to bringing love into the revolution. Committed to the idea that the revolution did not have to be drab, these poets labored against their states’ moral and austere injunction to fall in line. On the contrary, as Sénac noted in the opening line of this piece, “there is no revolution without Love.”Footnote ¹¹

Violence and love were no figures of speech. Eager not to be confused with elitist European poets, beatniks, or “hairy marijuana dealers,” these poets made clear that they were no mere “marchers of war and peace.”Footnote ¹² Their intention was not to beat the “tam-tams of victory,”Footnote ¹³ to loll in the comforts of folklore and exoticism but rather to “dynamite the rotten halls of the old humanisms.”Footnote ¹⁴ And the lives of these poets were indeed steeped in violence. In January 1972, the writers of Souffles were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, some, like Laâbi, for eight years. Sénac was first fired from his show on the Algerian radio, then assassinated in his apartment in August 1973, most likely for his outspokenness against the Algerian regime. Depestre was forced to flee Haiti, then Cuba, leaving behind most of his papers and a couple partners.Footnote ¹⁵ If their use and experience of violence was not rhetorical, neither was their mention of love. As René Depestre mandated in a poem entitled “Eros and Revolution”:

Poets like Depestre and Joans took this injunction quite literally, sleeping with women across the Maghrib, claiming, in doing so, to overcome the colonial barriers between Black and White Africa. In a poem entitled “My trip,” Joans described his trek across Africa, alluding to the many women he encountered. Through these women, Joans claimed to have become Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian. “I have been to the desert I have lived with the blue men, the Tuaregs,” he wrote, “That/was my trip/I have drank mint tea while sitting on my Harlemese/haunches after Saharan hospitality lunches I have hitchhiked with my/fly wide open and spurted hot sperm into wide pelvic Berber women […] That is my trip I have Moroccod/Algeried/Tunised.”Footnote ¹⁷ For Joans, sex with Maghribian women was a revolutionary act. It represented the potential to bridge the distance between Africa and America, between Black and White Africa, it allowed Joans to don a Maghribian identity. As Depestre explained to me in an interview in December 2017, “through my sexual relations in Algiers and Morocco, I discovered Arab poetry, Arab culture, the great sociologists of the past, like Avicenna.”Footnote ¹⁸ The unabashed hyper-sexualization that both Joans and Depestre deployed was central to their ideology—an ideology of revolutionary “love” and sexual conquest, one that, they thought, transcended the racial landscape Europe had imposed, and the national boundaries the new states dictated.

The encounters between artists in the Maghrib of the 1960s radically altered the language and reality of postcolonial networks. From a solidarity based primarily on race and hinged upon national liberation, was born a transnational movement of revolutionary poetics articulated around the use of poetry, violence and sex as tools to reclaim space from the colonial powers and the new postcolonial states. It is no coincidence that this transition happened in the Maghrib. The Maghrib's interstitial position between the Middle East and Africa challenged pre-existing assumptions of racial solidarity and forced new forms of identification. These were expressed through a commitment to constant political and sexual revolution. Race did not matter as much as sharpness of tongue and blade, and sex was a way to bring together—quite literally—Blacks and Whites.

This ideological shift demonstrates that in the 1960s and 1970s, when historians have argued that intellectuals, politicians and artists concentrated on nation-building, a number of artists and militants from the postcolonial world ignored their state's calls to protect the nation-state and created a transnational network that in fact undermined the very foundations of these new nations. These are important narratives, as they demonstrate that the hardening of national borders, the construction of the nation-state, and the expansion of capitalism, that followed decolonization were not inevitable processes, but that people, like Joans, Andrade, Laâbi, Sénac, and Depestre fought these developments every step of the way. However, this ideological shift may be the very reason for the movement's eventual demise. Depestre and Joans traveled to the Maghrib with the aim of participating in a worldwide political project to decolonize culture and to fight state tyranny. Their personal lives were intimately intertwined with their political struggles, something that is of course inherent to the fight for postcolonial subjectivity. Through sex they argued that they better understood Africa, and that they could become truly African. Too often they substituted actual political action for the illusion that what happened between the sheets was inherently part of the struggle for continued revolution. The revolution thus became a personal project, a fact that is clear in the final line of Depestre's “Eros and Revolution”: “make your revolution.”Footnote ¹⁹ And so, these men “nibbled” at their future “in between their peanuts,” turning their gaze inward, and at times forgetting the project of collective liberation that they had nurtured in the Maghrib.Footnote ²⁰