The Tangerine Dream : la Cité de l’entre deux mondes

This article evokes the Tangerine dream related to the port of Tangier, Morocco, located on the straits of Gibraltar - a privileged position where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. Many writers have become infatuated with it for half a century, like the three disciples of the Beat Generation - Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac who lived there, in the wake of another American writer, Paul Bowles - a composer and traveler who became a forerunner by settling down in Tangier after the Second World War. These meetings in Tangier, where expatriates dealt with art, literature and drugs, gave birth to Burrough’s avant-garde masterpiece, The Naked Lunch, in which Tangier reflects the author’s inner experience. Paul Bowles translated into English Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone, a major work of classical Moroccan literature, which depicts the port after the manner of traditional, realistic, autobiographical novels. Both novels were censored when published in their author’s country of origin for their transgressive aspects, revealing the darker side of life in Tangier, not unknown to the demons of American counterculture as well as to experiences of misery in Morocco, as shown in Choukri’s novel (translated into French by Ben Jelloun).