2 - The African Shore: Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Morocco

Summary

[A]t an oasis in Northern Africa, memory extended a startling and secret bridge that led to the desert of my childhood in Northern Mexico … And that caravan of images that carried me from one desert to another, spanning two continents … opened an inner doorway to a strange territory of the imagination, a kind of garden in the desert …

Alberto Ruy Sánchez, ‘Shadow and Light in the Desert’

In the 1980s, Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958) travelled to Morocco where he attended Paul Bowles’s creative writing workshop. La orilla africana (The African Shore, 1999), his novel set in Tangier, intertwines African, European and Latin American shores. In 1975, Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez undertook a trip to Morocco, which recalled the Sonoran Desert in northern Mexico, and published a series of novels inspired by the ancient Moroccan city of Mogador. Rey Rosa’s and Ruy Sánchez’s Morocco-set novels explore the relationship of Mexico and Central America to North Africa through Latin American Orientalism and transatlantic travel to the Arab world.

Latin American writers such as Domingo Sarmiento, Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Roberto Arlt and Severo Sarduy travelled to North Africa in the twentieth century and published travelogues, chronicles, essays and novels. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy published a brief essay on Tangier, ‘Tanger’, in Tel Quel in 1971, which appeared in his novel El Cristo de la rue Jacob (Christ on the Rue Jacob, 1992). Both novels are located in a tradition of Latin American Orientalist literature, with Rey Rosa’s novel focused on cultural encounters between Latin Americans and Moroccans and a unique relationship to Tangier, while Ruy Sánchez’s novel, inspired by and set in Essaouira, concentrates on Moroccan characters. Like Héctor Abad Faciolince who wrote Oriente empieza en El Cairo as part of Año O, a collection of travel literature in 2000, Rey Rosa wrote El tren a Travancore (Cartas Indias) (The Train to Travancore, 2002), an epistolary picaresque travelogue commissioned for the series about his trip to Chennai.

Latin American travel literature on North Africa shows a longstanding interest in the Orient and explores forms of transcontinental contact.