Kenny Gilmore

Video by Francisco c.p. Vasconcelos | csxlab.org
Equipment used: Canon EOS 7D and Sigma 50mm f1.4

Souls of Fire website —-> Souls of Fire

Part two, sight seeing.

Marrakesh seems to be a major tourist destination for Europeans;
although once the high adrenaline shopping sprees are discounted it is
hard to see why. We tried the main Mosque, a clear landmark for the
city and were kindly informed that non-Muslims were not welcome to
visit. Next we marched the orange tree lined rivers of traffic that
passed for roads and aimed for the Grand Palais Royal and the mighty
Jardins de Palais. Perhaps this might be a fair tourist attraction. It
seemed obvious from the gleaming uniforms and stern expressions of the
Palace guards and the solid gates that visitors get their kicks from
looking at the outside of the Palais Royal. In a last attempt at
conventional sight-seeing I tried the gardens, which had clear roads
going right through it on my tourist map and so appeared to be very
accessible. I found the roads. I also found some very high walls. I
walked through the beautiful royal gardens on a narrow road, dodging
millions of scooters, my view blocked by towering white mortar –
Welcome to the Palace Gardens! I thought. Standing on a low part of
the wall I could see that the main use of the royal gardens appeared
to be to stock the Kings food cupboards, as there seemed to be great
orchards of fruiting trees and date palms. Frustratedly I asked a
policeman if I was allowed to enter the gardens at all. “Bien sur” he
replied impatiently, indicating shrouded archways ahead. But at each
one point of entry my access was denied, just as before, by a severe
glance under a shrouded brow and a stern gesture of the forefinger.
What the policeman might have explained, had he been more committed to
public service, was that the gardens open to the public for only one
afternoon a week and not on this day. We returned to our rooftop
hostel and slept.

What was a Western tourist to do in this town, besides shop the
spider web Zouks and dine in the rooftop café in a kind of delightful
purgatory – free from the saturated fat laden processed food products
of our cities and the ubiquitous alcohol of our usual table fare. How
shocking it was when this ascetic façade came crashing down at
nightfall. We made our way to the only part of the new town where a
man could get a drink without looking over his shoulder and made a
bee-line for a club reputed for live African music. This felt more
like it, and we smiled boldly at the formidable looking bouncers and
greeted them in French and Arabic, just to be sure.

We were ready for the five piece Berber combo, complete with a unique
instrument I have not seen the like of before, a sort of archaic base
guitar carved out of softwood with elevated strings like an upright, a
battery of percussion instruments including the finger cymbals and a
midget on lead vocals giving a sort of cabaret effect. There were a
lot of really stunning Moroccan women in there, in their twenties,
looking like a row of beautiful cats sitting up on stools at the bar.
Their eyebrows looked like they had been painted on by some kind of
French painter like Matisse, and their flawless skins and graceful
bare shoulders glowed with an olive brown luster under pale cotton
dresses. They all turned round to face us with feline eyes, and gave
us inviting cat stares. Suddenly I felt like a saucer of milk that was
being placed on the floor, and somewhere in the back of my mind an
alarm bell started ringing. We tried striking up a conversation with
two of them but something just wasn’t quite right, and they kept
giggling as if there was a secret that they knew and we didn’t… and so
we tried to sit down innocuously in the corner and to take a long hard
look at this place. It might have been a stroke of genius, but we sat
down right in front of the belly dancers, one of whom inexplicably
hopped up onto our table and began to perform the most truly
heart stoppingly wild display of exotic sensuality that we had ever
seen…she had captured our Western imaginations with the hypnotic
shimmering of her rapturous torso, and then proceeded to beat those
imaginations to death with her hip- we imagined we were getting a
glimpse of the sort of entertainment usually reserved for Sultans
with large harems, and we felt a mixture of fascination and
intimidation. We sank back into the couches and actually flinched when
a woman behind us began flicking her hair across our shoulders
provocatively as she spun her head in time with the music. Although
not sure what was expected of us, somehow we chose correctly in giving
the young dancer some money, affixing it  to her silky blue costume and
then looked up to see the cats staring again. This
time, with a look of undisguised temptation. And then the penny
dropped. We were slow to see it, but this was the third day in Morocco
and we were learners..every woman in the place was a working girl and
this was a Marrakesh version of the Parisian Moulin Rouge-complete
with Courtesans. The truth is normal Moroccan women just don’t go out.
This horrifying truth was confirmed when one of the cats pounced on me
outside the gents and delivered a smooth proposition against the side
of my neck with her little paw tightly pressed in mine. Luckily I
understood not one word as my French failed me and she tried again in
English – her English being as bad as my French, she now sounded less
seductive and more like a child offering me some kind of ice cream.
The language barrier being now firmly established I retreated
gratefully behind it and excused myself with a shoulder gesture and an
innocent ‘Je ne comprends pas’…but it was a lie and I went for the
door now like a pearl diver heading up for air. It was then one on the
hour, and the whole bar closed with remarkable efficiency like a clam
closing on the ocean floor, presumably due to some severe legal
restrictions. We staggered along the night streets, drunk with mirth
after the experience and still a little hypnotized by the memory of
those swirling blue-clad hips (the memory of which haunted us for many
more nights to come). As we passed, strangers stepped out of the
shadows to offer us a literal smorgasbord of hard drugs, as well as
the ubiquitous hashish. So here was the other side to Moroccan
tourism, a playground for the wealthy tourist wishing to pursue
pleasures less easily available at home. We recalled the response of
our tour guide Abdul Gani when we mentioned our plans for a night in
the new town ‘they will want to suck your blood like vampires!’ he had
forewarned. At this juncture we felt thoroughly unbalanced by the
excesses of Marrakesh, and the distant high Atlas Mountains seemed to
beckon like a sage offering council to two troubled young men, and it
was to these sheltering arms of ancient stone that we now fled.

Postscript: the Instrument we saw played was called a Guenbri, or
Hajouje and the music was the Gnawa type-beautiful music of the people
of the desert.

Kenny

Part two, Finding Abdul Gani

Two years previously my kiwi travelling companion Mike had been camel
trekking through the desert with a consummate host and tour guide by
the name of Abdul Gani, and the second day was spent largely looking
for this man in Marrakesh. First of all, we tried his phone number –
retrieving an interesting message in Berber Arabic which, in the
manner of all telephone operators everywhere made it abundantly clear
that we needed to try another way of finding Abdul Gani. Next we tried
the hotel and library where he used to work. This we found purely by
good fortune, having navigated our way from the square by the
democratic system of taking turns to make random navigational
decisions in the colourful winding labyrinth of the Medina. After
another good Tagine on the rooftops, and a few more glasses of
Moroccan mint tea, we were told that Abdul Gani no longer worked here
and we digested this information slowly as we stretched out on the rug
covered couches, the twin speakers nailed to the wall accompanying
our musings with the twang of Bedouin guitar desert blues. When
inspiration struck we arose as one man and set off to find a taxi
driver. We had an address to work with, indecipherable to the western
eye but according to the tall young taxi driver it would be ‘facile’.
The difficult part would be agreeing the price. The most successful
age of piracy apparently took place in this region in the form of slave
corsairs raiding the Mediterranean coasts for Christian slaves for at
least three hundred years. Spirited back to Marrakesh these hapless
Italians, Spanish, Italian and English slaves were sold on the block
and sent off into the deserts to a destiny lost to history. This
magnificent outrage was only brought to an end by a certain Lord
Exmouth in 1861, who fired 50,000 cannonballs into the city of
Tangiers (I think he was somewhat displeased). This may have been a
set back but I am pleased to report that one hundred and fifty years
later the descendants of these former pirates are doing well. They are
taxi drivers, and as far as I can see the true Golden age of Piracy in
this region is only just beginning. Having said that, after a good
hour of bad directions, U-turns, spiral driving patterns and quiet
French swearing I did begin to pity our young pirate as struggled to
find Abdul Gani in the strangely understated suburbs of Marrakesh,
where not a single roadway bore a sign or street name of any
description. At last we had a breakthrough, and we were standing
outside his door preparing to explain ourselves. This was answered by
a smiling young man in a tracksuit, who touched his hand on his heart
in the warm manner of all Moroccan men in greeting us and declared
that he was Abdul’s nephew and knew where to find him. Two hours later
we were tucking into Moroccan salads at the same hotel, knees to knees
at a small table with our tour guide, artist, musician, and soon to be
friend – Abdul Gani.

In our conversation that night the topic of Moroccan music came up and
I was fascinated to hear of the colourful variety and vibrant
traditions of Gnawa mystical desert music, Rai, Chaabi and underground
Muslim pop. The guy Cheb Mami who sung with Sting on the hit ‘Desert
Rose’ apparently is not Moroccan as I thought, but Algerian. Check out
this gentleman Dawdi:

Kenny