Santiago de Luca, director of the international literary publication SureS and coordinator of the Argentine-Maghreb Space “Jorge Luis Borges”, unearths this little-commented episode in Borges’ life, revealing the sensitivity felt by an extraordinary writer towards a unique and authentic culture.
For de Luca, “Borges and Morocco met physically at the end of his life, but I have the impression that they have known each other forever: Morocco is Borgesian and Borges inhabits the metaphors of Morocco.”
At the initiative of the late HM Hassan II, he told MAP, the magician of Hispanic letters had been the guest of honor at the 7th World Congress of Poetry, organized in October 1984 in Marrakech, under the presidency of the champion of negritude, the former Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“Borges could not see Morocco (he was already blind) but he felt it. He was able to touch it, smell it and, according to some testimonies, he greatly appreciated the sound universe” that a living society gave off.
And de Luca added that “at nightfall, Borges was moved by the calls to prayer that rose from the surrounding mosques.” This emotion was captured and then recounted by his wife Maria Kodama, who accompanied him during his stay in the ochre city.
In the Jamaa El Fna square, Borges, without understanding the language, was captivated by the musical sounds and the performances of the “Hlaikiyas” (public storytellers) who populate this emblematic space.
For de Luca, “Borges recognized himself among these storytellers because he was, in his own way, a storyteller like them. He belonged to this ancient lineage of Moroccan storytellers”, who transport the spectator to horizons similar to Borgesian universes.
Although he only visited Morocco once, Jorge Luis Borges was able to create, through his readings and his imagination, a deep connection with the Kingdom and with its rich cultural and spiritual heritage, which appears in Borges’ work as a symbolic place, a space where worlds intersect, where echoes of the infinite and the mystical mingle.
In his literary odyssey, Borges was “very receptive to Arabic literature in general, such as pre-Islamic poetry or Jahiliya which he commented on in his work. Likewise, his reading of The Thousand and One Nights was the most powerful ever made in Spanish.”
The Venezuelan poet Ana Maria del Re, also present in Marrakech in 1984, recalls her conversation with Borges about her stay in the ochre city. “Every morning, the muezzin wakes me up and it fills me with joy. I am moved by the prayers of the faithful,” Borges had told Ana Maria. This confession revealed the great attraction that Sufi mysticism had always had for Borges.
Charmed by this kind of communion that seemed to envelop Borges during his stay in Marrakech, Maria Del Re wrote that “throughout his work there are continuous allusions to oriental culture, its history, its traditions, its mythologies; there is a whole recreation of this distant past.”
Stories like those told for centuries in Jamaa El Fna would have awakened in Jorge Luis Borges a great dazzlement for the Arab-Muslim world. In one of his poems written in Ronda, Spain, Borges praised the magic of Morocco, and of the Orient in general, in these terms: “in the delicate darkness of blindness, a concave silence of the patios, a leisure of jasmine and a light murmur of water, which evoked memories of deserts.”
Despite the rare evocations of this episode in Borges’ life, his only trip to Morocco, two years before his death, was an encounter between a writer and a space that he had often explored through his reading, aided by a fertile imagination despite his blindness.
From the few available testimonies it emerges that Morocco offered Borges an intense sensory and intellectual experience.
Although late, Borges’ Moroccan experience brought depth to his work, confirming his status as a universal writer, capable of transcending the boundaries of time and space.
In Borges’ imagination, the medinas of Morocco and their winding alleys seem to be spaces straight out of his own writings furnished with literary labyrinths. These places, which mix the past and the present and where the sacred and the profane coexist, would echo the inextricable literary obsessions of Borges, whose aficionados nourish the hope that the famous writer will have been able to confront his literary explorations with reality on Moroccan soil.
2024-08-16 15:55:38