Morocco is full of art, literature and music festivals created to attract tourists and their money. One such event, however, includes seminars on globalisation, development and international co-operation and has transformed the city where it is held. Ursula Lindsey explains.
In the summer, the beach across from the train station in Asilah – a small, ancient city west of Tangiers on Morocco’s Atlantic coast – is a compact, chaotic expanse of beach umbrellas and tanned bodies. Late into the night the streets are crowded with families on holiday, foreign tourists and emigrants back from Europe to visit their hometown.
Among the throngs a particular subset of visitors goes practically unnoticed: the diplomats, intellectuals, artists and writers from the Middle East, Africa and the Spanish-speaking world who come every August for the International Cultural Moussem (Season) of Asilah.
It is a low-key festival that has nonetheless brought many changes to the city and has become a cherished rendezvous for those who attend it year in and year out. “I’ve been coming here for 20 years,” the expatriate Iraqi author Samuel Shimon says, “since back when this” – he points to the crowded street in front of us – “was a dirt road.”
The Asilah festival is the result of a friendship between two talented and ambitious local men, Mohammed Benaissa and Mohammed Melehi. Both come from well-to-do Asilah families and both became interested in the arts and the larger world outside their own at an early age.
Benaissa studied drama and literature in Cairo, then photography and communications in the United States. Melehi moved to Spain and then New York, where he lived and worked in the early 1960s. Eventually Benaissa embarked on a successful political career. He served as Morocco’s minister of foreign affairs, then as culture minister. Melehi became one of Morocco’s best-known abstract painters and was the original graphic designer of the left-wing Moroccan cultural magazine Souffles.
In 1976 the two friends came home and ran for city council. They started the cultural festival as a way to spur development in what was then a small, depressed fishing town. “Asilah was a little forgotten village,” says Hatim Bataoui, the press attaché for the Cultural Moussem and a member of the Asilah Forum Foundation. “There was nothing here.”
The moussem lasts about three weeks and includes a number of public concerts, as well as workshops put on by invited artists. This year one could come across the Japanese engraver Masaki Oya in the gardens of the Culture Palace where he was working on etchings inspired by the sunsets outside Asilah’s walls. Nearby was the Chinese artist Wang Suo Yan drawing intently in a small black notebook. A few steps away the renowned Egyptian painter Adam Henein prepared his materials.
In addition to cultural pursuits, the festival has seminars dedicated to issues of globalisation, development and international co-operation that attract ministers and heads of state, mostly of African, Latin American, and Arab countries. This may seem a surprising addition, but it is part and parcel of the original concept. From the beginning Benaissa and Melehi saw the festival as a way to link culture and development, to celebrate the arts and help their hometown prosper.
Asilah is dotted with buildings that have come about thanks to the festival: the Hassan II Convention Centre, the Cultural Palace, a new library. The streets of the medina have been repaved, its buildings are maintained a gleaming white. A fortified tower built in 1503 by the Portuguese was recently restored.
The artists invited to Asilah all donate works to the city and there are plans to create permanent exhibition space for them soon. The walls of the fortified old city are festooned with murals that visiting artists and locals have been creating for the past 31 years.
Bataoui tells a story of the visit of the Senegalese president and poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was on his way to meet the former king, Hassan II. At the time Asilah had no running water and the Senegalese president mentioned this to the king. The result? “Now there are no problems of running water and electricity in Asilah.”
But modernisation always has its discontents. In the picturesque medina, local women grumble as tourists snap their picture and one notices – alongside the famous murals – many walls with hand-painted “For Sale” signs.
The number of local residents has dropped by 50 per cent in recent years and today, like the medinas of many Moroccan cities that have become tourism destinations, Asilah’s is home to more foreigners than locals.
“Of course the city has lost some its traditional social cachet,” says Khaled Chegraoui, a professor of history and political anthropology at Mohammed V University who has researched the link between festivals and development. “But that’s the ‘development tax’.”
The people who have sold their houses made “enormous profits”, he notes, and many residents have moved “from extreme poverty to being rather comfortable” thanks in part to the business the festival has brought to town.
The idea that a cultural festival is the best way to promote tourism and kick-start development has become popular in Morocco. As the reporter Muriel Tancrez put it in a recent article on cultural life in the country: “In the last 10 years, Morocco has entered the era of: If I have a festival, my city or my region exists.
Yet, as many observers have pointed out, the promotion of festivals has become Morocco’s cultural policy to the exclusion of all others. And rather than being the result of a communal vision and a political process, their creation almost always depends on the will and resources of a particular individual.
The Gnawa Festival in Essaouria would never have come about without the backing of the royal counsellor André Azoulay. The Rabat musical festival Mawazeen takes place under the patronage of King Mohammed VI and is run by his personal secretary. The International Film Festival in Marrakesh is presided over by the king’s brother, Moulay Rashid.
Festivals with such powerful backers have no trouble finding commercial sponsors, but it is often unclear what long-term benefits they bring to the local population or to local artists. Asilah is more modest and more long-lived than many other festivals and Chegraoui considers it a model. But there are moments when the complex culture/development equation doesn’t quite add up.
While the tradition of painting murals was clearly instituted in the spirit of bringing art to the people, the seminars – held behind closed doors and security checkpoints – don’t seem to draw a local public. “You can’t expect a hairdresser to come to a seminar on the world financial crisis. It’s a bit academic, it’s an elite subject,” Bataoui says.
For its continued success, the people of Asilah have to come to see the festival as more than a form of entertainment or a business opportunity, to see it as “their” festival too. “There’s an infrastructure now,” says Chegraoui, “but you need to educate people so they can become creative. The people need to develop their own initiatives.”