Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The United States and the Maghrib

1976; Middle East Institute; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-3461

Lorraine Brown,

Islamic Studies and History

E ~ VEN in the exuberance of the American Bicentennial celebration anyone who would write about 200 years of relations between the United States and North Africa might as well begin with a frank admission: until quite recently contact between the two has amounted little more than fleeting footnotes the major historical record of each. Moreover, the American perception of the Maghrib has always been not only faint but also distorted by venerable prejudice and pervasive romanticism. To most Americans North Africa is the land of pirates and Beau Geste, Casablanca a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman while Algiers-to those over 40 at least-evokes memories of Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer (come with me the casbah). Indeed, the American image of the Maghrib relies over much on music and drama which, while ranging from excellent egregious in aesthetic quality, is uniformly inaccurate as historical fact. To the list of movies might be added a recent entry, Wind and the Lion, based on an incident in the Morocco of 1904 involving the kidnapping by a Rifian tribal leader of a middle-aged Greek claiming American citizenship, but in the Hollywood extravaganza the balding businessman, Jon Perdicaris, is transmogrified into a nubile Candice Bergen. As for songs the line in the Marines Hymn to the shores of Tripoli commemorates the quite small-scale operations against those Barbary Pirates in the first years of the nineteenth century. Or there is Sigmund Romberg's beautiful The Desert Song from the musical of the 1920s inspired by Abd al-Karim's fight against the French and the Spanish (the play also features The Rif Song). Of course, purists might point out that Abd al-Karim was not a bedouin but a mountaineer, not an Arab but a Berber. Presumably, however, The Mountain Song would not have conveyed the same romanticized touch of exotica. Then, finally, there is the eminently forgettable Dirty Gertie from Bizerte, a song cranked out at the time of the American campaign against the Axis in North Africa.