Casablanca. Fragments d´imaginaire

 

´Toi, tu ne vois pas la ville. Tu es dedans. Et dans la mesure où elle est en toi, là sous ta peau, tu ne la verras pas. Te viendra, peut-être l´image d´un mur laissé derrière toi mais tu ne sauras dire où´. La ville que j'ai dans la peau by Youssef Adel, translated from Arabic by the late Francis Gouin

´A Casablanca on peutt avoir tout ce qu´on désire´. Jean Michel Zurfluh

Cities like Casablanca are haunting the imagination of the Western world, but many may rarely go beyond the cinematic representation of the place. This is the fate of many cities stereotypically turned into symbols of something beyond themselves. 

This 2-volume collection dedicated to Casablanca, published in French, is a literary journey of memories, memories about memories, poetry through the borroughs and people of Casablanca. The real people of literary encounters.

I haven´t been to Casablanca myself and not a big fan of the movie anyway and most probably when I will visit Morocco will rather go to other places. However, reading this collection of short stories, the childhood memories of the authors, their nostalgy for the world who once was and I, among others, will never experience it as such, made me reconsider my thoughts. 

Also, it inspired me to a more complex take on urban existences. How do we exist in the midst of cities, how do we co-exist with the fragments of our previous lives in a landscape itself changing? Also, how can we survive the shock of being faced with the distorsions of our memories? How many times I was longing myself to revisit the places of my early childhood - and there were many of them - only to leave heartbroken as nothing from my representations I hold dear seemed to exist any more.

Everyone its own Casablanca...