Mapped
For Bread Alone
Mohamed Choukri
Choukri's Tangier is the hungry underside of the international city: the Grand Socco and Petit Socco markets, the alleys of the medina, the working port, and the cafés and back rooms of the interzone. The map runs from the famine-struck Rif countryside near Nador, which drives the family west to the coast, through the streets where the boy survives, out to a spell in Tetouan.
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The Spider's House
Paul Bowles
In the ancient Moroccan city of Fez in 1954, as the nationalist rising against French rule reaches the medina, an illiterate boy, Amar, and a disillusioned American writer, Stenham, are thrown together amid the violence. Bowles maps the real city precisely: the labyrinth of Fez el-Bali, the shrine of Moulay Idriss and the Qarawiyyin at its heart, the French Ville Nouvelle where the settlers live, the Palais Jamaï on the medina's edge, and the Merinid tombs on the hills above from which the whole city is seen.
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