There are few place names quite so evocative as that of Casablanca, the sprawling hub of Moroccan trade on the kingdom’s windswept Atlantic coast.
To think of it is to allow one’s memory to slip into black and white: images of Bogart and Bergman, cocktails and cigarettes, set against the strains of Sam at the piano in Rick’s Café Américain.
Six years ago I uprooted my wife and two small children from a quiet life in London, and dragged them to Casablanca, to live in a mansion located in the middle of a vast shantytown that was supposedly infested with Jinn (supernatural beings). After prolonged exorcisms and fumigations, we set about renovating the house and exploring the city that had become our new home.
The tourists who flock to Morocco tend to make a beeline for Marrakech, Essaouira and Fès. Some of them do land in Casa (pronounced ‘Caza’ by the locals), but they don’t hang around. The blanket of negative publicity is so thick that it pushes many visitors away.
Most foreigners regard the city as a den of iniquity and vice, a bastion of inferior architecture, a place that isn’t in essence properly Moroccan.
From time to time I overhear the legend being passed on, slipping from mouth to ear, spreading like wildfire. At first the bad-mouthing of the city I had chosen as a home bothered me. But now nothing fills me with greater delight when I hear of tourists retreating from Casablanca, or skirting around it – because it means that they’re leaving all the more for me.
A raw seething melting-pot of humanity, drawn from all four corners of the Moroccan kingdom, Casablanca is an intoxicating blend of life. With innumerable levels and secret corners, it’s the kind of place that takes a lifetime to get to know properly. The longer you spend there, however, the more you realize you hardly know it, or understand it, at all.
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