The Orientalist Leanings in Bowlesייs Translation and Representation of Moroccan Culture

When Paul Bowles settled in the International zone of Tangier after WWII, he took up a project of translating a group of young and poor uneducated oral storytellers from Tangier (Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi, Ahmed Yacoubi, and Abdesslam Boulaich). In his translation and writings about Morocco, Paul Bowles concentrated on two main features of the culture, mainly the popular and the oral. Accordingly, aim of this paper is to reveal the motivations behind Bowles’s reductionist approach in his representation of Morocco through his translations of Moroccan oral tradition. The paper also aims to demonstrate how Orientalism characterizes Bowles’s translations in its two main definitions; both as a reductionist form of representation and as a form of knowledge/ Power. The main argument is that in his concentration on only popular culture and the illiterate class of society in his representation of the culture, Bowles transmitted to the West a fragmented and incomplete image about the “other.” Therefore, this paper comes to the conclusion that like most orientalist writings, Bowles’s translations and writings about Morocco serve in reinforcing biased stereotypes about the East.