Directed by Catherine Hiller Warnow & Regina WeinreichFirst Run Features
During the years that he resided in Tangier, Morocco, composer and novelist Paul Bowles enjoyed smattering “a bit of jam on a biscuit” in order to attain a hallucinogenic state of “kif consciousness.” Bowles’ “jam” was Moroccan Majoon, a homemade hashish concoction consisting of kif [the Moroccan term for hashish] fruit, nuts, ginger, cinnamon, anise seed, honey and orange flower water.
Amongst the mind-altering offerings featured in Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider is a recipe for Moroccan Majoon and a series of fascinating interviews with the unconventional and immensely quotable Bowles. Bowles, who is best known for his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was born in Jamaica, New York in 1910. He was treated like “a complete outsider” by his emotionally-distant parents and quickly fled to Paris as soon as he was old enough to leave home. Once there, Bowles recalls: “I was another kind of outsider, not so intimate and not so painful. Then, I got so that I liked the idea of being an outsider, so I’ve always been one since.”
While in France, Bowles developed a close friendship with the writer Gertrude Stein. Stein suggested that he visit Tangier, and he liked it so much that he decided to settle there permanently in 1947. During an on-location interview in Tangier, Bowles explains how his expatriate life fueled his writing: “There’s more to say about the friction between the person who is outside his social milieu than the person who is in it. If you write about the person whose in it, you’re simply writing about the milieu.”
Bowles cultivated personal relationships with many prominent writers during his lifetime. His curious marriage to the lesbian writer Jane Auer, as well as his relationships with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein and other writers, provides plenty of fodder for interesting stories and reminiscences. In one segment, the poet Edouard Roditi speculates on the psychological underpinnings of Bowles’ “outsider” existence in Tangier: “He’s certainly the complete expatriate. He has a horror of America. He has a horror of every place except Tangier and he seems to be developing a horror of Tangier too. The moment that he goes out of his apartment, he is horrified by what he sees there. I think that he just doesn’t like reality.”
When Bowles passed away at the age of 88, his remains were shipped to Lakemont, New York in accordance with his wishes. Instead of a burial near Jane Bowles, in Spain, the restless expatriate writer was buried in a hometown grave situated near the bodies of the parents who had planted the “complete outsider” seeds deep within his soul. In the highly recommended “New Interview with Ned Rorem” bonus selection, Rorem eloquently summarizes the vacuum created by Bowles’ death: “The world weighs less with his departure.”
Review by Rachelle Nones
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