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Presentation of “Tangiers, Second Homeland”
May 24, 20187:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Ambassadors’ Hall (at Calle Alcalá, 62). First floor.
7:00 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
Rocío Rojas-Marcos is presenting her most recent work, “Tánger,
segunda patria” (“Tangiers: Second Homeland”) on Thursday, May 24, at
the Casa Árabe headquarters in Madrid.
The event, to be introduced by Pedro Martínez-Avial, the General Director of Casa Árabe, will include interventions by the author herself and by Bernabé López García, a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies.
In this book, Rocío Rojas-Marcos combs through the Tangiers that has been written, described and portrayed in Spanish, at a time when arriving in that city must have felt like docking at a port where you would start life from scratch. Paragraph by paragraph, we see writers appear in the pages, including Carmen Laforet, Ramón Buenaventura, or the recently rediscovered author of La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni), Ángel Vázquez, along with many others.
Because Tangiers has a relationship with Spain that not everyone remembers: until the first half of the twentieth century, it was practically a Spanish city in terms of its customs, festivals and forms of coexistence....and above all, in its language. At this Gateway to Africa, Spanish became yet another native language and is the reason why today we can refer to the city as an indispensable enclave of literature in Spanish.
The truth is that, given its cosmopolitan character and status as a free city, many writers from around the globe have felt a fascination for taking up residence there...or have become passing ships in the night: Barthes, Beckett, Burroughs, Bowles, Capote, Genet, Ginsberg, Goytisolo, Kessel, Morand, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams and Yourcenar, as well as others.
In this book, Rocío Rojas-Marcos combs through the Tangiers that has been written, described and portrayed in Spanish, at a time when arriving in that city must have felt like docking at a port where you would start life from scratch. Paragraph by paragraph, we see writers appear in the pages, including Carmen Laforet, Ramón Buenaventura, or the recently rediscovered author of La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni), Ángel Vázquez, along with many others.
Because Tangiers has a relationship with Spain that not everyone remembers: until the first half of the twentieth century, it was practically a Spanish city in terms of its customs, festivals and forms of coexistence....and above all, in its language. At this Gateway to Africa, Spanish became yet another native language and is the reason why today we can refer to the city as an indispensable enclave of literature in Spanish.
The truth is that, given its cosmopolitan character and status as a free city, many writers from around the globe have felt a fascination for taking up residence there...or have become passing ships in the night: Barthes, Beckett, Burroughs, Bowles, Capote, Genet, Ginsberg, Goytisolo, Kessel, Morand, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams and Yourcenar, as well as others.
Rocío Rojas-Marcos (Seville, 1979) has a PhD in Literature and Aesthetics in the Information Society (University of Seville, 2017), a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and a bachelor’s degree in Arab and Islamic Studies (2003). Some of her most notable publications include: Tánger ciudad internacional (Tangiers, International City), Sanz de Soto and Buñuel. La tercera España transfretana (Sanz de Soto and Buñuel: The third Spain Beyond the Straits) and Carmen Laforet en Tánger (Carmen Laforet in Tangiers).
