ABSTRACT
Tangier is a city that could be considered both as movement and in movement. Placed on a crossroad of routes, it is a place of transit. However, like no other city on the crossroads of past and current transcontinental movements, Tangier has been transformed into a symbol of movement itself: of transits of knowledge and its vectoriality. In its history and myth, Tangier is not territorial, but vectorial: Tangier is transit. From the histories of the fourth century by Ibn Battuta, the most famous peregrin of the Arab world, Tangier will be transformed in the starting point of a journey that, induced by nostalgia and longing, stretches beyond Mecca and Medina. Tangier means concomitantly origin and provenance, an idea that stays alive in the reader’s consciousness. Its narratives provide us with fundamental data about the conviviality of cultures, and contribute at large to a convivial knowledge, fundamental to organizing an existence in peace and difference. Later on, in the twentieth century, Severo Sarduy and Roland Barthes presented other angles of Tangier’s history and myth in the sense of vectoriality, as a continuity to the writings of Ibn Battuta. From their experiences we will talk about Tanger Transit - and we will formulate the question through which paths and vectorial channels it is possible to consider an archaic place, a mythical place, a literary place in movement, from movement and as movement. We will manage to discover the way we can replace a history of space with a history of movement in order to develop not only logics of moving, but also moving logics and polilogics that are not anchored in static systems of reference.
Keywords:
Tangier; poetics of movement; literature between-worlds; transreal studies; verbal movements