Marrakech
2025
First Published
3.69
Average Rating
300
Number of Pages
In this short essay, written in the spring of 1939, Orwell again makes proof of his remarkable ability to turn every aspect of native life into a spectacle of disorder and futility. Having contracted a case of tuberculosis in England, he made his journey south to Marrakech in the winter of 1938, where he started his novel Coming Up for Air. “Marrakech” which sums up his own thoughts about his experience in the city consists of a series of disjointed passages, each mapping out a particular scene of the poverty and dreariness so pervasive in the city. In its fragmentary structure, the essay reflects the lack of homogeneity in the colonial space. It is a space populated by a Muslim majority, a Jewish minority and even a smaller European community whose colonial authority is served by yet a body of well disciplined Senegalese soldiers. In this heterogeneous community, racial and ethnic differences become not so much signs of diversity as those of conflict and clash. To Orwell’s panoptic eye, this divided, hierarchic society typifies a deplorable order generated by the mediocrity and passiveness of the natives.
Avg Rating
3.69
Number of Ratings
122
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
32%
3 STARS
38%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
2%
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