About the item
- Author, Arthur Asseraf
- Role, Historian, University of Cambridge
-
an hour ago
Confiscated letters written to Moroccan men by Spanish women decades ago reveal a history of taboo love during the colonial era.
“When will you return to Spain?” The desperate plea was carefully written on the page, a sign of its importance to Carmela.
“Tell me you don’t look at any other woman,” he wrote from Granada in 1944.
But the man for whom these words were intended never managed to read them. Carmela’s international love letter did not reach its destination in Morocco.
Instead she found herself buried in the Spanish archives, in an unexpected cache of hundreds of romantic messages between Spanish women and Moroccan men.
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Seized between the 1930s and 1950s, they tell of forbidden romantic relationships.
For decades, the colonial authorities of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco systematically seized this mail.
The envelopes are full of passionate words: “I’m crazy about you…” writes a Valencian woman.
Some contain photographs. Inserted letter after letter, dozens of portraits of women with immaculate hairstyles pose to remind their distant lovers what they look like. One sent a photo of her riding a bike, a carefree snapshot of everyday life.
All letters were carefully filed in envelopes by conscientious bureaucrats, then forgotten among the routine paperwork.
They collected dust until they were discovered and published by the academics Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste and Nieves Muriel García.
Each letter contains a tantalizing insight into an entire relationship, but each also tells us about the repression these relationships have faced.
The Spanish authorities have done everything to make these relations impossible.
As a 1937 directive stated: “As a general rule, marriages between Moroccan soldiers and Spanish women must be prevented. »
Since 1912, Spain had claimed sovereignty over part of Morocco as a protectorate, dividing the country into two zones, along with France.
Fighters from the Berber community resisted this situation, particularly during the long and bloody Rif War between 1921 and 1926, which saw the Spanish army decimated by forces led by Abdelkrim al-Khattabi.
To meet this challenge, the Spanish government increased the number of its troops in Morocco and recruited thousands of Moroccans to join its army.
In the 1930s, a long strip along the north of the country, from the Atlantic coast of Asilah to the Algerian border in the east, was effectively administered by Spain with its capital in Tetouan.
It was from the military bases of this territory that in 1936 General Francisco Franco launched a coup against the republican government, triggering the Spanish Civil War.
As the war raged, thousands of Moroccan men conscripted into the Spanish army were sent overseas to Spain to fight alongside Franco’s forces.
In addition to the military, students, traders and other workers also joined them and came to live throughout the country, in cities and in the most remote rural areas.
After all, unlike many European colonial possessions, this one is a stone’s throw from Spain itself: at its narrowest part, in the Strait of Gibraltar, the Moroccan coast is only 14 kilometers from the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.
Everywhere they went, Moroccan men met Spanish women.
In Salamanca, a woman named Concha met Nasar, a Moroccan soldier stationed nearby.
Madly in love, she wrote to her superiors to obtain authorization to marry him in 1938. But for the Spanish colonial authorities such contacts had to be absolutely forbidden.
They expressed disgust at Concha, whom they disparaged as old, “ugly, as big as a hippopotamus and with a slight limp.”
They suspected that Nasar only expressed interest because Concha owned a house, which triggered his “volcanic love.”
Official orders were to impose “as many difficulties as possible” to prevent these relationships “without openly prohibiting them,” as one 1937 order put it.
Indeed, since the Franco regime counted on the loyalty of Moroccan soldiers, it did not make these relationships explicitly illegal. Instead, they developed a whole host of ways to make them impossible in practice.
For example, if a woman wrote to a Moroccan, they would prohibit her from entering Morocco.
They also often banned the Moroccan from entering Spain, making their relationship impossible.
In 1948 a letter was intercepted between Carmen of Zaragoza and her lover Abdeselam in Morocco. The Tetouan authorities immediately prohibited them from crossing to the other side.
In the letter Carmen gives news of her daughter, who will now grow up without ever seeing her father. The officers did not take the child into consideration.
Why did they view these relationships with such contempt?
Part of the answer lies in the reactionary ideology of the dictatorship.
Franco’s government was aggressively misogynistic, rigidly controlling women’s mobility and limiting their access to work.
He also saw himself as a defender of Catholicism, and for religious reasons, women who married Muslim men were considered “lost in the faith”.
But the main reason was what the authorities called “prestigio de raza”, “the prestige of the race”.
For colonial domination to continue, Spain had to be considered superior to Morocco.
Because the government viewed marriage as the subordination of a woman to a man, any marriage across the colonial divide would have subjected a Spanish woman to a Moroccan man.
If this were known, it would undermine the very foundations of colonial rule.
In contrast, relationships between Spanish men and Moroccan women, of which there were many in the protectorate, were not subject to the same scrutiny and censorship because they replicated the larger power structure of society on an intimate scale without threatening it.
This was not specific to Spain: the fear of European women entering into relationships with colonized men was common to all European colonial administrations.
In the neighboring French zone, officials expressed similar disapproval of the political consequences of the report.
The Dutch in the East Indies and the English in India viewed relationships between European women and colonized men as much more threatening than the other way around and monitored them accordingly.
Although the range of measures to discourage such relationships ranged from disapproval to outright prohibition, the underlying rule was the same: such relationships constituted a threat.
These letters reveal, however, that beneath the surface of colonial society, dating was common and led to a variety of relationships: friendships, courtships, sexual encounters, and marriages.
Opening these letters is fascinating: a window into lives that official documents rarely tell us about. But it’s also worrying: most letters never reach their destination. It feels like an invasion of privacy, as these people never chose to be included in these archives.
When Morocco became independent in 1956, the Tetouan Protectorate government closed its doors and its archives were largely forgotten.
Most of them ended up near Madrid, in the central archives of the administration of the university city of Alcalá de Henares where, like much of Spanish colonial history in Africa, they were forgotten.
But despite the recent publication of some of these letters, their stories remain little known, and these long-forgotten archives have not yet revealed all their secrets.
Dr Arthur Asseraf is a historian of modern France, North Africa and the Mediterranean.
Photographic illustrations by Matt Thomas; Source photographs from Getty Images.
2024-01-15 17:44:39
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