WHEN I FIRST started this project in 2005, I expected that Beirut would be one of the principal sites of my research and get its own chapter. I have since traveled to Lebanon’s capital seven times. For about a year, I engaged a research assistant in Beirut, whom I asked to track when and how American cultural artifacts appeared in Lebanese media, including book and film reviews, popular culture, and online postings. I didn’t quite know what I was looking for, though we gathered a great deal of interesting material. The amount was quickly overwhelming. And then Beirut was under attack by Israel again, and such a project seemed incidental if not impracticable.
On one of those trips to Beirut, I happened across a little café called Café Younes. The branch in Hamra is well known to those who live in or travel to the city, around the corner from the famous Commodore hotel, where Western journalists were based during the Lebanese civil war of the 1990s. It remains a place I visit on each trip.
In 2005, Café Younes was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, with a roasting machine squeezed in the corner and some stools pulled up to a shallow counter along the wall.
1 At first glance, this location gave off a certain air of authenticity. Seventy years earlier, in 1935, Amin Younes had returned to Lebanon from Brazil to open a coffee shop in downtown Beirut (the branch in Hamra opened in 1960 and was the second). When I visited, a man named Abou Anwar was celebrating a half-century as roaster. He had worked for Younes since 1955, when he was sixteen years old.
To be sure, multiple traditions and styles of coffee preparation were in evidence here, a palimpsest left behind by the numerous imperial powers with an interest in Beirut. At Younes, you could have Turkish coffee made to order or excellent espresso or café crème from the traditions learned during the French Mandate period. American-style filtered coffee, too, was on the menu.
My first visit to Café Younes came five years after a big Starbucks had opened on Hamra Street, just a few blocks away. In news coverage about the massive expansion of Starbucks in those years, journalists worried that the great café culture of the Arab Middle East would be lost or—worse—Americanized by the huge Seattle chain. Language similar to that which greeted the arrival of McDonald’s in Moscow and Beijing during the previous decade was reemerging.
I myself wondered how a Starbucks around the corner would affect Café Younes. How could this place compete with the trademark frappuccinos, to say nothing of the spacious seating area, plush chairs, and sidewalk terrace, none of which Younes had here?
Posted on the wall were news clippings from the local press. There I found my answer. Amin Younes, the founder’s thirty-something grandson, had been asked precisely the same question that was on my mind. He answered in a way that surprised me: the arrival of Starbucks had the potential to improve his business. Starbucks was changing how his own customers thought about coffee drinks and in turn provided him with the opportunity to expand his menu. As Younes told a journalist, “When Star-bucks opened, we had fewer than 10 varieties of coffee drinks on offer. Weeks later, we had expanded the selection to more than 20, and sales were higher.”
2Though I decided not to pursue research in Beirut for this book, Younes’s comment stuck with me. In the face of a challenge that others (myself included) assumed would wipe out his business, Younes’s response represented not only business acumen—the recognition that Starbucks was helping him expand his own menu—but also a form of creativity. Younes took the American menu and, rather than replicating it, made it into one his own customers would cherish, responding to their own now altered sense of what a café might serve. There were the typical espresso drinks, but now he added drinks with Middle Eastern flavors and spices, such as a cardamom-flavored espresso, lattes laced with rose water, and smoothies that incorporated green bananas and mango.
On my most recent visit to Beirut in February 2015, I visited not only the small location in which I had first sat in 2005 but also the new, large-scale addition next door, complete with souvenirs, books, customized mugs, and T-shirts. Though there were now comfortable seating and a sidewalk terrace, the place was no replica of Starbucks but had retained its own personality. Café Younes had done well.
A few months earlier, in May 2014, as I was completing the manuscript of this book, the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern hosted the Tangier filmmaker Moumen Smihi. Smihi’s visit was in connection with a film retrospective organized in Santa Cruz that we had brought to Evanston. Though I was working on this book when he came, I assumed Smihi was working in a different paradigm than the younger Moroccan filmmakers I discuss in
chapter 4. After all, Smihi—born in 1945 and a former student of Roland Barthes—was more influenced by structuralist theory, I assumed, than by digital culture.
After one of his talks, I asked Smihi what he thought about what anthropologist Kevin Dwyer has called the paradox of Moroccan cinema, wherein the movie houses are closing even as a dynamic series of films is emerging from Morocco. The curator of the retrospective had gone to considerable expense to procure and screen 35-millimeter prints of Smihi’s lush films, which were otherwise out of circulation.
Smihi responded to my question in a way that surprised me: “Actually,” he said, “this crisis of [movie] theaters in Morocco is my chance.” By “chance,” he meant the French sense of the word, “my good luck.” He went on to say, “It’s the distributors who decide how many [in the] audience they must have, and then [the distributors don’t] take films below a certain number.” He paused. I reflected on how little known Smihi himself was in the United States precisely because of this dynamic. But then, again, he surprised me.
“In Morocco there is a real revolution that is not of the Arab Spring, of theaters collapsing, etcetera,” he said. “The real revolution is that you can buy all the Bergman and Hitchcock films on the sidewalks, pirated films, for 10 cents a film.”
Later that week I watched Smihi’s film Moroccan Chronicles, which had been released in the last year of the twentieth century. The film is ostensibly the depiction of three tales told by a mother to her young son as he recovers from his circumcision. Each of the three tales is set in a different Moroccan city: Marrakech, Essaouira, and Tangier. But they are also in complex ways engaged with American cinematic forerunners—most explicitly The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which Alfred Hitchcock had filmed in Marrakech, and Othello (1952), which Orson Welles had filmed in Essaouira. I knew both of the forerunners quite well—I had written about the Hitchcock film in my first book—but I had not known about Smihi’s reworking of them. As I watched Smihi’s film now with great admiration, I thought about what I would have said about it a decade ago when I was finishing my book Morocco Bound. Back then, I was fascinated by Moroccan texts that “disoriented” American representations of Morocco. I had analyzed a film by another Moroccan director that recast the iconic Casablanca dramatically.
How had I missed this film, which reoriented Hitchcock and Welles in such interesting ways? I berated myself.
Hitchcock’s film had made its way into Morocco on those cheap pirated copies, I realized, where a filmmaker such as Smihi or his followers could pick it up and do what they might with it. But the circulatory process works differently in the other direction. Smihi’s 1999 film is still not distributed on DVD, and ten years ago you would have had to track it down in the director’s private collection or the Moroccan film archive. No one had written about it seriously yet, so there was no record in the scholarship that it engaged Hitchcock.
3 And now, in 2014, it took a film retrospective in a museum to bring it to general attention. Anyone could see the Hitchcock film, but I could count the number of the people in the Chicago area who might see Smihi’s film.
These are but two stories of the curious pathways along which American cultural products and forms—a Hitchcock film and a Starbucks menu—have traveled in recent years. These stories begin to suggest the creativity with which some individuals in the Middle East and North Africa have taken up American culture for their own projects. At the same time, they alert us to the ways in which some of the more interesting new products end up out of circulation and remain local (a café down a side street, a brilliant film barely known outside of Morocco). Though many have assumed that globalization in the cultural realm brings endless circulation, these new products are end points, perhaps even dead ends, and they do not return easily. But neither do they particularly want to, and that is what makes them perhaps crucial to understand in grasping what the world after the American century looks like.