ISBN: 1899282955 9781899282951

Category: Unavailable

Page count: 65

"'I thought: people say it's better to have no life at all than a life full of holes. But then, they say: better an empty sack than no sack. I don't know'. (Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi, ""A Life Full of Holes"", 1964; recorded and translated by Paul Bowles). The word 'strait', like its French - and as chance would have it, Arabic - equivalent, combines the senses of narrowness and distress. The collapse of the colonial enterprise has left behind a complex legacy, bridging the Mediterranean, and shaping how movement across the Strait of Gibraltar is managed and perceived. Before 1991, any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But, since the European Union's (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical, and intimately personal."