Mohamed Mrabet

Mohamed Mrabet was born in 1936 (the date varies between sources) and grew up in and around Tangier, then an international zone full of foreign writers and artists. He never went to school and never learned to read or write. He met Paul Bowles, the American novelist and composer who had settled in Tangier, in 1965, and began to tell him stories.

Bowles recorded Mrabet's tales on tape — stories of hashish, love, trickery, violence and magic, drawn from his life and from the oral tradition of northern Morocco. They published about fourteen books together, among them Love with a Few Hairs (1967), The Lemon, M'Hashish (1969), the autobiography Look & Move On (1976) and Chocolate Creams and Dollars (1992). Bowles translated them into English, and they have appeared in several languages.

Mrabet is also a visual artist. He began making ink drawings in 1958, inspired in part by the Moroccan painter Ahmed Yacoubi, and later painted as well. His dense, swirling images of figures, animals and patterns sit somewhere between abstraction, Arabic calligraphy and the designs of henna, and he has exhibited them for decades, mostly in Tangier and Spain. A recent visitor describes his newer work as dense pen-and-ink drawings made of webs of lines and dozens or even hundreds of tiny marks.

How to look at a Mrabet drawing: move slowly from the centre outwards. The marks are repeated until they read as a pattern, and the figures and animals in them appear and then dissolve, much as characters do in his spoken stories. That reading is this site's own.

Where to see the work

The Jennifer Lauren Gallery and the Saudi Aramco Aramco World article "The Storyteller of Tangier" show his drawings and tell his story; in Tangier, galleries announce his exhibitions, and City Lights publishes his books. See our lists of Moroccan painters and Moroccan artists, and the Tangier artist Yto Barrada.