hello,

My friend Lucy suggested Cafe Hafa for this project and now I really want to go.

Why?

It looks gorgeous. Warm, calm, welcoming. It’s perched on the edge of Africa, looking over the Strait of Gibraltar, serving teas and whatnot. The perfect antidote to European Gloom since 1921.

And it’s got a vibe. An atmosphere of International Zone bohemian chill. Poets, writers, musicians hung out here. Everyone from The Beats to The Beatles. I’m a sucker for that combination of the glamorous and the literary. Somewhere liminal with nice cakes? Sign me up.

Tahar Ben Jelloun has described it like this:

“In Tangier, in the winter, the Café Hafa becomes an observatory for dreams and their aftermath. Cats from the cemetery, the terraces, and the chief communal bread oven of the Marshan district gather round the café as if to watch the play unfolding there in silence, and fooling nobody. Long pipes of kif pass from table to table while glasses of mint tea grow cold, enticing bees that eventually tumble in, a matter of indifference to customers long since lost to the limbo of hashish and tinseled reverie.”

That sounds great doesn’t it?

Why not?

But I can’t justify going if nothing started here. If no manifestos were written and no schemes schemed. If no one invented a new form of painting or a better way to organise society then it’s just a place where people we’ve heard of shared a beverage. Like Graham Norton’s Green Room.

And actually, it seems that that’s what happened. Not much. Maybe it was just too pleasant to start a revolution.

Lots of people came. Genet. Ginsberg. Becket. Burroughs, many of them to visit Paul Bowles. But it’s hard to actually prove they even met at Cafe Hafa, it just seems likely.

Tahar Ben Jelloun on that world:

"I didn't like Bowles, the man or the writer. He loved young Moroccan boys and preferred them illiterate. He'd write books in their words; it was an ambiguous relationship." He preferred the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. "I asked him, 'why Tangier in the '50s?' He answered, 'boys and hashish - and neither is expensive'. But at least he was frank."

And it’s not that remarkable that The Beatles and The Stones liked it here too. They were always hunting for places to expand their consciousness and avoid their tax.

It’s a shame. Tangier looks extraordinary, with a ton of great cafes. If one of them could birth a renaissance I could put it on expenses.

So, no Cafe Hafa for me. Stayed tuned for January’s premium edition where I actually write about a cafe properly.

cheers

russell

(I originally wondered if I could get Chat GPT to do this for me. It was good at the research so I asked it to write the email too. If you’d like to read ChatGPT’s version of this story it’s in the Google Doc.)