Marrakech Themes

By highlighting how difficult survival is in 1930s Marrakech, Orwell undercuts any naïve, romantic notions about poverty and struggle that Westerners might superimpose onto the city’s working poor. Life under colonial rule is brutal, and death surrounds the native people as they struggle to work and eat. As the travel narrative opens, four men carry a corpse to a small hole to be buried. With a “little crowd of mourners,” they pass a restaurant and…

In “Marrakech,” George Orwell maintains that tourists, visitors, and colonial powers do not see the full reality of Marrakech, contending that the city’s poverty must be “invisible” for travel, tourism, and leisure to exist there. Suggesting that poverty and manual labor erase the poor from view, Orwell’s travel narrative investigates the ways in which even he himself overlooks or fails to see the working poor in Marrakech.

For instance, Orwell daily watches loads of firewood…

Orwell visits the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, recognizing the historical legacy of restrictions placed on the city’s Jewish people and hearing “dark rumours about the Jews” from both Arabs and “poorer Europeans.” These observations, given in a travel narrative published in 1939, allude to Hitler, whose “Final Solution” would soon engulf Jewish and other marginalized populations in Europe. Highlighting the ethnic divisions that someone like Hitler drew in the 1930s, Orwell shows how this kind…