“While the family is supposed to be able to recognize the tomb, it shouldn’t be decorated with plants, precious stones, and so on, since everyone is equal in death,” a Moroccan friend of mine told me. It is unclear, therefore, whether he is aware of the reason why traditional Moroccan burials do not involve ornate gravestones that distinguish one tomb from another. The tone of Orwell’s Marrakech diaries is largely descriptive – he offers little in terms of moral judgment of Moroccan society itself. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind.” “When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick.
“What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends,” he writes. From the outset, Orwell hints at his own impulses of this kind – the essay opens with an account of a funeral procession that passed him in the street, temporarily distracting the flies from his lunch. If European imperialism has a central myth, it is this: We are civilized and they are not. “All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.” “When you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings,” he wrote. Much of his language is grating to the modern ear, but an unmistakable solidarity with the victims of imperialism underlies Orwell’s writing about Morocco, just as it had in Burma and elsewhere. Orwell does not only attack the hypocrisy and brutality of the French regime but explores and criticizes the imperialist attitudes that he himself had internalized.
He famously wrote that the essential characteristic of the free intellect was “the power of facing unpleasant facts,” and strove to live up to this standard in his writing about Morocco. One of the qualities of Orwell that made his political writing so powerful was his unique desire to understand the appeal of the ideologies he opposed, in order to combat their symptoms in himself and others. Orwell was a passionate critic of all forms of imperialism and made no exception in his excoriation of French colonial rule. His essay “ Marrakech,” a distillation of his “Morocco Diaries,” was published around Christmas, 1939. Orwell religiously chronicled his experience in Morocco, which at that time was under the control of the French Protectorate.
By the time they set sail again from Casablanca, on March 26, 1939, Orwell had written his novel “Coming Up for Air,” which was published shortly after his return to England. Myers and, after Orwell’s death, Myers’ estate was repaid from the proceeds of “Animal Farm.” The couple arrived in Marrakech on September 14, 1938. Orwell knew that the identity of his creditor was the novelist L.H. Orwell and Eileen had to rely on a loan of £300 from an anonymous donor in order to finance their trip to Morocco. His dryly comic essay “ Confessions of a Book Reviewer” springs particularly to mind. The drudgery and faint humiliation of a writer’s existence, today as in his time, was captured brilliantly by Orwell in much of his work. Orwell and his wife, Eileen Blair (Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair), were in dire financial straits. His doctors told him that it would be best for him to spend the following winter in a warm climate. It was suspected that he was suffering from tuberculosis, the malady that would later cut his life short at the age of 46. George Orwell was admitted to a hospital in England on March 15, 1938.