"Dans Le Noir": Where the Forest Meets the City, a View from Tangier, Morocco

“It suits them [white Europeans] for us [black Africans] to live in ‘le noir’ [in the darkness or the black]", a longtime resident of Tangier, Morocco, who is also a familial chief in Cameroon reflected, drawing explicit links between the extra-legal policing of racialized migration through EU Partnership Agreements in North Africa and the subversion of regulatory regimes in the continent’s centre. Contrasting memories of seeing the twinkling lights of European cities through his deportation flight window with the relative darkness of landing back in Cameroon after stowing away on a ship as a child, and comparing this to subsequent years living without lights in the forests of Algeria and Morocco – dressed in dark clothes to avoid detection by the police, admiring “shining” cities from a distance – another Cameroonian resident who now struggles to maintain a viable life in the city insists living in 'le noir' is “a reality for us”. In this paper, I map and model key elements in the socio-spatial recomposition and affective experience of ‘le noir’ by focusing on a selection of moments and movements through which ‘le noir’ is formed and transformed: as an ultimately unknowable zone of seeming hopelessness, apparently of no apparent value, offering a perspective without perspective, and threatening an orientation of total disorientation. In reflecting on how Cameroonian interlocutors reflect (or try not to reflect too much) on the situations they inhabit in context, I show how not everyone in ‘le noir’ (as a socio-spatial situation) is ‘noir’ (as a racial identity read through skin colour) or vice versa, and yet signs and symbols of blackness and their various significations come to be associated with one another in affective material ways. I consider how this view from Tangier might inform a propositional politics of inhabitation (Lancione and Simone 2021).