Marrakech gained its major bohemian appeal in 1960’s as the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jean-Paul Getty all came to hang out here.
Hideous Kinky depicts Marrakech at this time, seen through the eyes of a five-year-old little girl who travels in North Africa with her hippie mother and her older sister.
Living in a cheap hotel and making a living out of making hand sewn dolls, the girls explore the city, picking up the language and even passing themselves off as beggars. This is definitely not a conventional vision of Marrakech!
Written in 1992 by Esther Freud, the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and great-grand daughter of Lucian Freud, the novel is full of delicate irony: while the mother immerses herself in the Sufi religion and quests for personal – and sexual – fulfillment, the children begin to rebel, the older sister insists on going to school while the narrator dreams of mashed potato…
The book was translated in French under the title “Marrakech Express” and adapted into a film in 1998.
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