All posts by Betsy

Craftspeople in the Fès medina

September 21, 2013Arts, TourismBetsy

As part of the study tour, Jess Stephens split us into two groups and set up a series of visits with artisans working in the Fez medina.

Seffarine square is the brassworker’s square, with metal being hammered, joined, and heated. To make a brass pot, for instance, first the side is hammered out, then the base, then the two are joined.

Small pieces of brass and aluminum are combined to make the seam, then the seam is heated in an open fire:

Once the pot comes out of the fire, it’s beaten some more, to smooth and strengthen the seam.

Finished pots are lined with aluminum; they’re surprisingly light-weight.

Around the corner from the brassworkers is a quiet square known as Carpenter’s square, though there’s only one woodworker still present, urged by city government to remain.

He makes simple three-legged stools for other artisans in the medina; he can also make musical instruments, or even a peg-leg (a small model hangs in the doorway of his workshop as a way of clarifying specifications).

The dyer’s street (As-Sabbaghin) is also located near Seffarine square, along the river dividing the Karouine bank of Fes from the Andalusian bank. On a cool morning, the steaming pots of dying fabric have the feel of magic potions.

And it is a kind of magic, to watch the newly dyed fabric drawn up out of the bucket where it has been steeping:

Dark colors are died in hot water, light colors in cold water. These days the alum (to fix the color) is included in the dye. Traditional dyes drew colors from banana leaves, from henna, from kohl, from mint leaves, from zaatar (oregano).

Even the original silk is luscious, satisfying even just to look at: the colors gild the lily. The “silk” itself is imported from India, but it can also be sourced in Morocco from agave plants (sabra). Sabra silk is preferred to silk from silkworms because Mohammed banned his male followers from wearing gold or silk, but Sabra silk is a vegetable fibre, exempt from this prohibition.

The knife sharpening shops were not as picturesque as some of the other workshops, but here I had a sense of the ongoing life of the medina.
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Everyone needs sharp knives and scissors, after all.

And the shop next store was well-stocked with the small motors that are used to twist the braids that are used to trim djellabas–and we had been ducking those twisting threads at various points on our wanders through the medina.

Fès used to have a public bakery in every neighborhood; people would make their bread at home, and then carry it to the public bakery to be cooked. Now, as more and more people have ovens at home, the public bakeries are becoming increasingly scarce. A pity, since the smell of baking bread wafting through the streets is pretty wonderful.

The horn-carver also seems poised on the brink of the past: very picturesque, but I suspect he survives mostly on purchases from foreign tourists. He takes a sheep horn, and straightens it with a vise to flatten it out.

Then he cuts, trims, and carves different shapes and utensils out of that horn:

The smallest shapes, like toothpicks, involved fine levels of sanding (and tough heels!):

The metal embossing seemed most directly relevant to our study of Islamic pattern: the tools, the patterns, the geometric relationships.

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The artisan had worked all over the world: Spain, the United States. But Fès is home.
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Some of his work is drawn from patterns; other pieces he seems to know by heart.

In early fall, by the time you see the sign for the tannery, you’ve already been smelling its potent presence for a while. Jess handed out squares of ambergris to sniff as a kind of antidote for the smell.

We started up in a shop overlooking the tanneries. Here you can get a kind of overview of the process: (some of) the pools of white are filled with chalk and salt, to separate the skin from the fur. Then there are the pools of pigeon droppings, to soften the leather. SONY DSC

The dying containers are filled with colors derived from vegetables: red from poppy, blue from indigo, tan from a combination of saffron and mimosa. There are no yellow vats: unadulterated saffron is so precious and powerful that the dye is painted directly on the pre-softened skins.

The men who work in the tanneries coat their bare legs and hands with olive oil to protect them from the dyes. (But I don’t imagine the work is good for one’s health.)

That was the overview. Then two of us went into the tannery itself for a closer look:

Lots of skins. If you can get past the corpse effect, you can see why softening might be desirable.
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Painting the skin with chalk-salt solution just inside the entrance to the tannery:

Scraping fur from leather:

Clearly, the work is physically hard; there’s also an art and a rhythm to it.

And a community among the tanners:

The dyed skins are laid out to dry on any available surface: rooftops, hillsides (near the Merenid tombs).

After drying, the skins are scraped with a half-moon shaped knife, to soften them even more. FInally, the carefully treated leather is cut and stitched into bags, shoes, belts, and other accoutrements.

Fès the palimpsest

September 21, 2013Arts, Geography and environment, HistoryBetsy

Narrowly defined, a palimpsest is a piece of writing material that’s been used more than once, so that earlier writing has been erased or covered, but traces of that previous text still remain. Fès is like that, with medieval elements peeking through its modern modes of functioning. The two time periods intersect most obviously, perhaps, in the fact that the both the UPS guy and the Coca Cola truck are… donkeys.

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The cry of the medina: Andak! Balak! Look out: donkey coming through!

Can we recreate the previous writing of this palimpsest? Maybe not. Who really knows what the oldest layer of Fès (the Idrissid period) looks like?

Alla, Iraqi-Moroccan owner of the guesthouse Dar Seffarine and an architect specializing in Fès restorations, focuses on some basic elements. “Fès had water and materials for building. Mud houses had existed here for many many years, but with the major construction of the city in the 8th century, they imported architectural principles from the East.”

Water:

Some of Fès’s rivers are still visible, channeled through cement, but not yet covered over. The river still serves (and suffers from) the crafts practiced through the city: here, the tannery…

and, hidden under the bridge, some small-scale metalworking.

Materials for building:
The foundational material is “medlouk” (I think this is the regional word for what Marrakshis call tadelakt): 50% lime and 50% sand. The lime (chaux in French) is composed of limestone, marble, and shells; Romans similarly used limestone and volcanic rock to make a kind of concrete.

Medlouk takes its form from the “lime cycle,” connecting the architecture of this area with the limestone of the landscape. What’s the lime cycle? you ask. (Well, let’s pretend you want to know.) When heat is added to limestone, a chemical reaction occurs: CaCO3 turns into CaO (quicklime) plus CO2. When you add water to quicklime, you get slaked lime: CaO + H20 = Ca (OH)2. Expose slaked lime to air and it will slowly react with carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate or limestone, plus water: CaCO3 + H2O. So here’s one way to think about all this: the buildings in Fès are made out of limestone–mined, fired, and reconstructed limestone. Its architecture is recycled rock–mineral shaped and transformed by humans, but still rock–almost a living, breathing stone.

David Amster, a resident of the medina and a passionate advocate for this traditional building material, says lime mortar is “like a solid sponge.” Because it’s porous, it insulates well: medlouk lets moisture escape. It’s also oddly flexible: in the slaking and the curing process, molecules themselves stretch. Medlouk distributes the weight of the walls–otherwise, the stone at the bottom of a tall Fassi structure would explode from the weight of the upper (stone) stories. In case of seismic activity, medlouk has some “give” to it; if it cracks, it can heal itself. By contrast, cement sets fast but it is brittle–and unlike medlouk, cement is not porous, so it traps moisture.

Cement covered with more traditional plaster

David leads our study tour on a walk through the medina, working to disprove the myth that Fassi exteriors were unimportant in comparison with interiors. David insists that the original façades were beautiful–though he grants that the interiors were still more beautiful. The highlights of our walk touch on elements that could have come from many different periods of Fès’s history, though they stress the basic elements of water and building materials.

Until recently, water in Fès was free, available through an ancient system of fountains and pipes. A siqaya is a public fountain, built by a wealthy homeowner as a public benefit (the plaque on the right announces the name of this siqaya:

This particular siqaya shows the distance between earlier craftsmanship and more recent repairs:

The left shows the original zellij; the right shows the relatively shoddy repair work.

The black calligraphy around the fountain is produced by glazing the tiles black, then carving out the negative space around the shapes and letters. Once again, the recent repair work (visible in the right hand image, in the odd little alien-esque figures) seems laughably poor in comparison with the original.

Medlouk as an exterior surface has a certain austere beauty, but it could be decorated by pressing wire into the plaster surface before it dries, as in the example of this carefully remodeled house, Al Adir:

Or this more extravagant design:

Below is another design pattern, with bricks visible below. Bricks were expensive, so they would have been left exposed (while stone would be entirely covered with medlouk):

Carved wooden surfaces offer another medium for elaboration: amazingly detailed even when discoloured by age, and half-hidden by an unattractive street lamp.

Other arches sport small decorative zellij and calligraphy at the keystone:

David persuaded a friend to restore a wall within the medina to the standard he thinks would have obtained during original construction in ancient Fès : exposed bricks, interesting design, elegant medlouk. Imagine an entire medina like this:

Architectural principles from the east:
After water and building materials comes architectural principles. Alla describes simple shapes, responsive to the environment. Lines: “Follow the breeze. The old street plans are a diagram of the movement of air. The plan of the city sent all roads to the north. But then in the summer came sandstorms, and they moved some of the streets to block the storms.” Circles: “The medina is an organic form. At the center of each neighborhood, there is a mosque. Around the edges, the free façade of that mosque, some trading develops into a suq. Around the suq, houses are built; around the houses, gardens; around the entire area, a wall.”

This map from skyscrapercity.com shows some of the street layouts defining Fès today, though most of the derbs or residential streets don’t appear. The rivers that watered the ancient city are still visible at the margins.

But descriptions of Idrissid Fès, according to Wikipedia, describe a rural town, a far cry from the sophisticated cities of Al-Andalus (Moorish Spain) and Ifriquia (Algeria/Tunis). Imagine two small centers, with open areas surrounding them.

The Almoravids
After Idrissid Fès comes Almoravid Fès. In 1070, the Almoravid Ibn Tashfin conquered Fès and transformed its two rural towns into a single city. Walls separating Medinat Fès from Al-Aliya were taken down, bridges were built over the river, and a new wall was built to connect the two centers. The Qarawiyyin mosque was expanded and renovated in 1134-43 and Fès became a famous center for Maliki legal scholarship. (The Malekite school is one of four major traditions within Sunni Islam: more details coming on a historical reference page.)

Image from Walter B. Denny Islamic Art Photographs, University of Washington Digital Collection

The next dynasty, the Almohads (1121-1269), broke down the old Idrissid city walls and constructed new walls which still define the outer boundaries of Fes el Bali, the old city. Under the Almohads, Fès became a major center for trade, the largest city in the world in the years 1170-80. Part of this merchant city’s structure were the funduqs that served as hostels for traveling merchants, with an open courtyard for pack animals surrounded by artisan’s workshops on the groundfloor, with rented rooms on the floors above.

The magnificently restored funduq now serving as the Nejjarine Museum of wooden arts and crafts was built much later (1711), but it gives a (grander) sense of what the earlier funduqs might have been like.

Still, I think everyone would agree that the Marinid dynasty (1244-1465) left the most extravagant visual effects, particularly in medersas like the Bou Inania and the Attarine.

Bou Inania

These architectural gems are so complicated, though, that they deserve a post or more just for themselves. Coming up soon!

Imperial cities: Fès in context

September 20, 2013Geography and environment, History, ReligionBetsy

OK, this is a geeky post, with maps and dates. But where else are you going to find these kinds of details, right? [Correction: now you can find a much fuller introduction to Fès on my friend Eric Ross’s blog at http://ericrossacademic.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/presenting-moroccos-imperial-cities/.] Still, I have to get this out of my system before I move onto all the photos of the highly photogenic Fez medina….

Morocco’s four imperial cities—Fez, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat—survive with one foot in the present and one in the past in part because they shared the status of “imperial city” with one another for many years.

Fez was founded as Morocco’s first imperial city by the first Moroccan dynasty, the Idrissids. Actually, it was founded as two separate cities. First, Idris I founded “Medinat Fas” in 789; then, Idriss II founded Al-Aliyah twenty years later (809).

SONY DSC Notice the important rivers (wadis or oueds) running between and around the two towns

The two towns remained distinct, separately walled, for centuries. In a bid to gain greater independence from his local Berber protectors, Idriss II, identifying as an Arab, welcomed two waves of Arab immigration into the city of Fez: first, 800 refugee families from Cordoba settled in Medinat Fas in 818; second, 2000 refugee families from Kairouan settled in Al-Aliyah in 824. (You can find both cities on the second map below, the one with trade routes: Cordoba in Al-Andalus [modern day Spain], and Kairouan below Tunis, near Sousse.)

Imagine, if you can, 2000 families moving across the top of Africa en masse–or 800 families crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. What chaos that must have been! Imagine 2800 families–maybe 10,000 people? more?–settling into two tiny towns of mud buildings and trying to build a city big enough to hold them. The pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock look like pretty small potatoes in comparison.)

Both groups (from Kairouan and from Cordoba) were displaced by conflicts within the Islamic empire, but they arrived in Fez with different cultural assumptions and expectations–and they seem to have maintained those distinct cultures as they maintained the walls of their separate villages (and mosques). Jama’a means gathering–in the context of the map above, it means the gathering of the faithful in a congregational mosque. Fatima el Fihri, daughter of a wealthy businessman from Kairouan, founded the Qarawiyine mosque in 859, just 35 years after the refugees arrived in the city. The medersa, or Islamic school associated with the mosque, is the oldest continuously functioning university in the world.

Photo by Hans Munk Hansen, in the David Collection, Copenhagen

Now if all that that wasn’t complicated enough, let’s add in another factor: shortly before the founding of Fez, another important Moroccan city was founded: Sijilmassa, gateway to the Sahara and to the lucrative gold trade with Western Africa. Fez and Sijilmassa were cities in competition with one another, but their fortunes were also closely linked by the trade routes that fed them both. (Sijilmassa is in the midst of the palm tree symbols below Fez.)

Fez enjoyed the status of (contested) imperial capital for a couple of hundred years before being displaced by Marrakesh, a capital founded by the new dynasty of rulers, the Almoravids. The next dynasty, the Almohads, founded Rabat in their turn. But Fez continued to grow and thrive, becoming by some accounts the largest city in the world at that period (1170-1180). And the next dynasty, the Merenids, turned back to Fez, creating a new capital in Fez Jdid, effectively building a new city beside the old medina of Fes elBali, just as the French would do many centuries later with the “villes nouvelles” of the protectorate era.

Despite its imperial vicissitudes, then, Fez grew and prospered throughout the medieval period, thriving on the trade routes that brought wealth and culture to its many doors. And the Alouite dynasty, reigning from the seventeenth century to the present day, made a practice of ruling as a kind of circuit court, visiting each imperial city (and potentially troublesome region) of the kingdom in turn. This practice meant that each of the major cities shared in the royal attention and resources. As a result, the modern city of Fez–like the other imperial cities, only more so– is a kind of living palimpsest, with layers of history piling one on top of another.

Fassi nostalgia

September 19, 2013Arts, History, Reading, TourismBetsy

The city of Fez is shrouded in a mist of nostalgia.[Note: Fez in Arabic is spelled Fas; the adjective for things associated with the city is Fassi.]

Everyone who writes or speaks of it—and there are many people who love this city deeply—seem also to speak of its present state as a dim reflection of its past glory; often, they describe the city as perched on the brink of destruction.

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The local bakeries are closing; the public fountains are drying up. The buildings themselves are on the edge of collapse, some or many of them, depending on whom you talk to.
I find myself totally caught up in this sense of imminent ruin, only to remember that Edith Wharton was already marking the city’s demise in the 1920s, and Paul Bowles foretold its end in the 1950s. [In what follows, I don’t mean to downplay the real threats of overcrowding and limited resources–I’m just struck by the persistent perception of imminent demise.]

Wharton, an enthusiastic supporter of empire, is hard to read today: her prose is at times wonderfully detailed and energetic, but it is almost always marked by a willful prejudice, a pre-judging of what she sees. Her “first vision” of Fez is introduced by the ideological (and clearly false) claim that “Nothing endures in Islam except what human inertia has left standing and its own solidity has preserved from the elements. Or rather, nothing remains intact, and nothing wholly perishes, but the architecture, like all else, lingers on half-ruined and half-unchanged.” I want to distance my view from Wharton’s, but she too is focused on Fez’s liminality.

“There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress and ilex, but growing more precipitous as the ravine of the Fez narrows downward with the fall of the river. it is as though some powerful enchanter, after decreeing that the city should be hurled into the depths, had been moved by its beauty, and with a wave of his wand held it suspended above destruction.” Note how “dammed” evokes the idea of damnation just before Wharton changes direction from religion toward a narrative that might have come from the Thousand and One Nights.

Paul Bowles had his own predispositions. He wrote in his preface to The Spider’s House, “I wanted to write a novel using as backdrop the traditional daily life of Fez, because it was a medieval city functioning in the twentieth century.” The struggle for independence intervened, however: “I soon saw that I was going to have to write, not about the traditional pattern of life in Fez, but about its dissolution.”
But has traditional life really dissolved? Or has it just morphed to include high top sneakers and modern shoes along with seasonal mandarins and beans?

Sure, there’s an uncanniness here: a medieval city in the modern world,
minaret with satellite dishes

an acclaimed World Heritage Site that survives partly on its own terms, but largely as a simulacrum of itself, offering up its performance of authenticity to the tourists whose influx of money keeps the life support functioning. I don’t mean this critically: I’m fascinated by the liminal status of Fes, and even more fascinated by the length of time that liminality has lingered.

I hope you will linger in Fez with me for the next week or so. I have come down the mountain from Ifrane to Fez to take a study tour of “The Art of Islamic Pattern” led by two British artists and teachers: Richard Henry and Adam Williamson.

The course includes teaching sessions on the geometrical and biomorphic patterns of local Islamic art, along with tours of the medina—tours focused on architecture and traditional arts. Disclaimer: as a result, my image of Fes is shaped by a number of English-speaking interpreters, guides, teachers (and of course books in both French and English). So here’s what’s coming up: a quick primer on the history of Fez in relation to the rest of Morocco and the Islamic empire; a glance at Fez as a palimpsest, full of historical layers and overwriting; an overview of domestic architecture; a glance at some of the logic underlying geometric pattern in Fassi zellij or tile mosaics; a still briefer glance at some principles of biomorphism in Fassi plaster and wood carving; and a trip through the artisanal centers of Fez, divided into four separate posts. Lots of photos and not too many words, I promise!

Lynn’s rugs

August 30, 2013Arts, Daily life, HistoryBetsy

I had not wanted to live in an expat community during this year in Morocco, but as I trudge up the hill toward the suq, I begin to see some advantages. I am wearing a pair of linen trousers and a linen shirt, both of which belong to Lynn-the-textiles-expert-who-is-leaving-for-Doha. I still don’t know Lynn’s last name or even her email, but over the next few months, I will be wearing her clothes, drinking out of her mug, eating her spices. Channeling Lynn. At the same time, I will be regretting my failure to record her impromptu lecture-demonstration on Moroccan rugs and textiles.

Lynn’s first career was as a spinner and knitter in the United States, and she achieved national recognition for her work. When I came by to look at her rugs and her give-aways, she was packing up some of the journals that featured her work. She showed me some exquisitely fine hand-spun lace knitting she had done, and (like all true spinners) dismissed my inability to work with a drop spindle. “It’s easy—and so convenient!” Convenient, yes; easy, for some. Give me a wheel any day.

“What brought you to Morocco?” I asked, but I should have known. It’s an old sad story. Textile artists, like many other artists, can’t survive on their work. When Lynn realized that even the top people in her field could make a living only by traveling and giving workshops six months out of the year, she decided she needed a day job—and that day job, in academic support, has taken her on a twelve-year odyssey around the globe, with a two-year residence in Morocco.

I think about Lynn, not only as I wear her clothes, but as I look around at her rugs, scattered through our house. We have an exquisitely soft, hand-spun, naturally colored brown-and-gray striped piece that I can’t bear to put on the floor. “It could be a couverture (bed covering) or a rug,” Lynn acknowledged, and I imagine huddling under its fibers in the cold winter everyone warns us about.

Similar in coloring, but rougher to the touch is a goat’s wool rug I’ve put under my work table. “Walk on it and the fibers will become shiny,” Lynn advised.

In the living room, we have a large rug, striped red, purple, blue, with one thin slice of bright orange.

“Those will be synthetic dyes, probably, because the orange is not available with the natural dyes. That stripe, it constitutes a signature,” Lynn told me. “The way it stands out, calls attention to itself: it’s a mark of individuality, idiosyncracy.”

On the other side of the living room, there’s a slightly older piece, hand-spun, all in red, with wonderful variations in color; the red comes from cochineal—crushed insect shells. Remember the insects that live on Opuntia–prickly pear cactus?

There are rugs I didn’t buy, because we felt so short of cash: one rug that had a wonderful patched hole in it, from serving as part of a Berber tent; another where the colors were too bright for my taste. There were other rugs Lynn wasn’t selling—she felt obliged to return them to the person she had bought them from, because she had had to work so hard to persuade the original owner to part with them. There was the immense “aliens” rug—yellow and brown with other accents, full of humanoid figures. “The prohibition on reproducing the human figure comes from Arab culture, not Berber society,” Lynn noted. “But what would you do with this piece? It needs to be hung in some monumental space.” She described another rug as being “woven with time.” The weaver used the same dye but left the rug exposed to the sun during the weaving process so that some of the coloring would fade, creating a two-tone pattern.

Lynn was particularly interested in a transitional moment in bouchereite: rag rugs produced by Imazighen (Berber) women. “There’s this explosion in creativity,” Lynn asserted. “All of a sudden, there were these industrial scraps available, and they were cheap, and so the sky was the limit. It wasn’t like working with wool that you had to shear and clean and card and spin. The rags must have felt like a windfall, a nearly free resource.” In her collection of bouchereite, Lynn tracked the way weavers would create a sense of motion in their work: the blue river, she called one piece, for the meanderings of blue rags down the middle of the pattern.

Another piece that she called the red trellis showcases the traditional diamond pattern that Lynn insisted was vaginal—“I have a picture of this old weaver woman, her knees wide, holding open her vagina: it’s a classic diamond, I’m telling you”—and a recording of lineage, a weaver recording her family back through her mother and her mother’s mother.

Lynn prized the oddities, the idiosyncrasies in rugs: “These are the places where you see a woman, weaving in isolation, making a statement, creating something personal. The workshops that have been set up more recently make women’s lives much better by offering them a community in which to work, and providing a clearer market for their goods, but there’s a loss in terms of creativity. Instead of a single woman making her individual decisions, there are set patterns that are taught and maintained. They’re all good—I just happen to like seeing the individual weaver at work.” But the transitional moment passes. “After that initial explosion, the spark goes out,” Lynn said. “It’s as if the women suddenly looked up and recognized what they were working with: garbage. Call it recycling, repurposing, call it what you want, but it’s the same old story: you don’t get any real resources after all.” Now there’s a Marxist-feminist analysis: base and superstructure as seen through the lens of gender.

Someday, once we acquire a car and my Darija improves, perhaps we’ll go rug-shopping for ourselves, for the education of it. In the meantime, Lynn’s rugs have moved into Omar’s house, and together they offer a beautiful, comfortable back-drop to our lives here. And that’s even before considering the linen towels, sheets, and pillowcases Lynn gave me: suq finds that I hope to replicate, if my fingers can ever become as knowing as Lynn’s, as quick to feel the differences among linen, cotton, and synthetics. “This piece,” she said, showing me a prize she would take with her to Doha, “came from Hungary: you can tell by the design. I love to see these fabrics travel, to imagine the route that would bring them to this little suq in Ifrane.” Fabrics and people, wandering through this landscape.

Learning (in) Darija

August 20, 2013Cultural lessons from language learningBetsy

When you spend two hours a day with someone, that person starts to feel a little like a friend or a family member. Youssef finds this easiest in relation to Jeremy. “Aji!” he calls to Jeremy. “Gliss!” (Come here! Sit down!) He pats the chair next to him emphatically. Jeremy looks at me sideway and I nod: yes, you need to go and sit down, at least briefly. Jeremy does so. Youssef then tries to carry on a one-sided conversation: “Ki deir? Mizian? Hamdullah! Sahebi?” (How are you? Good? Thanks be to God. Are you my friend?) I nod at Jeremy, and he obediently nods at Youssef. Friends. Youssef gives him a hug.

Before long, Youssef has raised the ante: “Khuya.” Jeremy is now his brother. (People on the street also call each other “my brother” or “my sister,” but in this context, it’s a little more intimate.) Before we came, I worried some about the famous Moroccan love of children. I wasn’t sure Jeremy would appreciate being loved by people he didn’t know well, but while he’s a bit timid at present, he’s taking all the love in stride. Still, he scrambles off to play again as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

In many ways, Youssef seems more traditionally Moroccan than many of the people we meet here in Ifrane. Most Ifranis have at least moderately good French, for instance, even people who only made it through 3^rd grade. Youssef has some words of French, but not enough to communicate clearly. (He doesn’t speak much English either, which makes it hard to ask about new words or concepts. And occasionally, the translations he offers head in the wrong direction: “God needs you” instead of “May God help you.”) Like “the country people” Ifranis describe, Youssef doesn’t change his watch with the official changes in time. (Morocco follows daylight savings time, but goes off DST during Ramadan, and then returns to DST at the end of Ramadan. We changed our clocks with the official time, but Youssef didn’t, with the result that for about a week he turned up an hour before we expected him.) Less traditional, I imagine, is Youssef’s passion for linguistics: he just finished a master’s degree on using technology to teach modern standard Arabic to foreigners; he’s hoping to start a new degree in Fez come the fall—perhaps a national doctorate (as opposed to an internationally recognized PhD).

In practicing vocabulary, Youssef and I talk about families and where we come from. Youssef was born in Errachidia; he lives with his two brothers in Azrou. Screen Shot 2013-12-06 at 9.35.43 AM
One brother is a greengrocer; the other sells furniture like Moroccan banquettes. Youssef occasionally drives a truck for this second brother, picking up furnishings from El Hoceima, for instance, on the Mediterranean coast, and grabbing a few hours on the beach in the process. Back in Errachidia, his father used to sell vegetables in the suq; he’s now retired. Another brother brings truckloads of produce from Agadir (on the southern Atlantic coast) to sell in Errachidia.

If I recall correctly, there are four brothers and three sisters in total. One of the sisters lives in Rabat; I lost track of the other two. But I’m struck by the geographical distribution of the family, given the importance of family within Moroccan culture. Still, one of Youssef’s nephews is going to marry one of Youssef’s nieces—Darija makes it clear that this is cousin rather than sibling marriage—a practice still quite common in Morocco.

Family vocabulary is very important in Darija, so it’s interesting to see what the structure of the language allows and emphasizes, and what it obscures. There’s no simple word for cousin, for instance: instead, one specifies the relationship through the older generation. A cousin is “son-of-a-paternal-aunt” or “daughter-of-a-maternal-uncle.” An American “blended” family is hard to describe in Darija. To talk about my much-loved stepmother, for instance, I have to refer to her as my father’s second wife, which has rather different overtones. Talking about my stepfather is a little more shady: “Your mother’s second husband?” (Really?)

Youssef and I work on an imaginary family tree.

Fatima and Hamid are the grandparents; they have four children, two girls (Ouam and Amina) and two boys (Khalid and Mohamed). All four are married: Ouam to Abdellah; Amina to Qasm; Khalid to Nizha; Mohamed to Ismaa. I read the family tree from the wrong direction, left to right, taking the women ahead of the men. When I ask about terms like sister-in-law, Youssef points me to the mother-in-law relationship.

“No, I want to know how to describe the relationship between Ismaa and Nizha.”
“There is no relationship there. No word to describe it.”
“Really?”
“Really. Besides, they hate each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“This woman (pointing to Nizha) always hates this woman (pointing to Ismaa). At least if the brothers share a house.”

Ah, the light dawns. Brothers share the family house, and their wives are structurally in conflict with one another, struggling for dominance, disagreeing over how family resources and space should be managed.

Youssef isn’t done. “But the worst is this one.” He points to Fatima, the matriarch. “Both of these women (Nizha and Ismaa) hate her and she hates them. They must work for her, and she may be terrible to them, making trouble for them with each other and with their husbands. The older women are especially bad: no education, nothing in their life but the power to make their daughters-in-law miserable.”

Wow. I make a face at Youssef to show I’m a little taken aback.
He nods and grins. “You won’t find this in any books, but this is what I say. This is what I see. It’s not so bad now, but in the old days it was very hard.”

Talk about names within the family leads to a discussion of how affection is expressed. Parents are called by their titles: El Haj (marking those who have been on hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, but the title is used more generally to indicate respect); a Lalla. Children kiss their parents’ hands; parents kiss their children’s (bent) heads. On the street, of course, there is the double kiss–cheeks pressed together on both sides of the face–and often an embrace, mostly between people of the same sex. Youssef imagines I want to know how to say ‘I love you,’ though I don’t think I’ve asked this. “The young people use ‘bgheet’ (the same as ‘to want’) but the old people don’t say this word. They show love by helping each other with burdens or giving a hand down a steep path, but they don’t say the word. The young people–it’s the opposite. They say the word, but they don’t show it!”

Youssef and I are very different from one another, and Youssef works, often visibly, to overcome the strangeness our family represents. When we invite him into a different part of the house, beyond the public area of the Moroccan salon, he pauses and then physically pushes himself forward into this inappropriate interior. When I bring up one of the famous secret prisons from Morocco’s “years of lead,” he startles, but again pushes on: “In this context” of tutoring, he states explicitly, “we can say anything.” The statement demonstrates openness and tolerance even as it marks a political gulf between us.

He’s happier to talking about the Green March, celebrated each November 4-6 in Morocco. During the Green March, some 350,000 Moroccans (escorted by 20,000 army troops) marched into the disputed territory of the (then Spanish) Western Sahara: they marched singing, carrying Qurans and Moroccan flags.

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image from Morocco World News image from dynamicafrica.tumblr.com

“My uncle was a part of the Green March,” Youssef tells me, exultantly. “He was so happy: they were all so happy! Marching, singing! It was a wonderful time!” The Western Sahara, cannily annexed without bloodshed during this Green March, continues to be a vexed political issue, underscored by a 16-year war and ongoing conflict with the Polisario front, but it’s clearly important to Moroccan patriotic feeling.

When my tutoring sessions with Youssef come to an end, we take some photos to help us remember our time together.

Youssef wants photos with Jeremy and James; James insists on taking a photo of Youssef with me. I can feel Youssef’s discomfort despite Jeremy’s presence between us.

Once the photo has been taken, Youssef leaps away and then steps back to tell me I am like a mother to him. I would have chosen younger brother rather than son (is this vanity on my part or immaturity?), but I take his point. He has coped so well with this strange family, has worked diligently at this odd relationship with an uncovered, inappropriately dressed older woman. A lalla Betsy: Ms. Betsy. How do we resolve this odd, uncanny friendship? Through the model of family. Khuya: my brother. Umi: my mother.

Lalla Aisha: women’s ceramics in the Rif

August 13, 2013Arts, Geography and environment, TourismBetsy

We had originally decided not to visit Lalla Aisha to see her ceramics because the village where she lives was over an hour away from the village where we were staying. (“Lalla” is an honorific, something between “Ma’am” and “Lady.”) We didn’t want to spend 2-3 hours driving on rough roads. But James was recuperating slowly, so we decided to stay an extra day and make the trip. The drive was rough in places, but also breathtaking, weaving up the side of mountain, running along a mountain ridge, with the sun gleaming beside us.

We arrived and were offered Moroccan tea with cookies, then proceeded to converse in a hodge-podge of languages. James was a big hit, throwing out his scarecrow arms and legs, mugging for his new friends. They tried to teach him how to ask for manly tea in a café, and when James entered into the spirit of the joke, trying to pronounce the words with macho enthusiasm, they laughed till they cried. The children looked on, baffled at their father and our hosts alike. Lalla Aisha’s grown son told us how relieved he was that we could stand a joke. “Some visitors, they come and sit here with their long faces. We’re not always sure they’re human.”

The lesson started with a trench in the field behind the house and workshop. Grab some clumps of dirt (also known as raw clay).

Break up the clumps into fine clay dust.
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Sift out any remaing lumps.

Add water to make… clay.

Knead the clay to make it smooth and consistent. Think about what shape you’d like to make.

Our whole family wants to make mugs.

Jeremy gets a little extra help from Lalla Aisha, which means he has time to make a candlestick as well.

After the pieces are made, and as they begin to dry a little, Lalla Aisha explains how to decorate them with slip and pigments: both of these made from dirt or stone she has dug up a little farther from the house.

These stones produce the slip and pigment.

The mug is covered with slip before being painted with a darker pigment.
Dark stone is crushed, then water is added to make a pasty paint.
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Paintbrushes are made from animal hair with clay handles.

The work is absorbing and lots of fun, even if James’s mug is the only one to pass inspection. (“We might actually fire and sell this one!”)

We won’t be taking our less polished work with us: there’s no time to fire and finish the pieces. Instead, we have the simple pleasure of the process.
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It’s dark by the time we’re done, and we drive slowly over the rutted path. Hayat has driven us here in her 4×4, since our car would not be able to manage the road. There’s some conflict about the piste: Lalla Aisha wants her neighbors to contribute to repairing the road but they say she should bear all the cost, since she’s the one who has foreigners coming to visit. In the dusk, some boys on a nearby hill throw a rock at the car. Hayat’s son shouts at them, and Hayat tells him sharply to be still and quiet. “Just stupid boys,” she says. But there’s a bit of tension in the car, and as we take the road home, through the dark now, Hayat is concentrating hard on the road. I think about how much courage and agility it must take for her to do the work she does, translating between cultures, living on the cusp between comparatively wealthy visitors and impoverished neighbors, and I’m grateful for the charm and graciousness with which she has welcomed and cared for us.

The art of the tagine

August 12, 2013FoodBetsy

As you probably know, “tagine” is the name for any dish cooked in a tagine: this kind of a pot.

There are a variety of classic Moroccan tagines (lamb and prune, chicken and preserved lemon, etc.), but since we’re vegetarian, we asked Hayat to teach us how to make a vegetarian tagine.

We start with olive oil to coat the tagine, then a base of onions. Note the absence of a cutting board. Most Moroccan women do all their chopping with the vegetables in their hands.

After potatoes come the carrots, cored to remove the woody center.

Then squash and green beans.
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Add peppers and tomatoes (the tomatoes peeled and seeded).

Add parsley and cilantro, finely chopped, and finely grated garlic.

Then come the spices: pepper (1 tsp), paprika (2 tsps), turmeric (2 tsps), ginger (1 tsp), salt (2 tsps). Garnish with several sprigs of fresh rosemary, and drizzle generously with olive oil.

“It’s so beautiful, it’s like a painting!” says Jeremy.

You put the top on and cook the tagine on the stove (or a fire) until the vegetables are soft and well-flavored. (I like it cooked a little less than is typical for Morocco.) The indentation in the top of the tagine cover is filled with water to help keep the food from drying out.

Et voila! (I failed to take a photo of the finished tagine because we were so busy gobbling it up: you’ll have to use your imagination.)

Rghaif

August 11, 2013FoodBetsy

This is a cooking lesson, but it starts with a pronunciation challenge. The starting ‘r’ is at the front of the tongue; the next consonant is pronounced like a French ‘r’, in the back of the throat. All together now: rghaif!

OK, you can also call it msemmen or milhui. That’s considerably easier for me, at least.

The starting ingredients are very simple: sifted flour, salt, water, oil.

Hayat told us apologetically that her sister would have to do the first part of making the dough: the proper ratio of flour, water, and oil is a matter of long experience, measured mostly by feel–we wouldn’t have a chance of getting it right.

Kneading, on the other hand, was fair game.

After a considerable amount of kneading–about 20 minutes, shared among us all–the next step was to grab a handful of the (remarkably light and fluffy dough) and squeeze it out between your thumb and index finger in the shape of a little ball or a balloon. This was harder than it ought to have been for us; we needed some help and a lot of practice.
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The little balls of dough then sit and rest for a while: 30-60 minutes or thereabouts. Then you take one at a time and start to press it out into a circle on a well-oiled surface. The patting is very gentle, expanding the circle little bit by little bit. Again, this was harder than it might seem: we had heavy hands, apparently.

The best moment, though, came when Hayat’s sister picked up the edge of this circle of dough–extended as far as it could go, we thought–and pulled it out to the very edge of this round table, and then did the same in all four directions. We literally gasped at the unexpectedness of this move. Not a move we could really replicate, however:

Imagine an unbroken circle of dough, extending much farther in all directions.

Next, you drizzle a little oil on the dough, and you fold in the edges, shaping a square with several layers. That square–the rghaif or msemmen or milhoui–is then fried in oil (preferably olive oil) and enjoyed hot off the stove.

Yum.

The Rif

August 10, 2013Geography and environment, History, TourismBetsy

“What is this plant?” James asks. It’s everywhere we look, growing right up to the door of the gite—a small rural guesthouse—or up to the fence-line a few feet from the door of the gite. We brush against it on our way to the road; we look out over a sea of greenery

“Oh, do you really not know it?” Hayat asks (I’ve changed our host’s name, out of mild paranoia on her behalf). The words are neutral, but her tone says it all. Cannabis. James is embarrassed not to have known, but the problem is less one of recognition than of incredulity. Surely, this expanse of bio-matter could not possibly be marijuana. Surely, an illegal drug would be at least somewhat hidden, tucked away behind other crops, shielded by houses. The ubiquity of this plant beggars belief.

“When I was little,” Hayat tells us, “this whole area was orchard: fruit trees of all kinds, along with olives, and vegetables growing underneath. The trees have all been rooted out: nothing is allowed to compete with the cannabis.”
Of course, everyone knows that the Rif is full of cannabis. The guidebooks tell you explicitly, naming certain cities as places to avoid unless you’re there for the obvious reason. They suggest avoiding certain treks because the police or the military might think you were a dealer or an aspiring dealer. They warn that inhabitants of the Rif are unfriendly to outsiders because of the cannabis trade: some visitors have even been pelted with rocks to drive them away.

But I had worked hard to avoid the cannabis regions of the Rif: who wants to bring their children into an area associated with illegal drugs? I thought I had found a Riffian cannabis-free zone.

Time to think again.

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In the morning, we take a short hike. As we follow the piste—the dirt road—up the hillside, we walk alongside a dry riverbed. Snaking along the bottom of the gully are a series of hoses. “Are people taking water from further upstream?” I ask.

“For their precious cannabis,” Hayat confirms. “They treat it like a baby. Better. No one take water this way for their family: only for the cannabis.”

“Does that create conflict? Battles over water?”

Hayat tips her head sideways in partial acknowledgment. “The big growers take their water where they like. No one really argues with them.”

But the wells here seem to be running dry:

In the field southwest of the piste, people are bringing in the harvest. This stage of farming is labor-intensive and precise: only the plants with slightly yellowing leaves are taken. Walking toward us down the road from a farther field, an old woman is bent double by the load of cannabis she carries.

“That is the old life,” says Hayat, referring to the weight of the woman’s load. “Now women tell their men, ‘I won’t be your mule. I won’t marry you if you expect me to work like that.’”

I feel I should be focused on gender politics, but I can’t get over the fact that the old woman is bent double under a weight of cannabis, specifically.

There’s a chapter in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire that has influenced my views on cannabis. Pollan focuses on the transformation of the cannabis plant in the United States, with the war on drugs and the subsequent move indoors, to light- and water-intensive growing systems. Pollan also includes a description of a marijuana café in Amsterdam, but somehow I feel certain he has never seen a seventy-year-old Moroccan woman bent double under a load of cannabis. Pollan’s meditation on pleasure and desire and socio-political efforts to control the pleasure and wildness associated with cannabis seems very distant from this purely economic calculus of backbreaking labor in exchange for cash.

We pass a large pile of gathered firewood by the side of the road. “In the old days,” says Hayat, “you could tell a lot about a woman and her family by the pile of wood she would build. Everyone would see and would judge you by the size of the pile, the tidiness, the structure of the pile. It’s the women who go up onto the mountain and cut the wood and carry it down. Sometimes a man, but mostly the women.”

“Doesn’t that cause trouble on the mountain, with deforestation and erosion?”

“There’s a ban on cutting wood now, but people do it anyway. It’s custom. In the old days, there were not so many people living here, so the wood harvesting made little difference to the mountain. Now there are too many people, and how will they all live?”

We pass a tethered goat. “Women would have to go and gather forage for the animals, too. Life is easier now than it was then. Many people have no animals, so there’s no need to gather forage. Some people heat their homes with gas. People can buy what they need with the money from the cannabis. These days, a mother will say to her son, ‘Let us find you a strong woman to help you,’ and the son will say, ‘My wife doesn’t have to help me, she can sit at the mirror all day and make herself beautiful.’” (!)

“Is the cannabis so bad, then?” I ask. “If it makes people’s lives easier?”

“Some people have done well out of cannabis,” Hayat acknowledges. “They have been able to build houses, buy cars. Others have not done so well. My brothers—” (Hayat’s brothers grow cannabis, a fact she was reluctant to own straight out: “My brothers do what everyone else does,” she finally conceded, “though I am ashamed of this.”) “Once we were examining family finances, to pool our resources to care for my mother in her illness, so I know how much my brothers make, and it comes out to about 100 dirhams a day, which is not that much money when you think about it.” Roughly $12 per day, $84 per week (assuming a seven day work week), not quite $4,500 per year. Not that much indeed. “My brothers still can’t afford to build themselves a house, though they’ve been trying for three years.”

Cannabis drying on rooftops:

A recent UN report on drugs and crime lists Morocco and Afghanistan as “the foremost source countries for cannabis resin” in the world. Morocco has 47,000 hectares devoted to cannabis cultivation; Afghanistan has only 12,000 hectares. Moroccan cannabis goes to Europe through Spain—so my old woman loaded with cannabis might well be supplying Michael Pollan’s marijuana café in Amsterdam. Spain evidently manages to confiscate 34% of the hashish smuggled through its borders while Morocco stops only 12% of the cannabis moving across its territories. (How exactly do they come up with these percentages, I wonder. Is someone counting total quantity somewhere? Is there a gentleman’s agreement about how much cannabis will be confiscated? “OK, give me 12% of that and then move on.”)

The government used to carpet bomb the Rif in an attempt to limit the cannabis crop. What Hayat describes sounds alarmingly similar to napalm or agent orange: every plant touched by the spray dies; people are left coughing and ill.

But since the February 20^th movement—the “Arab spring,” Moroccan style—the carpet bombing has ceased. The sense I get from conversations with a number of people is that the government, alarmed by the protests, pulled back from active conflict in the Rif. Now, the government lets the cannabis provide the social support it cannot afford to offer. Cannabis provides jobs and brings cash to the region. There are no other crops that Europe is so happy to purchase.
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“The government did try a pilot program growing saffron here, and it was successful, but it was not well publicized,” says Hayat. “I told my father and brothers that we should try growing saffron, but they laughed at me. My father said we would need hectares of land to grow that crop successfully, but we only have tiny plots. It would never work.”

Micro-cropping: cork tree with cannabis (the bark is stripped from the bottom of the tree and used to make stools and other useful things).

Still, others complain that teenagers go to work for these big growers, for the dealers, and they don’t finish school. “Maybe they start smoking themselves, and then they’re trapped in a world where they will never really matter. Their lives are wasted. This is not support; this is abandonment.”

But no one says this very loudly.