Category Archives: History

Recent history or the distant past, from post-colonialism back to 8th century refugees from Iraq, or further…

Fès: domestic architecture and its logic

September 22, 2013Daily life, Geography and environment, History, TourismBetsy

In this post, I’m trying to reconstruct a presentation given by Alla of Dar Seffarine, an architect originally from Iraq, but now a long-time resident of Fès. Alla and his wife Kate own the guesthouse Dar Seffarine; Alla also specializes in reconstructing traditional houses in the Fès medina, so he has thought deeply about the architectural features of the typical Fassi house.

Imagine these words as spoken by Alla, as he gestures towards the features recorded in the photos. (All errors, of course, are mine–and the first photo is actually of David Amster showing our group an entry to a derb, where the door and the guardian would have been located.)

Alla: Every derb, or residential street, should have a door at its beginning, and that door should be watched by a guardian. The guardian will ask of each visitor: where are you going? who are you coming to see? how long will you stay? Only in the past 60-70 years has the tradition of the doors been lost, the doors themselves sold, the guardians unemployed. This entry (to Dar Seffarine) is actually the door to the street. Since there are only two houses on the street, the government lets us maintain the street door between us.

The riad is the garden (visible just through the window above the right-hand door); the house or dar exists just beside the garden. A duera is a small house connected to another house: servants’ quarters, housing the servants and slaves who served the family of the dar.

When you come to the house proper, you will notice that the door that opens for daily use is on the right side. You use your right hand to open the door. All this emphasis on the right hand comes from the Quran, which teaches that the right hand is the good hand.

The door opens to the inside of the house, and you find yourself in the corridor. Every house has a corridor: it is an essential part of the house. Sometimes, the corridor is only a meter long; sometimes it is much longer and has a door at each end; but all traditional Fassi houses have a corridor. To be polite, you stand in the corridor as your host goes into main part of the house and tells the women to leave, that a guest will be entering.

Notice the square holes down at foot level: these are ventilation for the basement. Fassi houses have basements, with columns and arches, where one can escape the heat of the summer. Some houses, you enter, and then go four or five steps down: again, the principle is to use the cooling available below grade.

Also in the corridor, you may see windows to the street: this will help with ventilation.

The street itself may be roofed (as seen in the second photo of this post) to create a tunnel to help move the breeze through the space.

Above your head, you may see a boxed in area. This is a storage space for taxes, or zakat, the charitable giving obligatory in Islam. At the end of Ramadan, each household had to give 1.5 kilos of flour to the poor [multiplied by some factor, it seems to me—bb]. That boxed area made it possible for householders to buy the flour when it was cheap, store it, and then distribute it at the appropriate moment.

Immediately inside the door to the house, you see another door, leading to an internal staircase: this allows the man of the family to visit one of his wives without the others having to know. Separate doors for separate wives: this minimizes conflict within the family.
SONY DSC
On the wall in our corridor, we have hung the contract of sale for our house. As you can see, this is a large document, recording the most recent three sales. The three pages—one for each separate sale—are bound together. Every time the house is sold, the oldest contract is removed, and the newest contract connected to the document.

At the end of the corridor, we have another door—a door within the door. The larger door allows for large items to enter or leave the home; the small door, for everyday use, forces the person entering to duck. You must enter the house with respect. When you have stepped through the doorway and you straighten up, you raise your eyes to the calligraphy opposite, which reads: “All this belongs to God” or “There is no power but God.” This saying counterbalances pride in the owner of the house and envy in the visitor.

Finally, you find the courtyard on your right. You will never enter a traditional house directly: always, you turn to discover the house, the central courtyard.

That courtyard is open to allow for gradual cooling overnight. Houses in Fès were single-storey buildings originally. Seffarine’s small minaret tells the story: the minaret must always rise above surrounding buildings, but today that minaret is dwarfed by the houses and buildings around it. Originally, the houses would have been a single story, but as the city grew and wealth increased, homeowners expanded their houses upwards, building additional living quarters around the existing courtyard.

On either side of the courtyard, two salons face each other: one salon is for family use; one is for entertaining guests. This salon is a man’s space.

Above, there is a mezzanine for the women’s use, where the women could sit and listen to the men’s conversation without being seen.

[BB: From the inside, the mezzanine is fabulously decorated with ornate zouaq–painted wood–but it’s a small space, too low to stand in. Definitely only a space for sitting on the floor and listening.]
SONY DSC
The norm in domestic architecture as in more monumental or sacred spaces, is to decorate the floor and lower areas with zellij, tiles in complex geometric patterns; above the zellij comes plaster (often plain, then carved), calligraphy (in plaster or tile), and then carved or painted wood. Dates in houses are recorded in terms of the Hijra or Islamic calendar–a lunar calendar starting with 622, the year Mohammed moved to Medina–and they normally just register the date the most recent plaster was finished.

To complement Alla’s presentation, here’s a map of a traditional Fassi house before the Protectorate from Roger Le Tourneau’s book:

Here you can see the stairs, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the entryway. But what stays with you after a visit to Dar Seffarine is the glory of that courtyard, lifting the eye to wonders overhead.

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.

SONY DSC

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.

SONY DSC
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.

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.

SONY DSC
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.
SONY DSC

“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.

Down the mountain to Azrou

July 30, 2013Daily life, Food, HistoryBetsy

In the midst of house-hunting, our friend Said took us on a drive to the nearby city of Azrou for some shopping. The drive itself was an amazing tour of the local cedar forests and the Middle Atlas mountains. Descending into Azrou, you really see the mountains; up high in Ifrane, they’re less noticeable somehow. Not that I managed to take any photos on that winding road…

In Azrou, Said tried to orient us to the shopping resources of the town: where to get fuel, where to get prickly pears (good for the digestion during Ramadan), where to find the best bakery. Then he took us on a high-speed tour of the permanent market (as opposed to the famous Tuesday suq or souk).

Lots of delicious smells of parsley, cilantro, mint. Also chickens and ducks sitting on blankets surrounded by eggs. “Are they there to lay eggs?” asks Jeremy. “No: I think they’re there to be bought and eaten.” “Why don’t they fly away?” “Probably their legs are tied.” Then there are the butchers’ shops with the lamb’s heads still attached to their skinned bodies. We passed some men with long lines stretched down the narrow alley. One of the men held a motor in his hand. It made me think of flying a kite. “What are they doing?” I asked. “They are helping make a djellaba,” replied Said. The motor twists the strings together to make a braid for trimming the edges of a traditional overall covering or djellaba.

On the way home, we noticed a vacation center and mosque built by developers from the United Arab Emirates. Morocco is evidently becoming a vacation destination for other parts of the Muslim world….

So here’s another postcolonial ecology note: Opuntia (prickly pear, native to the western hemisphere, probably Mexico) was introduced into North Africa by the French as a means of feeding cochineal, insects whose shells and eggs produce a red color used to dye food and clothing. Opuntia quickly naturalized and in other places became invasive. In Morocco, it seems to exist in balance with other plants, providing fruits especially appreciated during Ramadan. Who would have anticipated this?

Ifrane: first impressions

July 22, 2013Daily life, Geography and environment, HistoryBetsy

We seem to be experiencing an odd kind of culture shock here, one partly composed of seeing familiar things in unfamiliar contexts. We knew in advance that Ifrane was a French hill station—a cool mountain village where the colonial powers could retreat from the heat of summer.

We knew that the houses were constructed as “villas,” and that the town itself was known as “Little Switzerland.” But we didn’t fully recognize what it would be like to live in this mixture of European and North African elements.
SONY DSC
(Aziz, the “guardian” of the house, brings me roses from the garden nearby!
Who would have expected these?)

The sun is so strong and the light so correspondingly bright that life feels a little like an over-exposed photograph. There have been very few spells of rain: what rain there is reliably comes on the days when we have laundry drying on the line—but even after a drenching, our clothes dry in less than half the time they take at home.

Ahmed the gardener comes to water the garden after dark, after he’s broken his fast with his family. The flow of water is stronger after dark, he explains, and it’s cooler besides. Ahmed works at the palace as a gardener during the day (the king has a palace in Ifrane, one of many royal residences); gardening at the Smith’s house is a second job for him.

When Ahmed and I talk plants, it’s very useful to have scientific names to draw on. Yes, he agrees, that tree is indeed Gleditsia tricanthos: the same honey locust that grows in front of our house in Swarthmore.

Just as in Swarthmore, there are volunteer Gleditsia’s all over the town: at least they’re fixing the nitrogen, enriching the soil, I think. This one is feeding a small rose bush. There’s another Gleditsia here, though, with delicious drupes: that’s the kind you really want to plant, Ahmed tells me.

But even the weeds are familiar here: how can that be? It takes days for my brain to wake up: of course, this is postcolonialism. Even the normal flora of the country has been changed by French imports. Perhaps the most striking example are the sycamores that line the streets in Ifrane and even many of the major roadways in Morocco.

Jeremy loves Ifrane—“I want to live here the rest of my life!—and he loves to serve as guide around the town. He has found his bearings better than either Zoë or I have, and he takes me by the hand and leads me around the town in the cool of the morning. He likes to walk down to the duck pond and visit the large stone-carved lion which seems to be Ifrane’s major tourist attraction.

He also likes to go out in the evening to look at and listen for the storks which nest in the chimneys of the houses here. I asked Kevin Smith if storks were considered good luck in Morocco, and he answered, “Well, they bring the tourists.”

The storks clack their beaks at evening, and sometimes they make a kind of gargling sound. I wonder if they stay through the winter. I guess we’ll find out.