Category Archives: Geography and environment

How does the remarkable geographical diversity of this country shape its culture? What are Morocco’s environmental challenges, strengths, and strategies?

Teachers in Telouet

October 10, 2013Education, Geography and environmentBetsy

The day of visiting teachers in Telouet is a study in contrasts: the movie studios we pass on the road out of Ouarzazate both opposing and imitating the villages themselves; the teacher’s thumbdrive serving as an unexpected counterpoint to his improvised, plastic-covered blackboard, and so on.

Here are some highlights of the trip:

School 0: On the road into the first small village, we pass a gaggle of children on the road. The tallest boy in the group runs to shake hands with Hassan out the driver’s side window. “Hassan used to teach in this village,” Ahmed explains. “That boy was one of his students.” Clearly, Hassan was a beloved teacher. Still, I wonder why the children are not in school this morning. At this first stop, we don’t even get out of the car. There’s a small school on the left and a small residence up the hill on the right. Hassan calls to the children in the school, but there doesn’t seem to be a teacher present. One of the children runs up the steps to bang on the door. After five extended poundings, Hassan calls him back, laughing. Enough is enough: either the teacher is not present or he or she is not in a state to meet with us. Hassan restarts the car and we drive on.

School 1: As Ahmed asks the teacher, Lahcen, about the needs he would like to see addressed in the next training session, Hassan talks to some of the children, trying to help the little girl nearest me to see where she went wrong with the math problem in her notebook. What Lahcen most wants is a way to use the materials Hassan and Ahmed are bringing (a set of picture books and children’s magazines) to really develop a love of reading in his students. It’s a central issue: how to make these materials come to life for the children?

School 2: We stop at a preschool where the teacher who’s been participating in training has now moved onto a new placement in Rabat; her replacement asks eagerly whether she could participate in the training instead.

School 3: A husband-and-wife team divide the upper classes: Abdulrachman teaches French, and Hayat teaches Arabic. Only during this visit do I realize that the school day starts around 8:00 and ends at about 12:30, with a break at 10-10:15; after the break, the children who have been studying with Hayat go to work with Abdelrachman and vice versa. In most of the schools in this area, education continues to be split evenly between Arabic and French, with the students speaking Tamazight at home. In this context, my limited Arabic and non-existent Tamazight make me feel like a slouch.

The walls of Hayat’s classroom have posters about H1N1 and others proclaiming Allahu akhbar: God is great. I’m struck by the mix of state religion and hygiene. Hayat is wearing a bathrobe, as are some of her students, for warmth; she’s just had a tooth pulled, and still suffers pain in that jaw. But she’s sharply focused on the books and the discussion of pedagogical needs. She is looking for activities that children can do independently for a sustained period of time, to enable her to intervene more directly and extensively with those children who are struggling.

As we are leaving, Hayat addresses me in a mixture of French and English, and we end up talking about family. It turns out that the teachers have a four-year-old son and eighteen-month-old daughter. The children sleep until 10, when Hayat runs home to make breakfast for them before coming back to teach the second half of the morning. I hope there’s an adult home with the children as well, and I assume there is, but I don’t want to ask. Still, I’m struck by the lack of margin in Hayat’s life, the pressure to be teacher and mother, even though I’m sure she also celebrates the opportunity to fill both roles as fully as she can. I’m missing my children as well, as we climb back in the car for the next extended drive down the rough piste.

School 4: We wait for the teacher to come back from lunch. The director of the school invites us to sit in his office, and eventually tea is produced. Hassan and Ahmed take the opportunity to ask whether the teacher we’re waiting for has been sharing her new resources with other teachers at the school. “Not really,” the director replies; pressed for detail, he specifies: she hasn’t shared software or library books or teaching techniques. Ahmed recaps the conversation for me while the director goes off in response to a different teacher’s request.
“That’s not good,” I respond, somewhat indignantly. “It’s a good thing you found out. People shouldn’t hoard resources.”
“Yes, but perhaps she didn’t understand what we were asking of her,” Ahmed replies gently, and I stand reproved. When will generosity come as my first response to other people’s actions?

When Sukhaina arrives, in fact, she is full of energy and ideas. In the past training, she appreciated Lotto as a way of teaching students categories of French vocabulary. What she most wants from this next training is a demonstration of different learning games: she wants her students to learn by doing. Asked about what she’s done to share what she’s gained from the workshops, Sukhaina is quick to say that her fellow teachers haven’t been interested in learning what she’s been taught, and Ahmed quietly but firmly clarifies: even if the other teachers are not interested, you need to take books to them, you need to demonstrate the software or describe a new teaching strategy in staff meetings. Work with your director: he’s keen to extend the read of the training.

School 5: We spend quite a while at the next school: Ahmed goes off to talk with the director of the school and Hassan and I hang out in the preschool class. Some seventeen 3-4-year-olds sit at two long rows of tables; another 4 children sit on a rug at the side of the room. The teacher is working on Arabic: she’s drawn a stick figure on the board, and the children repeat the fusHa (or modern standard Arabic) after her: femoon, nefoon, eienoon, oudnoon. It’s odd to hear this formal-sounding language coming out of these tiny mouths.

Hassan focuses his attention on Leila, a three-year-old deaf girl. She’s tiny, engaging, just on the almost-manageable side of hyperactive. When it’s Leila’s turn to go to the board, the teacher has her point to the stick figure, then stroke the relevant part of her own body: modified signing. Hassan calls a boarding school for the deaf in Ouarzazate: a school where he used to work. The director there agrees to talk more with Hassan about Leila’s case, and the two try to set up an assessment for Leila. Her best hope, Hassan thinks, is to go to the boarding school, even at age 3. There’s no instruction for her, and almost no potential for communication, in her home village. In the not too distant past, deaf people have been physically abused (Hassan’s word is “tortured”) in Morocco.

School 6: Ahmed tries to call ahead, but when we arrive, the teacher is nowhere to be seen. “Moroccan mobile phones!” Ahmed jokes. “Even when you talk to the person, the phones don’t work.”

We sit in the director’s office and Hanan arrives, along with tea and little tea cookies. I’m particularly impressed with the teaching books and materials Hanan has produced. Talking about digital stories leads into a conversation about how much the children enjoy doing plays with home-made puppets. She also shows us the story books her older children have produced–and the flip books she has made to help her students understand components of French words (syllables, prefixes, suffixes, etc.)

Bonus school: As we near the road back to Ouarzazate, we pass a new “community school” that has only just opened. The idea here is that numerous small villages will send their children to this one larger community school. The school is designed to hold some 80 boarding students and about 200 day students. The whole place is spanking clean and new. The students are practicing for an inaugural ceremony: they are singing the national anthem. Hassan and Ahmed know everyone here, from the gardener to the director. Everyone gives them a hero’s welcome.

I’m struck by the fact that Hassan and Ahmed vanish briefly (sequentially, leaving someone to keep an eye on me) to pray. We started the day at 7:30 in the morning; we were given some bread, butter, olives and honey at about 10 a.m.; it’s now 5 p.m. One of the phrases from the dawn call to prayer (or just before) is this: “It is better to pray than to sleep.” I think of this now: for Ahmed and Hassan, it seems, it is better to pray than to eat. I am terrifically impressed with their dedication, their good humor, their attentiveness, their focus. When I try to tell them this, they laugh. “We work harder than Americans!” they exclaim, wonderingly. It becomes clear that they are trying, quietly, to transform their country, to compensate for their countrymen and women who are not working as hard as they might. Education is the key to the transformation they desire: a world of possibility and hope for all.

Ouarzazate and first impressions

October 8, 2013Geography and environment, ReadingBetsy

I feel as if I’m on a blind date—I don’t know what or whom I’m looking for. Will Hassan, my contact, be arriving by car, bike, motorcycle, petit taxi? What will he be wearing? How will he recognize me? I am standing at early dusk in the shadow cast by Kasbah Taourirt, the tourist attraction par excellence, waiting to see how and whether I will be seen.

Kasbah_Taourirt_in_Ouarzazate_2011

No joy. In the end, I have to go back to the car to find the phone I’ve left. Hassan has left two messages. Evidently, we are neither of us what the other expected. Even once Hassan has told me that he is standing in front of the Marmara bus, I seem to drift right past him. I’m about to phone again when he calls to me, coming from the direction I’ve just been.

We go to meet Ahmed at the Centre de Documentation Pedagogique (CDP—center for teaching documentation) and there’s another odd echo of a feeling—this time of a bargain waiting to be struck. A weird benevolent-Godfather kind of vibe. Would I work with students as well? at the end of November? “Ah, yes, that is what we wanted to know. Very good. We invited you to work at this time with the French group, but we don’t need to be limited to that time. There is a long history of Moroccan-American collaborations. Very good.”

Ahmed tells me tomorrow we will go to Telouet, an area associated with the de facto ruler of this part of Morocco in the early twentieth century. Glaoui? I venture. “Yes. All this area is known as Glaoua. So you will learn a little history, a little geography.”

Thami_El_Glaoui
Thami el Glaoui: I’ve read a little about his immense power and wealth, and his lack of squeamishness when it came to extending either.

After this short meeting, I follow Hassan’s car over a narrow causeway to the newer section of Ouarzazate, to his family’s home. I will be staying with them both nights I am in Ouarzazate. Bleary from the eight-hour drive, I try to summon the mental energy to recall my small portion of Darija.

Hassan’s family doesn’t seem to eat much meat, and I don’t think that has anything to do with my visit. The first night I stay with them, they eat semolina soup; the second night, rice pilaf. Dinner is late, maybe 8:30, about the time I’m ready to crash; Hassan’s nephew stays up late, and as we drive through Ouarzazate, the streets are full of children out with their families. Don’t they fall asleep in school, I wonder?

Just as my brain feels ready to explode, a friend and neighbor of Hassan’s stops by to meet me. His name is also Hassane, though for reasons unclear to me the spelling conveniently includes a distinguishing E. I revive a little on discovering that Hassane speaks fluent English and is working on a PhD in cultural studies at the university in Fez.

“What did you think of the landscape on your way down?” Hassane asks me.

“Amazing! It was like driving through the Grand Canyon,” I say.

“Yes, this is what everyone says!” Hassane replies, underscoring my own sense of the predictability of my response.

We go on to talk about the books we have both read, enthusing together about the work of Brian Edwards in Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghrib.

Even on the drive down, I had been thinking about Edwards, and his chapter on how American soldiers in Morocco during the second World War responded to Morocco as a mixture of the Wild West and a kind of Biblical pastiche.

“Here I go,” I thought, looking out the window at that Grand Canyon landscape, “making that same old American translation of the unknown into the known.” But is there really an alternative to this habitual recoding of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar?

Can we just confront the unknown head on—or will we always duck aside at the last minute, giving up on the cultural game of chicken?

The problem with projection and transposition are the misrecognitions that come with them. So…. focus on geology: seeing the angle of the stone, imagining the the pressures that must have thrust it up out of the ground.

Focus on specifics—the details of this particular teaching task, this context—to help separate reality from imaginary projections.

I have so much to learn.

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.
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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.]
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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.

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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.

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 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.

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.
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(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.