Category Archives: Tourism

I don’t like to think of myself as a tourist, but that’s part of what I am, here in Morocco. Tourism is one of the anchors of the Moroccan economy. There’s also a new academic field called tourism studies, one strand of which focuses on how to make tourism more ethical and effective, both for the tourist and for the host group or nation. How can tourism become a productive cultural encounter?

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.

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.

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!

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.

Chefchaouen

August 9, 2013Arts, TourismBetsy

We got tired of waiting for Youssef to produce the car we’re supposed to be buying, so we rented a wreck for a week and drove north to Chefchaouen. This small town in the Rif mountains must be one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, so I will mostly let the photos speak for themselves.

The drive north was brutal: the car had no air-conditioning, and the plains of central Morocco get hot-hot-hot in mid-August. The roads, which are indeed much better than they might be, are still pretty bumpy, and the checkerboard of cultivated fields comes in a drier, more dramatic palette here than in the mid-Atlantic landscape I’m more used to.

We were very impressed by the cantilevered loading of hay and straw bales on these trucks: the load at times seems to be double the size of the truck carrying it.

By the time we reached the mountains, we were gasping for water and slightly cooler air. Chefchaouen was a sight for sore eyes.

Chaouen is undeniably a tourist town, but it’s a relaxed tourist town. We stayed in an apartment in the medina itself, and over the course of our visit, we saw the shops and the townspeople relaxing with one another rather than performing for tourists.This is not to imply that we were not busy being tourists ourselves, of course. There was Jeremy’s favorite woodworking shop, where we spent so much time, we bought a nominal spatula out of sheer embarrassment.
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Jeremy also loved the scent, soap, and potion shop:

There were artisanal workshops, where the master weaver took a liking to Jeremy; he was about the age of the weaver’s own sons, who were already helping out in the workshop. We were particularly intrigued by the use of appropriate technology: bicycle wheels being used to wind weaving bobbins.

Why so many colors, James wanted to know, if you’re only going to paint the buildings blue?But of course there’s all the interior colors and careful wood-painting (zouaq) to consider as well:
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In the heat of the afternoon, we joined a host of other, mostly Moroccan tourists, trying to cool off at the Ras el Ma, the little waterfall just outside of town: