![\"P1000894\"](\"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/P1000894.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nLynn\u2019s first career was as a spinner and knitter in the United States, and she achieved national recognition for her work.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s easy\u2014and so convenient!\u201d\u00a0 Convenient, yes; easy, for some.\u00a0 Give me a wheel any day.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat brought you to Morocco?\u201d I asked, but I should have known.\u00a0 It\u2019s an old sad story.\u00a0 Textile artists, like many other artists, can\u2019t 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\u2014and that day job, in academic support, has taken her on a twelve-year odyssey around the globe, with a two-year residence in Morocco.<\/p>\n
I think about Lynn, not only as I wear her clothes, but as I look around at her rugs, scattered through our house.\u00a0 We have an exquisitely soft, hand-spun, naturally colored brown-and-gray striped piece that I can\u2019t bear to put on the floor.\u00a0 \u201cIt could be a couverture (bed covering) or a rug,\u201d Lynn acknowledged, and I imagine huddling under its fibers in the cold winter everyone warns us about. Lynn was particularly interested in a transitional moment in bouchereite: rag rugs produced by Imazighen (Berber) women.\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s this explosion in creativity,\u201d Lynn asserted.\u00a0 \u201cAll of a sudden, there were these industrial scraps available, and they were cheap, and so the sky was the limit.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t like working with wool that you had to shear and clean and card and spin.\u00a0 The rags must have felt like a windfall, a nearly free resource.\u201d\u00a0 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. Someday, once we acquire a car and my Darija improves, perhaps we\u2019ll go rug-shopping for ourselves, for the education of it.\u00a0 In the meantime, Lynn\u2019s rugs have moved into Omar\u2019s house, and together they offer a beautiful, comfortable back-drop to our lives here.\u00a0 And that\u2019s 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\u2019s, as quick to feel the differences among linen, cotton, and synthetics.\u00a0 \u201cThis piece,\u201d she said, showing me a prize she would take with her to Doha, \u201ccame from Hungary: you can tell by the design.\u00a0 I love to see these fabrics travel, to imagine the route that would bring them to this little suq in Ifrane.\u201d Fabrics and people, wandering through this landscape.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t know Lynn\u2019s last … Continue reading Lynn’s rugs<\/span>
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\nSimilar in coloring, but rougher to the touch is a goat\u2019s wool rug I\u2019ve put under my work table.\u00a0 \u201cWalk on it and the fibers will become shiny,\u201d Lynn advised.
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\nIn the living room, we have a large rug, striped red, purple, blue, with one thin slice of bright orange.
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\n\u201cThose will be synthetic dyes, probably, because the orange is not available with the natural dyes.\u00a0 That stripe, it constitutes a signature,\u201d Lynn told me.\u00a0 \u201cThe way it stands out, calls attention to itself: it\u2019s a mark of individuality, idiosyncracy.\u201d
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\nOn the other side of the living room, there\u2019s a slightly older piece, hand-spun, all in red, with wonderful variations in color; the red comes from cochineal\u2014crushed insect shells. \u00a0Remember the insects that live on Opuntia–prickly pear cactus?
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\nThere are rugs I didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 There were other rugs Lynn wasn\u2019t selling\u2014she 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.\u00a0 There was the immense \u201caliens\u201d rug\u2014yellow and brown with other accents, full of humanoid figures.\u00a0 \u201cThe prohibition on reproducing the human figure comes from Arab culture, not Berber society,\u201d Lynn noted.\u00a0 \u201cBut what would you do with this piece?\u00a0 It needs to be hung in some monumental space.\u201d\u00a0 She described another rug as being \u201cwoven with time.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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\nAnother piece that she called the red trellis showcases the traditional diamond pattern that Lynn insisted was vaginal\u2014\u201cI have a picture of this old weaver woman, her knees wide, holding open her vagina: it\u2019s a classic diamond, I\u2019m telling you\u201d\u2014and a recording of lineage, a weaver recording her family back through her mother and her mother\u2019s mother.
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\nLynn prized the oddities, the idiosyncrasies in rugs: \u201cThese are the places where you see a woman, weaving in isolation, making a statement, creating something personal.\u00a0 The workshops that have been set up more recently make women\u2019s lives much better by offering them a community in which to work, and providing a clearer market for their goods, but there\u2019s a loss in terms of creativity.\u00a0 Instead of a single woman making her individual decisions, there are set patterns that are taught and maintained.\u00a0 They\u2019re all good\u2014I just happen to like seeing the individual weaver at work.\u201d\u00a0 But the transitional moment passes.\u00a0 \u201cAfter that initial explosion, the spark goes out,\u201d Lynn said.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s as if the women suddenly looked up and recognized what they were working with: garbage.\u00a0 Call it recycling, repurposing, call it what you want, but it\u2019s the same old story: you don\u2019t get any real resources after all.\u201d\u00a0 Now there\u2019s a Marxist-feminist analysis: base and superstructure as seen through the lens of gender.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"