Sarmi Household, Marrakech
The third floor roof patio
of the Sarmi household
A full moon overhead.
I’ve always believed in a not letting my mind dwell on the past any more than necessary. My thinking is, the mind is like another set of eyes and allows you vision in one direction at a time. Time spent pondering the past is time lost for planning for the future and robs you of the omnipotent present. Still, these are only my two cents rattling against one another. There is one guru who said “people have been meditating for years. They just called it day dreaming.” Who’s to say? Still, I don’t want to cheat myself out of going over what an interesting day I had today. Since I have bad rapped looking back, I’ll file this reminiscing under business review time.
I arrived at the Marrakech railroad yard as early as they told me the man in charge of packing, Hassan, would be there. Being a get up at four AM guy, I was almost ready for lunch by the time he got to work, at eight. The first thing that hit me (in a figurative sense) when I came into the yard was a huge fork lift coming my way, trailed by a cloud of dust that would make a Kansan take cover. The chugging beast looked like something out of the movie Transformers. Pulling my tee shirt over my nose, I stepped out of harms way and took in the show. On the end of my forty foot container, it said gross weight 77,000 lbs. Although the containers and the ships can support that weight, very few load more than 44,000 pounds, the maximum legal weight for trucks to pull. The man behind the wheel picked up container after container and adeptly placed them on top of one another like he was setting cups on saucers. Other than the scraping from the tongs between the containers, as he backed up, there was barely a noise. He hypnotized me. What is it they say? “Little girls come out saying mama and dada but boys say vrooom.” For nine dusty hours, small Toyota pickup trucks full of, cardboard wrapped fountains arrived. Each truck had five or six young gentlemen who moved the concrete and tile fountains like I move small rugs. Due to the nature of their construction, stacking the fountains was out of the question. Hassan and his pro’s slid, tugged, grunted and roped my booty down in the container until not a square inch of flooring showed. Any rugs that I could score could be thrown on top.
Here I am on Latif’s patio surrounded by more rugs than I can possibly afford. These aren’t like the stacks of rugs you see in the rug markets of Fez and Marrakech. Most of those stores are supplied by weaver’s, working in regimented situations or weaving co-ops. These beautiful, more formal, city rugs are exported around the world. Like their Oriental counterparts, they are bought and sold by the square meter. The work is controlled, successful for all concerned, and the lifeblood of the Moroccan weaving industry.
These rugs I’m sitting on, around and under, however, are what make me tick, and have since nineteen seventy five. These are the colorful creations of the Atlas mountain Berber tribespeople. These women use the finest hand spun High Atlas wool and weave one of a kind rugs and flat woven kilims, strictly by hand. In the Middle Atlas kilim flat weaves, they use traditional designs and symbols. The High Atlas weavers use traditional and non-traditional patterns and figures to create one of a kind, hand knotted, works of art, that we call rugs.
Many of the Berber people are pastoral. They live and set up their loom in tents, in the mountains, during the summer and migrate to the desert pueblo’s in the winter. As a whole their weavings, depict their lives, less structured and nonconformist. The Berber’s call themselves the Imazgin, which means “the free people.” The Romans gave them the name, Berbers, for “Barbarians”, because they fought their invader’s so fiercely. Go figure.
The designs in the Berber tribal rugs (kilims, specifically) all over Morocco represent the only written language of a people who’s origin remains’ a mystery. In one kilim, from the Middle Atlas tribe of Azrou, we found symbols (letters) from the Ogam alphabet. These were the Celts who were run out of Ireland for practicing sorcery. The Celt language and alphabet was composed of different arrangements of five digits across from five similar digits, so they could, essentially, speak with their fingers. This Azrou kilim had these digits woven into it. The director of the Folk and Craft Museum, in Los Angeles bought it from me many years ago. In the library of Dublin, there are books that tell of Berber raiders who attacked and took twenty boatloads of women, when they left. In the Atlas mountains you will still see red haired, blue eyed people, today. Once, outside of Tucson they found the Ogam alphabet scratched into the rocks. It was translated to say ”the natives are not friendly.” That leaves room for the imagination of what insued.
Four mountain merchants had answered my call and had spent the week gathering all of the nice tribal pieces that they could find, and brought them to latif’s house, where they carried them three stories up to the roof. All of these guy’s knew me and also know I my funds are always limited. Each merchant wanted to tempt me as much as possible. And tempted I was, as I pawed through sixty or seventy beautiful primitive pieces, frustrated because many of them would have to stay behind… hopefully, until my next trip. Not many visitor’s to Morocco have access to these independant dealers and vice versa. Most tourist’s are escorted to the larger stores, where these types of rugs rarely surface. My selection made and my pockets empty I stuffed my three duffelbags full and planned to throw the rest on top of a few tons of concrete and tile the container. With that, I bid farewell and, hopefully, good storage to the runner’s up.
Tomorrow would be a dull day after I packed the last of my goods and put the lock on my container. Meeting with shipping agents, custom broker’s and the other officials who make small time exporter’s do the hoop dance, to the tune of their choosing, is not my cup of tea. I was expecting the various variables that, invariably, hit on the day before departure. But, as I mentioned before, if it was easy everyone would do it.
