Women Artisans of Morocco by Susan Schaefer Davis

Author:Susan Schaefer Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thrums Books
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Heavy beater to beat the wool.

A traditional flatweave rug, showing the richness of Middle Atlas weaving.

Certain practices shuttle back and forth between old and new ways of doing things. “When I learned to weave with my mother, we didn’t have a special layout in mind. We didn’t say, ‘We’re going to do this or that rug.’ Perhaps we’d borrow a rug from that man who dreams designs and take parts from it. We’d just measure where the center was and work towards it. Since we knew the designs, we’d just let our ideas run free. But after we attended training workshops last year, I started thinking, ‘Before we weave, we should have a plan.’ So we don’t work free-form anymore. Now when we get an order, we make a layout, measure the distance from here to there, and then start weaving. Everyone in our association shares in the overall design of the rug.

“We also wanted to get away from copying the old rugs, with everybody doing the same thing. So now each weaver will do something from her own head. The rugs are black and white in the Beni-Ouarain style, but the motifs in black are all different. Each woman creates her own.”

And so the women have moved from traditional “free-form” weaving to a fixed idea of the final article, obeying certain rules about layout and measurement, and at the same time relying on creative inspiration to weave individual designs.

The founder of Anou wants to encourage creativity in Moroccan artisans, a delicate proposition, and one step in doing so has been to provide a training in it for the four artisan leaders. After this training, Kenza designed and produced a very nontraditional rug.

Despite her interest in the new, Kenza is one of the few women with insight into the cultural significance of traditional designs. One set of symbols, Kenza says, are the letters of the Berber alphabet, which women “hid” in their weaving, which is where researchers found them. While the alphabet may be very old, the use of it is quite recent in Morocco and not very widespread. The letters are neither Western nor Arabic but look a bit like hieroglyphics. Berber or Amazigh speakers are very proud of them. More generally, Kenza says, “The designs are connected to a woman’s life and work. For example, there’s one design that represents a horse’s bridle. It keeps the horse’s mouth closed, it controls. When the design originated, women were dominated. The man was everything. So the design is related to men’s control over women at that time.

“The zigzag design we call the ‘saw’ exists in relation to wood. Like the relationship between saw and wood, we always find the relationship of the man and the woman going along together. Neither could work alone; they help and complete each other.” In contrast to the symbolism of control above, here we see interdependence.

“Nature is the source of our colors: the pastel colors of flowers, the green of the grass, and the blue of the sky.

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