Mr & Mrs Stitch Go To The Library
The library is closed. The factory is open though, so we go there, by way of the shrine. In the courtyard of the shrine, the sick have found some shade for themselves in the arcades that line it. Some of them rest on makeshift mattresses—cardboard, blankets—while others sit on the floor with their backs to the green-tiled wall and look heavy-lidded into the middle distance.
People like us would never be permitted to set foot in the shrine, but the indulgent caretaker lets us poke our heads through the doorway for a peek. It is dim and cool and high ceilinged, and hung with heavy fabrics and the accoutrement of devotion.
We pull our unholy heads back out and head for the factory. On the way there, M shows us through the covered alleyways of the old town, pointing out a few this and thats. We've only known him for ten minutes so he's not exactly doing this out of the goodness of his heart. Later, he'll charge us—but at a rate which makes him feel, if not a friend, then perfectly friendly and a decent sort.
The factory is not what we were expecting, consisting as it does of three deep puddles, some muddy, weary-looking men and an ominous pillar of jet black smoke that rises from the far end of an open yard. A pit there is populated by an old man, a tiny man and a very unhappy looking man. The old and the sad tend furnaces while the little one shuttles their fuel. They are working in heat I am sure I could not stand for two minutes.
M introduces us to the foreman, A, who proceeds to give us the grand tour—from puddle to pit and, briefly, into a side shed where he half buries himself in the ground in order to spin a similarly half-buried turntable. It seems a very odd arrangement to me until he explains it's so the artists, as he calls them, can stay cool as they work.
Although the closed library was our first port of call this morning, and the shrine expected, the existence of this factory was known to us long before either, and is our reason for coming here. Ever since we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and for all the time we've spent driving a thousand kilometres south via the capital, Rabat, frenetic Marrakech, that city of chancers, the Atlas mountains and their otherworldly valleys and gorges, and the string of oases that thread along the Draa valley, our minds have been on this place. But we're not here to seek a cure at the shrine or to borrow a book from the library. We're here to buy a fruit bowl.
The green of Tamegroute pottery is a very particular and very deep green, the complex kind of colour a looker can fall into a little, find themselves mesmerised by, momentarily—forgetful of where they are or what they were thinking about before they looked. We've seen examples all over northern Morocco, on many occasions, and have been curious enough to ask and learn about its origin, but this is the first time we've made it here, to the mighty Draa valley, with its sprawling date palmeries and eroding kasbahs, and the dusty little desert town of Tamegroute.
We buy a wide green bowl and, because it's finer than the mottled examples we've liked elsewhere, we buy one of those too. The place is a cooperative and we get fixed prices which we assume are at the higher end but within the bounds of reason. Afterwards, M has some disappointing news. The library is still closed, and will remain so for some hours. Pleased with our purchase, but determined not to miss out on the books, I tell him we'll try again in the morning.
In the morning, the library is closed. We go to the shop instead—the shop being the shop M ushers us into for some tea while we wait for the library to open. It's the kind of development that, were we in Marrakech, that city of predators, we would never go along with—to accept tea there is to acquiesce to being bullied and held hostage until some hasty purchase seems the only way to effect a getaway. Here though, M and the shopkeeper seem so lackadaisical we just go with the flow.They offer us tea, they make us tea, we drink the tea. Some antique knives and jewellery are briefly discussed but, on my declaring we won't be buying any of them, they are put away and not again mentioned, the conversation—a little stilted due to language issues—becoming pleasantly non-transactional.
Eventually though, and with the best will in the world, it dries up. The twenty minutes M had told us we'd be waiting become forty, then an hour. African time. We resolve to leave it again, hoping that when we pass this way for the third and final time, two days from now, we'll have better luck. An apologetic M walks us back to our car but, before we can get into it, triumphantly declares the key to the library has arrived. Following his extended index finger, I see that it has done so in a Renault Twingo. The library is open.
Crossing a little square and stepping through an arched wooden doorway into the mosque complex, we pass through a shaded courtyard, greeting a couple of women who sit together there, and wait by the locked library door for the driver of the Twingo to come with the key. When he does, he is a well-dressed, well-groomed, professional looking young man and, upon being introduced to us as R, he let's us in. It's a one room affair and like its attendant is well kept and fairly new. Handsome and functional, it is lined with glass-fronted shelves on three walls and lit brightly from the high windows of the forth. Much of the remaining space is taken up by a large table for study. At waist height all along the shelves are slender glass cabinets, and in them some select books are displayed. It's important to protect them, I suppose, because although the current building is young, the library is anything but.
The first book R draws our attention to, a koran, is just a little larger than a pocket paperback and a thousand years old. Next to it, hadith, not much more recent. For a little while we make our way, the three of us, around the room, R quietly telling us at each point what we're looking at. More copies of the koran, more religious works, astronomy, histories, grammatical works and Pythagoras—none of books are especially ornate, tending instead toward the workmanlike, though the calligraphy is of course lovely and some diagrams exquisite.
I won't bother you with the particulars of the library's founder, with its history and function—you can look it up for yourself if it interests you. Suffice it to say that when, after not all that many minutes, our visit comes to an end, I am entranced. To the extent that, despite our obsession with green pottery and the presence of a holy man's mausoleum, it is this place, these books, that will linger in my memory the most—at least until a few days later when, in an out of the way market in one of those oases of the Draa valley that few tourists will see, we are made an offer on a Tamegroute bowl and realise that the prices we have paid in the cooperative here are indeed at the higher end, and bear very little relation to reason.
People like us would never be permitted to set foot in the shrine, but the indulgent caretaker lets us poke our heads through the doorway for a peek. It is dim and cool and high ceilinged, and hung with heavy fabrics and the accoutrement of devotion.
We pull our unholy heads back out and head for the factory. On the way there, M shows us through the covered alleyways of the old town, pointing out a few this and thats. We've only known him for ten minutes so he's not exactly doing this out of the goodness of his heart. Later, he'll charge us—but at a rate which makes him feel, if not a friend, then perfectly friendly and a decent sort.
The factory is not what we were expecting, consisting as it does of three deep puddles, some muddy, weary-looking men and an ominous pillar of jet black smoke that rises from the far end of an open yard. A pit there is populated by an old man, a tiny man and a very unhappy looking man. The old and the sad tend furnaces while the little one shuttles their fuel. They are working in heat I am sure I could not stand for two minutes.
M introduces us to the foreman, A, who proceeds to give us the grand tour—from puddle to pit and, briefly, into a side shed where he half buries himself in the ground in order to spin a similarly half-buried turntable. It seems a very odd arrangement to me until he explains it's so the artists, as he calls them, can stay cool as they work.
Although the closed library was our first port of call this morning, and the shrine expected, the existence of this factory was known to us long before either, and is our reason for coming here. Ever since we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and for all the time we've spent driving a thousand kilometres south via the capital, Rabat, frenetic Marrakech, that city of chancers, the Atlas mountains and their otherworldly valleys and gorges, and the string of oases that thread along the Draa valley, our minds have been on this place. But we're not here to seek a cure at the shrine or to borrow a book from the library. We're here to buy a fruit bowl.
The green of Tamegroute pottery is a very particular and very deep green, the complex kind of colour a looker can fall into a little, find themselves mesmerised by, momentarily—forgetful of where they are or what they were thinking about before they looked. We've seen examples all over northern Morocco, on many occasions, and have been curious enough to ask and learn about its origin, but this is the first time we've made it here, to the mighty Draa valley, with its sprawling date palmeries and eroding kasbahs, and the dusty little desert town of Tamegroute.
We buy a wide green bowl and, because it's finer than the mottled examples we've liked elsewhere, we buy one of those too. The place is a cooperative and we get fixed prices which we assume are at the higher end but within the bounds of reason. Afterwards, M has some disappointing news. The library is still closed, and will remain so for some hours. Pleased with our purchase, but determined not to miss out on the books, I tell him we'll try again in the morning.
In the morning, the library is closed. We go to the shop instead—the shop being the shop M ushers us into for some tea while we wait for the library to open. It's the kind of development that, were we in Marrakech, that city of predators, we would never go along with—to accept tea there is to acquiesce to being bullied and held hostage until some hasty purchase seems the only way to effect a getaway. Here though, M and the shopkeeper seem so lackadaisical we just go with the flow.They offer us tea, they make us tea, we drink the tea. Some antique knives and jewellery are briefly discussed but, on my declaring we won't be buying any of them, they are put away and not again mentioned, the conversation—a little stilted due to language issues—becoming pleasantly non-transactional.
Eventually though, and with the best will in the world, it dries up. The twenty minutes M had told us we'd be waiting become forty, then an hour. African time. We resolve to leave it again, hoping that when we pass this way for the third and final time, two days from now, we'll have better luck. An apologetic M walks us back to our car but, before we can get into it, triumphantly declares the key to the library has arrived. Following his extended index finger, I see that it has done so in a Renault Twingo. The library is open.
Crossing a little square and stepping through an arched wooden doorway into the mosque complex, we pass through a shaded courtyard, greeting a couple of women who sit together there, and wait by the locked library door for the driver of the Twingo to come with the key. When he does, he is a well-dressed, well-groomed, professional looking young man and, upon being introduced to us as R, he let's us in. It's a one room affair and like its attendant is well kept and fairly new. Handsome and functional, it is lined with glass-fronted shelves on three walls and lit brightly from the high windows of the forth. Much of the remaining space is taken up by a large table for study. At waist height all along the shelves are slender glass cabinets, and in them some select books are displayed. It's important to protect them, I suppose, because although the current building is young, the library is anything but.
The first book R draws our attention to, a koran, is just a little larger than a pocket paperback and a thousand years old. Next to it, hadith, not much more recent. For a little while we make our way, the three of us, around the room, R quietly telling us at each point what we're looking at. More copies of the koran, more religious works, astronomy, histories, grammatical works and Pythagoras—none of books are especially ornate, tending instead toward the workmanlike, though the calligraphy is of course lovely and some diagrams exquisite.
I won't bother you with the particulars of the library's founder, with its history and function—you can look it up for yourself if it interests you. Suffice it to say that when, after not all that many minutes, our visit comes to an end, I am entranced. To the extent that, despite our obsession with green pottery and the presence of a holy man's mausoleum, it is this place, these books, that will linger in my memory the most—at least until a few days later when, in an out of the way market in one of those oases of the Draa valley that few tourists will see, we are made an offer on a Tamegroute bowl and realise that the prices we have paid in the cooperative here are indeed at the higher end, and bear very little relation to reason.
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