Cutting for Stars

I took advantage of another later start to the day with an early run around Marrakech down Mohamed V Street. It’s a big, wide street with ample sidewalks. It was nice to watch the city come to life and go about its everyday business. I also found art in an unexpected place: the trees lining the street are carved when they die. 

I’m not sure if this is an approved art form or if there’s a rogue street artist with a chainsaw, but I dig it.

The main event for the day was a tilework, or zellij, workshop. Tilework, in case you haven’t noticed, is very big here, and they are excellent at it. We walked to the local artisan collective through one of the many beautiful public parks. 

This one, interestingly, had a bunch of public health and environmental health informational posters. 

This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: "Two bags, one paper and one plastic, walk into a bar..."

The park also (randomly) had a telephone museum, of which we took full advantage.

"To whom may I connect you?"

We arrived at the artisan’s collective excited to learn. 

The beautiful entrance to the Ensemble Artisanal

Nobody was more eager than our artist-in-residence, my sister. We first learned to draw the tile shapes on the baked tiles using a sort of paste and a sharpened reed. It was much harder than it looked. The language barrier between the artisans and us made learning a challenge, and the artisans seemed to have that particular affliction of the very skilled where they lose the ability to break things down into discrete steps that are easy for a beginner to follow. Which side of the reed works best? Why do you sometimes wipe it before you use it and sometimes not? The same was true when we went on to the next step: tile cutting. Using a jerry-rigged contraption that left a metal ridge as a work surface, we laid tiles atop the ridge and hit them with an adze. The adze had to be leaned on one’s leg for stability, and even getting the right sitting position proved a feat. Our legs fell so deeply asleep that we stumbled like baby gazelles every time we tried to stand. We sat with our adzes for a long while, trying to carefully chip out the shapes that we had painstakingly drawn. 

That is, trying to chip along a straight line so we could cut out a square. The artisan working next to me kept telling me to hit the tile harder. I resisted, but he continued to prod. At last, I gave the tile a good whack and… it splintered into five pieces, none of which were the shape I wanted. We had a good laugh and I tried to salvage something from the rubble I had created. Luckily, there were many more tiles. Just as we had progressed from tracing squares to tracing more complex shapes like stars, we gradually moved from chipping squares (badly, in the case of my mother and me) to more complicated shapes. My sister and father each managed to keep their shapes recognizable, and my sister even produced some stars to the point where the head of the workshop invited her to stay on and apprentice. He said she could live in his house and teach his kids English, and in return she would be trained as a zellij artisan. She was so excited, we feared we might have to leave her behind.

Before leaving, my sister and I each pieced together a small mosaic (from tiles cut by experts, as we wanted a traditional look rather than a cubist commentary on Moroccan zellij) and had them plastered. First, the design was laid out, which felt a bit like playing with Moroccan tangrams. Then, the whole design was flipped over and squared off using hollow metal pipes. 

The whole thing was covered with a bit of plaster/cement dust and a spatter of water; this helped it not to stick to the floor at the end, apparently. 

They then mixed plaster in a small bucket and poured it over, smoothing it back and forth to fill cracks and even out the surface of the back. After about ten minutes, the metal pipes were broken off and the whole piece was flipped over to reveal our mosaics!

We left with sore forearms (from the adze work), full hearts, and heavy mosaics and headed to lunch. Given that we only have a few days left, we have been trying to sample as many different Moroccan dishes as possible before we return home. To this end, Ahmed had called ahead and ordered us tangia, meat cooked in a large pot with spices. He had also ordered rafisa (the chicken + lentil + crepe dish we had yesterday) without the chicken and with extra lentils, so that my (as much as possible) vegan mother could mix things up a bit. Our giant meat pot was brought to the table by the proprietor, who popped off the aluminum foil lid and gave it a good shake. 

He then ceremoniously poured the contents into a large dish, prompting whispers of curiosity and jealousy from the large American tour groups at the surrounding tables. 

It was a lot of meat to eat, but was so tender and well-seasoned that we finished nearly all of it. We handed off the last chunks to the curious observers at the nearby tables, who gamely down the tangia.

Our afternoon, what little was left of it, was spent relaxing. A week and a half of high-energy travel has made us savor our hours of rest.

Spotted: Berber music! After seeing how excited we got listening to Moroccan music with Omar in the truck (fun fact: French Montana is also Moroccan), Ahmed played us some Berber tunes. The song of the day is therefore Aman Iman by Tinariwen.