The Magic Carpets of Morocco

“Alhamdulillah”. Fatima smiles, a broad, genuine grin, in sharp contrast to the story she has just told. I am in Fatima’s small front room halfway down the fortified hill at Ait Benhaddou in Morocco. The sun is murderous and I’m exhausted. Outside, donkeys stand in the heat, motionless, obedient, eyes half shut. I was feeling the same. This morning it rained. Hard. So hard, it turned all the tiny streams that wind their way down the hill into gushing rivers of coffee-coloured water. “Oued”, Fatima corrects me. “Oued can be sometimes dry. A river, it is never dry…” much like Fatima’s courage I am soon to learn. 

Fatima had caught me on my way up. “When you come back, I will make you henna. You will be tired. I will have tea”. I thanked her and left with promises that I would come for tea on my return not really expecting her to be standing in the same dark, clay doorway and pretty certain I would not remember which house was hers in the meandering, narrow maze of burnt-orange, earthen merchants’ dwellings that climbed up the hill from the river (the real one). But she was there, hours later, running up to me like a long-lost friend and ushering me through small, sparse rooms and faint whiffs of maghrebi tea (“Berber whiskey!”) into the relative cool of her front room. 

Not an inch of floor or wall was left unadorned by intricate, woven Berber rugs. Even more were stacked high in every corner. Vibrant greens, blues, pinks. Bold block designs and geometric shapes. Fatima pulls up a couple of tiny wooden stools and starts preparing the brown henna paste. She gently holds my hand with her thick, work-worn fingers as the needleless syringe weaves the dark liquid in delicate patterns from my wrist to my fingertips. 

At first glance, huddled in her doorway, hair bound tightly in a thin, knotted scarf, I had guessed her to be approaching 60, but she had a lightless and manner that suggested a woman much younger. Fatima was telling her story. A mother of 7, her husband had divorced her, something that carried a certain amount of shame in her village, leaving her to fend for herself and all her 7 children. With no money, never an opportunity for education, she could only weave her rugs and offer tea and henna to the tourists who climbed here every day. Past her small front room. Past her village. On her hill. The kindness of strangers.  

I look at her with a sad appreciation of her struggle. A mist creeps across her eyes and, for a moment, softens the perma-smile lines she has worked so hard to etch into her face. With a self-deprecating laugh she waves her hand dismissively, shooing the bad memories away. “Alhamdulillah”, she smiles, peacefully. “I am happy. I thank God every day for what I have. Alhamdulillah”. 

That day, I bought a lot of rugs.