The Shoemaker of Fez
The souk in Fez Morocco 2009
My daughter and I stayed in what is called a ‘riad’ when we were in Fez. This is an old house, once owned by a prosperous Moroccan family, that has been converted to a B&B. Usually it is European people who refurbish these old homes. The houses have a square patio that is open to the sky. It is surrounded by rooms that open onto the patio or if they are upstairs, to the balcony.
I read Fatima Mernissi’s book, Dreams of Trespass, where she described how the women of her mother’s age and older were confined to the home and the only sky they saw was the square patch of sky above the atrium. Fatima’s mother, even though she had never been to school, was determined that Fatima would go to the school that the French (Mococco at the time was a French colony) had opened for girls. Fatima went and suceeded. She is now a world reknowned scholar and teaches at Rabat University.
Back to our riad…it was Morocco, fountains, tiled walls, windows with arabesqued grills, uneven stairs climbing to rooms arranged helter-skelter. We could hear the fish monger, the vegetable man and children playing through our open window. Up on the rooftop, we could see the city of Fez at our feet and watch families cooking and eating on their rooftops.
We hired a guide to lead us through the souk. It is a labyrinth and it’s easy to keep going round and round on the same streets. Guides can be a help or a hindrence. So many times they want to direct you, not guide you. But this man was taken with my daughter and soon forgot the reason we had hired him. We seemed to be visiting his friends who had small, cubby-hole shops in the souk. Fine with me! I got some great shots. It’s funny, but when I look at some photo-centric Moroccan cookbooks that I have collected, I see photos of those same men. I wasn’t the only one to appreciate them.