We came to the Berber tannery by accident. We had been working at our own traditional trade of being hopelessly lost in the medina, wandering in confusion amid the haphazard alleyways crammed with brightly colored piles of spices, pointy-toed Moroccan slippers, heavy silver jewelry, brass trays, harem pants, and gorgeous ceramic bowls, when a helpful stranger emerged out of nowhere offering his guidance. We showed him our map, told him our destination—the Marrakech Museum—and he shook his head with a disappointed expression. Unfortunately, he explained, the museum was closed on Tuesdays. The Berber tannery was open, however, and it was more interesting than the museum anyway. Why didn’t we go there?
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| The Vats at the Berber Tannery |
This, we already knew, is a common sales ploy here in Marrakech, one we experienced daily. It goes like this:
Helpful stranger: “Sir! Madame! If you are going to the Royal Palace, I’m sorry to tell you it closes at 1:30.”
Trusting tourist: “Oh no! There goes our whole afternoon. What are we going to do now?”
Helpful stranger: “Let me think . . . you know, there is a shop down the street where you can watch women grind spices in the traditional Berber fashion. You would find it quite fascinating.”
Trusting tourist: “That sounds like fun! How do we get there?”
What goes unsaid: The place is a spice shop and he owns it, or his brother or cousin or uncle does, and the palace is actually open all day, every day. This is just part of the way business is done in Morocco.
This particular stranger shows us the way to the tannery, greets the guy at the gate with a hug, and vanishes as quickly as he appeared. The gentleman at the tannery hands John and me each a sprig of mint to hold up our noses—“Berber gas mask,” he says—and leads us among the foul-smelling vats as he talks abouts how the skin is cured.
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| John and Me with Our “Berber Gas Masks” |
“For the ammonia, they use the pigeon shit. Do you know the pigeon shit?” We tell him yes, we are familiar with it.
He tells us about the traditional dyes: henna for red, poppies for orange, saffron for yellow, indigo for blue, mint for green. Then, of course, he takes us to the shops, where we can buy bags, belts, wallets, carpets, vases, and blankets, all made from the skin and fur and bones of animals.
And this is where my dilemma comes in. I look over the gorgeous and diligently handmade articles and instantly a border war erupts between my various sets of ethical standards. On one side, wielding swords and scimitars, stands my conviction that every group of people has the right to determine how they will live on the Earth, accompanied by my commitment to supporting traditional arts and businesses. On the other side, with its slingshots and spears, is my strong belief that we should never, ever use animals as commodities. I am engaged in a great civil war, all going on inside my head.
Let me make this absolutely clear: I’m not making judgments about Berber life here. The Berbers have herded animals in the arid lands of North Africa not for mere centuries, but for millenia. I know little about how they treat animals, but it can’t possibly be as viciously as we do in the U.S. (and if you doubt that for a moment, check out meatvideo.com and be prepared for horror).
As in all Muslim countries, meat shops here unabashedly display hanging carcasses of dead animals that look like the hanging carcasses of dead animals. There are hooves, too, and eyes and tongues. The food stalls in the central square have neat stacks of severed, skinned sheep heads. And, yes, I find this hard to see, but I also find it refreshing. At least it’s honest, not a big cover up, like the neatly packaged slices wrapped in plastic that allow Americans to forget the living beings they came from.
In short, there’s no way I’m going to stand here with my American credit cards and sensibilities and think about how holy I am compared to these people.
My dilemma, in fact, has nothing to do with what these tanners and weavers are doing. It’s all about what I’m going to do. Do I support these wonderful traditional arts and buy a rug woven from animal fur, or do I stand by my determination to avoid using animal products whenever possible? To buy or not to buy: That is the question.
After much discussion in an awkward mixture of the seller’s incomplete English and my ludicrous French, after tea drinking, haggling, and indecision, I buy. Two carpets, one of cactus fiber and one of sheep and camel wool.
Afterwards, the gentleman offers both John and me wallets as a gift. John takes his, but I draw the line at leather. “I had enough trouble with the wool,” I mutter to John. I don’t expect the Berber gentleman to understand my English, let alone the implication of what I said, but he gets it all. “You’re a vegetarian,” he says, as if exclaiming about my exotic ethnicity. “There was a girl in the shop last week who was vegetarian. She was looking at the leather and crying. But why?”
I am immediately annoyed at this girl. What animal advocates do not need are girls weeping in leather shops, but people who come across as intelligent adults making ethical choices. Still, I defend her, perhaps because just the night before I had fled the food stalls in the central square mumbling, “Too many heads! Too many heads!”
“She was crying because animals suffer,” I say.
The man shakes his head. “But they don’t. We slit their throats. They die without pain.” My American Buddhist self thinks, it’s still killing a sentient being for a wallet, but I keep it to myself. It’s my ethics, not his. The world has seen too many attempts to impose one people’s rules on another’s. It always goes bad.