Purple on the Pilgrim Road
The plain is gold, the sky is white,
and she chose purple.
Loose shapes, a painter's hand,
the road to the shrine running through.
Boujad is a market town on the Tadla plain with a saint at its centre, and on the days of the pilgrimage the road fills with people walking in from the villages, their robes every colour the dye pots can make. The women who weave there have been looking at that road for generations, which may be why Boujad rugs look the way they do: free, loose, painterly, nothing quite symmetrical, colour laid down with more courage than plan. This one is purple, which is less usual for Boujad than its pinks and oranges, and it is drawn the Boujad way, in shapes that seem to have moved since she set them down.
The pile is short, as Boujad pile is, and forty years have worn it to a soft, flat-woven feel that lets the drawing show. It is a rug for a wall as much as a floor. In a house it goes where it can be looked at: under a glass table, along a corridor, in a studio.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.