The Night Before the Henna
The women's night, the men sent out.
Trays of sweets, a drum, somebody's aunt singing.
Pink on the roof, pink on the walls,
and the biggest pink of all on the floor.
The night before a Boujad wedding belongs to the women. The men are sent to a cousin's house and told not to come back, the roof is strung with lamps, the trays of sweets come up the stairs one after another, and somebody's aunt who has not sung in public for thirty years decides that tonight she will. The bride sits in the middle with her hands held out for the henna, and everything around her is pink: the dresses, the cushions, the cones of sugar, and under all of it the rug, the biggest one the family owns, unrolled for the first time that year.
This is a rug for that night. Three and a half metres of Boujad pink with other colours dropped in where she felt like it, in the loose, painterly way the plains weavers have, with a good pile that has gone soft rather than thin over forty years of being danced on. It has moved to a loft with a concrete floor and white brick walls, where the pink does not have to compete with anything, and wins.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.