Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Tannery
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Travel is educational. That’s what I lecture in my high school civics classes. Travelers learn about history, art, culture, cuisine, language—and witness social and economic conditions firsthand. To engage their attention, I tell my students that in Fez I learned that a tannery is not a Moroccan resort-spa for sunbathing.
Since the city’s earliest days, using the same basic technique for 1100 years, Fez tanneries have been producing world-class leather—buttery soft, supple, sensual.
Tannery tours are a first-rate factory tour, a tourist attraction. Perched on lookout platform three stories above an area the size of a football field, sprawled below me is the largest tannery in Fez. I am sweating droplets.
The air stinks. The odor sticks on my tongue like dried, cakey peanut butter. To shut out the stench, a sprig of mint is shoved up my nostrils.
The process is medieval. Cow, sheep, goat and camel skins are scraped clean of fur and hair with menacingly sharp knives wielded by hand. Hides are softened in a liquid mixture of cow urine, pigeon feces, quicklime, salt and water.
The tanning pits are filled with natural colorants— a painter’s palette of deep, rich, earthy colors. Blues made from indigo; reds from poppies or paprika; henna for orange; yellow from turmeric.
Under the same glaring Moroccan sun that scorches the Saharan desert, workers stand thigh-deep in the stone pits pummeling the hides to spread the colors evenly. For the final step, the hides are sun-dried on racks, rooftops, balconies.
The work is backbreaking, brutal. The vats are laced with chromium. My guide says that tannery workers live longer than workers in other ‘collectives’—whatever that means. He claims the jobs are well-paid, sought after and handed down from father to son.
The laborers toil in silence. The only sound is sloshing fluids, the snorting of donkeys, the occasional grunt as a pile of wet hides are hoisted onto a set of muscular shoulders.
As if time traveling to witness an ancient rite, I watch the men work, mesmerized. Except for unassembled IKEA furniture, products enter my house premade, shrink-wrapped, clean smelling, sanitized of life’s raw realities. Watching TV, I don’t give a thought to the utility lineman repairing broken circuits. Before wearing a shirt, I don’t consider how the cotton was harvested, woven, dyed or stitched.
Standing with me on the viewing platform, the angular woman next to me is wearing fawn cargo pants, beige blouse, caramel-colored hat, tan suede shoes. She looks like a camel, except a camel has more curves.
In a prickly, challenging voice, she huffs with indignation, “This is appalling. Those poor men are being exploited. I’m leaving.” Instead of seeing a craft tradition being preserved, an indigenous way of life protected, she sees a cancer factory.
Reflexively I step back leaving a space between us. As a guest in Morocco, I’m slow to judge, to take sides before I even know how many sides there are. I travel with my outsider’s detachment, void of empathy.
Later, I catch a glimpse of camel-woman shopping. In an artisanal leather store.
