Blue/Chefchaouen, Morocco/March 2020
Intro
In our podcasts, we wish to address the origins of pigments but also the multi-faceted nature of color—how poetics and art and history and economy create a more complete biography of color. Our choice of locations reflects this interest in the character of color and its relation to people as much as geography. After visiting Marrakech in Morocco, we discovered an inland city called Chefchaouen. Known as The Blue Pearl, all of the buildings in the medina are painted various shades of blue. The lime-based paint covers walls, stairs, and alleyways so that one becomes immersed in a blue spectrum. Rather than situate ourselves in a location such as Afghanistan, where ultramarine blue pigment from lapis lazuli is found, we wanted to explore the meaning of blue in relation to cultural history and identity. While Chefchaouen is not a center of pigment production, it is a center of blue as a spiritual ideology.
Blue, in the sky and the sea, colors much of our world. While ubiquitous, blue is also quite intangible. The seemingly endless expanses of the sea and sky speak to many people of a spiritual infinity—unearthly and unworldly, and blue has been an esteemed color in many religions perhaps because of this connotation. The English word blue can be traced from Germanic origin to an Old French word, bleu. Referring mostly to the color of the sea, it could be a mix of blue, green, and grey; but also reflective or shimmering.
More appropriate to our interests, is the name azure, meaning “color of the clear sky.” The word comes from the Arabic lazward, which refers to the mineral lapis lazuli and its place of production in current Afghanistan. In a French interpretation, “al lazward” became “Azur." And this is the name given to a blue mineral, used as a pigment, azurite. While blue in English referred to a dark or grey color and the associated mood, azure describes lightness, and more specifically, the actual color. Very little in nature is truly blue. There are a few flowers, such as the cornflower, and almost no foods other than blueberries. None can be used to make a pigment directly- blue things do not always make a blue color. Blue minerals that do exist in nature need to be found, mined, processed, and transported. Other organic blues come from green plants like woad and indigo and have to be transformed through chemical or alchemical processes.
Though not simple to access, the mineral azurite was fairly available in Asia and Europe. It was not as brilliant as ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli. The Romans called it Ultramarine, meaning "from beyond the sea," and its scarce availability, and therefore cost, contributed to it being a sacred color. But lapis was a heavy mineral, and the pigment was difficult to suspend in a binder for painting, and therefore impossible to use as an ink or dye. Cennini described the laborious method of obtaining a pigment from the mineral, making it the most expensive pigment. Ultramarine has literally been worth its weight in gold throughout history, and often azurite was used in lieu of it. One way to prove that the blue pigment paid for was genuine was to burn it. Azurite turns black while Ultramarine stays blue.
As lapis lazuli was reportedly worth its weight in gold, another color, Tyrian Purple (originating from Tyre, Lebanon), was worth its weight in silver. Though not blue, it is worth mentioning here that the Mogador Islands of Morocco were a leading producer of this dye, and called the “purple Islands” by the Phoenicians. Tyrian Purple is made from the gland of a sea snail, bolinus brandaris or murex brandaris. Still, there is another rare blue made from another species of sea snail, hexaplex trunculus. This blue color is called “tekhelet" in Hebrew and was reserved for dyeing religious garments. The sky, the sea, and from something even so humble as the snail become the color of salvation.
All blues were rare and valuable until they were synthetically made in the modern era. However, the ancient Egyptians made the earliest human-made pigment- Egyptian blue. Made by heating copper filings with lime in furnaces, this valuable painting pigment was used throughout antiquity but all but disappeared with the collapse of the Empire in Rome. An example of another lost pigment was Mayan Blue that combined indigo with a white Yucatan clay through a heating process. Also a holy color in Mayan culture, it was used for murals and religious rituals.
More common plant-based blues came from indigo and woad and were used as fabric dyes. With some simple alchemy, fermentation, acidity, and oxidation, these plants could be processed into permanent dyes, and they have been used around the world since antiquity. Due to the availability by the late 1800s of cheap synthetic blues, pure lapis lazuli and azurite are now rarely used in contemporary painting, nor woad or indigo in commercial dyeing.
Woad grows in Europe, while indigo generally came from India, as its Latin name implies. Indigo had a high concentration of pigment and soon replaced woad as a more concentrated fabric dye, as long as trade permitted. Indigo was transported along the Spice Road from India, spread through the Middle East and Northern Africa, and Europe through Venice. The Tuaregs of Northern Africa are a semi-nomadic Berber tribe and came into contact with indigo traded on the Spice route through Egypt. The Tuaregs are called "the blue people" for their blue headscarves, or tagelmust. The pigment, processed with little water due to its scarcity in the Sahara desert, rubbed off and tinted the skin of the wearer.
As trade routes opened to and from the New World, both indigo and slavery made their way to the new American South. Soon indigo plantations were built, and enslaved Africans were cultivating this dye in the New World. Indigo and cloth itself were used as currency, and at the height of both the indigo and slave trade, "one length of cloth was traded in exchange for one human body."
In many ways, African culture survived and endured, despite the vicious circumstances. The Gullah—African-Americans descended directly from slaves from West Africa in the United States Southeastern Lowcountry (Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina), still maintain a strong linguistic, religious, and cultural influence of their African heritage.
One of these influences is the Gullah use of the color Haint Blue to paint porch ceilings. The color was created by mixing indigo with lye. Indigo dye was an important part of Northwest African culture. It was used as a symbol of wealth by the Tuaregs of the Sahara and other peoples in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Mali. Along with their culture, enslaved Africans also brought their agricultural expertise in rice farming and indigo production. In 1700’s South Carolina indigo was the largest cash crop next to rice. Although the lye in Haint Blue is an insect repellent and may deter disease-bearing mosquitos, the color is more likely linked to the belief that the blue color would ward off ghosts. The Gullah word “haint” is a variation of “haunt,” and the color is said to ward off spirits or ghosts. By painting porch ceilings this blue, the insects and spirits would both be confused that the ceiling was the sky and leave the inhabitants alone.
Another poetic link between the word blue and culture is the music genre of “the blues,” began by African slaves in the American South in the 18th century. “The blues” itself as a term refers to a mood and dates to the 14th century. The American Blues are a kind of lament and Chaucer used “blewe" to refer to sorrow, as if bruised, black and blue. Dryden, in the 17th century, used it to refer to the plague or plague-like afflictions. The term may derive from the expression "blue devils," a state of depression often related to alcohol consumption or withdrawal. The musical style and musical instruments, such as the banjo, were derived from African predecessors like the halam (or xalam). While the blues are usually associated with despair, they also mark a turning point of spiritual transcendence and physical liberation as slaves began to be freed after the American Civil War. With the many forms of the Blues in the 20th century (jazz, etc.), it began to have a more celebratory or cathartic connotation for African-Americans. Where blue becomes symbolic of salvation, the Blues became a release from earthly struggles and hardship.
Chefchaouen
We came upon Chefchaouen by car from Tangier in mid-March, and the landscape was in springtime bloom. As we neared Chefchaouen, its bluminosity! almost hovered amongst the surrounding lush green. The collective blueness immediately brought smiles to our faces, and blue's association with sorrow was left behind.
Seventy miles from Tangier and the Strait of Gibraltar, Chefchouen is an isolated mountain town. It was founded in 1471 and populated after 1492 by Sephardic Jews and Muslims fleeing persecution from the Spanish Inquisition. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 forced Jews to leave Spain, convert to Christianity, or die. Anyone who wasn't Christian was forced to flee the Spanish territories, and the town of Chefchaouen was populated by many of these refugees.
There are a few theories as to why Chefchaouen is painted almost entirely in shades of blue. One of these says it was to ward off mosquitos. As with Haint Blue, this theory proposes that mosquitos are disoriented by the blue color of the sky, and so will quite literally "buzz off." It may repel insects since the paint is lime-based. But, it may be more useful to perhaps understand the tradition of white-washing of Mediterranean towns, like nearby Tetuan on the Moroccan coast, or many Mediterranean islands. White-washing serves a few purposes: as a lime-based paint, it reinforces brick or concrete structures; it is white, and so reflects heat keeping buildings cool, and it acts as an antifungal and antibacterial agent. Since lime is naturally white, that explains, in a sense, white, but not blue.
Another theory suggests it was by a tradition of Jewish refugees who fled southern Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century, settling in Morocco. Blue represented the color of the sky and the sea, and similar spiritual salvation in its infiniteness and blue is historically the color of Judaism. We tend to believe an extension of this theory: that painting houses blue was a way to distinguish Jews from Muslims. Chefchaouen was culturally diverse but within a Muslim country. Rather than a mandate of the Muslim majority, it was by choice of the Jews themselves—for identity, solidarity, or salvation. Unlike the Jewish ghetto of 15th century Venice and elsewhere, these homes were integrated into the community. Rather than a unifying aesthetic, it was one of religious identity, but not of persecution or exclusion. Historically Jews were accepted by Arab rulers as "of the book," and the religions and history of the two were often united against Christianity. It has also been suggested that Jews escaping Europe under Fascism of the 1930s came to Chefchaouen and either started or continued the tradition of painting their houses blue. The last Jewish family emigrated to Israel in the 1960s, so the religious connotations to Judaism are now somewhat lost. Some say the continuation in the 1970s of painting the medina blue was to simply boost tourism. All of these theories might be true, at least in part. What we are left with is the physiological experience of being immersed in blue. It radiates, becomes light, and accentuates every other color in its radius.
Conclusion
In 1924, the French artist Jacques Majorelle built a house and garden in Marrakech, after falling in love with the color and light there. Influenced by Moroccan blue tiles, he developed and painted his house blue and named the specific color Majorelle Blue. Although Majorelle was an advocate for Moroccan culture, we cannot ignore the fact that there is some colonial exploitation of his ownership of the copyrighted color. Although Majorelle Blue reflects both European and African influences that inform modern notions of fashion and design, the free use of blue in Chefchaouen shows how color is more equitably cross-cultural.
In Morocco and elsewhere, nomadic peoples carry their possessions with them. Partly because of the transitory nature of living and the Islamic belief against idolatry, color and pattern become vehicles for abstract spirituality. The Jews that fled to Chefchaouen brought very little with them besides their beliefs and traditions. With this in mind, it is easy to understand how color can embody culture and history. The ubiquitous illusion of blue in the sea and the sky is a universal symbol of the infinite as salvation and transcendence. For us, our immersion in the blue of Chefchaouen became about transcending suffering, and the color became a pure form of joy and celebration of life.
