Fadma Lhacen: Healer of Women and Weaver of Textiles (Moroccan Berber Healer)

Abstract

In the Tafilalet oasis of southeastern Morocco, one of the first people I met was a seventy-year-old Berber woman, Fadma Lhacen. I did not know then how much I would learn from her. Nor could I know then that her mud-brick home with its largely female household would become my home two years later when I returned to study Berber art and the role of women in artistic production. Instead, when I first met Fadma, we did not even have a common language. Then I knew neither Arabic nor Berber, her native language. I tried to communicate with her youngest daughter in French, but since she had last used French in school eight years ago, it was rusty. We did have a good time though, laughing at our inability to talk and communicating with each other in sign language.