PUDRE ROUGE

Poudre Rouge was born out of an adventure in the Moroccan desert. I was headed to Ouarzazate to search for rose essential oil, but in the end I found more than just an essence. Leaving Marrakech in a beat-up car, I climbed a winding road through the Atlas Mountains. After a few kilometers, the vegetation became sparser to give way to an arid landscape of earth and red rocks; it looked like a lunar landscape. As soon as I passed the mountains, I arrived in a fortified city, I had the feeling of living in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.” High walls and huge handmade red earth towers surrounded by palm trees, in the middle of a desert-I had been practically catapulted into another world. Arriving in Ouarzazate, I discovered that the Hollywood “Studios” had in fact filmed a number of movies here that made movie history. Just before arriving in this town is Morocco’s most famous Kasbah, Kasbah Ait Ben Haddou, carved into the mountain-a jaw-dropping sight. There are no words to describe what nature and the hand of man have shaped over time. Silence accompanies the traveler as he wanders through the alleys of this thousand-year-old city, a silence of admiration, a silence of respect. Arriving finally in the valley of roses, I was incredulous to see this oasis with damask rose plants in the middle of such a barren, red landscape. Probably the presence of the damask rose in this place comes from caravaners and merchants from the East who left rose seeds here as a trade commodity. Today, tons of roses are still grown in this valley, producing some of the finest essential oil in the world. On the return journey, I noticed a symbol drawn on a rock, it looked like a cave painting: it was the letter “Z” of the Berber alphabet, meaning “free man,” freedom. At that moment everything I had seen and experienced up to that day flashed before my eyes, from the trip to the kasbha to the sharing of food eaten with my hands, to the tea drunk in the desert with my friend Omar, and I understood the meaning those peoples give to the word Freedom. Since that day I always wear that symbol around my neck.