The Last Indigo Dyer of the Wadi

The blue is the first thing, before the person, before the room. It is everywhere in Tahar Oujdi's courtyard — dripping from lengths of cloth strung overhead, crusted around the rims of the sunken vats, worked so deep into the creases of his hands that no amount of washing has touched it in forty years. "You do not choose indigo," he told me, lifting a skein from a vat and holding it up to oxidize. As I watched, the cloth changed its mind in the air: out of the vat it was a dull swampy green, and then, breath by breath as the air reached it, it turned — green to teal to a blue so deep it seemed lit from inside. "Indigo chooses you," he said. "And then it never lets your hands go."

Where the blue comes from

Real indigo is not a pigment you paint on. It is a chemical trick performed by a living vat. The dye is fermented in a sunken jar — plant matter, wood ash, a little lime, warmth, and time — until the liquid turns a particular coppery green with a metallic sheen on top that dyers call "the flower." Cloth dipped into this liquid comes out green and turns blue only on contact with air, as the dye oxidizes and locks into the fibre. The depth of the blue is built dip by dip: a pale sky after one, a working blue after several, a near-black indigo after a dozen patient immersions with a drying in between each. The vat is alive and it has moods. Oujdi feeds his, checks it, talks to it a little, the way you would tend a sourdough or a slow fire.

The vat is alive. You do not command it. You keep it well, and it keeps you. — Tahar Oujdi, dyer

Why it nearly vanished

A little over a century ago the world learned to make blue in a factory, cheaply and identically, and the bottom fell out of the living-vat trade almost overnight. The synthetic version is a fine and useful thing, but it is not this: it does not shift in the air, it does not deepen with wear, it does not carry the faint sweet-sour smell of the ferment that people here associate with good cloth. One by one the courtyards went quiet. Oujdi is, by his own careful accounting, the last person in this wadi still keeping a vat the old way year-round. For a long time he expected to be the last, full stop.

Who is learning it next

He is no longer so sure, and that is the hopeful part of this story. Twice a week now his courtyard fills with students — a couple of local teenagers, a textile designer who moved out from the city, a young man from the next valley who intends to open a vat of his own. They come for the same reason people are returning to earth walls and hand-cut salt: the factory version is everywhere and cheap, and precisely because of that, the living version has become worth learning again. Oujdi teaches the way he was taught, by the hands, with almost no words, letting the vat correct the mistakes.

"They ask me if I am worried the knowledge will die," he said, wringing a finished length of cloth the color of deep water. "I tell them: look at your hands." Three of the students had blue in their creases already, the first faint layer of a stain that, if they keep at it, will never fully leave. "The blue is in their hands now," he said. "That is how it stays alive. Not in a book. In the hands."