Zanafi
A striped flatweave from the Draa valley where every row is a colour decision — the plainest construction in Moroccan weaving, and one of the most honest.
The Zanafi is the most transparent of the Moroccan flatweaves: horizontal stripes of varying width and colour run the full width of the cloth, and the whole composition is just the weaver's colour choices as she changes weft at each new band. No hidden geometry, no symbolic reading to decode. The power of a Zanafi is colour and rhythm — which colours, in what order, at what width.
That plainness is deceptive. The best Zanafi weavers make fine judgements: the ratio of wide band to narrow, an accent set against a ground, a run of stripes that builds tension and then resolves it. A Zanafi that looks obvious at a glance turns out, the longer you look, to be exactly right in a way that is hard to explain.
Because the stripes are the structure, a Zanafi lies hard and flat and reads as a graphic object. It sits under furniture without a pile to crush, and it goes into a room the way a plain, strong pattern does. In old natural-dyed pieces — saffron, madder, henna, walnut, pomegranate, indigo — the colour looks as though it came out of the landscape. In a sense it did.