Ellen Datlow Quote

Merchant Bashir got up and plodded to a pile of rugs. He grabbed a kilim and unrolled it across the floor. A mosaic of black, yellow, and maroon geometries glimmered. He taught me rug weaving. It’s a nomadic art, he said. Pattern making carries the past into the future. Bashir pointed to a recurrent cross motif that ran down the kilim’s center. The four corners of the cross are the four corners of the universe. The scorpion here—he toed a many-legged symmetric creature woven in yellow—represents freedom. Sharif taught me this and more. He was a natural at symbols. I asked him why he went to Turkey. He looked at me and said, ‘To learn to weave the best kilim in the world.