Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  Olivia is no rabble rouser. She does not harangue us with her outrage at the statelessness of Palestine, the injustices heaped upon it. She is not here to talk about the conflict. What she is here to do is to tell us about a people, like too many others in the world, who have been displaced from where they belong and annexed from elsewhere. In Palestine, they have been separated more emphatically than most by the physical reality of the wall. But, as she explains, refugees all around the world are separated, not just physically but emotionally: by exhaustion, fear, their own powerlessness. And it is women who become most isolated from everyone but family. War has immobilised them, but for the sake of their family they must create a still point of safety. They are the steady, unmoving, unchanging core for men and children to return to.

  The idea of experiential tourism is simple: home stays. But the purpose is more complex and compelling. Visitors don’t just stay with a refugee family; they sign up for an activity run by their host, such as cookery or traditional embroidery. The activity is a crucial part of the experience. It is an alternative to the sometimes detached voyeurism of cultural or political tourism, focused not on the history and effects of conflict or the tragic stories of displacement, not even on telling or showing the ordinary life of war-torn victims. Instead, through home stays, visitors share in the everyday activity of a household, they live the difficult reality of family life. They are there when there’s a power cut or a water shortage; there when a mother frets over the late return of a child from school; there to hear first-hand tales of harassment at the border controls, the nightmare of travel. As the visitor and her hostess knead dough or sit close over stitching, an empathy develops. The visitor becomes involved and her understanding grows. It is this she will take back home with her, not snapshots of a place and its heritage, but intimate images of family life. This form of tourism offers a different kind of journey of human discovery and personal connection. It is journey on which you learn to care.

  For refugee women in Palestine and elsewhere who feel forgotten and unheard, this kind of experiential tourism gives them access to people in the wider world, beyond the socially curtailed home they inhabit. It offers a sense of mattering. Through home stays, refugee women can exercise their social skills, offer the dignity of hospitality and have the boon of financial reward. They are no longer passive as victims, but are active as hosts whose traditions and experiences matter. It is a small release from anonymity and a way to replenish worth.

  At the end of her talk, Olivia introduces a live feed to Palestine, where a young designer, Noora Husseini from Ramallah, talks enthusiastically about the forthcoming launch of her new collection from the social enterprise Taita Leila, which references traditional Palestinian embroidery through modern designs and will be promoted and sold online to a worldwide market. As she talks, the signal fades and goes; we hear her apologies but can no longer see her. Then she re-connects. It seems like a metaphor for her life in Palestine: erratic, dislocated, uncertain. But through such technology, however sporadic the signal, lies the possibility of connection, of being able to participate in a creative consumer world that lies beyond the political and emotional divide.

  Traditionally, Palestinian embroidery and dress provided an intricate code of social signalling, each village marking difference in distinctive stitches and patterns, the construction of a garment or sleeve design, the kind of threads used and sewing techniques, colours and motifs. Needlework was a form of detailed genealogy – each motif and stitch had a specific name, each detail an ascribed locality. It encapsulated human diversity in an internal system of personal and intercommunity communication.

  In 1948, when the State of Israel was established, Palestinian villages were destroyed, abandoned or occupied. Survivors were resettled in refugee camps in the West Bank or the Gaza strip, in Jordan and Lebanon. Their traditional way of life was eradicated. Communities, no longer separated geographically, were jumbled together in overcrowded camps, their identities displaced, their distinctive embroideries no longer relevant. This human fragmentation resulted in a scattering of meaning, and the age-old significance of sewing as a form of embroidered mapping lost purchase.

  At first, Palestinian women continued to sew as they had always done, safeguarding their village stitches, holding on to their diverse material identities, honouring their unique stitched heritage, filling the absence of their past identities with their patterns. Over time, however, such markings mattered less. In the camps, they were all refugees. A new homogeneity emerged; a shared memory of loss. What was more important was solidarity and the collective forging of a united national identity.

  During the 1980s and 90s, Palestinian needlework began to change. Patterns became conflated, colours mixed, a mixed repertoire of stitches became fused. A younger generation began to include patriotic symbols within regional variations: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Palestinian flag, the word Palestinian stitched out in letters. It indicated a changing sensibility, a strengthening of a national consciousness. Village variations became subsumed into a more cohesive and radical symbolism which reinforced national pride. This was embroidery shaped by resistance, and is what is now being stitched in camps and settlements in Palestine in needlework cooperatives and small design studios: embroidery that, while respecting the past, articulates the present and traces out a future.

  Embroidery is often the last remnant of identity to be salvaged by the dispossessed. Emerging from the fray of war, women often take up a needle and thread as a practical occupation. It is accessible, cheap, requires limited space and basic tools. Through it they can create saleable goods to market in the camps themselves and, with the help of aid charities, sell to wider markets. But their motive is not solely financial. Sewing has a deeper resonance. It re-threads a sense of identity, reclaims a culture, anchors communities adrift from their social history and generates a community spirit, at the same time keeping future generations in touch with their heritage.

  Throughout the world, in the culture of textile, it is clothing that carries the most clearly articulated political and social values of a community. Its sewing is imbued with culture, beliefs, history and landscape. For most refugees, as for Palestinians, the loss of place is the saddest loss of all because place is not just a physical location, but also the wellspring of a community culture through which identity is collectively shaped and individually represented. And what we wear is its most intimate expression. Our clothes, worn next to our skin, are mediators between ourselves and the external world. They tell others who we are and where we belong. They protect us and declare us. They carry our social stamp.

  The kilt is the material mark of Scotland. Since I am Scottish, it would seem natural for me to claim tartan as my defining fabric. But coming from Glasgow, a city of sharp urban style, I had limited exposure to kilts, which were a costume, in my experience, to be donned only when Scotland was in sentimental mode: on television at Hogmanay, at Burns suppers or for a big rugby game. But when I first met my husband and went to his father’s birthday party, I discovered a world comfortable in a ceilidh of kilts not worn with self-consciousness or a tokenistic nod to national identity, but simply because it was the natural dress for the occasion. When we married and set up home in a small glen, I grew to delight in the flare of kilts tossing up and down among a burl of dancers in the village hall. In time, I found myself altering the kilt my husband had worn as a boy to fit our son, pieced, as was the tradition, from his grandfather’s kilt. A tactility of generations, material rites of passage handed on from man to boy: a quiet, precious heritage.

  The kilt is more than a national dress. It carries the triumph of victory, of Scottish identity and independence reclaimed. Kilts were banned after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746 in the Dress Act of that same year, amended with more censorious measures in the Proscription Act of 1747. The failed attempt to restore a Stuart dynasty to Scotland so incited the rage of the English King George II that he was deter
mined to destroy Highland culture and its clan system forever. Speaking Gaelic was forbidden, the playing of the bagpipes was made a criminal offence and the most visible representation of Highland identity, of rebellion and male virility, the plaid (or kilt, as it is now more commonly called), was proscribed. The people of Scotland were forbidden to wear:

  the plaid, philibeg, or little kilt, trouse, shoulder belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the highland garb and that no TARTAN or partly-coloured plaid or stuff shall be used for great coats, or for upper coats.

  The penalty was imprisonment for six months; a second offence risked transportation to a plantation for seven years. (Ironically, the order book of one of the major suppliers of tartan, Wilson’s of Bannockburn, records the export of tartan cloth to plantations, where slaves were made to wear it to ensure their high visibility should they try to escape.)

  The Proscription Act remained in place for nearly forty years before finally being repealed in 1782. At the start of the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish nation’s most celebrated novelist of the time, took it upon himself to enhance Scotland’s appeal with typical romantic and nationalistic fervour. He fictionalised the concept of a Scottish, rather than Highland, entitlement and even enticed the English King George IV northwards in 1822 to participate in a theatricalised spectacle of Scottish pageantry. The King’s Jaunt, as its sceptics nicknamed the royal visit to Edinburgh, owed little to Highland tradition and much to the imagination and showmanship of Sir Walter himself. Here were the Scottish gentry festooned in a kaleidoscope of kilted splendour, and George himself swathed in a fat-camouflaging insult of Stuart tartan, his legs decorously clad in pink tights.

  The upsurge in material clan identity was a boon to Scotland’s burgeoning weaving industry. In the early nineteenth century, Scotland, still bruised by its cultural reduction by English command and longing for an identity emphatically its own, embraced the ambitions of the Sobieski brothers, christened Allen, who claimed direct descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, and became the feted if bogus claimants to the royal Stuart line. In 1842 they produced a beautifully illustrated inventory of ‘ancient’ tartans, the Vestiarium Scoticum. Some people questioned its authenticity and when it was shown to be largely fictional, with many of the tartan designs exposed as figments of the brothers’ imagination, their duplicity was revealed. The brothers retreated to London, but many of the tartans they had invented were adopted despite their spurious heritage. They can be seen in tourist gift shops throughout Scotland, at Highland Games, village ceilidhs: the tartans of the Sobieski brothers, an inauthenticity embraced, more splendid and more diverse than its original.

  If traditional dress is not erased by the breaking apart of community traditions, its use can be disbanded through fear and force. Oppressors’ assertion of power has frequently been enforced through the suppression of traditional dress. Their intention is not only to sever a community from its past, but also to rob it of its spiritual protection and its cultural and ceremonial values; to silence its ability to communicate identity, beliefs, relationships and mutual significance. To rob a community of what nourishes its sacred and secular meaning is to render it mute. It makes assimilation more easily managed.

  Missionaries, those proselytisers of Christianity who, since the sixteenth century had travelled to un-Christian regions of the world with conversion in mind, were, despite their preaching of goodwill to all men, equally guilty of wiping out the ancient spiritual and social significance of tribal clothing. Scandalised by ‘pagan’ symbolism, alarmed by riotous patterning and horrified by magical connotations, they mounted zealous campaigns to re-clothe tribes in more suitable apparel, the adoption of which signalled compliance and conversion. Missionary wives were keen to make their own contribution to the Christian cause and set up needlework schools to introduce what they considered to be more demure forms of sewing and dressmaking.

  Emma Hahn, the wife of the Lutheran missionary Hugo Hahn who established the first Rhenish mission station in Gross Barmen in the desert plain of Namibia, began organising sewing classes there in 1846. She introduced the women of local tribes – the Herero, Oorlam and Nama – to the fashions of Europe: stiff bodices, full gathered voluminous skirts and layered petticoats accessorised with bonnets and shawls. The women adopted the cumbersome weight of these clothes and their cloying warmth with surprising zeal. To them, there was much more to such attire than a borrowed modernity. It represented the capacity of a powerful and economically strong nation. It embodied authority. By 1850, Emma Hahn had a class of forty women, and by 1867 she needed to import a sewing machine to cope with the demands of production. European clothing and cloth became valued as tradeable goods, worth stealing if necessary. They represented status. Local tribesmen began to adopt trousers and suits; some even took to wearing dresses and bonnets. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, German colonial rule took hold in Namibia. Already weakened by inter-tribal wars, in 1904 the Herero rebelled against German domination. Their resistance was met with violent acts of enforced subordination: they were hunted down and shot. Many of those who escaped the genocide fled to the Omaheke Desert and died there of starvation or exhaustion. Those who survived became enslaved and were imprisoned in concentration camps.

  When German rule ended in 1915 there were few vestiges left of traditional Herero life. The Herero had lost their lands, their cattle, their customs and their rituals, and their social cohesion and identity was all but erased. To rebuild a community, reorganise a society and reclaim tribal dignity, they turned to the social structures and ceremonial displays of their oppressors.

  Herero men organised themselves into regiments called Otreppe, which, although non-military, stratified social groupings, their differences indicated through hybrid versions of military dress: some in bowlers and trilby hats, others in ostrich-feathered helmets or colour-coded epaulettes and belts. They customised the uniforms left behind by their colonialists, concocted their own motley adaptations, and paraded in colours that symbolised key moments of their history. This was military and capitalist power transformed into a public expression of reclaimed independence.

  The women too retained the fashions they had been introduced to by Emma Hahn over fifty years earlier but, freed from German rule, they now caricatured them with skirts made from over ten metres of fabric, exaggerated in bold, brash patchwork, to amplify their presence and emphasise their appropriation of Western needlework traditions. Through such clothes, the Herero wore not just a heritage, but their specific history. And they still wear them today as an everyday mark of who they are, even in the fifty-degree heat, to record a community identity altered by cultural contact, persecution and survival. The photographer Jim Naughton has photographed the Herero tribe in his book Conflict and Costume. It is a vivid portrayal of a community told through portraits that leaves us in no doubt as to the Herero tribe’s reclamation of self-respect. Such a repossession is dearly bought; it requires a major investment of time in a country where many sewers are still reliant on hand-worked sewing machines, where water for washing must be fetched and carried and irons heated on hot coals. For the Herero, though, what they wear is a self-proclamation, a mark of pride and also a protection of sorts, ensuring that their story will endure.

  We can find the legacy of Western colonialisation in many parts of the world and in the unlikeliest of places. In 1991, when I visited Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean, I was surprised to find women quilting under the shade of palm trees. It was a cultural remnant of the proselytising European Christian missionaries who had come to the island in 1821 as part of the London Missionary Society. The missionaries brought with them calico cloth and, having persuaded the islanders to forgo their animist culture and their worship of tribal gods and idols and adopt a Christian God instead, they instructed the local women in Western techniques of needlework to make clothes and home furnishings. This is why an anomaly of needlework survives, i
n their quilts, a form of sewing designed for cold countries, but now transported to a climate where, even in cool periods, the temperature rarely drops below twenty-five degrees. The Cook islanders have, over time, reintroduced into their quilts some elements of their indigenous culture, such as a love of bright colour and symbols that held meaning in older traditions, but in the tidy arrangement of their quilted blocks, they retain a constraining Western influence: stitched squares corralled within a tight framework, a sewn archive of their religious conversion.

  In some instances, oppression or the prudery of missionaries did not mean the complete abandonment of traditional dress, but rather its customisation. Invasion often led to a deliberate neutering of the spiritual and symbolic language of a vanquished nation, leading to a country diminished not by ethnic cleansing but by cultural erosion, by the re-fashioning of its visual language and folk costumes into a more sterile form and the reinvention of them as innocuous and charming remnants of rural peasant life.

  When the Soviet Union was created there was no place for the diversity of languages and cultures of what had been, until then, independent nations. Any lurking expression of national identity could fan unrest and encourage uprisings. In Ukraine the wearing of national costume was forbidden, denounced as a provocation of anti-Soviet feeling. Its wearers could be, and were, imprisoned. Museums were instructed to destroy their traditional costume collections. The Soviet Government did not banish national costume entirely, however; that might have led to it becoming a dangerous clandestine symbol of defiance, of it gaining rather than losing power. Instead, they designed a different secularised and theatricalised version, which Ukrainians were instructed to wear for public dance performances and festivals. By maintaining a Soviet-wrought neutered version, the authorities reduced its potency and stayed in control of its meaning.