by Clare Hunter
The Hmong story cloths became a way of retaining a threatened identity. While the stitching of the panels had an economic trigger, they were also emotionally significant, documenting shared terror and loss. These weren’t personal tales, but collective laments. While they undoubtedly had creative and therapeutic value for the women who made them, they effected more than an individual salve. They provided a clan, the Hmong diaspora of refugees still in Thailand, with a cultural archive. Exported to or made in host countries, they became symbolic of a re-formed Hmong identity, one that included its recent history. Their bright colours and tragic tales had a public appeal which was important to refugees trying to negotiate acceptance in a country whose language they didn’t share. The Hmong’s appliquéd and embroidered stories were exhibited in galleries and community centres. They were sold in charity and gift shops; books and articles were written about them. The publicity and proceeds helped to sustain a new enterprise for displaced families, but more important was what they brought to the dispersed Hmong people. They salvaged a sense of belonging, of still being connected to a culture and a community.
The origin of their story cloths is unknown. Were they an invention of the post-war generation of Hmong or the suggestion of an aid worker, or did they emerge from their more ancient parent culture of the Miao? Intrigued by the possibility of the latter, I applied to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for a travel fellowship to go on a quest to see if story cloths existed in the Miao heartland of southwest China. I wanted to discover whether the Hmong sewn narratives had roots in their ancient heritage, reclaimed, like a mother tongue, as a lost language of tribal identity. An interview in London had me grilled on my ability to survive the rigours of an area of rural China that had only been opened-up to foreigners eight years earlier. Something of the determined thrill I showed for the chase must have appealed to the judges because in December 1995 I found myself on a dark and empty country lane that stretched away from Guiyang’s airport.
I have spent the day in Kaili sketching Miao designs in the city’s museum. The curator was impressed enough with my drawings to switch on the lights and bring me a stool. Although there were wonderful displays of embroidered skirts and shaman’s robes inscribed with mystic secrets. There were no story cloths. When I left the museum, bright barrage balloons floated above the main street, marking the opening of a new department store. On the second floor, inside a locked glass cabinet, I saw an exquisitely tooled leather toilet case alongside a plastic bottle of Duck disinfectant. There was no incongruity there. In pre-millennium China, both were luxury items.
The market had glowing hillocks of oranges and teetering piles of hand-made baskets, but the yards of unbleached cotton and the bundled skeins of silk thread that I had hoped for were nowhere to be seen. Instead there were waterfalls of lurid nylon in acid colours and stretches of acrylic wool: China on its new road to consumerism.
I visit the Sichuan University Museum in Chengdu, which is said to house over 40,000 cultural artefacts including a trove of Miao textiles. The museum, once I find it, seems lost in time, as if a sleeping princess might lie within a thicket of briar roses. I am its only visitor. I find Miao costumes stilled behind glass, their colours dimmed by a curtain of dust. Their presence is eerie, as if their wearers had momentarily evaporated, leaving their clothes poised mid-dance. In the quiet of the gallery I take out my sketchbook and begin to draw. Suddenly, a young woman appears at my side in a chatter of chiding. She holds out her hand for my sketchbook, which I dutifully hand over. She thumbs through it quickly. As she peruses my drawings of baby hats and marriage purses, of Buddhist banners and silken collars, of women washing clothes by the river and a family crowded together on a single bicycle, she begins to smile. She closes the book and, crooking her finger conspiratorially, beckons me to follow.
She stops by a small door, which she unlocks. It opens onto a bare room lined with wooden cabinets. A long empty table runs down its length. She opens one of the cabinets. A glory of Miao textiles spills into her arms. With gleeful exclamations, she heaps them on the table. She opens another and frees more embroideries, making a soft hill of decorative cloth. They are all old textiles, their colours muted through time. Where have they all come from? How has so much been lost to the villagers who created them? Have they been given up willingly or taken as plunder, or in some desperate exchange for other necessities? It is a collection way beyond what would pass for cultural conservation.
I pick up a baby carrier and notice a small scrap of paper stuck to its back. It is a price tag. How do you price talismanic textiles? This piece was made by a mother to ensure the exact alignment of her and her baby’s hearts, her protective blessings stitched into its ribbons. I turn over another textile and find another price. I have been led to the shop. I am expected to buy.
Preservation of culture and its commercial potential are the dual demands of modern-day China; they are not necessarily incompatible, but require compromise and care. The Cultural Revolution saw the enforced destruction of much of the Han’s traditional crafts. But now that the economic lure of tourism has taken hold, the surviving folk art of the country’s minorities has much to offer. It appeals to visitors and is a profitable resource, but it makes minority groups vulnerable to cultural loss.
In that small room in the museum in Chengdu there was poignancy in the dislocation of the textiles before me, severed from their communities and their spiritual purpose. Crammed into a dark of neglect they had been denied the meaning they should have had. I bought a jacket. The museum attendant was pleased but I felt unaccountably guilty.
It was on Christmas Day in the village of Shidong that I finally found the story cloths of the Miao.
I arrive at a river misted in winter. A cormorant is straining at its chain to claim a fish as the boat to which it is anchored skims along the water. At the river’s curve I can hear the small strangled sound of lusheng pipes, the bamboo reed pipes Chinese musicians play at festivals and rituals. They herald another boat which, when it rounds into view, boasts a bride in lustred finery gazing forlornly towards her new home and a different community. With my guides, I climb up from the patchwork of paddy fields, scattering chickens and pigs, to reach the house of a woman reputed to be the best embroiderer in the village.
She is expecting me. She has laid out her embroideries and those of her mother and grandmother on the floor of her newspaper-lined home. She is a rounded, plump woman, dressed for warmth, the final cardigan straining at her chest, her glasses slipping down her nose, her hair knotted up in the style of all the women here, pinned with decorative skewers. Her welcome is warm. She is more than ready for a show. The neighbours cluster outside the open door, peeking in like onions strung on a rope, one head above another.
First, she announces, she will demonstrate. She squats on a low stool by the light of the doorway, drags another stool close to it and gestures for me to sit. With large, calloused hands, she picks up a tiny sliver of a needle and snips off a length of thread whose end she licks with a slick of saliva. Holding the needle aloft in pantomimic style, she slips the thread into the almost non-existent eye of the needle and nods. I nod. We both nod. The neighbours give a collective wheeze of pleasure. She is my teacher and I am her pupil. This is how it should be between East and West.
She shows me how the Miao edge their embroidery with tiny triangles. She demonstrates how to cord glistening threads by twisting them tightly on two sticks, weighted by stones, and how to lay down a thin strip of gold foil and sew across it at intervals to break its sheen and make it glint even more. She sews and I learn. After a while she invites me to take over her stitching. The neighbours inch in, keen on the entertainment. Realising she has thrown me a challenge, I take up the tiny needle cautiously and begin to sew. When I reach a curve where the lie of the thread must change, I look to her for guidance. The neighbours sigh in satisfaction. My teacher jabs an earth-grimed finger on the place where the needle must go next and watches closely while
I diligently follow the direction she has indicated. When I have finished she claps her hands approvingly and the neighbours sigh again, this time in disappointment. We take turns, comfortable like this on our low stools in the keen light of winter, sewing together.
Lesson over, she takes me to her display of embroideries, carpeted on the floor for me to see. In among the hats, bags, aprons, jackets, skirts, collars and baby carriers, I spy a small embroidered rectangle crammed with sewn illustration, similar in size to a Hmong textile. I hold it up. ‘What is this?’ I ask through Li, my guide interpreter. To my surprise and delight, the small indigo rectangle is indeed a Miao story cloth, its tale narrated in embroidery.
We gather around the woman who smooths out the small rectangle and reads its tale as you would read a picture book to a child, pointing to characters as she names them, tracing the circle of their embroidered world with an emphatic finger as she tells their story, her dramatic monologue a lullaby told through Li’s laconic echo. He is bored now by sewing and the company of women. The neighbours join in with interjections, corrections and exclamations like a chorus in a Greek tragedy.
‘It is,’ the woman tells me, ‘one of the oldest of the Miao myths.’ There is a circle for the earth, I am told. Inside the circle are two bodiless grinning heads with fearsome stitched eyebrows: the gods. Outside the circle are two more gods together with a young woman, her hair knotted high, carrying a basket: the mother when young. A whiskered woman in navy trousers flecked with white: the mother when old. What about the girl in the brightly coloured skirt riding an indigo dragon and the young man on the horse? Her daughter and her son; sister and brother.
In the ancient days, near but not at the beginning of humanity, there was a mother and her son and her daughter and, after the great flood that fell upon the earth, they were the only three people left alive in the world. And the son realised that the human race would end with them unless he could bear sons, but the only women alive were his mother and his sister. His sister, frightened by his intent, bridled up a dragon and rode fast away to the other side of the world to make her escape. But her brother jumped on his horse and rode after her. Around the world they rode, but no matter how much the brother kicked his heels into his horse’s flanks, his sister’s dragon was faster and she stayed out of reach. Exhausted and frustrated, the brother implored the gods to help him save the human race from extinction. One spoke quietly but wisely: ‘Ride around the world the other way and you are sure to meet your sister.’ He did what he was told and turned his horse around and rode in the opposite direction, encountering his sister and forcing her to his will. And so mankind was fostered and this tale is told.
All this on a small rectangle of cloth: the story of the procreation of humanity in such a density of stitches you could feel its rise and fall as you stroked its surface. It is an incest myth that would not be thought suitable today as bedtime reading for our children, but it is one of many found in ancient folklore throughout the world in Greek mythology, Nordic legends, Icelandic folk tales and Irish sagas. This Miao tale would have been told over and over again, and sometimes sung about at festivals. It would have been told while a woman embroidered it – a mother to her daughter, grandmother to granddaughter – as her thread looped the characters into shape: the girl on her dragon, the mother with her whiskers, the son on his horse. It would have been told at night as a child sleepily rested in its mother’s lap and fingered the mane of the embroidered horse.
The woman pulls an apron out from her textile display. Its central panel is thick with black woollen stitches, its side panels ablaze with narrative. ‘This’, she tells me through Li, ‘is our story of man’s harmony with nature.’ Her hand guides mine through its maze, tracing out the contours of a serpent snaking centre stage, surrounded by monkeys, birds and frogs secreted in a dense blackness. They are lit only by the pink of the serpent’s eye and the gleam of claws. It is the story of evolution, darkly told. The apron’s panelled sides animate human history, how man made his accommodation with the creatures of the earth. An Adam figure travels through his universe of cockerels, butterflies, crested birds, flying fish, centipedes, tigers, horses, dragonflies, owls and rats. The creatures crowd together, sewn in every imaginable shade of red, hues of pink, crimson, scarlet, rose, burgundy and cerise. It is a riot of redness that captures a series of encounters between man and beast, man and insect, man threading his way and trying to find his place on earth.
It’s hard to believe you can take a blank piece of cloth and, without drawing a mark, stitch such an intense medley of human history. But yet, this is what Li told me is the way of much of Miao embroidery. Sometimes a paper stencil is made first, pasted on to the cloth to act as a guide, but often the embroiderer just holds the images of a story in her head and sews them free-hand. And here in this apron is the extraordinary truth of that. It is an embroidery that reveals the human capacity for visual memory and the depth of creative intimacy it is possible to achieve between man and nature: a symbiotic collaboration, a communion so practised they can call it into being, into feeling, through the skill of a stitcher’s touch.
The Miao are animists, and believe that everyone and everything has a spirit. They manifest the spirit of their sewn cloth softly and slowly through embroidery, coaxing into being something they believe already exists but is waiting for transportation from the spiritual to the temporal world. They are responsible for its wellbeing and are the guardians of its soul.
There is no written Miao language. Oral history relates that they lost their original writing system when it was proscribed by an early Chinese dynasty. Any infringement was punishable by death. So Miao women began to conserve the Miao alphabet by embroidering mnemonics on their clothes, although no one can now read its code. It is believed that Miao embroidery is lingual and that their sewn story cloths are libraries that house myths, histories, tales of community experiences and sacred tracts of beliefs. Miao embroiderers replicate complex images and patterns from memory, like oral storytellers do, retaining sewn rhythms and choruses of patterns in their heads.
The wellspring of beauty in Miao embroideries lies not just in the objects themselves, but also in the process of their creation. The Miao sow, nurture and harvest plants in the most reluctant of terrains, coaxing yields of the fibres they need for spinning thread and weaving cloth with community care. They steep the cloth for days in vast vats of dyes, walling their villages in drying drapes of indigo. They pound the dyed cloth for hours, the sound of its hammering rising from each house like an echoing drum roll calling spirits to attention. This mashing ensures durability and adds lustre to trap what little light glimmers in a mist-bound landscape.
The Miao work through the seasons towards the communal begetting of beauty. To each season belongs another process, a shared yearly rhythm of seeding, spinning and sewing. It can take months to produce a small baby carrier, years to create one jacket. Sometimes it can take a whole day to stitch just one centimetre of cloth. But this is their gift to their gods. The difficulties they overcome, the patience they practise, their labour and time, are all gifts. The greater the challenge, the more time spent, the greater the gift they bestow.
I ask my hostess what she would like to sell. She holds out the apron. I am uncertain; it seems too great a treasure. Aware of my hesitation, she shows me another identical apron showing the same story. I ask the price. She names it. I do not haggle; I do not feign astonishment; I do not demur. This is a work of art, a work of undisputed beauty. It is treasure.
9
Protest
In the New Living Translation of the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, Isaiah is commanded to ‘raise a banner on a barren hilltop: shout to them, beckon them to enter the gates of the nobles’ (13:2). The legions in ancient Rome led their armies into battle with banners at their helm. Banners also adorned Roman city streets, where, emblazoned with coats of arms, they marked out who lived where. Throughout medieval Europe, banners were used as a chivalric v
isual code, to carry the colours and emblems of a king or knight and signal his allegiance to a cause or the woman he loved. The legacy of this ‘carrying of colours’ still persists in Italy where, for 500 years, the Palio di Siena, a spectacular pageant and horse race, is held twice a year in the Piazza del Campo. Each participating neighbourhood, or contrada, is identified by the design of its painted or embroidered banners, which sway from balconies throughout the city and are thrown and caught in billowing bravado by flag wavers in costumed parades. The race itself lasts for just ninety seconds. The winning contrada is awarded the coveted palio (the word is derived from the Latin pallium, meaning ‘a precious piece of cloth’), which honours the Virgin Mary and is ceremoniously presented to the victorious contrada in the city’s grand cathedral.
Banners are public proclamations that tell of the who, the what and the why of social and political fealty. They message solidarity and collective strength. Banners are declarations of identity. They have been adopted by trade unions, friendly societies, fraternity groups, bands of hope, masonic lodges, women’s institutes, churches and campaigning charities to create bold, often beautiful, visual statements that encapsulate both a message and a purpose.
In 1984 the Mansfield Trades Council in Nottinghamshire contacted me. It wanted to boost local participation in its May Day parade by encouraging greater community involvement. We agreed on a project of community banner-making with the theme: Mansfield Past, Present and Future. Local groups were invited to make a banner representing their own organisation and join in with the May Day procession. The parade would end with a phalanx of young people wearing headdresses of white question marks. For this was a community uncertain about its future, a mining area where generation upon generation had depended on the pits, not just for their livelihood, but for their way of life. This was the year the miners’ strike took hold.