by Clare Hunter
But this mile upon mile of fabric eulogy was an indisputable call to awareness, stitched by those who cared. The NAMES Project ensured that the public was witness to the scale of loss through a haunting and memorable spectacle. Public and governmental attitudes changed. And while the NAMES Memorial Quilt might not have been the trigger, it played its part in raising funds for research, better sex education, preventative measures and effective drugs. Perhaps its main achievement was to realise one of the aims stated in its early publicity: ‘to break down bigotry that inhibits global response’.
People in different countries, at different times and in different ways, have used needlework to speak when their voices have been silenced, to speak for those they have lost through social and political upheaval. Women, especially those who are illiterate or living in poverty, have used sewing because it is the most accessible form available to them and used it as their voice.
The military dictatorship in Chile, which followed the overthrow of President Salvador Allende and his democratic government in 1973, ushered in seventeen years of dictatorship, censorship, curfews and the suspension of civil liberty. Under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile was silenced. The constitution was suspended, left-wing parties proscribed and the media put under the control of the military government. Those who tried to speak out were arrested and imprisoned. In the first three weeks of the new regime, 1,500 are said to have been killed, and many more thousands were rounded up and taken to the two main sports stadiums in Santiago. Sixteen-year-old Lelia Perez was taken with ten of her classmates to the central stadium, the Estadio Nacional, where 18,000 people were eventually detained. Her hands were tied together and she was held there for the next five days. In 1975 she was arrested again, but this time her eyes were taped over and she was subjected to electric shocks. The singer-songwriter Victor Jarra was arrested in September 1973 and, like Lelia, taken to a football stadium where he was beaten up and his fingers smashed. The guards taunted him, ordering him to play the guitar with his broken hands. He was subsequently shot, his body riddled with bullets. According to Amnesty International, during Pinochet’s reign 40,000 people were illegally detained or tortured and up to 3,000 more killed or forcibly disappeared; 30,000 fled the country.
Some of those who were killed, tortured, imprisoned or abducted came from the shanty towns of Santiago. Many were young. Women whose husbands had been abducted or killed became the sole providers for their families. In 1974, the Catholic Church formed the Vicariate of Solidarity as an agent of support and, as part of its aid programme, established a handicraft workshop where women could make products for the Church to sell and provide the women with as an economic lifeline.
Under the guidance of Valentina Bonne, a church official who knew of the appliquéd pictures sewn by women in Isla Negra, the coastal area of Chile, that illustrated their rural fishing community, and aware of the arpilleras (embroideries sewn on burlap, a coarse jute cloth) created by the Chilean artist Violeta Parra, who had exhibited in the Louvre in Paris in 1964, the women were encouraged to make their own arpilleras with scraps of fabric, and sew the scenes of their lives. The women fashioned small three-dimensional dolls to animate their stitched scenes of rural landscapes and city streets, and they told of a Chile in crisis, a community laid low by water and food shortages, poverty and prostitution, unemployment and broken homes. They told of their own experiences, of kidnapped sons and daughters, of their search to find them, of the loneliness of not knowing what had befallen loved ones.
Given the paucity of available materials, they recycled old clothes, dressing their scenes and dolls in fabric they brought from home. Some stitched their own hair onto their dolls’ heads and, little by little, these cloth figures began to embody those they loved. Their sewing became an act of repossession.
The arpilleras depicted domestic scenes of loss: a woman standing by herself in the doorway of her home, a family mealtime with one empty place. There were also exterior scenes: a marketplace with no food on its stalls, unemployed youngsters scavenging for cardboard to sell, policemen making an arrest, a tree with pictures of lost relatives instead of leaves all backgrounded by the Andes mountains and a shining sun or bright moon. They were made in the most cheerful of fabrics, bright colours and pretty fabrics belying the stories of fear and desolation.
Visitors and journalists discovered the arpilleras and started buying them. The Church began to smuggle them out of the country through its own network of support. What started as a way for the women to earn some money became a clandestine, political act. At the time, these were the only dissenting voices to reach the outside world. So, the arpilleras – layered with emotional meaning – became tactile cloths of resistance and symbols of reunion: the joining together of fabric remnants as a metaphor for the reclamation of family.
With their jaunty colours, rudimentary stitching and worn cloth the arpilleras appeared innocuous and were overlooked at first by the regime’s officials as tools of subversion, dismissed as women’s sewing. They weren’t circulated within Chile but exported to other countries as evidence with which to expose the infringements of human rights that were being perpetrated by Pinochet’s regime. Exhibitions were held in Washington, D.C.; Amnesty International published greeting cards, a calendar was printed and the arpilleras found buyers and collectors among the politically aware and the Chilean diaspora. Purchasing an arpillera became an act of solidarity. But the promotion of them by supporters in other countries brought them to the attention of the authorities in Chile itself.
The dictatorship in Chile became incensed. The arpilleras were denounced as ‘tapestries of infamy’. The women were followed, their homes raided, some had a red cross painted on their door to mark out the home of a workshop member. But the women sewed on. They hid their needlework as they made their way to and from the church. They trained other women and the workshops expanded until there were forty throughout the country. After 1993 and the overthrow of Pinochet’s government, their activities became public. The making of arpilleras became what it had originally been intended as: an income-generating scheme for the poor. But the original arpilleristas continued to stitch their stories of loss, unwilling to relinquish their role as political commentators or allow history to be sanitised. They had been at the forefront of political dissent, not only through their sewing, but also through other political actions such as hunger strikes, chaining themselves to railings and publishing the names of the detained and disappeared and they had done so largely without the support of men who, in a patriarchal society, had been generally dismissive, even critical, of their efforts. Now, even with Pinochet’s dictatorship long over, and despite the frailty of their failing sight and ageing hands, they insist on still having a voice, of sewing their laments and testimonies. There is no longer a need or a market for what they make. In Chile, people want to forget. But these women keep faith, denouncing the murderers of their family members, calling them to account, replaying their crimes and documenting the excavation of the mass graves of their loved ones. They are the guardians of a nation’s memory, the conscience of Chile.
And women in other countries have adopted the medium of arpilleras to tell of community trauma. The Conflict Textiles collection at Ulster University, Northern Ireland, has archived arpilleras from Germany, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Spain, Ecuador, Brazil and Canada as well as Chile.
In 1973, the same year that General Pinochet and his military forces took control of Chile, Juan Domingo Peron was re-elected in Argentina as its president after an exile of eighteen years. It marked the beginning of what became known as the Dirty War, an escalating aggression between right and left-wing factions. Political opponents were kidnapped and many never seen again. As in Chile, many of those abducted were young adults. Their mothers went in desperate search of them and fourteen of them, unknown to each other, converged at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in the public square in Buenos Aires, demanding news of t
heir children. They were told to go home. When the guards warned them that it was forbidden for more than three people to gather together in public, the women defiantly linked arms and stayed, strolling in pairs around the public square.
It was the start of what became a thirty-five-year campaign against their loss, of their public proclamation of loss as mothers, as a family. From that first defiance in 1973 they gathered every Thursday, the day they had first met, their numbers swelled by other mothers asking about the whereabouts of their children, more and more coming to the square, until there were hundreds of them asking about the fate of their children.
They named themselves Les Madres de Plaza de Mayo and began to wear white headscarves to mark themselves out as mothers, headscarves that mimicked white nappies. On them they embroidered the names and birth dates of their children, not the date of their disappearance, but the day these women had brought their children into the world. The headscarves were worn as symbols of their mothering, assertions of their responsibility for continuing maternal care and the rights of mothers to protect their young. They identified the women publicly as the Mothers of the Disappeared and, more importantly, identified their children, many of whom were denied an existence by military guards who claimed not to have heard of them never mind know of their whereabouts. The mothers were determined not to let their children to become statistics but to be known as individuals who belonged to others. Through their head-scarves they insisted on their children’s presence. The final March of Resistance took place in 2006. By then the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo had been formed, demanding to know the fate of the 500 children who had been born in detention camps or prisons during Peron’s regime, more than half of them already illegally adopted. Their grandmothers’ campaign resulted in over 100 children being identified and reunited with their biological parents.
It is extraordinary to know now of the measures the government took to silence and stop these mothers’ efforts to find their children or know of their fate. When Azucena Villaflor De Vincenti, a founder member of Les Madres de Plaza de Mayo, published the names of missing young people in a national newspaper in December 1977, on International Human Rights Day, she was abducted, tortured and taken, it transpired, on what became known as a ‘death flight’, and tossed into the sea. Two other founder members met a similar death. That same year their bodies were washed ashore. It took until 2005 and DNA testing for their identities to be verified. Azucena’s ashes were buried in the Playa de Mayo. By then, mass graves had been excavated and the bodies of hundreds of young people exhumed. But their identities lived on in the headscarves their mothers wore. By the end of the Dirty War it was estimated that 30,000 had been kidnapped, most presumed dead and 9,000 people remain unaccounted for.
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz knew only too well the cost of war. Born a Jew in the tiny village of Mniszek in Poland, home to just a dozen families, her childhood was shaped by local rural life – tending geese, swimming in the river, going to market, taking part in the rituals of her Jewish faith, the celebrations of Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah and Passover. At nine she learned to sew, taught by the local dressmaker. In 1939, when Esther was twelve years old, Nazi troops arrived at her village. Her grandfather was dragged from his house and badly beaten. His beard, a symbol of his faith, was cut off as a sign to other Jews in the village that their race, their religion, was despised by their oppressors. The troops set the villagers to work. They depleted their food stock by commandeering food for themselves and forbidding the care of livestock. When Esther’s family were preparing for Passover with the table set with special dishes, two soldiers came to the house and, incensed by the show of a Jewish ceremony, tugged the cloth from the table, sending its dishes smashing to the floor. On discovering a goose that her family had kept hidden in readiness for the feast, they killed it.
But there was worse to come. In 1942 the Gestapo arrived in the village at dawn. They marched Esther’s entire family in their nightshirts under gunpoint to the river, lined them up and raised their guns. Neighbours pleaded for their lives and they were saved. There were dawn raids when she and her family had to run and stay hidden in the woods. She was struck in the face by a soldier’s rifle when he didn’t think she had raised her arms high enough when he had ordered her to do so. Then the day came when the Gestapo ordered all Jews to leave the village and join the wagons going to the station at Krasni. Those who disobeyed their orders would be shot. Esther disobeyed. Unlike her parents, who believed they were being sent to a Jewish ghetto, Esther was convinced that the journey would end in imprisonment in a concentration camp and possibly death. She persuaded her parents to let her and her younger sister Mania find a different means of escape. On 15 October, they bid goodbye to their parents, brother, little sisters, aunts, uncle and five cousins. Esther was only fifteen years old and Mania thirteen when they became fugitives. They never saw their family again.
The girls masqueraded as Polish Catholics, changed their names to Josephine and Maria and hid in attics protected by courageous people and they survived the war. After Liberation, in July 1944, Esther went in search of her family. She visited the concentration camp in Maidanek outside Lublin, where she thought they might have been taken. She saw the small hills of shoes and heard about the massacre at nearby Krepicki Forest, where 18,000 Polish Jews were killed in November 1943. She joined the Russian and Polish army as it made its way through a landscape hung with the rotting bodies of German soldiers. She married, gave birth to a daughter and emigrated with her husband to America in 1949 at the age of just twenty-two.
We know this story because Esther sewed it down. She couldn’t write it. Writing would not have captured as vividly the pictures she had held in her mind through time. Prose could not have described the contrast between the flowering fields and the barbed wire of a labour camp; nor the intensity of the colours of the fallen autumn leaves on the day her family left on death trucks. It could not have captured the way the patterns of her clothes merged with the meadowed grass, camouflaging her as she crouched in the fields beyond her village. Sewing allowed her to stitch the detail of her girlhood, her terror and escape, acutely remembered: the prettiness of the embroidered cloth her mother laid on the table for Rosh Hashanah; the pattern of the thatched roof of the cottage where she and her sister found refuge. Through her sewing she demonstrated how the adrenaline of fear heightens our senses and fixes a memory. The panels she appliquéd and embroidered, 36 in all, are illustrated like a storybook, pictures above and text below. She set each scene in its specific location – her family home, the field beyond her house, the countryside around it – defined in textured scraps of carefully chosen fabric and embroidered to render the detail of her experiences. Her scene of when the Nazis arrive in Mniszek in September 1939 has her grandmother in a crisp sprigged apron standing on the steps of her lace-curtained house, her grandfather’s shoe lying where it fell as he was dragged from his home. Esther and her two sisters are tidy in floral dresses and plaited hair, watching helplessly as their world changes. Around them pansies are in full flower on the verges, the tree outside their grandparent’s house is laden with apples and chickens are pecking at the soil. Everything seems just as it ever was but for the four helmeted Nazi soldiers on horseback and the one who has dismounted with his gun in his belt, the one chopping off her grandfather’s beard. There is patterned fabric for the floral hedgerows, striped cloth for the garden sheds, both carefully remembered. One sister has a large red bow tied beautifully at her waist, another’s dress is collared in lace. She portrays a normality brutally disrupted in horror. Her embroidered personal story of war and the holocaust ends in 1949 with Esther, her husband, child and sister standing in America for the first time, two small suitcases by their side. They are gazing up at the Statue of Liberty, around which seagulls are winging free in the sky.
It would be twenty-eight years after her arrival in America before Esther took up a needle and thread to set down her story. By then she was fifty years old.
She embroidered it as a legacy for her daughters, as a textile memoir. The 36 embroidered pictures track the twelve years of her life from when she was ten until she was twenty-two during which she witnessed the cost of human prejudice and greed: a culture and religion humiliated, a village and family destroyed. Her belief in humanity was tested over and over again. But she chose sewing as an act of restoration. Through her sewn picture, she reanimates her parents and siblings, revisits her faith, rebuilds her village, re-plants the fields around her house. Restores a lost life. She goes back home.
Needlework takes time. The choosing of fabric, its cutting out to shape different images – the leaves of a tree, the bright red bow of a girl’s dress – have to be carefully done. The needle lingers and the stitcher is forced to pause from time to time to re-thread a needle, pick out and cut a new piece of thread, decide what to embroider next, what colour or stitch to use. It allows space for reminiscing, for remembering. So it must have been for Esther Nisenthal Krinitz on her slow journey of re-creation; one stitch a commemoration, and the next a farewell.
11
Community
It is early afternoon in the Scottish Storytelling Centre Gallery and all the seats are taken. People have come for the Edinbrugh launch of Material Matters, the community textile project I have been working on over the past year with people from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. Now its results – twelve small textile panels – are to be unveiled, each telling the story of a piece of fabric or embroidery which has special meaning to its maker. One by one, participants remove the red cloth that covers their creation to reveal the story beneath.