Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  Today there are a growing number of organisations attempting to end exploitation in the textile industry, such as the Clean Clothes Campaign, Global Exchange, No Sweat, Stop Child Labour, Fairtrade, Fair Wear Foundation, all campaigning for ethical trade and protective practices that support and value workers. The Alta Gracia factory in the Dominican Republic is a new kind of anti-sweatshop, an innovative model of textile production that combines financial profit with social justice. In an alliance between its workers, management and experts in the apparel industry, it championed full participation of its workers to develop a company that treated them fairly and rewarded them with an adequate and reliable income, well above normal rates. It has published a book, Sewing Hope, about its ambition and its achievement, told by those involved. It is inspirational, and sets a new standard for what can be done successfully to establish a profitable textile enterprise that values and promotes the skills and input of all its stakeholders.

  Such cooperative working in textile production is not a new concept. In parts of the world where war, famine and ethnic cleansing have devastated communities, needlework has often been used and continues to be used by aid agencies as a tool to help women whose need for income is urgent, to set up their own cooperatives or social enterprises. Sewing offers advantages for women in desperate circumstances. Its raw materials are cheap and readily sourced. It requires no equipment or electricity and is easily accommodated when living conditions are cramped. Moreover, it can be done at any time of day and be fitted around domestic chores and child care.

  When Liz Kemp, a craft and design consultant based in Scotland, was invited to Peshawar in northwest Pakistan in 2004 to work with female Afghan refugees, she met women traumatised by war, sequestered in heavily guarded compounds. With social contact limited to their immediate families, living under the strict control of their husbands, they lived claustrophobic lives in which divisions and rivalries were common. To alleviate the stress and tedium, many young women had turned to drugs, and it was the United Office of Drug Control that invited Liz to run needlework design workshops with the women in the hope that an enterprise based on sewing – an activity allowed by their husbands and fathers – might relieve these women of boredom, bring them a small independent income and, in time, alleviate their drug dependency.

  The women were well versed in the intricacies of embroidery, since Afghanistan has an extraordinarily rich textile heritage. What they lacked was commercial insight. Using fewer colours and less surface decoration, the women created designs that could be transferred from product to product, to bags, shawls and cushions. They made samples and test-marketed them at local shops, the bazaar and through charitable agencies. The feedback was positive. The Nomad Gallery in Islamabad put in an order. Sales increased and earning money brought unexpected side benefits: it raised the status of the women in the eyes of their husbands and won them a small relaxation of social control.

  The project in Peshwar is just one of the many that have been and are organised to assist beleaguered communities find an economic and social lifeline through needlework. Organisations like Common Threads and Clothroads provide training, workshop space, business skills, outlets and an environment where women can debate issues which prevent them seizing a better way to live their lives. And yet, and yet. There is always the threat of cultural colonialisation: of women being persuaded to relinquish sewing traditions and techniques to manufacture products the west will buy: fabric accessories like bags, spectacle cases, purses, covers for iPads, computers and mobile phones – products that many of the women who sew them cannot afford to possess. This is especially at odds with the cultural and emotional needs of refugees, for whom community upheaval often strengthens the urge to keep traditions intact. The repetition of pattern and the certainty of design offer visual continuity in communities broken apart by social or political change. How to retain the integrity and authenticity of traditional embroidery while meeting the demands of a competitive market is a continuing dilemma. Commercial imperatives mean that the replication of traditional needlework is often not economically viable: it simply takes too long to sew. Moreover, many traditional textiles, especially densely embroidered clothes, while beautiful, hold little interest for the modern consumer or tourist. With an urgent need to sell, adaptation is essential, a compromise found for the rich, ceremonial and meaningful embroidery to be truncated into more marketable goods that are quicker to create, easier to display and meet the needs and tastes of consumers. The sacrifice is a trade-off for other benefits, other vital forms of support, such as credit banks, child care, health clinics, literacy and numeracy education and business skills. Needlework is often used as a first step to empowering women to determine ways to improve their status and diminish the social controls and economic dependency that limit their well-being and progress.

  This is the motivation behind the Sughar Empowerment Society which has twenty-five embroidery and cultural centres in rural Pakistan. It was set up by an eighteen-year-old, Khalida Brohi, who was determined to challenge the lack of equality between men and women, an inequality exacerbated by a male culture which condoned practices such as arranged marriages and honour killings. Through the project, which reproduces tribal designs in traditional ways, embroidery heritage and skills are not only respected but also safeguarded. The Sughar Empowerment Society values the talents and traditions of the women involved. An embroidered purse might take eleven hours to sew, but it retains the integrity of its roots. It places a high price on their worth, selling them to Pakistan’s burgeoning fashion industry, marketing not just an embroidered product but the traditions they conserve. Their centres provide a place for women to be together, to talk about their rights, the issues that restrict them and how best to improve their standing without rejecting or destroying precious community traditions. These women are the archivists of some of needlework’s most ancient patterns and techniques. Without their labours, the needlework heritage of their culture would become extinct as has happened elsewhere. They are conserving not just traditional skills and patterns but the heartbeat of needlework itself: its emotional purpose.

  At the Sughar Empowerment Society, one woman was confused about how she could transfer the honour she had sewed into a garment for her daughter’s dowry to a handbag she made for a stranger. How could she sew into her product its personal message of protection, her blessings? In her questioning lies a challenge to the textile industries of the future of how can they best endow what they sew with honour?

  16

  Voice

  From when I was very young my mother lured me into a love of sewing. She bought me little linen cloths, already stamped with designs, and packets of gold tipped needles; scissors shaped like birds with folded wings and skeins of embroidery thread in hues, softer and richer than anything I had ever seen. My mother taught me how to carefully draw out a length of thread from its looped skein, cut it, then separate its six strands into divisions of ones, twos or threes depending on the desired delicacy of stitches. And she showed me the basic repertoire of strangely named stitches – stem, blanket, fern, lazy daisy, chain and French knot.

  I would spend hours coaxing a flat cloth to yield to my design jabbing the needle in and out and untangling the thread that twisted and knotted until, eventually, I found a rhythm of my own that could settle smooth in my hands. Then the cloth became pliant, absorbing all that I stitched into it until, little by little, it became what it was meant to be: a pretty tray cloth, or a tablecloth festooned in blossom. In my memory, all the stencilled cloths, and those I later inked with transfers, were always floral. I would delve into my hoard of threads and select a bouquet of colour, sensing harmony. At the time, it seemed to me that this embroidering of flowers was not just a pastime but a portal to another way of life. My designs held the essence of luxury, of dressing tables strewn with perfume bottles, of tea sipped from porcelain cups amongst a friendship of women. It wasn’t that I yearned to be part of such a world but, from the aus
terity of my own life in post-war Glasgow, it seemed a comfort that it might exist at all.

  But why did my mother, so hard-pressed with the toil of housework and the rearing of four children, take time to sit patiently by my side and induct me in the intricacies of embroidery? With finances already stretched why did she invest in skeins of thread and linen cloth to feed my flickering interest in needlework? I believe now that she wanted to find a way to keep me occupied. Although never boisterous, I was forged from a curious spirit, ever questioning, wanting to explore the small world around me. My inquisitiveness claimed an excessive share of her attention. The absorption of needlework encouraged me to be stiller, quieter. But it also gave me another way to express myself.

  Sewing is a visual language. It has a voice. It has been used by people to communicate something of themselves – their history, beliefs, prayers and protests. For some, it is the only means to tell of what matters to them: those who are imprisoned or censored; those who do not know how or are not allowed to write of their lives. For them needlework can carry their autobiographies and testimonies, registering their origin and fate. Using patterns as its syntax, symbols and motifs as its vocabulary, the arrangement of both as its grammar, sewing is a graphic way to add information and meaning. But it is not a monologue, it is part of a conversation, a dialogue, a correspondence only fully realised once it is seen and its messages are read. It connects the maker to the viewer across time, cultures, generations and geographies. As a shared language, needlework transmits – through techniques, coded symbols, fabrics and colour – the unedited stories not just of women, but often of those marginalised by oppression and prejudice. And sewers use it – adapting it to their own circumstances, concerns and cultures – to provide a continuum of traditions, values and perceptions, in a world in which their influence is all too often deemed superfluous. It has evolved, primarily, as the voice of women who, through the centuries with limited access to literacy, or little assurance that if they did write, their words would be preserved, chose needlework as a medium to assert their presence in the hope that it, at least, might persist and, in time, be heard.

  But oppressors have also appropriated sewing to disempower and diminish others: the German missionaries in Namibia who replaced Herero tribal dress with European fashion, the Soviet regime which neutered the traditional embroidery of Ukraine. It was, however, the Nazis, who as part of Hitler’s Final Solution – his ambition to eradicate the Jewish race – used sewing to silence a people.

  One of the Nazis’ strategies for Jewish genocide was called ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit’, destruction through work. In 1940 the Nazis set up sewing workshops in the Polish Jewish ghetto of Lodz, called the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Here they corralled over 160,000 local Jews, men, women and children, into an area four-mile square. Imprisoned behind high walls patrolled by German guards, the Jewish community was cut off from the outside world with no access to food beyond what their captors permitted them: a daily ration of little more than 700 calories a day, inadequate to sustain health. In the first year 18,000 died from famine. Others, those deemed unproductive, predominantly children under the age of nine and the elderly, were deportated to concentration camps. The rest became slave labour. Sewing machines were requisitioned from plundered Jewish properties and despatched to Lodz where they were stamped with a metal Star of David, the word ‘ghetto’ engraved at its centre. The Jews in Lodz worked from 7 in the morning until 7 at night in overcrowded and scarcely ventilated rooms, sewing German uniforms, corsets and luxury textile goods for German stores. The hundreds of child workers, those over the age of nine, made dolls dresses for German toy shops and learnt tailoring and machining from their elders. Like the adults they toiled as pieceworkers, repetitively sewing the same kind of seam, or attaching the same kind of collar for hours, for months, for years on end. A quota not reached would be punished with a reduction in food rations, any dip in production could mean deportation and certain death. These were children sewing for their lives. Survivor Josef Zelkowicz described in secret diaries the effect on the children in the ghetto: ‘The machine digests their young tender bodies, squeezes them, and turns them into waste . . . [they] have twisted, stooped spines, sunken chests, and subdued, dejected eyes that drift off a distant, alien, cold gaze . . .’ When the ghetto was liberated in 1944 the Soviet troops found 877 Jewish survivors who had hidden in the ghetto itself or had been hidden in the town by Polish families. Only twelve of them were children.

  Needlework has duality: the ability to show one thing and tell of another. The seemingly joyous, brightly-coloured patchwork pictures made by women in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship sent word to the outside world of deprivation and the suppression of human rights; the embroidered flowers on the patchwork quilts made by women in Changi prison were unreadable to their guards but conveyed messages of hope, love and undented patriotism to male relatives in the adjoining camp; the embroidered story cloths of the Miao were visual translations of a forbidden language, history and myth conserved in stitches. In the Hunan province of China over 1,000 years ago women used needlework to write their own secret language, Nüshu, a phonetic code based on the local proscribed dialect. They embroidered their thoughts and feelings onto handkerchiefs and pillowcases and wrote with a needle and thread on cloth books made as gifts of female friendship and given to a new bride when she left the village. It was a script which men could not read, passed on from woman to woman, the only gender specific language known to exist in the world. Amongst words of advice: ‘Be a good wife, do lots of embroidery and try your best to tolerate your husband’s family,’ women also sewed laments at losing a friend, recorded their resignation to an arranged marriage, told of their frustration at the lack of control over their fate. These little books of embroidered stitches were created as covert intimate conversations between women.

  It is not just through stitching that needlework articulates emotion and correspondence. The nature of what is made, and the choice of colour, its use, offer opportunities to provide a complex and multi-layered form of communication. As a coded language, needlework can embed dialogues directed at specific people and convey secret messages unknown to those lacking the knowledge or culture to understand its material nuances. The African American slave Harriet Powers used her seemingly innocuous bible quilts to sew themes of oppression and freedom and conserve an African visual language only decipherable by other slaves. Another slave in the mid-nineteenth century used a non descript cotton seed sack to gift her spirit to the generations who followed.

  The sack was discovered in a flea market in Nashville in 2007. It had belonged to Rose, an African slave, who gave it to her nine-year-old daughter Ashley when she was separated from her mother, sold by her owner’s family after his death. Seventy years after their separation, in 1921, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth Middleton, embroidered eight lines of text, which she signed and dated, on the bag to record the story of the sack: of how Rose had given the sack to Ashley as a farewell gift, that it had contained a tattered dress, a braid of Rose’s hair and a handful of pecan nuts. But the way the story is stitched, has a deeper resonance than its basic narrative. The words are set out with different lengths of spaces between them as if to mimic the pauses for breath in human speech; some phrases are written in an African vernacular ‘It be filled with my Love always,’ the word ‘Love’ sewn in larger text to emphasise its message of kinship. This is a tangible form of storytelling, a way of transcribing oral speech into stitched spacing and colour. Ruth’s embroidery carries the voices of her great-grandmother, and her mother’s conserving them in her sewing, as she has had it conserved for her by her mother telling her its tale. The sack itself has been carefully patched and mended over time, a sign of how it has been cherished, not just as a family heirloom but as a form of tangible connection, a continuing dialogue between generations. Its safe-guarding represents more than that of a sentimental keepsake, because the sack was in fact a form of niksi, or mojo (a prayer in a ba
g), a magical amulet in West African culture. Most usually manifested by a bundle of herbs and roots, or a carved figurine which contained symbols of protection, the tattered dress in Ashley’s sack was an embodiment of Rose herself, her gift of her hair, traditionally in Africa invested with a person’s power, was the gift of her own spirit; the pecan nuts a symbol of growth and nourishment. Rose’s sack, made from rough cotton in what was then called ‘negro cloth’ was emblematic of her life as a slave and her powerlessness. By filling it with objects of magical significance, Rose transformed it into a powerful talisman to protect her daughter, to provide her and subsequent generations with the tools of survival. Ruth, a single mother at the age of fifteen, embroidered Rose’s story directly onto the cloth itself, to add to its protective power, investing it with her own personal spirit and transmitting it to her daughter, just as Rose had done for Ashley. Her embroidery ensured that the cultural and spiritual value of the sack was preserved. The sack is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., a rare material testimony of the cultural transference between slaves and their descendants, an invisible correspondence, only meaningful to those who can understand its layered messages.

  When a cultural language is threatened, or forbidden, its distinct vocabulary is often preserved through needlework as an alternative visual script. When the Welsh language was banned in Welsh schools, people conserved it on sewn samplers. When Catholicism was outlawed in Reformation Britain, Helena Wintour, the daughter and niece of two of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators who were executed for their plan to blow up the King and the houses of Parliament in 1605, risked imprisonment not only by harbouring fugitive Jesuit priests, but by articulating her clandestine faith – its meditations, devotions and hallelujahs – on exquisitely embroidered vestments encrusted with coded imagery which paid homage to martyred saints and called upon the Virgin Mary to hear her prayers. She signed her needlework: ‘Orate per me, Helena Wintour,’ ‘Pray for me, Helena Wintour.’