This incredible photo of a Bedouin woman was taken in Syria in 1893.

The Bedouin are, historically, the Middle East’s nomadic sheep, goat and camel herders; their name means literally ‘desert dweller’ in Arabic. They are found from the Gulf to north Africa, but here of course we want to focus on the Syrian Bedouin, and especially their amazing embroidery and craft.

Syria’s Bedouin

Syria is about 80% arid land. For centuries, Bedouin tribes ranged across these areas searching for food and water for their animals. Their lifestyle was ecologically sustainable and their culture rich.

Everything they made was perfectly adapted to the harsh environment in which they lived. Their highly-skilled weaving, embroidery and beading was used to create the tents, rugs and blankets that sheltered them from the scorching heat and icy cold of the desert, and the long loose robes and headdresses that protected them from the rays of the sun.

The motifs they chose reflected what was culturally important – the cypress tree pattern that symbolised the tree of life, flowers signifying growth and plenty, and the camel representing patience and strength. Dresses in particular were heavily embroidered, often on both front and back.

It was mostly women who did this weaving and embroidery, and techniques would be passed down from one generation to the next. While many pieces were undeniably the work of one talented maker, others were a group effort, with one woman picking up the shuttle (or needle) when another left off. Weaving and embroidery became social events as much as functional necessities – just as for the Sabbara artisans, for whom getting together to knit and embroider is as much about the community as the income.

A culture under threat

Over the past hundred years, a series of colonial and state policies have pressured the Bedouin to give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle in towns and villages. As a result, although about 12 to 15% of Syrians still identify as Bedouin, only perhaps 2% are still nomadic pastoralists. 

These people, already representing a culture under threat, have had their entire way of life endangered by the war. Finding themselves unable to move around to support their herds, caught in the middle of bombing and battles, vast numbers have been forced to give up their animals and lifestyle and become internally displaced or refugees.

There is not a lot that tiny Sabbara, helping what is in the bigger picture a handful of women, can do to stop these heartbreaking events. The Bedouin have received startlingly little attention in the coverage of the war – we hope this piece will raise some awareness of their situation. 

We created our Bedouin cushion as a tribute to some of the colours and patterns observed in Bedouin craftsmanship. As with all of our pieces, 100% of the profits go to support Syrian women displaced by war.

When Singapore was taken by Japanese forces on February 15th 1942, during the course of the Second World War, five hundred women and girls were interred in the notorious Changi Prison Camp. Here they were separated from their husbands, sons and brothers, who were held in the male camp, and whom they would not see again until the end of the war in 1945. 

The dehumanising conditions these women experienced are difficult to imagine. They faced severe overcrowding, malnutrition, and torture. 

Many were colonial wives used to days of tea parties, afternoon rests and ex-pat gossip. Textile artist and academic Clare Hunter (who wrote beautifully about the Changi quilts in her 2019 book Threads of Life, which this blog is inspired by), argues that for these women, worse even than the physical trials was the uncertainty that plagued their every waking moment. Years spent chasing the mirage of hope. Would they survive to see their beloved homeland once more? What treatment were their sons and husbands facing in the adjoining camp? Would they be standing alongside them if freedom ever came?

In a bid to remedy the last and most painful of these fears, one of the women had an ingenious idea. Canadian prisoner and former Red Cross ambulance driver Ethel Mulvany proposed her solution, that oft-overlooked and underestimated female pastime: sewing. The height of incongruity within Changi’s unscalable walls, but all the more effective for this. Mulvany believed that the imprisoned women could utilise sewing’s virtuous reputation to their advantage, by using the medium to establish contact with their loved ones imprisoned within the male camp, and to assure them of their continued survival. 

Mulvany’s plan was quietly ingenious. The women would create three quilts as gifts to the three Red Cross organisations active in Singapore – an Australian quilt, a British quilt, and a Japanese quilt (included as the ultimate decoy). They would present these quilts as humanitarian gifts for the patients of the male camp’s hospital, in so doing painting themselves as models of womanly virtue, while secretly sending coded messages of hope to their loved ones. 

Just like their chosen craft, they were underestimated. Their captors were entirely taken in by their charade of female devotion, to the extent that – as Hunter shares with incredulity – Mulvany was for a time allowed to escape the confines of the camp once a month (under strict supervision) to buy sewing supplies from the market.

Mulvany implored the women to ‘sew something of themselves’ along with their signature into their allocated square, a space of six inches within which they could soar from the camp and revisit their old selves, savouring old delights and capturing them in thread for their beloved to feast on. The knowledge of their continued survival ensured by the evocation of shared memories on tattered cloth. Mulvany’s accomplices were only too happy to follow her instructions, as demonstrated by the Changi quilts which each contain sixty-six squares bearing the initials and personal symbols of the women who embroidered them. 

Clare Hunter is lucky enough to have seen one of the surviving Changi quilts in person when she visited the headquarters of the British Red Cross in London, where it is displayed. During this visit, she was initially bewildered by the cream squares that absorbed her. She did not expect this artefact of war to express the ‘frivolity of femininity’. She had imagined a textile weighed down by the suffering with which it was wrought. Instead, she encountered a thing of beauty, colour, and most shockingly, of life. Butterflies traverse the quilt, ships sail across its oceans, poppies and primroses burst from its earth, lambs bleat, cherries hang heavy in their ripeness.

We may ask where such idealised visions of home belonged amongst the squalor of the camp, how its inhabitants, worn down as they were by the grind of daily and prolonged suffering, could even imagine, yet alone bear to illustrate, the beauty of a home they feared they would never see again. Absorbing the scenes upon this quilt, Hunter came to see these motifs for what they truly were. In her own words: ‘trapped in the squalor of the camp, surrounded by the uncertainty of survival, these women embroidered motifs that symbolised what most sustained them. They stitched patriotism, hope, defiance, and love.’ 

This observation provides key insight into why the practice of embroidery was so vital to sustaining these women’s collective and individual spirits. More than just showing their loved ones that despite all they lived on, the very act of sewing – immortalising their existence through thread – demonstrated this unequivocal fact to the women themselves. Through each stitch they reformed themselves anew and reminded themselves of the beauty that existed beyond the prison’s walls and their promised place within it once they escaped them. 

The sustaining powers of embroidery, so crucial to the women of Changi prison camp, are also evident in the work of Sabbara’s artisans. As Hunter so shrewdly perceives, sewing’s physicality, ‘the making of something substantial from discarded remnants, is a comforting metaphor for personal growth in the face of an enforced reduction’. Through their work, Sabbara’s artisans make beauty from loss, embedding each stitch with the pain it took to leave their home, their life, and emerge anew, even stronger than before. 

Sewing is the ultimate remedy for helplessness: those who ply the needle can travel through its eye and into a world where they are the author of their own destiny, where they can create beauty, colour and life, and immerse themselves within it. 

Sisterhood of the Stitch blog series by Tashy Hughes.

References 

Hunter, C (2019). Threads of Life, A History of the World through the Eye of a Needle, Sceptre. 

During her time at Ravensbruck, Mies had an incredibly poignant experience that led her to champion the power of textiles to heal and to forge communities. An extract of the speech Boissevain-van Lennep gave on the radio programme Woman to Woman in April 1946 provides insight into her experience within the infamous concentration camp and the incident that inspired the Liberation Skirt:

The cell was stifling and everything was ugly…stone…steel…frosted glass …Ugly, ugly, ugly. After fourteen days our laundry arrived… a moment of joy and expectation… But then comes the big surprise, at the bottom of the bag is a little patchwork-scarf! Little pieces of cloth, fresh, colourful and bright. Cloth that I remember from my children’s dresses and gowns, beautifully composed by someone who loves me… All my cell-mates pick it up, admire it. faces light up. Suddenly there is colour in our bare cell existence. We hang the scarf over the ugly mirror… Its memory…remained. Not just of the scarf but of the lovely world it came from that was included in it’ (Boissevain-van Lennep in Jolande, 1994:302).

A dear friend of the resistance fighter had managed to smuggle this beloved gift into the camp, bringing with it a reminder of Boissevain-van Lennep’s previous existence, of her life before imprisonment and unimaginable loss. As she began to share the stories the scarf contained with her cellmates, ‘my relatives and friends came back to me. I talked and talked and my cell-mates became friends. Everything changed…”. 

This touching reflection exemplifies the power of needle and thread to reinstate identity, return the past to us, and forge solidarity in the present.

Upon the liberation of Ravensbruck, Boissevain-van Lennep, one amongst millions, collected the fragments of her life. The patchwork scarf was her most sacred possession. Like every other female survivor, she was expected to return to her prewar existence, silently forsaking the woman that years of resistance, heartbreak, hard labour and malnutrition had shaped her into. 

Millions of women like Boissevain-van Lennep, who had undertaken vital roles during the conflict, found themselves forced back into the domestic sphere, despite considering the nature of their gender fundamentally changed, and believing that their political and social identities would shift to mirror this. As we know, these women were sorely disappointed. Society expected them to return to their previous occupations, performing the unseen and unappreciated labour that had previously been their domain. During the course of the war, these women became engineers, mechanics, pilots and nurses, exploring and pushing the socially constructed boundaries of their gender. Now, the kitchen door was shut firmly behind them, their pinafores returned. Thoughts of aeromechanics begrudgingly replaced with shortcrust pastry, stubborn stain removal, and the dreaded mending pile. 

Luckily, resistance still flowed through Boissevain-van Lennep’s veins- the mending pile sat untouched. Her scarf around her neck, she reflected upon its power to salvage her faltering sense of identity amongst the most hopeless of circumstances and to forge vital friendships that ensured her survival. And thus, the National Liberation Skirt was born, as artist and academic Clare Hunter puts it ‘as a rallying cry to women to…demonstrate their changing identity’, and to do this together. 

This skirt, which was sewn from the material and emotional fragments of their previous lives, was intended as a physical manifestation of the war-altered consciousness of Dutch women, and the bravery, determination and unity they had displayed. In so doing, the National Liberation Skirt also had political aspirations. Clare Hunter believes that Boissevain-van Lennep hoped that the widespread showcasing of the skirt would ‘publicly demonstrate the courage, resolve and solidarity of Dutch women… and their right to play a part in forging [Holland’s] future,’. Within the skirt women found a means by which to rediscover and implement the self-expression and autonomy quashed by the Nazi regime; the act of creation enabled them to play an active part in the portrayal of both a personal and political identity.

It is obvious that women relished the political power and sense of camaraderie the National Liberation skirt provided. This is evidenced by photographs of women proudly wearing their skirts, and by the songs they wrote. The perception of the skirt as a successful means of negotiating trauma and rediscovering identity is particularly pertinent in ‘The Hymn of the National Celebration Skirt’, which was sung as women, clad in their skirts, marched past the houses of parliament in 1948:

Shape by your skirt a together-connectedness, Unite multiple forms, colours and lines;

In the stream of historical events Embroider the design with your heart and your hand.

Stamp your skirt with the mark of your days, Colour your flag with what Was and Will Be; The Present, the Past- merrily borne,

Let them adorn your costume, your family, your life.

The lyrics of this song speak not only of the effects of wearing the skirt, but of creating it. The ‘together-connectedness’ referenced was a vital part of Boissevain-van Lennep’s decision to tackle women’s lost identities through the medium of textiles. In this she was inspired by the quilting tradition of America, wherein women gathered to both create and communicate. By sitting around their stitched skirts and sharing the stories of the material fragments they were made from, Boissevain-van Lennep believed that solidarity and empathy could be realised. She hoped that sewing this skirt would act as a therapy substitute, which she termed grief work. In so doing, she recognised the potential of the needle as a tool of personal and communal healing, a potential that is at the core of Sabbara’s work. 

The experience of the artisans we work with attests to the power of Boissevain-van Lennep’s vision and insight regarding the power of needle and thread. Through this power, Sabbara’s artisans forge new communities, process their experiences, discover independence, and just like Boissevain-van Lennep, find a way forward, together. 

Sisterhood of the Stitch blog series by Tashy Hughes.

References:

Hunter, C. (2019) Threads of Life. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

Jolande, W. (1994) Patchwork politics in the Netherlands, 1946-50 Women’s History Review. 

Throughout the centuries, we too have internalised this image. We have never thought to question, whilst admiring these plentiful bonnet-clad heads bent to their embroidery, what the women within the artwork are thinking. While their hands work it must follow that their minds too are working. This obvious conclusion seems to have conveniently escaped the minds of many a historian over the years. Until that is, Rozsika Parker’s seminal text of 1984 was published. “The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine,” detailed the true nature of embroidery and all of its contradictions in a way that was impossible to ignore: “the art of embroidery has been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and proving that they have attained it, but it also provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity”. Since the publication of this text, there has been a steady flow of work, both academic and creative, that pushes the boundaries of embroidery and reveals its true, constantly surprising nature.

Whilst it is impossible to deny the role embroidery has played in forging and containing a certain, and in some eras aspirational, version of femininity, it is vital to acknowledge it to be, as feminist academic Maureen Goggin believes, ‘both a tool of oppression and an instrument of liberation’. More than this, the practice of embroidery can provide an essential creative outlet and a means of self-expression, and has for centuries been a vital and vibrant part of women’s lives. In the words of E. Tammy Kim, journalist and needlework enthusiast, ‘to embroider is to embellish: to create a fantasia and thus be momentarily free’.  

This series of articles will explore this claim and the women who have demonstrated its truth. It will showcase the diverse, disparate and ingenious methods through which embroidery has been used within a variety of surprising scenarios, and throughout the centuries: The Dutch resistance fighter whose textiles redefined the female identity in post-war Holland; the suffragette who utilised needlework to overcome, endure, and process imprisonment; the Queen who plied a secret marriage proposal in cross-stitch; the prisoners of war who communicated with their families through embroidery; the Hmong women who documented and immortalised their marginalised history in thread; the slaves who used encoded quilts as maps to aid their escape efforts; and the contemporary artists exploring this medium to protest, and to enact change- neatly turning the practice historically intended to inculcate and repress the female experience on its head. 

Each of these examples presents a relationship between women and thread evidently at odds with the sterile and passive one we are presented with throughout history. The way in which women have so ingeniously used this practice speaks of the power of needle and thread as tools of creative and personal communication as valid and expressive as the pen or paintbrush, but that have been misguidedly and continually underestimated. 

This power is at the heart of what we at Sabbara do. We recognise and embrace the beauty, potential and strength in every stitch that the women we work with create. Their beautiful embroideries tell their stories, honour their heritage, and provide them with the financial stability to care for their families. Vitally, the work of Sabbara also brings Syrian women together to share their experiences, support each other, and build a community with whom they can both laugh and cry, depending on the day. In the words of Faten, one of the women supported by Sabbara: ‘when we work, we forget a little the crises that we went through. And through this work we get to meet other women- we sing and laugh and produce beautiful things. We love life.’ Faten, and all of us who share her passion for embroidery are members of a very exclusive club: The Sisterhood Of The Stitch – the very sisterhood this series will go on to explore.

Sisterhood of the Stitch blog series by Tashy Hughes.

References:

Goggin M et al. (2009) Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles 1750- 1950. P.3, Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Parker, R. (2010) The Subversive Stitch, Embroidery and The Making of The Feminine, P.ix, I.B Tauris.

Tammy Kim, E. (2018) The Feminist Power of Embroidery. New York Times. Date accessed: 17/06/21 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/opinion/sunday/feminist-embroidery-korea.html