Arabic embroidery and identity
Palestinian woman from Ramallah in embroidered dress, from a negative taken between 1898 and 1914.
Embroidery is about making visible. It is the adornment of cloth to add meaning and value. As such, it is about identity – making a claim about who you are, and displaying that for others to see. This is both personal and political, and nowhere is this more true than in the modern Middle East.
Embroidery, place and symbolism
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan share a traditional style of cross-stitch embroidery, or ‘tatreez’ in Arabic. While there are over-arching similarities in style and symbols used across the region, this traditional art form gives endless potential for local and personal variation, and as such has always been closely linked with place and identity.
Collector and academic John Gillow writes that ‘older women can tell the village and sometimes even the embroiderer of a particular dress’, due to the association of particular colours and motifs with particular locations. For example, if we look at Palestinian embroidery, historically, the town of Ramallah was known for its vibrant scarlet thread. Work from Hebron, just to the south, can be identified by a browner shade.
Bright red thread and the ‘long palm’ motif mark this embroidery as coming from Ramallah.
From the collection of Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress.
Textile ethnographer Sheila Paine records that traditional embroidery from the Syrian village al-Sukhna is famous for its palms – reflecting the scenery of this desert oasis – and that these trees are also found in the fabrics of al-Safira, which had marriage links with al-Sukhna. It’s wonderful to imagine the women who made these dresses taking their traditions with them, and recreating the vibrant palms of the oasis in their work in their new homes.
‘Tree of Life’ motifs on a dress from Al-Sukhna, Syria.
From the collection of Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress.
“Embroidery is integral to our being”
We asked our refugee artisans if they remembered their mothers or grandmothers practicing this craft. Is it still a central part of the culture, or an arcane and obscure practice? Their answers were unequivocal.
“Embroidery is integral to our being. Especially for people from the south, from Daraa and Sweida, they all know how to embroider,” said Mona, who comes from the countryside near Damascus in south/central Syria.
Um Qassim from the Houran said that “in the Houran region it is really important for women to know embroidery. We all embroider cushions, clothes and pictures.”
Um Nour from Idlib said ‘In Idlib we really care about the jihaz al-arous [the clothes, linen and belongings that a bride takes to her new house – an Arabic trousseau]. All these things would be hand-embroidered”.
For each of these women, who are now all living as refugees in the neighbouring country of Lebanon, embroidery remains very distinctly identified with the particular regions of Syria they come from. Whether expressed in colours and motifs, or in the heart, ideas of place and origin form an essential part of how women think about tatreez.
Palestinian embroidery, displacement and identity
For Palestinian women, the association between embroidery and place is even more loaded. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948 in the violence surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. They and their descendants have lived their lives as refugees, mostly in the surrounding countries of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Generations of Palestinian refugee women have continued to laboriously pick out the patterns of the villages their families came from, places most of them have never seen. This is a political act, a claim of ownership and identity in the face of the denial of their statehood and rights.
As Palestinians from different villages found themselves living together in refugee camps, a distinctive ‘camp style’ also developed. This style incorporated elements from diverse areas as well as the regional traditions of the countries in which they now found themselves, and was also influenced by Western fashion.
Chest panel of a 1970’s “Camp Dress” that was produced in the refugee camps of Lebanon by Palestinian women. Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, DC.
During the first Intifada in the occupied territories, when Israel confiscated Palestinian flags, women embroidered the colours and symbols of Palestinian nationalism – the flag, the Dome of the Rock, the outline of the country – onto their very dresses.
Embroidery is a living craft, and as such continues to change and develop, reflecting human lives, identities and localities.
Intifada Dress, from the collection of Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress.
Palestinian embroidery and Oshana
Many of the artisans we work with at Oshana are Palestinian refugees from Syria, now twice displaced and living in Lebanon.
Among our embroidery designs are ones based on traditional Palestinian patterns - keeping this tradition alive.
Oshana’s ‘Felastin’ (Palestinian in Arabic) cushion
Syrian embroidery and the war
Over a decade of war has also impacted Syrian embroidery. In our artisan Mona’s words: “People who are living under bombardment are thinking about how to flee and how to get food for their children, they’re not going to sit down and embroider”.
Not only did many women stop practicing embroidery due to the conflict, but many were also forced to leave behind embroidered heirlooms, those statements of their family history and mementoes of significant events such as births and marriages. This loss is often a hugely underestimated source of sorrow and trauma.
Mona mourns her parents’ embroidered wedding blanket, and the baby clothes her mother embroidered for her when she had her first child: “I remember my mother, that’s the thing that makes me sad sometimes, she made diara [things for new babies], and embroidered them herself. I wish I was able to pass them on to Massa for when she has children. Probably she wouldn’t have used them but they would have been a good memory to pass on.”
Um Nour picks up the thread: “We left with such a panic that we didn’t take anything with us, and we didn’t think about the embroidery that we had made. When we found Oshana and we started to work and be creative, we found ourselves again.”
Oshana’s Syrian women doing embroidery
Embroidery is the thread between past and present.
In it is stitched the knowledge of who you are and where you’re from, made visible, tangible, undeniable. For Oshana’s Syrian and Palestinian refugee artisans, it is what connects them to what they have lost, and through that they find themselves.
We can’t express this more beautifully than Um Qassim, and we will leave you with her words: “Doing embroidery reminds me of my house and my home and my country. It reminds me of my grandmother and my mother, of my best memories and moments in my life.”
