Cross-stitches that bind us together: on Ukrainian and Palestinian embroidery
“We have to revive our muscular memory. The memory of us before we were made into types before we were taxonomies”, says Ariella Aїsha Azoulay, while learning how to make traditional Middle Eastern pieces of jewellery her Jewish Arab ancestors made for centuries — this moment happened to be my favorite part of Azoulay’s recent film, “a world like a Jewel in the Hand: unlearning imperial plunder,” presented in New School on March 29th. It was one of the most intellectually stimulating, poignant, and intense films I have seen. Azoulay’s words, so masterfully put into thought-provoking questions and ideas, kept lingering in my head for the rest of the evening. Therefore, I decided to think alongside some of her ideas about art and craft. How to decolonize our aesthetics and perceptions through embroidering? How to practice solidarity, feminism, and resilience through embroidering?
I decided to focus on embroidering since it kept following me on a thread for the last year. I hated embroidering as a kid; it was obligatory in my school classes of labor, which were divided by gender. Thus, embroidering, cooking, and sewing was for girls, while boys were woodcarving. Generally, it was also connected to some weird ethnonationalism claims to preserving the “real authentic Ukrainian identity”, while repeating some old Soviet myths about Ukraine as somehow united in aesthetics. Such attitudes erased the complexity of Ukrainian embroidery, which has its regional specialties and is non-unified in either colors or goals. It also ignored its radical political potential not just to preserve one’s identity under Russian and then Soviet imperialism. As I think of it now, Ukrainian embroidery was a vernacular way to exercise peasant, mainly women’s, agency through the accessible form of artistic practice.
My perception of embroidery significantly shifted last spring when my friend Shereen invited me to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a group that protests against Israeli apartheid) tatreez workshop in Vienna. Tatreez is a centuries-old Palestinian craft practiced mainly by women. While observing books with various tatreez patterns, I just kept being shocked and amazed, looking through some old Palestinian embroideries and seeing how those are so similar to my own. Unlearning toxic exceptionalism was my way to gain real strength in the potential to unite through craft, through these old powerful symbols that belong to the ethnic communities worldwide, not particular nations. These threads of solidarity appeared when I needed them so badly while I felt weirdly at home among the Palestinian diaspora in Vienna. The manual “labor of love” made my anxieties disappear for a while, I could feel my senses, my body felt less alienated and more present. After that, I bought some embroidery equipment and made simple stitches together to feel less anxious.
It made me think about the decolonial potential of craft as a “language” for unity and feminist solidarity. Both tatreez and vyshyvanka are central to Palestinian and Ukrainian identities. According to Tania Tamari Nassir, tatreez was also traditionally known as fallahi, a word that signified a farm worker closely tied to its soil. The primary source of inspiration for Palestinian and Ukrainian embroidery was the land itself, the landscape, plants, and trees. Before the Soviet collectivization, which led to a human-made famine in 1932–1933, around four million Ukrainian peasants died, Ukrainians were predominantly farmers and peasants, too. The embroidery in this matter is a text that remembers the non-modern way of living and relating to soil, both crucial to Ukrainians and Palestinians, which was harshly disrupted by the Soviet and Israeli occupation. In this regard, Soviet collectivization and Nakba forced displacement and mass murder of Palestinians in 1948 politicized and accelerated the visual language of tatreez and vyshyvanka and became a central identity trait for Palestinians and Ukrainians in the diaspora and those who stayed at home.
In her short essay “Diaspora and tatreez: reflection in stitch”, Chelsey Y. Gruner mentions that women predominantly practiced Palestinian embroidery i It was a matrilineal tradition passed from mother to daughter when she turned six. In Ukraine, vyshyvannia is primarily practiced by women and often created spaces where women could meet to craft, share news and gossip, and spend time together. In Stalinist Gulag camps, vyshyvannia became one of the central instruments of women’s resistance to everyday dehumanization and terror. I keep thinking about embroidering as a critical centuries-old feminist practice and how its redefinition might expand our understanding of what feminisms are.
Lastly, I would like to briefly discuss the latest piece tinian artist Nour Shantout. In this piece of fabric, Nour cross-stitched three words in Kurdish: Woman. Life. Freedom is a motto of the brave and ongoing Iranian revolution that is now a symbol of solidarity with Iranian women worldwide. As Nour reflects on her Instagram page, she uses tatreez here as an ancestral feminist strategy of resisting Israeli occupation in Palestine, stitching the same kind of flowers women in Palestine embroidered next to the Palestinian flag that was not allowed to be waived. Such combinations speak back to the radical political embroidery that has the potential to be decolonized through unlearning ethnonationalism, exceptionalism, and both capitalist and socialist modernities that alter our sensibilities and relations to the self, community, and the land.
