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Threads of Identity: Preserving Palestinian Costume and Heritage
Palestine Center Book Review No. 14 (12
April 2011)
Each month, we conduct a review of a
recent book that deals with issues relating to
Palestine and/or the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Books that are chosen for review can be
academic or non-academic, historical or
fictional. Next month we will be reviewing
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global
Struggle for Palestinian Rights
by Omar Barghouti. If you would like to
suggest a book for review, please contact the
Palestine
Center.
Threads of Identity:
Preserving Palestinian Costume and
Heritage
written by Widad Kamel Kawar
Paperback: 464 pages, Rimal Publications;
1st edition (9 February 2011)
By Dagmar Painter
One of the leading authorities on
Palestinian costume, Widad Kamel Kawar takes a
unique approach to the topic in her latest
book, Threads of Identity. While this
handsomely-illustrated, 449-page volume offers
a beautifully photographed compendium of rarely
seen examples of Palestinian garments and
jewelry, Kawar‘s interviews with the women who
made them elevates this book into a valuable
history of Palestine as seen by those who lived
it.
Born in the Nablus area of the West Bank, Kawar
studied in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and later
attended university in Beirut. Upon her
marriage, she moved to Amman, Jordan, and began
to systematize a collection of textiles and
jewelry begun while she was still in college.
Upon returning to Bethlehem in 1950, witnessing
the drastic changes taking place after the
Israeli occupation compelled her to start
collecting traditional costumes as a way of
"preserving the world as I knew it." Today the
Widad Kawar Collection comprises more than
3,000 examples of traditional Palestinian,
Jordanian and Arab dress and accessories.
Illustrated with part of this collection, the
book details with some precision the
traditional embroidery styles, but its purpose
is less to be a scholarly compilation of
textile design, than to link those designs to
the history of Palestine.
Kawar realized early on that the heritage
represented by Palestinian embroidery was fast
being erased in the face of war and political
change, so she strove to find the stories of
the women whose endurance, creativity and
changing roles reflected these alterations.
More than 25 people offer first person accounts
of their lives. In these vignettes, the
political, economic and cultural history of
Palestine is revealed. For example, she links
the lavish embroidery of marriage textiles in
Jaffa to the prosperity of Jaffa occasioned by
the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, which gave
cultivators of land title to it, thus
encouraging orange growers to prosper and
consequently be generous in their marriage
settlements of textiles and jewelry.
Each chapter starts with a very short history
of the major town and principal villages,
including Ramallah, Jericho, Hebron, Bethlehem,
Jerusalem, Jaffa, Ramla and Lydda, Galilee,
Nablus and Gaza. Later chapters include the
Bedouin of southern Palestine and conclude with
the changing styles born of camp life and
resistance.
The women's narratives offer personal vignettes
that devolve into the historical. Habiba of
Bethlehem was one of the last women to wear the
costly and elaborate Malak dress,
embroidered in floral or geometric couching
stitches outlined in gold cording on Syrian
silk. In 1914, when she was barely 15, her
family rushed her into marriage with her
distant cousin Salim, to protect him from
conscription into the Ottoman army. This story
of her trousseau evolves into an economic
history of Bethlehem, detailing the rise of the
city as a fashion center, with the opening of
the Najib Naser factory, whose 400 employees
provided fabric for all of Palestine, until
1948.
Hasna of Isdud remembered people putting white
sheets over the doors of their houses, but
being expelled by Israeli soldiers nonetheless.
Escaping to live in schoolhouses in Faluja,
they were again forced out, beaten and driven
towards Hebron, her father-in-law dying on the
way. From 1949 to 1955 they lived on rations
from UNRWA, until she was able to get work
embroidering. But in 1967, the camp was
bombed, and fleeing the napalm in the direction
of Jericho, they walked until they reached the
Baqa'a refugee camp in Jordan. "My favorite
pastime these days is...telling...my
grandchildren...stories about Isdud...and our
homeland. I often take out my old dress and
allow my granddaughters to wear it...the
costumes I have carried with me all my
life."
In each woman's story the sad destruction of
lively, independent, economically sound
villages by the invasions by the Israeli army
in 1948 is detailed. As they mourn for their
lost homes and lives, they turn to their
dresses as living memories of that lost time.
And in many cases, their ability to embroider,
adapted from creating a trousseau to making
cushion covers for UN charities, is the only
thing keeping their families from starvation in
the refugee camps.
The last chapters offer an important and oft
neglected coda to the story of Palestinian
dress—the effect of the camps and the spirit of
resistance upon the designs. Responding to the
wars and deprivations subsequent to their
diaspora, women are now producing an entirely
new style of garment, incorporating symbols of
Palestinian national identity, and merging
designs from the many village traditions that
they are exposed to in the camps. Individuals
and organizations such as SAMED have opened
embroidery workshops and marketed the products
to provide both an economic base and a
repository of Palestinian heritage. Most
marked in this regard is the Intifada
dress, embroidered with the colors of the
Palestinian flag, olive branches, maps and
inscriptions of "we shall return," in direct
defiance of Israeli bans on public displays of
these colors.
Threads of Identity makes an important
point in demonstrating that "the domestic arts"
play a vital role in the history and culture of
a people, and often provide the only surviving
link to that culture.
Dagmar Painter is
the Gallery Curator at The Jerusalem Fund. This
book review may be used without permission but
with proper attribution to the Center.
The views in this review are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect those
of The Jerusalem Fund.