Posts
We met with many people and visited a wide variety of places, but to stay true to the purpose of this blog....from a fabric perspective, there were definitely some highlights. I was able to watch a Karen (pronounced, "kah-RYN") woman using a traditional back loom to weave fabric in a traditional Karen pattern. A back loom literally surrounds the weaver with a wooden brace across her back and the threads stretched in front of her, tied to a wall or other solid object in front of her. This particular weaver's body looked like it had melded itself into that position from years of weaving, her fingers moved the various shuttles through warp and 
weft quickly and assuredly, the complex pattern appearing before our eyes without us even really understanding how it was happening. (These photos don't pick up the intracacies of the actual pattern well--sorry.) Yes, she was partially there "on display", but we weren't in a tourist spot--we were at a school in a women's organization office which works to help the Karen women support themselves through traditional handicrafts. So this weaver was representative of a culture past and very much future--a people embracing their tradition to help ensure that tradition is able to continue unfettered for generations to come.Later, in a somewhat more "touristy" spot (although still way off the beaten trail), we shopped at a store run by a Hmong woman (pronouned "mung"). The Hmong are another group who have a history of being refugees--they originated in southern China but spread south into Laos, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand; due to their opposition to the communist regime in Laos in the late 70s, thousands of Hmong there were forced from their homes and fled to Thailand; many were later resettled in other countries around the world including the U.S. Several thousand remain in Thailand to this day.
The Hmong woman we met was selling clothing, purses, and a wide variety of clothing that she told us she had made by hand.
I'm not entirely sure I would've believed her--it always sounds like a tourist-oriented sales-pitch and she had a fair volume of goods for sale--until she sat down to very quickly fix an article a woman in our group wanted to buy but had found a problem with a seam. The Hmong woman's fingers flew with that needle and thread and she had fixed the problem in mere seconds. It was suddenly very believable that she could've made all of those items herself in a fairly limited period of time. After I finished paying for my purchases, her face broke into a wide grin and she excitedly grabbed my arm and said something in her native language that I mentally translated into great thanks for the income I'd just ploughed into her business! I had also remarked earlier to another traveling companion that I was always a little skeptical about "traditional clothing," wondering if people really ever wore those clothes anymore except in high ceremony--until we were driving through the countryside in the miles around that little store and I saw all sorts of men and women wearing clothing exactly as she had been wearing and selling--as they farmed, carried huge baskets of harvest on their heads, led obedient cattle with ropes, and carried out the tasks of their daily lives. So yes, traditional clothing sometimes truly is traditional clothing.I guess maybe I'm a bit too skeptical. There truly is such a thing as tradition left somewhere in the world. I come from a fairly mongrel American background so I don't have much ethnic tradition left in my own family history. I've married into a smattering of it in my husband's family but there is still little we can point to that's distinctive to anything other than a general euro-Christian-American-middle-class culture. On the other hand, the Karen and Hmong women, and the Kachin, Chin, and other refugees around the world who work to support themselves in this way are, in general, barely making a living. I don't want to glorify their lives in any way--it's a hard, unimaginable life of never being sure what's going to happen tomorrow. And yet they keep their traditions alive--they hang onto them, perhaps even more so, in the face of uncertainty; the weaving and the embroidery and the ethnically-distinctive patterns remind them of who they are and where they came from when all that was familiar has been ripped from them.
And one way I can support them is through purchasing their goods and adding my own creativity to theirs by making quilts out of their fabrics. And everytime my eyes land on those fabrics on my shelves or hanging on my wall in a completed project, I will remember women the world over who struggle to put food on the table, who have been thrust from their homes and villages and chased across the countryside into strange lands, who deal with life circumstances I can't even begin to imagine, but whose fingers nimbly trip over the threads bringing beauty to life.
No comments:
Post a Comment