Embroidering Palestine: Tatreez , cultural resistance, and female labour in Palestinian American graphic narratives
2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 38; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2023.2243912
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoABSTRACTThis essay examines the use of tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, in two Palestinian American graphic narratives: Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi and Marguerite Dabaie's The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories. By including tatreez as a visual motif in their works and referencing it as a cultural practice, both authors demonstrate the importance of continuing the traditional practice of embroidery in order to create connections with Palestinian culture and Palestine as a homeland in the diaspora. However, they also emphasise the need for adapting tatreez to the twenty-first century by drawing it as a versatile and adaptable signifier. Braided together with different symbols of nationalism and resistance, tatreez becomes a critical visual space to unpack the complex relations that Palestinians in the diaspora have with Palestine as a homeland. Thus, Abdelrazaq and Dabaie show that tatreez not only establishes a connection with the past but that it equally functions as a conscious forward-looking approach to engage with Palestinian culture, an approach that draws attention to the materiality of female cultural resistance in its everyday forms and the significant role this type of resistance plays in defining Palestinian identities in the United States and the wider Palestinian diaspora.KEYWORDS: Palestinian diaspora identitycultural resistancefemale labourTatreezgraphic narrative Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 @RepRashida. 'I'm honoring my parents, who came to this country from Palestine in search of a better life, by wearing a #Palestinian embroidered dress for my swearing in today', Twitter, 4 Jan 2019, 7:21 am, https://twitter.com/RepRashida/status/1345827682639106055 [Date accessed: 28 May 2021].2 The Mosaic Rooms. 'Jordan Nassar. Online Conversation', 16 July 2020. https://mosaicrooms.org/event/jordan-nassar/ [Date accessed: 12 April 2021].3 The popularity of tatreez in the Palestinian diaspora in the US can also be seen in initiatives such as Wafa Ghnaim's Tatreez & Tea project, which includes a self-published book on tatreez and offers in-person and online tatreez classes. (Wafa Ghnaim, 'Tatreez & Tea', https://www.tatreezandtea.com/tatreez-and-tea [Date accessed: 2 July 2021]).4 Shelagh Weir, Palestinian Costume (London: British Museum Press, 1989), p. 76.5 Laura Lamberti, 'Palestinian Embroidery, Collective Memory and Land Ownership', Palestine - Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, 25, no. 1/2 (2020), p. 186.6 Hagar Salamon, 'Embroidered Palestine: A Stitched Narrative', Narrative Culture, 3, no. 1 (2016), p. 6, original emphasis.7 Laila Farah, 'Stitching Survival: Revisioning Silence and Expression', in Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, eds. Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carillo Rowe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 240.8 In a 2020 study Maha Nassar found that in the Washington Post and the New York Times, two of the major US news outlets covering relations between Israelis and Palestinians, less than 2% of the opinion pieces about Palestinians were written by Palestinians (Maha Nassar, 'US Media Talks a lot About Palestinians – Just Without Palestinians', 2 October 2020, +972 Magazine, https://www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians/ [Date accessed: 10 July 2023]). In terms of US politics towards Palestine, Khaled Elgindy has noted a shift from ambivalence to indifference during the Trump Era (Blind Spot: American and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), 246), which has not seen a pronounced improvement since Joe Biden took office in 2021.9 Abdelrazaq has said in an interview that 'even though [she does]n't write [her]self into the story', she 'see[s] the graphic novelist as a character in the story', including through the visuals she uses to represent the story of her father and other family members (Leila Abdelrazaq, 'Leila Abdelrazaq Interview', Interview with Quest Sawyer, 18 May 2018, Asian American Art Oral History Project. https://via.library.depaul.edu/oral_his_series/110/ [Date accessed: 10 July 2023]).10 The only other Palestinian example I am aware of is Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas's young adult graphic novel Squire (2022), which uses tatreez-style drawings in the chapter openings. However, we do see a focus on embroideries – whether as a metaphor or as a material element – in other graphic narratives, such as Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries (2003) and Kate Evans's Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017).11 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics, 1st ed., trans. Bart Beaty, and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), p. 107.12 Thierry Groensteen, 'The Art of Braiding: A Clarification', trans. Ann Miller, European Comic Art, 9, no. 1 (2016): p. 94.13 Nur Masalha, 'Naji Al-Ali, Edward Said and Civil Liberation Theology in Palestine: Contextual, Indigenous and Decolonising Methodologies', Holy Land Studies, 11, no. 2 (2012): p. 128.14 Ted Swedenburg, 'Seeing Double. Palestinian/American Histories of the Kufiya', Michigan Quarterly Review, 31, no. 4 (1992), p. 563.15 Liyana Kayali, Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance: Perceptions, Attitudes and Strategies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 2; 3; 37.16 Natalie El-Eid, 'Visual Hakawatis: Drawing Resistance in Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi and Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream', Mashriq & Mahjar, 9, no. 1 (2022), p. 159.17 Leila Abdelrazaq, Baddawi (St Lucia: Hunter, 2015), p. 16.18 Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 31. In a similar vein, Tania Pérez-Busto sees knitting 'as a practice of embodied knowledge' ('El tejido como conocimiento, el conocimiento como tejido: reflexiones feministas en torno a la agencia de las materialidades', Rev. Colomb. Soc., 39, no. 2 (2016), p. 168). All translations from Spanish are my own unless otherwise indicated.19 Bidisha Banerjee, 'Picturing Precarity: Diasporic Belonging and Camp Life in Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi', Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 57, no. 1, p. 21.20 Hiyem Cheurfa, 'Testifying Graphically: Bearing Witness to a Palestinian Childhood in Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi', A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 35, no. 2 (2020), p. 373.21 Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: NYU Press, 2014), p. 29.22 Mischa Hiller, 'Onions and Diamonds', in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, eds. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2013), p. 147.23 For an overview of Leila Abdelrazaq's work, see https://lalaleila.com/ [Date accessed: 7 July 2022].24 Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 12.25 Yair Wallach, 'Trapped in Mirror-Images: The Rhetoric of Maps in Israel/Palestine', Political Geography, 30, no. 7 (2011), p. 365.26 Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa'di, 'Introduction: The Claims of Memory', in Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), p. 19.27 Wallach, 'Trapped in Mirror-Images', p. 362.28 Salamon, 'Embroidered Palestine', p. 17.29 Rebecca Scherr, 'Shaking Hands with Other People's Pain: Joe Sacco's "Palestine"', Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 46, no. 1 (2013), p. 21.30 Salamon, 'Embroidered Palestine', pp. 17–8.31 Abdelrazaq, Baddawi, 11.32 Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature, pp. 1–2.33 Dabaie qtd. in Jütka Salavetz and Spencer Drate, 'Marguerite Dabaie', Creating Comics! 47 Master Artists Reveal the Techniques and Inspiration Behind Their Comic Genius, (Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2010), p. 43.34 Kayali, Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance, p. 80.35 Carol N.W. Fadda, 'Orientalism and Cultural Translation: Middle Eastern American Writing', in Orientalism and Literature, ed. Geoffrey P. Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), p. 288.36 Sirène H. Harb, Articulations of Resistance: Transformative Practices in Arab-American Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 72.37 Marguerite Dabaie, The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories (Greenbelt: Rosarium Publishing, 2018), p. 65.38 Marguerite Dabaie, '23andMe Doesn't Know What Makes a Palestinian', The Nib, 12 April 2019, https://thenib.com/23andme-doesn-t-know-what-makes-a-palestinian/ [Date accessed: 27 September 2021]. Khelil Bouarrouj, 'Speaking up as a Palestinian: Interview with Comics Artist Marguerite Dabaie', Palestine Square, 29 Aug 2015, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232378 [Date accessed: 27 September 2021].39 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 6.40 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 6.41 Steven Salaita, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 124.42 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 9.43 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 10. In an interview, Dabaie has explained that in addition to wanting to represent Palestinians as human, they created these comics because they 'felt that the comics addressing Palestinians at the time were not actually made by them' (Alex Dueben, 'Smash Pages Q&A: Marguerite Dabaie', in Smash Pages: The Comics Super Blog, 2019, https://smashpages.net/2019/05/28/smash-pages-qa-marguerite-dabaie/ [Date accessed: 27 September 2021]). When Dabaie started drawing comics in 2007, the most famous graphic narrative about Palestine would have been Joe Sacco's book of the same title, which was first published as a collected volume in 2001. In addition to Abdelrazaq's and Dabaie's work there are now a few more book-length Anglophone Palestinian graphic narratives, including Iasmin Omar Ata's Mis(h)adra (2017) and Mohammad Sabaaneh's Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine (2021).44 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 60.45 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 31.46 Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward, 'Identity, Transformation, and the Anglophone Arab Novel', in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015), p. 321.47 Jared Gardner, 'Storylines', SubStance, 40, no. 1 (2011), p. 65.48 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 56.49 Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 28.50 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 57.51 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 7.52 Swedenburg, 'Seeing Double', pp. 564–5; 567.53 Sarah Irving, Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation (London: Pluto Press, 2012), p. 90, original emphasis.54 Dabaie, The Hookah Girl, p. 81.55 Ahmed Moor qtd. in Irving, Leila Khaled, p. 134.56 Farah, 'Stitching Survival', p. 242.57 Kayali, Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance, p. 182.
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