Our bodies keep the score, and so do the garments that clothe them. Textiles, like our bodies, become imprinted with the weight of experience and emotion. Embroidered objects, such as Palestinian embroidery (tatreez), do so no differently.
This occurred to me as I came across Carole Hunt’s paper, ‘Worn clothes and textiles as archives of memory’, in which she explains how garments ‘hold’ the memory of the person who wore them. I found it rang true to work conducted by Marianne Hirsch, who analyses the Holocaust photograph as a medium for a type of inherited trauma she calls ‘postmemory’.
However, I became fully convinced after finding Wafa Ghnaim’s Tatreez and Tea, a postmemorial text that narrates her mother’s and her family’s flight from Safad, Palestine, in 1948. Her family keeps memories of Palestine alive through the embroidered dress or thobe. From this perspective, one undoubtedly sees that embroidered objects serve a far greater role than decoration alone. They hold the wearer’s imprint, capturing their essence, and offer a tactile connection to history, identity and emotion.
Tatreez and Palestinian memory
Palestinian thobes, adorned with tatreez, act as memory aids, connecting us to the deeper meanings attached to them. This occurs through both their creation and their use and display. For young Palestinians in the diaspora, whose families fled their homes during the creation of the State of Israel, tatreez becomes a means of processing and expressing their families’ postmemory.
Living outside Palestine, some never seeing their familial homeland firsthand, they inherit the grief of previous generations. From this, they find in tatreez both a tool of remembrance and a form of resistance.
This has been occurring for decades. The historical intifada dress, for example, tells a story of occupation and resistance, during a time when the Israeli government outlawed displays of Palestinian nationality. More recently, Jordan Nassar’s work questions the nostalgic gaze young Palestinians cast upon their lost homeland, a gaze which they tacitly inherit from their refugee parents and grandparents, while the Naqsh Collective’s thobes, in contrast, celebrates it.
The power and paradox of domestic craft
Tragically, some in the West shelve embroidery and its value, dismissing it on account of its association with forced domestication. Yet this dismissal overlooks its potential as an empowering practice. For some, embroidery gives them a voice, offering a medium through which they articulate personal and collective experiences.
The paradox of embroidery as both powerful and disregarded is especially evident in tatreez, which one scholar described as ‘an apparel of the past’. Yet, through tatreez, we see its enormous mnemonic potential. What irony!
I believe this speaks to the extent to which we underestimate domesticity overall. Indeed, mundane acts like cooking, embroidering, even simply sharing our experiences with the ones we love, and especially when practised regularly, reinforce the psychology driving our behaviours and emotions. Day in and day out, these acts make us into who we are.
It is for this very reason that, historically, women – mothers, sisters, grandmothers – by mastering the home, also became guardians of the memories of those who inhabit it. These people, therefore, became the gatekeepers to unique forms of familial and cultural knowledge.
Postmemory and collective outrage
To me, this raises a poignant question. If we have such power quite literally at our fingertips, a power that not only allows us to understand the past, but understand ourselves in relation to it, then why do we disregard it so?
I’ve asked this question as I’ve witnessed people flooding the streets in recent years, outraged not only by the human rights violations of the present but also by the past atrocities endured that connect us to current injustices.
This is not limited to the Gazan genocide and the legacy of settler-colonialism in Palestine and Israel. Jewish communities, who adopt ‘never again’ as a core ideology in response to Holocaust postmemory, Black Lives Matter protests rooted in the legacy of slavery, and First Nations groups protesting the uncovering of mass graves from residential schools all illustrate how the pains of previous generations continue through the lives of their offspring.
Unprocessed grief, compounded by structural inequalities, shows itself through their suffering, forming the basis for collective action and resistance.
These struggles, in turn, often challenge dominant historical narratives. Minority histories, so very real to them, are not always so real according to formal narratives. The debate over Palestinian and Israeli histories, the removal of critical race theory from American school and university curricula, and other acts of historical censorship cast doubt on how a nation represents history.
Such erasures limit the capacity of citizens – both survivors’ descendants and perpetrators’ offspring – to understand the issues that affect them at present, reinforcing cycles of ignorance and injustice.
Embroidery as counternarrative
In this context, embroidery and other domestic acts emerge as mediums for counternarratives. This is why we must turn to unofficial archives, such as embroidered objects, to understand the past. Embroidery, as a tactile and visual medium, resists the silencing of minority voices and reclaims censored histories.
These acts allow us to grapple with what we know versus what we should know. They encourage us to find ways through which we can access this knowledge ourselves, rather than relying on inaccurate representations of history to define our truths.
Undervaluing these practices means overlooking their capacity to empower, heal and resist erasure. By reclaiming and celebrating them, we can forge deeper connections to history, to culture and to each other.
Kristine L. Sheets, PhD (Exeter), explores how inherited memories shape identity, resilience, and resistance in marginalized communities, examining everyday actions/objects as living archives of cultural and historical memory.
Embroidered memories: postmemorial nostalgia in Palestinian tatreez by Kristine Sheets is available on Bristol University Press Digital.
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Image credit: Aseel zm via Wikimedia
