Looking at the camel trapping hanging on the wall, and remembering….
The first year we were married we lived in Greece, both of us teaching fellows at Athens College, a private school in a suburb of Athens. Our colleagues in the English department were Americans, Brits, Kiwis - some with Greek heritage or Greek spouses giving them an in with the language and culture. Most of them had been there a long time (we were young, so for anyone to do something for more than 10 years sounded like a long time.) There’s a type of person that falls in love with Greece - they go there and never return to their home country. Many are British, and I suspect the weather and the balmy sea and islands has something to do with it. This was our first experience with expats, people who choose to live away from their home culture. I think expats are always suspected of an aversion for their origins, and in some cases there’s definitely a sense of escape, but the more significant element, what makes it last, is love for the chosen home. People talk of birth families and chosen families, well there are also chosen homes. For us it was different - we kept moving, but chose the lifestyle of living and working abroad, continually learning new places, not alighting on a set home.
Sketchbook page - ink drawing of the view outside the window at our Athens College flat. Hills, trees, a house with curved tile roof.
But Greece was the beginning, the introduction to such possibilities, and it was fascinating to meet people who had been immersed for so long that their habits and communication style were Greek. I remember learning the yes and no head gestures, subtle and nearly opposite to ours, from a British man, who was doing it so subconsciously he didn’t realize they needed explaining.
Greece was also our entry point to Asia, which I only truly understand in retrospect. But even while there, the notion of Asia Minor, of this culture that was leaning toward Asian rather than European sensibilities, was palpable. It was in the iconography and the devotion of the churches, the narrow and piled-up layout of villages, the widows everywhere in black dresses. It felt European and Asian-leaning, both at once, as with one foot in each type of society.
Sketchbook page - ink drawings of geometric designs from the peristeriones, the dovecotes of the Greek islands. Profile of a small island at bottom.
This made is easy to grasp that Istanbul was the real gateway to Asia, the Bosphorus Strait a crossing. And of course the mosques, the markets, the handwoven carpets and women in headscarves pulled our minds that much further into the unfamiliar, a reality tinged with unknowables and enticing details - like the sage tea served in small tulip-shaped glasses, the flatbread ovens working all day long to produce warm stacks collected by boys … the swirl and the busy street life told me I was in Asia. The profusion of scents and patterns, the togetherness of people. Some of this is only known by looking back, but since our own path went progressively into Asia and remained there at length, I can see what drew me in and eventually became familiar.
Sketchbook page - pencil drawing of “Ali Pasha’s, Istanbul”, a rug seller’s booth bedecked with textiles.
We only had tourist visas, we teaching fellows of Athens College, so we left the country every 3 months. Twice to Turkey, once to Egypt, and it was on one of the Istanbul visits that I purchased tribal patchwork textiles in the market. Everyone was trying to get foreigners to buy rugs. Traveling with two other teaching fellows, we were invited into rug-laden dens, given tea, and treated to an endless display of kilim, which none of us wanted. We were too young to have houses that needed rugs, and were living in borrowed rooms for less than a year. So we enjoyed the show but staved off the selling. The patchwork that I thought of as Uzbek, however, I spotted on my own as we wandered through a narrow set of street stalls. As a quilter, I took a special interest in patchwork, and I already owned a few Uzbek pieces, from my time at an import store, so I knew what I was looking at.
Small patchwork hanging bought in Istanbul, with rope snake and lattice of squares joined on point. Silk, velvet, and cotton fabrics in rich jewel tones, lots of red. Presumably the snake is protective. From what I understand, the patchwork and high contrast colors confuse and repel evil spirits. These hangings are used over doors and windows and along the interior walls of the yurt.
The two from Istanbul were unusual - one with a snake made from black and white rope, stitched onto a red velvet ground, and the other a wide, meandering piece that unfolded into arms with fabric tassels on the end and took all four of us to hold it open as the vendor said, “Camel trapping.” I believed him because the head piece was clearly visible in the shape of this thing, but for years I never knew what it really meant. I just knew that someone had edged each square with narrow binding, had embellished with white lines by sewing machine and by hand, had embroidered and appliquéd and sewn on buttons and coins and tassels made from shreds of fabric. The amount of work and care given to this thing, and its extraordinary structure of black and red arms with rows of squares joined on point in between, spoke the importance of this piece, even if I had no idea who made it or why, exactly. The vendor may have said Turkmen - I called all such things Uzbek, but suffice to say it came from Central Asia and was tribal. Who ever knows where nomadic people are at any given moment?
Close up of head piece of camel trapping - rounded flap, edged with red, decorated with black and white braid, appliquéd red and white zig zag, coins and buttons. Machine and hand embroidery in different areas.
Detail of fabric tassels.
Detail of white square with black and red felt appliqué triangles. Susan Meller calls patches with this kind of embellishment ‘talismanic.’
And this is what it tells me about now - now that I’ve read about the use of these textiles to adorn the lead camel in a Turkmen bridal procession. It tells me of nomadic pastoralism, of people who know their way through a certain land, who move with the weather and the seasons and the needs of their animals, whose life rituals are molded from this reliance on mobility and known but unowned land. No need to use cliché phrases here, we know the fate of such lifestyles, and of the concept of “unowned land”. And the camel trapping’s availability in the market tells me about that, the eventual expiration of the need for camel-led bridal processions. Not much to say… it was an important thing, and now it’s not. But to me it’s important to know, to see the effort that people put into textiles that were emblematic of a way of life. They are a form of memory, and a message that value systems shift and change, that what one set of people considers impressive, significant, indicative of wealth and status, will be utterly missed by another set of people who value different signs and symbols.
Camel trapping from Susan Meller’s book Silk and Cotton: Textiles from the Central Asia that was. This image, first seen in an ARAMCO calendar, confirmed that my piece is a camel trapping - there are many striking similarities of design and embellishment technique.
Detail of my camel trapping, showing embroidery, black and white braid, buttons, zig zag appliqué.
Detail of my camel trapping. I photographed it at night in bright light, because it’s not very well lighted during the day. Shadows are a little harsh.
Humans converge on objects of importance across cultures at different times, and for centuries those objects were textile-based. Certain dyestuffs, the method of silk cultivation, how to mechanically spin cotton into thread - these things ruled trade and power at moments in history. But converging on one set of values does not do humans any good when those values drag us away from the realms we have learned and known as a people. This artificial imposition of value is wearing itself out, wearing us out. Somehow the Turkmen camel trapping tells me all of this.
Another camel trapping image, from Janet Harvey’s Traditional Textiles of Central Asia. This one, again with many similarities to both of my pieces, has an emphasis on red, squares joined on point, tassels and high contrast embroidery. It also has child’s hair sewn onto the main red rectangle, as noted in Harvey’s caption.