A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts
Abstract
Artisans in resettling refugee communities in Worcester, Massachusetts sometimes use their craft-making as a means of solace in the face of troubling memories. In this essay I contend that some other refugee artisans use the making of hand loomed textiles as a coded archive of the many borders they have crossed and losses they have experienced, fleeing extreme violence. One such textile is a dark orangish pink table runner woven in 2022 for sale by the nonprofit, Refugee Artisans of Worcester, or RAW. The weaver is the Karenni artisan Tu Meh, age about 62. I employ historian Tiya Miles’ historiography of another specific cloth object, a cotton sack, as set out in her All that She Carried (2022) and apply that approach to cloths made along the refugee journey.
Citation: Rodgers, Susan. “A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2024, www.thejugaadproject.pub/karenni-refugee [date of access]
In her revelatory 2022 book, All that She Carried, historian Tiya Miles documents how the personal and familial pain of enslavement and institutionalized anti-Black racism was embodied in a seemingly simple cotton sack given to a 9-year-old Black enslaved girl named Ashley in 1852 by her enslaved mother. Rose, the girl’s mother, lived on a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, and knew the girl was leaving her for the last time to do forced labor on a distant cotton plantation in upriver South Carolina. The bag was later embroidered with verses explaining the history of “Ashley’s sack” by a descendant, long after the Civil War. Ashley’s mother Rose packed the bag with pecans for sustenance, an old dress for bodily protection, and family mementos as signs of love, as the pair parted. Miles spends her entire book unpacking the layers of meaning about rupture, injustice and resilience embedded in this plain-looking sack and its contents. This approach is suggestive of rich new ways to analyze and write about textiles worldwide, especially ones linked to dislocation and broken social bonds.
Figure 1. Tu Meh’s rose-colored table runner. Image courtesy of author.
In this case of Ashley and her sack, and perhaps many other fiber-related human situations, cloth objects can narrate immense universes of despair and forced dislocation. In this frankly exploratory essay, I employ Miles’s methodology of deep immersion in the hidden social histories and oblique messages woven into a cloth object to examine a patterned, stunningly beautiful back strap weaving made in 2022 by Tu Meh, a Karenni master weaver now resettling as a refugee in Worcester, Massachusetts (Figure 1). Originally from Karenni state in Burma/Myanmar (Karenni forced migrants in Worcester prefer the old term, “Burma” since the word “Myanmar” is associated with the current central government), Tu Meh was forced to flee with her family about 12 years ago to a refugee camp along the Thai/Burma border. They were literally fleeing for their lives; they had been transformed into unwilling exiles by attacks by the Myanmar national army, the Tatmadaw, which is still on the rampage against Burma’s many ethnic minority societies today.
Figure 2. Close up of Tu Meh’s rose-colored textile. Image courtesy of author.
In the border camp, Tu Meh wove in the staff-run craft house and often at home, on a piece work basis for the craft house. The staff wanted the forced migrants to have a way to earn cash to supplement the food rations and household supplies provided by the camp. The staff would sell the goods made in or in connection with the craft house and give back a portion of the proceeds to the crafters. However, the workers were obligated to use a limited color palette and traditionalized motifs. Upon arriving in Worcester, however, Tu Meh encountered a nonprofit, Refugee Artisans of Worcester (RAW), which offered weaving supplies for free and encouraged thread-level and motif-level creativity and innovation, the better to market the textiles to American publics seeking to buy “traditional crafts” and to help refugees financially. Each crafter(1) would receive at least 85% of the sales price from RAW, to use as she or he wished. The founders of RAW (Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko) knew that the resultant hand weavings were as much products of Massachusetts arts markets as they were so-called repositories of Karenni ‘traditions.’ Tu Meh is a weaver who has thrived within this context of a very small-scale social business that explicitly wants to empower forced migrants resettling in Massachusetts. RAW sponsors monthly business meetings and introduces the artisans to such international business practices as marketing, banking, and surveys of the buying public to discover which products are the most attractive. At the same time, RAW’s Ellen and Joan deeply respect their collaborators’ extraordinarily high level of artistic skill and artisanal knowledge.
Over the last 7 years of her residence in Central Massachusetts, Tu Meh has become exuberantly creative and unapologetically non-traditional, to the extent that she often uses bamboo fiber and her cloths have taken on an almost sculptural quality, in a wide palette of hues (not just the red, black and white and bits of yellow and green of ‘traditional’ Karenni handloomed cloth). Basing my interpretation on a close examination of this one rose-colored textile (a table runner, Figure 1) and on ethnographic interviews with RAW artisans and Tu Meh since 2017, I narrate this cloth as Tu Meh’s coded way of ‘storying about’ a refugee journey from her home village in Burma, across a state border to an international refugee camp in Thailand, and on to a challenging, sometimes lonely resettlement in America. Tu Meh is studying for the U.S. citizenship interview and test but is finding that process difficult. She speaks little English and is quite quiet and seemingly uncommunicative. But, through her weaving work Tu Meh is telling rich narratives of rupture, suffering, hope lost and hope somewhat regained. As outsiders to her communications in cloth, as textile scholars and refugee studies scholars we need to find ways to hear and see her hidden messages about her many fraught border-crossings and challenges along her way. She has put these into her rose/orange textile, for those who have eyes to see. Borrowing on Miles’s deft historiography and also on the wider literature on Asian handwoven textiles (I have focused much of my previous fieldwork and analyses of cloth on Southeast Asia and Indonesia and Malaysia within that [see especially Rodgers 2011a, 2011b, 2019]), I read the concrete details of her magnificent cloth (her choice of color, motifs, overall design) in this way, as a proclamation of survival beyond the cliches of ‘the resilient refugee’ that one sometimes finds in popular rhetoric, social work boosterism, and journalistic accounts in America today (Ong, 2003).
In Central Massachusetts during the years of Tu Meh’s residence there, most places of formal employment disparage the skills and sheer social worth of women like Tu Meh: over age 60, non-fluent in English, largely homebound due to family care obligations, modest formal schooling accomplishments, and formally unemployed. The brilliance of this textile in terms of its level of weaving technique, its commanding aesthetic, and its insouciant self-confidence and innovative flair have provided Tu Meh with a way of navigating her many border crossings and changes in social status with pride and verve.
In person, with mainline American interlocutors, Tu Meh is quiet and seemingly shy and deferential (something of a stereotype in Worcester when residents talk about Karenni and also Karen refugees now living in the city). However, her textile gives the lie to all of this: it is eloquent as a proclamation of pride through personal craft-work excellence and creativity.
What does historian Tiya Miles have to offer textile scholars and anthropologists of art like myself in terms of a methodology for reading cloth objects like this one, cloths that have been generated by both social and psychic dislocation but also by creative efforts by makers to “craft a new home” in resettlement? Along with Miles’s research, there is her focus on rupture, emotion and memory, and her distinctive ways of writing about cloth through both analytical prose and personal narrative.
Tiya Miles and a Historiography of Dislocation, Loss and Bravery: Lessons for Looking at Tu Meh’s Cloth
As an historian of slavery and Black women within its structures of oppression and resistance, Miles was certainly familiar with the more obvious narratives of slavery’s effects on enslaved individuals: the printed slave narratives; enslaved people’s letters; autobiographical interviews with formerly enslaved women and men given to researchers during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, Miles and other scholars who had encountered Ashley’s sack wanted to go beyond these familiar sources to see how slavery’s horrors and particularly the pain felt in Black families during the mid-19th century when relatives were torn apart from each other during the cotton boom era might have been manifest in material culture. Older plantation crops such as rice and tobacco were being supplanted in profitability by cotton, which was exploding in value as the factory manufacture of cotton textiles in New England and Britain revved up to unprecedented levels. Cotton is a labor-intensive crop, demanding many hands to pick the bolls off the plant at the peak of harvest times. As a consequence of this, plantation owners saw profits could be made quickly by selling their enslaved field hands to other plantation enterprises in the growing cotton belt areas (middle South Carolina in Ashley’s case and Alabama and Mississippi in others on an even larger scale). Enslaved women, men, and youth were bundled together into coffle gangs(2) and sent along on forced marches, chained together, to distant new forced labor camps (a more precise way of referring to plantations, many scholars aver).
This was the labor regime that had consumed 9-year-old Ashley. As noted, her mother was left behind on a large plantation somewhere near Charleston, South Carolina, while the child was packed off to a new cotton-growing enterprise somewhere upstate. Ashley’s sack, Miles writes – a gift given to her by her distraught mother ‘for the road’ - was assembled as a kind of kit for survival. Rose, Ashley’s mother, had re-purposed a fairly large cotton tote bag with a drawstring at the top. The sack itself may have been handloomed or it could have been factory-made. Into this bag, Rose placed three handfuls of pecans, a tattered old dress, and a lock of her own hair; family stories about the sack’s contents passed down over generations as the bag was kept by descendants, until Rose’s great-granddaughter Ruth embroidered a kind of poem onto the material in multi-colored thread. The lines went as follows (Miles 2022, 5):
My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
She never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921 [punctuation as in the original].
Curators at the Middleton Plantation outside of Charleston where the sack had ended up as a display piece early on in its peregrinations found that museum visitors would burst into tears when they viewed the sack and read these lines. The object had become a kind of Black Hole of emotions. Today, the sack oscillates between Middleton Place Plantation and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
According to Miles, the following are some of the most prominent themes embedded in Ashley’s sack. These implicit messages were originally for Ashley herself as she found herself “on the road”, but later on the themes also addressed other observers of the object and its verses. The first message carried by the sack is that Ashley is much loved and exists within a nexus of caring, loving Black kin. The depredations of Cotton Empire slavery (Miles 2022, 3-4, 11-14, 20, 233, 235, 264, 274) cannot take that away from the child or, by extension, her descendants. Miles documents these claims by going through the various parts of the sack and its contents to explore how each component represented love and care for the girl (for instance, the provision of three handfuls of high-energy, high-protein pecans gave Ashley food but also a potential item to trade on her forced journey).
Then, the sack goes on to “speak” about Rose’s agency as a mother: Rose is actively managing her daughter’s forced move to the upstate cotton plantation by providing her with calorie-dense food, by giving her a dress to protect her dignity as a young woman from lustful gazes of elite and much older white plantation-owner men; and by giving her a lock of her mother’s braided hair, a clear sign of Black family continuity and promise in dangerous times (2022, pp. 20-21, 102-103, 145, 155, 184-185).
Thirdly, the cotton threads that the sack is made from themselves embody the ironic nature of history. Cotton plantations in the antebellum South were indeed a devil’s playground, for why else would a child be pulled away from her mother’s presence except to fulfill the plantation economy’s hunger for forced, unpaid labor? Yet, given the fact that the sack itself is an object made of cotton, this shows that the instruments of exploitation can sometimes be turned into critiques of that very production system. The cotton sack has been transformed into a means of survival and psychic resource for the 9-year-old.
Fourthly, the sack was made as a provider of pleasures. Years after it was given to Ashley, the added embroidery verses also made it an object of beauty. For post-Civil War Black women, doing fine embroidery in bright colors was a way to assert rising social class status, since white women made lovely samplers and decorated cushions as signs of “refinement” and artistic sophistication (2022, 247-249, 251, 2545-264). Black seamstresses could aspire to such cultural refinement, too, the embroidered lines proclaim.
Miles’s own rapturous prose style (reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s writings), and her frequent excursions throughout her arguments into far-flung domains of scholarship about textiles, Black kinship studies, and slavery history, are also part of her interpretive strategy. Can we apply Miles’s approach to textile interpretation to the cloths made by refugees now resettling in countries like the United States? I would say that we can. But first, a short glimpse at the rewarding scholarship about materiality and memory in the Thai/Burma border refugee camps, where many Karenni lived for years before going on to the next stage of their exile, in countries of more lasting resettlement.
On the Materiality of Refugee Camp Life: Insights from S. Dudley, Materialising Exile
Anthropologist Sandra Dudley is entirely correct in asserting that refugee studies in general and analyses of refugee camp life both need more attention to the ways in which forced exile takes material form for refugees and in fact for humanitarian work staff as well. She addresses this gap in the literature in her excellent Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand (2010), based on her Ph.D. dissertation fieldwork. Dudley based her study on several lengthy stays in Karenni-majority refugee camps along the Thai border. She investigated rituals, daily and ceremonial clothing, household routines and work lives in the camp clinic and craft house (which tended to be focused on weaving in the Karenni camps). Relevant to this present study of a Karenni textile woven in American refugee resettlement are her insights about ‘traditional’ Karenni dress in Mae Hong Son camp (where many residents purposely do not wear traditional costumes) and about weaving per se. Physically making their own textiles for everyday wear or for ceremonial occasions gave Karenni women weavers in the camps a chance to link their lives in forced exile to a remembered village past, before the rupture caused by attacks by the Tatmadaw armed forces.
The weavers in the refugee camps were making cloth to earn money and they sometimes wove not in the craft house but at their homes, sitting on the ground under the floorboards with their backstrap looms attached to the house posts. This is how they wove ‘back home’ in Burma before the flight to the refugee camp. The physicality and rhythmic motions of passing the weft threads across and under and above the warps to grow their textile on the loom afforded the women a satisfying tactile sense of linking their own daily lives to memories from their pre-exile existence.
For some Karenni women in the camps, putting on and wearing ‘traditional’ clothing also formed a material bridge to their previous lives before they were forced to flee home villages. There is much ethnic diversity within the “Karenni” category of person in Burma and in the refugee camp. The term covers individuals who consider themselves to be Kayah, or Kayan, or several other sub-ethnic terms. Consequently, distinctive ethnic clothing comes in somewhat different forms for women who lived in this Karenni majority Mae Hong Son camp when Dudley conducted her study there in the 1990s. Many women who had been in the camp for a long time simply wore t-shirts and dark slacks or sarongs; they may have considered the ultra-traditional, red and black female garb of short, patterned skirt cloths and black, partial breast coverings to be “too village-ified.” Apparently, the Thai medical staff at the nearby hospital also found village fashions of this sort to be old-fashioned, overly rural, and insufficiently modest (this fashion is sleeveless and sometimes lets a breast be exposed). However, women who had very recently arrived in the refugee camp from their home villages found the village clothing style to be more comfortable and psychologically reassuring than the internationalized styles such as t-shirt and slacks. Traditional garb for men (black cotton trousers, white jackets) appeared mostly in holiday times, when old rituals were performed. Children mostly ran around the camp in black slacks or shorts along with t-shirts or under shirts.
Dudley’s discussion of weaving on backstrap looms, as craftwork but also as memory work, noted the following. Most poignantly, many Karenni women of various sub-groups lamented the paucity of good cotton thread to string their looms with, to make clothing of any sort in the refugee camps. This stood in contrast to the “old days” in home villages back in Burma, where thread could easily be purchased and sometimes cotton itself could be planted, harvested, and spun.
So, being able to weave cotton goods in the camp had certain enjoyable aspects to it as the activity helped women to recover home, in a sense. Yet, there were also sorrowful, subtle constraints on weaving in the camps. Dudley writes,
“Growing cotton is clearly impossible in the refugee context, and acquiring undyed cotton yarn is both difficult and unaffordable for these women. Even when the latter is possible, the dyeing of the cotton to create some of the required soft hues is hampered by both restricted access to jungle plants and by the local lack of certain plant species on which women relied inside Karenni State. Producing black (various barks can be used), yellow (turmeric) and green (leaves of ‘tiger beans’ and other types of climbing legume) was considered by most women to be quite feasible in the refugee camp, as the necessary, familiar plant species are readily available. Red, however – the colour most important to the Kayah – was viewed as impossible to produce in the camp, whatever traditional method and plant dye was attempted, because of the unavailability of appropriate plant species in the vicinity. Furthermore, these weavers are unlikely to be able to afford, and are unused to, working with brightly coloured, chemically dyed yarns such as those used by women in the longer-staying refugee community. As a result, and in association with the importance to them of being able to continue to wear their traditional clothing…there was considerable distress amongst this group about their inability to continue to weave once in the camp” (Dudley 2010, 147).
Dudley goes on to note that it is important that several weavers had made sure to bring along precious cotton threads and some dyed yarns, on the jungle trek to the refugee camp in the rainy season. She writes that the value of other creative work in displacement (her insightful term) such as house building along with weaving “lies thus in part in the provision, sight and use of familiar artefacts” where forced migrant artisans can assert a degree of control over an often-frustrating new environment (148). “But the physical process of making textile and houses, and simply undertaking everyday cooking and other chores, is also of fundamental importance” (148; emphasis in original). A loss of connection to any of these tactile processes was deeply threatening, for it portended a loss of home.
This helps explain Worcester refugee artisans’ appreciation for the creative possibilities of working with the empowerment-minded mini nonprofit, RAW.
Tu Meh Narrates Dislocations and ‘Refugee-dom” through Weaving
Drawing on a lengthy life history interview with Tu Meh in her previous home in 2017 in which her medical translator son Oo Reh was our English translator, many encounters with Tu Meh in craft fairs since then, a filming session for our digital archive of refugee artisans of Worcester in 2023, and then an hour-long follow-up interview with Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko, cofounder and co-directors of RAW on May 6, 2024 specifically for this present article, I can fairly say that Tu Meh is a remarkable person, though shy and retiring. However, though she is a woman of few words with interviewers like me (academic, white, lifelong U.S. citizen), Tu Meh tells aspects of her story through her weaving, as we shall shortly see.
Tu Meh is in her sixties now and finds her days increasingly occupied with caring for her many small grandchildren while her sons and daughters-in-law work in paid jobs outside the home. She learned to weave on a backstrap loom as a child in her home village in Karenni State in Burma. Once she was married and raising her children in her village, she wove almost all of their clothes. The family did not have the money to purchase ready-made clothing. She even grew her own cotton, an unusual practice at that time. Once the family was forced into exile in the Thai border refugee camp after the Burmese military attacked the village as a rebel stronghold, Tu Meh took up weaving again. But this time, it was to make money from the sale of handwoven cloths by the camp craft shop staff. The cotton thread was provided to the weavers by the staff and was pre-dyed, usually in black, red, or white (the better to turn out Karenni ‘traditional’ dress). She would sometimes weave in the family’s home, or, rather, under it, using the house posts as places to attach her backstrap loom to set up its tension.
Figure 3. 2023, Tu Meh in Karenni heritage costume, for a posed photograph for the Digital Archive: Refugee Artisans of Worcester. Photograph by Troy Thompson.
In our 2017 interview in her South Worcester triple decker home, a Holy Cross undergraduate researcher (Martina Umunna) and I saw several color photographs mounted on the living room wall of a younger Tu Meh dressed in Karenni ceremonial garb. That is, sleeveless black top, patterned woven skirt, chains decked out with an abundance of silver coins, broadcasting family wealth, and black rings on her legs. However, for that particular interview, Tu Meh was dressed much more simply, in a blouse and slacks, both factory-made. In fact, until 2024 we never saw her wear Karenni dress (Figure 3). One day, the videographer for our digital archive project (Troy Thompson) was scheduled to come to her house with Ellen and Joan to take photos; Tu Meh spent hours getting into the leg rings and special clothes of the traditional dress. It was a shock for me to see the resultant photograph because, previous to this, I had only seen her in conservative, standardized international-style business attire, a dark jacket. black slacks, a costume she would wear to all of her public appearances when she would demonstrate weaving on her loom at craft fairs in the Worcester area (see Figure 4, for instance). The sleeveless, tight-fitting Karenni dress was almost sensual and in marked contrast to that subdued ensemble.
Figure 4. Tu Meh in everyday dress, doing a weaving demonstration at a Worcester craft fair, circa 2017. Image courtesy of author.
Soon after arrival in Worcester, Tu Meh had started to attend events at WRAP, a nonprofit – Worcester Refugee Assistance Project, which specialized in helping forced migrants from Burma/Myanmar. WRAP held ESL classes, cooking classes, help with paperwork sessions, and community parties at an old de-commissioned Catholic church on the city’s east side. I was a volunteer tutor there for 6 years. At WRAP, Tu Meh heard about RAW and about Ellen and Joan from 3 women who were already weaving in collaboration with RAW. Tu Meh and RAW linked up soon afterward and Joan brought an abundance of different colors of thread to Tu Meh’s house where she lived with her husband and several grown children and their young families. Tu Meh had carried along her backstrap loom from the refugee camp to resettlement in Massachusetts. She later reconstructed and refined that loom with the addition of more self-designed, carefully cut pieces of bamboo, gleaned from a RAW-sponsored trip to an experimental bamboo farm in Plymouth, MA. Ellen and Joan had organized that trip for the RAW crafts people who wanted to work with bamboo and needed a good supply. Tu Meh became a constant presence on these twice-a-year expeditions to the experimental bamboo farm In Plymouth. MA. By this time, she was also a regular attendee at RAW’s monthly business meetings held at local universities or museums. She interacted with RAW’s several weavers from the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese forced migrant community and with a skilled weaver of Karen background, also from Burma. None of these older women spoke much English but they communicated by showing each other samples of their hand weavings.
Before too many months had passed, Ellen and Joan discovered that Tu Meh was what they term “a production weaver” - someone who was devoted to weaving a very great deal, virtually every day, and who could be counted on to produce new weavings on a regular basis for the craft fair sales that RAW sponsored. Ellen or Joan would bring 85% of each sales price to Tu Meh for her own use, to spend in whatever way she wished. That was RAW’s standard business model.
Early on in her work for RAW, Tu Meh would produce blankets and traditional Karenni blouses. These did not sell well to the general Massachusetts public and she drifted over to weaving mostly scarves for American women to use as fashion wear. These sold briskly and as the years passed, Tu Meh expanded her color palette beyond blue into a broad range of pastels and from cotton threads into bamboo threads, which she loved for its silkiness, lightness, and flexibility. She alternated between using cotton and bamboo fiber, sometimes incorporating shiny metallic thread as well into her scarf patterns. Those scarves sold especially well. Somewhat larger textiles such as the rose-colored table runner did not “move” all that well to American publics, so Tu Meh rarely spent the time to produce these. A scarf could be purchased for about $35 and had ready, daily fashion uses for women; a table runner was a somewhat unfamiliar item for potential mainstream American buyers and more expensive to purchase. Its color would also have to complement the colors in buyers’ home décor.
The rose-colored table runner itself languished for a few years in storage with RAW for no buyer appeared. Then, Ellen and Joan decided to purchase it for me as a gift for a small celebration we held at a favorite bakery of ours after the completion of our digital archive aboutthe refugee artisans and their crafts. Ellen and Joan knew that I had decorated my home with many Indonesian weavings, hung on the walls, so I would know what to do with a purported table runner. I was immediately taken with the cloth’s beauty and presence. It was decidedly non-traditional: it included none of the typical Karenni heritage textile colors and in fact was monochromatic (her scarves usually included several colors). The table runner used one motif found in older Karenni textiles (large X’s), but for the most part was strikingly original: it was a weaving of the resettlement experience and of American craft market spaces. It was a kind of anti-Karenni heritage work, in the sense of moving beyond that set of artistic conventions.
Pink – and the Importance of Making One’s Own Choices in Life
Scholars of refugee resettlement often note that governmental agencies, social work bureaucracies, public schools, health care bureaucracies, and nonprofits in countries of resettlement sometimes hold refugee clients they are trying to assist to an unattainably high standard of being “good refugees.” That is, compliant to official rules and regulations, uncomplaining and endlessly grateful, eager to assimilate, and enthusiastic and diligent about learning English – quickly. But fieldworkers know that many refugees in resettlement are not fully in accord with this model of compliant behavior. Some forced migrants actively do not want to learn English; some see the standard job scene of late capitalism as hostile to their own lives; and some are simply too traumatized by violence in countries of origin to march happily to any authority’s tune. Master weaver Tu Meh is certainly not an overt rebel in any way, but to Joan, Ellen, and myself, she does appear to be a woman who insists on making her own life decisions in independence of that roster of beneficent but condescending list of “good refugee” behaviors and worldviews. Her rose table runner embodies this.
One way that Tu Meh shows this independent-minded stance is her choice of colors for her hand weavings. Like several other weavers in the Karen and Karenni as well as the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese communities in Worcester, in her early years in Worcester and her early months of collaboration with Refugee Artisans of Worcester, Tu Meh went through a phase of preferring hot pink threads for her weaving. These women indicated to Ellen and Joan that they were attracted to the brightness and ‘newness’ of pink yarns, a hue they usually could not access in their home countries or in refugee camps. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they swiftly found out, however, that textiles made in hot pink did not sell well in local craft fairs to upper-middle-class mainstream Massachusetts women in search of suitably understated, ‘autumn color’ or pastel heritage scarves to use as fashion wear. Neon green was another color choice that did not move well to the buying public. RAW’s Ellen and Joan, calm and subtle as always, avoided overtly telling the weavers to switch away from hot pink and neon green over to light blues, soft pastels, gold tones, ‘forest colors’ and so on. They simply waited long enough for the artisans to process the fact that almost no one was buying hot pink or neon green scarves and those items brought in no cash for them. In fact, these pieces often just got consigned to Joan’s and Ellen’s storage closets at home.
Tu Meh, along with the other early adopters of bright pinks, shifted away from those hues. However, in 2022 when Ellen and Joan happened upon a large supply of rose/russet/orange cotton threads at a Worcester craft store, and once Tu Meh saw those as a possible choice for her own weaving work, she jumped at the chance to create a near-pink textile, the one that eventually ended up at my house where it is cherished. This color choice was a product of a months-long negotiation with American middle-class fashion standards and Tu Meh’s own love for pink. She herself guided this negotiation. Her approach to weaving this one cloth in this one unorthodox color was emblematic of her overall take on resettlement per se.
She shows this independence of spirit in other ways, too, perhaps most prominently in her succession of decisions about where to live. At one level the Karenni in Massachusetts are of course forced migrants, physically exiled from their home villages in Burma due to central government attacks by the Tatmadaw military. However, once they had settled in Worcester for about five to seven years (and after many of the families had bought homes and no longer rented apartments in triple deckers) they started to move out of the city to new residences elsewhere in the United States. Some of the Karenni families moved to North Carolina for good jobs, milder winters, and to be near family; others moved to the American Midwest or to western states (Iowa, Indiana, South Dakota). Tu Meh herself lived with a married son and his family in a triple-decker in South Worcester for her first years of resettlement. This son and his wife, both employed (in a hospital system and an electronics factory, respectively) then bought a large house in Webster, MA, near a scenic lake. Tu Meh moved out to that countryside, rural area with them for a few years. (Webster is about a 40-minute drive from Worcester.) Then, rather suddenly, she announced to her family that she was moving back to Worcester, as she was lonely and felt isolated in Webster, a small place far from the bright city lights (and her older women friends). She went to live with another of her grown sons and his family, in east Worcester. She then oscillated between their house and the old South Worcester triple-decker neighborhood, where some of her old women friends still lived. Then, in summer 2024, the older son, his family, and Tu Meh and her husband all moved to Iowa, where they live now. Ellen, Joan and I were shocked especially once they heard from Tu Meh that she was quitting weaving. She was going to leave her backstrap loom behind, with RAW. As political scientist James C. Scott has maintained (2009), small-scale ethnic minority peoples in mainland Southeast Asia, surrounded by encroaching state-level societies, have often moved from place to place throughout many centuries. This is a modus operandi for dealing with hostile, larger-scale states.
The Mobile Back Strap Loom, for a Life on the Move
The lovely rose-orange textile was made on Tu Meh’s backstrap loom, a tool that itself embodies mobilities of the sort Karenni people have for so long found to be strategically useful. The Nepali-speaking Bhutanese weavers in RAW circles work on floor looms, which are fairly large and quite heavy. It takes true effort to uproot and move them. The weavers from Burma, by contrast, use eminently moveable, small, backstrap looms: these are lightweight and can be taken apart and bound together into an assemblage that is packable and easily carried. Tu Meh has carried her loom on the move from Burma to the Thai border camp and on to Massachusetts. The tool has been reconstructed a bit along the way (for instance, as mentioned, gaining new bamboo slats once RAW started to organize those semi-annual trips to the Plymouth, MA experimental bamboo farm). But the loom’s basic portability has remained constant.
The rose-colored textile is thus part and parcel of Tu Meh’s intensely mobile life as an artisan. A peripatetic nature as a purposeful border-crosser in her post-exile from Burma life is something that Tu Meh celebrates. She is not confined in space and she also exults in the fact that she continually crosses artistic boundaries as well. She uses Karenni weaving techniques and a few diagnostically Karenni motifs (for instance, large X’s show up in many of her weavings), but she is not hidebound within ‘traditional’ Karenni weaving conventions. She strides across borders with her deep pink/orange, monochromatic, non-traditional textile, which has little if any connection to Karenni heritage costume. All of this rhymes with the pleasure she seems to take in moving from place to place, no longer ‘chased out’ of anywhere but rather actively choosing new spots upon which to alight. Just in June, 2024, one of her family friends told me that she has sent word back to Worcester acquaintances that she misses them a great deal. She may well come back to the city.
On the Sheer Variety of Tu Meh’s Weavings – Resettlement and Creativity
Figure 5. Tu Meh has made a plethora of different styles of woven scarves, a few shown here. Image courtesy of author.
One of the popular culture American ways of imagining refugees is that they are rather woebegone forced wanderers needing pity and much aid from mainstream middle-class society. They are takers, not givers, in this stereotypical view. They are seen as recipients of welfare and are not quite ‘regular Americans yet,’ even when they have already attained U.S. citizenship. Tu Meh’s audacious, border-crossing textile shouts out a counter-narrative: artwork of this sort acts as an instrument of personal agency for the weaver from the midst of their negotiations about ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ in a wildly multicultural Gateway City such as Worcester, MA (over 60 different languages are spoken in the homes of the city’s public school students). Why artisanal production for this project of ethnicized world building? In Worcester at least, this is a relatively unsupervised, un-policed cultural domain. The RAW co-directors have worked with several exuberantly creative craftspeople much like Tu Meh, older adults who make new visions of ‘heritage’ art in thread or bamboo or stone, in the precise commercial spaces of craftwork done for sale to American publics, in collaboration with a nonprofit, mini-project such as RAW whose explicit goal is to financially empower the resettlement community and encourage community respect for their art-making skills. Many examples of this sort of craftwork are shown in the Digital Archive: Refugee Artisans of Worcester (for instance, the Bhutanese weaver Jahar Ghalley’s innovative cloths, the Bhutanese artisan Bhim Subba’s birdcages for Massachusetts-sized songbirds, and the re-fashioned cotton t-shirts with handwoven or embroidered decorative inset panels across the front).
Figure 6. Close up of Tu Meh’s rose-colored textile. Image courtesy of author.
Figure 5 shows some of the variety of Tu Meh’s scarves, an especially creative domain for her. She changes colors and types of thread, motifs, stripes or no stripes, metallic threads or no metallic threads. But another aspect of her creativity has a technical aspect to it. As Figure 6 shows (a close up of her rose table runner), sometimes, over to the edges of her textile on the loom, she has to squeeze together the size of her X motifs or her bands of tiny rows to make it all fit in. She does not count threads as she weaves and this is partly what occasions this ‘mashing together’ of elements of the cloth. But this ad hoc adjustment does not really harm the overall aesthetics of the textile: it just makes for one more variation. More is more, she seems to be implying.
Conclusion: Making Things of Beauty in the Midst of Refugee Flight, Exile, and Re-Homing
In January and early February, 2020, the RAW co-directors and I guest-curated an exhibition at the Worcester Center for Crafts entitled “Crafting a New Home: Refugee Artisans of Worcester.” The show included an array of the artisans’ crafts: bamboo fish traps, bamboo baskets, embroideries, wall hangings made of strips of cloth, seating mats, stone sculptures, winnowing trays, and a profusion of hand weavings by artisans from Bhutan or Burma. Within the latter sections of the exhibition, we knew that Tu Meh’s work had to be displayed as something truly unique, as creative and innovative in an off-the-charts way. So, Ellen and Joan constructed a three-tiered, tall bamboo frame, rather like a piece for displaying quilts. It had three rungs, each made of a long bamboo pole. Onto these, we hung about 30 of Tu Meh’s varied scarves. Gallerygoers could not miss the fact that she was a weaver who churned out a multiplicity of different ways to think about scarves (see Figure 6, which shows some of the variety of her work). In retrospect, it was almost as if Tu Meh was asserting: resettlement in Massachusetts, I’ve got this. She was announcing this in fiber, with flair. She was claiming a prominent museum space, to be admired.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the repeated talks with Tu Meh during the preparation of this paper over many years. Also much appreciated: talks with Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko, founders of Refugee Artisans of Worcester. Photographs by John Buckingham, Graphic Arts, Holy Cross; Troy Thompson, Daedal Creations; and Helen Whall, Professor Emerita, Holy Cross.
References
Dudley, Sandra H. 2010. Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand. Studies in Forced Migration vol. 27, University of Oxford. Berghahn: NY and Oxford.
Miles, Tiya. 2022 (2021). All that She Carried: The journey of Ashley’s sack, a Black family keepsake. New York: Random House.
Ong, Aihwa. 2003. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, citizenship, the New America. Berkeley and Los Angelos, University of California Press, Series in Public Anthropology, vol. 5.
Rodgers, Susan. 2011a. “Heritage and Ownership Debates in Three Sumatran Songkets,” in Walter Little and Patricia McAnany, eds., Textile Economies: Power and Value from the Local to the Transnational. Lanham MD: Altamira Press for Society of Economic Anthropology. Pp. 21-38.
Rodgers, Susan. 2011b. “Textile Commerce and Songket Creativity: The role of heritage entrepreneurs in contemporary gold thread weaving in Sumatra. In Textile: The journal of cloth and culture. Vol. 9, 3, 352-371.
Rodgers, Susan. 2019. Stunned by Beauty: Appreciating Ritual Textiles of Sarawak and West Kalimantan. Worcester, MA: College of the Holy Cross Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery.
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven and London.
Endnotes
[1] My usage of the English word “craft” is somewhat artificial for all of the RAW weavers I have spoken to apparently see their work as weaving per se, not as craft or indeed as part of any other category. But for readability of this article I have occasionally referred to craft work (as indeed the RAW founders see things but without any negative associations at all).
[2] A coffle, sometimes called a platoon or a drove, was a group of enslaved people chained together and marched from one place to another by owners or slave traders.
