All tagged backstrap

A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts

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.