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.
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- May 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- September 2022
- August 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- October 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- December 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019