Stitching Palestine

Directed by Carol Mansour
Featured at the Boston Palestine Film Festival
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 29, 2017
Visit bostonpalestinefilmfest.org or mfa.org

Stitching Palestine, directed by Carol Mansour, is a cinematic weaving that complements its “embroidery” subject: between each of the film’s twelve interviews with Palestinian women, the camera focuses on hands skillfully stitching colorful thread into a mesh backing. Arabic music accompanies these transitions, as do maps showing the numerous places each family moved to when forced out of Palestine in 1948—Lebanon, Gaza, England, Canada, the United States—a trail of moves. Displacement is a major theme of the film.

Richly embroidered thobes—traditional Palestinian garments—enter into every story, for they represent Palestinian heritage and cultural preservation. Families left everything behind in 1948, believing they would return in a matter of weeks. Now, several generations later, embroidery has come to embody the additional symbol of Palestinian resistance. As Malak al-Husseini Abdelrahim tells us: “We don’t have our country anymore but we have our embroidery. It’s become a nationalist issue . . . it’s about national belonging.” Her words are echoed later—“Embroidery is migratory, it’s like a refugee. There’s the notion of refugehood attached to it.” The movie shows us through each of the stories how embroidery has become synonymous with Palestinian identity— currently endangered.

The “12 Windows of Palestine” project—an initiative to create a mural reflecting the embroidery styles of Palestine’s twelve regions—augments the movie, as twelve women share their personal “tapestries.” For Huda al-Imam, the tilework of her father’s Jerusalem home always reminded her of embroidery—“embroidered with a paintbrush instead of a needle,” she says. When she discovered that the tiles were being discarded by the new Jewish owners, she salvaged them and created portions of her own flooring with their designs.

Words like apartheid, colonialism, occupation, prisoner, and ethnic cleansing come up in the discussions, with family evidence given. Anger is freely expressed by some of the women and restrained under a socially correct veneer by others.

Nazmiyeh Salem, who produces museum-quality pieces, is the third generation of a family that has lived in a refugee camp—“Embroidery flows in my blood,” she says. She and others describe how women today, and historically, have gathered to embroider and chat—it’s part of their female heritage and pride. Psychologist Leila Atshan adds to this, describing how the intricately connected patterns in each weaving contain the depth of their creator’s female experience. They show “the woman who has been able to persist and do so artistically and with femininity.”

Salma al-Yassir describes how, not knowing Palestine herself, she feels that she lives on “borrowed memory”—that of her grandfather and parents, their continuous stories of the homeland. Again, the sense of displacement pervades her life. Where does she belong?

The movie opens and closes with a poetic voiceover— bookends to the documentary—while colorful threads and stages of the embroidery process take place. The voice, the lines, weave with these visually changing “embroidery moments,” music in the background. The opening lines state dispassionately the current era’s sad truths:

With every stitch, she hides a story, a thought, a sigh.

Inside each of us, inside the map of Palestine,

our stories were like threads

that separate then come together

recounted and then hidden,

when faced with the “knot of occupation.”

A knot that rearranged all the threads,

scattering them in all directions.

A single life was now assigned two threads:

one thread that is real, another that could have been.

The stories transcended Palestine.

Their threads dispersed, seeking refuge or exile.

Those women who remained in their homeland

were accused of nonexistence.

It was said to them: You are not here.

They responded: We are not a lie inside a plot,

we are here.

And wherever we are

we narrate our stories in detail,

embroidering them on the face of our earth.

Some are privileged, others bearing life in a camp.

First, second, third generation.

Accents and cities, classes and cultures differ.

They are very different from one another

but all meet at one turning point

where all threads meet: the before and the after,

before 1948, and after it.

At that turning point,

Palestine was transformed.

It became a homeland the size of a planet.