Textiles as cultural language and resistance, and the return of raffles

Just a brief note today as I start another raffle. The raffle in question is for a piece of early 20th century handmade bobbin lace, a piece that must have taken many days to make, and which came out of a large and remarkable collection of bobbin lace that I purchased last year. Some of those pieces are still up on my website for sale (and they are on sale 30% off) but I have snaffled the largest and finest of those pieces for this raffle. I have written quite a bit about these laces here, because they are like nothing I have ever seen before or since. I was thinking about this lace and thinking about the situation which sees me putting it up to raffle.

If you are new here, I have been holding raffles over the last months for a young man named Abdalla, who is 21, the same age as my eldest child, a nursing student in Palestine. Initially I was raising money for his GoFundMe to rebuild his house and to get him out of Gaza to finish his nursing degree, as his university was the first of many universities destroyed by the Israeli army. Since then, priorities have changed. He cannot leave Gaza, which is now an open-air extermination camp, a genocide in plain view, and his damaged house was deliberately mined and completely destroyed by the IDF when they retreated from Central Gaza mid-last-year. Our goal now is to help keep him and his family fed, and to help show him that we are here and that he and his family matter.

I was thinking a lot about the role of textiles in all of this, in everything, because there is just so much of everything everywhere at the moment and it is poised to get worse. A lot has been written about tatreez, the beautiful and very old Palestinian embroidery technique that appears on so many of the gorgeous traditional dresses, and communicates so much about the wearer and the region of Palestine they are from. And a lot has also been written about the meaning of the keffiyah and how it symbolises resistance. Indigenous textiles in the modern world are in some ways always symbols of resistance, and they have always carried a deep meaning. This is why their appropriation by Western designers (looking at you Donna Karan/Urban Zen, Christian Dior, Gucci, Carolina Herrera, to name just a few), is an act of colonialism and violence. That is a discussion for another time though, what I wanted to just point out here is that what Israel is trying to do, what all genocides aim to do, is to remove not just the people but their entire culture and history. And this means removing their textile traditions, because textiles and dress are some of the most important and significant markers of culture and heritage we have.

The region where Palestine sits (I am using the name Palestine to indicate the entire country, including the regions that Israel occupies both ‘legally’ and illegally (it’s all illegal to me, don’t like that definition, don’t bother telling me, just unsubscribe), has some of the oldest textile traditions we know about. Weaving traditions there are incredibly ancient. It is from the region just north of here, in Lebanon, that the original murex purple which stained the clothes of Roman emperors was produced, in the city of Tyre, another place Israel is currently bombarding to fragments. There is no coincidence in the choice of these places as targets, they are aiming to annihilate human history there, including textile history, so that they can rewrite it and claim it as their own. This alone shows them to be white supremacist colonisers, this alone is why we should all be fighting back.

Because this history, this heritage that they are obliterating, seemingly with glee, belongs to all of us. It is all our cultural heritage, just as the religions that were birthed in this region have also shaped societies far beyond the region itself. They are obliterating human heritage, not just Islamic and Christian and true Jewish heritage, but something that should be held sacred to all of us, part of out own cultural DNA. And textiles play a very big part in that.

I hope that we ain’t going out like that, to quote Cypress Hill. Fight back, and hold onto what we have, it’s so important.

The lace offered here is the antithesis of the AI-generated, money-as-culture, extractive power structures and cultural landscapes that the billionaires currently in charge of the planet see our future as. This lace is a visual language, which came from the hands of a woman who probably started learning how to make it when she was around 6 or 7 years old, taught by the older women in her community. It might be a pattern that was passed down (but not written down), or she may have invented it but it holds within it centuries, maybe thousands of years, of passed-down inherited textile DNA. It represents in thread form why Indigenous cultures matter, why we as humans matter, what we are fighting for. The intrinsic beauty of this piece lies in the hands that made it, the mind that conceived it and/or retained the memory of its conception with such fineness that it could replicate that pattern hundreds of times, the earth that grew the flax used to make the linen thread it is woven out of. These are precious things. They show what we are as human animals, what is so magnificent about us as a species. Billionaires can’t manufacture these things or control them, but just like all life on Earth, our cultural lives and memories are fragile as well, and once they go extinct, they are gone and can rarely be revived.

This too is what is at stake in Palestine. Not just human beings alive today, but human heritage and memory and ancestry, our human heritage and memory and ancestry, because we share the same roots, all of us, and it is precious to all of us. Without antecedents, we are nothing.

HOW TO ENTER

If you’d like to see more of this lace, it is on the website here.

I am going to ask you to donate to Abdalla’s Paypal account. Normally I hate Paypal with a passion which I have explained many times on Instagram - but just for the moment I won’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The Paypal account is not in Abdalla’s name - Paypal will not allow Palestinians to hold an account - but he does have access to it. I have already run several raffles asking people to donate to this Paypal account and can confirm that the money is reaching him and is helping enormously.

To enter, please send €6 or more if you can to this paypal account : @akam0503

If it is easier you can use this link to get to that account : https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/akam0503

Take a screenshot of your donation, and send the screenshot to lagrossetoile.deux@gmail.com.

Please use this email which I set up specially for these raffles because if you use my usual email, your message might get lost.

I keep a list of all donors and next Friday evening I will put that list into a random number generator and choose a winner. I will pay uninsured postage for the lace to wherever the winner is in the world - they can choose to upgrade that to insured postage - if they choose to pay for postage themselves or if they have a box already going with me, I will pay the cost of the uninsured postage to the Paypal account.

Thank you once again for your support and for continuing to be here with me and with Abdalla and his family

xxHanna