Quilt me a Story

Our lives are a continuous thread of stories and these do not end even when we die ‘cos they continue in posterity in our children’s lives woven into the very fabric of human life on earth. We have been talking of stories for the past two exchanges and the story of stories seems to continue, its repertoire heavy and laden with more to say and share.

The picture above is a colorful design in embroidery, meticulously worked with patience, perseverance and ingenuity. It has an aesthetic appeal related to colour, touch and creativity, but more so it intrigues and enthrals us with the story which is woven unto the cloth. The sewing needle moves in and out of the fabric creating patterns with its long colorful thread tail treading a trail untold and anew. Each twist and knot is an amalgamation of explicit and symbolic meanderings of the needle and the tail replicating a story on the canvas of a wide fabric, to be deciphered and understood by humans far and wide through the ages. We arrive at the art of storytelling through ‘Quilting’.

Quilting is our artistic heritage, indulged for creativity, sharing  and community living. Quilting seems to have been around in the medieval times in Europe and the Eastern world, but it reached America in the 1800s. Initially quilts satisfied the practical purpose of warmth in the cold season, wrapping babies, folded and used as cushions or pitched on a clothes line to serve as children’s tent house. Quilting was mostly done by women at home or in larger extended groups to overcome isolation and satisfy their creative impulses. They would relay a simple joyful account of a family or episode, or be indicative of a family tree, recounting the entire history of generations of a clan. The pattern selected by the quilter can be indicative of a quilter’s lifestyle, artistic talents, political views, and even her emotions. Prior to a woman’s ability to vote, some women used their artistic talents and expressed their political views through a quilt.  Over times they morphed into story narratives, especially when women could not actively participate in active service during revolutions and wars. These stories on a cloth canvas became coded and suggestive of signals and messages to men, serving and stranded in tense zones.

An example in case would be the issue of slavery in the United States in the mid-1800s which led to quilt patterns called Slave Chain or Underground Railroad. The designs and colours indicated safe houses or routes to freedom. ‘Clara and the Freedom Quilt’  by Deborah Hopkinson is a picture book based on the true story of a young slave girl who is taken away from her mother to work on another plantation. Clara’s greatest wish is to be reunited with her mother and to become a free slave. Clara was skilled at sewing and became a seamstress at the plantation house. She was often privy to conversations between her master and other visitors to the estate. Being a sharp, clever girl she was able to piece together the information that the Ohio river was very close by. She stitched a map to the river and beyond to freedom, locating swamps, rivers and fields en route. The quilted story board was used by herself and her mother to escape and thereafter, they helped many other slaves to reach the underground railroad and thus freedom.

Harriet Powers and her two famous story quilts are now part of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was a completely illiterate woman who was greatly influenced by the sermons and gospels in church services and her quilts carry her favorite portrayals of biblical stories and folklore tales. “The Keeping Quilt’ by Patricia Polacco is a story of a quilt that

was made to preserve the memories of an immigrant Russian family’s remembrance of their country. Over the years the quilt is used as a tablecloth for the Sabbath, as a huppa for family weddings, and as a blanket to welcome newborn babies into the family. As the quilt is passed from one generation to the next, so too are family stories.”

‘The Sujjni Kantha’ embroidered bedspreads, ‘Embroidered Rumaals’ and  ‘Embroiderd Pahari Quilts’ are a few examples of the stitch craft practiced in India for 3000 years. They are preserved in museums across the Indian territory and the Victoria Albert museum in Britain. A revival wave in the country through the initiative of foreign interventions have led to the surfacing of our age-old heritage of crafted stories on cloth by women and it is providing sustenance to rural women in pockets even today.  The themes vary from the depiction of stories from the great Indian epics, ‘Raslila’, ‘Rukmini Haran’, depiction of popular dice game of ‘chaupad’  to contemporary works portraying  stories of female foeticide, education for girls, election violence. The oldest ‘rumaal’ is from the 16^th century embroidered by Bebe Nanki, sister of Guru Nanak, the founder of sikh religion, preserved in a Sikh shrine in Punjab.

‘Kalpa Vriksha’ – the boon giving tree, a treasure of the churning of the oceans – ‘Samudra Manthan’ was taken by Lord  Indra and planted in his garden. Many an embroidered quilts  depict the ‘Haran’ theft of the tree by Krishna and the ensuing fight between Indra seated on his white elephant and Krishna riding Garuda. ‘Ashatanayika’ is a representation of ‘Nayika Bheda’ the moods of the nayika through varied expressions, gestures and surrounding motifs of doves and peacocks.

A POW wiling away the war in a German prison camp delivered a defiant message insulting Hitler through the apparently innocuous skill of embroidery.

Maj Alexis Casdagil sewed a Morse code message around his sampler, reading 'God saves the king'.  

“Major Alexis Casdagli, who was taken prisoner in 1941, had turned to embroidery as a way of protecting his sanity against the tedium of POW life but he also found it provided a means of covert resistance. An innocent looking tapestry stitched by the officer in December 1941 bears the rather bland text stating the name and location of its creator and the date. But in a border surrounding the text Major Casdagli also stitched a series of dots and dashes, which in Morse code spelt out "God Save the King" and "---- Hitler". Unaware of the hidden message but impressed with the captive officer's needlework, the Germans even put it on display."It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing the rounds," Tony Casdagli, the Major's 79-year-old son, told the Daily Mail."It also stopped him going mad. He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity."

Quilting as a theme has been interspersed in writings in literature. To name a few writers would be Rohinton Mistry in ‘A Fine Balance’, Ismat Chugtai,  the feminist Urdu Indian writer and her controversial story titled ‘Lihaaf’ meaning quilt and Alice Walker in ‘Everyday Use’ and ‘The Color Purple’.

Quilting is here to stay through revivalist endeavors, maybe not patronized popularly but a haven for those seeking creativity, expression, sharing and healing qualities in their lives. Go Quilt a Story!  

Stories Galore!

       

We celebrated short story as a literary form of art in our last exchange and the impetus it has acquired in the digital age as the more favored form of narrative literature.  Today I will be enumerating and expounding on the ones that have lingered with me over the years, culminating in a couple from contemporary writers. We read short stories to occupy ourselves for a brief period of time, given the length of a short story. It intrigues me when they stay with me for longer durations and some have been in my mind space for years together. A short story is technically written to invoke a single effect or mood and all parameters of the story are etched towards that effect, climaxing to the most apt denouement.

 In my school text, I read  Tagore’s ’Homecoming’ which left such a deep impression on my mind that I would often dream of Phatik, his homesickness and ardour to be back home with his mother. Over the years, I have mulled over the poignancy of the story and how Tagore inimitably creates an aura of loneliness, alienation and neglect that shrouds Phatik who accompanies his Uncle to the city with a willing heart, but finds himself unwanted, ignored and a burden. The liberties that he took with his mother and younger brother are suddenly and strictly curtailed and the love that he took for granted becomes paramount and an obsession, by its complete absence. His loneliness crushes him into a shadow of his former boisterous self. He falls ill and in delirium the refrain continues – ‘Have the holidays come – can I go home?’

Equally unequivocal are the writings from the 2R’s – Roald Dahl and Ruskin Bond, read and followed by children and adults throughout the literary circles. ‘The Man from the South’ written by Roald Dahl is an intriguing piece of literature. The story portrays the compulsive and so, a strange urge of a man to trick other people into getting their fingers chopped in lieu of extravagant material possessions. It is a study of the psychological depths of the human mind. The expertise of the writer skillfully laces the intricate workings of the mind, of the desire for wealth, the bait of gambling, and compulsive behavioral patterns with humor and a lightness of being.

‘The Eyes Have It’ by Ruskin Bond is a sweet story of a blind traveler rendered in first person, who meets a girl on a train to Dehra. The brief, but beautiful exchange between the two acquires a deep poignancy with the revelation in the end. The sweetness of attraction, the little pretences to keep up the lovely fantasy, and the so very tender interlude leaves the reader with a savory chocolaty feel of the whole episode.

 ‘The Gift of Magi’ by O’ Henry is an insurmountable feat in literature by itself. ‘The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here, the author  lamely relates the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.’

Now I shall take the reader into the unpalatable realms of story writing by Franz Kafka and DH Lawrence. I term it unpalatable because ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, is a story that strips humans of every vestige of camouflage and shows us our barren naked souls. That every relationship in this world of desires and maya is based on give and take and what happens when it becomes just one sided. Of how we as human beings detest and are afraid of anything which is unlike or unfamiliar or grotesque to our senses. Kafkaesque, a repertoire of the absurd touched its zenith with the story ‘The Metamorphosis’. An extraordinary transformation of the protagonist Gregor Samsa into a giant insect is relayed in a mundane banal tone highlighting the absurd and chaotic in an everyday home with the kitsch of huge debts and themes of alienation and isolation. The evolving feelings of love and care juxtaposed with animal yearnings of food and shelter in Gregor, the insect (whose very sight and habits disconnect him from the family he so much cared for) deliver him in the end. Horrified by his appearance and transition from a bread winner to a grotesque burden and a liability, his family distances itself from him and his death releases the family to better days. In a way the story questions the consciousness of humans versus the animal world which is devoid of it.  Milan Kundera is another such writer whose writings are a journey into the cold, insensitive, basic and raw desires of the so-called highly evolved race of human beings. We shudder at their writings ’cause they are the hard, unpalatable (I use the word again) truth of our existence as a species. 

DH Lawrence wrote the ‘Rocking Horse Winner’ to mirror the ungainly image of mothers who in contrast to their nourishing avatars, drive their families to destruction with their incontrollable desires.  He brings out the irrevocable imprints that women as mothers leave on their children’s minds. The effect of a mother on her child can drive him to the realms of clouds and also to the dungeons of despair, depending on which way the energy of the bond is used by her. The story with its morbidity leaves an indelible mark on the reader’s mind.

Amongst contemporary writers, I devoured the story collection of Anjum Hasan – ‘Difficult Pleasures’ delightfully. The stories have urban settings with themes of displacement, longing and alienation imbued with a melancholic search for meaning, deeper connections, flair for creativity and sometimes an escape from a claustrophobic relationship or a flight from paranoia.

The reader is easily led into the interiority of the characters and more often than not the protagonists are solitary reapers exclusively binding and unwinding their lives, singing melancholic strains………... Characters are animated in deft strokes and their muddles, paradoxes archived using the stream of consciousness which builds crests and troughs diffusing situations and moments with a fluidity of a competent writer who has complete control on the design and structure of the narrative.

‘Revolutions’ is about a precocious child turned photographer who sees pictures in everyday things and freezes them into his frames. His endeavors are a face in a coconut husk, plastic that could be water and water that could be shadow. His quest for recognition makes him cling to a mentor and he himself becomes frozen in time. ‘Good Housekeeping’ unravels the deep emotional bond in a mother - daughter relationship. Ayana views the world through her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s mood -swings, tears, likes and dislikes are hers too. The last part of the story when she comes into her own is rendered with great mastery and subtlety. ‘The Big Picture’ walks away with all the laurels. It is a sweet story about an older woman who has cocooned herself in her house with her art works, and then suddenly she is let out in the wide world with an opportunity to travel to Europe with her selected paintings for an exhibition and the attraction of seeing master works and meeting world renowned artists. A menopausal woman stranded and lost at airports and art galleries , talking and mumbling to herself, fidgeting with tampons, with her menopausal timing gone awry.

And so the stories go on. Godspeed and stories galore to my readers too!