Palm trees, mountains, watersprings, stars, and Panamanian orchids adorn Lina Barkawi’s handmade wedding dress. But Lina’s dress was an act of more than mere craftsmanship — in creating her thobe, Lina contributed to the centuries-old tradition of Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez. Passed down orally from generation to generation, tatreez patterns hold great symbolic meaning, reflecting one’s personal life and regional identity. Sato (2023) introduces The Verge readers to Tirazain, a digital archive and library of tatreez patterns that seeks to preserve the ancient art for new generations of Palestinians like Lina.
Tirazain was created by embroidery artist and technology executive Zain Masri, who sought to “collect embroidery patterns from books in one place, where anyone could find and use motifs for their tatreez work — especially younger Palestinians whose families may not practice embroidery due to historic mass displacement” (Sato, 2023). Tatreez knowledge is traditionally conveyed through oral history, but decades of exile and dispossession resulting from the Zionist settler colonial project has severely impacted the ability for Palestinians to impart tatreez knowledge to younger generations.
Schwartz and Cook (2002) address how “classic archival concepts which emerged from the written culture of European bureaucracies” are not adept at preserving the memory of oral cultures like that of tatreez. Tirazain subverts the dogma of Eurocentric archival practice by taking the form of a community digital archive that attends to the needs of the global tatreez community. Caswell et al. (2016) speak to how community archives diverge from the traditional archive by “reframing the functions of appraisal, description, and access to align with community-specific priorities, to reflect contingent cultural values, and to allow for greater participation in archival decision making.” Tirazain reflects this alternative archival paradigm by populating the digital archive through the labor of volunteers who digitize the motifs, stitch by stitch. Renowned tatreez artist Wafa Ghnaim laments how “our dresses are exiled just like we are… they’re in all of these museums around the world, and we don’t have physical ownership over those dresses. What we really need to be digitizing are all the millions of patterns on those dresses that are under lock and key in these museums that we will never be able to reclaim physically” (Sato, 2023). Ghnaim’s words remind us that despite the importance of digital community archives like Tirazain enabling new generations to learn the art of tatreez, many more tatreez patterns remain captive by colonial memory institutions.
Caswell et al. suggest that community archives can unsettle traditional archival principles like provenance by using ethnicity as a form of provenance (2016). In that vein, Tirazain uses village and regional names of Palestine as a form of provenance, because tatreez motifs can “often be traced back to specific regions or villages, and historically, one could look at a dress and see where its wearer was from” (Sato, 2023). Using geography as a form of provenance is particularly potent given that many of the embroidery motifs in the Tirazain digital archive trace their origin to one of the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, in 1948-1949 (Aranguren & Barrilaro, 2024). Cook (2011) states that “as Verne Harris has remarked, following Derrida, the archive, and archiving is fundamentally political, and, not surprisingly, invites–and reflects–controversy, contestation, and challenge.” The impact of the Zionist settler colonial project on the displacement of generations of Palestinians and the loss of material and immaterial knowledge sources about tatreez situates Tirazain squarely at the intersection between politics and the archive.
Tirazain founder Zain Masri is clear that the archive exists in “equal parts to make tatreez more accessible and [as] a way to preserve its existence” (Sato, 2023). Archives exist to meet users’ needs and to be used (Lawrimore, 2024). Before Tirazain was created, tatreez artists like Barkawi had to buy expensive pattern books to expand her tatreez vocabulary. With the advent of Tirazain, tatreez artists of all skill levels have easy access to high-resolution patterns, demonstrating how Tirazain centers user need and surpasses mere preservation of tatreez motifs. Caswell et al. (2016) relate how “community archives can have important epistemological, ontological, and social impacts of members of marginalized communities.” Tirazain embodies this by reconstructing a repository of tatreez knowledge that would have otherwise been inaccessible or even lost entirely. Ghnaim encourages her tatreez students to stitch “resistance motifs that were produced post-1948, when Israeli militaries forcibly removed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes” (Sato, 2023). The emergence of resistance tatreez motifs is a refusal to forget the past, and a commitment to building a Palestinian future. Tirazain is an invaluable resource for Palestinians to use tatreez as a way to assert their cultural identity and historic ties to the land.
References
Aranguren, T., & Barrilaro, S. (2024). Against erasure: a photographic memory of Palestine before the Nakba (R. Davis & H. R. Aranguren, Trans.). Haymarket Books.
Barkawi, L [@linasthobe]. (2022, October 10). It’s all about the details [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CjiKYkiMXZf/
Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016). “To suddenly discover yourself existing”: Uncovering the impact of community archives 1. The American Archivist, 79(1), 56–81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56
Cook, T. (2011). “We are what we keep; we keep what we are”: Archival appraisal past, present and future. Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32(2), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/00379816.2011.619688
A., K. (2023, March 2). Palestinian Tatreez: Embroidering resistance and remembrance. Atmos. https://atmos.earth/palestinian-tatreez-embroidery-radical-history-resistance/
Lawrimore, E. (2024, June). Unit 4-A: Archival Use and Users. [Written lecture]. Canvas. https://sjsu.instructure.com/courses/1587126/pages/unit-4-a-archival-use-and-users?module_item_id=15468714
Sato, M. (2023, August 21). Stitching together an archive of an endangered Palestinian art. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/23833322/palestinian-embroidery-digital-archive-tatreez-wafa-ghnaim-tirazain
Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628
Tirazain. (n.d.). Library. Retrieved July 10, 2024 from https://tirazain.com/archive
Tirazain. (n.d.-a). Qowara/Vase (5). Retrieved July 10, 2024, from https://tirazain.com/archive/p/lily-f5j49-2ydlp-jkdr3-8rb6p?rq=qowara%20vase%20(5)