Flowers Multiply As Spring Nears

There were some direct requests for photos of the embroidery, so in addition to what I had up there before, here are some more.

Project #1: One Flower

This is the same one I included a different picture of in the original post.



Project #2: Three Flowers, With Shading

This is the one I completed over the fall and winter. At a slow and relaxed pace.

This is the sort of abstract style of shading that this studio uses a lot. My teacher showed me a piece from I guess probably 5 years ago that they had done, which was more like my first project, without shading. She commented that they had developed the shading method in response to people's tastes. (She teaches young girls, mainly, but then the studio also accepts orders from brides and people who want holiday doilies and stuff, so I think the more experienced older girls are the ones who work on those projects.) Anyway, I guess this stuff is constantly evolving, as culture does -- even ostensibly "traditional" culture.

As I commented on Flickr, locals prefer brighter colors than I would choose. My teacher also praised these synthetic yarns over natural fiber from the very beginning, because she says they wash better and therefore survive over time. The American students and I who originally started out with the lessons all figured that, since we weren't likely to wash these very often, we'd rather have colors more attractive to our palette, but this was the best we could do.



Project #3: The Race to Navruz

This is the Tajik national dress, or chakkan, that I'm working on now. We are trying to finish this by the Navruz holiday 3 weeks from now. I'm further along than 2 flowers, but I still don't see how it will be done in time.

You can see here that my teacher draws the pattern on the fabric (she has a whole library of patterns to trace from), and then we talk about how I'll fill it in, and then I set to it. (She is helping me a lot with completing the dress, but I still am lobbying for her to lose the Navruz deadline.)

This fabric was apparently something the girls at the studio hadn't seen before. The yarn is all bought by my teacher, but for this I went and cruised the fabric stalls at Green Market to see what I could find that I was least unlikely to wear. Baby blue satin was the best I found, and all the girls oohed and aahed over it as the sewing studio teacher quickly snip-snipped through the much-used pattern for kurta and PJ pants.



The fabric is wicked shiny, so unfortunately my photos of this are coming out badly. I'm not a very good photographer, obviously.

Coda: Suzani

I still really have to dig more to understand the difference between suzani and gulduzi. As I said before, it seems to me that gulduzi describes a method, while suzani describes an object and its function. But I'm still not sure. And part of me is thinking that suzani is one of these words that I keep discovering is really just a Russian colonial word that isn't even used in the Central Asian vernacular (e.g. plov [in reality in Tajik, 'oshi palau': rice pilav dish with regional variation], khalat ['chapan': man's quilted coat], tebiuteka ['toqi,' I think: headwear, esp. man's squarish hat]).

Anyway, here is the best example of suzani that we have at home (unlike many of our friends, we haven't invested heavily in the embroidery market). We bought this pomegranate composition last June in Bukhara, and supposedly it was made by hand by a group of women who included the daughter of the man who owned the little shop, in one of the covered markets in the old city.





If you look closely, you can see that in fact this is actually done in a very different stitch than what I'm doing -- it's more of a chain stitch (zangjirak, I now know) than the flat, long stitch that predominates in the style I am learning. So I wonder whether that also enters into what is defined as suzani vs. gulduzi. I don't know, and of course my Tajik informants are not really all that into the finer points of categorization. I think I need to finally take my embroidery teacher up on her offer to go to the ethnography museum and explore with her their examples of embroidery to get more of the story.

Flowers in Winter

What's been happening these last few weeks in Tajikistan, you ask?

Quite a lot.

Maybe my explanation of The Rogun Powerplant Drama either didn't make sense or wasn't very interesting to anyone who reads this regularly (I know, you don't number all that many, and probably the bulk of you are more interested in the Anya report than in updates on the political or social situation in and around Dushanbe). Or maybe you just decided that the long arm of the Tajik government might reach out and bite you if you commented? In any case, if you had spent the past month here, you would see to what farcical and more serious (although not yet that serious) extremes the whole enterprise has played itself out.

The forced deductions from people's salaries continue, and reports are also piling up about people (and organizations) receiving "strong suggestions" to purchase blocks of shares to support the hydropower station. Those suggestions have supposedly been backed by very real consequences: students can't take (or pass) exams; car owners are blocked from registering their cars; and there are some vague reports that the health ministry requires citizens to show proof of purchase of their Rogun shares (for what? all I can assume is for getting health care, or maybe access to their health insurance?).

For those who work with the bureaucracy I think it's been a pretty demoralizing time, although since I don't have a lot of direct interaction of that kind I have not been experiencing the same level of negative feeling.

For me, I've been getting more active locally -- doing a little bit of charity work, getting active in my next research project, on malaria in Tajikistan in the 1920s and 30s (finally, after finishing the Draft That Would Not End, based on Vladivostok materials), and continuing with a few different outlets for improving my Tajik, where I do finally feel I'm making some progress.

Back in the summer I added to my Tajik language lessons one additional way to practice language: I started taking embroidery lessons. (The most well known word for Tajik/Uzbek embroidery among expats in Central Asia is suzani, but apparently this really describes the object -- only some of the particular kinds of embroidered decorations -- produced using this method of embroidery. The craft method that I am learning, and which I guess is used to create those suzanis, is called gulduzi [гулдӯзӣ, literally "flower-sewing"] in Tajik.)


In some ways this embroidery stuff seems totally crazy: both in the way that even a 1.5 hour lesson barely fits in my week, as well as in the way that at first glance this seems like something only a "lady of leisure" would do. But I think it's good for two reasons: first, because it does allow me to have a little more chance to hear and try to speak Tajik, outside of class. But also, because men and women live in such separate spheres in Tajik culture (traditional Tajik culture -- which still accounts for so much more of the total culture here than it would in many other places in the world), and because women's roles are so prescribed (again, at least for those women who are not in the middle or upper class, that is, those whose lives tend to be more traditional), this actually seems to me to be one real, authentic way of interacting with some of my natural peers -- Tajik women.

Sure, I could have a local friend who, in education and interests and life situation, was a bit more like me, and I would interact with her by, I guess, going out for a coffee or having lunch or getting together for a play date with our kids. But I haven't yet found that person. It's not that she doesn't exist. It's not even that she wouldn't speak Tajik -- although the probability is, as far as I can tell, that a peer in terms of education and class probably would be more likely to speak Russian in her daily life and more generally live in the European (which in Tajikistan means Russian) style. I think in theory she probably exists, but she is rare. Mainly I just haven't had the opportunity to find her.

Anyway, embroidery class is fun, and it's a totally different way of interacting with a few local women (and girls: I study with a lady at a local NGO who gives daily lessons to groups of Tajik girls between the ages of 8 and 16. Teaching them embroidery is viewed in part as a way of giving these girls a skill that they can use to earn money even within the confines of their more traditional, home-bound lives into adulthood. It's a strategy that isn't unique to this NGO -- I've heard others engaged in this kind of training. In the months I've been visiting the sewing studio I've started to reflect -- undoubtedly with the help of the meditative process of embroidering -- on that development strategy and have kind of decided that it is a bit lame and overly accommodating of the very misogynistic tendencies in contemporary Tajik culture. But I guess I still enjoy the activity and the unique kind of contact it gives me, so... I continue to participate in it).

So far I've learned the 3 basic stitches and have completed one mini doily-square (see photo) and one larger doily-square, the smaller of which I guess I'd like to frame or something for Anya. I know how to say "my yarn has a knot" in Tajik ("Решта гиреҳ зад."). I keep forgetting the damn Tajik word for "scissors." I have only seriously pricked myself once with the needle and have (surprisingly) only once sewed my needlework onto my own clothes. An important element of the whole method is that we sit on the floor on a traditional Tajik cushion (курпача), surrounding a low little table that is like a Western table that has had its legs chopped off halfway down. We sit with our backs propped up against pillows, and our knees folded up at a loose angle, and we have to keep the right edge of the fabric that constitutes our embroidery project fastened in place by holding it between our knees. That is actually an important element that our teacher always needs to remind me to do. Somehow the friend who used to take the class with me in summer got away with using a safety pin (сӯзанак) to anchor her project to her right knee and sitting cross-legged. I just keep forgetting the suzanak.

I'm now on my third project, which is probably a tad ambitious: my teacher decided I was ready to embroider the flower pattern all over a set of Tajik national loose-fitting pants and dress (kurta, or chakkan), all to be completed (and worn!?) in honor of the Persian world's start-of-spring holiday, Navruz (March 21). So I have just under 6 weeks to finish, and I think I am done with all of 4 flowers -- woefully under par by my calculations. But it continues to be fun, and if all else fails I will aim to wear it on Navruz 2011.