Nakba #45 - Widad Kawar

1937 The family settled in Bayt Lahm. I started at a new boarding school, this time in Ramallah. It was run by the Quakers, and I felt very much at home there. In Ramallah, all women wore beautifully embroidered dresses. If they carried a bag, it too was embroidered; on their heads they wore an embroidered scarf. The teachers taught us embroidery, so we learned their patterns, which they had brought with them from the United States.” 1948 “The boarding school in Ramallah distributed our graduation certificates a couple of months early. Then we were sent home. Everyone was afraid that war would break out when the British left Filastin. People were waiting for something to happen. The Jordanian girls in my class did not know how they would get home. They were picked up by a Jordanian military vehicle. We found that very exciting. The road to al-Quds was not safe. There was gunfire between the two sides. Four or five of us girls shared a taxi. I got off at Bab al-‘Amud and went to the social welfare office. My father had good connections there. I found a woman who knew us, and she offered to drive me home to Bayt Lahm. Gradually, everything returned to normal. Peasant women began coming back to Bayt Lahm to sell their vegetables. There was a market on Saturdays, and that was when I got to know these women. They wore beautiful traditional clothing and silver jewelry. I used to talk to them and took an interest in their garments. They were beautifully embroidered in cross-stitch. When the dresses wore out, they sold parts of the garments: vegetables on the left, pieces of fabric on the right. The embroidery in Bayt Lahm is completely different from that in Ramallah—different stitches and different thread. The tradition is more closely linked to church embroidery, since there are so many monasteries in Bayt Lahm. When the war broke out a steady stream of refugees arrived from al-Quds and the surrounding villages. Everything was turned upside down. We had upper-class refugees from al-Quds who rented houses, and we had those who had nothing, who lived in camps. Poor refugees sometimes worked for the wealthy refugees. On market days, the refugee women had no vegetables to sell. Yet despite their poverty, they had intact clothing and looked healthy.” 1952 “The pieces of fabric grew into a collection of traditional Palestinian dresses. As soon as I heard that a Palestinian village had been destroyed by the Israelis—another piece of our Palestinian cultural heritage—I reacted by wanting to buy more dresses. I wanted to show how beautiful the textiles are. And not only that—the work required system and discipline. The women who embroidered strove for perfection. How could they remember the patterns? They had no templates to copy from. Perhaps they looked at their mother’s dress. I found this ability astonishing. The embroidered textiles are an important part of our cultural heritage. The women stopped embroidering these magnificent dresses when they ended up in refugee camps. Instead, they made simple refugee dresses with simple embroidery.” 1967 “After the occupation of al-Diffa al-Gharbia, the refugees’ situation worsened even further. Bayt Lahm was surrounded by Jewish settlements.” 2022 “In the Al Makhrur Valley, between Bayt Lahm and Bayt Jala, lies the Saint George Monastery. They make very good wine. Now Jewish settlers have seized half of the valley, and there are rumors that they will also take over the monastery.” Afterthought “I have been collecting these garments for over 70 years now. The collection amounts to 2,000 dresses, objects, and silver jewelry. My children want me to stop, but I continue to buy dresses in secret. As recently as today, I bought two dresses—one very simple and one more elaborate.”