Reclaiming Palestinian Beauty, One Wall Label at a Time
On October 7, 2023, I had plans to meet at the Brooklyn Museum with my close friend, Palestinian fashion designer Suzy Tamimi, and to view the groundbreaking exhibition Africa Fashion. Despite the immense emotions that overcame us with the news that morning, Suzy and I chose to be together and continue with our plans to meet at the museum. I had just begun my research fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, and had a keen interest in learning about the ways in which traditional fashions across the African continent were to be displayed alongside contemporary styles — an approach to displaying Palestinian dress that I have not yet seen.
No one else was better suited to accompany me than Suzy, a creative force who designed the Freedom Fighter collection in 2019, repurposing 1960s tatreez fragments made in Palestinian refugee camps onto camouflage fabric, boxing robes, and athletic leisure wear. Together, with the embroidery of Palestinian women, she establishes the arms and armor of the resistance, and a duality of strength and femininity. Reclaiming the long-stigmatized title of “freedom fighter” as one of honor surfaces an ancestral power that the Palestinian spirit needs in the face of danger and forms a fascinating and poetic paradox. Africa Fashion began with the end of colonial rule on the continent, showcasing the fruits of the independence movements that liberated some 48 nations by the end of the ’60s and led to a cultural renaissance that drew on local traditions to create new and innovative fashions. This novel visual language expressed a newfound political hope in the wake of colonial liberation, an aspiration also held by Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and those of us living in exile.
Arriving at the Brooklyn Museum a bit early, I sat outside the entrance, quietly and in solitude with my thoughts, and felt the light misty rain fall on my skin and frizzy hair. Amid the thunderous Brooklyn traffic sounds, an unusually thick fog was obstructing the beautiful New York cityscape. After some time had passed, I spotted Suzy on the horizon. The fog and clouds were various shades of gray, hanging so low from the sky that they seemed to be trailing her path as she hiked forward. At the time, I didn’t yet know what the future held for us, Palestinians, nor for my friends and colleagues in Gaza. Who could imagine the horror that would soon be delivered to our phones, every morning and night for more than a year, without end? The indifference and inaction of the world to Palestinian suffering, a betrayal. What I did know as a Palestinian in the diaspora was that freedom would come for us someday — though I couldn’t have imagined it would be at such an appalling and tragic cost to humanity on infinite scroll.
Suzy and I allowed ourselves to become distracted for a moment from the events of the day, getting lost in the dazzling garments presented in Africa Fashion. Afterward, we wandered aimlessly through the galleries, sharing what we could of our dismay against a backdrop of great masterpieces, now merely a gray blur in my mind. Maybe they were the same gray fog and clouds that hung heavy outside, now fixed onto my shoulders, weighted and without an end in sight.
We arrived at the Arts of the Islamic World collection gallery, and to our surprise, were met by a display that included a traditional Palestinian dress, or thobe in Arabic. The thobe was colorfully cross-stitched with traditional Gaza motifs along the skirt, sleeves, and chest, including patterns of amulets, zigzags, and cypress trees, each carrying a protective quality for the wearer that wards off the evil eye. The stitching was primarily in bright red and pink silk threads, adorned with handmade purple and white lace that reflects the specialized skills of the maker and the celebratory occasion for which she must have prepared this garment. The women of Gaza and their beloved vibrant embellishments, including the richness of handwoven Syrian Atlas silk in the shoulder panels, were on full display here in a museum in my very own Brooklyn, New York. I felt such immense pride that the only thobe I have seen on permanent display was in the very city, and borough, in which my son was born.
Left: Gaza thobe on view at the Brooklyn Museum (photo Lakshmi Rivera Amin/Hyperallergic); right: Defiled wall label on October 7, 2023 (photo Wafa Ghnaim/Hyperallergic)However, the wall label indicated that the thobe was merely a “black robe” from “circa 1930–58” in “Palestine/Israel,” without any specific geographic, social, or cultural details that could help the visitor understand the process for making the dress, or the life of the woman to whom it belongs. “Israel” had been crossed out in red pen. I could see that the wall label was written by a well-meaning staff member, trying their best to understand the treasure that lay before them — perhaps reckoning with an obscured archival record that gave them no clues on its origins. As a Palestinian dress historian who has studied under the guidance of my mother, Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, and collaborated with prominent Elders in the field throughout my career, I immediately knew the thobe was from the historic Gaza region, made perhaps during the early 20th century. The power of the dress is that, through her materials, motifs, and making, she, the thobe, can subvert efforts to suppress Palestinian voices. She tells many stories in one.
At that moment, Suzy and I looked straight at each other with eyes widened, first with a mutual sense of urgency that the thobe — our thobe — was the only thread or shred of representation we had in the museum. We then softened, knowing what lay ahead of us: a fight against repression and for representation, a recurring cycle we have been accustomed to since we were children. Whether during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s intense surveillance of Arab and Muslim communities in the 1990s, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, or every Israeli bombardment of occupied Palestine, Lebanon, or Syria over the years, it was always the same. Palestinian voices are drowned out in the political and social contentions of dominant discourse in the United States, our humanity reduced to debates on Fox News and MSNBC. Year after year, here we are still.
Wafa Ghnaim examining a Palestinian thobe at the Brooklyn Museum (courtesy the author)The gray clouds are much heavier for the Palestinians who were spared the death and destruction of Gaza and do not know the same world anymore. The psychological trauma of witnessing friends, family, and colleagues fighting for their lives from behind a phone screen, burning alive as they receive an IV drip, has caused my total dissociation from the world around me. At the beginning of the genocide, I looked around at the world as a place to which I once belonged that had become unrecognizable, inhospitable, and depraved. To the rest of the world, Palestinian life seems to amount to nothing more than numbers in a death toll. Now, I can’t even look up, let alone look around.
When I do look up, I am likely doing so during my thobe research, finding some clue as to who the women who made these dresses are, or were. Just as we are nameless and placeless in the news, our traditional thobes live in a similar inhumanity in the United States without any information about who made the dress, and where she is now. At times, I will find a small morsel of information on the thobe through its construction. She was superstitious if she embroidered a blue bead in her tatreez for good luck; she wore a belt if the fabric is faded except for the space underneath the chest panel that was protected from the sun. This information may seem minuscule and unimportant, but it brings me closer to the maker and wearer (often the same person), helping me reconstruct the life she once lived and who she once was.
We don’t often see the Palestinian image reflected comprehensively and humanely in museum spaces, and we certainly don’t see our traditional dress exhibited unless it is used to cast us as terrorists or static biblical characters. Palestinians are rarely named as a cultural or ethnic group in North American and European museums, which tend to opt for more obscure geographic attributions such as “Ottoman Syria,” “Bedouin,” or “the Holy Land.” To explore Palestinian history in the ancient world is an even more arduous task, requiring specific knowledge of the naming conventions of past kingdoms and the years of rule by various empires over time. Regardless of these realities, and despite them, I know how to navigate museum spaces, and find that often the curators and staff are kind people who inherited a flawed, colonialist institution in some ways stuck in the past. So, with all that I could muster, I decided to raise my voice to anyone at the Brooklyn Museum who would listen.
Fortunately, I found the Brooklyn Museum to be incredibly responsive to my request for a discussion. Kat McFarlin, my generous colleague at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and coincidentally one of the thobe’s original installers, introduced me to Joan Cummins, curator of Asian art at the Brooklyn Museum, on October 19, 2023. Cummins immediately accepted my offer to view the Palestinian dresses in the collection and rewrite the label for the Gaza thobe on view. After my discussions with curatorial staff to coordinate the visit, I spent the day viewing the 35 Palestinian dresses in the museum’s collection, helping them geographically attribute the dresses and ensure they were properly archived.
Left: Ghnaim inaugurating her new wall label with Tamimi on May 15 (photo by and courtesy Kat McFarlin); right: The new wall label written by Ghnaim (photo Wafa Ghnaim/Hyperallergic)On May 15, 2024 — the 76th annual commemoration of al-Nakba or النكبة — Suzy and I visited the Brooklyn Museum again. This time it was with renewed hope: The wall label I had volunteered to author was approved by the curatorial staff and installed in April. The thobe I’d encountered that foggy Saturday morning is now correctly attributed to “Palestine (Gaza Region),” a testament to Palestinian belonging to be read by a world that I can no longer recognize, and to which I genuinely feel I no longer belong. I still don’t bother to look up from the dresses I study very often, and when I do, it is either to see the smiles of my beautiful son or the joy of my wonderful people. I don’t know how long these gray clouds will be weighing on me; they now feel as impossibly heavy as the rubble from collapsed buildings that have buried us alive.
This Gaza thobe was made and worn by someone that I relate to and with; she was my Elder. And, frankly, Americans should learn about Palestinian identity, arts, and culture if they are to espouse opinions about whether we are deserving of life or death. The thobe is a testament to Palestinian belonging — my belonging — in this world, even when it has been so deeply undeserving of us. I will continue the fight to highlight Palestinian beauty, dress, and artistry everywhere I go.
