SWANA Stitch @Swanastitchpdx opens a community show tied to Portland TextileX Month: Origin Stories this Saturday, October 5th. With the title “Homelands Within,” the show asks contributing textile artists from the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) communities of Portland to think about their own “origin stories.” We sat down with one of the organizers of SWANA Stitch to talk about the origins of their organization, the show, and their work in the context of the larger scope of events in the world today.
SWANA Stitch is closely tied to SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center, located at 2942 NE MLK Jr Blvd., and many of the events that SWANA Stitch organize and host take place there. SWANA Stitch actually slightly predates SWANA Rose in the timeline, but both came about and fruitfully converged in the wake of the COVID lockdown. “The SWANA community, especially in Portland proper, is fairly small,” they note, “During the pandemic, [I was seeing] a lot of people making tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, and doing circles. I was like, oh, I want to do one of those, I wonder if there is one in Portland. But I couldn’t find one. To be honest, I was wondering if there might not be enough Palestinians who also do tatreez, so maybe it could be open to anybody with Southwest Asian and North African origins who does a needle craft.” Meanwhile, Ramzy Farouki, a local Palestinain organizer and educator, and founder of the Center for Study & Preservation of Palestine as well as the Jerusalem Rose Market, expanded from there to a neighboring space with the idea of forming a cultural center to host just the types of events and groups that SWANA Stitch had in mind. “At first, a few people showed up, and it just took off from there. I think we are one of the longest continuous groups that have been meeting, and we meet every month.”
SWANA Stitch proliferates through a variety of different events, some open to the public and some open only to SWANA community members. There is, of course, the monthly meetings (open only to SWANA folks) that form the core community of SWANA Stitch. They will occasionally host an open stitch session, which anyone can join in on, and are hoping to hold one during PTXM. Also on the horizon is a BIPOC Stitch night, which will bring together different affinity communities to share space. It’s important to the organizers to have a flexible range of openness for any event they hold, and to be able to clearly situate events that are for specific communities alongside events open to all people. “It’s interesting to think about how it’s normal to think that the only spaces that are for everyone are majority spaces, which are white spaces, usually, but we want to curate a space that’s for everyone, but is SWANA-led and SWANA-curated,” SWANA Stitch notes.
In this way, SWANA Stitch is one of the main programming components of SWANA Rose. Part of the beauty of this cultural space is how each of the programming arms intermingle and build each other up. “SWANA Rose is a space for us, by us, but it’s really open to any cultural programming by any community that has allied politics. There are artist soirees, there’s a library, a book club, yoga, a reading program for kids, film nights. I may be the primary organizer for SWANA Stitch but I also help out to organize the library.”
Building up SWANA Stitch and SWANA Rose has certainly not been without challenges, many brought about by the current global political environment. SWANA Stitch says, “We opened SWANA Rose two weeks before the start of the Palestinian genocide. Many of our members are Armenian, so there is also the Artsakh War. It’s been a trying time for our community, and we’re in survival mode.”
Even through that, connections develop and work gets done creatively to develop the cultural space. “While we’ve got a lot done, it’s not like hyper organization is at the top of the priorities, and some of the things we wanted to do haven’t happened because our attention is turned to those present issues. So I don’t think anyone was super actively being like, oh, we gotta get this library thing going. But our friend Katja, who’s not SWANA, actually, she was like, hey, what like do you just need somebody to catalog these books? Because I can totally do that. And just volunteered her and her friend’s time. And then we asked Revolutions Books, which is a local bookstore in St John’s, if they would do a program where they buy books, put them on a display in their store, and then people can buy that book for the library. One of our organizers who is a beautiful printmaker made this print that you get in exchange for buying us a book. So we’ve been collecting books through that.”
The monthly stitch sessions have been a space of comfort, community, and discussion during this past year of suffering and turbulence, and SWANA Stitch’s show “Homelands Within” emerged from those sessions. The meetings are “village style, which is, you come and bring whatever you work on,” SWANA Stitch describes, “there’s food and drink and people are working on their individual projects, exchanging ideas. Those were also historically spaces where women who have historically often been excluded from open politics, in many cultures, did their politicking. Our sessions are open to all gender expressions, of course. But you know, we talk a lot about women’s work and women’s information being gossip, but that’s also how societies were ran, and so as much of stitching is an act of connecting with ancestral culture, learning and relearning and re-honing ancestral skills. It’s also a somatic experience, the calming and soothing work with your hands. During that experience, it’s easier to even take in information and stories. In a lot of cultures you tell stories, or you have orators like speaking while people are working with their hands, because that’s somatically how humans kind of have tended to work over centuries and millennia.” In these stitches, you would see dozens of different forms and traditions of textile work, from the aforementioned tatreez to Marash embroidery to Armenian needle lace and Egyptian lace. There’s also, of course, knitting and crocheting. The work made in these stitching sessions will be on display in “Homelands Within.” Along with the show, the organizers are planning a zine about SWANA Stitch that features members of the community discussing the origin stories of their relationship to textile craft.
“We’re really excited about the theme of Origin Stories,” SWANA Stitch says, “I think one thing that is challenging for us right now is that our communities are going through like a massive trauma again. This show is an opportunity to generate resilience for our community through reminding everyone that we continue to carry these things within us. And I think that has generated a lot of like the proposals for the works that we’ve gotten have felt really meaningful. I think that offering our people a space where they can safely say what they need to say without a fear of repercussion can be part of that healing.”
This naturally led to a question about how the wider Portland (and Portland textile community more specifically) can support the SWANA community during this time. “In terms of support for our diaspora communities, within Portland, within the United States, participating in things like programming that we do, spaces that we curate, actually matters to us tremendously. There is such a campaign of propaganda and dehumanizing people, which is how we create the conditions for atrocities outside of the Western world, and so participating in and supporting specifically SWANA cultural events is one small, interpersonal way that all people can be in solidarity with our people. Being very vocal and open and unflinching in that support, too, because when people are mild or conditional in their support, it generates conditions where we then can’t speak as strongly as we need to, because we will not be protected. Let the impacted groups of people speak and lead and following their lead and not questioning their ways of expressing their anger, and not tempering our people’s demands, even if they feel hard for people to accept. Some of our core members have organized a program called Creators for Gaza, where people make art and amplify other people’s art to get visibility for our families get their stories out.”
There are also opportunities for material support. “Our people, people who are specifically members also of SWANA Stitch, run a mutual aid program where we support 47 families in Gaza in their efforts to survive, and also in their efforts to eventually evacuate. We raise money for them, and that’s work that anyone can do. One doesn’t have to be a creator and artist. When people ask us what they can do, we ask for material support specifically. And there isn’t like necessarily a guidebook for what that looks like from moment to moment or point in time and point in time, it can look like political action. It can look like donations. It can look like, you know, creating flyers specific support, creating artworks that benefit our people. I think for every people going through these things, what matters most in support is people being willing to challenge their assumptions and just listen and amplify, and people physically and materially showing up in the ways that we ask or ways that they come up with.”
All of this is deeply intertwined with the act of stitching. “I don’t really know what it is like to have non-political art, or have your art that’s apolitical,” SWANA Stitch says, “I don’t think that that exists. I think that people who believe it exists are misguided, and their art, in fact, has a politic. I think for that reason, seeing our art is also like a form of support for us, because it is like seeing us speak. And there’s some things that are kind of unspeakable right now, and I think art is one way for us to process those things, to keep going. We, as artists, get to examine this, especially with textiles, because textiles are a thing that are on our bodies and are physically tangible in our lives.”