Text on Textiles

One weekend in Urumqi, my friends and I were walking near Xinjiang University when I spotted some felt mats hanging on an apartment clothesline. Being obsessed with Turkic textiles, I had to suppress all urge to make off with one of these handmade carpets, which-- by the way-- are heavier than they look. Shyrdaks, as they are called, feature simple arabesque motifs, sewn as appliqués onto flattened layers of felt. I always had thought that the spirals so central to steppe art came from the Islamic Middle East, slowly uncurling over time and space into its present shape. Elizabeth Wayland Barber in The Mummies of Ürümchi, however, gives a more teleological explanation to the origin of these designs:

Because of its matted structure, however, felt has a peculiar property: wherever you sew along a straight line, the felt is likely to tear, just as a paper towel tears off along the line of perforation. The solution? Sew interlocking circles and spirals. Then the lines of sewing reinforce one another. So nomad art of the steppes characteristically winds and curls even when it has been transferred to wood carving... or to appliqués on woven cloth (where the curls are unnecessary), which we saw everywhere in both Chinese and Russian Turkestan." (50)

Last fall in Kashgar, I had poked around the local carpet shops looking for shyrdaks, but without much luck. Instead, most of these stores sold exquisitely ornate, but prohibitively expensive, silk oriental rugs--none of which had the same homespun feel of folk art. Given the inordinate production of oriental rugs, I guess tourists underappreciate shyrdaks (or perhaps locals think that we tourists do). At one point we ducked into a dusty antique shop and under the many piles of textiles, I pulled out an embroidered piece with that familiar spiral pattern. Known as suzani-- Persian for "needlework," these tapestries famously originate in Uzbekistan, but actually can come from anywhere in Central Asia, where people give them as dowry presents. Years before marriage, young women and their female relatives and friends gather to embroider sections of the cloth that one day will adorn their beds and walls. This one, however, was hand-stitched in Kazakhstan, at least according to what I think the owner said (though one can never be sure, given his broken Mandarin and lack of teeth). Much later, looking at an old postcard of Kyrgyz girls balancing their hive-like headdresses, I found similarities with my suzani-- the sunburst patterns, bold colors, and dense needlepoint, and I wonder how much regional ethnic identities are tied to the various embroideries that they produce.



While continuing on this quest for suzani this summer, I went to Gulja, a city heavily influenced by Kazakh art. A few blocks behind the bazaar, a dirt alleyway leads to a compound of small offices, each slightly larger than a cubicle. Inside these concrete walls-- bedizened with cushion covers and dance costumes-- middle-aged Kazakh women sit and sew suzani. The seamstresses start by drawing designs onto the black cloth with whiteout pen, then follow those lines with a sewing machine in bright, often neon threads. Very few suzani these days escape the use of glitter. (In fact, I bought out all the pieces without any-- a grand total of three out of a few hundred.) Ranging from two to three meters long, these vivid suzani serve as floor cushions for long banquet tables. Most tourist bazaars in Xinjiang do not sell suzanis; besides silk carpets, they actually stock their stores with imported pashminas from Turkey. Given the scarcity of suzanis, at first I thought that these art forms were produced by and for locals. After talking to one Kazakh family in Rockriverton, however, I found out that people are buying cheaper cushions made in factories-- patchwork pieces of synthetic damask, meaning that steppe spirals may soon reach the end of their mortal coils.