Maha Abu Shousheh is checking on her collection on display at Palestine Museum in West Bank city Birzeit on Sept. 13, 2018. (Xinhua)
by Fatima Aruri
RAMALLAH, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- Maha Abu Shousheh, a Palestinian business woman, is on a journey to seek the traditionally embroidered dress of her disappeared hometown.
Abu Shousheh, 56-year-old, now living in the central West Bank city Ramallah, was born to a family that witnessed the forced displacement of nearly two thirds of the Palestinian people in 1948, including her family.
The memory of her parents triggered her journey to seek the traditionally embroidered dress of her hometown Abu Shousheh near today's Ramleh city at the age of 17 though the village does not exists any more.
Her nearly 40-year journey has led her to learn many stories of Palestinian women behind traditionally handmade dresses from different areas and through different times.
The traditional Palestinian dress is a national costume that is embroidered by hand using different garments and colored silk threads.
Traditional embroidery in Palestine needs handmade weaving of thin silk braids that takes a great deal of patience and accuracy. It was a mission mainly tasked to women who weaved their own dresses and men clothing for different occasions.
Abu Shousheh revealed that it took her a few years and several failed attempts before her first encounter with what she believed was the closest resemblance to her hometown's traditional women dress.
"The first dress I bought thinking it would be the one turned out to be a Bedouin dress. For someone not experienced, a dress fully embroidered with aesthetics, nice colors and many flowers would catch the attention," she said.
"It was a beautiful Bedouin dress that I behold so dearly that I believed it was worthy of being showcased at the museum. But when I got home, they told me this was a dress worn by Bedouin women and not our hometown women," Abu Shousheh said.
So the Palestinian woman turned to more experienced people to learn how her hometown's dress looked and then laid her eyes on dress that is close to Abu Shousheh women.
Her journey was hard, she noted, because following the 1948 Catastrophe (Nakba) for Palestinians, much of the people's property was lost, the norms changed and the traditional way of embroidery also changed.
According to researchers at Birzeit University's ethnographic museum, the pre-1948 traditional dresses were filled with details that represent different geographic regions, social class and social occasions in Palestine identified by different types of embroidery, fabric, patterns and colors used.
The Catastrophe or "Nakba" for the Palestinian people is marked on May 15 each year in memory of the forcible transfer of two thirds of the Palestinian people and ethnic cleansing of at least 418 villages as a result of the 1948 war.
"Previously, the dresses were distinguishable. It was possible to know which area each dress belonged to," said Abu Shousheh.
"However, after the Nakba, for all the reasons we know and mainly, the loss of security, home and the land, women had to turn their attention to other more important things than spending their time, effort and money on buying silk threads and embroidery," she said.
In the post Nakba era, Abu Shousheh explained that women weaved less dresses and focused more on other day-to-day issues. This has made the traditional costumes from different geographical areas become less distinctive, which was seen by sociologists as one of the war's impacts on collective memory.
In order to preserve this collective memory and the tales of women, Abu Shousheh widened her search to find and refine old dresses from various eras and places, not just the celebratory or prominent, but also the daily dresses and the ones that tell stories of women who witnessed the political transformations that hit the region.
Some 20 years ago, Abu Shouhseh bought a dress from a Palestinian refugee. How the refugee got the dress and made it suitable to her size reveals the sufferings of thousands of refugees at that time.
Abu Shousheh said "the refugee got the dress from a woman in Ramallah city, but she was taller than the original dress owner, and in this case the only solution for her was to cut it. The extension of the dress is usually made by using similar fabric, but unfortunately, the refugee had no possibility to buy new cloth and had nothing, so she used the bag of flour offered to refugees in aid to make the extension, and now the dress reveals the last letter in the word flour (in Arabic) to tell us about the situation the refugees were in."
Many countries and region in the world have their own type of embroidery and Palestine is no exception. The traditional embroidery unfolds an important history period of Palestine and is a testament to individual tales that compose the bigger picture of Palestinian collective narrative.
