Amman Letter: Exhibition sheds light on Arab women’s lives

Amman's Tiraz centre, a museum displaying a one-woman collection of traditional Arab dress, is mounting an exhibition of splendidly embroidered women's costumes entitled, The Golden Threads of Bethlehem.

On display also are dresses from Jordan, including a dramatic black creation that is three metres long and is worn by women from the city of Salt by doubling the material into an under-dress and over-dress.

The woman who gathered 3,000 19th- and 20th-century dresses and hundreds of household items and built the museum, Widad Kawar, has an all-Palestine background.

Her father was from the port of Acre, her mother from Ramallah near Jerusalem.

Born in the town of Tulkarem before the establishment of Israel, Kawar was brought up in Bethlehem and educated at the Quaker school at Ramallah.

After attending university in Beirut, she taught at a college in Bethlehem before marrying Kamel Kawar, a geologist and mining engineer from Nazareth, and moving to Amman where she developed a keen interest in her Arab cultural heritage.

When Kamel went to Tucson in Arizona to study underground water, a far more useful pursuit in oil-less Jordan than oil, Kawar took a course in museums and developed interests in anthropology and home economics.

Back in Jordan, she volunteered in charitable centres in Palestinian refugee camps where she began to assemble her collection.

“After the 1967 war [when Israel occupied the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza] I took copy books and wrote down information on all the dresses I bought.

Kitchen scenes

“My family grew fed up with me as my kitchen was always full of women selling their dresses and telling me their stories. One piece took half a day,” she says.

Sibba Einarsdottir from the Women’s Museum in Denmark, who is cataloguing the museum collection, says, “Widad is a natural museum person.”

Widad has given 1,500 dresses to the museum and has a equally large private collection of costumes plus jewellery and other items.

In 1987, Germany's ambassador to Jordan, Herwig Bartels, arranged for an exhibition in Cologne and the publication of her first hardcover book in German and French – Pracht Und Geheimnis or Memoire de Soie (Memory of Silk) – and in a number of other languages.

The collection toured France, Denmark, Sweden, England, Iceland, Switzerland, Japan and Singapore.

Her latest book is Threads of Identity, published in 2011.

Early in the tour, the collection was mainly from “as-Sham” – the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Syria – but when Arab labourers from other countries working in Germany expressed disappointment that costumes from their homelands were not included, Kawar expanded her area of interest to the eastern Arab world.

Ottoman dress

Having focused on dresses from villages, she added city attire, “an imitation of Ottoman dress”, she says.

When she was asked why her exhibition ended with dresses made before 1950, she investigated how styles had changed and women shifted from making dresses to embroidering cushions for their homes and for sale at craft shops: “Today our heritage survives on cushions and wall hangings.” When her collection returned to Jordan, “I wanted to give it a home.

“It had spent too much time in boxes,” either in transit or storage.

“The house next door was put up for sale,” she says.

After it was purchased she “looked for staff and found very enthusiastic girls.

“We will hold workshops for growing children and teenagers to connect them to and make them aware of their Arab heritage.”

The museum, built in white stone, is on two floors – the exhibition halls above and the work and storage rooms below. Here Einarsdottir sits at her computer.

Endless cataloguing

“The job [of cataloguing] will never finish,” she says.

“Things turn up continuously. People give to museums when they see. . . their costumes and objects will be preserved.”

The dresses are repaired and cleaned by being covered in gauze and vacuumed gently before being wrapped in plastic bags and frozen for 10 days to kill fungus and mould, then allowed to defrost before being hung in the storeroom.

Each dress is labelled and identified but the stories of the dresses are not always recorded. Kawar’s notebooks have yet to be tackled.

Kawar has been honoured with a number of awards for her work, including Jordan’s King Hussein Medal and Holland’s Prince Klaus International Award for culture and development.

Having financed the museum, she is concerned that one day the funds needed to sustain it will run out.