Thinking of Nasrin

 We never learned a whole lot of history about Asian states in school. Before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979 I might not have known this country existed, but the following discussions about a boycott of Olympic Games in Moscow certainly showed that this was not a country without significance. I still don’t know enough about Afghan history before, during or after the World Wars, or about developments that led to the war-torn situation we have now, and trying to find out something about it with the help of a traditional encyclopedia is not helping me in this. I don’t think I will try, either. But yesterday’s picture of advancement of Taliban control of the country in the paper, the news we have been hearing ever since the US decided to pull out, and other NATO troops followed suit, and the stories I have heard told by my refugee friends from Afghanistan are heart breaking.

 

Graphics taken from front page of Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Saturday, August 14, 2021 edition.

I have made two quilts with Afghanistan as a topic. One is called “Imagined Dialogue” and was the quilt I would have entered at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines if I had managed to keep track of entry deadlines. As I checked back through my blog on the entries with ‘text messages’ it seems I have never shown it here, although I had notecards printed with it. It is a combined text, based on a few lines from John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, and a few lines from a poem by German playwriter and poet Bertold Brecht. I edited the lines slightly, and juxtaposed them, turning it into a kind of dialogue between the two voices. Brechts’s famous poem starts with the line “Imagine there is a war and nobody goes there”, and was frequently and wrongly cited by peace demonstrations in Germany in the Eighties. Cited wrongly, because the second line continues as “then war will come to you”. In fact, the whole poem is a call to action, though not necessarily to military action – if you don’t do anything about a situation, that situation will manifest itself and take control, instead of you taking control.

 

Imagined Dialogue

The second quilt with Afghanistan as a topic is called “Thinking of Nasrin”. It is based on a piece of cloth I had bought from Pascale Goldenberg which she had brought back from Afghanistan on one of her trips there to keep the Guldusi project going, and three of the embroidered squares that Afghan women in a particular village embroider. All three of these squares were made by a woman called Nasrin, which led to the title.

 

Thinking of Nasrin

Of course, I never met Nasrin, or saw a picture of her, as she is not mentioned in the book that Pascale Goldenberg published about the project. But I was thinking about her a lot while making the quilt. And I am thinking about her, and all the other women in that project, and the mothers and sisters of my Afghan refugee friends here who stayed behind – what will happen to them now? How will their life change?

For a while I had thought that these quilts had been left behind by history, they did not seem of current interest anymore. That has changed significantly.

I don’t understand what is going on there – but somehow it seems that the Western troops have deeply wronged the people whose country they were supposedly liberating for the last 20 years. I never thought it was right the way it was happening, but certainly this recent deal in the whole story seems even more wrong than anything that went on before. The troops are leaving behind many helpers who worked for them during the past 20 years, and they will not be protected. Germany even still deported Afghan refugees until a couple of weeks ago – it was only last week that deportations to Afghanistan were stopped. Perhaps another quilt with an Afghan topic may be brewing. I still have some eye-formed embroideries by Guldusi women, hanging on my design wall, biding their time.

What a sad sad situation. (Not to even start thinking about the many people who will flee the country, increasing the numbers of refugees whom the EU didn't want to have...)

Being part of history...

Last April I posted about how I finished a quilt for the German-Korean joint exhibition about the experience of living in a divided country. (Read here.) The exhibition has been shown in several different places by now, has been invited to Ste. Marie-aux-Mines next September, and is waiting for a verdict on whether it will be shown in Houston. When I was making my quilt, I was struggling with my family's and my personal involvement in history by having lived through some of the times I represented in the quilt. My aunt, who lived all her yound and working life under dictatorship, first the Nazis, then 'Socialism', and only a few years in 'freedom', after she was retired. My memories, how my mother always was preparing some package for relatives and friends, marking it as 'presents, no commercial value', taking care not to include printed matter, records or cassette tapes, or jeans. How on November 9, 1989 suddenly a room mate of my then fiancée ran through the apartment and shouted 'They are opening the wall!' and nobody dared believe it, after weeks of rising fear and insecurity with regard to how the East German government would react towards the rising numbers of protesters in the Monday marches, demanding change.
So there was a lot of broohaw about 30-years-end-of-the-Wall this past November. Speeches, self-praisal, groups of youn people from abroad being shipped to Berlin to participate in some events to commemorate the happenings then.
Ever since it happened I have been unhappy with how the even in 1989 has overtaken that specific date. Yes, it certainly was an important date, I would never contradict that. But there were other important things that happened on or around November 9 in German history in the 20th century - it seems unfair that the fall of the Wall is the one which receives most attention nowadays.
End of World War I. The 1938 progroms against Jews (link in German, link in English). The first attempted attack on Hitler in 1939 by Georg Elser (link in German, link in English), which had an 80th anniversary and was mentioned much less. These, of course, I have not lived through. But somehow they always affected me, because we were living in the aftermaths of what Nazi-history had done to my country. My son, now a sound 14 years old, had not been born in 1989 and has a very distant relationship to that part of history, as he told me recently. He has read The Diary of Anne Frank, but different from my own experience many years ago, it was 'just another story' for him. And 'I was not even on your horizon when the Wall came down, and then it is 30th anniversary and what does that mean to me?'
Those were interesting conversations we had, and he is right in a way. It is not the kind of history he has lived through. And obviously school and our family narratives have not given him the feeling of connectedness and enough context to put things into perspective.
I do hope our exhibition gets accepted for Houston, and I do hope I get to go, because it will be really interesting to be there and talk to people about it.