Karma Muses: Part 1

Homes for the Disembodied (2002) by Mary Tuma

Standing at 4.5 meters tall, these slightly haunting, slightly ethereal figures seem larger than life, as if reaching to the sky itself. A single piece of fabric folded into five dresses, (which I would love to see in real life), Tuma created these dresses as “offerings for the people of Jerusalem who were kicked out in 1967 and never saw their land and homes again before they died”. While many of Tuma’s works can be said to be horror a vacui, I find her pieces most effective when they leave space for the spirit to dwell. What is it to be disembodied? Separated from or existing without the body. The process of disembodiment is that of a soul, spirit, or consciousness which otherwise lacks a physical form. How better to describe the Palestinian experience? The ethnic cleansing of our people and the massacre of our land. The uprooting of our trees and our lives. The robbing of our homes, our stories, our past, present, and future.

The dresses resemble the thobe, a traditional dress worn by Palestinian women. The thobe is often adorned with different patterns of embroidery, with the patterns representing different villages. Tatreez, or embroidery, was taught to me by my grandmother, just as her grandmother taught her. The women of Palestine embroidered what they saw; the land and its trees, its hills, its birds. The motifs and symbols illustrating our inextricable ties to the land. In this piece, the dresses exist not as individual entities, but a continuum. Perhaps a continuing dispossession, but also the resistance to that dispossession. Stories are told by grandfathers as their kin gather round to hear of a time before dispossession, before occupation, before apartheid. Our grandmothers pass down their family recipes, cherished and taught to all, ingredients from the motherland sent across the diaspora, exchanging hands many times before they reach our dinner table. Every day and every where, this spirit lives on. We put it on our tables, we put it on our backs, we never let anybody forget that we are Palestinian. We listen, and we teach, and we remember and remember and remember. In the context of colonial erasure, the past is an active site of resistance, negated by a present that claims we never existed, reanimated by memories passed down from generation to generation. And thus, Palestine lives on, embodied in us all. Tuma provides a resting place for the uprooted spirit to dwell, and with it, gives a chance to reflect on memory and its manifestations as an anchor to the land itself. In remembering, we pay respect to those who came before us, and we do a service to those that will come after, bellies full with their grandmother’s recipes, hearts full with their motherland’s stories.