stitching identity :: kgb museum vilnius

we had three teenagers with us in lithuania, so we told them we had to visit a museum. after perusing a swedish brochure we found at our rented apartment, they chose the museum of genocide victims, mostly due to its other name - the KGB museum, owing to the fact that it is housed in the former KGB headquarters (look at me, capitalizing KGB...hmm, i'll have to ponder that) of the soviet state of lithuania.

it's a moodily-lit place, in keeping with its sober subject, and has a big focus on the lithuanian patriots/revolutionaries who resisted the soviet yoke, especially in the decade after stalin and hitler sealed their fate without consulting them in a secret agreement in the early days of the second world war. the green cells in the basement, where prisoners were held, interrogated and tortured and then, quite literally, taken out back and shot, were stark.

but i think it was most struck by the stitched objects on display. most were made by prisoners who had been exiled to camps in siberia. they obviously used scraps of fabric and thread that were at hand. stitching to hold onto their homes, loved ones and traditions. and the stitched items were made by both men and women, both having a need to cling to their home and memories.

the sign said that this little black striped pouch contained some lithuanian soil and that the prisoner had kept it with him throughout his confinement in a siberian hard labor camp. i have a jar of stones from south dakota, where i grew up, so i could relate to this. we have a need to hold onto something tangible of where we come from.

some of the stitched cloths were large and all were beautiful. each stitch holding a memory of home and comfort and family. such beauty coming out of such adversity. it's amazing.

it was also a way of keeping their religion and belief alive, as sometimes the cloths were used in religious rituals and at holidays, like easter, which they surely practiced at great peril.

there were other objects, made of materials at hand - birchbark containers and the like, but i found the stitching most fascinating. especially since it wasn't just women who were stitching, but men as well, in a human need to hold onto beauty and home.

there were many pouches, which surely held precious mementos, like the wrapped-up soil of home or a photo of loved ones or a locket. there were also sayings, carefully stitched in lithuanian, a way of physically holding onto language and culture. each stitch a small act of defiance against the oppression, each stitch a way to hold onto an identity that was being torn away.

and i wonder if my soft guns aren't a similar way of coping with the sense that my very foundation has been ripped away by that ridiculous clown that cheated and colluded his way into the white house, robbing me of any pride i may have had in being american. maybe not, but they are definitely an act of defiance and mocking of the gun culture that has so strongly taken hold. not as deep as the items in the genocide victims museum, but a small act against the regime nonetheless.

certifying identity

i've not done a whole lot more on my torso since the weekend of the project. something holds me back, tho' i think about it all the time. i think i fear a little bit that i'll not be able to tap into that energy that arose when the group was together, working on the same thing when i'm at home all alone. but i also have been busy with other things and i do have faith that it will come in good time.

the only "requirement" of the project was that we all place a copy of our birth certificate on the back of the torso, so they would have that one element of commonality when we exhibit them. all along, i've been quite uncomfortable with that notion on some intuitive level that i can't really articulate. i have a feeling of it as some kind of official stamp (of approval? existence?) that i find doesn't really have a place in how i envision myself at this moment in time - the torso is, after all, a self-portrait.

then, i came across a passage in harold rosenberg's book about saul steinberg. he says, "official documents are among the most stylized elements in modern society. passports, drivers' licenses, bonding stamps, ID cards change very little." and it hit me that this has something to do with my objection to affixing my birth certificate to the torso. you see, i've changed a lot since then. and although it's arguably a formal trace of myself, i object on some gut level to the formality of it - to the official stamp of existence of it, to the unchangeability of it.

perhaps it also has something to do with the issue of displacement, which i have often pondered and which is in my consciousness again as i read salman rushdie's joseph anton biography.  i have chosen to live outside the country of my birth and that causes a rift with my old identity. identity is often grounded in place and time and people and work and when all of those change, you do too. in forging a new one (that is never truly of the new place you've chosen either), you leave behind some of the old, breaking with it. i think that documentation of identity represented by a birth certificate is too strong a reminder of that break. and leaves me acutely conscious that i am cast adrift somewhere in the mid-atlantic - neither fully here nor there.

so my birth certificate is there, on the inside. but in the end, it will probably be mostly covered over - hidden beneath, forming the foundation of the layers, but changed by what comes after. and perhaps that's as powerful a statement as displaying it for all to see.

molding the territory of my own belonging

"i began to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging." - david whyte, crossing the unknown sea. 

i'm reading david whyte's crossing the unknown sea: work and the shaping of identity. i have this notion that we come to the books we need to read at the moment we need to read them. and if we come to them at the wrong time, they don't speak to us (the snow child is just not doing it for me and i'm going to return it to the library without finishing it). it's not the book's fault, it's something within. but when the book and your need align, hello! it's magical.

my encounter with last evening's troglodyte reminds me that i have spent a number of years trying not to be defined by what i do for a living. this is partially because i think that the nature of work is changing and partially because i don't think that my work (or my car or my house) is who i am, i'm far too complex for that.

thus, i only reluctantly listed my current (and several former) workplaces in my mini-bio on our group website because i have come to feel that it is expected of me. plus, the things i have done lend credibility to me and my story. no one in denmark can bring themselves to look down on someone who worked for denmark's biggest, most revered company and people also have respect for those who have their own business. so i have ended up in a position where i felt like i had to list those things to be considered legitimate. otherwise, i'm just some foreigner trying to horn in on local business. (if you can make out danish, you'll notice that many of the members have listed how long they're lived in town to boost their credibility.)

for two years, i answered the question of "what do you do?" with a list of the many things that fill my days - horses, kittens, chickens, cooking, laundry, writing, photographing, gardening, conversations, thinking, volunteering, sharing, laughing...but people look at you like you're mental when you do that. a few got it, but mostly, they acted like they thought my danish was bad and i had misunderstood the question. that begins to eat away at you after awhile, so you just revert to custom. perhaps i gave up too easily.

maybe it's time to begin to work the clay of my own life again, to mold the territory of my own belonging.

identity regained

when you leave a job, you feel as if you are losing some part of your identity...in today's world, we so much ARE our jobs, they define us and consume us and our world revolves around them. so i was a bit sad, thinking about losing my identity, but already now, i realize i haven't lost who i am at all...but in fact, i'm already regaining it. one lost identity: regained.