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Sewing Voice: Yezidi Women's Journey Towards Literacy Development and Agency

Sewing Voice: Yezidi Women's Journey Towards Literacy Development and Agency

Lisa Miara (Springs of Hope Foundation, Iraq)
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 25
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5614-9.ch013
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Abstract

At the beginning of August 2014, the army of ISIS executed a genocide of the Yezidi (Yazidi) people of the Sinjar province in Iraq. Thousands of older adults and men were brutally murdered, and thousands of young women and girls were forced into sex slavery. In 2015, the author founded the Spring of Hope Foundation Center and has been working since with the deeply traumatized escapees and released women and children on rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Many attempts were made by professionals to coax the women and girls to speak about their experiences and tell their stories in order to lift some of the burden on their souls, but to no avail. However, when the women themselves brought up the idea of sewing, it was taken up as a literacy practice that was used to assist the women and girls to cope with their traumas, raise their silenced voices, communicate their stories, and find agency as they tried to become functioning members of the community.
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Philomela’S Tapestry

According to Greek mythology, Tereus king of Thrace brutally raped Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne. He “locked her, and revealed his own black heart and ravished her, a virgin, all alone” (Ovid Book 137). When she protested, the king cut out her tongue to ensure silence, and locked her up in a lone cabin in the woods.

Philomela, violated and mutilated, constructed for herself a loom and began weaving a “clever fabric” where on a background of white using “purple notes” she told her story and depicted her unfortunate tale (Ovid 139). After completing her story, she gave the tapestry to an old woman who smuggled it to her sister, the queen. Procne, upon seeing the tapestry and “reading” the events that befell Philomela, set out to free her sister.

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Introduction

This chapter describes a journey of a group of Yezidi women in Kurdistan, Iraq, from being traumatized survivors of sex slavery to becoming active agents in their own lives and in their community through the art of sewing. The women were subjected to extreme acts of brutality that left them beaten and voiceless, yet in a process leading toward healing and rising back up to social functioning, they sewed their stories into beautiful gowns and found ways to move toward a viable future. The women managed to rise up from devastating circumstances, and although most of them could not read or write, their voices found a conduit through their sewing. This chapter will begin with the historical background of the Yezidi women to provide a context, followed by the theoretical framework on which the work is based, and will then describe the storytelling/healing/growth process of the women and their tenacious journey up and out.

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