Seamstress: a Multimedia Documentary Song-Cycle Based on the Collected Oral Histories of Palestinian Women

Abstract

Seamstress is a 42-minute multimedia and interdisciplinary documentary song-cycle, in six movements, for solo soprano, chamber ensemble, chorus, electronics, recorded audio and video. It is based on oral history interviews I conducted with Palestinian women from different generations and social sectors in occupied Palestine (The West Bank and Gaza) from the summer of 2012 through the winter of 2017. Blending audio interviews, photography, raw and archival footage with live chamber orchestra and dance performances, Seamstress aims to create a moving and powerful portrait of love, strength, and resistance in the face of colonization, injustice and misinformation. The women interviewed include my aunt, who lives in Ramallah, a seamstress named Shahrat who fled from Jaffa to Nablus pre-Nakba, former students from the Deir Ghassaneh music center, and current artistic collaborators and colleagues, including Palestinian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Huda Asfour. Song texts are adapted from the interviews, weaving together their different voices, perspectives and experiences in a way that challenges current existing media stereotypes of Palestinian culture and womanhood, providing a global and de-colonial context for Palestinian women’s narratives by focusing on shared universal themes of memory, identity, exile, displacement, femininity and love. The oral histories draw unifying connections between Palestinian women’s individual and collective memories in response to an undermining postcolonial geographical separation across the West Bank, Israel, Gaza and the Diaspora.

My research questions were rooted in the shaping and defining of the individual and collective voice through documentary-style narratives, which is where the music comes into play in providing a sonic exploration of the voice and memory. Who belongs to the voice and whom does the voice belong to? How much of our stories are shaped by what others have told us, and how much are shaped by our lived experiences? At what point do the stories, the voices of our ancestors, become our own, and at what point do the stories, the voices of our colleagues and contemporaries, become woven into the shared fabric of our histories? How does performance help shape our understanding of marginalized communities and function in reclaiming a space for their voices, and how does it reshape our understanding of the theories and histories we have encountered about ethnic conflicts and their subjects? How does performance as resistance in marginalized communities extend beyond the boundaries of politics and nation-states? I feature Palestinian women as vital cultural and social agents of change whose stories empower and awaken a movement of progress on the regional, local and global levels.

The film provides visual landscapes and timelines for the audience through use of archival footage from the Lumiere Brothers dating back to 1896, scenes from the Nablus soap factory in 1938, and British mandate clips of settlers in the orange groves of Jaffa in 1946. It features collaborative work with cinematographers and choreographers Yusuf Karajah, Maher Shawmreh and Meropi Makhlouf of the Orient and Dance Theater in Ramallah. The files and oral histories are accessible and easily shared online via the Seamstress Project (seamstressproject.com), as social media plays a pivotal role in shaping global understanding of people and their cultures.

The result is a sonic and visual exploration of personal experiences with place in relation to diasporic and transnational intersectional feminist perspectives on the self/denial of the self, the state, personal identity, the body, sociality and agency.