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NURTURING AN IDENTITY BY HEL6NE TURKEWICZ-SANKO A needle, a thread, a piece of cloth and a Ukrainian woman...and suddenly an ancient pattern comes to life on a man's shirt, a woman's modern blouse, a ceremonial or ritual cloth. And with the embroiderer's work, the beauty of a country, of a region and perhaps even of a village someone remembers in a far-away land comes alive. How many of these embroideries have kept minds, souls and hearts alive? It is not by accident that the editors of the magazine OurJJfe continuously offer a reprint of Ukrainian patterns of embroidery on the magazine's back cover. The type of stitch, the color of the thread, the choice of pattern (geometric or floral), all these things reveal an identity. The piece embroidered indicates a ritual passage in someone's life: a welcome at birth, a christening, a wedding, a parting, welcoming with bread-and-salt, and ultimately burying. Some women in this century dared to glorify their "invincible spirit" in suffering and death through embroideries of tiny bits of cloth while in a political prison. Their embroidered pieces along with their poems, reproduced in the book Invincible Spirit, remain one of our most cherished legacies.1 There is another characteristic of this Ukrainian tradition: as a woman stitches the piece of embroidery, a wish is made, so many thoughts, perhaps even prayers are channeled to the one for whom the embroidery is destined. It is said that in the past centuries smocks embroidered for brides- to-be were heavily marked by black threads in some parts of Ukraine. The given explanation is that for each stitch in black thread, a prayer was made to redeem the bride from as many unhappy days in her married life as possible. Since very often very young women were marrying rather older gentlemen, there was reason to anticipate darker days. For the one who receives a piece of embroidery, there is obviously much to say about the message inscribed forever in the cloth. In that respect, the embroidered cloth has a lot in common with the tradition of pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs. The type of cloth to be used and the ultimate use of the embroidered piece can be compared to chapters in a book. At the turn of the century, women's Copyright H e le n e N. Turkewicz-Sanko, 1997. Department of Classical and Modem Languages and Cultures John Carroll University shirts were ankle-length like American pioneers' smocks and the lower seam was richly embroidered in a pattern that echoed the pattern on the sleeves. They were made of home woven linen cloth. There were no fancy cuts and all the pieces were square angled so that there was no waste of hard spun cloth. In the book How A Shirt Grew In The Fields, artist Yaroslava Surmach Mills illustrated the Ukrainian tradition of planting and harvesting flax, spinning home-made thread and weaving home made cloth.2 In his beautiful album The Sap of Life Dmytro Pavlychko confirms that this tradition, perhaps by necessity, is still very much alive in some parts of Ukraine: With her skirt tucked up my mother stood knee-deep in the dirty water, pulling small bundles of hemp from the trench. She wore a ragged jacket when swollen with water drooped and seemed to be about to unravel itself at any moment...I stood on the bank my eyes tight shut so as not to see her stooping and dipping her hands into the slimy green kingdom of the frogs.3 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ТРАВЕНЬ 1997 17 Illustration from Invincible Spirit.
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