My Mother’s Best “Set”: Diasporic Threads of Crochet

Abstract

In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao. As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.

Keywords:

• crochet
• creolisation
• creative agency
• becoming

Notes

1. TFR iterations include: The Black Chair: Rediscovering the West Indian Front Room (1999, Wycombe Chair Museum, High Wycombe); The West Indian Front Room (2003, Zion Arts Centre, Manchester); Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in The Netherlands (2007–2008, Imagine IC, Amsterdam, OBT: Bibliotheek Midden-Brabant Central Library, Tilburg, and Stefanus Church/Kosmopolis, Utrecht); A Living Room Surrounded by Salt (2008, Instituto Buena Bista (IBB), Center for Curacao Contemporary Art, Curacao); The Front Room in the African Diaspora (2014, an inter-cultural workshop project in Accra, Ghana with 24 young people from Tobago, London, Amsterdam). WIFR also inspired a BBC4 documentary entitled Tales from the Front Room (Percival 2007). It was documented in The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (McMillan 2009) and archived in an interactive website (thefrontroom 2007).

2. Ironically, they were doing jobs in a ruined post-war Britain at wages the English working class were not prepared to accept.

3. Rose Sinclair, Notes from her PhD research into crochet, gender and race (Goldsmiths College, London, 2006).

4. The Arrivants comes from the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry collection (Braithwaite 1981), and as a UK-based black British artist-designer-academic of Jamaican migrant heritage, Checinska investigates the relationship between culture, race, and dress. The conceptual departure point for the work is the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush at London’s Tilbury Docks carrying some 500 Jamaican migrants—colonial subjects invited by the government to assist in rebuilding post-war Britain—hoping to make a better life in the “Mother Country.” The Empire Windrush’s arrival marked the first time that African-Caribbeans had traveled to England in great numbers, thereafter establishing themselves as communities in major cities such as London, Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester.

5. Many argue that Shweshwe fabric was originally a German print with floral and geometric motif that was initially popular amongst white, urban, poor, and Trek-Boers during the mid-nineteenth century and later in contemporary South Africa where it is not simply a fashion, but is used ceremonially and associated with women.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael McMillan

Michael McMillan is a London based writer, playwright, artist/curator and scholar of Vincentian migrant heritage. His curatorial work includes: The West Indian Front Room (2005–2006), and recently: No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 (2015–2016). He has an Arts Doctorate (Middlesex University 2010), is Associate Lecturer in Cultural Studies (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London), and Research Associate (Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg).

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