I would like to know the hands of the woman in Palestine who plunged her needle with saffron and marigold thread, in and out of this raw silk gown. The stitcher who embroidered an intricate weave over an angular neckline, draped both arms and edges of the female form with patterns of olive grove resilience and fishnet lines to the sea. I would like to ask her if she remembers looping a measuring tape over my mother’s hips, if she can recall the occasion, the year? If she remembers anything at all about the ghost that my mother has become. I want to tell the maker I wore her dress, the one she made when my mother was a young woman, to my high school graduation. At the International School of Geneva, I wore it beside vibrant saris and red kilts, a UN display of traditional garments. I want to tell her it fit me beautifully, show her pictures of my mother glowing with pride beside me in all the awkward photographs. I don’t want to tell her it has hung in a sheath of protection for twenty-five years at the back of my closet. I could never part with it but wondered if and when I would wear it again.
When I hung it on the line to freshen the fibres, it swung in the breeze like the Red Dress Project honouring all the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in this country. I want to tell her I found the occasion to wear it again. That the zipper was still smooth, the raw silk parting to welcome my middle-age frame. The gown hugged my contours, so I was again 18 and again a reflection of my mother, bending time, a history helixing backwards. I wore it to The Mir Centre for Peace, in a restored Doukhobor dwelling on stolen lands, surrounded by golden larches in October. I wore it as an invited guest, to an event called Peace in the Middle East. I explained that the title of my book “Min Hayati” means “who is my life, who is my beloved.” My mother’s name was Hayat, life. I was her beloved, but I did not tell them this. When I said the word Palestine, I pictured the maker’s home which was occupied and stolen long before this moment. Long before the world could not look away. I stood in a room and looked at my hands holding pages of poems. The blue raw silk casting a shadow of protection. The embroidered threads of the neckline giving me voice. I pictured her hands. The hands of a maker. I want to thank her; in this moment of darkness, the hours of her labour continue to bring light. I wish I could hold her hands like I once held my mother’s.
Rayya Liebich is a writer and educator of Lebanese and Polish descent. She is the author of the award-winning chapbook Tell Me Everything (Beret Day Press) and full-length poetry collection Min Hayati (Inanna Publications). Passionate about writing as a tool for transformation and changing the discourse on grief, she is currently obsessed with nonlinear forms of creative nonfiction and recently completed a hybrid memoir on her simultaneous experience of motherhood/mother-loss. A finalist in seven CNF contests in the past two years including the CBC Nonfiction Prize, she is the 2022 winner of The International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir, and The Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest.
Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/brando
